Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Ed · 04-03-2003, 08:08 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by winstonjen

Originally posted by Ed
You are contradicting yourself, because if evolution is true then suffering and death ARE necessary and therefore actually GOOD. There is no such thing as unnecessary and undeserved suffering and therefore there is no such thing as evil.

wj: WRONG! Natural selection picks those organisms that will survive most successfully in their environment. Most successfully means that they will be in balance with their environment, and multiply. Success also implies a sense of ease - less suffering with each passing generation.

Please provide evidence that there is less suffering with each passing generation. But even if there is, my statement still stands because there is no unnecessary suffering, ie the suffering was necessary to bring about less suffering. But I see no evidence that there is less suffering with each generation especially among animals.

Quote:

jtb: And of COURSE death is needed - the world would get overpopulated with all kinds of creatures otherwise.

If death is needed, then do you consider causing extinctions and murder wrong?

Fiach · 04-03-2003, 08:12 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Starboy
Ed, we don't "know" anything about their status in heaven, hell or anywhere else for that matter. All we "know" is that they are dead. That is the point. You may suspect that they are in some location but the only evidence you have is that they are dead.

I believe that those who are dead, are no longer cogitive conscious beings, but decomposing tissues that eventually be recycled as insects, worms, and various plants whose roots get to them. Christians believe dead people go to heaven if they have correct belief, no matter how much they sin. They believe that Atheists go to Hell, no matter how moral and spotless their lives may be.

Ed, listen carefully. It didn't work in the case of Hitler or Dahlmer.

Hitler felt and wrote repeatedly that he was doing the work of God in killing the Jews. That is crazy, but he did have faith in God, while he had a crazy notion that Jesus was an Aryan not a Jew. I don't know if he would meet the Christian criteria of salvation. Jeffrey Dahmer, a very mentally defective man with no sense of moral right or wrong. He converted to fundamentalist Christianity, was Born Again, so Christian Fundies believe that he got to Heaven.

These people broke the "law" of god without regard for the consequences.

But that is OK, if you believe that and accept that Jesus Christ as your lord and saviour, who died and resurrected to nullify sin...etc.

You see Ed; any student of human behavior understands that if people aren�t convinced that something bad will indeed happen to them if they break a human "law", people will ignore it. It doesn't appear that a "law" of god is any more effective or special than a "law" of man.

I disagree. I am an Atheist, as are my wife, son, daughter, two uncles, father (deceased), and a cousin. I know more christians personally. I feel a moral drive that has nothing to do with consequences. I stop at an intersection near hear at midnight when no cars are on the road, and no cops are near. If I drove past the stop marker, I would never face prosecution. On a couple of times I found a wallet with currency, I found the owner and returned it. I could have taken it and not been prosecuted. We have never cheated on Taxes. My Christian friend laughs at me for stopping on the deserted intersection. I think that is the difference in the moral imperatives of Atheists and Theists. Atheists avoid doing wrong because it is harmful and we don't want to do that which is harmful. Why? I think it is because we value our integrity and feel that we degrade ourselves by bad acts, harm someone else, or contribute to disorder.

It is theist who believes that there is a penalty for wrong acts called sins. But there is an escape cause. Catholics can confess sins to erase them and the punishment. Fundies can be born again and cancel the penalties for sin. I think that makes them less rigidly moral than those of us who behave because it is right, not out of fear.....fear that can be bought off.

This NEW data was provided by Spike Tyson. The old article is here.
http://www.atheists.org/nj/html/body_prisons.html

"I have expanded the figures to provide a % of the total respondents, and I have ranked them (they were presented to me alphabetically). These stats were obtained from their computer on 5 March 1997.The Federal Bureau of Prisons does have statistics on religious affiliations of inmates. The following are total number of inmates per religion category:

Response Number %
---------------------------- --------

Catholic---------------29267------------------------39.164%

Protestant------------26162------------------------35.008%

Muslim-------------------5435-------------------------7.273%

American Indian-------2408-------------------------3.222%

Nation-------------------1734-------------------------2.320%

Rasta--------------------1485-------------------------1.987%

Jewish-------------------1325-------------------------1.773%

Church of Christ-------1303-------------------------1.744%

Pentecostal------------1093-------------------------1.463%

Moorish-----------------1066-------------------------1.426%

Buddhist-----------------882--------------------------1.180%

Jehovah Witness-------665--------------------------0.890%

Adventist-----------------621--------------------------0.831%

Orthodox-----------------375--------------------------0.502%

Mormon-------------------298--------------------------0.399%

Scientology---------------190--------------------------0.254%

Atheist---------------------156-------------------------0.209%

Hindu-----------------------119-------------------------0.159%

Santeria-------------------117--------------------------0.157%

Sikh--------------------------14--------------------------0.019%

Bahai-------------------------9---------------------------0.012%

Krishna-----------------------7---------------------------0.009%

---------------------------- --------

Total Known Responses 74731 100.001% (rounding to 3 digits does this)

Unknown/No Answer 18381

----------------------------

Total Convicted 93112 80.259% (74731) prisoners' religion is known.

Total In Prisons 96968
Sincerely,

Denise Golumbaski, Research Analyst
Federal Bureau of Prisons

Unless man is the one enforcing it, the �law" is worthless. This very human characteristic of a so called "law" of god is further evidence that they are manmade and have nothing to do with a presumed god. Ed, the "law" of gravity isn't anything like a "law" of god. The "law" of gravity works without any human enforcement, while the "law" of god doesn't. You could make a case that god made the "law" of gravity, but it is obvious that man made the "law" of god.

Also, if you violate the law of gravity, the usual penalty is falling on your arse, or dropping your rare 6th dynasty Egyptian vase. The penalty can't be rescinded. But violation of the law of God can be erased by confession or fundamentalistic born againism. We Atheists can only make our self-guilt go away by full restitution of damage to the victim. We can't rescind it if we kill or rape someone. If we steal, we can return what we steal. The Christian can simply confess sins and get what he/she thinks is forgiveness. That was an issue that made Christianity win converts over pagans in the Roman Empire, one of the few religions that writes off your sins in exchange for belief.

Starboy

Fiach

Starboy · 04-03-2003, 08:22 PM

Fiach, is there a reason you responded to the post I made to Ed? It is very difficult to keep him on topic let alone get him to respond. With Ed you have to keep things very simple and to the point. I understand and appreciate the points you made but I am afraid that they will only serve to give Ed an excuse to derail the argument. Thanks but no thanks.

Starboy

Ed · 04-03-2003, 09:32 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Fiach
[B]I can't believe that Ed and other people say such a thing as "if evolution is true." It is inescapable, a proven fact. We now have not only fossils as multiple stages of development at various epochs of million year periods and eras. This is confirmed by the isotope dating, the correlation of that with the rates of sea floor spreading and continental drift. Plate tectonic is a fact. The velocity of the continents can be measured by satellite laser at 2 cm per year.

That velocity divided into the distance Europe-Africa and the Americas from the mid Atlantic rift gives approx. 240 million years which is the date of the igneous rocks on opposite sides of the Atlantic in Kameroons and Brazil.

Hello Fiach. It is nice to talk with someone from my ancestral homeland. But I don't see the connection, we were talking about evolution and you are talking about plate tectonics!??

Quote:

F: Now genetic information from the Human Genome and related non-human genomes confirms evolution like a molecular textbook. We carry the old relic genes of Cambrian ancestors. The gene for a arthropod shell is still in our nuclei. Occasionally it expresses and causes a human baby to grow a lobster like chitonous shell.

Evidence for your human lobster assertion? Actually the fact that genetic information exists is strong evidence for a creator. DNA is a complex language like code, and only minds can create language like codes.

Quote:

F: We all in the embryo pass through a chordate stage develop a notochord not found in adult vertebrates but found in primitive amphioxus. We go through fish stages with gill slits, and amphibian stage with lobe fins developing into limbs. We temporarily have a tail that absorbs, but an occasional baby has a tail. The Gill slits get recycled into ear and laryngeal parts. But sometimes part persists and a human baby is born with a partial gill, technically and politically correctly called a branchial cleft cyst. But what it is is gill tissue.

Evolution is all around us. Our embryonic development is a movie strip of our evolution. Our genome (nucleotide codes) is a history text of our evolution. Denial of this important core fact of biological science is wishful thinking. Evolution and the knowledge it spurs has made great medical breakthroughs, that Magical Creation never promised.

No, that is called "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" and it has been totally discredited. Evidence a baby was born with a partial gill? Branchial clefts are not gills at all. They only appear to be gills because of their location. Swiss embryologist Gunter Rager explains, "The concept "pharyngeal arches" is purely descriptive and ideologically neutral. It describes folds that appear in the neck region. But in man, however, gills never do exist."
Evolution has not provided any knowledge that has spurred great medical breakthroughs and most of the founders of modern medical science were Christians.

Fiach · 04-03-2003, 10:46 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Ed
Hello Fiach. It is nice to talk with someone from my ancestral homeland. But I don't see the connection, we were talking about evolution and you are talking about plate tectonics!??

The linkage is important. Arguments by fundamentalists have been 1, Isotope decay MAY not have been constant (mathematically it is a constant.) 2, sedimentary layering may vary. 3. Magnetic polar reversals may not be rythmical, despite ocean core samples to the contrary. These three lines of evidence helped in the chronology of new species, genera, families, and orders separating and lining them up chronologically. Still many fundamentalists said "no its not." Then we discoverd Wegener's theory of continental drift. Europe and Africa fit rather neatly into North and South America as though they separated like jig saw puzzles. Then deep probes found the mid-atlantic rift zone where magma wells up in a long 15,000 mile line. The upwelling magma pushed the floating crustal plates over the magma appart in equal velocities. Numerous faults are found parallel to the mid-ocean rift zone. This explained continental drift. Laser measurment measured the velocity at 2 cm /year. Dividing that into the distance Kameroon is from the hump of Brazil gets a number of about 240 milliion years. Fossil containing rocks with igneous intrusions at the present coastlines have an isotope dating of 240 million years. What this does it confirms two things. It confirms the Permian age of 240 million years ago from both isotope decay rate and velocity of continental drift.

Now if one is variable, then the isotope variation had to vary the exactly same way the seafloor spreading did. That is far too coincidental with the long dates involved. So we know that our Cambrian fossils, Ordovician, Silurian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Palaeocene, Oligocene, Myocene up to now can be accurately dated. The fossils in those dated layers thus can be dated. We can see the anatomical and phenotypical mutations like a series of frames of a movie film from Cambrian to Pleistocene. We can tell when extinctions occurred, and when new forms either slowly evolved (horses) or suddenly appeared (Punctuated Equilibrium: bats?, the early proto-ape that lead to us.)

Evidence for your human lobster assertion? Actually the fact that genetic information exists is strong evidence for a creator. DNA is a complex language like code, and only minds can create language like codes.

Fortunately the human exoskeleton is rare. The only case I saw was in the Republic of Georgia in the Caucasus. The gene however is in all of us and is likely left over from a time when a yet discovered common ancestor gave rise to arthropods and chordates leading to vertebrates and us. It may (my guess OK?) it was a creature that had a soft body with a stiff notochord plus armoured plates on the skin for protection. Some of them mutated to develop a more complete exoskeleton that was very protective but it limited size of growth and some mobility. It didn't need its notochord so it discarded it. The other branch sacrificed the armoured plates to grow larger and more mobile, the notochord became harder yet somewhat flexible. Later chordates developed calcified bones internally that allowed big muscles to support greater weight and size. The Notochord developed similar bony calcifications to strengthen the back and allow more lateral tilt and twist. But we didn't discard the notochord gene or the exoskeleton gene. In fact we have a notochord identical to the primitive amphioxus during our early embryo stage. It usually reabsorbs. But when if persists usually at the front end, it forms a tumour called a chordoma that grows. It is in the clivus (base of the brain, where it can compress the brain stem.

It would be nice if we could discard old genes, but just perhaps they serve some purpose in our embryonic development when we progress from a jellyfish like stage to an amphioxus stage with a notochord, to a fish stage with gills for which we have the same genes as a shark. Then we develop stubby fins that grow digits and become hands and feet. We have an amphibian tail that reabsorbs. Our neural tube forms a primitive nervous system like amphioxus where neurons cross the midline as our brain does. We go from an amphioxus neural tube to a fish with primitive brainstem like our brainstem but no cortex (higher brain.) Gradually the embryonic brain adds the amphibian pons and mesencephalon. We don' t discard any. We add the Reptile diencephalon with thalamus, hypothalamus and basal ganglia. Then we add archaeocortex of primitive mammals, paleocortex of middle evolved mammals, then neocortex of higher mammals like apes, dolphins, and Us.

Oh, bTW, we reabsorb the gills and recycle them by regulatory genes into ear bones and laryngeal structures. Occasional human babies are born with part of a gill left over (Branchial cleft cyst). Other babies retain some of the tail (remember George Costanzas on Seinfeld's comedy series, he supposedly had such a tail and didn't want to undress in the locker room.)

Evolution is supported by tonnes of fossil evidence, chronology of dating fossils by 4 interconfirmatory methods, a clear picture of evolution of new forms and extinction of some but not all older forms. Genes now identify many genes that we share with worms, fruit flies, dogs, monkeys, rats, and of course close ones with chimps. It is a textbook of our evolution in codes. It contains old codes that we no longer appear to need and occasionally cause problems. And lastly we have the development of the human embryo which gives a 9 month video replay of 500 years of evolution, and structures only found in ancient ancestors but not adult humans. We recapitulate the story of Evolution in every woman's womb.

No, that is called "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" and it has been totally discredited. Evidence a baby was born with a partial gill? Branchial clefts are not gills at all. They only appear to be gills because of their location. Swiss embryologist Gunter Rager explains, "The concept "pharyngeal arches" is purely descriptive and ideologically neutral. It describes folds that appear in the neck region. But in man, however, gills never do exist."

They are gills, histologically, espically the branchial primitive ones in primitive fish. They don't function as gills anymore but they are gills. The cells look identical in the one cyst I had and that of an embryonic fish from a fish egg. How else to you explain these clefts that are later resorbed by the regulatory genes for the inner ear strutures. Regulatory genes do that with many of our primitive structures including the multiple stages of brain development. All you need to do is watch a neuropathologist or neuroanatomist dissect a deceased person's brain. He/she can show you the still retained fish, amphibian, reptile, and mammal brain. WE kept these parts and just added to them.

A human who has a cross-sectional laceration of the mid mesencephalon develops a posture of decerebrate posturing. All four limbs go into extension on stimulation just like a newt swimming posture. If the poor guy has a laceration above the mesencephalon in the upper diencephalon, he develops decorticate responses. The arms flex at the elbows and wrist, and fingers, while the legs extend. This is the postural adaptation of a tree dwelling brachiating primate (his ambulation is largely his arms reaching and flexing to pull him up. But in a dog, this flexed arm, extended leg posture will not occur, all legs are in extension because dogs never brachiated in trees like ours did. This shows our links to the trees.

Evolution has not provided any knowledge that has spurred great medical breakthroughs and most of the founders of modern medical science were Christians.

Please, that hurts. My work in genetic association of movement disorders like Parkinsons, Huntingtons Chorea, Ballismus, and Ataxia over the past 10 years was spurred on by our evolutionary assumptions then localising the genes causing that devolution on a pathological scale. I managed to get some generous grants after the first couple findings which led to surgical therapies and deep indwelling sub-thalamic electrical stimulators. I would still be wondering over which genes if not for the evolution paradigm.

Even if your fundamentalist religion doen't like evolution because it counters the Bible, at least be happy for people who now can walk well but were once wheel chair bound. Some who had disabling tremors who now can paint decent art or piano. Without my workd and a 1000 other guys like me, many of these evolutionary related genetic disorders and even brain injury patterns could never have been treated. At least have compassion for these grateful people who may not understand the complexities of evolution but defend it for what it gave them through its clues to medical science.

My entire work now is on genetic, evolution based neuroscience. I have given up my regular practice to do this only. I am optimistic on the genes in Alzheimers that has clues related to gene regulated proteins that go back millions of years.

Let your schools, esp. American, to reintroduce evolutionary biology so that more will go into our field where there is a shortage now. American labs and graduate university programmes cannot find enough Americans for student grad slots or professorial positions, without importing them from Europe and Japan, China, and Inda. I hate to see the Americans falling behind. But their great successes over there are largely due to foreign born evolutionary geneticists, and neuroscientists.

Think about it. I find it sad that Bronze Age superstitions are so dominant in America where impaird people could benefit from our rapid advances based on evolutionary genetics and its branch sciences. Bible quotes just will not help anyone with anything.

Fiach

lpetrich · 04-03-2003, 10:59 PM

Ed:
But I don't see the connection, we were talking about evolution and you are talking about plate tectonics!??

It is relevant to the question of the age of the Earth.

Evidence for your human lobster assertion?

Fiach is wrong there, it must be said. Vertebrates do not produce chitin, that lobster-shell substance.

Actually the fact that genetic information exists is strong evidence for a creator. DNA is a complex language like code, and only minds can create language like codes.

Let's take Ed's inferences a little further. The only minds we know of are

Multiple
Finite
Fallible

So if a mind was the source of genetic information, then it must have been multiple, finite, and fallible. And many of the features of living things suggest that if minds had been responsible for them, then those minds must have been multiple, finite, and fallible.

Also, there are non-mental processes that increase the amount of information, like gene duplication.

No, that is called "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" and it has been totally discredited.

Except that it has not been "totally" discredited -- embryos tend to resemble each other more than adults, and some adults resemble their embryos more than others.

Evidence a baby was born with a partial gill?

Gill slits, yes. Complete gills, no.

Branchial clefts are not gills at all. They only appear to be gills because of their location. Swiss embryologist Gunter Rager explains, "The concept "pharyngeal arches" is purely descriptive and ideologically neutral. It describes folds that appear in the neck region. But in man, however, gills never do exist."

Pure quote-mining. Human embryos do not produce functional gills; instead, they produce structures that have a suspicious resemblance to structure that become gills in fish embryos.

And are we to believe that that resemblance is pure chance?

Evolution has not provided any knowledge that has spurred great medical breakthroughs

Evolutionary biology has been an important part of model-system selection for biomedical research.

And more recently, it has been an absolutely essential part of genomics. Large numbers of genes have been identified with the help of cross-species comparison.

And to see more on the usefulness of evolutionary biology, see this page of genome-sequencing proposals; read some of those proposals.

and most of the founders of modern medical science were Christians.

They would have had to profess to believe in some Xian sect in order to get anywhere; it was like being a Muslim in Saudi Arabia.

Also, contrary to what Ed seems to believe, one can be an Xian and accept evolution. One would have to be a serious non-Fundie, however, but that should be no more difficult than rejecting what the Bible states about the shape and motions of the Earth.

Furthermore, the Hippocratic Oath, something that opponents of abortion absolutely adore, had been composed by a PAGAN. Yes, that oath invokes PAGAN GODS.

Furthermore, in the Middle Ages, the Islamic world had more advanced medicine than the Xian world, and Xian clergymen often put down secular medicine as worthless.

So why not believe in Apollo and Allah?

lpetrich · 04-03-2003, 11:19 PM

(Ed on Fiach bringing up plate tectonics)
Fiach:
The linkage is important.

It affects young-earth creationism, but not old-earth creationism that posits creations of the ancestors of species or of "kinds" over geological time.

Arguments by fundamentalists have been 1, Isotope decay MAY not have been constant (mathematically it is a constant.)

It's effectively constant under Earth conditions, but it's not a mathematical constant.

2, sedimentary layering may vary.

Such layering is used to find relative ages -- not absolute ones.

Fortunately the human exoskeleton is rare. The only case I saw was in the Republic of Georgia in the Caucasus.

Are you sure that that wasn't keratin? I'd bet on a human exoskeleton being keratin rather than chitin, because our hair and nails are made of keratin, and because no vertebrate produces chitin.

I think that it's a case of keratin being produced in the wrong place rather than some sort of chitin-production throwback.

Note: keratin is a protein and chitin an amino polysaccharide (amino-sugar polymer). However, they outwardly look rather similar -- compare your fingernails to an insect's skin. Also, note how both items look like plastic.

Jack the Bodiless · 04-04-2003, 12:26 AM

On gills and mammalian ears:

They are produced by the same genes. Structures in our ears evolved from fish gills: for instance, the bones of the inner ear once supported gills. It's not difficult to see how this happened. In land-dwelling amphibians, the gill cavities would become resonating chambers. And we can study the "transitional forms" in living and fossil amphibians and reptiles.

"Ontology recapitulates phylogeny" is not a universal law, but it IS a common phenomenon.

lpetrich · 04-04-2003, 08:11 PM

Fiach's "human exoskeleton" case may simply be a body-wide version of the formation of corns and calluses, which are heavily keratinized skin.

So it's NOT some evolution-related atavism; there are much better examples of such atavism, including several of Fiach's other examples.

Looking at plants, one interesting example is alternation of generations. Plants alternate between a diploid sporophyte (makes spores) and a haploid gametophyte (makes gametes).

Both sporophytes and gametophytes are readily recognizable in primitive land plants like mosses and ferns. However, in seed plants, the sporophytes are nearly all of the plant, and the gametophytes are only a few cells that grow inside a sporophyte. Seed plants still produce spores; the male spores are better known as pollen, while the female spores stay inside of the parent plant.

So why haven't any seed plants reduced the gametophyte phase to a purely one-celled phase, becoming like the animal kingdom? Is there something in the gametophyte phase that is too difficult to safely reduce to a single cell?

Ed · 04-05-2003, 09:41 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by NOGO

Ed:
Genesis teaches that there is a definite beginning to the universe and so does BB theory. BB theory also means that space time and matter came into existence ex nihilo. This is also what Genesis teaches.

ng: Ed, what have you read, "BB theory for kindergaden students".

BB Theory does not say that matter and space time came into being at a point in time. We simply have no way of knowing that. The universe did start expanding at some point in time and is continuing to expand and we do have evidence for that.

If you run cosmological history in reverse you come to a point with no dimensions, this plainly implies that matter and space did not exist at that point.

Quote:

ng: The Bible also says that the earth existed before the sun and stars which is completely contrary to BB theory.

No, verse 1 states God created the heavens and the earth, this conjunctive phrase means the universe so the sun and stars began to come into existence at the same time as the earth. The rest of Genesis 1 is written from the perspective of a hypothetical earthbound observer, so he would not be able to see the sun and stars until after the atmosphere cleared which was of course much later than the formation of the earth.

Quote:

ng: Ed, this is yet another example where you ignore evidence. You only take what you want, what fits into your preconceived beliefs and ignore the rest.

What Genesis says has absolutely nothing to do with BB theory.

Fraid so, see above.

04-03-2003, 10:59 PM	#766
lpetrich Contributor Join Date: Jul 2000 Location: Lebanon, OR, USA Posts: 16,829	Re: Re: If Evolution is true???? Ed: But I don't see the connection, we were talking about evolution and you are talking about plate tectonics!?? It is relevant to the question of the age of the Earth. Evidence for your human lobster assertion? Fiach is wrong there, it must be said. Vertebrates do not produce chitin, that lobster-shell substance. Actually the fact that genetic information exists is strong evidence for a creator. DNA is a complex language like code, and only minds can create language like codes. Let's take Ed's inferences a little further. The only minds we know of are Multiple Finite Fallible So if a mind was the source of genetic information, then it must have been multiple, finite, and fallible. And many of the features of living things suggest that if minds had been responsible for them, then those minds must have been multiple, finite, and fallible. Also, there are non-mental processes that increase the amount of information, like gene duplication. No, that is called "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" and it has been totally discredited. Except that it has not been "totally" discredited -- embryos tend to resemble each other more than adults, and some adults resemble their embryos more than others. Evidence a baby was born with a partial gill? Gill slits, yes. Complete gills, no. Branchial clefts are not gills at all. They only appear to be gills because of their location. Swiss embryologist Gunter Rager explains, "The concept "pharyngeal arches" is purely descriptive and ideologically neutral. It describes folds that appear in the neck region. But in man, however, gills never do exist." Pure quote-mining. Human embryos do not produce functional gills; instead, they produce structures that have a suspicious resemblance to structure that become gills in fish embryos. And are we to believe that that resemblance is pure chance? Evolution has not provided any knowledge that has spurred great medical breakthroughs Evolutionary biology has been an important part of model-system selection for biomedical research. And more recently, it has been an absolutely essential part of genomics. Large numbers of genes have been identified with the help of cross-species comparison. And to see more on the usefulness of evolutionary biology, see this page of genome-sequencing proposals; read some of those proposals. and most of the founders of modern medical science were Christians. They would have had to profess to believe in some Xian sect in order to get anywhere; it was like being a Muslim in Saudi Arabia. Also, contrary to what Ed seems to believe, one can be an Xian and accept evolution. One would have to be a serious non-Fundie, however, but that should be no more difficult than rejecting what the Bible states about the shape and motions of the Earth. Furthermore, the Hippocratic Oath, something that opponents of abortion absolutely adore, had been composed by a PAGAN. Yes, that oath invokes PAGAN GODS. Furthermore, in the Middle Ages, the Islamic world had more advanced medicine than the Xian world, and Xian clergymen often put down secular medicine as worthless. So why not believe in Apollo and Allah?

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04-03-2003, 08:22 PM	#763
Starboy Banned Join Date: Jun 2002 Location: Tallahassee, FL Reality Adventurer Posts: 5,276	Fiach, is there a reason you responded to the post I made to Ed? It is very difficult to keep him on topic let alone get him to respond. With Ed you have to keep things very simple and to the point. I understand and appreciate the points you made but I am afraid that they will only serve to give Ed an excuse to derail the argument. Thanks but no thanks. Starboy

04-03-2003, 11:19 PM	#767
lpetrich Contributor Join Date: Jul 2000 Location: Lebanon, OR, USA Posts: 16,829	(Ed on Fiach bringing up plate tectonics) Fiach: The linkage is important. It affects young-earth creationism, but not old-earth creationism that posits creations of the ancestors of species or of "kinds" over geological time. Arguments by fundamentalists have been 1, Isotope decay MAY not have been constant (mathematically it is a constant.) It's effectively constant under Earth conditions, but it's not a mathematical constant. 2, sedimentary layering may vary. Such layering is used to find relative ages -- not absolute ones. Fortunately the human exoskeleton is rare. The only case I saw was in the Republic of Georgia in the Caucasus. Are you sure that that wasn't keratin? I'd bet on a human exoskeleton being keratin rather than chitin, because our hair and nails are made of keratin, and because no vertebrate produces chitin. I think that it's a case of keratin being produced in the wrong place rather than some sort of chitin-production throwback. Note: keratin is a protein and chitin an amino polysaccharide (amino-sugar polymer). However, they outwardly look rather similar -- compare your fingernails to an insect's skin. Also, note how both items look like plastic.

04-04-2003, 12:26 AM	#768
Jack the Bodiless Veteran Member Join Date: Feb 2001 Location: UK Posts: 5,815	On gills and mammalian ears: They are produced by the same genes. Structures in our ears evolved from fish gills: for instance, the bones of the inner ear once supported gills. It's not difficult to see how this happened. In land-dwelling amphibians, the gill cavities would become resonating chambers. And we can study the "transitional forms" in living and fossil amphibians and reptiles. "Ontology recapitulates phylogeny" is not a universal law, but it IS a common phenomenon.

04-04-2003, 08:11 PM	#769
lpetrich Contributor Join Date: Jul 2000 Location: Lebanon, OR, USA Posts: 16,829	Fiach's "human exoskeleton" case may simply be a body-wide version of the formation of corns and calluses, which are heavily keratinized skin. So it's NOT some evolution-related atavism; there are much better examples of such atavism, including several of Fiach's other examples. Looking at plants, one interesting example is alternation of generations. Plants alternate between a diploid sporophyte (makes spores) and a haploid gametophyte (makes gametes). Both sporophytes and gametophytes are readily recognizable in primitive land plants like mosses and ferns. However, in seed plants, the sporophytes are nearly all of the plant, and the gametophytes are only a few cells that grow inside a sporophyte. Seed plants still produce spores; the male spores are better known as pollen, while the female spores stay inside of the parent plant. So why haven't any seed plants reduced the gametophyte phase to a purely one-celled phase, becoming like the animal kingdom? Is there something in the gametophyte phase that is too difficult to safely reduce to a single cell?

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