Camaban

And where are these examples of rejected creationist papers? (accompanied by rejection letters.... if they exist, they'd be easy to find, wouldn't they? With creationists wanting to show the "flimsy" reasons they were rejected for)

LiveFreeOrDie

Of course there's a great bias against creationism -- it's all rubbish!

Paul

Thats not an opinion upheld by a fair number of Scientists. At the moment Dr Lee Spetner Book Not by chance it proving to be an interesting read. Before you write it of as rubbish reading it yourself might be useful.

Godless Dave

If by "fair number" you mean one or two, who aren't even biologists, then you're correct.

LiveFreeOrDie

Rubbish.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/fitness/spetner.html

http://home.planet.nl/~gkorthof/kortho36.htm

RufusAtticus

Creationists cannot claim bias if they don't even submit their papers to the journals. That is the problem: lack of reject letters.

Again I will post from McLean v. Arkansas (1982):
Creation science as defined in Section 4(a), not only fails to follow the canons of dealing with scientific theory, it also fails to fit the more general descriptions of "what scientists think" and "what scientists do." The scientific community consists of individuals and groups, nationally and internationally, who work independently in such varied fields as biology, paleontology, geology, and astronomy. Their work is published and subject to review and testing by their peers. The journals for publication are both numerous and varied. There is, however, not one recognized scientific journal which has published an article espousing the creation science theory described in Section 4(a). Some of the State's witnesses suggested that the scientific community was "close-minded" on the subject of creationism and that explained the lack of acceptance of the creation science arguments. Yet no witness produced a scientific article for which publication has been refused. Perhaps some members of the scientific community are resistant to new ideas. It is, however, inconceivable that such a loose knit group of independent thinkers in all the varied fields of science could, or would, so effectively censor new scientific thought.

RufusAtticus

How much is a "fair number?" Chemists and physicists don't count. The importance is how many scientists in fields concernint the diversity of life on this planet think that special creation or creationism in general is an adequate explaination.

Paul

Well I happen to think that all Scientist have something to add
in all fields of Science after all what would a Biologist know about
geology and the Big Bang theory

Oolon Colluphid

Ditto. So, like, what sort of evidence might persuade you that evolution is correct? You see, for everybody who has looked into it thoroughly, the evidence we already have is more than sufficient. So what would persuade you? What would you expect to see in nature if evolution were correct?

And I guess more to the point, what do you think evolution actually is? Could you briefly outline what it is about it you disagree with? Thanks.

MrDarwin has already given you a neat short reply. Perhaps also you would do me the favour of reading through this thread, specifically Scigirl’s post about complexity.

You see, complexity itself is not a problem for evolution. It is simply a matter of, ‘could X have evolved from something very slightly different from itself?’ The answer has to be yes, provided the difference is slight enough. Call that thing W.

Now apply that logic to W. Could W have evolved from something very slightly different from itself? Again the answer has to be yes, provided the difference is slight enough. Call that thing V.

And so on to U, and T, and S... By the time you get to A, the brain (or whatever the complex thing) could be noticably different to our starting one. Go back along the alphabet of each-slightly-different brains again. And again. The A’’ brain would be more different still, but our original X is still linked to it by a lot of small-enough-to-be-probable changes.

By the time you have gone back say a million small changes, the ‘brain’ would likely be totally different. All that’s needed is enough time, and the proviso that each small change confers a slight benefit, a slight survival-to-breeding advantage, over its contemporaries.

I’ll cover that latter point if I need to; on the former point, time, let me put it this way.

Suppose (and this is only to show the logic of it, so supposing is fine ) that a change only turns up on average once in five generations (and remember that individuals vary populations anyway, and takes another five to spread through the population.

So each small change in the long line takes ten generations. That means that there’s 10 million generations between X, our modern brain, and the proto-brain, the A^38500 or so.

How long is a generation? For elephants it is twenty years or more; for hamsters its four months. Call it a year. That means that our modern X brain could in principle evolve in little, plausible steps in just ten million years.

As it happens, brains of notable size have been around at least twenty times as long.

You see, evolution works by cumulative changes. It doesn’t start from scratch each time, it changes what is already present, which is why, eg, bird and bat wings are made from forelimb bones.

You see, I hope, that there’s nothing logically preventing brains as complex as ours evolving by natural means. That’s evolution by natural selection: make changes, and only keep the good ones, which become the ones you build from for the next step.

That’s as concise as I can make it. Please read the linked thread above... which is in itself a cut-down version of the full argument. But once you’ve understood the rough version, we can work on any further problems.

Hope that helps.

Cheers, DT

Oolon Colluphid

That’s nice. A scientist is a scientist, and his field doesn’t matter. You’d get a plumber to fix your TV would you?

This is what is called ‘making our point for us’. Similarly, what (individual exceptions notwithstanding) would a geologist know of genetics, or biochemistry, or population ecology. What might a biochemist know of quantum mechanics?

Rufus’s (and my) point is that the field of expertise is very very relevant to the level of creedence we give to a scientist’s pronouncements. If a cosmologist (eg Fred Hoyle) decides that natural selection can’t work, should we trust him in preference to the many population geneticists who actually study it and say it does?

TTFN, DT