Just noticed that as of YOUR post, the CV left margins (or texts) are slowly translating towards each other, obscuring the first few words of each paragraph. Thought you’d wanna know.

Jimbo

Those who stick with Darwin’s theory and atheism are just as bad as those who want to teach “magic god creationism” in a theme park. What’s wrong with teaching students that we just haven’t completely figured everything out yet?

Teaching that we haven’t figured everything out yet is an integral part of science. I have no idea why you think atheism has anything to do with that. To suggest that this means teaching about ID is, however, crazy. There are many places you can read about evolution and learn enough to understand why evolution is accepted by all credible scientists.

Mark on Dec 19th, 2007 at 8:03 am
Mike, adaptation through natural selection is precisely what people mean by evolution. I refer you to http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/ for a discussion of this.

The late Carl Sagan once did a Cosmos episode about Japanese crabs. Some of the crabs had a shell that looked like a caricature of a Ninja warrior’s face. The Japanese fishermen had a legend about an ancient battle where the losers were run into the sea, where they became crabs.

Carl Sagan explained it as artificial selection. For hundreds of years, the fishermen had been throwing any crab that resembled a Ninja, back into the sea. Sagan proclaimed this as proof that evolution is true.

I don’t see proof of evolution. What I see is proof that you can make a crab look different through artificial selection. You could breed crabs until you have every mathematical possibility for a face on a crab shell, and all you will ever get are crabs. You will never get a new species of animal that is a different species from a crab.

Evolution is supposed to be small and gradual changes over time, but Darwin didn’t know about chromosomes or that different species have different numbers of chromosomes. So even if a 48 chromosome simian had a mutation that caused two pairs of chromosomes to fuse together into one pair, giving rise to a new species of humanoid with 46 pairs of chromosomes, this would have to occur all at once in one generation. This is not “small and gradual” but “sudden and abrupt.”

Organisms make slight changes from one generation to the next in order to adapt to changes in the environment, and Darwin observed this and concluded that all forms of life branched off from a common ancestor. Knowing what we know now about chromosomes, we surely must see that the changes from one species to another must be abrupt, not slow and gradual. We have never observed or found any evidence of a “slow and gradual” change from one species to another, but in a world that has been thoroughly explored over and over, we keep finding new, previously undiscovered species on a regular and periodic basis. In the fossil record, new species appear suddenly as well.

Those who stick with Darwin’s theory and atheism are just as bad as those who want to teach “magic god creationism” in a theme park. What’s wrong with teaching students that we just haven’t completely figured everything out yet?

I myself, I know that I cannot disprove an afterlife or god, and that is enough for me to have a small residue of faith in both of them.

There was an interview I saw a while ago with a conservative American politician, and he was saying that he would not accept God did not play a part in the creation of humans, and the person interviewing him sort of missed the point on the carefully worded lingo the politician was trying to use. He was in effect, at the time, saying that if science proved to him that the big bang was the beginning of life in the universe, that he would accept that God created the big bang, or some variant of that. That in my mind, coming from a conservative politician who typically plays to the religious right in America, is also progression.

Another point of view that I like to keep is that as a race, people like the organization for this theme park, do serve a purpose in progression. Perhaps there is an unseen pace to our development culturally that we do in fact need in order for the whole of humanity to keep it’s sanity and resist the bad habits associated with mob mentality, which is still our biggest flaw by far, one that every group of people, no matter what their beliefs, indulges in far to often.

Summary, everybody has faith, just in different things. I think that most people of science have faith that humanity will overcome it’s own flaws and we’ll make it to a Utopian society stretching across the stars one day, and that’s sort of in common with people who remain very religious and somewhat backward, whether we admit it or not.

The documentary did show interesting points about complex structures within organisms, taking on totally new functions with only slight changes to the structures. Of course, we don’t see what corresponding changes to the DNA were required, so we have no idea the likelyhood of all those DNA changes occurring at once to produce these more complex structures.

The supposed coup de grace, was the discovery that humans have a single chromosome that appears to be the merging of two chromosomes, which would explain how our suspected progenators, the apes, have 48 chromosomes, while we have only 47. What they didn’t explain, is if / how the first human with 47 chromosome, was supposed to reproduce with the concurrent apes, who have 48 chromosomes. Wouldn’t you have to have a mating pair of humans with 47 chromosomes, to produce viable offspring? Also, it was my understanding that it was necessary to have around 30 or 60 diverse breeding pairs to maintain an isolated population, so wouldn’t you have to have 30 to 60 humans with 47 chromosomes show up simultaneously?