Agnostic75 said:
What if some aliens helped evolution develop much faster than it would have developed on its own?
Shermana said:
Yeah, if they believe in the concepts of Theism and at least what I consider TRUE Christianity in regards to how they live their lives, everything else is basically, in comparison at least, similar to debating how many angels can dance on a pin relatively speaking in terms of Theology, though still not completely because there are still some interpretation issues involved that could reflect how to read what Jesus said.
But you have been discussing science in this thread, no theology. If aliens brought life to earth, that is what they did regardless of what they believe about God. You must know that some naturalists believe that aliens brought life to earth. That would still leave them with the problem of explaining where the aliens came from, but nevertheless, some naturalists believe that aliens brought life to earth.
Regarding what Dr. Stuart Newman said about incremental changes, what does that have to do with whether or not naturalism had enough time to account for evolution?
In an article at
Stuart A. Newman: Evolution Is More Than Natural Selection, Dr. Newman says:
Dr. Stuart Newman said:
While evolution can thus occur with or without natural selection, the really big, phylum-defining transformations, which happened in an era when developmental systems were much more plastic than they are now, are unlikely to have been produced by incremental adaptation-based mechanisms. I hope to discuss these early phylogenetic events in a future blog post.
Regarding "an era when developmental systems were much more plastic than they are now," I assume that he meant that long ago, some evolutionary mechanisms operated at faster rates than they did at other times.
Consider the following:
New York Medical College - Press Releases
New York Medical College said:
Natural selection, acting over the hundreds of millions of years since the occurrence of these origination events led, according to Newman’s hypothesis, to more complex developmental processes which have made embryogenesis much less dependent on potentially inconsistent physical determinants, although the “physical” motifs were retained. As Newman describes in his article, this new perspective provides natural interpretations for puzzling aspects of the early evolution of the animals, including the “explosive” rise of complex body forms between 540 and 640 million years ago and the failure to add new motifs since that time. The model also helps us to understand the conserved use of the same set of genes to orchestrate development in all of the morphologically diverse phyla, and the “embryonic hourglass” of comparative developmental biology: the observation that the species of a phylum can have drastically different trajectories of early embryogenesis (e.g., frogs and mice), but still wind up with very similar “body plans.”
Therefore, according to Dr. Newman, evolution occurs without the need of incremental changes.
Lots of experts disagree with Dr. Newman, and you would not be able to win public debates with any of them. You are well aware that a man can be right, but still be unable to provide reasonable arguments that support his position. For many years, experts who were hired by cigarette companies won debates about the health risks of smoking cigarettes. That is because that had enough money to hire experts to debate for them. Eventually, those experts lost the debates, but for many years, they won the debates. There is little doubt that you do not understand Ken Miller's article on the flagellum, intelligent design, and irreducible complexity at
The Flagellum Unspun well enough to adequately refute it.
You said that Judge Jones did not listen to Scott Minnich's arguments, but you know that he did. He just did not agree with Minnich. If you wish, I will be happy to start a new thread on the Dover trial, and you can explain why Scott Minnich was right, and Ken Miller was wrong. Of course, you will need to know what they both said in order to judge what they said. If you have not already read what they said, you cannot adequately judge what they said. I assume that you do not know enough about biology to adequately judge what they said.
There is a Youtube video by Ken Miller about intelligent design, and the Dover trial at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AK0CYZvaJLw.
As judge Jones said, some of the defendants lied under oath, and had selective memory loss. That was no doubt because they believed that the ends justify the means, even if the means include lying.
