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Science Mann [06 January 2012 18:24]
Paul, when you say you have researched the debate over creation/evolution, did you stop to first understand the science of it, or just read what creationists have to say on the matter? I hate to say it but do you, Paul, know your stuff? Many people who were brainwashed into the religious way (usually between the ages of 4 and 14 - the most vulnerable age) simply lose the ability to comprehend even such a simple concept as that 1. Not all animals in a breed are born the same 2. The ones better suited to their environment survive to breed, and pass down their more survivable traits 3. Over time, these small changes become large changes - but so gradually that you'll only see it in real time if you study something with a very short generation speed. Like the bacterium experiment which found that bacteria does indeed change over generations, usually unnoticeably, but eventually enough changes happen to make a huge difference - like metabolizing different sugars that they couldn't before. How would you explain that, given your 'no new information' notion? Then there are Italian Wall Lizards (changed since the 1970s), guppy fish (get less colourful when predators are around) and many others. Please qualify where you get your information in the future - some of it appears to be bad.
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Paul [04 January 2012 18:04]
I have taken about 10 years of my life to research the Creation Evolution debate and have made my conclusions. This letter more or less sums it up. You need more faith to believe evolution theories than in God. I wish people can start to think for themselves and stop being brain washed. If you start from a single cell, you can´t possibly get all the bio diversity with vastly differing DNA you get today. there is nothing like beneficial mutations. You loose DNA info through mutation. Intelligent design is the only explanation, but because people do not want to acknowledge God, they have to believe in a hokus pokus theory called evolution. Some Christians believe in the gap theory, because they are convinced that evolution is true since the grads say it´s so and they try to modify the Bible to somehow prove that God used evolution. BTW> Opstoker, there are no, I repeat NO facts that support evolution or proofs evolution. I have gone over all of them. they will not hold up in a court of law if it was a case.
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Science Mann [04 January 2012 10:41]
Funny, Ken, that you baulk at the charge of being lied to, that to suggest you are the recipient of bad information is ‘name-calling and derogatory’, then go on to accuse those who know their science of ‘stupidity’. Hypocritical much? Science is built around the idea that anyone can check your results and point out your errors. Any individual in any field can make a mistake, get overenthusiastic about a pet idea, or be up to mischief. The difference with science – as opposed to those fields which require faith – is that any claim can and will be checked by others to make sure it is true. If there is an error, for whatever reason, the error is caught, usually before too long – by other scientists. The primary aim of science is the discovery of truth. Haeckel’s study of embryology was good – even if his connection with the animal’s ancestry was not. He was correct in his observation that closely related animals resemble each other very closely in the womb, but made the error in ascribing each stage of development to some ancestral memory. This was discredited – by other scientists – in the 19th century, but his other observations are pretty good. Your man Richardson said of Haeckel ‘"on a fundamental level, Haeckel was correct”. Just not about everything, it seems. Piltdown Man was pure hoax – possibly started by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1912. Ahhh. What larks. It actually got in the way of serious palaeontology for many years – it just didn’t fit in with everything else they were discovering! First discredited in 1923, then finally put to rest by Oakley, Clark and Weiner in 1953. Took a while, but truth eventually won out. Thanks, Oaks. Tasaday Indians? Some Philippine makes a hoax to grab world cash and you pin that on scientists? The scientists were the ones who were banned by President Marcos for trying to expose the truth! Archaeopteryx is a transitional fossil, whether or not its descendents still survive, but then, so is virtually every fossil. Ancon sheep? – selective breeding. Proves that mutations can happen, and breed to carry the short-leg gene. What’s your point? Please tell me you have more than a short-legged sheep. Wait… all these half-truths and exaggerations sound familiar… Ah! I have him! I have found your liar: Johnathan Wells. A complete fraudster whose books mislead and exaggerate to push forward his pet project – Intelligent Design, and almost all your arguments here reflect his, so I assume this is your source. ID is a complete fabrication – a hoax, a myth, a lie of pseudoscience. It has been thoroughly routed by everyone except Wells himself, yet he still bangs on. There is no merit to his work, yet some cling to his notions like a lifebuoy. Some call this faith. But faith in what? Some man named Wells. And who is he? I reiterate – there are thousands of examples of transitional animals to support evolution, from whale legs to teacup dogs, and anatomy, genetics, breeding and so on, but absolutely nothing for any form of creation, including Intelligent Design.
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KenE [03 January 2012 18:29]
It never fails to amuse me how everyone who refutes faith and intelligent design will resort to name-calling and derogatory labels. SO - if we are to look for liars, lets look among the evolutionists. Michael Richardson stated that L" Haeckel was ‘An embryonic liar’. ‘This is one of the worst cases of scientific fraud. It’s shocking to find that somebody one thought was a great scientist was deliberately misleading. What he [Haeckel] did was to take a human embryo and copy it, pretending that the salamander and the pig and all the others looked the same at the same stage of development. They don’t … These are fakes.’ Worst of all, these fraudulent pictures are STILL in school science books today! Why? To deceive and coerce young minds to believe that maybe evolution is a fact. The Piltdown hoax is one of the most famous cases of fraud in science. Many Darwinists, though, claim that this case is an anomaly, and that fraud is no longer a problem today. However, the cases of fraud or deception in the field of evolution include not only the Piltdown Man, but Archaeoraptor, the peppered moth, the Midwife Toad, Haeckel’s embryos, Ancon sheep, the Tasaday Indians, Bathybius haeckelii and Hesperopithecus (Nebraska Man)—the missing link that turned out to be a pig.Actually, fraud as a whole is now ‘a serious, deeply rooted problem’ that affects no small number of contemporary scientific research studies, especially in the field of evolution. Scientists have recently been forced by several events to recognize this problem and try to deal with it. Why all these frauds if evolution is such an accepted fact? Evolutionists have also lost the 'vestigial organs' and 'junk DNA' debates. Badly. To have faith in a Divine Designer ( or God as we like to call Him ) is one easy step, based on the enormous amount of information to support intelligent design and the moral values that this inculcates in a society which accepts it. Faith in evolution, however, (yes - it takes faith to believe in something that has never been seen) requires a giant, blind leap of stupidity.
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Science Mann [03 January 2012 12:30]
Science class revisted Perhaps a few people dozed off during science class, so I’m bringing it back around. Non-science people tend to use the word ‘theory’ to describe anything which pops into their heads, which really should rather be called notion, hunch or opinion. If we’re going to test them, we call them hypotheses, and get to the testing ground. Testing and observation will reveal facts, with which we can check our hypothesis. Facts are commonplace. ‘Cheetahs are fast’, ‘Giraffes are tall’. Facts are like bricks. Common, strong, but by themselves useless. Laws are similar, just more broad. They can describe what things do, but not why it happens. For that you need a Theory. A Scientific Theory is top currency in all knowledge. It must be consistent with all known facts and laws, and have been available to the public so they can test for themselves the validity of the Theory. If the notion be the plan, facts the bricks and laws the beams, then Theory is the whole house. To disprove a Theory, just find one loose brick. Just one. Conduct a test to find a disharmonious fact, or a law that was broken. Can’t do it? Then the Theory proves true, and just found another good brick. After 150 years of thousands of very clever people trying to find holes in it, the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection not only stands strong, with nothing to disprove it, but has mountains of evidence to support it, from how the same medicines don’t work twice if you stop halfway, why rabbits are faster in areas where there are predators, and why you can still see leg bones on whale skeletons. All thoroughly experimented, observed and confirmed by thousands. It is as strong a piece of information as you can get. So if anyone says ‘It’s just a theory’ to the Theory of Evolution, they are either showing their ignorance, or selling snake oil. Evolution by Natural Selection, by the way, merely explains that animals which are born slightly different –and we all are, a little - but better suited to a given environment, breed more successfully than those which are not, that with all these little tiny changes, a species can change over time (a loooong time), and can eventually become a species different from and unbreedable with its long-lost cousin. That’s it. Nothing about big bangs. Moving on. Intelligent Design is not a Theory. It has been disproven and discredited, and is never brought up in serious scientific circles, because it is untrue. Anyone who still pushes it forward is a liar or has been lied to. Creationism is a myth. Enjoy it, but don’t pretend it to be true. To be able to believe something to be true which just plain isn’t - well, you need faith.
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