LOL.  Go back to your friends playing on the swing set and the teeter-totters.  It's recess, and there's lots of snow outside.  Better hurry!   ....you do, um, have friends, don't you?

In the neither here nor there range - My Personal favorite theory, because it illustrates the scientific method so well, has to be John Dalton's theory of colorblindness . He discovered that it existed, and came up with a theory to explain it, and it's great. His Theory was that colorblindness was the result of the internal liquid in the eye being tinted with the colors you are blind to, like looking through the colored lens of old 3-D glasses filters out one image of the two for each eye.

Beautiful theory. Entirely wrong of course, but it illustrates everything beautiful about science - take something you know, concoct a hypothesis, design a test for the hypothesis (He was himself colorblind, so he donated his eyes after his death) ... and if that doesn't work science marches on with a new hypothesis.

The problem with ideologies like the AGW 'skeptics' is they have a thousand theories, and even the occasional odd fact, but they don't have any actual tests - "It's all natural cycles/sunspot activity/orbital variation/volcanic activity/!" - okay, how would you tell, how does your prediction vary from theirs?

You never get an answer to that - by odd coincidence their prediction is that the climate scientists are going to quit being right, in some unforeseen way, at some unforeseen point. That's not a prediction, that's crossreferencing the Bible and Nostradamus and hoping people won't notice.

Jonnan

katana, I suspect that you and I have many areas of political agreement, but your basic behavior in this thread is why Stardock's pre-forum-sprawl guidelines discouraged religious and political discussions at any site other than joeuser. More importantly to me as a former civics instructor and a worried-but-still-engaged citizen, civility (being at least vaguely polite) is essential for democratic governments.

Your profile says you're from the Netherlands. I had a friend for several years who was born in the same Florida town I was, but unlike me he is fluent in several languages and had lived for a while in the Netherlands. One of the many interesting things he told me about the Dutch is that you have at least three(?) different words for what we in US English just call "reasonable."

Sadly, I can't remember those Dutch words or the specific nuances that distinguish them, but the story he told to try illustrating one was striking to a boy born and raised in the US South. One evening, my friend and his lover were waiting in line to get into a night club and a very intoxicated couple had decided to step out of line, lay down, and fuck. The surrounding nearly-all-Dutch crowd apparently responded by starting numerous discussions about whether or not what that couple were doing was "reasonable." Plenty of folks thought it wasn't "reasonable," but apparently it also wasn't "reasonable" to attack the rude couple or to call the authorities. I thought that made the crowd waiting in line sound very "reasonable," and I really do wish I remembered the Dutch word I was thinking at the time.

Getting into flame-fights on Stardock boards is not reasonable. And it doesn't do a fucking thing to help what I believe is your real concern, namely trying as much as possible to purge blatant irrationality and lies from national and international political dialogues. I obviously feel a regular need to express contempt for certain ideas and practices, but I do my very best to avoid directly insulting or baiting strangers.

p.s. Apologies for sounding paternalistic there. If it is any consolation, I'm a lapsed anarchist, queer, and feminist. But my one of my grandfathers was a preacher and the other was a general, so I often have an irresistable impulse to tell other people how they ought to live their lives...

Okay, I can accept that, and won't hold it against you.

Yes I believe in science, and never said otherwise.  The problem is, people in their "arguments" conflate science with what they are espousing, or what the so-called "scientific" community espouses.  The two are not the same.

Science is the scientific method.  That's all it is.  If anyone tells you any different, they are lying.  If anyone tells you that they speak for science, or get to define what science is, they are lying.

Evolution has so many problems - philosophical, scientific, rational, probabalistic, mathematical, mechanical, common-sensical, and otherwise - that I quite honestly wouldn't know where to start.  I really wouldn't.  You could fill a library with critiques on every element of evolution.  So rather than me trying to pick one place out of a million possible places to start, why don't you tell me what convinces you to evolution?  Give me your best argument, your best evidence, whatever.  But please, don't make an appeal to authority, or cite some wikipedia source.  Tell me what convinces YOU to evolution.  Give me YOUR best argument, YOUR best reasoning or evidence.

Someone or something made all animals and all life - that much is quite obvious.  Who or what?  I have no idea, and neither does anyone else.

There is no way in hell I could convince you that the timex watch on your wrist evolved.  You would say that mathematically it couldn't happen.  Yet that timex watch is a joke compared to the complexity of the simplest cell in the simplest organism you can think of.  So why aren't you consistent?  Why do you have one explanation for how the space shuttle comes about, or the microprocessor (the pinnacles of human design and engineering, but jokes compared to the simplest protein in a cell), and another set for how biology comes about?  You see, I am consistent.  I have one explanation for all complex machines.  One.  And it is born out through observation.  I don't think that space shuttles come about due to random chance, and I don't think that microprocessors come about due to random chance.  For that matter, I don't think that all of the written works of Shakespeare come about due to random chance.  In fact, demonstrably, these things DON'T come about due to random chance.  Demonstrably, they are all designed and built.

Evolution claims to be a science, yet it is a process which cannot even be observed, which means it breaks the first tenant of the scientific method right off the bat, and just goes downhill from there (you learn in grade school that science starts with an observation).

If you landed on Mars, being the first person in history to do so, and walked into a martian cave, where you found thousands of alien texts bound up in enclycopedias, would your explanation be "this must have come about due to wind, erosion, random chance, etc?"  Of course not.  Yet DNA contains way more information than you could ever fit into books in a martian cave.  But you want to believe the information in DNA came about due to some random chance?  If so, how so?  The evolutionists can't tell you, but everyone with common sense knows that the only known cause of information is a mind, a brain.  If there is another known cause of information, tell me.

Where do blueprints come from?  Highly complex, highly-specified, highly-detailed blueprints?  Blueprints on how to build a highly advanced machine using highly advanced nanotechnology and composite materials - a machine that self-replicates and self-repairs and is fully automated?  Have you ever heard of blueprints coming about through random chance?  DNA are blueprints.

In fact, the fossil record shows all life appearing instantly.  There isn't a "tree of life" to be found in the fossil record.  You don't see fossils of organisms which, slowly over millions of years, change into other organisms, branching from a single creature into a "tree of life."  What you see is organisms appearing instantly in the blink of an eye fully-formed, remaining steady-state and unchanging for millions of years, and then going extinct.

What I just stated to you is not controversial.  Charles Darwin himself was aware of the problem, and even wrote about it.  He thought it was quite a challenge to his theory.  His explanation was that during his day the fossil record had been sampled incompletely and thus had numerous "gaps," but that when the gaps were filled in years later, one would be able to see a worm changing into a fish in the fossil record over time.  The problem is, the problem is actually far worse now than it was in Darwin's day.  Now we DO have a complete sampling of the fossil record.  In the words of Steven J. Gould, famous EVOLUTIONARY biologist and paleontologist, "the gaps in the fossil record are real."

But those are just stories, just as the head paleontologist at the museum of natural history will tell you (I know because I have a letter from him where he states that these are just stories, and he will also tell you the same thing about the fossil record I just told you).  And stories aren't science, are they?  Now, it is perfectly fine if you like stories, and if you want to believe in stories.  Just don't ever confuse stories with science, and don't ever try to pass off one for the other.

Yes, that is most certainly selection.  No one denies that selection takes place, natural or otherwise.  But selection cannot be demostrated to produce evolution, and if it can't be demonstrated, it isn't science.

We will use your same example, but with people.  Let's say you have a room of 100 people, 50 are black, 50 are white.  I walk in with a gun and shoot the 50 white, leaving the 50 black.  The evolutionist would say that the people in the room had just undergone some sort of instantaneous evolution.  The person with half a brain laughs and says you just killed all the white people, leaving only blacks.  You affected a statistical change in the population.  You applied a filter.  You did not do anything else.  The black people (or the black mice in your other example) were already there before the filter was applied.  Nothing changed into something else.  No organism became a new or different organism.  No "evolution" occurred.

They say people have multiple words for describing various specifics of items important to them as a culture, the trope namer being the "Inuit have a dozen names for Snow" .

Man, if I could find a place that had a dozen words for Reasonable I'd move there in a heartbeat -  .

Jonnan

Four steps:

A: Life Exists

B: Each surviving generation produces another generation of which the vast majority inherit traits that are fundamentally identical to the parent generation.

C: Each member of a Generation so produced has a chance of having an inherent (One which could itself be inherited) change that renders it different from it's parent Generation.

D: There is a chance, however small, that the change so induced is better suited to an environment than it's parent generation.

Given those four premises, Evolution is then inevitable.

I note for the record that A, B, and C are each verifiable. To defend the thesis that Evolution does not exist, you have to posit that there is *no* chance for any inherent change that would be a positive adaptation in an ensuing generation.

Since nothing is ever *perfectly* adapted to a changing environment there is *always* room for improvement.

Jonnan

You didn´t have to do all this.=) Very nice writeup hehe. The reason I'm so angry at Teleytea is that he claimed absolutely ludicrous things about Einstein theories and physics in general and claimed to work at a particle collider. Although I have no degree in the field in physics I can tell you that what he claimed was absolutely bull. (also throwing around formulas to impress the public). He tried to convince everyone he was some physics expert by writing some formulas and hard words.

After calling him out on this multiple times I got insulted and he ignored it.

Ok where to start... Ok note that I use God for any creator. Your personal beliefs may differ but please dont get offended by this.

Even if something *were* perfectly adapted for its environment, well this whole nonsense started due to an argument about environmental changes, correct?

Besides, evolution can be observed directly at the microbiology level - and in doing so also shits on the creationist argument "if man evolved from monkeys, why are monkeys still here?" Take one petri dish full of bacteria and split it in two. Let one grow in the original conditions and add a tiny amount of an antibacterial agent to the other. Not enough to kill it entirely, but enough to retard growth. After a while the dish treated with the poison will tolerate it better, and be able to withstand higher and higher doses, unitl that strain is effectively immune to that particular poison. At that point, you could say the bacteria has evolved to meet its new surroundings, but the half of the tray never exposed has not. WTF, evolution and the original species is still here? Wierd.

As for real-world proof, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphylococcus_aureus. You'll note the standard variety of staph is still around, even after the resistant forms evolved.

Wait Willy is a creationist too? 

I suddenly feel strenghtened in all my liberal views=). 

Evolution doesn't need the original species to die. They can diverge but why does everyone think the original species needs to dissapear after evolution?

Also resistant bacteria are not neccesseraly superior to the standard variety. They may be more suspecible to other enviroments for instance or have retarded growth. 

How about no? In no way can my post be construed as supporting a creationist veiwpoint. In fact, I was using it to argue AGAINST one of the prevailing arguments for ID.

You're forgetting that Wikipedia isn't part of the Web Woo-Point-O vanguard. It's part of the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. Just like all those nurses doing paperwork and the epidemeologists who parse mountains of that paperwork into one of those very rare commodities, meaningful statistics...

Meh, for something factual in nature and easily verified Wikipedia is fine. Resistant staph is hardly a controversial topic.

At the risk of being pedantic ....

evolution - a change in the allelic frequency of a population

Definition 1 can be proven to occur as per the examples above although the explanations are incorrect.  Taking a bacterial culture and exposing it to an antibiotic agent does not create a mechanism for tolerance, the mechanism must exist and the genetic basis for tolerance will be present in some percentage of the population.  Exposure to a level of the antibiotic that is not immediate fatal to the organism will result in the expression of the "tolerance protein" the non-tolerant bacteria are killed and the culture will show a dramatic selection in favor of the allele. 

Darwinian theory of evolution - the theory that all living organisms have evolved from a common ancestor

Darwinian evolution requires that random genetic mutations under selection pressure accumulated over time lead to divergence of species.  Proof of speciation has not been observed, although some aspects of the fossil record indicate some substantiation of the theory.

Arguing that proof of evolution = proof of Darwinian evolution is bad science

LOL.  I think you oversimplified it just a tad.

If you want to make an appeal to authority, fine.  But then you also have to bow out of the debate, and sit on the sidelines.

The same question can be asked of all the theories on "your" side of the issue.  For instance...

Classical Darwinian evolution needs life to already exist before it can operate.  So what made the first life?

The big bang needs an infinitesmally dense, hot, small, compact singularity containing all matter and energy in the universe to explode.  So what created that?  On and on.

If your point is that we don't have all the answers, I agree with you.  You don't either.  None of us do.

Uh, just about everything.

1. Don't attribute "god" to anything I said.

2. You are also subject to "infinite regress" in any theories you propose (see above).

3. You are arbitrarily and irrationally picking a demarcation point (biology) so as to try to divorce yourself from the "infinite regress."  I've often pondered why it is so obvious to evolutionists that an internal combustion engine was designed and built, yet so inobvious to them that a biological machine was.  I think it comes down to a bias against highly-advanced nanomolecular composite materials (skin, bone, etc).  In other words, if I were made of metal, wires, plastic, etc. and spoke in a monotone robotic voice, you'd think I was designed and built.  The difference is the materials used, and the technology in the materials.

Evolution is most certainly based on random chance.  Yes, there is a mechanial process operating over that random chance (natural selection), but the basis is random chance.  If you don't know that, then you don't know your own theory.

LOL.  Because you say it did?  Sounds like magic.

Nope.  No evolution took place.

Fine, show me another precedent for how information came into being.

It most certainly does.

No.  If you want to discuss the bible or creationism, that's fine, but you are talking to the wrong guy.  I'm not the guy to be talking to on that.

I'm not citing any sources, because I am literally halfway around the world from all of my accumulated information on this subject, and it's not my job to spoon feed you this stuff anyway.  If you want to know more about the fossil record, do your own research and reading.  Look up the most famous cambrian paleontologist in China, read what he has to say about the fossil record there.  Look up what Stephen J. Gould had to say.  Why the hell do you think Stephen J. Gould proposed his theory of "Punctuated Equilibrium?"  Because there isn't a tree of life in the fossil record, and he's trying to explain it, that's why.  For that matter, like I said before, look up what Charles Darwin himself had to say on this.

Like I said, I'm not here to spoonfeed anything to you.  You either know the subject you are trying to argue, or you don't.  My recommendation is to be as informed on a subject as possible before having an opinion on it, or arguing or debating it.

LOL.  See above statement.

Right.  Anything that doesn't support evolution can be dismissed with a wave of the hand as being a "tricky thing."  But if the fossil record HAD supported evolution, the tree of life, etc. boy, you'd never hear the end of it.

Right!  Nothing is an argument against evolution!  I understand that.

LOL.  If you believe that, and apparently you do, then I guess this discussion is over.  YES, we agree that the statistical population will change from mixed to black, but NO, no "evolution" takes place, you are simply killing off all the whites and leaving the blacks!

You can do the exact same thing with nonliving things.  You can have 5 white rocks and 5 black rocks.  You can then destroy the 5 white rocks, leaving only the 5 black rocks.  I guess you must be jumping for joy at this moment.  You just made a new discovery, didn't you?  Non-living things evolve just like living things do, apparently!  LOL!

Life, maybe you should just admit you're a dick?  Blaming it on being a second language is a little far fetched.

Jonnan, you're either knowingly or unknowingly propogating incorrect information.  The models have not predicted anything, and can't come up with the past changes either.  That's what all the manual adjustments were for.  You know, the ones in the code for the models with programmer notation explaining that they were alterations to make it fit the record?  Well, said Neuton, the apple didn't really fall every time I dropped it, so I had it circumcized to account for the failure last Saturday...

They've said themselves that they can't explain why it's cooling as well.  This led me to believe they were a bunch of idiots, since our recent record high solar activity has gone back into decline.  But then, if they accept that solar activity is causing the cooling, that would mean solar activity caused the warming too.  Yes yes yes, I know, so and so with a degree, who is thus inviolate and all knowing, said that solar activity wasn't the cause because obviously, the highest level of solar activity in centuries isn't enough of an effect to change the temperature so drastically as to increase it by less than one percent from absolute zero, where it would be without it.

This is essentially correct.  I've seen this done in the laboratory many times.  What happens is, if you have an entire test tube of e-coli, there might be one bacterium in that entire test tube that is a mutant.  The mutation is actually in the lactose-processing mechanism of the bacterium.  The mechanism is broken, and no longer works - the mutant bacterium is actually crippled.  So the mutant bacterium uses an inefficient back-up mechanism it already possesses to process the food that it eats.

This is why it survives when the normal bacteria around it die to the antibiotics.  You see, the antibiotics are taken up into the bacteria through the lactose-processing mechanism, and then those bacteria die.  But the mutant bacterium can't take up anything through its lactose-processing mechanism because that mechanism is broken and doesn't work, so it doesn't die to the antibiotics.

If you have a couple trillion bacteria in a test tube, one might have this crippling mutation.  Expose all the bacteria to the antibiotics, all will die but the one.  You can then culture that one bacteria, and it will grow into an entire colony that share the same crippling mutation.  The organisms aren't fit, however, and when you mix them back in with a normal population, they are outcompeted and out-reproduced and the statistical population returns back to normal.

It's the same exact "filter" I was speaking of earlier.  It's quite hillarious, but evolutionists think that "evolution" is happening if you take a gun and kill all the white people in the room, leaving the blacks.  The same with bacteria (instead of a gun to do the selecting, you use an antibiotic).

(As an aside, I have an evolutionist friend who claims that cars evolve.  He really does claim this.  As evidence, he will show you past models of cars, and then show you progressively newer models of cars, and show you how they "evolved" from one type of car into another, LOL.)

In my defense, I was merely giving the more general case as not every mechanism of tolerance is a metabolically crippling mutation.  However even in these cases when exposed to routine conditions these bacteria are still energetically disadvantaged as they are wasting a lot of cellular energy expressing a useless protein.

Wikipedia is neither leftist nor rightist (though there have been specific instances of 'inconvenient facts' being removed), just not always very reliable as a factual basis for supporting any given argument.  Most academic institutions decline to accept it as a valid reference in support of academic submissions due to its changing nature.

Climate science has no method of empirical testing - only hypothetical testing using different mathematical models which can only yield certain outcome probabilities given certain inputs.  Small errors in input can yield very large errors in output, depending on the number of iterations and particular statistical methods being used; or not.  Climate science depends entirely on statistical analysis for its hypothetical conclusions.  Professional statisticians have raised credible doubts about the validity of the particular methods and models used by the climatologists whose work constituted the principal basis of the IPCC recommendations.

Throw in the uncertainties about the quality of the raw data & the methodology of applying adjustments to that data before it was plugged into the hypothetical statistical models, and I think a reasonable person could be forgiven for having reservations about the validity of proposals to 'fix' this hypothetical 'fact,' not to mention man's capacity to 'get it right' on a global scale, assuming you accept the proposals as valid.

IPCC is more politics and 'foreign aid turned on its head' than science, if it is science at all.  It is an excuse for poor nations to demand a transfer of wealth, as opposed to being grateful & thankful for the immense amount of aid wealthy nations already provide voluntarily.  It's about a blatant money grab - one that won't do squat to solve, in actuality, the alleged problem being used as justification.  It seems pathetically obvious to me.  I don't need any 'peer-reviewed' articles to see what is happening.  I don't understand how allegedly intelligent leaders of first world countries can propose to act against the interests of their own citizens on such a flimsy basis.  The 'success' of IPCC depends on holding together a house of cards.  I found shocking & bizarro the comparative treatment of leaders of third world thugocracies (which have no money & can't do squat) and leaders of first world democracies who might have the money & might be convinced to help - talk about biting the hand that feeds you.  We should have walked out after Chavez & Mugabe, told the delegates to help themselves to everything the two of them could provide, have a nice (freezing) day.

All for now.

Except for this:

I don't think that's the case, actually.  That 'evolutionists' think that way, that is.

Actually the only flaw in the statement is that the room compromises a population.  A similiar comparable situation such as the Nazi holocaust can accurately be described by definition as evolution in that the genetic distribution of the human race did change.

Hard to consider the Holocaust as 'natural,' however, granting that evolution has no judgmental character. 

The Holocaust is as natural as exposing a population of E. coli to antibiotics.

Note however I am not claiming that either are natural selection, but evolution as defined by most biologists which only requires a change in allelic distribution across a population

Only if you equate sentient human beings with E. coli.  Nature does, I grant you, but the Holocaust required something a little different in character.

Murder is 'natural' in the biological/evolutionary sense.  But I take your point.

In a pure biological sense, the sentience or complexity of the population doesn't matter.  On the character issue I completely agree with you.  However my point was that neither are "natural" selection pressures, the biological definition of evolution doesn't differentiate between natural and artifical selection.