But even if it did, you’d be claiming that an organism that was wasting tons of extra energy and cellular resources to accommodate useless regulatory mechanisms would somehow be naturally selected to out-survive its competitors and then later develop the cellular function that the previously unused regulatory mechanisms were regulating. This, once again, is impossible, because by the very definition of natural selection, any cell that is wasting energy maintaining unnecessary regulatory mechanisms will not have the cellular resources available to outlive its competitors.

In either case, this is a direct contradiction and simply cannot be supported by science. Now, don’t put words in my mouth. I am not advocating Creationism as an alternate explanation. However, it seems that many of the above posters don’t understand one of the simple facts about science: while you can never prove that one particular conjecture is absolutely true, you can prove a given conjecture is absolutely false.

I think that one service which the Creationist community has inadvertently provided us is that evolution is a scientifically weak and flawed idea. It is not scientifically tenable. Any rational thinking person of science can see right through the idea of evolution and immediately see that there is no way it can be an accurate explanation. It’s quite simply wrong, and some clever scientist in the future is going to propose a thesis more deserving of the endorsement of the scientific community.

But for now, try to avoid being so condescending. Many of you posters make it sound as if you know it all, when, judging by your posts, you know very little about advanced mathematics and probability, logic, and microbiology (the only three domains that bear relevance to the issues between evolution and creationism).

It doesn’t matter how old the universe is. You can run this monte carlo experiment infintely-many times and you’ll see that the proposed mechanisms of evolution are actually pure contradictions. From a priori analysis we can see that they are not even possible. Hence, astronomy plays absolutely no role in evolution or creation. The universe could be any age and it would make no difference.

It is rather curious how the OMG TEH EVIL SITH are the only ones who consistently tell the truth. “Oh, we use the Dark Side of the Force. We think it can be controlled. Oh, by the way, anger and fear and hate are useful on occasion.”

The you look at the Jedi. “I’m going to lie about your father. The Dark Side is BAD and once you go black, you never go back. Fear is BAD because it inevitably leads to anger and anger is BAD because it inevitably leads to hate and hate is BAD because it leads to the Dark Side, which is BAD.” Actually, the Jedi are the ones who think in absolutes. All absolutes, all the bloody time.

Then again, we’re talking about late Doc Smith Galactic Patrolmen (you know, the Omega-level hereditary psychics) who can be existentially threatened by two, count them, TWO Dark Siders at any given point in time (because there’s only two Sith ever? Leaving out EU apologetics, what?) and a numbered general order. You know. The kind you find printed in manuals.

Ah, it becomes clear. Jedi are illiterate.

Yes, you heard me correctly. That video is NOT WRONG.

You can learn from being wrong. This video does not rate nearly as highly as “wrong”.

This video is a deliberate and considered lie.

I feel your pain.

> “Only the Sith Think in Absolutes” – Obi-Wan McGregor

That is an absolute statement! GAH! Do Jedis ever stop lying? Ever? GRAAAAHHHHH CENTIPEDE POISON.

Still, we can’t say we’re surprised that the Creationists abuse cosmology so. They start with their fundamental assertion and conclusion (Creation) and accept only evidence or its illegitimate brother vague assertion that support that conclusion. It’s Soviet social science methodology applied to cosmology: everything has to support the conclusion that the New Communist Man is superior, historical evidence be damned.

See, here’s the problem as far as I read it. I was rereading some [i]Thus Spake Zarathrustra[/i] again (Nietzsche is an angry hyperbolic German, yes, but he has some good points about him) and what we have here is a bunch of people to whom God is not dead [in terms of being a spiritual motivator and concentration for their actions and the core explanation for everyday natural events]. They are attempting to hold a debate–to put it politely–with people to whom God is philosophically dead and because of this no communication can be achieved. There are two major reasons behind the communications breakdown: first, the creationists do not wish to let go of their God-centric explanation for everything, as that would be an admission in part that God as a dominating influence in their lives is dead; second, the non-creationists do not wish to bend an iota half because of creationist ‘aggression’ against science and half because the non-creationists believe they are Right: while God is dead to them as a concept, the need of the human animal to adhere to an absolutist doctrine that defines everything hasn’t gone away.

Science, to its credit, as a superorganism does correct its own mistakes much faster than religions tend to. However, it’s obvious by inspection of the history of science that those who hold science dear build into it a sort of sub-society with its own institutional inertia and hierarchal structures that make it resistant to change. This resistance is both good, in that it prevents the Crazy Hypothesis Of The Week from becoming dominant, and bad in that it slows advance by establishing some things almost as canon and hardly tolerating investigation against them (Newtonian mechanics, for the longest time; relativity until now, so on and so forth). Ideally, science is skeptical until the evidence clearly indicates that one hypothesis supplants another, and remains skeptical even after that; as science is made of people, however (say that in your best Heston voice!), science lauds its current Truth, is skeptical in the first stage of supplanting probably longer than it needs to be, then swaps out one Truth with a new Truth. There is, of course, internal arguments and hold-outs and additional such things that turn the black and white grey, but you can consider now how, for example, non-Big Bang cosmologies are hardly given the time of day today and a skeptical doubt in the Big Bang is immediately attacked as “wrong” (even by the good Doctor here).

The optimal formulation of scientific knowledge is “given our current state of ignorance, we believe what we observe is best modeled by…” and then the theory goes. Unfortunately, though, an almost cringing statement of ignorance isn’t absolute enough for what most humans seem to need as a philosophy (as opposed to a methodology, like true science). God is dead, and some people see this, but very few people if any have any idea what exactly this means, and hence absolutism is alive and well.