RufusAtticus

<a href="http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/epaper/editions/sunday/opinion_c32c640a277f91f70082.html" target="_blank">Atlanta Journal-Constitution - letters</a>

Scroll down a bit.

I'm going to try to write a response tonight.

-RvFvS

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Scotty

I am still of the opinion that in these cases you should just talk right over their heads.
If they don't understand, then how can they make claims about knowing exactly what it should be like?
Infuriating.

-Scott

tgamble

fake it of course. Or consult highly respected, well educated and brilliant scientists like Dr. Kent Hovind for information.

Valentine Pontifex

Maybe a good rhetorical question would be to ask, praytell, just how paleontology can prove that mayo causes cancer.

KeithHarwood

Leonardo da Vinci was the first person to point out that the fossilised shells on tops of mountains could not have been deposited during the flood. If a scientist five hundred years ago could pick holes in the biblical account, why depict him as supporting it today?

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[ April 22, 2002: Message edited by: Pantera ]</p>

Philosoft

This is rich:
Y'know, he's right. There simply aren't any nucleotides with little signs sticking out of them saying, "&lt;---- this way to ancestral DNA."

<img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

ksagnostic

Go get 'em!

-=Vagrant=-

Those were scary letters! How can evolution stand against such proof of creation and the lack of evidence supporting evolution?

Automaton

To John Paap: DNA is not the explanation for bacterial pathogen resistance. DNA is the coded hereditary system of life. The real explanation is that, since the DNA copying mechanism is not 100% efficient (none is), minor pieces of the code may be altered when it is passed on to offspring. This is a mutation. The mutation may have a negative, a neutral, or a beneficial effect on the progeny's chance for survival and reproduction. If it is beneficial, it will propagate and become fixed in the population, this is natural selection. Certain mutations in the code for bacterial enzymes will be beneficial in that it may cause them to become toxin resistant. After several stages of mutation/natural selection, through gradual refinement, it is possible for more complex toxin resistance, as seen in the 6 part system of vancomycin resistant bacteria. If you want factual DNA evidence of beneficial mutations, you may want to look up the work of Barry G. Hall in the scientific literature, who includes DNA sequences before and after a novel enzyme evolved in bacteria in the test tube.
Additionally, sequencing DNA can be the key to understanding evolutionary histories. This is known as the science of phylogenetics. It is much more complex than you give it credit for, and involves such processes as extrapolating common ancestries by counting the number of differences between two related species and offsetting this against the rate of neutral mutations. Perhaps if you think it is so flawed that you'd like to submit a scientific critique of it to a peer-reviewed journal? It cannot be pinned down to mere similarity, take for example the crocodile. This has been shown, through dozens of different phylogenetic analyses to be more closely related to chickens than to snakes. Why would it not be closer to a fellow reptile? Perhaps because it is closely related to the dinosaurs and birds evolved from dinosaurs? And why do phylogenetic methods, that are completely independant from the fossil record, converge almost exactly with it?
And yes, we would like you to please demonstrate how paleontology shows mayonaise causes cancer. This should be very interesting. (By the way, a mutation is NOT the same as an "evolution" as you put it, or an adaptation as scientists do.)
Anthropology has nothing to do with biology (where can we find anti-evolutionary sentiments in the anthropological literature anyway?), and theology is not a science.

To Katherine Rumble: Your original statement is merely an argument from authority, plus these were men in the long past when belief in creationism was pretty much mandatory. On the same token, you could claim pantheism is right because Einstein was a pantheist that believed in Spinoza's god (which is far closer to atheism than it is to traditional theism).
Science certainly can predict the future. Prediction is actually one of the prerequisites for a good scientific theory. Einstein's relativity predicted certain phenomena that have now all been confirmed. Gravity predicts that in the future, any time someone drops a ball, it will invariably fall to the ground. Things that happened in the past are well within the realm of science too. Have you heard of forensic science? The examination of a crime scene deals with events that happened in the past, yet we can still form conclusions about that event.

To Wendy Shaver: The biological theory of evolution has nothing to do with cosmology, although you are free to take up the evidence with Stephen Hawking if you like. Your whole argument is personal incredulity, and I wouldn't be surprised if you know nothing about the science at all. You might as well be stating, "Since I can't possibly imagine the Earth is round, it must be flat."

To Betty Lingle: The actual problems with evolutionary theory IS presented in the textbooks, that's why the creationists have a problem with it. They want to invent their own "problems" so their asinine religious dogma appears more credible.

What do you guys think? Too long?

RufusAtticus

My Reply:

Evolution is both a fact and a theory. The fact of evolution is that the properties of populations of organisms change over time. The Theory of Evolution explains this fact. Evolution is not a faith, a religion, or even a speculation, as the Cobb textbook disclaimers would have students believe. It is a well-tested and well-supported field of science that has survived over a hundred years of scientific review and religiously based political assault.

Any textbook disclaimer is just going to end up wasting taxpayers’ money in an effort to decrease the quality of education. Biology teachers will have little difficulty using the new textbooks to show that the BOE cannot tell the difference between scientific and common usages of the word “theory.” The BOE should act to improve the quality of schools, not kowtow to a small number of scientifically illiterate parents.

The Talk.Origins Archive (http://www.talkorigins.org) is a good site for anyone interested in the evidence for evolution.

Reed Cartwright
PhD Student, Population Genetics