Correct… if you applied differences then evolution would likely come out differently… but that doesn’t mean it comes out in impossible ways, and it depends on how far you roll back since evolution typically just adds to what came before. So if you rolled back 100,000 years we might evolve mostly the same way but just be more hairy and more hunched over or something, we wouldn’t just grow wings or something ridiculous.
“just means changing”? It’s not that simple. Fish to men? That’s not just simple change, that’s very complex change. And the nonsense that parts just floating around could suddenly attach themselves to another organism to perform a new, useful function. How would the cell, for example, add the code of the new part to its DNA in order to reproduce it?
There’s no way to know that. None. The duck billed platypus is rather ridiculous. Did the Koala just happen to look up at a eucalyptus tree and think, You know, that will be my source of food and water?
Peace,
Well… fish didn’t exist then. It was a common ancestor, but yes. Small changes don’t change much… but small changes over 3 billion years is a lot. Few people understand how big of a time period that really is. How do cells add new parts to DNA? That’s easy… we can actually do that in the lab. This is not a biology lesson though, I’m not going into that.
Maybe to some degree, but if they’re all singing from the same hymnbook, they’re hardly going to be as critical as they might be.
It may support the current theory, but then I’m sure it could support any number of theories, including Creationism. Or scientology, for that matter! It’s all in the interpretation, as far as I can see.
We have no real way of verifying such datings! Come to that, I’m skeptical that we can really say we know with any degree of knowledge even whether the Earth is as old as it’s thought to be!
Again, I suppose we’re hitting a point of linguistic vagarity and implication. I’m seperating the 2 concepts on the basis that 1) is that life changes and develops and 2) that this proves a certain chain of events from a superbasic lifeform to numerous lifeforms, including some extremely complex ones. Maybe my rejection of 2) doesn’t neccesitate my rejection of 1), and contrariwise, my acceptance of 1) does not neccesitate my acceptance of 2). However, I’m fairly sure that the concept of 1) was certainly originally referred to as adaptation (or maybe adaption?) predating the more ambitious theory of 2) evolution, so I suspect there’s a certain unhelpful changing of conceptualising going on elsewhere along the way. It would be like saying if you are a Theist, you are a Catholic!
Well, what is it that’s being considered fact? I thought it was the whole process from abiogenesis to human (etc.)! Although I suspect there is some deliberate obfuscation along the way, whereby the confirmation of the earlier more basic theory is encouraged to imply that the entire hypothesised Darwinistic evolutionary process as a whole has been proven… a rather extremely unhelpful ambiguity indeed.
There’s a reason they all “sing from the some hymn book”. Because all the evidence points to that conclusion. Reproducable evidence. And besides, in many cases they don’t all sing from the same book. Just look at the climate debate going on right now.
This doesn’t really allay my concerns. The evidence, as usual only points to the conclusion when the theory is investigated in a rather single minded fashion.
For a fact? your next but one paragraph virtually refutes this.
The evidence is there, but it performs according to the fashion the theory and assumptions applied expect it to. I understand that the core 3 dating techniques don’t even agree with each other… and that ultimately we’re just talking unrefuted theory - not fact. Where ideas are established according to a particular discipline without recognized challenge, and established in the form of an orthodoxy, it takes more than skeptism to dislodge them as the established ‘truth’ - which goes for all of this stuff. Your next statement regarding the detectives seeking a solution with negligable evidence is the best analogy I’ve heard… but an orthodox ‘best guess’ does not constitute a fact in real terms - although apparently so in conventional scientific terms. Even (or, perhaps, especially) if you support it with a bunch of other eagerly supportive ‘best guesses’, in a system of study eager to establish the veracity of it’s method by mutual subdivisional agreement.
It’s just that sometimes it doesn’t so much seem like a few detectives trying to determine the truth of a situation, as a bunch of crims trying to formulate a consistent story!
Only from the mainstream - and science is not entirely about collecting evidence. It is also about testing of theories, and finding the most likely truth. My fear is that, as it gains political and social power and influence, science is also being far too eager to demand acceptance of ‘proofs’ that simply aren’t really there in order to verify it’s right to the authority some would have it granted as the sole method of interpreting the world. Evolutionary theory would be a key theory in doing that.
You’re concerned about the validity of the science. Fine, that’s quite healthy. Go study geology and do the studies yourself if you’re that concerned over it. Now, realistically I know that’s probably unrealistic, but my point is that unless you’re willing to study and prove them wrong, you really don’t have much of a leg to stand on. When the vast majority of scientists says X is true, you’d be wise to accept it even if you still have a few reservations about it. I’m curious, how many medications do you take without concern over what your doctors actually know?as far as I’m concerned, this doesn’t really dissuade me from thinking there is tautology at work at all - if anything, it increases my concerns. Although reassuringly emphasizing that such testing works to make findings more accurate, it occurs to me that there is likely to be appeal to other sciences only in cases where geology alone fails to successfully fit the general model with regard to the traditional evolutionary theory. As if it were already an established fact. So, the assumption that evolution has occured does influence the evidence itself which should work to prove whether evolution has occurred or not.
As for the climate debate, I see the reckless conservatism of science in protecting it’s interests in scientific progressivism as the primary cause of any impending ecological disasters that may or may not occur… that Hitchens blames religion for all this, when my personal lifelong experience is of mainstream science’s endless rebuttals to concerns from marginalised groups like Greenpeace demonstrates to me that the world is no more enlightened now than in the 11th century… BC. That some scientists still cling to the idea that human action does not have such cataclysmic possibilities surprises me not at all.
For a fact? your next but one paragraph virtually refutes this.
I’ve got to say, I also can’t help but be suspicious whenever I hear of a ‘miraculously well preserved fossil’ – there’s a thoroughly entertaining Fortean website somewhere arguing that Dinosaurs are Dragons, partly supported by the find of a Tyranosaurus Rex with blood samples – on examination, this turns out to be rather tissue sample or somesuch, which apparently should not survive for so long a time, which is excused (on what looked like the official website detailing the find) on the basis that such ‘miraculous’ preservations are quite frequently found on fossils of this age! Again, this kind of thing doesn’t quite reassure me regarding the accurate dating of such findings.
That such processes as geological morphology enter the public consciousness only after the declaration of evolution to be proved according to the previously discussed proof of adaptation (which I still think it is rather disingenuous to refer to as proof of evolution), and are found to be essentially tautologically supported by geological data, (itself a science doubtless increasingly influenced by the ideological benefits of subscription to Darwinistic theory ever since the latter was developed based on what has subsequently been admitted to be rather scant evidence) all do nothing but make me rather skeptical regarding the objectivity of the assessment of data as it has been done over, say, the last 150 years……at least….
The evidence is there, but it performs according to the fashion the theory and assumptions applied expect it to. I understand that the core 3 dating techniques don’t even agree with each other… and that ultimately we’re just talking unrefuted theory - not fact. Where ideas are established according to a particular discipline without recognized challenge, and established in the form of an orthodoxy, it takes more than skeptism to dislodge them as the established ‘truth’ - which goes for all of this stuff. Your next statement regarding the detectives seeking a solution with negligable evidence is the best analogy I’ve heard… but an orthodox ‘best guess’ does not constitute a fact in real terms - although apparently so in conventional scientific terms. Even (or, perhaps, especially) if you support it with a bunch of other eagerly supportive ‘best guesses’, in a system of study eager to establish the veracity of it’s method by mutual subdivisional agreement.
It’s just that sometimes it doesn’t so much seem like a few detectives trying to determine the truth of a situation, as a bunch of crims trying to formulate a consistent story!
Even if you stick with the detective analogy, there is simply too little evidence to really be sure you’re not eagerly picking the wrong suspect, where the real culprit may not have left a mark…
Only from the mainstream - and science is not entirely about collecting evidence. It is also about testing of theories, and finding the most likely truth. My fear is that, as it gains political and social power and influence, science is also being far too eager to demand acceptance of ‘proofs’ that simply aren’t really there in order to verify it’s right to the authority some would have it granted as the sole method of interpreting the world. Evolutionary theory would be a key theory in doing that.
Interestingly, I’ve actually seen the ‘random chance’ hypothesis - from bumping memes to humans - including abiogenesis - expounded repeatedly as ‘fact’ by Baldrick, in an advert for a show on the BBC proclaiming the same. They, at least, appear to have decided the entire idea is also apparently ‘a fact’.
Whether there is genuinely sufficient proof or not.
First, it was not “soft tissue” and they aren’t “bones”. It was some organic material (some proteins were extracted, proteins are actually very robust), and the bone was solid rock - the definition of a fossil.
As I understand it, carbon dating is seen as more reliable for very recent stuff, chemical testing for middle stuff, and radiometric testing for very old stuff. Thing is, since the whole age of the Earth is essentially hypothetical and is essentially, yet again, unverifiable, the relative age of everything could be calculated entirely differently at the drop of a new theory… anyway, what you say does nothing to refute my concerns over the reassurances in the decidedly pro-evolutionary article in question.
Sorry for butting in Ed…
The age of the Earth is a lot more scientific and widely re-tested than I think you realize. You can view some specific details of how it’s done here:As I understand it, carbon dating is seen as more reliable for very recent stuff, chemical testing for middle stuff, and radiometric testing for very old stuff. Thing is, since the whole age of the Earth is essentially hypothetical and is essentially, yet again, unverifiable, the relative age of everything could be calculated entirely differently at the drop of a new theory… anyway, what you say does nothing to refute my concerns over the reassurances in the decidedly pro-evolutionary article in question.
Recalculated the size of the Universe recently, didn’t they? And decided it was contracting rather than expanding? Science makes mistakes. Big ones. Regularly. With discipline wide consensus supporting them… the most amazing thing is how often radical changes in orthodox opinion is always declared without a hint of concern over the tremendous degree of certainty the previous position was often held with…
The vast majority of scientists believed the world was growing colder, not warmer, not so many years ago, and that environmental concerns were the wailing paranoias of nutty extremists… like any discipline, I don’t think majority consensus is any guarantee of reliability in science. We’d have been wiser to have been far more skeptical of them long ago…
Wasn’t it radiometric testing that led to the declaration that CDs would turn out to be vitually indestructable?
Dawkins is for me the archetypical self-deluded, dogmatic scientist. Given his amazing track record in delivering laughable proofs for the nonexistence of God, I can’t really take him seriously as a reliably objective scientist. Have you got a video from some biologist who is less of a self-deluded fascist? Davros, perhaps?
Incidentally, I can’t help but note the irony in you demanding I give up arguing evolution for lack of a Geology degree, then referring me to a scientist who spends most of his time dreaming up nonsensical arguments outside his speciality which I, with my half a degree in philosophy, bit in psychology, and subsiduary qualifications in history, sociology etc. can’t help but see a series of gaping holes in…
You’re assuming that some surviving organic molecules in a fossil somehow means it’s young.Sorry for butting in Ed…
Liquidpele, this doesn’t void the core descrepancy. That if a large number of other fossils have such matter attached, but that this is infernally unlikely, this puts the age of such fossils under more question than they’re conventionally allowed to be. It’s also known that fossilization doesn’t actually neccesarily require exteme age to occur.
Ed, this is the tip of the iceburg… the one that gets me every time is the one about the apparently human footprints in a riverbed being assumed to be those of ‘a dinosaur slipping in the mud’ - I advise you both to go and read Charles Fort. He’d be laughing his cake off at that one!
I have the complete works of Charles Fort. Currently, the overarching concern here is to get a majority concensus for mindless, unguided, no God involved evolution, then they’ll go on to step two.Sorry for butting in Ed…
Liquidpele, this doesn’t void the core descrepancy. That if a large number of other fossils have such matter attached, but that this is infernally unlikely, this puts the age of such fossils under more question than they’re conventionally allowed to be. It’s also known that fossilization doesn’t actually neccesarily require exteme age to occur.
Ed, this is the tip of the iceburg… the one that gets me every time is the one about the apparently human footprints in a riverbed being assumed to be those of ‘a dinosaur slipping in the mud’ - I advise you both to go and read Charles Fort. He’d be laughing his cake off at that one!
Thing is, doesn’t most of the geomorphological evidence in support of evolutionism in the case of anomalous data assume something coming along to ‘shake things up’, despite a lack of evidence for the same?
The old evidence, as ed points out, remains the same. It is only the theories and interpretations, beliefs, and assumptions which are applied to them which change. The point I am trying to make to you is that in the face of something where the evidence cannot really be assessed in a real case fashion, the theories cannot be reliably tested. This goes for both evolutionism and creationism (whether ‘young Earth’ based or not)
Yes, but the principle is the same, isn’t it?Consensus is probably not the major factor you’ll want to base your beliefs on, I’ll agree with that one
The fact that you just brought up CD’s and radiometry is a bit concerning… you realize the term can mean different things right? As in radioactive material vs electromagnetic radiation?
google.com/search?q=define%3Aradiometric
It’s not simply an idiological aversion - it’s the extent to which Dawkins’ reasoning is ludicrously (perhaps literally) twisted according to his particular prejudices. See my earlier arguments on the “Dawkins makes sense” thread.
Yes - but, again you’re missing the point! I’ll try and be clearer - you say I shouldn’t comment outside my qualification, then point to someone who does just that - regularly…anyway, I’ve already mentioned this, but I’ll emphasize it again - his arguments don’t make sense. Rational sense. That he’s a bit of a fascist doesn’t help, but his lopsided interpretation of history and possibility makes me hope that he departmentalises his reasoning ability from his fervant dogmas only outside his chosen speciality… but given how daft he is in a lot of his anti-theological arguments, I find it hard to believe!