Sapiens, I understand you don’t like “Discovery Institute”,
I have the normal dislike that people have for liars.
the science teacher is unpublished and James Tour is just a chemist with no background in biology. this typical ad hominem would’t give merit to your case.
It is not an ad hominem, it is recognition of your failed attempt at an argument from authority. Tour builds micro electronics and has no background in evolutionary biology, he is not an authority any more than a sy a typsetter is an author.
James Tour was named among "The 50 most Influential Scientists in the World”.
By whom? The Nobel Committee? The MacArthur Foundation? The National Acdemy of Sciences? No ... the webite, "Best Schools" that collects parental opinions on the quality of primary and secondary schools. Please do not insult our intelegence.
I would definitely give some credit to his opinion as a scientist.
I would to, the next time I have a micro circuity problem I'll call him.
Hoping for future explanation (that may not happen) doesn’t change the fact that scientific challenges stay with no answer today.
So?
You consider 100 or 500 scientist doubting the evolution as small percentage but I definitely consider it as a serious challenge.
I consider it meaningless, especially when you look at the actual qualifications and the claimed affiliations of the "scientists." To see the magnatude of the Discovery Institute's faceplant, check-out "Project Steve."
Yes, at least most are. If not, explain how?
Scientifc Theories are assembled from numerous facts, that's how it works.
Well it depends on what you mean on evolution. If you say we evolved from Apes then that would not really be accurate. However, any type of evolution should not be regarded as fact. It is a theory. If it were real, there would be substantial evidence. Theories are changed a lot, so to regard it as fact or something close to it is absurd. Wait until we have an ''established fact'' then we will go from there.
Evolution means a change in gene frequency over time. Yes, we evolved from a common ancestor with the Chimpanzees, who was also an ape. This is fact, this can be shown. There is substantial evidence. Look up, Human chromasome 2.
I agree there is more to it, but the gaps in the record have long been a fundamental point of contention between the two. Credit where it is due, it was creationists who favored taking the scientific evidence at face value, and evolutionists who favored liberally sprinkling it with imaginary transitionals to fit a predetermined conclusion. science v atheism?
Only because they thought that PE would "defy" evolution. Once they discovered that it did not they jumped ship, Talk about a clear example of presuppositionalism denied.
The extent to which a person might say Darwinism has already been refuted is subjective, but the pattern, the direction is clear, the gaps and leaps are continually being clarified, not filled in and smoothed out- as Darwin considered fundamental to the theory. Ironically we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transitions than we had in Darwin's time
No, that's false. It is no subject, it is "God of the Gaps." Each time a transitional fossil is found the creationists just claim that now there are two missing links rather than just one. They will no be satisfied until there is a complete unbroken record of every single individual in the chain, which is absurd. This is one of the reasons that so much more weight is now given to genetic, genomic and immunological data.
Brother, fact in science is a verifiable observation. Evolution is both fact and theory. It depends on what you mean though. If you believe we evolved from Apes, then this is false. However, i believe the Qur'an does not go against Evolution.
Yes, a fact is a verifiable observation. But, when a statement that appears to be true based on previous experiences and is backed by a significant body of experience, the inference is also considered to be a fact. Theories are assembled from mutually supporting facts. Humans and chimps are descended from a common ancestor who also was an ape ... that is a fact.
Sure, I also don't really want to get mired in semantics of what characterizes 'transitional' or 'gradual' .. but the fossil record certainly did not satisfy Darwinian predictions as hoped, creationists and PE advocates agree on this, and even a staunch classical Darwinist like Dawkins notes 'it's as though they were just planted there with no evolutionary history'
I agree with Darwin, that yes, kinda the predictions of smooth transitions were fundamental to the entire theory of evolution, the shorter the window- the more improbable the millions of significant lucky accidents that have to take place during that time. It doesn't exactly kill off Darwinism- and off course people will come up with work-arounds, but it certainly doesn't help the case does it? , Point being, that it's the goalposts of evolution that are shifting by necessity here, not creationism.
You're worrying about how fast the bus it traveling and whether its speed is constant or not. Frankly I have never understood the fuss. Like Dawkins (who spent an entire chapter in The Blind Watchmaker discussing confusion about rates of change. Dawkins argues that phyletic gradualism (evolution proceeds at a single uniform rate of speed and refered to by Dawkins as "constant speedism") is a "caricature of Darwinism" and "does not really exist." Dawkins correlary argument is that if "constant speedism" is impeached, there is but one logical out, "variable speedism," which is divisiable into two: "discrete variable speedism" and "continuously variable speedism." Eldredge and Gould, in their seminal 1972 paper suggeted that evolution jumps between stability and relative rapidity. Thus, they are described by Dawkins (The Blind Watchmaker) as "discrete variable speedists," and are described as "in this respect ... genuinely radical."
It seems obvious to me that the speed of evolution would be variable and would be a multi-variate function summarized by the magnitude of the niche vector. In plain English, and simplifying by focusing attention on the extremes, that is to say that a species introduced into a new habitat with plentiful resources but slightly different conditions will, given genetic isolation, change faster than a species in closely packed niche space with good gene flow. That's a no-brainer, decried by a passing small cadre of "bloody tooth and fang" advocates whose belief system demands that evolutionary "progress" is dependent on the intensity of competition or the saltificationists with their advacosy of Richard Goldschmidt's hypothesis of "Hopeful Monsters". So I am a "continuously variable speedist." I can see that evolutionary rates fluctuate continuously from very fast to stasis, with all possible intermediates. I find no reason to argue for certain speeds more than others. Stasis is just an extreme case of ultra-slow evolution.
Punctuationism is consistent with Darwin's conception of evolution. In any case, this argument creates no embarrassment for the TOE itself, which is unaffected by the rate of evolution question. At worst it only goes too show that Darwin was a child of his times and expressed what he saw to be the gradual nature of evolution in accordance with the gradualism promoted by his friend Charles Lyell.
Darwin privately expressed concern, noting in the margin of an unpolished and unpublished essay from 1844, "Better begin with this: If species really, after catastrophes, created in showers world over, my theory false" But ... by the publication of the first edition of
On the Origin of Species (1859) Darwin had come arround to: "Species of different genera and classes have not changed at the same rate, or in the same degree. In the oldest tertiary beds a few living shells may still be found in the midst of a multitude of extinct forms... The Silurian Lingula differs but little from the living species of this genus". and in the fourth edition (1866) he wrote that "the periods during which species have undergone modification, though long as measured in years, have probably been short in comparison with the periods during which they retain the same form."
David Raup- curator and Dean at the Chicago Field Museum, defined evolution as simply change over time, which incorporates Genesis as much as Darwinism
How does that incorporate Genesis with it's special creation event for humans and it's flood, just for starters?
Genetics are another matter- whenever the fundamental flaws in the fossil record are pointed out- 'it doesn't matter, because we have genetics'.... and vice versa...
There are no flaws in the fossil record, per se, there have been errors in how people interpreted it. Genetics, genomics and imunology have confirmed, over and over and over again most of what had been learned from fossils and corrected some fine points and a very few glaring errors.
two inadequate sets of evidence do not make a whole one, if anything I'd say the problems in each compound one another
Some examples please.
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