Problems with evolution? Submit your questions.

Perhaps everything you say was intended to mean something. And maybe some of it was even intended to relate to the post to which you were ostensibly replying.But if so then the actual execution of the post seems to have fallen short of your ambitions.

The constancy of the speed of light in a vacuum, which is denoted by c, is actually a completely different thing from the "cosmological constant", which is denoted by Λ.Don't you sometimes wish that you were less ignorant? People knew that already. But General Relativity predicted that light would undergo twice as much angular deflection as it would in Newtonian mechanics. (See here.)And of course people also knew that this "unchangeable thing" could be bent by ordinary refraction.

This is only one of the many things that you are wrong about.

I quoted Einstein saying that c was a constant. You replied by saying, and I quote, "No - the cosmological constant was his gravest error, he admitted it." And you thought that I was confusing what is meant? Apparently what you are learning is how to spout nonsense.Try learning some science, a little basic logic, and the meanings of some --- perhaps even all --- of the words that you wish to employ.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Yes indeed. If the time stamps are correct, you can have spent no more than nine minutes writing that --- and it shows.Perhaps you could take a little time, or a lot, to give some coherency to your thoughts. If we are fortunate, coherence of language may follow.

"Wrong"? That is the very mildest word I would use for someone who denies that the relation of equality is symmetric.

Then how does this "jump" differ from the evolution of any other form of symbiosis? And in what sense is it a "jump"?What exactly are you visualizing as happening here?

Saying that it was unique doesn't mean that it was a saltation.And I don't see how a saltation would have worked. Surely they can't have "jumped" in a single step from no symbiosis to obligate endosymbiosis. How do you envisage that happening?

How does Woese's work imply a saltation?If you're thinking of HGT, then obviously there has to be diversity before that can have any substantial effect. It can't create the three domains, it can only blur the boundaries between them.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Can we hear more about this please?Thanks.

Saltations by HGT may not be Darwinian; but they are certainly neo-Darwinian; and clearly Woese thinks he can explain the saltations that he thinks occurred --- he thinks they happened by HGT. In order to commit the God-of-the-Gaps fallacy, it is first necessary to find some gaps. What we have here are transitions that scientists say are explicable by endosymbiosis and HGT respectively. You have quoted them doing so.These mechanisms would doubtless have briefly surprised (and then continually delighted) Mr Charles Darwin, but that doesn't somehow render them inutile as explanations.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Yes, quite so. Why do you mention it?

I'm fairly sure that he didn't create "all that is in it" --- for example, some of the motor cars were created by Ford.As to whether it's a scientific hypothesis, it could be made into one only by being more specific. The problem is that when you combine the proposition that God can do things that are impossible with the proposition that he moves in mysterious ways, you have a hypothesis which is consistent with any conceivable state of affairs, and which is therefore untestable.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Well, no, we can imagine several other answers. However for the most part no-one advocates them because they're neither well-evidenced nor in conformity with their religious beliefs.However, it is possible in principle and occasionally in practice for people to believe something different from either.The moral is that creationist rhetoric against evolution or against the theory of evolution wouldn't particularly confirm their view even if their anti-evolutionary arguments were right --- not while we can imagine a whole bunch of other non-evolutionary views which are equally poorly evidenced. Reason would require that we should either find evidence that allowed us to pick one non-evolutionary hypothesis, or remain agnostic between them. The fact that out of all of them only creationism is popular would not give us a rational cause for preferring it.

Even Behe seems to have realized he's wrong by now. But creationists don't drop an idea just because it's been proved wrong, that's why they're creationists. I believe you're thinking of Professor Imaginary Madeupperson of Nonesuch University. The actual reason you can't think of anything that falsifies it is that it's true.