Third of Americans Don't Believe in Human Evolution
I've been a little dismayed at times in how the arguments about Evolution/Creation have taken over some posts. Here is some information that has helped me see the issue a little clearer. Though I admit, that objectively, it still confuses me.
But I was just meandering. Wasn't it you who posted above:
>I enjoy the site and the meandering,
Different to you, not to natural selection.
And the difference is one of degree, not of kind.
Why is that so very different from the New York Museum of Natural History, with its famous "Horse Series" claiming to show all the transitional skeletons between ancient eohippus and modern equus. It turns out they were all distinct species that simply went extinct for whatever reason, and were not at all ancestors in any way. (The museum quietly removed the exhibit and tucked it away in the basement.)
There's as much propaganda for the Darwin story in that museum as there is for the literal Bible story in the Creation Museum. And with about as much scientific evidence, too.
Based on what evidence? Gaps in the fossil record? The gaps are real. The transitions are imaginary.
Fantastic! But a brown bear is a BEAR, and a polar bear is a BEAR. They're both BEARS, and all of the "transitional forms" between those two kinds of bears are yet themselves still BEARS. Everything is bears: bears at the start of the evolution; bears at the end of the evolution; bears in between the two end-points as transitions.
Prove to me right now that evidence of "bear transitions" between one bear and another bear are the same kind of thing as the lack of evidence of "transitions" between bears and whales. Or between tree shrews and humans.
You provided neither a good challenge nor anything of substance. What you did — as many on this thread have done — is confuse an instance of microevolution (the dominant appearance of a hitherto recessed trait amongst a given species, or the appearance of a new variety, race, or breed of species within a given genus) with the lack of evidence for macroevolution (the transmutation of one disparate taxon into another).
Thank you, amigo!
>You make very few positive claims of your own.
Thank you, again. I try not to step outside the bounds of politeness, diplomacy, decorum, and scientific rigor. The fact is, we don't have a clue how life began or how it speciated from a single "Ur" form, if, indeed, that's how it actually occurred. One famous (and controversial) panbiogeographer named Leon Croizat (you can Google him) believed that from a very early point in the Earth's history, all species existed at the same time and in all places. As the Earth began to change geologically and geographically, species began to die out, leaving the species "tracks" or patterns that we see today — sort of like a balding pattern. So maybe life started out ubiquitous and became local only by attrition. Who knows?
The idea that life started as a single "Ur-blob" at a single point on the Earth and then "mutated" and got "selected", morphing into the diverse forms we see today is probably a myth, as fictional as one of Rudyard Kipling's "Just So!" stories about animal genesis.
>It is a form of intellectual guerilla warfare.
Quite so.
>It is satisfying to you, perhaps, but delivers little positive value to the rest of us.
My sincere regrets. But if I knew how life actually started and how it diversified, I'd have a Nobel Prize, in which case, would I be talking to you? The fact is, no one knows. No one is even close.
>(I grant that the Alaskan Date Palms were a plus.)
Grazias, caballero! (It was sweet, was it not? Imagine her look of puzzlement evolving into one of shock, thence mutating into disbelief, whence it morphs into a series of closely related transitional forms: disillusionment, anger, hostility — yes, even despair — until finally it flowers into the highest form yet reached by this taxon: Holy Denial.
(moment of silence as an angel passes)
God, I wish I had been there to see it.
Anyway, thanks for the kudos!
But not zero probability, right?
LOL!!!!! Now you're suddenly interested in concepts from probability such as "likely" and "unlikely"? Love it. You were snoring loudly over those same concepts when I performed calculations in previous threads showing the astronomical odds against sufficient random mutations being beneficial and selected to turn a bear into a whale, or to do anything of interest in macroevolution. You truly are a Darwinist True Believer.
>a species of palm that could survive in AK is not the same as thrive
(Whew!!!) Nice save!
(Ahem. We all noticed how quickly you adopted the famous Bill Clinton Rhetorical Technique #9 known as "parsing otherwise well-understood words to make it appear as if there really is significant difference between 'is' and 'is', or between 'survive' and 'thrive.'" Congratulations. Did you earn a certificate for completing the course?)
Darwinian evolution vs. a magical man in the sky — those are the only two choices? Actually, it's a false alternative.
And if you believe in Darwinian evolution of species and chemical evolution of the first self-replicating cell from inanimate chemicals then you believe in mathematical miracles (which are the one kind of miracle that can be both predicted and retroacted with great precision), which makes you a Mystic of Spirit.
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