Nature of Man

[Mallon]

So unless I can argue scientifically about something which I consider beyond the remit of science I should shut up and go with the consensus and leave you to your living wage.

Unless you have something helpful to say beyond "you're wrong", then yeah! But simply telling someone they're wrong without elaborating WHY it is so really isn't helpful at all.

 

[Assyrian]

You cannot defend a monkey as you would a child - they are not in the same league- a monkey will never be anything but a monkey.

So what? You think an ape's abilities cannot be compared to a human's, well a child is a human being. The fact that a child can grow into an adult with an adults abilities shows how an apes abilities are simply a matter of scale, if the ape brain evolved in size and complexity why shouldn't its abilities increase the way a child's abilities increase with age?

The quality of the evidence for heliocentricism in our solar system is overwhelming, can be checked mathematically, observationally and by the physical presence of satellites around the solar system. We do not know very much even about our own neighbourhood but we know the sun is the biggest kid in our playground. The evidence from maths and telescopes was also hard to deny for a thinking person in c17 and could be checked then also.

They knew the the sun was ginormous from the third century BC, Aristarchus used it to argue that the earth went round the sun and everybody laughed. It simply does not follow that because the sun is big it is not the one to move, You need to know that the sun's volume means its mass is ginormous too, that the law of gravity says the gravitational attraction of the sun is the result of its mass, that the gravitational attraction of an astronomical body can pull smaller bodies into orbit around it, and all this in the seventeenth century without the benefit of satellites and rockets. Yes they could do the maths and the maths fit, but that only meant that heliocentrism worked as a model, not that the model represented reality. This was a serious problem for Galileo's opponents. Christian in the 17th century had much much less evidence supporting heliocentrism than we d for evolution, yet they changed their interpretation of scripture because heliocentrism was the better scientific model. Now we have satellites and rockets and we know they were right to change the traditional interpretation with the very limited information that had because it was the best scientific information available.

You cannot equate the quality of this evidence with that for evolution. Its degraded, incomplete and even in our best samples partial, often ruined, sometimes tampered with and in highest probability mainly misunderstood! We also have no human check for the processes described.

No you cannot equate the information we have for evolution with the highly limited subjective and unverifiable hypotheses of astronomers. However degraded the fossils, we can examine them in our hands in a laboratory. The astronomers had to view the movement of planets across the vast distances of interplanetary space and view the movement from the worst possible angle, seeing their orbits, if that is what they are as linear motion back and forth along the ecliptic. Evolution is further confirmed, by the nested hierarchies of organisms alive today who we can view complete and undegraded, as well as by all the evidence we have from genetics. All you talk of of partial and degraded samples is simply making excuses, the 17th century church had much less to go on and yet had the wisdom to accept the science based on the fact that the very little evidence they did have supported heliocentrism.