Gregg

It's one thing to make man out of the same "macro elements," i.e. carbon, water, etc., that chimpanzees (and everything else) are made of. It's another to use practically the exact same genetic material, right down to broken and fused sequences. I mean, I thought we were supposed to be a special creation, set apart from the animals.It's called Occam's Razor. Common ancestry is the simpler explanation, and it's supported by the evidence. It's not common ancestry's fault that you don't find it pretty or inspiring.

Gregg

I don't think I can take credit for that one, dd. But happy to oblige:

Hint, Albert. Does the Earth receive any energy from an outside source?

Gregg

Albert Cipriani

Dear Gregg,
Sorry to disappoint you:
What did ya expect? After all, how worthy can someone like me be who thinks he’s just the slime of the earth and doesn’t think he’s evolved like you guys think you have? But I wouldn't let your sense of superiority go to your head cuz whether or not God or Chance did the deed, we both agree that our origins had to have been humble. So neither of us ought to have a swelled head about it.

You say we can’t speculate on how or why we have any sense of awe because:
I say poppycock on all four counts:
1) We don’t fully understand how anything works. If we waited until we fully understood how things worked, none would get married and the human race would go extinct.
2) They dissected Einstein’s brain to no avail. Obviously, human intelligence cannot be plumbed by a scalpel.
3) A lot of unknown variables are involved in every process we know of, especially evolution, which, like so many speed bumps, doesn’t stop us or hardly even slow us down from speculating or believing.
4) Creationists are more inclined to say “I don’t know” than scientists because our entire belief system is based upon a sense of awe over our ignorance. We revel in it rather than wishing to be rid of it and pretending to be washed clean of it as if it were slime… and we weren’t

-- Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic
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GreggLD1

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to suggest that you, yourself, are intrinsically less worthy. It's just that I thought you might have some interesting and worthwhile arguments to make, but you're talking about the Paluxy tracks and SLoT and all the other YEC arguments that even many YEC's no longer use. You need to brush up a bit (OK, a lot).This argument makes no sense. I never said we had to fully understand how our emotions work before we can act on them. Also, I never said that people can't speculate on things like why we have emotions. I said that scientists, when acting in a scientific capacity, are willing to say "I don't know" rather than propose a spiritual explanation for everything they don't understand.This is false. There are noticeable differences between the brains of geniuses and the brains of people with normal intelligence. We know a lot more about the brain than we used to know, and in the future we'll know even more.However, science requires that speculation be supported by evidence.So, we should feel guilty about wanting to know things. We should feel BAD about the knowledge of the universe that we've painstakingly gathered, often against the will of powerful religious establishments with a vested interest in keeping themselves and the masses ignorant, over the past millennia.

In any event, the creationists' "I don't know" is a whole different animal than the scientists' "I don't know," so this is a meaningless comparison.

Albert Cipriani

Nightshade asks:
Those are the unfortunate words of our compromised leader, Pope John Paul II. Because of such ambiguous words and the absence of critical words, because of what he and his predecessor have done and have failed to do, I am a Traditional Catholic, not a Catholic in communion with the present-day corrupted, compromised, and largely apostate hierarchy.

This pope also says that capital punishment is wrong and that the upcoming war with Iraq is wrong. Fact is, he’s wrong. Papal infallibility applies to matters of faith and morals that he binds upon the faithful, not his opinions. By the Church’s own reckoning, some 40 popes expressed heretical views over the centuries. Our last two have a lot of company.

If evolution stands or falls, it will do so not on the say-so of authority figures. Neither this pope’s opinion nor Darwin’s opinion, nor the vast majority of people’s opinion should matter to anyone who honestly seek the truth. – Albert the Seeker, a.k.a., the Traditional Catholic
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Albert Cipriani

Methinks PZ doth protest too much:
I admitted my relative deficiency in the hard sciences related to evolution and express my appreciation of the links here that help sandbag the gaps in my perspective and I get to be called names like “unlettered.” This is not the way to win friends and influence people. If this forum had a welcome wagon, your offerings wouldn’t even qualify as axle grease.

PZ:
That all depends on how you define complexity. If complexity includes the notion of potentiality, then yes, the zygote Albert was a more complex entity than I am today and my entire life from conception forward can be seen as a devolving of potential and a narrowing of the person I could have become.

We are all Marlon Brando in the backseat of that taxi saying “I could’a been somebody, I could’a been a contenda.” This is the refrain of every cell in our body ever since their zygote days. They’ve all long since specialized their way out of the potential to become anything other than what they presently are. Fingernail cells continue to replicate themselves as fingernail cells and I continue to clip them off into the wastebasket. That’s the story of their narrowed, bereft-of-potential, devolved existence.

To extrapolate, I’m saying that the singularity of the Big Bang can be conceived of as the most complex entity ever, that every femtosecond since then has been a dumbing down of that complexity, an atomizing of what was unified, a dissipation of potential, and a mere distillation of lesser artifacts.

Sure, there are localized temporary reversals of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as for example, life that has been becoming more and more complex on Earth these last 3 billion years. But this has all been just a temporary stay of execution, not a get-out-of-jail-free card. The law that condemns all matter to become less complex has not been repealed. Evolution is just part of the appeal process that, like everything else, is doomed. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic
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Baloo

Have you sought out the truth of whether you properly applied the second law of thermodynamics to the theory that life on our planet evolved from a common ancestor?

-- Baloo the Questioner of Seekers

Baloo

4.5 billion years ago, a small self-replicating clump of molecules had the potential to utilize billions of years of energy from the sun to evolve into any global biosphere imaginable. The biosphere we wound up with today makes many of biospheres that could have been unreachable. Thus we see the loss of complexity that comes about with each tick of the evolutionary clock...

Thanks, Albert, I never saw things in that light before.

pz

If you really want to include the notion of potentiality (bizarre as that is), it doesn't rescue you. You still have all the "potential" that the zygote Albert had.

Developmental biologists certainly don't regard the progress of an individual as a "narrowing" or "devolving". Individual cells may experience a restriction of potential, but the individual is the product of an explosion of increasingly elaborate complexity.
Are you your fingernail clippings? You are intentionally trying to focus on one tissue and ignore all the others, so that you can claim a false reduction in complexity.
You are going to have to make up your mind about whether you are a Calvinist or a Catholic.
So? Nobody claimed otherwise. The bottom line is that we have a history of increasing diversity and complexity, which is accurately described by evolutionary theory. It seems to me that all your superficial objections to evolution have been addressed, and that you are now on a rapid retreat (dare I say a devolution?) from your initial extravagant claims.

Albert Cipriani

See Spot run. See Baloo taunt the Creationist:
Baloo, your challenge is predicated upon your fallacious assumption that an “external source of energy” is a real entity, or a possibility. It is neither. The very concept of “external” is fallacious.

If an external source of energy was really a factor in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, then surely you could point to someplace in this universe where there was no external source of energy to demonstrate the differential -- how the law worked in the one place but not the other. Until you can do that, your appeal to the mythical possibility of a place without an external source of energy will remain as disingenuous an appeal as is a Creationist’s appeal to a God-of-the-gaps to answer our questions.

Tell you what: I’ll believe in your two places: a place basking in an “external source of energy” and a place without an external source of energy if you’ll believe in my two places -- heaven and hell. Deal? Or I will simply accept the lie that someplace in our universe is without an external source of energy such that the concept of “external” is meaningful, and you will simply accept God as the external source of the Big Bang. That seems symmetrically fair.

Like the number “zero,” “space” is a useful fiction. It’s but a lie we tell ourselves to navigate around concepts. Like the lie that the sun rises and sets, the lie of “space” must not be taken at face value. Just as you can divide a fraction forever and never get to zero, you can vacuum out some corner of “outer space” forever and never get to nothingness.

Every angstrom of our universe is suffused, to more or less degrees, with energy or matter or waveforms (electromagnetic or gravitational). But as an expression of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, every angstrom of our universe is becoming more and more diffused with less and less of this stuff as our universe collectively approaches heat death. Localized eddies of stuff do not reverse this inexorable process, whether that eddy is in the form of star dust becoming red giants or blue algae becoming angiosperms.

Ergo, complexity must be seen as a temporary exception to the rule. That’s why wherever we find the anomaly of complexity we also detect its shadow in the form of powerful principles, like gravity, that justify complexity’s freakish existence. But when we come to the complexity of life, I’m asked to believe that the principle responsible for it is not a principle at all, it is but the theory of Evolution founded upon the rock of Chance. Sounds like more of that old time religion to me.

Look how messed up the Catholic Church is, and yet it was founded upon the rock of Peter, the first pope, a man. As messed up he was and the Church has been ever since, that’s still a whole lot more promising than Chance. It is Evolution’s first principle of Chance that I object to, that smacks of idol worship, that seems simply incredible to me and it is why I am here. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic
Albert's Rants