to Christians in this forum...

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The word, "evolution" deconstructed means "e-" "out of" or "from" and "volution" life-cycle. It expresses the essense of "natural" selection, whereas god guiding the production of organic diversity would be "artificial" selection. We produced breeds of dogs through "evolition," out of our will or choices.

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I do not believe you are correct, sir. I think that actually, "evolutio" means "to unroll." The actual word simply means to grow or develop. In biology, the term can imply natural selection, but it can also imply the historical development of a species. Thus even in a biological sense, it can apply to "God-directed 'common descent.'"

I hate it when scientists steal words. Take "accelerate" for example. To normal people, it means "go faster." To science people, it means "to change velocity." It is a sad day indeed when highly accredited people of reason believe that one can be accelerating when one is slowing down. It makes me wonder if physicists get into car accidents when they hit the accelerator, forgetting that it isn't also a brake.The same thing happened with evolution. In common parlance, the word "evolution" simply means change over time. Our technology level has evolved, our culture has evolved, our language has evolved, etc. Now those word thieves have taken another perfectly good word and assigned it a more specific connotation than it should have. Maybe they didn't mean to, but that is what happened, and they should apologize and make up a new word.You may be right that we need different words for natural and artificial selection development in biology, I simply submit that evolution is a word that fits both. Perhaps a qualifier such as "NS" or "AS" before evolution (or whatever word biologists make up instead)?[This message has been edited by Cynic1, 04-05-2004]

I realize that sarcasm can be hard to convey in a couple of written paragraphs, but I thought I was laying it on pretty thick. I thought I was being fairly obvious when I referred to scientists as "word thieves." You didn't really have to give me the high school physics class explanation of the scientific usage of "accelerate." There are lots of words with multiple meanings, take the word, "run," for example.I'll try to be make the sarcasm more obvious in the future to avoid any more misunderstandings.