Interesting to see how we can ignore information if it suits us.

Yes, I agree. Not only comparative anatomy - evolution is the cornerstone of almost all modern biology.

A definition of evolution that you would find in a standard biology textbook, is :
"a change in the gene pool of a population over time",
with a gene being a unit of DNA that codes for a characteristic, and a gene pool being the set of all of the genes in a species or in a population.

The theory of how RNA came about is called 'abiogenesis'. I know nothing about it so can't comment.**

Yes, that is evolution. They are other mechanisms besides mutation and natural selection that cause changes to gene pool - there is also genetic drift, recombination, lateral gene transfer and gene flow.

About 'increased in complexity'... I would say yes and no. Some single-celled organisms have 100 times larger genomes than humans. Does this make them more complex?

Natural selection is not random, its ordered based on the differential reproductive success of different genetic variants in a particular place and time, which are for good reasons.

WAT, for example, already considers me an idiot for my belief in creation...

MM - thanks for your explanation. I wish that others shared your constraint when dealing with those of differing ideas.

One thing, though. It's not your God vs no God. There are many beliefs regarding this and many who may be just as sincere and devoted as you to God, but "see" him/her/it differently.

What "bothers" me is when folks want to impose their particular beliefs on me and tell me I'm going to he11 if I don't. I'd prefer a "don't ask, don't tell" policy. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" /> Don't ask if I'm saved and don't tell me where I'm going if I'm not.

Folks like this are perhaps so far "right" (conservative) that they've gone around the backside and have reappeared on the "left" (liberal). It sure feels to me like pure paternalistic liberalism. Poor, WAT - he can't help himself and needs OUR help. Not only does WAT qualify for spiritual "welfare", he should get it whether he wants it or not! How much more liberal can one get? <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Hmmmmmmmm - the Constitution not designed to be a living document? That's a strange notion for a document that was designed to be amended. Or maybe you meant that it wasn't meant to be interpreted between amendments.

Seems to me that's exactly what the judicial branch is for. It's designed in.

Is it fair to observe that maybe you read the Constitution in a similarly, rigid way that you read your Bible?

Literally, without applying increased knowledge? At least the Constitution can be amended and even if interpretations get made that the citizenry doesn't agree with, amendments can "fix" them.

Why can't the Bible be updated? I can't fault the scribes way back then for not knowing about dinosaurs, the real age of the universe, a spherical earth (vs a "circle"), "local" floods, or common descent. Just think how much conflict could be avoided with an upgrade to version 2.0! <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

WAT

According to Al Gore's new film "An Inconvenient Truth," we're in for "a planetary emergency": melting ice sheets, huge increases in sea levels, more and stronger hurricanes, and invasions of tropical disease, among other cataclysms--unless we change the way we live now.

Bill Clinton has become the latest evangelist for Mr. Gore's gospel, proclaiming that current weather events show that he and Mr. Gore were right about global warming, and we are all suffering the consequences of President Bush's obtuseness on the matter. And why not? Mr. Gore assures us that "the debate in the scientific community is over."

That statement, which Mr. Gore made in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC, ought to have been followed by an asterisk. What exactly is this debate that Mr. Gore is referring to? Is there really a scientific community that is debating all these issues and then somehow agreeing in unison? Far from such a thing being over, it has never been clear to me what this "debate" actually is in the first place.

The media rarely help, of course. When Newsweek featured global warming in a 1988 issue, it was claimed that all scientists agreed. Periodically thereafter it was revealed that although there had been lingering doubts beforehand, now all scientists did indeed agree. Even Mr. Gore qualified his statement on ABC only a few minutes after he made it, clarifying things in an important way. When Mr. Stephanopoulos confronted Mr. Gore with the fact that the best estimates of rising sea levels are far less dire than he suggests in his movie, Mr. Gore defended his claims by noting that scientists "don't have any models that give them a high level of confidence" one way or the other and went on to claim--in his defense--that scientists "don't know. . . . They just don't know."

So, presumably, those scientists do not belong to the "consensus." Yet their research is forced, whether the evidence supports it or not, into Mr. Gore's preferred global-warming template--namely, shrill alarmism. To believe it requires that one ignore the truly inconvenient facts. To take the issue of rising sea levels, these include: that the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940; that icebergs have been known since time immemorial; that the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average. A likely result of all this is increased pressure pushing ice off the coastal perimeter of that country, which is depicted so ominously in Mr. Gore's movie. In the absence of factual context, these images are perhaps dire or alarming.

They are less so otherwise. Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries before that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don't know why.

The other elements of the global-warming scare scenario are predicated on similar oversights. Malaria, claimed as a byproduct of warming, was once common in Michigan and Siberia and remains common in Siberia--mosquitoes don't require tropical warmth. Hurricanes, too, vary on multidecadal time scales; sea-surface temperature is likely to be an important factor. This temperature, itself, varies on multidecadal time scales. However, questions concerning the origin of the relevant sea-surface temperatures and the nature of trends in hurricane intensity are being hotly argued within the profession.

Even among those arguing, there is general agreement that we can't attribute any particular hurricane to global warming. To be sure, there is one exception, Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who argues that it must be global warming because he can't think of anything else. While arguments like these, based on lassitude, are becoming rather common in climate assessments, such claims, given the primitive state of weather and climate science, are hardly compelling.

A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse. Regardless, these items are clearly not issues over which debate is ended--at least not in terms of the actual science.

A clearer claim as to what debate has ended is provided by the environmental journalist Gregg Easterbrook. He concludes that the scientific community now agrees that significant warming is occurring, and that there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate system. This is still a most peculiar claim. At some level, it has never been widely contested. Most of the climate community has agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early '70s, increased again until the '90s, and remaining essentially flat since 1998.

There is also little disagreement that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million by volume in the 19th century to about 387 ppmv today. Finally, there has been no question whatever that carbon dioxide is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas--albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed, assuming that the small observed increase was in fact due to increasing carbon dioxide rather than a natural fluctuation in the climate system. Although no cause for alarm rests on this issue, there has been an intense effort to claim that the theoretically expected contribution from additional carbon dioxide has actually been detected.

Given that we do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change, this task is currently impossible. Nevertheless there has been a persistent effort to suggest otherwise, and with surprising impact. Thus, although the conflicted state of the affair was accurately presented in the 1996 text of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the infamous "summary for policy makers" reported ambiguously that "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." This sufficed as the smoking gun for Kyoto.

The next IPCC report again described the problems surrounding what has become known as the attribution issue: that is, to explain what mechanisms are responsible for observed changes in climate. Some deployed the lassitude argument--e.g., we can't think of an alternative--to support human attribution. But the "summary for policy makers" claimed in a manner largely unrelated to the actual text of the report that "In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations."

In a similar vein, the National Academy of Sciences issued a brief (15-page) report responding to questions from the White House. It again enumerated the difficulties with attribution, but again the report was preceded by a front end that ambiguously claimed that "The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability." This was sufficient for CNN's Michelle Mitchell to presciently declare that the report represented a "unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse and is due to man. There is no wiggle room." Well, no.

More recently, a study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.

Even more recently, the Climate Change Science Program, the Bush administration's coordinating agency for global-warming research, declared it had found "clear evidence of human influences on the climate system." This, for Mr. Easterbrook, meant: "Case closed." What exactly was this evidence? The models imply that greenhouse warming should impact atmospheric temperatures more than surface temperatures, and yet satellite data showed no warming in the atmosphere since 1979. The report showed that selective corrections to the atmospheric data could lead to some warming, thus reducing the conflict between observations and models descriptions of what greenhouse warming should look like. That, to me, means the case is still very much open.

So what, then, is one to make of this alleged debate? I would suggest at least three points.
First, nonscientists generally do not want to bother with understanding the science. Claims of consensus relieve policy types, environmental advocates and politicians of any need to do so. Such claims also serve to intimidate the public and even scientists--especially those outside the area of climate dynamics. Secondly, given that the question of human attribution largely cannot be resolved, its use in promoting visions of disaster constitutes nothing so much as a bait-and-switch scam. That is an inauspicious beginning to what Mr. Gore claims is not a political issue but a "moral" crusade.

Lastly, there is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition. An earlier attempt at this was accompanied by tragedy. Perhaps Marx was right. This time around we may have farce--if we're lucky.

Mr. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT.

There is also little disagreement that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million by volume in the 19th century to about 387 ppmv today.

....there is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition.

It would appear that this concluding statement in your last post is that Evolution IS part of Biology as THE cornerstone of belief.

A definition of evolution that you would find in a standard biology textbook, is :
"a change in the gene pool of a population over time",

I have no problem with this limited definition of the word "evolution".

... "Theory of Evolution" postulates arose from non-living chemicals.

There is a huge difference in complexity and information content in the DNA of multicellular organisms than in a single cell organism.

Now, He did use man to write it. Let me give an anaolgy here, before someone goes down the road of "scribes" wrote it. Let's say I am paralyzed. And I have JustJ sit next to me a write down a book I am wanting to write. Who is the author? JustJ or me? I am, of course. JustJ just wrote down what I told her to write down.

Same goes with the Bible. We believe that the Bible is inspired by God. That those that wrote it, and later transcribed it and pased it on, were inspired by God. And while mankind held the pen, it was God who was the author.

Thus, since He is the author...He has a right to amend it. We, on the otherhand, do not have tht right. And I dont want to either, as it continues to be a perfect document...yet to be proven false in any of its ascertains, predictions or historical claims.

'Kinds' doesn't have a biological meaning. I think you said in a previous post that the 'creation model' allows for speciation .. did I get that right?

I may have misinterpreted, so correct me if I'm wrong. But to summarise my understanding so far:
1) Both evolution and creation models allow for genetic change in populations over time (='Evolution' as scientists understand and use the term).
2)Both models allow for speciation.
3)Evolution is not a theory about how things with genetic sequences ('life') arose. This is an unrelated theory.

It's the "no true Scotsman" argument writ large.

rs0522 - and this is "scientific" how? This "argument" applies equally to those who believe in evolution. So what is the point you are trying to make?

It's scientific because I am pointing out the logical fallacy of the creationists' denial of speciation. That's my point.

And no, it does not apply equally to evolutionist thinking. Evolutionary theory is falsifiable; that is, when flaws are discovered the theory is amended. That never happens with creationists.

Is there any aspect of young-earth creationism that you are willing to discuss based on positive evidence? I have made some suggestions, but these don't seem congenial to you.

Do you have any evidence? Pretend, for instance, that you need to show with evidence that the earth is 6,000 years old. Could you run thru the things that prove that this is the case?

rso522 - It would appear that you are operating under the false evolutionist assumption that creationists believe in the "fixity of species." Creationists do not. Variation of species is accepted and predicted by creationism.

Okay, and what has been falsified in evolutionary theory by scientific experiment? Or what has been proven that does not equally well fit with the creation model?

An example, if I may. Evolutionist Geologists pretty much all ascribed to the Uniformitarian theory, but since around 1970 more and more geologists are scrapping that idea in favor of a catastrophic model to "explain" what has actually been found. Now, they stop short of a "universal flood" as described biblically, but they are almost "uniformily" scrapping the gradualism of Uniformitarian theory and going "part way" to Catastrophism as the real history of the earth.

Yep, there is.




Yes there is "evidence." And it's not "pretend," so you can stop the snide comments that contribute nothing to the discussion.

Yes, I can, and will "run through" several of them in time. Time should not be a problem for evolutionists as they require immense amounts of time to try and make their model "fit" the real world. So, as I have the time to write up the information you want, I will get to it. Patience is a virtue for all, not just evolutionists.

Variation within species, or creation of new ones? The creation of new species is at the foundation of the theory of the origin of species thru natural selection.

Well, plate tectonics, for one, which requires more than 6,000 years to accomplish.

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An example, if I may. Evolutionist Geologists pretty much all ascribed to the Uniformitarian theory, but since around 1970 more and more geologists are scrapping that idea in favor of a catastrophic model to "explain" what has actually been found. Now, they stop short of a "universal flood" as described biblically, but they are almost "uniformily" scrapping the gradualism of Uniformitarian theory and going "part way" to Catastrophism as the real history of the earth.



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I don't think it is either-or.

Yes, I can, and will "run through" several of them in time. Time should not be a problem for evolutionists as they require immense amounts of time to try and make their model "fit" the real world. So, as I have the time to write up the information you want, I will get to it. Patience is a virtue for all, not just evolutionists.


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I look forward to that.

rs0522, you are operating under a false assumption or a misunderstanding. But I'll pick up on that later. For the moment let's make sure we understanding something that is fundamental to the evolution model. While variation of species is expected by "natural selection" from both the evolution model and the creation model, it is NOT the "foundation" of evolution.

The "foundation of evolution" is that life increases in complexity of information (i.e. new genetic coding) along with "pressures" of natural selection. In short, the "foundation" of evolution is that LIFE arose from some nonliving conglomeration of chemicals to establish the first primitive "one cell" form of life. From that original lifeform, increases in information somehow came into being that allowed for multicellular lifeforms and all of the varieties of life on earth (from the simple to the complex), including man.

"The major tenets of the evolutionary synthesis, then, were that populations contain genetic variation that arises by random (ie. not adaptively directed) mutation and recombination; that populations evolve by changes in gene frequency brought about by random genetic drift, gene flow, and especially natural selection; that most adaptive genetic variants have individually slight phenotypic effects so that phenotypic changes are gradual (although some alleles with discrete effects may be advantageous, as in certain color polymorphisms); that diversification comes about by speciation, which normally entails the gradual evolution of reproductive isolation among populations; and that these processes, continued for sufficiently long, give rise to changes of such great magnitude as to warrant the designation of higher taxonomic levels (genera, families, and so forth)."
- Futuyma, D.J. in Evolutionary Biology, Sinauer Associates, 1986; p.12

Okay....how many more years than 6,000?

Besides what are you saying is "falsified" about plate tectonics? Continental drift? Mountain building? Etc.?

Of course not, it can, and does, attempt to "have it's cake and eat it too. That's fundamentally based on the rejection of the biblical account and the embracing of an evolutionary presuppostion. However, Uniformitaritanism is fundamental to the evolution model, and allowing for "regional" or "local" catastrophes works against Lyellian Uniformitarianism and affects other aspects of supposed evolution.

Yet the evidence is quite clear that catastrophe has operated on earth, in opposition to Uniformitarianism as the "how" things supposedly happened by evolution.

And that doesn't even take into account the required increase in genetic information required to produce more complex lifeforms.