MrDarwin

Oh, and one other question, but surely one that has already been raised: does the existence of something like a venus flytrap mean that God wants living creatures to be killed and eaten? That, perhaps, God wanted his/her/its creations to suffer and die, right from the start?

GunnerJ

NO WAY Mr. Darwin! Everyone knows God is loving and kind! Before the Fall, Venus flytraps only ate other plants. That happened to be flying. The Fall wiped those out though. Yeah. Nasty thing, that Fall.

scigirl

Google = not a good place to search for science. Try <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi" target="_blank">pubmed</a>.

They evolved a good enough one to get their genes passed on. And, anything natural selection makes is constrained by what it has to start with (like NASA's budget).

Well you are correct that writing a thesis is similar to visiting the great place of fire. I'm not so sure why you get offended when I use that word, when I don't even believe in it. But I apologize.

Two words: His creation. Hey, you can babble all you want about "o sin" and "the fall" but if God hates homos so much, why did he make so much natural homosexual behavior in nature? Clearly, either this God of yours doesn't hate it that much or He did not make animals such as bonobos, which spend a lot of time having both lesbian and gay sex. (or . . .he doesn't exist the way you think he does - I vote for this option).

And as for good and evil: As a biologist, I can tell you that there are few things I could classify in those nice neat categories that religion believes in. The immune system for instance: sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad. Not having one is really bad, but having an overactive one is just as bad. This is a very common paradigm in biology.

We've already had that conversation. And even if I believed in your Bible and your God (which I clearly don't), I still don't see how those 2 or 3 bible verses you quoted last time have anything to do with why God didn't want animals to suffer.

The fact is, animals do suffer. And animals are not capable of sin. It doesn't take a PhD in math or biology to figure out that obviously, your God likes animals suffering, or perhaps. . . he does not exist the way you think he does (or not at all).

And consider for a moment if you are correct: What kind of crazy god would punish his entire creation for the sins of two people? Especially if this creator made the two people to act like that in the first place? That's just nuts.

Do you ever actually look at the big picture of what you believe?

Well I encourage you to read the thread in more detail. Here it is again:
<a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=000920" target="_blank">http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=000920</a>

Mainly I'm picking on you to read this thread because I truly believe that even if we convinced you that venus fly traps did evolve, you (and most creationists) would say, "So, that doesn't mean that we evolved."

You want solid evidence that humans evolved? Look at the thread I started again.

What are you talking about?

Scientists do not dispute evolution, just as they don't dispute gravity. However, neither process is completely and fully understood just yet.

Why aren't you bothering physicists; harassing them for not looking for "supernatural" explanations for why gravity works? Or cancer researchers? Why give evo biologists all the harassment? I still have not heard from one creationist why they expect evolutionary scientists to accept their religious beliefs, but all other scientists are expected to only look for natural explanations.

You will note that President Bush recently gave the NIH several million dollars to look for natural explanations for bioterror and other microbial diseases. Why didn't he give the Baptist church the same amount of money? Because, even though he's a bible-believing fundie, he still has enough sense to recognize that if you want real answers about how something works in order to cure it or stop it, you must do boring old naturalistic science.

scigirl

pangloss

<a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=000936" target="_blank">http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=000936</a>

Gee, I was looking forward to this amazing evidence that 'micro' cannot add up to 'macro'....

Nic Tamzek

&lt;bump&gt;

I forgot to post this here where it belongs...

Two nifty things I just noticed:

1)

======
PLANT EVOLUTION: Elaborate Carnivorous Plants Prove to Be Kin (p. 1626)
--------------------------------------------------

Elizabeth Pennisi

Charles Darwin thought the Venus flytrap, the elegant bug eater from the southern United States, had close ties to a European aquatic weed
called the waterwheel. A century later, researchers decided that the waterwheel's closest kin was not the Venus flytrap but the terrestrial sundew, which also dines on insects. Now a DNA analysis of these botanical carnivores, reported in the September issue of the American Journal of Botany, suggests that Darwin was right after all.

Full story at
<a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/297/5587/1626a" target="_blank">http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/297/5587/1626a</a>


Here is the article Pennisini is referring to:

KENNETH M. CAMERON, KENNETH J. WURDACK, AND RICHARD W. JOBSON

Molecular evidence for the common origin of snap-traps among carnivorous plants
Am. J. Bot. 2002; 89: 1503
<a href="http://www.amjbot.org/future/89.9.shtml" target="_blank">http://www.amjbot.org/future/89.9.shtml</a>


[Another random interesting-looking article by Cameron:

<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=117430 69&dopt=Abstract" target="_blank">Plant Physiol 2001 Dec;127(4):1328-33
Plant systematics in the age of genomics.
Daly DC, Cameron KM, Stevenson DW.
</a>

Kenneth M. Cameron page at the New York Botanical Garden
<a href="http://www.nybg.org/bsci/staf/cameron.html" target="_blank">http://www.nybg.org/bsci/staf/cameron.html</a>
]

====

This finding is not exactly revolutionary (the kinship of waterwheel (Aldrovanda) and Venus Flytrap (Dionaea) has actually been the common view ever since Darwin...which we can check, because...

...Darwin's book Insectivorous Plants is now online for the very first time, and with illustrations to boot:

<a href="http://pages.britishlibrary.net/charles.darwin3/insectivorous/insect_fm.htm" target="_blank">http://pages.britishlibrary.net/charles.darwin3/insectivorous/insect_fm.htm</a>

======

Originally on an ARN thread:

<a href="http://www.arn.org/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=14;t=000160" target="_blank">http://www.arn.org/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=14;t=000160</a>

nic

galiel

Why not?

Whenever confronted with a question about why God would choose to do something distastful like, say, let all those people die on 9/11, while sparing others just as hardworking, decent family members, the answer from faith is always "god moves in mysterious ways" or "the reasons are beyond human understanding". (Of course, those who made it out always say god was with them, thus implying that god abandoned the poor suckers who were left behind, or who died charging in to save others, instead of running to save their own skins. But I digress.)

Scientists are not the ones claiming to have figured everything out. Science is not about a complete understanding of "The Truth." You have us confused with your guys.

Science is the incremental process of developing useful models of universal principles. It is the system of starting simple and building from there. Religion operates in precisely the other way: starting with the answer for everything and then trying to reconcile human experience which does not fit into rigid theology.

The experience of science has been that, over time, for more and more things for which the answer used to be "we don't know", the answer is now "it works this way". There is no reason to believe this trend will not exist. No logical reason, that is.

By contrast, the experience of faith since the advent of science is that is becomes progressively less necessary to explain human experience--to the point that a growing number of us have concluded, logically, that there is no reason to continue to credit a supernatural entity for any phenomenon within human experience or even human thought. The burden of proof has now shifted on the other party.

Science works, really, really well. You can measure its results in every baby that survives a previously fatal birth condition, every human alive today because science eradicated polio, smallpox, the plague, etc--which religion, for all its thousands of years to perfect its techniques--which are supposedly handed dwon by holy writ from god, anyway--has failed miserably to affect, either through prayer, exorcism or stoning.

In only a century or two, science has explained why things work the way they do for nearly everything you experience on a daily basis, and improved the physical lot of humanity immesurably.

Empirical science works. You use it every day. If you want to drive your car to the football game, do you pray for gas, or do you go to your local gas station. Why? Because emperical experience has taught you that, based upon past experience, reproducible experimentation and peer review, praying don't get you there in time for the game--GAS does. Do you conclude that god filled the underground tank in which the station stores its gas, or was it a supply truck from an oil company? How do you know? Did you witness the delivery? You rely on another aspect of science, the documentation and sharing of results, and the development over time of trusted, yet always verified, sources. (We practitioners of the scientific method are a notoriously skeptical bunch).

I have a more fundamental question for you. Why are you appropriating the empirical terminology of science when you do not accept its methods or results in the first place? You start with a conclusion: God did it, and then try to justify it whenever science finds a more mundane explanation. You do not believe in the results of scientist, yet you dishonestly argue here as if you were willing to entertain any answer that does not end with "god did it".

There will always be something you can point to and say: "you don't know the answer to this, therefore god did it." That is a very defeatest attitude to take, considering that in this century alone "god did it" as an explanation for specific natural phenomena has been discarded left and right--hell, even the Pope, not exactly a shining beacon of radicalism, accepts the theory of evolution (not that is required his approval).

Fundamentally, (pun intended), theists who argue with religion, not on religious grounds, but using the terms of science, are hypocritical, dishonest and carrying hidden agendas. Yes, that is a generalization. And, yes, I stand by it 100%, despite the folks who are now going to berate me for not being nice to our fundie brethren who are responsible for the excrable quality of my daughter's science texbooks.

Nothing personal, of course...

P.S. Do they "award" extra "points" in "creationist school" for "excessive" use of "parentheses"?

[ September 12, 2002: Message edited by: galiel ]</p>

Nic Tamzek

&lt;bump&gt;

Forgive me, this is becoming my archive page on this.

The AmJBot article is out

<a href="http://www.amjbot.org/cgi/content/abstract/89/9/1503" target="_blank">http://www.amjbot.org/cgi/content/abstract/89/9/1503</a>

...need to get the full text on this one methinks...

Gregg

Where do people learn to reason like this? Is there a School of Bad Logic somewhere?

Hasn't it ever occured to you that there could be natural processes that are CURRENTLY UNKNOWN?

People used to not know the natural process by which babies got made. Does that mean that before we figured it out, babies either didn't exist, or that they were supernaturally created?

People used to not know what caused wind, clouds, rain, thunder, and lightning. Does that mean those things either didn't exist, or that they were supernaturally created?

People used to not know what made them sick. Does that mean sickness is either an illusion, or that it's caused by demons?

We still don't know exactly what causes consciousness. Does that mean we're either not really conscious, or that consciousness was supernaturally created?

Crimony. Use the ol' noggin.

Gregg

Kosh

Good logic is probably more a learned trait than we'd like to admit. However, I think this thread is yet another excellent example how the typical creationist argues.....

out of ignorance.

Argumentum ad Ignorance

(is there a better latin word for ignorance?)

Nic Tamzek

Bump, as this just came up.

Interestingly, Linneaus thought that Venus Flytraps just held insects temporarily, and then nicely opened up and let them go.

Return-link to other thread on Behe/IC/direct evolution:

<a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=001693" target="_blank">http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=001693</a>