Register | Sign In


Understanding through Discussion


EvC Forum active members: 60 (9209 total)
0 online now:
Newest Member: The Rutificador chile
Post Volume: Total: 919,497 Year: 6,754/9,624 Month: 94/238 Week: 11/83 Day: 2/9 Hour: 0/0


Thread  Details

Email This Thread
Newer Topic | Older Topic
  
Author Topic:   new creation/evolution debate forum
Panda
Member (Idle past 3968 days)
Posts: 2688
From: UK
Joined: 10-04-2010


Message 106 of 121 (618605)
06-04-2011 8:11 AM
Reply to: Message 105 by Crazynutsx
06-04-2011 6:46 AM


Re: reply
Crazynutsx writes:
its funny that you are complaining about me yet, i started a thread on macro evolution and no one has botherd to respond to it evidence wise ?
Where is the incentive to address the points you've raised about macro-evolution?
This is what I would expect to happen:
i) We will post an explanation detailing what is incorrect.
ii) You will post a picture with the caption: "This shows macro-evolution".
iii) We will ask what the picture is of.
iv) You will avoid answering the question.
v) We will ask again.
vi) You will get upset.
vii) We will ask again.
viii) You will say: "I'll look in to the subject when I get time."
TBH: You could save everyone a lot of time by just typing macro-evolution in to Google.
Edited by Panda, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 105 by Crazynutsx, posted 06-04-2011 6:46 AM Crazynutsx has not replied

  
Itinerant Lurker
Member (Idle past 2911 days)
Posts: 67
Joined: 12-12-2008


Message 107 of 121 (624219)
07-16-2011 3:32 PM
Reply to: Message 104 by Scienctifictruths
06-04-2011 5:53 AM


So I'm assuming this site is really not worth the time and effort? Oh how I long to actually debate issues with someone intelligent. I'm becoming more and more convinced that these Creationist are semi-retarded.....
You could try Evolutionary Fairy Tale forums (http://www.evolutionfairytale.com/forum/index.php?), but you'll run into mostly ridiculous PRATTs and likely get banned within a few weeks.
I had some decent discussions over at Worthy Christian Forums: Fath vs. Science (http://www.worthychristianforums.com/index.php?/forum/91-...) before being banned, though you do have to wade through quite a bit of refuse.
Good luck.
Lurker
Edited by Itinerant Lurker, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 104 by Scienctifictruths, posted 06-04-2011 5:53 AM Scienctifictruths has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 108 by hooah212002, posted 07-16-2011 3:47 PM Itinerant Lurker has not replied

  
hooah212002
Member (Idle past 1057 days)
Posts: 3193
Joined: 08-12-2009


Message 108 of 121 (624224)
07-16-2011 3:47 PM
Reply to: Message 107 by Itinerant Lurker
07-16-2011 3:32 PM


Dear FSM, WHY did I click those links!?!?!?!?! My brain hurts now.... I've only heard of those places in passing, never checked them out. I wish I hadn't.

"Why don't you call upon your God to strike me? Oh, I forgot it's because he's fake like Thor, so bite me" -Greydon Square

This message is a reply to:
 Message 107 by Itinerant Lurker, posted 07-16-2011 3:32 PM Itinerant Lurker has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 6077
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 7.2


(1)
Message 109 of 121 (768014)
09-04-2015 3:28 PM
Reply to: Message 105 by Crazynutsx
06-04-2011 6:46 AM


Re: reply
also this forum will not be abandoned with the next few weeks, i will keep running my site and making improvements in the best way i can
I know that nuts is no longer present, but I was just taking a walk down memory lane. I'm in the midst of writing a web page about the bogus claim about the slowing down of the earth's rotation (yes, it is indeed slowing down overall, but a rate that's about 1/33,000-th what creationists claim) and I remembered a classic crazynutsx SNAFU that I wanted to include. We "discussed" that claim at http://creationvsevolution.freeforums.org/...g-down-t66.html -- actually, I had to explain everything to him while he "responded" by posting other people's writing that he plagiarized, his usual MO. At one point, he plagiarized yet again in an attempt to defend the claim, but ironically he had lifted it from the classic refutation of the claim, As the World Turns: Can Creationists Keep Time? by Thwaites and Awbrey (Creation/Evolution, Issue IX, Summer 1982, pp.18-22). Unfortunately, towards the end he started deleting messages that he didn't like, which included that one.
Shortly thereafter, he abandoned his forum as well as attempting to discuss creation/evolution, it would appear. He was clearly way over his head and finally realized it. Then several months later new messages started appearing in Japanese (ie, using Kanji and Kana) and the forum ended up being taken over completely by Japanese. Today, Chrome offered to translate for me and the topics appeared to be mainly about golf and clothing.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 105 by Crazynutsx, posted 06-04-2011 6:46 AM Crazynutsx has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 6077
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 7.2


Message 110 of 121 (882412)
09-21-2020 8:55 PM


Then dad joined Crazynutsx' Long Abandoned Web Site
Some of you might remember an adolescent creationist who joined briefly in 2011, mainly to promote a creation/evolution forum he had set up at http://creationvsevolution.freeforums.org/. From the UK, claimed to be 20 years old, though many members placed his age as being at least half a decade less (I've seen too many sad cases that support his claim). He was also heavily into video gaming and if you Google on him that mainly what you find. He only lasted here from 18 May 2011 to 13 June 2011, so for less than a month. However, he had moved all his cre-ev activity that I know of to his own forum, which he abandoned around Sep 2011.
After he ran away from his own forum, some of us continued to use it into about 2013, usually because somebody new would join and we would respond to them. Then, as I reported in Message 109 immediately above, the site was suddenly taken over by Japanese hackers -- even though Japanese is written with Chinese characters such that by learning the one language you can read the other for the most part, you can identify text as being in Japanese because of the inclusion of Kana which are phonetic and uniquely Japanese though some Chinese territories formerly occupied by the Japanese might have retained some of it (hiragana is used mainly for grammatical markers (eg, "no" meaning "of") and katakana for phonetically spelling out foreign words (eg, "dansu" for European style dance as in the internationally popular 1996 movie, "Shall We Dansu?"). The new Japanese content appeared to mainly discuss golf (so popular and important that Japanese businessmen would fly to Hawaii just to go golfing which was cheaper than trying to golf in Japan) and clothing fashion. I also saw ads for a dentist in Japan.
And yet, the site still functions automatically for people wanting to discuss creation/evolution. I rediscovered it at the url, https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/creationvsevolution/ -- I just tested the old URL and it got me to the new one.
Back in early May 2019, our very own former member, dad, showed up at that forum and posted a couple messages: one was a failed attempt to start a discussion, the second was to try to explain away the logistical problems of Noah's Ark. Then more than half a year later (ie, Feb 2020) he returned with more nonsense about how completely different everything was different in the ante-diluvial "different nature" in exactly the manner he needed to hand-wave all difficulties away by such an amazing coincidence.
 
It has been observed that nothing that has ever been posted on the Internet every goes away. Has that effect been given a name?
 
In the meantime, we haven't seen hide nor hair of dad since 23-Jul-2020 15:01 PDT (I would assume since I'm logged in).

Replies to this message:
 Message 111 by Tangle, posted 09-22-2020 2:50 AM dwise1 has not replied
 Message 112 by caffeine, posted 09-22-2020 3:49 PM dwise1 has not replied

  
Tangle
Member
Posts: 9581
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 6.5


Message 111 of 121 (882413)
09-22-2020 2:50 AM
Reply to: Message 110 by dwise1
09-21-2020 8:55 PM


Re: Then dad joined Crazynutsx' Long Abandoned Web Site
dwise1 writes:
In the meantime, we haven't seen hide nor hair of dad since 23-Jul-2020 15:01 PDT (I would assume since I'm logged in).
His last post at Fairytales of Evolution was 17th July.

Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien. I am Mancunian. I am Brum. I am London.I am Finland. Soy Barcelona
"Life, don't talk to me about life" - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved."
- Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 110 by dwise1, posted 09-21-2020 8:55 PM dwise1 has not replied

  
caffeine
Member (Idle past 1280 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


Message 112 of 121 (882414)
09-22-2020 3:49 PM
Reply to: Message 110 by dwise1
09-21-2020 8:55 PM


Re: Then dad joined Crazynutsx' Long Abandoned Web Site
It has been observed that nothing that has ever been posted on the Internet every goes away. Has that effect been given a name?
That's not really true - much is lost forever. There are now, far more active attempts to archive stuff; but there are also orders of magnitude more content appearing now than 20 years ago. Much of it is extremely ephemeral.
Thankfully, most of it is also shit.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 110 by dwise1, posted 09-21-2020 8:55 PM dwise1 has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 113 by AZPaul3, posted 09-22-2020 8:09 PM caffeine has not replied
 Message 115 by Phat, posted 09-23-2020 2:37 AM caffeine has not replied

  
AZPaul3
Member
Posts: 8654
From: Phoenix
Joined: 11-06-2006
Member Rating: 6.7


Message 113 of 121 (882415)
09-22-2020 8:09 PM
Reply to: Message 112 by caffeine
09-22-2020 3:49 PM


Delete Key Enabled
Isn’t there an information horizon around the internet?
The information content is the logarithm of the reciprocal of the substructure (paths and nodes) raised to the power of the technological index while the information entropy of the net is the maximum expected value of the internet’s information content.
If the content of the net exceeds the entropy of the net it will collapse into a black hole. To forestall this possibility the early designers (hallowed be their IBM Green Cards) designed the information horizon around the entire net by causing there to be, on all input protocols and data structures, a required key or field labeled delete.
That was how we did it in my day. You young folks have different and probably better ways.

Factio Republicana delenda est.
I am antifa.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 112 by caffeine, posted 09-22-2020 3:49 PM caffeine has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 114 by jar, posted 09-22-2020 8:11 PM AZPaul3 has seen this message but not replied

  
jar
Member (Idle past 94 days)
Posts: 34140
From: Texas!!
Joined: 04-20-2004


(1)
Message 114 of 121 (882416)
09-22-2020 8:11 PM
Reply to: Message 113 by AZPaul3
09-22-2020 8:09 PM


Re: Delete Key Enabled
What ever happened to just keep the 9 side down?

My Sister's Website: Rose Hill StudiosMy Website: My Website

This message is a reply to:
 Message 113 by AZPaul3, posted 09-22-2020 8:09 PM AZPaul3 has seen this message but not replied

  
Phat
Member
Posts: 18650
From: Denver,Colorado USA
Joined: 12-30-2003
Member Rating: 4.3


Message 115 of 121 (882419)
09-23-2020 2:37 AM
Reply to: Message 112 by caffeine
09-22-2020 3:49 PM


Re: Then dad joined Crazynutsx' Long Abandoned Web Site
dwise1 writes:
It has been observed that nothing that has ever been posted on the Internet every goes away. Has that effect been given a name?
Caffeine writes:
That's not really true - much is lost forever. There are now, far more active attempts to archive stuff; but there are also orders of magnitude more content appearing now than 20 years ago. Much of it is extremely ephemeral.
Thankfully, most of it is also shit.
As for our archives here at EvC, they will last as long as Percy keeps them, though I suppose that places such as the Wayback Machine can keep them even if Percy deleted them.
I've said some stupid things a lot of times, but I'm not in consideration for the Supreme Court or any position of importance where public scrutiny would be involved.
And I'm already cleared by the Stae to go into correctional facilities both juvenile and adult...though if you liberals had your way none of we religious folk would ever be allowed in there without bringing in the Pagan, the Jew, the Muslim, and the LGBQT activist in the same visit.
Which is the sum ridicule of Liberalism. Lets confuse everybody!

"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." ~Mark Twain "
***
far from science having buried God, not only do the results of science point towards his existence, but the scientific enterprise itself is validated by his existence.- Dr.John Lennox
The whole war between the atheist and the theist comes down to this: the atheist believes a 'what' created the universe; the theist believes a 'who' created the universe.
- Criss Jami, Killosophy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 112 by caffeine, posted 09-22-2020 3:49 PM caffeine has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 116 by Tangle, posted 09-23-2020 3:03 AM Phat has replied

  
Tangle
Member
Posts: 9581
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 6.5


(1)
Message 116 of 121 (882421)
09-23-2020 3:03 AM
Reply to: Message 115 by Phat
09-23-2020 2:37 AM


Re: Then dad joined Crazynutsx' Long Abandoned Web Site
Phat writes:
I've said some stupid things a lot of times
oh look, here comes another
quote:
And I'm already cleared by the Stae to go into correctional facilities both juvenile and adult...though if you liberals had your way none of we religious folk would ever be allowed in there without bringing in the Pagan, the Jew, the Muslim, and the LGBQT activist in the same visit.
Which is the sum ridicule of Liberalism.
If you knew how ridiculous that makes you look, you wouldn't write such thoughtless drivel.

Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien. I am Mancunian. I am Brum. I am London.I am Finland. Soy Barcelona
"Life, don't talk to me about life" - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved."
- Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 115 by Phat, posted 09-23-2020 2:37 AM Phat has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 117 by Phat, posted 09-23-2020 3:39 AM Tangle has replied

  
Phat
Member
Posts: 18650
From: Denver,Colorado USA
Joined: 12-30-2003
Member Rating: 4.3


Message 117 of 121 (882422)
09-23-2020 3:39 AM
Reply to: Message 116 by Tangle
09-23-2020 3:03 AM


Nutters R Us
Maybe you are right.
I think I just like to rant here instead of actually thinking sometimes.

"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." ~Mark Twain "
***
far from science having buried God, not only do the results of science point towards his existence, but the scientific enterprise itself is validated by his existence.- Dr.John Lennox
The whole war between the atheist and the theist comes down to this: the atheist believes a 'what' created the universe; the theist believes a 'who' created the universe.
- Criss Jami, Killosophy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 116 by Tangle, posted 09-23-2020 3:03 AM Tangle has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 118 by Tangle, posted 09-23-2020 6:31 AM Phat has not replied

  
Tangle
Member
Posts: 9581
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 6.5


Message 118 of 121 (882423)
09-23-2020 6:31 AM
Reply to: Message 117 by Phat
09-23-2020 3:39 AM


Re: Nutters R Us
Phat writes:
I think I just like to rant here instead of actually thinking sometimes.
Well, you could always take a positive out of it and use it as a way of understanding/recognising your own prejudices.

Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien. I am Mancunian. I am Brum. I am London.I am Finland. Soy Barcelona
"Life, don't talk to me about life" - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved."
- Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 117 by Phat, posted 09-23-2020 3:39 AM Phat has not replied

  
Sarah Bellum
Member (Idle past 851 days)
Posts: 826
Joined: 05-04-2019


(2)
Message 119 of 121 (882955)
10-28-2020 3:45 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Crazynutsx
05-24-2011 11:14 PM


The scientific evidence for evolution is a fascinating topic, from Darwin and others' researches in the 19th century to 21st century discoveries. Here's a brief summary:
What is evolution in the first place? When an animal such as a horse, whale, dog, chicken, shark or beetle is born (or hatched, as the case may be) it becomes a member of one more generation in a long sequence of generations reaching back into the far distant past. What did those ancestors of long-ago generations look like? How are the different living things you see around you related?
Take the example of the horse or whale or other mammal. The first fossil evidence of mammals is from the Triassic Period, when the reptiles still ruled. The early mammals were small (often described by paleontologists as "shrew-like" or "mouse-like" animals) and certainly far different from the horses, whales, elephants and other mammals we see today. So we have evolutionary change over many generations. The most important evidence for evolution is the simplest: go from point A, an ancestor, to point B, a creature living today of much different form than that ancestor.
What do Creationists think happened to get from point A to point B? Millions and millions of miracles, over millions and millions of years, creating new forms of life in the precise order that matches the fossil record and the DNA evolutionary tree? Why weren't whales created at the same time as fish? Surely if they were created ex nihilo, it would be strange to create all those land mammals first, then create the forms with vestigial limbs, then finally the fully aquatic forms . . . exactly in the order of their evolution.
There is more evidence for evolution in the simple fact that we see it happening all the time, all around us. It seems unlikely that God would use miracles to create new species in the distant past, but nowadays allow species to evolve naturally, not bothering with miracles anymore. For examples, we have:
- A new species of Buffalo grass evolved that can tolerate soil contaminated with mine tailings.
(go to page 2 of http://education.nationalgeographic.com/...opedia/speciation)
- The worm Nereis acuminata (JSTOR: Access Check)
- Madeira island house mice Speciation: more evidence ignored by intelligent design | Nondiscovery Blog
and Are new species still evolving? › Ask an Expert (ABC Science))
- A flower called the "American goatsbeard" (Evolution: Watching Speciation Occur | Observations - Scientific American Blog Network)
Do a web search on "examples of observed speciation" to find more examples, if you like.
Then there is the distribution of life forms on Earth. Of course, one would expect polar bears and penguins in cold climates, camels and cacti in hot climates. But why do we find penguins only in Antarctica and other regions in the southern hemisphere, but not in the north? Why should there be no camels in the deserts of North America? Alfred Russell Wallace typically gets second billing to Darwin, because of the fame of Origin of Species, but he is justly famous in his own right. Among other things, he studied the geographic ranges that species inhabited. The Creationist idea that different species were created especially for particular climates and environments was shown to be incorrect when Wallace observed that mountains and rivers marked the boundaries of the ranges of many species. He discovered that there were regions that were similar, but inhabited by very different animals.
Then there are the "evolutionary leftovers" that indicate the living creatures we see around us weren't created totally new, but instead bear evidence of change from earlier forms. The "panda's thumb" is a popular example. Notice that these are NOT imperfections (the argument with Creationists - if any - who believe that all of the created life forms are without blemish is a different argument) but traces of ancestry remaining in the body of the organism. The most glaring example, of course, is the eyes of blind cave fish. Why would they have been "created" by God with vestigial eyes? There are many other examples: the laryngeal nerve, the appendix, whale hip bones and vestigial leg bones, goose bumps and human body hair, kiwi bird vestigial wings, vestigial crab tails, vestigial koala caruncles, etc.
Then we have evidence from DNA. Chromosome #2 in humans is the most famous example: fused from two chromosomes that are separate in chimpanzee DNA, showing a common ancestor of humans and chimps.
There are other more subtle DNA traces showing common ancestry. Some of our genetic material is "pseudo-genes," genes that no longer code for a protein because of a mutation, and so are "inactive" bits of the DNA code. Consider DNA as instructions for assembling complex machines, because that's what DNA is: instructions for the chemical reactions of a developing organism. If two similar machines have similar instruction manuals, then they might have just got nearly the same wording because the machines have similar functions. But suppose the instruction manuals have the same typographical or grammar errors? Then we would expect the manuals to come from a common source. In the analogy, this would represent a common ancestor in the case of living creatures. A concrete example is the gene for synthesizing vitamin C. We need to consume vitamin C because our gene is inactive. Mapping such genes shows the common descent of humans and other primates, but demonstrates that other mammals (the guinea pig is one example) are further away on the evolutionary tree. The same pseudogene is present in humans and primates, but the guinea pig has a different pseudogene. "Intelligent Design" might argue for similarities in the active DNA code between humans and chimps, and dissimilarities between human and guinea pigs, but the inactive part of the DNA indicates the branching of the evolutionary tree.
More DNA evidence is provided by endogenous retroviruses:
quote:
Endogenous retroviruses are the remnant DNA of a past viral infection. Retroviruses (like the AIDS virus or HTLV1, which causes a form of leukemia) make a copy of their own viral DNA and insert it into their host's DNA. This is how they take over the cellular machinery of a cell and use it to manufacture new copies of the virus.
Sometimes, the cell that gets infected by such a virus is an immature egg cell in the ovary of a female animal. Such cells can be stored in a state of suspended animation or dormancy for as much as 50 years before they complete meiosis and become mature egg cells ready to be fertilized. Because they are dormant, gene expression is suppressed and the infection cannot take over the cell and kill it. If that egg later matures and is fertilized, the newborn organism will have that endogenous retrovirus in every one of its cells, and so will all of its descendants.
Every viral infection is unique. The complete genome of an animal is so huge, and the insertion point of a virus’s DNA is so random that it is statistically impossible for any two individuals to have the same exact endogenous retrovirus in the same exact spot on the genome unless they both inherited it from a common ancestor who had the original infection. And the infection of a germ cell is so rare that ERVs make up only somewhere between 1% and 8% of the entire human genome.
If two humans have the same identical ERV, it is proof that they are descended from a common ancestor. And if two different species have the identical ERV, it is proof that they too are descended from a common ancestor. In humans, there are about 30,000 different ERVS embedded in each person's DNA. Except for those later duplicated by a duplication mutation, all of them record unique infections of a single ancestral individual. Now here is where it gets really interesting.
There are at least seven different known instances of shared ERVs between chimps and humans... i.e. ERVs which are the identical viral DNA inserted into the identical spot of the genome. 100% of all chimps and 100% of all humans have these same ERVs. This is only possible if 100% of all chimps and all humans are descended from the single individual that had these original infections.
They are proof that humans and chimps share a common ancestor.
In a 2000 paper published in the journal Gene researchers identified ERVS shared by different primates and used them to assemble a family tree of monkeys apes and humans.
Reference: Lebedev, Y. B., Belonovitch, O. S., Zybrova, N. V, Khil, P. P., Kurdyukov, S. G., Vinogradova, T. V., Hunsmann, G., and Sverdlov, E. D. (2000) "Differences in HERV-K LTR insertions in orthologous loci of humans and great apes." Gene 247: 265-277.
Human Evolution: Endogenous Retroviruses prove that humans and chimps share a common ancestor.
Even at the level of single-celled life, there is interesting DNA evidence. Cellular structures such as mitochondria or chloroplasts have their own DNA, distinct from the DNA found in the cell nucleus. This is evidence for the evolution of the first single-celled life, cells with no nucleus or organelles, into more complex forms. Chloroplast DNA, for example, is evidence of a photosynthetic cyanobacterium that was engulfed by an early eukaryotic cell to form a larger symbiotic organism that could photosynthesize.
Then, of course, there are other interesting facts about the genetic material of living organisms, such as the chromosome count. If life were designed from some Divine blueprint, we would expect the more complex organisms to have more DNA and therefore more chromosomes. And Man, of course, at the top of the heap, according to Genesis, and made in God's image, should have the most: toolmaking skills, memory, brain, long life, the immortal soul, and, of course, a body larger and more complex than almost all of the millions of other organisms on the planet. For some organisms, this pattern does indeed hold. Myrmecia pilosula, an ant species, has only one pair of chromosomes and the individual workers, being haploid, have only one chromosome (not even a pair!) each. Small creature, small amount of genetic information. But when we look at even smaller creatures, we find, to our surprise, examples like Amoeba proteus, a microbe with more than 500 chromosomes! And so it goes. Humans have 23 chromosome pairs, one less than chimpanzees (see the example of chromosome #2 above) and a lot less than Ophioglossum reticulatum, whose 630 chromosome pairs make this lowly fern the reigning champion.
Even for structures of living organisms that don't fossilize well, such as the heart or the eye, we can see the pathways of evolutionary change in the organisms that live to day. This is not to say we, with our complex four-chambered heart, are evolved from some modern species of amphibian or fish alive today, of course. Living species are all leaves on the evolutionary tree, with the branches down below showing where different forms of life diverged. But modern forms of reptile, amphibian, fish and others can show us the path evolution took along those branches.
The mammalian four chamber heart is slightly different from the reptilian three-and-a-half chamber heart, which is different from the amphibian three chamber heart, which is different from the lungfish heart, which is different from the agnathan two chamber heart, which is different from the paired contractile aorta of the amphioxis, which is different from the single contractile aorta of the hemichordates. Then there is the earthworm who does not use an actual heart; it has one or more small muscular areas capable of contracting and pushing the blood and then reabsorbing it as it filters back.
Finally, consider the timeline of life on Earth. The simplest living things, the primitive unicellular organisms of billions of years ago, took the longest to develop! Why would that be? If a supernatural force were involved, why would it take so many hundreds of millions of years to develop the earliest single-celled life forms, while far more complex organisms, like Archaeopteryx, Australopithecus, Rhynia gwynne-vaughanii, Miohippus, Ichthyostega, Hylonomus, or cynodonts were "created" in the blink (on the geological time scale) of an eye? Seen as a natural process, however, the timeline of change is easy to understand: it takes a long time for nonliving chemicals to develop into living organisms, and it takes a long time for single-celled organisms to make the great leap to combine into multicellular life, if there is no supernatural intervention prodding them along.
Is the Origin of Species miraculous? In the sense that the birth of a child is miraculous, yes. Complex and marvelous, it is true, but also natural. "Speak to the earth and it shall teach thee."

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by Crazynutsx, posted 05-24-2011 11:14 PM Crazynutsx has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 120 by Stile, posted 10-30-2020 8:43 AM Sarah Bellum has replied

  
Stile
Member (Idle past 299 days)
Posts: 4295
From: Ontario, Canada
Joined: 12-02-2004


Message 120 of 121 (882979)
10-30-2020 8:43 AM
Reply to: Message 119 by Sarah Bellum
10-28-2020 3:45 PM


Sarah Bellum writes:
Is the Origin of Species miraculous? In the sense that the birth of a child is miraculous, yes. Complex and marvelous, it is true, but also natural. "Speak to the earth and it shall teach thee."
I always like to think that naturally-occurring things are more marvelous and incredible than any miracle ever could be.
For example, let's take a world where "miracles" really do happen: Harry Potter.
-The whomping tree. There is a magical tree that if you get close to it, it will move of it's own accord and attempt to "whomp" you by smashing it's limbs on the ground in attempts to crush the "intruder."
In the magical world of Harry Potter - where magic exists, and this tree is magical - this is common place, and just something to know about.
What about if this occurred in the same world - Harry Potter - but it wasn't magical at all? What if it was some strange route of evolution that took millions of years and eventually came to a sentient tree that would "whomp" intruders underneath it?
What's more impressive?
A "magical" tree that's doing what "magic" allows it to do?
Or a "natural" tree that - without any supernatural forces being applied to it to "help" it - started doing this "seemingly-magical/miraculous" motions?
To me, it's clear that natural causes are far more miraculous/impressive than any "miracle" caused by a God or being that is simply "able to do such things anyway."

This message is a reply to:
 Message 119 by Sarah Bellum, posted 10-28-2020 3:45 PM Sarah Bellum has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 121 by Sarah Bellum, posted 10-30-2020 10:15 AM Stile has seen this message but not replied

  
Newer Topic | Older Topic
Jump to:


Copyright 2001-2023 by EvC Forum, All Rights Reserved

™ Version 4.2
Innovative software from Qwixotic © 2024