Since most evolutionists are Christians,
I think you meant most Christians are evolutionists but it was a nice though anyway.
Actually, both statements are true.
You and others think that it has to be one extreme or the other never once considering that there could be another option.
Funny. That was one of the arguments I used against creationists all of my life.
Creation does not mean magic,
"Speaking" something into existence is magic.
Abra-cadabera =
*poof* there it is.
it does not mean that a process has not occurred that mankind has labled evolution. On one hand you have the evolutionists (theist and secular alike) that feel the process is either 1. God set the whole ball rolling and stepped aside (Theist)
I think that is actually the Deist position. Non-Deist theists tend to think that God is still involved.
or 2. There is no need for God and everything occurring was due to natural selection and environmental influences(secular. Any stepping over those lines creates chaos in both camps.
If you'll take a look at the "
Origin of life views" thread, you'll see that I'm not like that.
As a scientist, you are required to limit your explanations to those things which can be tested for, or evidenced in some way, at least potentially. My position is that, (if God were real) you would be able to detect him and indicate him in some objective way. And I say that because anytime any supernatural anything dips his hand into the prime material plane to effect some physical change, he should pull his ethereal arm out dripping with physics. In other words, even miracles should leave a trace of themselves.
And some supernatural something should have been proven by now: Kirlian photography, full trance mediums, psionics, Transcendental Meditation, past life remembrance, astral projection, ESP, or precognition. Yet what have we got? 150,000 dead, and tens of millions homeless because nobody foretold the largest natural disaster in recorded history. All the animals were able to detect something, ultrasonic vibrations perhaps, but not us oh-so-spiritually tuned prophets of oh-so-many gods and ghosts. We went down to the retreated beach without even
common sense much less
sixth sense, or second sight. What's wrong with that picture?
As a species, we are so astoundingly in-sensative that things like the Asian tsunami or the twin tower attack always hit us blind and without warning even when
get warnings. Yet we somehow manage to make ourselves believe that David Blain has genuine spiritual powers, and that we'll receive a promotion or a new love interest now that Jupiter is in the house of Virgo. On the whole, despite all our genius in the practical world, man is still a metaphysical moron, and definitely not psychic.
It either happened according to the laws of physics, or it didn't adhere to physical laws and happened miraculously instead. Either way, it couldn't have formed by changing alleles that weren't there yet. So until they were, it can't be considered evolution.
See case in point. It either had to be laws of physics or miracles. Has it occurred to you that God being the Creator and the originator of all intelligence would and could use such laws in His creation?
Absolutely! That's why I was a Taoist for more than ten years. But I always thought that some element of the supernatural had been quantified or qualified to some degree, and that the spiritual (astral) planes and the entities therein were simply another, quite natural dimension working in association with this one. My spiritual beliefs were fairly complex and (I think) well-considered. I also thought that at least some of them had legitimate backing. When I realized they didn't, at all, and that no one else's did either, then I reluctantly had to resign myself to materialism.
Taoist or Shamanic creation concepts could be true. With some modifications, even some version of Hindu tradition could be true I suppose. But Biblical creationism still couldn't be.
I imagine that this will come up again in this thread but I want to give you my theory and hopefully you can at least see that I have a reasonable hypothesis regarding Genesis. But the time is not right for it now in this thread.
I would be interested to hear it. That would probably give me an opportunity to explain my special brand of Taoism.
But would you not agree that many of these tiers and fundamental similarities are unproven and many are assumed by pieced together information that has some elements unknown.
There is always some element of the unknown, no matter what we're talking about. But I think we have so much evidence of common descent as to be perverse to deny that these tiers of similarities really do mean what they seem to. You are not an animal because men devised some arbitrary and therefore meaningless system of classification. You are an animal because you are descended from animals. And I think that's been proven about as solidly as anything ever could be.
To clarify, we see similarities with organisms and classify them accordingly but at times these classifications are very limiting and have become problematic. Case in point Kingdom has begun to be almost obsolete due to the advances of biology today.
That is true, and there are other examples as well; the exact taxonomic position of aardvarks as the most primitive of all living hooved animals for example. But remember what I said before, about science slowly bringing the image of reality into focus. Everytime we have to make some minor change, we're improving our knowledge even further. And its clear that we're still seeing what Darwin detected through the blur of 19th Century understanding.
The taxonomic classifications in fact sometimes contridict or do not correlate with the geological evidence.
I am unaware of any of these occasions ...except perhaps for one.
I have a pet polypterus. It is a lobe-finned fish who looks a lot like a lizard, especially when it stands on its short little front legs. When I first saw it, I was stunned, looking at a living fossil I didn't know even existed. Its obviously a very ancient fish, closely-related to the Sarcopterygiian fish of the Paleozoic era. But the only fossil we actually have of this order comes from the end of the Mesozoic. That is not to say that this order didn't exist when we think they should have appeared. Phylogenetically, they should be much older than the fossils so far indicate. So their kind are typically described as
"from the late Cretaceous (and probably much earlier)".
Or are you talking about subjectivity in lieu of sufficient evidence? For example, I always believed that birds were dinosaurs. Now the world at last agrees due to the many transitional species that have since been found in that line so far. Similarly, I always believed that scorpions were descended from Eurypterids, where most paleontologists still don't. But I managed to present a good enough case that some systematists now think I'm right; that both
scorpions and arachnids are both nested, (separately) within Eurypterids, and that scorpions should be nested among Mixopterecean eupterids specifically.
But (as I said) we still lack one critical intermediate in that line to make my position conclusive.
Don't you remember what a miracle is? It is something which is outside, beyond, even counter to the laws of physical reality.
No, that is one aspect to a miracle. A miracle can be within the scope of physical reality. Creation is not defined by the process of miraculous events that do not relate to the physical reality of our universe.
Perhaps. But a miracle
is defined as "
beyond the scope of reality", (or words to that effect) in many dictionaries.
Creation if defined would be the event that created the laws of our physical reality.
So the Big Bang was the creation event. All the laws of the universe were already set, and everything in existence was designed to look like it didn't need a designer. God is a master of hiding his handiwork. Not the kind of thing one would expect from someone who is allegedly vain and jealous.
Eukaryotic flagella form at the tip, posing a problem with assembly. I mean how do you get all these proteins into the flagellum so that they get in the right formation? Many of the pieces are partly assembled at the base of the flagellum and then transported into the flagellum by a specialized pathway known as Intraflagellar Transport. The basic ingredients are a kinesin-II motor that shuttles precursors into the flagellum, a dynein motor and an IFT "raft" which carrys the material in/out of the flagellum.
So it can not "simply form on the wrong side".
Why not?
The kinesin and dynein motors could be explained by gene duplication. Yet here we would seem to require concurrent duplications, as both motors are essential for flagellar assembly. If you knock out the kenesin-II (also known as fla10), no flagella assemble (the phenotype of called "bald"), as the machine for moving the material into the flagellum is missing. If you knock out the transport dynein, stumpy, non-functional flagella form, as material (including the kinesins) is not carried out of the flagella and so accumulate into a disordered tangle.
What if you didn't knock out anything? What if (as I said before) the flagellum in this case merely pushes instead of pulls? I mean, I could cite many more structural difficulties with growing legs out a fly's head. But we've already proven that can happen with a single alteration. So a flagellum on the "rear" of a cell that doesn't even have a front or back to begin with should be no problem at all.
The evidence of this mutation is as follows: (1.) We know mutations happen randomly in nature, and that on rare occasions, they can be quite dramatic.
Although I agree that this is true, we can not always postulate any unexplained or unproven mechanism in evolution to this : mutations happen so it could happen... explanation. It is an equalivent of God of the Gaps only we replace God with evolution.
Don't forget this one important detail:
We know mutations exist. We have no reason to imagine that a god does. Why do you postulate unexplained and unproven mechanisms? This makes your position equivelent to saying;
"this doesn't happen, but let's insist that it does anyway." Let's keep things in their proper perspective.
(2.) And we know that even dramatic mutations can be inherited, especially if they're of a beneficial nature. And a rear-mounted flagellum is more efficient in a fluid environment than a front-mounted one, so there certainly would be a selective advantage there.
Again we can always come up with an advantageous explantation which takes the place of actual evidence for such a event.
...including "Goddidit." The trick is, can we come up with an explanation that is still probable without having to postulate any forces or phenomenon which have never been observed, and can neither be verified nor adequately defined in any way? Which are therefore likely imagined, and believed only on faith anyway?
(3.) We know from traveling freak show attractions (among other things) that it is even possible to grow too many limbs, or for limbs to appear in the wrong place.
Yes this is true but the DNA for these "limbs" (or whatever) are already developed (established) within the organism. This is not the case with the flagellum.
Yes it is. Flagellum are just elongated cillia, remember?
(4.) And we know from early laboratory experiments on the genetics of flies that certain genes can be activated by a deliberate mutation to cause legs to grow out of the head instead of the thorax (for example). And these are significantly more complex animals which are much more dependant on integrity of the foundational structure to support their legs than are any single-celled organisms are for their elongated cillia.
As above we can cause this to happen but you must remember that we "intelligent designers" so to speak are manipulating the circumstances in these iinstances.
All we did was duplicate one of several types of mutation that are known to occur naturally, albeit very rarely.
So for a flagellum to appear on the wrong side, or simply to work backwards is not a very big change. It may not even have been a change in position. Many of these cells, (including Ameobas) are surrounded by cillia.
As I have explained this is not probable.
Granted. If it were probable, it would have happened more often. But it is certainly possible. And what is improbable in one generation may be inevitable in a billion generations.
neoteny is actually quite an important feature of the morphological evolution of many species, and we see lots of neoteny in dogs for example. When one looks at humany, we are neotenous apes, with a few other differences thrown in for measure.
