Yes, possibly, but it obviously wouldn't be 'half' an eye.

An entirely possible mutation might be to expand the visible spectrum, and though it might be cool I don't see it having any significant advantages towards survival.

I personally don't believe in life just by chance existing, but then again, each has their own opinions. I sure as heck was ignorant and say "I don't want to learn this in school." I personally try to keep an open mind on things. I believe in both Evolution and creationism in a way.

The wrath of heaven does indeed burn. Yeah, I re-read what you said... whoops, my apologies.

Damn, how did I extract what I did... Well, I'll just say that I can't read, yep. What are all these pretty symbols?!

That's really unnecessarily obnoxious.

Heh, I'm the one being attacked, and I think in context it was needed. I basically ranted on about something he didn't say, so yeah.

I love how accurate the pronunciation key was. :p

LITERALLY speaking, Genesis 1 says God created everything by speaking it into existance. Genesis 2 talks about forming everything. The only potential conflict I see is use of the term "day," which even in this day, we use as a generic term for "a period of time"... like I did just now. And that same rule applies to the Hebrew word. And LITERALLY speaking, "day" could not have possibly been referring to earth-based days because the sun did not even exist until day 4.
Here's an interesting, but unrelated, bit of information. Genesis 1:2 says "...the earth was formless." However it can also be interpreted to English as "the earth became formless." Verse 3 mentions a great light... on the same day. Not the sun. That was day 4, like I said. Interpret it as you will.

Mind you, I don't go for a literal account. Actually, belief of religion is based on faith. A subtle, but important difference.

All of this controversy, and we haven't even gotten into the topics of Teleological arguments or Intelligent Design!

GAH, GET THAT TELEOLOGIC CRAP OUTTA HERE! I've been reading too much of that in class lately. Stupid phiolosophy crap, I shake my fist at thee!

But yeah, tons of untouched, virgin ground. So soft and delecate, until our plows of argument violate it and... alright, enough of that...

I think the worst part of this whole thing is that I grew up/my parents still live in Cobb County. If I saw the woman who got the petition to put the stickers in the books I would throw a T-rex at her.

****, et tu Brute? I should've known lighthearted crazy posting goes through an internet seriousness filter. Lord Kuat, I sincerely apologize if I came across as attacking you. I wasn't, and I misread posts all the time; no hard feelings at all...



See, lots of people who attack evolution in my experience don't have a clue what it means; no offense. The basics of evolution is:
1- Random mutation
2- Rigorous natural and sexual selection

The process is anything but random.

:p

But seriousely though..

Any of you who think it's so unlikely that life managed to survive so well, and that the conditions were all so perfectly right, you're right. Just look at what we know about the universe... out of thousands of known planets on thousands of different systems, only one even comes close to having the conditions needed to harbor life.

This isn't an argument for creationism, on the contrary, it's an argument against it. If all planets in our star system had forms of intelligent (or even otherwise) life, then it would make slightly more sense to presume some external force or intelligent beings were responsible.

I know you were joking, but that's exactly what so many people do: they acknowledge point 1 (random mutation) and ignore point 2 (deterministic selection). I don't know why. Perhaps it even happens subconsciously, where every information that doesn't support their undefendable view of reality gets consistently blocked out. Then they still have point one in mind and go all berserk: life is too complex to have evolved through chance!

In its basic form (point 1+2) evolution is not hard to grasp. The pitfall is, people assume too fast that they get it. Darwin knew this when his friend and supporter Huxley gave a very blurry and confused speech on the subject. People falsely assume they get it, so think they're allowed to have a viewpoint on the subject, to have a shot at Truth. Which they're not.

I'm all for opinion and freedom of speech and everything, but in the discussion of evolution it has no place; meaning people who reject evolution because of a personal/religious bias (every single anti-evolutionist) shouldn't get the kind of attention they get now. It's amazing that the marginal belief of so few has become the marginal belief of so many, to the point that people assume there is a debate.

But there is no debate. This topic is useless. It frustrates me to Hell (non-existent) that in conversation with fundies I have to make sense, while they can keep proposing the same ****ed up, illogical, counterfactual, wishful thinking view on reality, with the Good Book in hand (which isn't all that good after all, as history keeps showing us).

So, before you get worked up too much in this debate, read a scientific book on the subject. Why don't I debate the fact that e=mc²? Because I don't know **** about that particular subject, and reality doesn't care about my personal viewpoint, until it's backed up by evidence (which, in the evolution debate, you don't have - yet?).

Yes, sorry, I misunderstood.

Anyway, pretty much anything that 'Intelligent Design' puts forward has been covered here against Creationism. Intelligent Design is just Creationism with a whole load of irrelevant scientific jargon pelted at it for good measure. It's just as much a non-theory as Creationism. Intelligent Design is for Creationists that want to have some facade of looking 'scientific'.



A lot of Creationists (I shall refer to Intelligent Design as Creationism as well) like to use the argument that the Universe must be fine-tuned to our survival as the likelihood of a Universe supporting a life is very unlikely to happen 'by itself'. This is the weak anthropic principle, and it's probably the best argument Creationists have going for them.

It has one fairly big logical fallacy, and several other smaller ones.
The big one is, regardless of what the probability is, it happened. This Universe does support life, so the probability of it occuring is not 0 - it's not impossible for it to all have been a big coincidence (so this doesn't really show that 'God must exist', at best it shows that 'God probably exists'). But if this Universe didn't support life, then we wouldn't be here talking about it. There might be another Universe that doesn't support life. This isn't it. There might be lots of Universes that don't support life. This one isn't one of them. In terms of us, the Universes that don't support life might as well not exist at all. So, in terms of us, the probability of a Universe supporting life must be 1.

And it all assumes that the Universal constants came about randomly, it assumes that they could be different. That is a fairly big assumption, and it hasn't really been justified.

Also, if the Universe was 'fine-tuned' then life should be much more abundant, rather than being as rare as it appears in this Universe.

The real proof of the existance for God would be if he created life in a Universe that couldn't support life. If we looked at all the constants in the Universe and realised "hey, life shouldn't be able to exist at all in this Universe", that could only that God must exist.

You have to realize that the general populace is rather conservative by nature. If you come up with something that contradicts what their established mindsets, they'll reject it automatically. I know what you mean, and it pisses me off too. But you just have to make a habit of ignoring them.

I think this only really applies to the US. Creationism really doesn't have any support in Europe, save perhaps for heavily Roman Catholic areas. The 'conflict' doesn't really exist outside of the southern US states, Europeans accept natural selection as truth and consider it no different from any other widely accepted scientific principle. The 'controvesy' over evolution is something Europe got over a hundred years ago.

(Yes, I do realise the world contains more than just America and Europe, the Middle-East believes almost exclusively in Islamic Creationism, which is essentially exactly the same. Because of the nature of the Middle-East, this probably isn't going to change any time soon)

Have you ever heard the phrase "If you can't wow them with intellect, baffle them with bullsh*t?"

That's mainly what I meant. Europe and north-east north america are just a small factor.

I was on my way to posting this exact same thing, until i discovered you'd beaten me to it

Kinda like how a hole conforms to a puddle.


Oh wait...

Well kids, I know of two things you can always depend on.

You're going to die, and poo smells like ****.

Circular argument.

That's because the vowels are represented as pictures, since standard ASCII can't represent the phonetic alphabet well at all.