I'm entitled to express my opinion, I believe in God. Not my problem if you don't.



I think that the difference is that Humans both have no need to kill, as well as know better common sense wise that killing is wrong.

Animals kill because it's in their nature and survival. Humans kill because they're sick and twisted.

I sincerely doubt God would cast the people who fought for our freedoms in WW1-2 for the simple fact that they were fighting for our survival, for the greater good.

It's odd, and somewhat irritating, that people think that 'their opinion!!' is something sacred that no-one must touch.

Imagine that your friend is crossing the road, and he is of the opinion that there are no cars coming. You observe that there are cars coming. Are you going to think "Oh well, it's his opinion that there are no cars, I should respect that and not correct him!"? Of course not. You stop him, you tell him that his opinion is false, and he is very thankful for that information.
This should be the response for all opinions, road-crossing-related or otherwise. When someone shows your opinion to be false, and offers you an alternative, you should be glad, and not stick to 'my opinion!!' blindly and boldy.

That is, of course, if you are at all interested in the truth. If you're not, then.. well, have fun crossing that road.


(And no, no-one has a 'right' to an opinion)

No, but it is my problem.



No, WE (animals) kill because of evolutionary inertia.

Let me get this straight..

You have a problem with the fact that I believe in these things?



Too ****ing bad. Deal with it.

No, I have a problem with people directing planes into buildings because of it, being "allowed an opinion" or raping children and pillaging cities because they're "above justification".

I'm pretty sure there are other motivations behind people bombing cities aside from "I believe in God, so you must die".

Of course there are, but religion provides an explosive combination of some of the most dangerous dynamics: general irrationality, sense of superiority, labelling, belief in afterlife, etc... Dawkins, agains, says it best:

My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a "they" as opposed to a "we" can be identified at all. I am not even claiming that religion is the only label by which we identify the victims of our prejudice. There's also skin color, language, and social class. But often, as in Northern Ireland, these don't apply and religion is the only divisive label around. Even when it is not alone, religion is nearly always an incendiary ingredient in the mix as well.

It is not an exaggeration to say that religion is the most inflammatory enemy-labelling device in history. Who killed your father? Not the individuals you are about to kill in 'revenge.' The culprits themselves have vanished over the border. The people who stole your great grandfather's land have died of old age. You aim your vendetta at those who belong to the same religion as the original perpetrators. It wasn't Seamus who killed your brother, but it was Catholics, so Seamus deserves to die "in return." Next, it was Protestants who killed Seamus so let's go out and kill some Protestants "in revenge." It was Muslims who destroyed the World Trade Center so let's set upon the turbaned driver of a London taxi and leave him paralyzed from the neck down.

edit: unnecessary

What makes you think I'm religious? I'm not. I have no religion. I was not baptized nor put under any religion of my parents. I do not go to church, I do not confess my sins. I do not believe in male circumcision, and I don't starve myself on certain days of the month.

Just because you believe in God, doesnt mean you are religious. God is not a religion, he's a religious figure.

Although, I agree with you, when people use religion and beliefs of religion for an excuse for something, it is wrong yes. However people can believe in things, and be just as right as you or me.

I would like to believe in God, if he gave me something to believe in. I can't just go: "there is a God" without any proof, its not my nature. This goes for anything paranormal too.

sci•ence
n.
1.
a. The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena.
b. Such activities restricted to a class of natural phenomena.
c. Such activities applied to an object of inquiry or study.


Natural selection does not cause macroevolution. I assume you know this, but I thought I should throw that out there because it’s a common misconception. It can’t happen. Think of it this way. An animal has a genetic code that is a certain number of values long. Each value determines something like length of hair, tail ect. Now you can change those values and get drastically different creatures. In a dog’s case, anywhere from a Great Dane to a Pekinese. But you can breed dogs till the cows come home, but you ain’t gonna ever get a giraffe. Why? Because the girraffe might have 70 values and the dog might have 120. (Keep in mind that these “values”, alleles, are very complex and determine way more than a numerical digit could.)
So evolution’s up a creek right? Not really. You can change the make-up and number of these allele through genetic mutation. Now genetic mutation doesn’t happen very often, and interestingly enough, it’s never actually given a creature an advantage. However, scientists conjecture that during certain times when there is a vast quantity of mutations from natural disasters and the like, evolution happens at an accelerated rate helped along by natural selection. That way the quality and quantity of the Alleles can be fooled around with to produce Macroevolution.
Obviously that was over simplified, but to understand it fully, we’d both have to have doctor’s degrees in genetic science.
However, ignoring the fact, that no observed mutations have actually benefited an animal, there are some other problems. Take the whole bird-dinosaur thing. Why should the dinosaurs with feathers survive over more than the one’s with out? It would be millions and millions of years before they would be able to fly, and in the mean time natural selection wouldn’t be rebuilding their bodies to help them to. The feathers would give them no advantage.

Moon dust. Why isn’t their hundreds of feet of dust on the moon? According to scientists there is only about a few thousands of years worth of dust on the moon.
At the rate that the oceans are getting saltier, a few million years should have it pretty much devoid of live, it would be 100% saturated with salt. It’s not.
We have not, even through carefully controlled scientific experiment been able to induce the creation a of simple life form. How could it happen by accident?
If they were created by accident, they wouldn’t have the necessary methods to gain nutrients.
What would it eat? Rock? There are no other organisms yet.
We could go back and forth forever, but like I say, with out some one there to write it down, no theory is going to be perfect.

Check these out

http://lifelinepro.com/MP3/Vote/track03.mp3
http://lifelinepro.com/MP3/Vote/track05.mp3
http://lifelinepro.com/MP3/Vote/track02.mp3

Good god man. Get with the program. I even spy an argument than I not only refuted hardcore about a year ago (never witnessed a beneficial mutation), but also betrays a total lack of understanding of evolutionary theory. I also remember saying you should read up on what you're criticizing - and you haven't (no better testimony to that than your post).

Again: too many people are allowed an opinion nowadays.

NEXT

Edit: WTF MOONDUST!? Seriously you are messed up. This argument is listed on a hardcore fundamentalist site as one of the arguments creationists should NOT use. Does anyone get the mindtwisting dimensions of delusion in this? You're so fundamentalist, you've OUTFUNDIED the most hardcore christian fundamentalist site I have ever seen - and I've been around.

This is chilling. *think happy thoughts think happy thoughts*

Get - with - the - program.

Seriously, no rhetorics: why do you think you're allowed an opinion? Cause that is seriously messed up.

The Creationist site that Tenshu quoted also lists the 'macroevolution' argument as another one that Creationists really shouldn't use. Why? Because it doesn't exist. There is no 'macro-evolution'. The evolutionary forces that govern bacteria are exactly the same as those that govern the Lion, and that is part of the beauty of evolution.

Subtle differences in individuals and competition between them results in the spreading of some qualities, and the loss of others.
Why do you expect this to be any different on the 'big' scale?





I don't know what mean by 'genetic code that is a certain number of values long'.

Genetics doesn't work like that. What governs phenotype is the combination of alleles, some being dominant over others.

If you had a tall guy and a short woman, and you breed them, what would you expect their children to be? All of them middle-sized? Nope!
The result is some tall children, and some short children, in a fixed ratio.




No, alleles aren't complex at all. They are two alternate forms of one gene responsible for alternative traits. The gene for blossom color in flowers - a single gene controls the colour of the petals, but there may be several different 'versions' of the gene. One 'version' might result in red petals, while another might result in white petals. These versions are alleles.





"There is roughly 0.1 to 1 mutation per genome replication in viruses and 0.003 mutations per genome per replication in microbes. Mutation rates for higher organisms vary quite a bit between organisms, but excluding the parts of the genome in which most mutations are neutral (the junk DNA), the mutation rates are also roughly 0.003 per effective genome per cell replication. Since sexual reproduction involves many cell replications, humans have about 1.6 mutations per generation. This is likely an underestimate, because mutations with very small effect are easy to miss in the studies. Including neutral mutations, each human zygote has about 64 new mutations (Drake et al. 1998)."
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB100.html


And most mutations have no effect at all, but beneficial mutations have most certainly been observed, as in antibiotic resistance in disease-causing organisms. Other observed examples include:
# Mutations have given bacteria the ability to degrade nylon (Prijambada et al. 1995).
# Plant breeders have used mutation breeding to induce mutations and select the beneficial ones (FAO/IAEA 1977).
# Certain mutations in humans confer resistance to AIDS (Dean et al. 1996; Sullivan et al. 2001) or to heart disease (Long 1994; Weisgraber et al. 1983).
# A mutation in humans makes bones strong (Boyden et al. 2002).
# Transposons are common, especially in plants, and help to provide beneficial diversity (Moffat 2000).
# In vitro mutation and selection can be used to evolve substantially improved function of RNA molecules, such as a ribozyme (Wright and Joyce 1997).


And 'beneficial' depends entirely upon environment anyway. What starts off as being a fairly useless trait might turn out to be life-saving if the environment changes.




How do natural disasters increase mutations?




No, we don't. High school science is more than enough to understand the most important principles of evolutionary biology and genetic science, as long as you have science teachers willing and able to thoroughly teach evolution as the core concept that it is.




Ah, excellent. See, this is the real debate that the most intellectual of Creationists will follow up. Even they know that your 'macroevolution' crap is going to get them nowhere. The only way they're going to attack evolution is irreducible complexity, some feature that is so complex that any 'evolutionary steps' to produce it would have been detrimental to the individual. The most common examples they use are the eye, the ear, the brain, bombadier beetle, giraffe, woodpecker tongue, and snake venom.

And it is a perfectly valid question, a very sensible one. Unfortunately, scientists have already asked it, and answered it (and all those other ones too)

'Half a wing' may have a multitude of different uses:

* In insects, half a wing is useful for skimming rapidly across the surface of water (Marden and Kramer 1995).
* In larger animals, half a wing is useful for gliding. Airfoils for gliding appear in several different forms in many different animals, including
o skin between legs on flying squirrels, flying phalangers, flying lemurs, some lizards (e.g. Saurus soarus), and some frogs (e.g. Rana dermoptera)
o flattened body of the flying snake (Chrysopelea)
o large webbed feet on gliding tree frogs (Rhacophorus and Polypedates)
o fins on flying fish (Exocoetidae) and flying squid (Onychoteuthis)
o expanded lateral membranes supported by elongated flexible ribs on gliding lizards (e.g., Draco)
o expanded lateral membranes supported by elongated jointed ribs on the Kuehneosauridae from the late Triassic
o lateral membrane supported by bones separate from the rest of the skeleton on Coelurosauravus jaekeli, an Upper Permian flying reptile (Frey et al. 1997)
o even an ant (Cephalotes atratus), when it falls, uses its hind legs to direct its aerial descent back to its home tree's trunk (Yanoviak et al. 2005).
* In immature chickens, wing-flapping enhances hindlimb traction, allowing the chickens to ascend steeper inclines. This function could be an intermediate to the original flight of birds. (Dial 2003)
* In some flightless birds (e.g., penguins), wings are used for swimming.
* In some flightless birds, wings are probably used for startling potential predators.
* Black herons use their wings to shade the water in which they fish.
* Some owls use their wings to hold their prey against the ground.
* Nighthawks, woodcocks, riflebirds, and several species of manakins make noises with their wings as part of sexual displays.
* Partial wings may have other useful functions that nobody has thought of yet.
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB921_2.html

And what's more, partially-winged creatures have been found.
Sinosauropteryx prima was a dinosaur covered with primitive feathers, but structurally similar to unfeathered dinosaurs. There's quite a few more, Deinonychosaurs, Byronosaurus, Yandangornis and Jixiangornis.
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC214.html


I think that's everything important.

I do encourage you to keep trying, though, if nothing else you'll educate yourself more about evolutionary biology, and eventually come to understand it. If it takes a million of these threads, Obi, it'll be worth it.

I think creationists generally mean 'evolution above species-level' by the term macro-evolution. Noone knows for sure, because clear definitions scare creationists. You're right that it doesn't exist though.



Oh COME ON. He posted some of this exact same *refuted* stuff about a year ago - he's not interested in education, intellectual honesty, knowledge, justification of beliefs or any other virtue (unless 'lying for jesus' is one). It's very obvious whatever you say won't get through ***you have a sudden craving for Coca-Cola®*** and I can write whatever I want here because it won't get through to his conscious mind anyway.

I suggest we let the dude live on in his own little mental world. He doesn't give a **** about the energy we put into this anyway, so let's return the favor - we can condescend too (dunno about you, but I can)

Heh

Huh, no reply?

One year ago:
Arguments A, B, C (lame, uninformed anti-informed ones, I might add)
Refutation of argument A, B, C
No response, leave thread ("I will post back on tuesday" - tuesday: nothing)

Now:
SAME arguments A, B, C
Refutation of argument A, B, C
No response, leave thread

My god there's a pattern!

No more willful ignorance, Obi_Kwiet - I want a public retraction of your 'arguments' or a refutation of Mort-Hog's replies. I'm sick of my time and effort being **** on.

Refute or retract. There's no third option, and if there was one, it definitely wouldn't be 'I can't HEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR YOOOOOUUU!!!'.

So, see you in a year I guess... I'm copying and pasting MH's reply - it'll come in handy.

Quit whining. All debates on this forum end with one side not responding.

[QUOTE=IRG SithLord]Quit whining. All debates on this forum end with one side not responding.[/QUOTE]

Shut up.

No, you shut up. :p

No one really formally concedes here.

I'm an athiest!

Tenshu, might you try sending him a PM?

I'd rather not - out here in the public there's at least some social control on what I can say and what I can't.

I meant a PM saying "get back here."

Or we can place bets when Obi_Kwiet responses.

I really should, but it would require effort, and thought, and I'm observing a week of procrastination. Check back in a few days after I beat Far Cry. While I'm at it, I should probably read up on it, but since that would require effort to I dunno...


Come to think of it I do have a whole book on this subject. I should probably read that instead of trying to go on info I got from a book I read two years ago and have mostly forgotten.

That's admirable, but remember - you have said this exact thing before. Don't let yourself get away with it *again*

Heh heh. Far Cry. How the heck do you kill more than two of those monkies in a small room?


What the heck. While I'm at it one quick question. How would a featherless creature get feathers? It couldn't get them all at once, as the DNA for a feather is far to complex to appear from a mutation. but on the other hand, how could you slowly evolve a feather? One the same note, how could a fish evolve legs? Natural selection causes immediate effects such as a strengthened beak or better running muscles. Something that is simply decorative would never become functional. Feathers with out some sort of highly developed wing and bone structure are about as useless for flying as flapping your arms.

Cool... alright-

Evolution of feathers

The first important observation is that feathers and scutes basically are the same structure, forming from the epidermis, and are of the same chemical composition.

This is an interesting experiment: lizard epidermis can grow in patterns very similar to chick feathers, mouse fur and mouse whiskers. The same epidermis can produce structures almost identical to chick scales (between the tibia and toes).

It also responds to chick dorsal dermis, which in chicks determines the growth of feathers. Lizard epidermis can't interpret the inductive signaling for feather growth, so instead, it produces scales in a typical feather pattern.

When infected with a certain inhibitor virus at a certain stage in their development, chicks developed at least some feathers from their scutes.


Check out this pangolin, with scales which are actually modified mammalian hair/fur.

So it should be obvious that these 2 structures are largely the same.

The second important observation is that flight was probably not the first role feathers played. They probably played a role in thermoregulation or gliding instead of actual flying.

Check out this link for a pretty detailed analysis on morphology.

How fish evolved legs
To start, there's a common misconception that the fish-amphibian transition was a transition from water to land. This is not the case. The transition was from fins to legs, which happened *in* the water. The first amphibians developed primitive legs to move around efficiently on the bottom of the oceans. In fact, some still do.

The fact that all this happened in water means the anatomical adaptation, which is mostly muscle adaptation, to support this change didn't have to happen very fast.

I'm copying in pasting the next part, because it's to me still the most accessible read on fish-amphibian evolution I have ever seen.

So, picture a population of ancient fish living in a wide, shallow lake. They eat insects that they catch on the water's surface, and often swallow air with the insect. This is actually a benefit for these fish as the oxygen levels in the water of this lake are a bit low, so they are actually able to absorb some oxygen from the air in their stomach.

Over the next few thousand years, the climate changes very slightly and the oxygen levels in the lake get lower. This means that only the fish that are swallowing air can survive. Any mutation that makes this process more efficient would help the fish out a lot. The result was the evolution of a pocket opening off of the digestive system, one that could hold air while the stomach dealt with food. This pocket evolved to be thinner-walled, and to have many sub-divisions for maximum surface area. This pocket is essenially a simple lung.

We see fish with lungs today, called (not surprisingly) lungfish. Lungfish still have gills, but some cannot survive without air gulped from the surface.

Some of these ancient fish migrated back to water where there was more oxygen, so the lungs were no longer needed. However, the lungs confered another benefit: they allowed the fish to control buoyancy. These lungs eventually evolved into swim bladders. Most familiar fish (trout, perch, cod, tuna) have swim bladders.

Meanwhile, those fish still in the shallow lake are now having to deal with the lake shrinking in the dry summer. Some survive by wiggling short distances through the mud to nearby pools. Because they had lobed fins, they were able to do this quite well. A great advantage to spending time out of the water like this is the relatively open habitat (lots of food, little competition on land). So any mutation that improved ability to breath air and move on land could be favoured.

Soon there are early amphibians: animals that spend time in water and on land, but must lay their eggs in the water. The lobed fins have evolved into simple legs. The next big step is the evolution of thicker-walled eggs that can survive on land. At the same time, the "amphibians" are evolving skin coverings that help them to avoid drying out on land. Pretty soon (in geological terms) you have scaled reptiles that lay their eggs on land.

This opened up a huge assortment of new places to inhabit and new ecological niches to exploit. Many groups of reptiles evolved, including some that got quite good at controlling their body temperature. Note that there are even some fish that are "warm-blooded," all you need is a gradual increase in your ability to monitor and control your body temperature ("warm-blooded" does not mean that you have warm blood, it means that you control your internal body temperature more or less constantly).

Some of these warm blooded reptiles evolved an interesting new covering that aided in temperature control: hair. This opened up new possibilities, and resulted in the evolution of a number of traits (most notably milk production). Here are the mammals.

Some of these mammals spent a lot of time in trees, and evolved to live in the arboreal environment. These ultimately evolved into primates. Some of them evolved into apes. Some of the apes evolved into humans.

There you go, hundreds of millions of years of evolution in a single post. Basically we are just highly-derived fish (and our embryos still start to grow gills before the tissues are redirected to other form organs).
(From: Peez, iidb.org)

I leave you with a picture of this little dude, the mudskipper, which is morphologically simply an early amphibia. Are these feet or fins?

Excellent questions, exactly the sort of stuff you should be asking, and Tenshu answered it much better than I could. with pictures, too!

I'd also like to add that the limiting factor here is not the physical evidence, we have fossil evidence up the wazoo; the limiting factor is the creativity of biologists. Them trying to think up now what could this be used for?. Luckily, scientists are usually a creative bunch, and can usually think up loads of stuff, but if they can't, then it's a due to the limitations of their creativity, not the evolutionary model itself. The predictions and evidence still hold up, regardless of whether we can think up any explanation for them. (An interesting paralell with this is string theory, something I'm slightly more familiar with, in that we have the equations, or an approximation thereof, we have the mathematics, we just have no idea what it means. We have a completely arbitrary set of equations that explain the Universe perfectly, and we have no idea what they mean or why they work. They just do.)


Also! I'd like to pick up on a really interesting point in Tenshu's quoted thing.



This is what I find the most fascinating about evolution, how a certain feature has alternate uses when the environment changes. This is the sort of stuff I'd never even think of. Lungs are for breathing, the end. Lungs controlling buoyancy? Whaa?
And this happens with loads of things, the same basic bones are present in the forelimbs of humans, cats, bats, porpoises, and horses, and yet they're used for very different purposes in different environments.

Also, this

Speaking of feathers..


Which is heavier, a ton of bricks? or a ton of feathers?

:em321:

Metric or Imperial?

And are they both experiencing the same magnitude of acceleration due to gravity?

and most importantly: is there a breeze?

I think that's safe to assume.

Alright, I'm out for a week to prepare for my med school entry exams.... Obi_Kwiet, I'd really like an 'ok' if you have read this. I'm maybe overzealous, but I think it's important.

Thanks and have a good one

I love these debates. I remember back in the day when I used to be like Obi, passionately defending the faith. Then I realized that evolutionary theory really has no bearing on whether or not Jesus died on the cross, then I stopped trying to refute it and started investigating it. Thanks Massassi! Oh, and the moral to the story is... I am not agnostic or anything as some would have you believe. I prefer the term apathetic. I am like Tenshu, I have a strong dislike for any kind of organized religion.

I'm comfortably agnostic, but am just as fascinated by history religion and theolgy as I am by evolutionary theory.

Good stuff.

From a religious point of view I really have no assignment, I'll sit down and listen to everyones views because I respect that they have those views but other than that, I really don't bother much.