Quick Questions, Short Answers - No Debate

I remember the Christian apologist C. S. Lewis writing somewhere that Christianity, or perhaps theism in general, could only be justified by actually being true and that if it wasn't no amount of appeals to social utility would excuse it. Can anyone identify the quote?Thanks.

Unfortunately, you completely forgot to say how you know this. Which makes your assertions on this topic as worthless and useless as your assertions on every other topic.

Compare and contrast. The chin is the bit that sticks out at the front of the lower jaw in the human. Apes don't have a chin in this sense, they just have distal lower jaws.This is, arguably, a confusing use of the word "chin". Unfortunately the precise anatomical term is "mental eminence", which is also deeply confusing.Anyway, when people talk about humans having chins and apes not having chins, they mean the sticky-out bit.

That's not quite what's being suggested. But it may be a side-effect of a useful adaptation. It might happen that some gene that (for example) makes us so much smarter than chimps, and is therefore selected for, also gives us chins, which might be of no particular use. Or, as has been pointed out, maybe it is an adaptation to something humans particularly do, such as speech.Obviously more research is needed to (a) find the chin gene (b) find out what if any mechanical role the chin plays.Alternatively, we were made in God's image, and God has a chin to support the weight of his mighty beard.

One reason for this might be that the author of your book is using the word "exaptation" wrong.An exaptation is something which evolves for one purpose and subsequently is useful for some further evolutionary development. For example, the tongue is an exaptation for speech --- obviously tongues didn't first evolve in order that one day humans would be able too speak with them, but rather, having evolved for a different purpose, they were pressed into the service of speech. If we hadn't had them in the first place then our range of vocalizations would probably be too small for communication. From the point of view of speech it was just a bit of luck for us that we already had tongues.Another example would be the wide range of joint movement in the forearms of maniraptoran dinosaurs. Obviously this didn't evolve in order that one day birds would be able to fly. But if it hadn't been present, birds might be just one more group of moderately successful gliding animals.What Rice wants to say is that chins are a side-effect. They can't possibly be an exaptation because chins aren't part of our pre-human ancestry.P.S: you might be able to find out more about this subject if you stop spelling "exaptation" as "expatiation", which is a completely different word.

Yes, it has medical uses; for example, it would be hard to study and circumvent the evolution of bacterial resistance to medicine without knowing about evolution.Another medical application, in preventative medicine, would be the Ames test. This tests to see how mutagenic (and therefore how carcinogenic) a substance is by quantifying the amount of beneficial evolution it causes. (Remember that mutation is random, so the harmful somatic mutations the substance produces will be proportional to the beneficial germ-line mutations.)A third medical application is in epidemiology: finding the molecular phylogeny of a disease helps epidemiologists to reconstruct its history.A fourth medical application is the creation of live vaccines. A virus or bacterium which has evolved to adapt to one environment is less fit for another: so, for example, a strain of polio which has been cultured in monkey kidney cells will no longer be any good at preying on human nerve cells but will still trigger an immune response. This is how the oral polio vaccine works.There are a number of other practical applications both within and outside medicine, but I hope that this is enough to be going on with.

No.god | Etymology, origin and meaning of god by etymonline
good | Etymology, origin and meaning of good by etymonline
devil | Etymology, origin and meaning of devil by etymonline
evil | Etymology, origin and meaning of evil by etymonline

The rocket is pushing against its own exhaust.

(1) Is it real?
(2) What is it?
(3) How can I be sure of never encountering one?

I don't see that your longer version actually contradicts my shorter version.From the WP article: The rocket is pushing against its exhaust; equivalently, the exhaust is pushing against the rocket.

I didn't particularly see the need to state that law explicitly any more than if I was describing how a rowing boat or a punt works. Well apparently the ions are being pushed ("electric grids accelerate ions"). And, by Newton's Third Law, so is the spaceship.

(4) How do you know this?

Phone my high school physics teacher and say: "You gotta see this ... I've found a place where the formulas you taught me would actually apply ... if I was perfectly spherical."

It was the teeth that aroused my suspicion, but then I don't know very much about fish dentition. But they look too mammalian to me.There are more pictures of it here about 1/3 the way down.