Cozen said:
Thanks for taking the time the answer me Aron-Ra, it is greatly appreciated.
I gave my 5cents worth, and I got change back!
I think I might have buggerd up the Quoting function
Aron-Ra said:
Respectfully but strongly going to disagree here.
Evidence is the interpretation of facts, based on our preconceptions.
Facts can and will be interpreted differently.
We all have preconceptions/Biases, it is what makes us the individual wacky persons you either love or hate. Facts can also be interpreted incorrectly.
No sir. The facts themselves are unambiguous. If you drop something, it falls. That the particular object falls is a fact. You can choose an existing theory to explain that fact, or you can make up a new theory to explain it. But the fact remains unchanged no matter what the explanation is.
Let's look at another example:
Biological evolution is a process of varying genetic frequencies among reproductive populations; leading to (usually subtle) changes in their morphology, physiology, or developmental biology, -which (when compiled over successive generations) can increase biodiversity when continuing variation between genetically-isolated groups eventually lead to one or more descendant branches increasingly distinct from their ancestors or cousins.
Now, this is the defintion of evolution. But this is not the
'theory' of evolution. This is an inescapable
fact of population mechanics that is easily demonstrated, and which we've been vaguely aware of for thousands of years, but which only the theory of evolution can explain.
Aron-Ra said:
I do not [still] have any preconceptions.
It is impossible not to have preconceptions. Not to psychobabble, but it is only your preconception that you do not have preconceptions.
You're wrong sir. It is possible not to have preconceptions. I gave up all my preconceptions and have no more of them.
You have 100% faith in the scientific method, but this already starts out with preconceptions like there is no God.
But I don't have faith in anything. Remember that faith is a firm conviction that is independant of evidence and is not limited only to what is logically probable. I rely on science because it is the antithesis of faith, it is the best way we know to find out how wrong we are, -which is the only way one can improve our understanding.
And the existence or non-existence of God is not a preconception, at least not anymore. The result of a life-long investigation has yeilded many many reasons to doubt such a thing, and despite myriad requests no one to date has been able to provide sound reason to believe in one. So God remains remotely possible, though highly improbable, and is completely irrelevent to this discussion anyway.
If God exists, it is very likely that both of us are deeply mistaken about who and what that is. And if God exists, then evolution must have been one of his creations. And if God does not exist, then evolution has evidently proceeded on its own without him.
Aron-Ra said:
If you can accept that your understanding of facts is not also viable, then you are making progress.
I will gladly agree that my interpretation of facts might be wrong, but until you are willing to do the same, no progress can be made.
Oh sure, I could be mistaken about all kinds of things, and certainly have been before. But you're going to have demonstrate that to convince me.
For example,
Here is another fact, the discovery of
Sinosauropteryx prima.
Now, that it has this downy-like covering all down it's back is a fact -as is its general morphology, which is obviously not typical of "lizards", but is almost indistinguishable from birds. Now, whether these facts are evidence or not depends on whether they are only consistent with the conditions demanded by one potential explanation and no other. Is it consistent with evolution? Of course, this is the sort of transitional species Darwin himself predicted we would find -and which creationists predicted we would never find, and indeed still deny we've ever found. Why? Because for a dinosaur to be adorned with feather down and almost avian in every other way too -is wholly inconsistent with any of the current claims of creationism. They can only "interpret" it, because they cannot explain it like we can.
Aron-Ra said:
And yet we've bred many "kinds" of cattle who can no longer breed with each other. How do you explain that?
I did not know that, luckily I have veterans like you to educate me. Can you give me examples?
Sure. The taxonomic family,
Bovidae is huge; It includes sheep, goats, duikers, wildebeest, kobus, kudu, oxen, and antelope of all kinds. That group is difficult to distinquish from other ruminants like giraffes, deer, pronghorns. They are all fundamentally the same. But if you look only at "cattle" (genus, Bovini) you get several different kinds of cape buffalo, water buffalo, bison, and more types of domestic cattle than I think you could possibly realize. Most of the domestic ones were bred from one originally wild species, the aurochs, (
Bos primigenus) that finally went extinct in captivity in 1627.
Some lines of cattle or oxen can still be interbred. But not all of them can be anymore. And when they cannot, when the common gene pool is no longer shared and no longer binds to be "like" kinds, what's to stop them then from becoming even more different than they already are? The earliest Bovid we know of in the fossil record looks like a cross between a cow and goat an antilope and a short-necked giraffe, or like it could grow up to be any one of those. Is there anything preventing this level of divergence? Because that's what we see happening.
Aron-Ra said:
But humans and apes
can breed. Although, we can't be sure yet if anyone's tried it, there have been a few suspected hybrids.
Now that I did not know! You will understand that I will be VERY sceptical about that. I will admit, that for me personally, if conclusive evidence in this regard can be provided, I will have to really rethink my stance. Until then I will just treat this as evolutionists wishful thinking.
There's no such thing. As you may have heard, Oliver the chimp was long suspected to be a human-chimpanzee hybrid. There have been a few secretive scientists, mostly foreign threatening to experiment with this. And Oliver was thought to be a product of one of these.
Not only did he walk upright habitually all the time, but he also acted more human than chimp all the time too. He lived among other chimps, but he was sexually attracted only to humans, and he removed himself from chimpanzee company to do chores about the house instead, helping with the dishes and such. And his face didn't look quite like a typical chimp's either. There was such a contraversy about this that at last some geneticists tested him to find out if he was fully-chimp or not -they were that uncertain. Well, it turned out that he was not sired by any human parent, but emerged from chimpanzees with strangely human traits anyway.
Now, all this scientific suspicion over Oliver's heritage blossumed in an age before we realized that chimpanzees were much closer to us genetically that we reclassified all the great apes as hominids, (meaning that they are "humanoid", and alternately that we are apes). And since then, we've discovered that chimpanzees (bonobos at least) are even closer to us than that, such that there is actually serious discussion about whether they should be classified with us in the genus, Homo. Ironically, this is what one creationist scientist did himself decades before Darwin was ever born.
"I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character ... by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none. I wish somebody would indicate one to me. But, if I had called man an ape, or vice versa, I would have fallen under the ban of all ecclesiastics. It may be that as a naturalist I ought to have done so."
--Carolus Linnaeus, February 14, 1747
In fact, he did. The father of taxonomy declared chimpanzees to be
Homo troglodyte, a subspecies of human. And of course now we can even demonstrate how humans are a sub-set of apes.
Now add another element to this question, Australopithecus. Here is an ape, (as almost all creationists call it) who is even closer to modern humans by an order of magnitude. Certainly, we could breed with them because (genetically) we can already breed with chimps.
Aron-Ra said:
And what's to limit that, once they can't produce any viable offspring? A camel and a llama were successfully cross-bred. But it took took two years of artificial insemination to do it. Wouldn't that also imply a common ancestor, but one who lived much longer ago?
Even artificial insemination proofs common ancestry.
Yes, they had a common ancestor as far back as 4500 years ago, from after the global flood.
It is obvious that isolated species can change to the point where they cannot breed anymore; I just thought it would be unlikely in just 4500years.
Sorry no. There was never any global flood, nor could there have ever been. Its not that its just unlikely or improbable. Its impossible for more reasons than you suspect. And its an absolute certainty that it did not ever happen. The story you're talking about was based on a real flood almost 5,000 years ago. But it only effected Iraq. And there were already well-established city-states in Japan, China, India, Africa, Europe, and all around the Mediterranian thousands of years before that, and there were already American, Australian and European tribes tens of thousands of years before that, and they're still there -uninterrupted by any global flood because thta never happened.
