Quote Frank Merton;"think that Newhope has the capacity to understand the book, and it is hard to believe that anyone who gets through it would come out the other end with a shred of doubt that evolution theory is established beyond all reasonable doubt. But, if Newhope's mind were open to objective evidence, he would long ago have abandoned creationism. He won't read such books.
BTW,he is a she. The evidence that is provided has conflicting research in many cases. I think to have a realistic opinion one must acknowledge all research, even that which appears uncomforatable at the time.
Good point! I suppose that it is also fair to point out that you were quoting me, not Frank Merton.
That is a wonderful statement, but you clearly do not practice what you preach. You only listen to one side. Dawkins has carefully studied creationists' distortions of the research, and he exposes them for the nonsense that they really are.
Look, I hold no illusions that you will consider the evidence. One of the things that inspired Dawkins to write his book was a TV interview he got hooked into by a fundamentalist. She pointed out that she had visited a lot of museums and had seen no fossil evidence that we were evolved apes. Dawkins, quite stunned, kept repeating that the fossils were there. He named them. He cited other evidence. No matter what he said, she simply acted as if he had said nothing. That is classic argumentum ad nauseam--ignore all counterevidence and simply repeat your claims.
Molecular Clocks have been shown to be non constant and erranous. [/I]
Dawkins addresses that phony objection in great detail. He explains how they work and why we have the level of confidence in them that they do. That confidence comes from the fact that they can be cross-checked against each other and verified by independent means. Again, you will repeat what you have heard, but you will not check your facts. For example, your link on "molecular clocks" (but one of the many clocks that Dawkins described) actually supports the conclusion that those clocks have demonstrated reliability, although someone not checking the link would easily be fooled into thinking it supported your claim. Dawkins explains in detail how they work and why we consider them reliable.
...Dawkins explains why DNA represents such solid evidence, but the icing on the cake is that both the fossil record and methods of comparing DNA corroborate each other (Only in hindsight. eg hippo is not related to a pig but a whale. Thehuman Y chromosome is remarkably different to the chimp hence the requirement for accelerated evolution.) in such a way that the theory of evolution cannot be doubted...
What?!?
Do my eyes deceive me, or did you just admit that whales and hippos are related? You can only arrive at that conclusion if you buy off on the theory of evolution. Of course, whales and pigs also have a common ancestor. It is just that the whales' common ancestor with hippos was more recent on the geologic time scale. Anyway, I am a bit stunned that you seem to accept one claim by evolutionists in order to criticize a straw man. Fascinating.
But the book is not really for creationists. It is for anyone who wants a good nontechnical introduction to biology. [/I]
Actually there are very educated and credentialed persons that doubt the staus quo as being robust It is not just uneducated creationists that have problems. The chaos theory of evolution - life - 18 October 2010 - New Scientist
Gosh, I love it when you cite articles that support evolution 100%, but quibble with something some researcher has said about how it occurs. Science is different from religion. It is open to challenge. That article did not attack evolution theory, but it did say that the process was more chaotic than imagined by Darwin. I could see nothing in the article that Dawkins might object to other than the author's depiction of what Darwin believed. (Dawkins is the modern version of "Darwin's Bulldog".) By juxtaposing these "very educated and credentialed persons" with "creationists", you give the false impression that the two groups have something in common. They do not. This is the same technique that has been used by creationists to frame Stephen Jay Gould's evolution-friendly idea of "punctuated equilibrium" as an attack on evolution theory rather than simply an alternative proposal to Darwinian gradualism. It drove Gould crazy that his work was abused in that way, and he made that quite clear before he died.
There are also creation scientists around. I am sure it is difficult for them to get funding for any project that flys in the face of TOE in any way.
Jonathan Sarfati - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sarfati's expertise is in physical chemistry, not biology, and it is not difficult for so-called "creation scientists" to get funding. They get it from tax-exempt religious sources and private individuals with too much money. The reason that they fail to get it from more conventional sources for scientific research is that they do not do science. They write papers that cannot get published for lack of scientific merit, and they nitpick at the work of other scientific findings as if the nitpicking were genuine research.
