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Dinosaurs are fake and leads to atheism!

Lawson

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If you look at the history of this topic as it has been discussed on this forum, I'm afraid that you will find you are beating a dead horse here.
And speaking of dead horses:

4 million years ago

Ancient DNA derived from a horse fossil that's between 560,000 and 780,000 years old suggests that all living equids—members of the family that includes horses, donkeys, and zebras—shared a common ancestor that lived at least 4 million years ago, approximately 2 million years earlier than most previous estimates.
 

Lawson

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Can someone print the contents or at least the 15 answers in brief? The domain disallows Tor users so I can't read it.
Of course. Happy to.

1. Evolution is only a theory. It is not a fact or a scientific law.

Many people learned in elementary school that a theory falls in the middle of a hierarchy of certainty—above a mere hypothesis but below a law. Scientists do not use the terms that way, however. According to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a scientific theory is “a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses.” No amount of validation changes a theory into a law, which is a descriptive generalization about nature. So when scientists talk about the theory of evolution—or the atomic theory or the theory of relativity, for that matter—they are not expressing reservations about its truth.

In addition to the theory of evolution, meaning the idea of descent with modification, one may also speak of the fact of evolution. The NAS defines a fact as “an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and for all practical purposes is accepted as ‘true.’” The fossil record and abundant other evidence testify that organisms have evolved through time. Although no one observed those transformations, the indirect evidence is clear, unambiguous and compelling.

All sciences frequently rely on indirect evidence. Physicists cannot see subatomic particles directly, for instance, so they verify their existence by watching for telltale tracks that the particles leave in cloud chambers. The absence of direct observation does not make physicists' conclusions less certain.

2. Natural selection is based on circular reasoning: the fittest are those who survive, and those who survive are deemed fittest.

“Survival of the fittest” is a conversational way to describe natural selection, but a more technical description speaks of differential rates of survival and reproduction. That is, rather than labeling species as more or less fit, one can describe how many offspring they are likely to leave under given circumstances. Drop a fast-breeding pair of small-beaked finches and a slower-breeding pair of large-beaked finches onto an island full of food seeds. Within a few generations the fast breeders may control more of the food resources. Yet if large beaks more easily crush seeds, the advantage may tip to the slow breeders. In pioneering studies of finches on the Galpagos Islands, Peter Grant and Rosemary Grant of Princeton University observed these kinds of population shifts in the wild.

The key is that adaptive fitness can be defined without reference to survival: large beaks are better adapted for crushing seeds, irrespective of whether that trait has survival value under the circumstances.

3. Evolution is unscientific because it is not testable or falsifiable. It makes claims about events that were not observed and can never be re-created.

This blanket dismissal of evolution ignores important distinctions that divide the field into at least two broad areas: microevolution and macroevolution. Microevolution looks at changes within species over time—changes that may be preludes to speciation, the origin of new species. Macroevolution studies how taxonomic groups above the level of species change. Its evidence draws frequently from the fossil record and DNA comparisons to reconstruct how various organisms may be related.

These days even most creationists acknowledge that microevolution has been upheld by tests in the laboratory (as in studies of cells, plants and fruit flies) and in the field (as in the Grants' studies of evolving beak shapes among Galpagos finches). Natural selection and other mechanisms—such as chromosomal changes, symbiosis and hybridization—can drive profound changes in populations over time.

The historical nature of macroevolutionary study involves inference from fossils and DNA rather than direct observation. Yet in the historical sciences (which include astronomy, geology and archaeology, as well as evolutionary biology), hypotheses can still be tested by checking whether they accord with physical evidence and whether they lead to verifiable predictions about future discoveries. For instance, evolution implies that between the earliest known ancestors of humans (roughly five million years old) and the appearance of anatomically modern humans (about 200,000 years ago), one should find a succession of hominin creatures with features progressively less apelike and more modern, which is indeed what the fossil record shows. But one should not—and does not—find modern human fossils embedded in strata from the Jurassic period (65 million years ago). Evolutionary biology routinely makes predictions far more refined and precise than this, and researchers test them constantly.

Evolution could be disproved in other ways, too. If we could document the spontaneous generation of just one complex life-form from inanimate matter, then at least a few creatures seen in the fossil record might have originated this way. If superintelligent aliens appeared and claimed credit for creating life on Earth (or even particular species), the purely evolutionary explanation would be cast in doubt. But no one has yet produced such evidence.

scientificamericandebates1217-94-I3.jpg
New species evolve by diverging away from established ones and acquire sufficient differences to remain forever distinct. Credit: Science Picture Company Getty Images
It should be noted that the idea of falsifiability as the defining characteristic of science originated with philosopher Karl Popper in the 1930s. More recent elaborations on his thinking have expanded the narrowest interpretation of his principle precisely because it would eliminate too many branches of clearly scientific endeavor.

4. Increasingly, scientists doubt the truth of evolution.

No evidence suggests that evolution is losing adherents. Pick up any issue of a peer-reviewed biological journal, and you will find articles that support and extend evolutionary studies or that embrace evolution as a fundamental concept.


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Conversely, serious scientific publications disputing evolution are all but nonexistent. In the mid-1990s George W. Gilchrist, then at the University of Washington, surveyed thousands of journals in the primary literature, seeking articles on intelligent design or creation science. Among those hundreds of thousands of scientific reports, he found none. Surveys done independently by Barbara Forrest of Southeastern Louisiana University and Lawrence M. Krauss, now at Arizona State University, were similarly fruitless.

Creationists retort that a closed-minded scientific community rejects their evidence. Yet according to the editors of Nature, Science and other leading journals, few antievolution manuscripts are even submitted. Some antievolution authors have published papers in serious journals. Those papers, however, rarely attack evolution directly or advance creationist arguments; at best, they identify certain evolutionary problems as unsolved and difficult (which no one disputes). In short, creationists are not giving the scientific world good reason to take them seriously.

5. The disagreements among even evolutionary biologists show how little solid science supports evolution.

Evolutionary biologists passionately debate diverse topics: how speciation happens, the rates of evolutionary change, the ancestral relationships of birds and dinosaurs, whether Neandertals were a species apart from modern humans, and much more. These disputes are like those found in all other branches of science. Acceptance of evolution as a factual occurrence and a guiding principle is nonetheless universal in biology.

Unfortunately, dishonest creationists have shown a willingness to take scientists' comments out of context to exaggerate and distort the disagreements. Anyone acquainted with the works of paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard University knows that in addition to co-authoring the punctuated-equilibrium model, Gould was one of the most eloquent defenders and articulators of evolution. (Punctuated equilibrium explains patterns in the fossil record by suggesting that most evolutionary changes occur within geologically brief intervals—which may nonetheless amount to hundreds of generations.) Yet creationists delight in dissecting out phrases from Gould's voluminous prose to make him sound as though he had doubted evolution, and they present punctuated equilibrium as though it allows new species to materialize overnight or birds to be born from reptile eggs.


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scientificamericandebates1217-94-I41.jpg
Fossil record shows a succession of hominins, with features becoming progressively less apelike and more modern. Credit: E. R. Degginer Science Source
When confronted with a quotation from a scientific authority that seems to question evolution, insist on seeing the statement in context. Almost invariably, the attack on evolution will prove illusory.

6. If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?

This surprisingly common argument reflects several levels of ignorance about evolution. The first mistake is that evolution does not teach that humans descended from monkeys; it states that both have a common ancestor.

The deeper error is that this objection is tantamount to asking, “If children descended from adults, why are there still adults?” New species evolve by splintering off from established ones, when populations of organisms become isolated from the main branch of their family and acquire sufficient differences to remain forever distinct. The parent species may survive indefinitely thereafter, or it may become extinct.

7. Evolution cannot explain how life first appeared on Earth.

The origin of life remains very much a mystery, but biochemists have learned about how primitive nucleic acids, amino acids and other building blocks of life could have formed and organized themselves into self-replicating, self-sustaining units, laying the foundation for cellular biochemistry. Astrochemical analyses hint that quantities of these compounds might have originated in space and fallen to Earth in comets, a scenario that may solve the problem of how those constituents arose under the conditions that prevailed when our planet was young.

Creationists sometimes try to invalidate all of evolution by pointing to science's current inability to explain the origin of life. But even if life on Earth turned out to have a nonevolutionary origin (for instance, if aliens introduced the first cells billions of years ago), evolution since then would be robustly confirmed by countless microevolutionary and macroevolutionary studies.

8. Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance.

Chance plays a part in evolution (for example, in the random mutations that can give rise to new traits), but evolution does not depend on chance to create organisms, proteins or other entities. Quite the opposite: natural selection, the principal known mechanism of evolution, harnesses nonrandom change by preserving “desirable” (adaptive) features and eliminating “undesirable” (nonadaptive) ones. As long as the forces of selection stay constant, natural selection can push evolution in one direction and produce sophisticated structures in surprisingly short times.

As an analogy, consider the 13-letter sequence “TOBEORNOTTOBE.” A million hypothetical monkeys, each typing out one phrase a second on a keyboard, could take as long as 78,800 years to find it among the 2613 sequences of that length. But in the 1980s Richard Hardison, then at Glendale College, wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomly while preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed (in effect, selecting for phrases more like Hamlet's). On average, the program re-created the phrase in just 336 iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could reconstruct Shakespeare's entire play in just four and a half days.

9. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that systems must become more disordered over time. Living cells therefore could not have evolved from inanimate chemicals, and multicellular life could not have evolved from protozoa.

This argument derives from a misunderstanding of the Second Law. If it were valid, mineral crystals and snowflakes would also be impossible, because they, too, are complex structures that form spontaneously from disordered parts.

The Second Law actually states that the total entropy of a closed system (one that no energy or matter leaves or enters) cannot decrease. Entropy is a physical concept often casually described as disorder, but it differs significantly from the conversational use of the word.

More important, however, the Second Law permits parts of a system to decrease in entropy as long as other parts experience an offsetting increase. Thus, our planet as a whole can grow more complex because the sun pours heat and light onto it, and the greater entropy associated with the sun's nuclear fusion more than rebalances the scales. Simple organisms can fuel their rise toward complexity by consuming other forms of life and nonliving materials.

10. Mutations are essential to evolution theory, but mutations can only eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features.

On the contrary, biology has catalogued many traits produced by point mutations (changes at precise positions in an organism's DNA)—bacterial resistance to antibiotics, for example.

Mutations that arise in the homeobox (Hox) family of development-regulating genes in animals can also have complex effects. Hox genes direct where legs, wings, antennae and body segments should grow. In fruit flies, for instance, the mutation called Antennapedia causes legs to sprout where antennae should grow. These abnormal limbs are not functional, but their existence demonstrates that genetic mistakes can produce complex structures, which natural selection can then test for possible uses.

Moreover, molecular biology has discovered mechanisms for genetic change that go beyond point mutations, and these expand the ways in which new traits can appear. Functional modules within genes can be spliced together in novel ways. Whole genes can be accidentally duplicated in an organism's DNA, and the duplicates are free to mutate into genes for new, complex features. Comparisons of the DNA from a wide variety of organisms indicate that this is how the globin family of blood proteins evolved over millions of years.

11. Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life.

Evolutionary biologists have written extensively about how natural selection could produce new species. For instance, in the model called allopatry, developed by Ernst Mayr of Harvard University, if a population of organisms were isolated from the rest of its species by geographical boundaries, it might be subjected to different selective pressures. Changes would accumulate in the isolated population. If those changes became so significant that the splinter group could not or routinely would not breed with the original stock, then the splinter group would be reproductively isolated and on its way toward becoming a new species.

scientificamericandebates1217-94-I6.jpg
Nautilus shell has become a symbol of evolution and biological change. As the creature that occupies the shell outgrows one chamber, it builds another, larger chamber next to it, creating a growing spiral pattern. Credit: Bert Meyers Getty Images
Natural selection is the best studied of the evolutionary mechanisms, but biologists are open to other possibilities as well. Biologists are constantly assessing the potential of unusual genetic mechanisms for causing speciation or for producing complex features in organisms. Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and others have persuasively argued that some cellular organelles, such as the energy-generating mitochondria, evolved through the symbiotic merger of ancient organisms. Thus, science welcomes the possibility of evolution resulting from forces beyond natural selection. Yet those forces must be natural; they cannot be attributed to the actions of mysterious creative intelligences whose existence, in scientific terms, is unproved.

12. Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve.

Speciation is probably fairly rare and in many cases might take centuries. Furthermore, recognizing a new species during a formative stage can be difficult because biologists sometimes disagree about how best to define a species. The most widely used definition, Mayr's Biological Species Concept, recognizes a species as a distinct community of reproductively isolated populations—sets of organisms that normally do not or cannot breed outside their community. In practice, this standard can be difficult to apply to organisms isolated by distance or terrain or to plants (and, of course, fossils do not breed). Biologists therefore usually use organisms' physical and behavioral traits as clues to their species membership.

Nevertheless, the scientific literature does contain reports of apparent speciation events in plants, insects and worms. In most of these experiments, researchers subjected organisms to various types of selection—for anatomical differences, mating behaviors, habitat preferences and other traits—and found that they had created populations of organisms that did not breed with outsiders. For example, William R. Rice of the University of New Mexico and George W. Salt of the University of California, Davis, demonstrated that if they sorted a group of fruit flies by their preference for certain environments and bred those flies separately over 35 generations, the resulting flies would refuse to breed with those from a very different environment.

13. Evolutionists cannot point to any transitional fossils—creatures that are half reptile and half bird, for instance.

Actually, paleontologists know of many detailed examples of fossils intermediate in form between various taxonomic groups. One of the most famous fossils of all time is Archaeopteryx, which combines feathers and skeletal structures peculiar to birds with features of dinosaurs. A flock's worth of other feathered fossil species, some more avian and some less, has also been found. A sequence of fossils spans the evolution of modern horses from the tiny Eohippus. An amazing fossil creature from 375 million years ago named Tiktaalik embodies the predicted and long-sought transition of certain fishes to life on land. Whales had four-legged ancestors that walked on land, and creatures known as Ambulocetus and Rodhocetus helped to make that transition. Fossil seashells trace the evolution of various mollusks through millions of years. Perhaps 20 or more hominins (not all of them our ancestors) fill the gap between Lucy the australopithecine and modern humans.

scientificamericandebates1217-94-I7.jpg
Credit: Cleo Villet
Creationists, though, dismiss these fossil studies. They argue that Archaeopteryx is not a missing link between reptiles and birds—it is just an extinct bird with reptilian features. They want evolutionists to produce a weird, chimeric monster that cannot be classified as belonging to any known group. Even if a creationist does accept a fossil as transitional between two species, he or she may then insist on seeing other fossils intermediate between it and the first two. These frustrating requests can proceed ad infinitum and place an unreasonable burden on the always incomplete fossil record.

Nevertheless, evolutionists can cite further supportive evidence from molecular biology. All organisms share most of the same genes, but as evolution predicts, the structures of these genes and their products diverge among species, in keeping with their evolutionary relationships. Geneticists speak of the “molecular clock” that records the passage of time. These molecular data also show how various organisms are transitional within evolution.

14. Living things have fantastically intricate features—at the anatomical, cellular and molecular levels—that could not function if they were any less complex or sophisticated. The only prudent conclusion is that they are the products of intelligent design, not evolution.

This “argument from design” is the backbone of most recent attacks on evolution, but it is also one of the oldest. In 1802 theologian William Paley wrote that if one finds a pocket watch in a field, the most reasonable conclusion is that someone dropped it, not that natural forces created it there. By analogy, Paley argued, the complex structures of living things must be the handiwork of direct, divine invention. Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species as an answer to Paley: he explained how natural forces of selection, acting on inherited features, could gradually shape the evolution of ornate organic structures.

Generations of creationists have tried to counter Darwin by citing the example of the eye as a structure that could not have evolved. The eye's ability to provide vision depends on the perfect arrangement of its parts, these critics say. Natural selection could thus never favor the transitional forms needed during the eye's evolution—what good is half an eye? Anticipating this criticism, Darwin suggested that even “incomplete” eyes might confer benefits (such as helping creatures orient toward light) and thereby survive for further evolutionary refinement. Biology has vindicated Darwin: researchers have identified primitive eyes and light-sensing organs throughout the animal kingdom and have even tracked the evolutionary history of eyes through comparative genetics. (It now appears that in various families of organisms, eyes have evolved independently.)

Today's intelligent-design advocates are more sophisticated than their predecessors, but their arguments and goals are not fundamentally different. They criticize evolution by trying to demonstrate that it could not account for life as we know it and then insist that the only tenable alternative is that life was designed by an unidentified intelligence.

15. Recent discoveries prove that even at the microscopic level, life has a quality of complexity that could not have come about through evolution.

“Irreducible complexity” is the battle cry of Michael J. Behe of Lehigh University, author of Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. As a household example of irreducible complexity, Behe chooses the mousetrap—a machine that could not function if any of its pieces were missing and whose pieces have no value except as parts of the whole. What is true of the mousetrap, he says, is even truer of the bacterial flagellum, a whiplike cellular organelle used for propulsion that operates like an outboard motor. The proteins that make up a flagellum are uncannily arranged into motor components, a universal joint and other structures like those that a human engineer might specify. The possibility that this intricate array could have arisen through evolutionary modification is virtually nil, Behe argues, and that bespeaks intelligent design. He makes similar points about the blood's clotting mechanism and other molecular systems.

Yet evolutionary biologists have answers to these objections. First, there exist flagellae with forms simpler than the one that Behe cites, so it is not necessary for all those components to be present for a flagellum to work. The sophisticated components of this flagellum all have precedents elsewhere in nature, as described by Kenneth R. Miller of Brown University and others. In fact, the entire flagellum assembly is extremely similar to an organelle that Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague bacterium, uses to inject toxins into cells.

The key is that the flagellum's component structures, which Behe suggests have no value apart from their role in propulsion, can serve multiple functions that would have helped favor their evolution. The final evolution of the flagellum might then have involved only the novel recombination of sophisticated parts that initially evolved for other purposes. Similarly, the blood-clotting system seems to involve the modification and elaboration of proteins that were originally used in digestion, according to studies by Russell F. Doolittle of the University of California, San Diego. So some of the complexity that Behe calls proof of intelligent design is not irreducible at all.

Complexity of a different kind—“specified complexity”—is the cornerstone of the intelligent-design arguments of author William A. Dembski in his books The Design Inference and No Free Lunch. Essentially his argument is that living things are complex in a way that undirected, random processes could never produce. The only logical conclusion, Dembski asserts, in an echo of Paley 200 years ago, is that some superhuman intelligence created and shaped life.

Dembski's argument contains several holes. It is wrong to insinuate that the field of explanations consists only of random processes or designing intelligences. Researchers into nonlinear systems and cellular automata at the Santa Fe Institute and elsewhere have demonstrated that simple, undirected processes can yield extraordinarily complex patterns. Some of the complexity seen in organisms may therefore emerge through natural phenomena that we as yet barely understand. But that is far different from saying that the complexity could not have arisen naturally.
 
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Idolater

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And speaking of dead horses:

4 million years ago

Ancient DNA derived from a horse fossil that's between 560,000 and 780,000 years old suggests that all living equids—members of the family that includes horses, donkeys, and zebras—shared a common ancestor that lived at least 4 million years ago, approximately 2 million years earlier than most previous estimates.
Demonstrate 560,000 or 780,000 years, or any figure in between, so that we can see and establish that these aren't fictional entities, like Spiderman.
 

Right Divider

Body part
And speaking of dead horses:

4 million years ago

Ancient DNA derived from a horse fossil that's between 560,000 and 780,000 years old suggests that all living equids—members of the family that includes horses, donkeys, and zebras—shared a common ancestor that lived at least 4 million years ago, approximately 2 million years earlier than most previous estimates.
There is no such thing as "4 million years ago". Go ahead and try to make an argument for it.
 

7djengo7

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This question is semantically loaded so the only correct answer can be yes and no.

LOL @ your calling inconvenient, binary-choice questions, "semantically loaded". But, at least you're on record, here, admitting that it is a question that you are refusing to answer. What's it like for you, going through life as an anti-binary fruitcake?

Is your TOL screen name "Lawson"? Yes or No? ⬅️ Is that question "semantically loaded"? Yes or No? ⬅️ How about that one?


It depends.

What depends? And, on what does "it" depend?

You have to define human vs non-human

  • A human is not a non-human. Do you disagree?
  • A non-human is not a human. Do you disagree?
By your "vs" between them, it seems you do not disagree.

then I will give you a crisp answer to your liking,

We already know you're never going to answer the question, you calculating weasel. :)

See, even you know you would necessarily embarrass yourself were you to answer it in the affirmative. Just the same, even you know you would necessarily embarrass yourself were you to answer it in the negative. So, you've chosen your third, and only other option: to embarrass yourself by refusing to answer it.

Unlike you, any rationally-thinking person can answer the question correctly, and with ease: "No. No non-human has ever given birth to a human."


but be forewarned your tone is of the niggling variety.

Forewarned about what? That you're going to have a meltdown? Why should I care about that?

Niggling leads others to not only dislike what you say,

LOL @ your dislike of the question, "Has any non-human ever given birth to a human? Yes or No?"
LOLOL @ your pathetic, futile attempts at saving face for yourself against the spectacle of your pathetic failure to answer it.


but to dislike and avoid you.

Oh well. Better put me on "ignore," then, Professor Poser. ;)
 
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Lawson

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Has a horse given birth to a non-horse? Yes - when mated to a donkey.

Has a hominid given birth to a different kind of hominid? YES.
 

JudgeRightly

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Has a horse given birth to a non-horse? Yes - when mated to a donkey.

Equine-kind have indeed given birth to equine-kind.

Has a hominid given birth to a different kind of hominid? YES.

Has an African woman ever given birth to a non-African child? Yes, when the father is not African.

But BOTH are HUMANS.

The question you were asked, sir, was "has a non-human ever given birth to a human."

The answer is no, for your records.

And the corollary, "Has a human ever given birth to a non-human," answers thusly: No.

This question is semantically loaded so the only correct answer can be yes and no. It depends. You have to define human vs non-human then I will give you a crisp answer to your liking, but be forewarned your tone is of the niggling variety. Niggling leads others to not only dislike what you say, but to dislike and avoid you. I am susceptible to average human sensibilities.

Atheists like avoiding answering simple questions, because they know that answering those simple questions will completely undermine their position.

And answering "What is X" is another tactic used by atheists to avoid answering those simple questions.

Just like Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has to call into question exactly what a woman is, despite us (as a society) knowing EXACTLY what a woman is before, so too atheists have to call into question what a human is, in order to make their position seem viable to the rest of society.
 

Lawson

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Demonstrate 560,000 or 780,000 years, or any figure in between, so that we can see and establish that these aren't fictional entities, like Spiderman.
Dating was estimated by the location of a jaw bone in the permafrost. Are you well versed in permafrost? Focus on the PERMA part. People have studied permafrost, formulated hypotheses about the age of varies levels AND TESTED THOSE HYPOTHESES. They can achieve reliable predictability within a margin of error.

The jaw sample contained a few remaining pockets of collagen and blood. The researchers were able to reconstruct the equid's genetic code. For comparison, they also sequenced the genomes of a Late Pleistocene horse that lived about 43,000 years ago, a contemporary donkey, five different domestic horse breeds, and a Przewalski's horse, which is considered the world's only remaining wild horse and a source of controversy. Genetic clock techniques suggest how ancient things were.

You could look up aging permafrost or genetic clock instead of comparing all this to the Marvel Universe. Thor, a Norse God, is part of the Marvel universe. Try not to make laughable comparisons, dear friend.
 

Idolater

"Foundation of the World" Dispensationalist χρ
... Please to explain how any of your recent arguments advances the dialogue at all beyond what appears in this article: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/15-answers-to-creationist/

1. Evolution is only a theory. It is not a fact or a scientific law.

... The fossil record and abundant other evidence testify that organisms have evolved through time. ...
Begging the question, a fatal fallacy.
Although no one observed those transformations, the indirect evidence is clear, unambiguous and compelling.
Begging the question.
All sciences frequently rely on indirect evidence. Physicists cannot see subatomic particles directly, for instance, so they verify their existence by watching for telltale tracks that the particles leave in cloud chambers. The absence of direct observation does not make physicists' conclusions less certain.
False analogy between particle physics and evolution.

3. Evolution is unscientific because it is not testable or falsifiable. It makes claims about events that were not observed and can never be re-created.
Evolution has never been demonstrated.
microevolution
Begging the question (that evolution is real).
and macroevolution. Microevolution looks at changes within species over time—changes that may be preludes to speciation, the origin of new species. Macroevolution studies how taxonomic groups above the level of species change. Its evidence draws frequently from the fossil record and DNA comparisons
That's all the same evidence for God, God's creation, and for the Flood.
to reconstruct how various organisms may be related.

These days even most creationists acknowledge that microevolution has been upheld
"Microevolution" is begging the question.
... The historical nature of macroevolutionary study involves inference from fossils and DNA rather than direct observation.
That's all we're saying. If evolutionists would go here and no further we wouldn't be fighting so much.

one should not—and does not—find modern human fossils embedded in strata from the Jurassic period (65 million years ago).
Demonstrate "the Jurassic period (65 million years ago)" isn't only a particular strata, that could have formed far more recently than whatever 65 million years is supposed to designate.
scientificamericandebates1217-94-I3.jpg
New species evolve by diverging away from established ones and acquire sufficient differences to remain forever distinct.
Begging the question.
4. ... creationists are not giving the scientific world good reason to take them seriously.
Evolutionists are unanimously begging the question. Therefore they shouldn't be taken seriously. And they edit all the journals, they have a conflict of interest in ever publishing a very basic paper accusing them all of committing a fatal fallacy of reasoning. Evolution's their sacred cow.
7. Evolution cannot explain how life first appeared on Earth.
That's just a fact.
The origin of life remains very much a mystery
Not to theists.
, but biochemists have learned about how primitive nucleic acids, amino acids and other building blocks of life could have formed and organized themselves into self-replicating, self-sustaining units, laying the foundation for cellular biochemistry.
The odds involved are longer than God simply being real.
Astrochemical analyses hint that quantities of these compounds might have originated in space and fallen to Earth in comets, a scenario that may solve the problem of how those constituents arose under the conditions that prevailed when our planet was young.
Begging the question. (What if our planet is still young?)
Creationists sometimes try to invalidate all of evolution by pointing to science's current inability to explain the origin of life. But even if life on Earth turned out to have a nonevolutionary origin (for instance, if aliens introduced the first cells billions of years ago
That isn't an answer (how did this hypothetical alien life begin then?)
), evolution since then would be robustly confirmed by countless microevolutionary
That's not evolution.
and macroevolutionary studies.
Bald assertion. Declaratory.
11. Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life.
"Microevolution" is begging the question.
... science welcomes the possibility of evolution resulting from forces beyond natural selection. Yet those forces must be natural; they cannot be attributed to the actions of mysterious creative intelligences whose existence, in scientific terms, is unproved.
0e8b7d2c53195177a326670609fcb7ea.jpg

12. Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve.
Correct.
Speciation is probably fairly rare
Wut. Speciation is 100% responsible for speciation, according to evolution, so it is the opposite of rare, "fairly" or otherwise.
and in many cases might take centuries. Furthermore, recognizing a new species during a formative stage can be difficult because biologists sometimes disagree about how best to define a species. The most widely used definition, Mayr's Biological Species Concept, recognizes a species as a distinct community of reproductively isolated populations—sets of organisms that normally do not or cannot breed outside their community. In practice, this standard can be difficult to apply to organisms isolated by distance or terrain or to plants (and, of course, fossils do not breed). Biologists therefore usually use organisms' physical and behavioral traits as clues to their species membership.
Translation speciation is (conveniently) invisible /undetectable.
Nevertheless, the scientific literature does contain reports of apparent speciation events in plants, insects and worms. In most of these experiments, researchers subjected organisms to various types of selection—for anatomical differences, mating behaviors, habitat preferences and other traits—and found that they had created populations of organisms that did not breed with outsiders. For example, William R. Rice of the University of New Mexico and George W. Salt of the University of California, Davis, demonstrated that if they sorted a group of fruit flies by their preference for certain environments and bred those flies separately over 35 generations, the resulting flies would refuse to breed with those from a very different environment.
The delicate way in which this is reported has me very suspicious that it's positive proof of speciation. iow if scientists were convinced that this is a demonstration of evolution, they would (and should!) be shouting it from rooftops.

They ain't. Ergo, "12. Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve."
13. Evolutionists cannot point to any transitional fossils—creatures that are half reptile and half bird, for instance.

... A sequence of fossils spans the evolution of modern horses from the tiny Eohippus. ...
Begging the question.
... Whales had four-legged ancestors
Begging the question.
that walked on land
How is it established and demonstrated and proven that these creatures weren't shallow water dwellers like the gigantic herbivorous dinosaurs were?
, and creatures known as Ambulocetus and Rodhocetus helped to make that transition.
Begging the question.
Fossil seashells trace the evolution of various mollusks
Begging the question.
through millions of years.
Prove millions of years isn't fiction, like Superman.
Perhaps 20 or more hominins (not all of them our ancestors
Demonstrate any of them are "our ancestors".
) fill the gap between Lucy the australopithecine and modern humans.
Begging the question.
Creationists ... argue that Archaeopteryx is not a missing link between reptiles and birds—it is just an extinct bird with reptilian features. ...
Why can't this be true?
... All organisms share most of the same genes, but as evolution predicts, the structures of these genes and their products diverge among species
Circular.
, in keeping with their evolutionary relationships.
Begging the question.
Geneticists speak of the “molecular clock” that records the passage of time. These molecular data also show how various organisms are transitional within evolution.
Begging the question.

The ommitted points are straw man fallacies or variations on themes I addressed or simply uninteresting and unimportant.
 

Idolater

"Foundation of the World" Dispensationalist χρ
Dating was estimated by the location of a jaw bone in the permafrost. Are you well versed in permafrost? Focus on the PERMA part. People have studied permafrost, formulated hypotheses about the age of varies levels AND TESTED THOSE HYPOTHESES. They can achieve reliable predictability within a margin of error.

The jaw sample contained a few remaining pockets of collagen and blood. The researchers were able to reconstruct the equid's genetic code. For comparison, they also sequenced the genomes of a Late Pleistocene horse that lived about 43,000 years ago, a contemporary donkey, five different domestic horse breeds, and a Przewalski's horse, which is considered the world's only remaining wild horse and a source of controversy. Genetic clock techniques suggest how ancient things were.

You could look up aging permafrost or genetic clock instead of comparing all this to the Marvel Universe. Thor, a Norse God, is part of the Marvel universe. Try not to make laughable comparisons, dear friend.
Genetic clock is begging the question also, and "aging permafrost" isn't providing content you're alluding to, provide a cite yourself, I'm not going on a wild goose chase.
 

blueboy

Member
Beg your pardon Gents,

Reviewing several pages, it seems you simply apply the criticisms lodged at creationists back at evolutionists. Evolution is circular, unscientific, improbable; there is a supposed disagreement among evolutionists, etc.

I do not like the approach because it does not address the fact that the same criticisms would seemingly apply to creationism 100 fold.
Fair post.

I'm not sure where you actually come down on this subject, but in many ways the pure materialist scientist has more in common with a Creationist than they would care to admit.

There is an extensive fossil record that shows tantalising probabilities, but it does not explain the origins of life itself, how replicating RNA could form from a natural occurrence, how the complexity of a single cell can in any way have an accidental origin, or how in the Pre-Cambrian period all the Phylum were established even if everything looked like worms. And then there is human sentience which is a vast overshoot of what we have come to understand as the practical restraints of evolution, in that it provides balanced need, not excess want. Human sentience is excessive in the extreme.

Add to that the fact that evolution can not be regressed infinitely because this is a paradox and if it was so we would never arrive in the present and the entire universe is contingent, meaning it is all effect and as far as we know every effect has a cause.

So I do appreciate the simplicity of Creationism, God done it!

But our complexity feeds on complexity. We are born with WHY pulsing in our temples. I don't believe that evolution is random mutations blindly feeling its way in the universe. Evolution seems very directional and purpose bound. Recent insights suggest that DNA mutations ramp up in the exact region of the DNA that will afford a creature the greatest chance to gain an advantageous modification. Creatures react, for want of a better way of putting it, with intelligence at the sub-cellular.

Evolution describes an aspect of the rolling out of life via its attributes, the journey of its transmutation. Religion tries to put a language to the abstraction that underlies the essence of reality.

I'm a Creationist, but I think science is our best chance at understanding some of its complexities.
 
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