Does evidence of transitional forms exist ? (Hominid and other)

You mean, they might spend the first part of their life with a tail and gills, living in water, and then in a later part of their lives they would develop gills and legs and live on land?Maybe you've heard of these organisms - they're called "amphibians." All About ArchaeopteryxOf course it's not clear if Archaeopteryx is the ancestor of birds or (according to my Animal Diversity text) if it's a dead-end lineage with a common ancestor to birds. Nonetheless you'd have to be pretty ignorant not to recognize that it has both reptile and bird traits.

I think the difference, though, is that when we look at it our way - where natural events are best explained by natural processes - it leads to useful predictions and technologies.On the other hand, there was a period of time where your view held sway - where every natural event was explained by recourse to Almighty God. For about a thousand years that was the dominant paradigm.Nowadays, we refer to that time as "The Dark Ages", and life was nasty, brutish, and short.These viewpoints have consequences, and the consequence of your viewpoint was a thousand years of darkness, ignorance, and strife.

Did they? I was under the impression from their writings - and the tacit approval of the Catholic church - that they purported to be doing the Lord's work. You know, almost every one of you Christians say that, but when I look at the statistics, it's Christians who are overrepresented in the prision population, and who have the highest rate of divorce. On the other hand, it's atheists who are underrepresented in prisions, and tend to have the most successful marriages. It's atheists who tend to oppose wars, while it's our Christian president who starts them. Funny, though, that when I look at the stats, all those things are on the decline. I wonder why that is? If I follow your logic, I can only conclude it's because atheists and secular humanists generally take more responsibility for their own actions than people like you.You might want to look the the Scandanavian countries for an example of how secularizing a country tends to increase the standard of living. Moreover you might want to ponder why the real hellholes on this world - you know, most of the ones we're shipping troops to - are the ones most characterized by strict religionism. Why don't you pop over to Saudi Arabia and ask a woman how well she's doing under Wahhabism?This message has been edited by crashfrog, 05-29-2004 01:55 AM

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"What gets me is all the mean things people say about Secular Humanism without even taking the time to read some of our basic scriptures, such as the Bill of Rights or Omni magazine." - Barbara Ehrenreich