• Starting today August 7th, 2024, in order to post in the Married Couples, Courting Couples, or Singles forums, you will not be allowed to post if you have your Marital status designated as private. Announcements will be made in the respective forums as well but please note that if yours is currently listed as Private, you will need to submit a ticket in the Support Area to have yours changed.

  • CF has always been a site that welcomes people from different backgrounds and beliefs to participate in discussion and even debate. That is the nature of its ministry. In view of recent events emotions are running very high. We need to remind people of some basic principles in debating on this site. We need to be civil when we express differences in opinion. No personal attacks. Avoid you, your statements. Don't characterize an entire political party with comparisons to Fascism or Communism or other extreme movements that committed atrocities. CF is not the place for broad brush or blanket statements about groups and political parties. Put the broad brushes and blankets away when you come to CF, better yet, put them in the incinerator. Debate had no place for them. We need to remember that people that commit acts of violence represent themselves or a small extreme faction.
  • We hope the site problems here are now solved, however, if you still have any issues, please start a ticket in Contact Us

One thing never evolves into something else!

MarkT

Veteran
Mar 23, 2004
1,709
26
✟2,404.00
Faith
Adding hair to a reptile does not make a mammal.

Vehicles
.Cars
..American cars
...GM cars
....Cadillac
.....Eldorado
......Seville

Sorry. A car is a vehicle by definition. After that you're just narrowing things down to the company and the make and the model - where it's made, who makes it.

A Seville is the name of the car that is produced by GM.

We know GM makes cars and it has several divisions making cars.

But nature doesn't build cars ... or animals.

We can not put amphibians, for example, into the fish folder. We can not file 'Amphibians' under 'Fish'.

We can not say an amphibian is an evolved fish for the simple reason that the parts that belong to the fish do not belong to the amphibian. It's not simply a case of adding four legs.
 
Upvote 0

USincognito

a post by Alan Smithee
Site Supporter
Dec 25, 2003
42,070
16,820
Dallas
✟918,891.00
Country
United States
Gender
Male
Faith
Atheist
Marital Status
Private
MarkT said:
Adding hair to a reptile does not make a mammal.

Adding mammary glands to one certainly does...



MarkT said:
Sorry. A car is a vehicle by definition.

And all the the nestings of the taxonomies and claudagrams are placed where they are by definition too. Oddly enough, the one thing that doesn't have a real defintion is the Creationist "Kind."
 
Upvote 0

shinbits

Well-Known Member
Dec 4, 2005
12,245
299
44
New York
✟14,001.00
Faith
Deist
Marital Status
Married
Politics
US-Others
Aron-Ra said:
Then you were wrong when you said that the diversity between distinct human demes was "in no way evolution". You now admit that it is.
This is the third time you've misquoted me. Stop doing that.

I said that the mixing of races was in no way evolution.

Why not? Would you concede that our ancestors must have been apes if we are still apes right now?
Not if there is no proof that humans did come from apes.
 
Upvote 0

shinbits

Well-Known Member
Dec 4, 2005
12,245
299
44
New York
✟14,001.00
Faith
Deist
Marital Status
Married
Politics
US-Others
Nooj said:
We know microbes lived billions of years ago because we have found fossils of them. Or rather, the structures they have left behind. Stromatolites (mmmm...tomatoes) have been found as fossils. The only known organisms to create stromatolites are micro-organisms.


There are a few living stromatolite colonies, a throwback to the Pre-Cambrian time. One of which is in Shark Bay, Western Australia. I did a school project for Shark Bay. :)


This might also be of interest:
Thank you for this post.

The one question I've been asking, is how do they know how long bacteria has been in existence? There seems to be no real answer, or at least no one's offering one.
 
Upvote 0

Tomk80

Titleless
Apr 27, 2004
11,570
429
45
Maastricht
Visit site
✟36,582.00
Faith
Agnostic
shinbits said:
This is the third time you've misquoted me. Stop doing that.

I said that the mixing of races was in no way evolution.
Nowhere did Aron-Ra state that. He didn't say anything on the mixing of races. You might want to track back the last page of this discussion again and read it, because you seem to have no clue what it's going on about anymore.

Not if there is no proof that humans did come from apes.
If humans are apes, their ancestors are apes, right?
 
Upvote 0

shinbits

Well-Known Member
Dec 4, 2005
12,245
299
44
New York
✟14,001.00
Faith
Deist
Marital Status
Married
Politics
US-Others
Tomk80 said:
If humans are apes, their ancestors are apes, right?
That's only a possibility if evolution is true.

Humans are not apes. Apes are very hairy slouched over creatures. Humans walk upright, and by comparison are fairly hairless.
 
Upvote 0

Mallon

Senior Veteran
Mar 6, 2006
6,109
298
✟30,412.00
Faith
Lutheran
Marital Status
Private
MarkT said:
We can not put amphibians, for example, into the fish folder. We can not file 'Amphibians' under 'Fish'.

Scientists can and do, actually. The first amphibians were derived from rhipidistian sarcopterygian fish.
We can not say an amphibian is an evolved fish for the simple reason that the parts that belong to the fish do not belong to the amphibian. It's not simply a case of adding four legs.
Look and learn:
http://www.skepticwiki.org/wiki/index.php/Intermediate_Forms_Between_Classes#Fish-amphibian_intermediates
 
Upvote 0

Aron-Ra

Senior Veteran
Jul 3, 2004
4,571
393
63
Deep in the heart of the Bible belt
Visit site
✟29,521.00
Faith
Atheist
Marital Status
Single
MarkT said:
Adding hair to a reptile does not make a mammal.
That is correct. You wouldn't need hair, but you would need to add a neocortex and lactal glands, and there would be a number of skeletal adjustments too.

Skulls.JPG

Of course that's if you assume the word, "reptile" applies to synapsids like dimetrodon. That word has fallen out of favor these days because its paraphyletic, and inapplicable to systematics -unless it is considered synonemous with "diapsid". Of course in that case, birds are reptiles and mammals never were.
Aron-Ra said:
Vehicles
.Cars
..American cars
...GM cars
....Cadillac
.....Eldorado
......Seville
MarkT said:
Sorry. A car is a vehicle by definition. After that you're just narrowing things down to the company and the make and the model - where it's made, who makes it.
Showing how something can be a kind within a kind within a kind -which is all I was trying to show with that.
A Seville is the name of the car that is produced by GM.

We know GM makes cars and it has several divisions making cars.

But nature doesn't build cars ... or animals.
I explained in that post that I wanted to use a non-biological explanation to start with, because some people have a sort of knee-jerk reaction to that subject.
We can not put amphibians, for example, into the fish folder. We can not file 'Amphibians' under 'Fish'.
Actually, yes we can. I tried to argue from your side a few years ago, on Talk.Origins, and was proven wrong by a professional systematist. Cladistically, amphibians are fish, and so are people. Seriously, what is a fish? If you give a complete list of characters common to all fish without exception, you'll find that the word "fish" is synonemous with the word, Chordate, and it actually does include amphibians rather nicely.
We can not say an amphibian is an evolved fish for the simple reason that the parts that belong to the fish do not belong to the amphibian. It's not simply a case of adding four legs.
Isn't it? Tell me then, what traits belong to fish, (all fish) that do not belong to any amphibians? And tell me which this thing is?

acanthostega.jpg


While you're at it, I asked you a series of questions, and gave you several points you should address on another thread, and you just walked away ignoring them all. Why?
 
Upvote 0

USincognito

a post by Alan Smithee
Site Supporter
Dec 25, 2003
42,070
16,820
Dallas
✟918,891.00
Country
United States
Gender
Male
Faith
Atheist
Marital Status
Private
shinbits said:
Apes are very hairy slouched over creatures. Humans walk upright, and by comparison are fairly hairless.

Really? Where did you get that definition? I have a bad back and what I think are bulging disks in my neck and they make me slouch. I'm also quite hairless except for my legs. Does that make me a transitional between apes and humans or an example of an atavism?

For weeks now I've held out hope that you might at some point realize that words have meanings and that taxa and claudistic assignments are based on more than the most superficial interpretations of fossil and extant species, but the fact that you continue to conflate the "bill" of a platypus with a duck or hirsuitism with apes tells me you're just in denial.

I have no problem putting disruptive trolls like dad on Ignore, but I really hate putting people who at least try and discuss the evidence - even if their responses are nothing more than a littany of ad hoc arguments and answering questions with more questions, but at this point, I just don't have the patience to respond to all of your absurd tangents.

Take care dude...
 
Upvote 0

Aron-Ra

Senior Veteran
Jul 3, 2004
4,571
393
63
Deep in the heart of the Bible belt
Visit site
✟29,521.00
Faith
Atheist
Marital Status
Single
Aron-Ra said:
Then you were wrong when you said that the diversity between distinct human demes was "in no way evolution". You now admit that it is.
shinbits said:
This is the third time you've misquoted me. Stop doing that.

I said that the mixing of races was in no way evolution.
Then I didn't misquote you. You were talking about "mixing" two biological lineages that are already distinct, and were "just as" distinct as their grandparents were, stretching back hundreds of generations with no changes permitted by you at all. That is what you said, and that would specifically disallow both demes to have emerged from another, original ancestral one, implying they were specially-created separately. But now you've reversed your implication, and admit that they do share a common ancestor after all, and that rather than mixing two already distinct demes, you agree that one or both of these lineages have become "increasingly distinct" either from each other, their ancestors or both. That would be evolution.

Now that you agree that my definition of evolution is completely correct, can you cite any errors in the OP of this thread?
Would you concede that our ancestors must have been apes if we are still apes right now?
Not if there is no proof that humans did come from apes.
OK, let's pretend for a moment that you're right. But even if there wasn't any evidence of that at all, -if you are an ape right now, wouldn't it still be safe to assume that your parents and grandparents were apes too?

And how do you explain these guys?

sts5_small.jpg
homo_floresensis_300.jpg
 
Upvote 0

Aron-Ra

Senior Veteran
Jul 3, 2004
4,571
393
63
Deep in the heart of the Bible belt
Visit site
✟29,521.00
Faith
Atheist
Marital Status
Single
shinbits said:
That's only a possibility if evolution is true.

Humans are not apes. Apes are very hairy slouched over creatures. Humans walk upright, and by comparison are fairly hairless.
Not hairless, but sparsely so. That's one way to distinguish "great apes" from "lesser apes"; the "great apes" have relatively sparse hair.

Is this gorilla an ape?
240gorilla,0.jpg

Because, by comparison, he is fairly hairless.

Apes aren't "slouched-over" either. Some of them were habitually bi-pedal, walking upright just like we do. We know of several apes that were like this, Oreopithecus, Ardipithecus, and all the Australopithecines and Paranthropines. Even the occasional chimpanzee.
humanzee2.jpg

Is this an ape? Are you?
 
Upvote 0

Baggins

Senior Veteran
Mar 8, 2006
4,789
474
At Sea
✟29,982.00
Faith
Humanist
Marital Status
Married
Politics
UK-Labour
shinbits said:
Thank you for this post.

The one question I've been asking, is how do they know how long bacteria has been in existence? There seems to be no real answer, or at least no one's offering one.

I suggest you read:

Life on a young planet: the first 3 billion years of evolution on earth. by Andrew H Knoll ( Princeton Press )

I have read it and it it is well written and interesting. A layman with an interest in palaeontology or microbiology would understand it.

In answer to your question, the oldest sedimentary rocks on earth contain possible micro-fossils, and there are obvious single celled organisms and groups of said from at least 2.8 billion years ago.

The oldest probable fossils are in the Warrawoona group in Australia they are 3.465 billion years old and are fairly unambiguous bacteria and cyanobacteria preserved in chert. I should point out that there is some controversy over whether these rocks contain fossils or simply hyrothermal alteration products, but at the moment the stronger evidence seems to point towards fossils.

Chert is a sillica compound that preserves organic structures within it almost perfectly. These rocks have not undergone any appreciable metamorphism.

Life on earth is nearly as old as the earth itself
 
Upvote 0

MarkT

Veteran
Mar 23, 2004
1,709
26
✟2,404.00
Faith
Actually, yes we can. I tried to argue from your side a few years ago, on Talk.Origins, and was proven wrong by a professional systematist. Cladistically, amphibians are fish, and so are people.

Only according to your abstract way of grouping and naming things.

Reminds me of the principle, a rose is a rose by any other name.

You can call an amphibian a fish. They share a similar environment. Naturally, therefore, they might share similarities in structure though I suspect there are functional differences.

But remember, it's just a name you are calling it. You're still only grouping things. An amphibian is an ancient form/kind of creature.

As you can see the members of this kind have legs and feet. They don't swim like fish. They don't have typical fish parts like fins and scales.


Seriously, what is a fish? If you give a complete list of characters common to all fish without exception, you'll find that the word "fish" is synonemous with the word, Chordate, and it actually does include amphibians rather nicely.

The waters brought forth living creatures according to their kind. A fish is one kind. An amphibian is another kind. They both have a spinal column. That's only relevant to your system.

Isn't it? Tell me then, what traits belong to fish, (all fish) that do not belong to any amphibians? And tell me which this thing is?

It has no fins. It has a frog-like head, legs and feet. I would call it an amphibian.

While you're at it, I asked you a series of questions, and gave you several points you should address on another thread, and you just walked away ignoring them all. Why?

Sorry I missed a bunch of posts. Don't know how but I did.

Quote
Originally Posted by: Aron-Ra




"I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts. For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again."
--Ecclesiastes; 3:18-20
Quote
Originally Posted by: MarkT




No. With respect to death and dying a man has no advantage over the animals. They both die in the end and a man's life is all vanity and a striving after wind.







You misread this. It says that men are animals, and that to deny that is vanity. Yet you deny it anyway. Also, the next line assumes (for the sake of argument) that other animals may have souls, and it remarks on the fact that you don’t really what happens after they die –no matter what you believe.

No. You have to understand the writer's point of view. Man was created. In that sense, he is a creature like the other creatures God created.

The writer says, concerning the estate or the condition of his existence, that man is a beast. He says, - for he has no advantage over the beast - as one dieth, so the other dieth. All are of dust and all return to dust.


That’s ridiculous. Linnaeus was a creationist who had no explanation for what he was seeing, and even asked his colleagues and contemporaries to try and explain it away for him. They couldn’t. They could only ignore it as you. They (and you) are the ones using the system of ignorance. He saw what he did not want to see. And having no other way to explain it, he initially categorized chimpanzees as Homo troglodyte, a species of human. Being a creationist, he (like you) played the differences up to be more than they were, and this lead him to categorize American, Australian, and African tribesmen as different species of man also. And he made some fairly surely comments about each of them. As I said, if you only concentrate on the differences, you can isolate anyone from everyone else because we are all different.

Well, it's irrelevant whether he was a creationist or not. Systems group things and, as a result, they define things. Systems necessarily ignore or minimize any information that doesn't matter to the system.
 
Upvote 0

Tomk80

Titleless
Apr 27, 2004
11,570
429
45
Maastricht
Visit site
✟36,582.00
Faith
Agnostic
shinbits said:
That's only a possibility if evolution is true.

Humans are not apes. Apes are very hairy slouched over creatures. Humans walk upright, and by comparison are fairly hairless.
You already know from another thread that not all humans are 'fairly hairless'. If you had closely read that thread and actually picked something up from it, you would have even known that humans have the same hair follicle density as apes have, the hair is just lighter and not all hair follicles develop hairs all the time. I'm definitely not 'fairly hairless'. What a friend of mine lacks on his head, I have plenty of on my arms, legs and chest. You have even been shown pictures of a family with as much hairs as the chimps you mentioned, if not more. Are they not humans?

Seriously Shinbits. At this point my disappointment about you is reaching quite a limit. That you make statements about animals like the platypus and what kind of conclusions could be drawn from it, can still be attributed to the fact that you haven't studied the subject in depth yet. That you make such simplistic statements as above that you have to know are wrong from the start, casts doubt on your honesty.
 
Upvote 0

Lilandra

Princess-Majestrix
Dec 9, 2004
3,573
184
54
state of mind
Visit site
✟27,203.00
Faith
Pantheist
Marital Status
Private
Politics
US-Others
Wait a sec, it was last week that you were saying something similar. You said humans weren't related to primates because we aren't as hairy. Your words exactly...

you said:
If you can't explain why humans would've lost hair, or even have evidence for it, then it can't be used as proof of evolution.
I responded...

me said:
Don't be so hasty. Just because you are unaware of the research about this, doesn't mean there isn't evidence to be studied,


wolfboys.jpg


me from article said:

The localization of a gene for a rare hair growth disorder provides new information on the genetics of hair growth and highlights the phenomenon of atavistic expression of dormant genes.
Congenital generalized hypertrichosis (CGH) is an extremely rare disorder characterized by excessive hair growth on the face and upper body for which reason it has been dubbed "Werewolf syndrome" by the popular press. Individuals with this rare phenotype have in the past appeared in circuses as "dog men" and "ape men".

These children are expressing a dormant "genetic atavism" from ancestral primates, who had more hair.

me from article said:
CGH is a manifestation of a genetic atavism- reappearance of an ancestral phenotype. The reappearance of ancestral characteristics in individual members of the species "reminds us that the genetic and developmental information originally used in the production of such characteristics has not been lost during evolution, but lies quiescent within the genome and in the processes of embryonic development," notes Brian K. Hall, department of biology, University of Halifax, NS.


http://www.accessexcellence.org/WN/SUA05/wolfman.html


You responded to an on topic post about dormant genes for hair growth that answered your question with this


you said:
This is just a freak mishap, not "dormant genes".
you said:





All of a sudden, we were looking at a 3 horned cow that had nothing to do with your assertion that there was no proof that humans were once hairier. Even though I just showed you proof.





Now here you are again saying the same thing just like you were never shown anything.


Tomk80 said:
You already know from another thread that not all humans are 'fairly hairless'. If you had closely read that thread and actually picked something up from it, you would have even known that humans have the same hair follicle density as apes have, the hair is just lighter and not all hair follicles develop hairs all the time. I'm definitely not 'fairly hairless'. What a friend of mine lacks on his head, I have plenty of on my arms, legs and chest. You have even been shown pictures of a family with as much hairs as the chimps you mentioned, if not more. Are they not humans?
 
Upvote 0

shinbits

Well-Known Member
Dec 4, 2005
12,245
299
44
New York
✟14,001.00
Faith
Deist
Marital Status
Married
Politics
US-Others
Wow.

Everything you guys posted is meanless.

I said comparitively hairless, AND walk upright. Not JUST hairless by comparison. Humans are BOTH.

And the pics posted by consideringlily, were said by the link to be a "disorder". That means those people in the pics are unfortunate victems of a freak accident. A freak accident is not proof at all, except to those who desperately want to prove evolution.


Nice try though.
 
Upvote 0

Lilandra

Princess-Majestrix
Dec 9, 2004
3,573
184
54
state of mind
Visit site
✟27,203.00
Faith
Pantheist
Marital Status
Private
Politics
US-Others
this is a rare genetic disorder, of course their condition is rare.

Otherwise, we would all be hairier like our ancestors.

shinbits said:
And the pics posted by consideringlily, were said by the link to be a "disorder". That means those people in the pics are unfortunate victems of a freak accident. A freak accident is not proof at all, except to those who desperately want to prove evolution.
 
Upvote 0

random_guy

Senior Veteran
Jan 30, 2005
2,528
148
✟3,457.00
Faith
Christian
shinbits said:
Wow.

Everything you guys posted is meanless.

I said comparitively hairless, AND walk upright. Not JUST hairless by comparison. Humans are BOTH.

And the pics posted by consideringlily, were said by the link to be a "disorder". That means those people in the pics are unfortunate victems of a freak accident. A freak accident is not proof at all, except to those who desperately want to prove evolution.


Nice try though.

I'm sure this has been posted here, as this has been posted a lot on these boards, but to emphasize:

If you have a spine, four limbs, an ear with three bones and a jaw with one, fur, your females lactate and give birth to live young, warm blood, flexible fingers, forward facing eyes, general body plan, general dentition, trichromatic vision, fingernails, opposable thumb, no tail, larger than average brain cavity, then you are an ape. If you have a chin, your foramen magnum enters towards the front of the skull, a large Broca's Region, and are suited to bipedality, then you are also a Human.

So shinbits, which part do you not have that makes it so you're not an ape?
 
Upvote 0

Frumious Bandersnatch

Contributor
Mar 4, 2003
6,390
334
79
Visit site
✟30,931.00
Faith
Unitarian
shinbits said:
Wow.

Everything you guys posted is meanless.

I said comparitively hairless,
Humans are not hairless. Humans have hair on every surface of the body except your palms and soles and parts of the genitals. Humans have at least as many hairs as other great apes. That fact that you can't see the hairs doesn't mean they are not there. If a biopsy were taken the hairs could be found and if given the signal those hairs could be made to grow out long and thick. I am sure I told you this before.

The Frumious Bandersnatch
 
Upvote 0