RufusAtticus

Who said anything about mistakes? I don't see any mistakes.

You stupid skeptics don't even know what you're talking about.

GunnerJ

Jim,

It's been mentioned by a number of people that you should get a clearer understanding of what evolution is. I'd like to say that I support this statement, it is not a mere rhetorical slam. You have a lot of misconceptions about what the theory of biological evolution is. I suggest you brush up on the subject before you try and debate it, as it will save us all a lot of time.

For starters, there's this FAQ: What is Evolution?

RufusAtticus

But you're confusing distinctions between religious faith and general faith. Religious faith is as Hebrews 11:1 states "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of (3) things not seen." In other words, belief in things with out evidence or in spite of contrary evidence. This is a completely differnt thing that every-day faith/belief that rely on prior knowledge about the world, such as the garbage is picked up on tuesday.

Now which situation requires more faith.

1. I have faith that my wife, who is with me every night, is not cheating on me.
2. I have faith that my wife, who dresses up in a corset and fish-net stockings and spends her nights at the docks, is not cheating on me.

pz

These things are not matters of faith, they are matters of experience. They are also matters that can be tested pretty much at will.

Also, sometimes my light switch doesn't work. I don't then have a crisis of faith...I just assume the bulb might be burnt out, so I change it, or I might see other evidence that there has been a power failure, so I call it in or wait for the power company to fix it.

By the way, I fully expect that someday my body will fail me and I won't take another breath. That's also not faith: it happens to other people routinely, and I see no significant difference between their breathing apparatus and mine.Oh, no...that damned anonymous evilutionist. He's always running around screwing up things for the rest of us.

Of course, in this case, he is wrong. It would be a problem, and it might lead to a substantial revision in our thinking, but it depends on circumstances and details. It might be a case like the light switch that doesn't work one morning -- it doesn't necessarily mean that the physics of electricity has just gone kaput, or that the economics of power delivery have suddenly failed.Oh, dear.

Oh, dearie me.

You can't possibly be serious, can you?

The Paluxy River tracks are hokum. The only ones that get labeled human by creationists are the murky, ambiguous ones. The area is also notorious for creationist fraud. See the Talk.Origins faq on this matter to see them completely demolished.I'm guessing you are a freshman, or that you are attending a bible college. I strongly suggest that you forget about the biology major. Seriously. There is no future for you in it, or you are going to have a severe shock that will change your beliefs.Um, you clearly don't understand the experiment. You can start with a single bacterium that is antibiotic-sensitive, raise it up into a colony, and then find that some of the descendants of the original bacterium are resistant. It is most definitely a consequence of novel mutations."intercellular" biology? Please, study some more. I agree. Of course, nobody is arguing for that.

You know, you are in for a bit of ridicule if you stick around. So far, you're just parroting extraordinarily poor arguments by uninformed creationists. I strongly recommend that you back off from the dogma a bit, and ask sincere questions about things you don't understand. You're young, and we can respect someone who is really trying to learn, and we're happy to discuss and inform, but stuff like Paluxy River...jebus, that's just a joke.

Doubting Didymus

Let's see, Gunner gets to be pope, pz has bagged inquisitor, no doubt Rufus will end up being an archdeacon or something, which means I will end up being either God, or the novice that tends the monastary compost heaps.

I'm just going to enter a small and high pitched whinge at this point about the use of the term 'macro' evolution. Someone's going to have to define it, because if it isn't the historical patterns exhibited by life on earth as it evolves in a geological and ecological context on a large scale and over a long period of time (which in this case it obviously isn't), then the definition is a free for all, which just goes to show that I was right all along.

I'd prefer Jim to define his own idea of what 'macro' evolution is, but I have no doubt most people here have slightly different perspectives also, just because its such an insanely nebulous term.

- Didymus (E/C compost tender and/or god)

pz

I think you'd better stick to the compost heaps. The Inquisitor starts fondling his instruments of the question when people start talking about personal divinity. No, it's not. It's just a term that describes a process that is currently the subject of active research, which contains phenomena that we don't entirely understand yet.

I'll cite Gould here, in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory:
I think it is a useful term, and one that is going to become increasingly significant. Think of the difference between transmission genetics and population genetics: it's an extremely useful distinction, even though we don't imagine that special forces operate in populations that defy the rules of heredity for individuals.

Doubting Didymus

When properly applied the term is useful. I am not by any means denying the validity of macroevolutionary concepts. My problem is with the bastardisation and perversion of the word, such that it no longer reflects any of the ideas and hypotheses it was intended to represent. I snip this from your own Gould quote:

I'll stake a decent amount on the bet that the vast majority of laypeople-with-an-understanding-of-evolution, such as myself, as well as the entirety of the creationist population equate the term 'macroevolution' exclusively with large scale morphological change. Apes becoming Humans is considered by most to be macroevolution, as though it were a unit of meaurement. Many creationists expect macroevolution to refer to the sudden birth of a massively mutated new species in a single bound. Many evolutionists also believe that microevolution means one morphologically distinct species becoming a different visibly distinct species: the focus being on the change in morphology, not on the speciation itself, as though gradual physical alterations cross a magic line at some point and become "big" evolutionary change. I know that this was my position until only recently.

This confusion is not our fault. I squarely blame the originator of the term, whomever that may be, for creating a division where there is none. Again from your quote:

When two terms describe two phenomena that co-exist, that is, that do not contradict the other, the words used should not imply that such a distinction exists. One does not expect "macroevolution" and "microevolution" to be occuring at the same time. A simple reading of the words suggests that any given evolutionary phenomenon should be placed in either the one or the other. The truth is that almost every evolutionary phenomena has both micro and macro evolution at work. The confusion arises simply from this poor choice of words.

You will probably note that this topic does not appear to be specifically about 'macroevolution' as gould or goldshmidt would define it. The creationist means to say: "small change yes, big change no" and the rest of us go along with it.

GunnerJ

Actually, if we're to believe his profile, Jim is a veteran of the Vietnam War.

Edit: And, if this is so, I'd like to thank Jim for his service, even if I disagree with his opinions on science.

Doubting Didymus

I guess pz is too used to being the resident cranky old man.

RufusAtticus

Don't involve me in your heracy! I got the one true evolutionist message right here!

As the neontologistic evolutionary biolgists use it, macroevolution is "evolution apparent between species and higher taxa." And evolution is "the change in characteristics or properties of populations over time."

~~RvFvS, The one and only authoritative master of the True Evolutionist Faith (Missouri Synod)~~