I know many of them are sterile. But not all are. That would seem to be a way that would introduce a genetic change into a group of animals very quickly.

But, what fraction of the speed of light does that correspond to? (I’d do the math myself, but after losing 3 orders of magnitude, I’m giving up my calcuator for the day.)

Nope, still not close. If the universe is 6000 years old then the earth is 2000 years old and evolution is only about 1500 years old. This assumes a time contraction factor of 2,283,333 (13.7 billion / 6000).

Where Darwin Went Wrong:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3darzVqzV2o&feature=channel_page

JoeZo wrote:

,

Life on earth at 3,000 million years ago, possibly as far as 3,800 million years ago.

There was a paper published last year on some banded greenstones from Canada that might push the date back to 4300ma. Though, some question the methodology used in obtaining the age.

Per wikipedia, Big bang at between 13.61 and 13.85 billion years.
Life on earth at 3,000 million years ago, possibly as far as 3,800 million years ago.

LOL. Nice response.

The real humdinger, of course, was common descent. As far as I am concerned, common descent has been proven beyond reasonable doubt.

Now, it is true that there was no single species to represent the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) due to prolific horizontal gene transfer (HGT) that has occurred since. But we can still think of LUCA as a population of several or several hundred species – the interrelatedness of life is true nonetheless.

There is, consequently, no one true “tree of life”, which is what the New Scientist cover story was about a couple of weeks ago, but Darwin never really proposed a single tree of life. His diagrams were to do with species divergence, not with tracing the descent of all species back to LUCA.

Simple and elegant. But the IDiots sidestep the issue by saying “no one disputes that minor changes occur within species by natural selection, but it is ludicrous to think that it could lead to an entirely new form. Dogs will never become cats!”. And then they blame Darwin for all the ills in the world, despite the fact that what Darwin said was exactly what they say no one disputes.
Go figure.
My response: “What you are saying is that rain and wind can move individual grains of sand, but it is impossible for erosion to occur.”

I wrote about Darwin. My post was mostly about astronomy and how the Intelligent Design crowd do not understand the scope of math and science. I think it is easier to get people to accept that, by looking at the stars, than by looking inward, or at fossils.

While you may be right about showing up the lack of understanding within the ID crowd, I think there are other ways of combatting IDists. One is to try to help people understand what evolutionary theory is. At its core, it is actually pretty simple.

So, the next time someone asks why moderate Christians aren’t taking these people on, you can tell them that we are putting our careers on the line to defend science against these attacks. Happy Darwin Day.

Phil is just jealous ’cause we biologists *HAVE* a Grand Unified Theory!
There is a “Blog for Darwin” blog swarm at http://citizenship.typepad.com/blogfordarwin/
Click on my name to see my contribution, “Genius and Simplicity”.

Actually, it looks like the church got this one right:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article3993823.ece

Oh, SNAP!