Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

You expect us to wade through all your turgid prose that offers nothing of substance. What are you complaining about? Spare us the nonsense.

Which part of the barnyard is not synergetically connected to the rest of it and has no bearing on how the whole functions.

What a scathing criticism of Dawkins that actually is. It wipes him out. But fm is too thick to know that I suppose. But it wipes him out. As is quite well known in superior English circles. Sadly, if fm is anything to go by, which I doubt, not in US superior circles.

spendi, How can anyone know how "the whole functions," when they don't even understand the detail?

I never said anybody knows how the whole functions. Nobody can know that. Ever.

Your question shows you haven't a scientific hair on your bollocks. How can you know anything if you can't even read the Queen's English in one of its simplest manifestations.

How much have you lost short selling gold at $1495?

Your own words,

You're embarrassing yourself ci.

Having "a bearing on how the whole functions" is not the same as "knowing how the whole functions". Not by a very long way.

Actually, fm's clever remark about the barnyard shows he has no science as well. And he makes the point I've been making for years. You think you understand the "barnyard" on the basis that you know a few brilliantine words relating to one corner of it and shut everything else out and shout everybody else down. Like Dawkins does.

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

The last sentence of Origins.

" I marvel at my good fortune that Emma, so infinitely my superior in every single moral quality, should have consented to be my wife."

How on earth does a scientist arrive at such ridiculous and sentimental conclusions? What on earth does "beautiful" and "wonderful" mean to a scientist? What on earth is " moral quality" to a materialist.

I suppose five years on The Beagle at such a young age might produce such a twee romantic brain mush in any young man. It does in servicemen and prisoners. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

The Classical age doesn't seem to have produced these euphoric spasms at the "smiling face of nature" which de Sade pummelled into fine dust. So it can't be instinctive. It must have been conditioned.

What by? you might ask. Christianity of course.

One professor said that from the marriage bed to the flower bed was but a short step for our romantic scientist given to operating with cute analogies and comparing his dear Emma to a sweet-pea rather than to a Venus flytrap. (Dionaea Muscipula). Or kelp.

spendi, You have difficulty in separating science from emotion; that's your problem, not Darwin's.

Karl Marx said that Darwin "discovered among the beasts and plants the society of England with its division of labour, Constitution, opening up of new markets, invention and the Malthusian struggle for existence".

A completely physiological viewpoint as one might expect of a materialist. The logical error, of course, is that the society of England was created by a great deal more than physiological processes.

From pigeon fanciers producing novel variations in their birds Nature is assumed to be a Species fancier.

Darwin simply applied the division of labour, which was applied ferociously by his relations, in the English factory system from which his comforts were derived, onto nature and to Life. A projection. Like fm projects his own craving for attention onto my fight to prevent atheism taking over Western education. Darwin's projection obviously demonstrated that the English factory system was a perfectly natural phenomena rather than something foisted on the poor by his cronies and their bonnetted darling squeezes using the power of the magistrates to enforce it. He was a magistrate.

And the English factory system was highly mechanised and such things are merely "complicated" rather than" complex" and, as such, allow lesser minds to pose as if they are on equal footing to those who grapple with complexities as long as their audience remains unaware of the gulf between those two concepts.

PS. Will someone inform me of what exactly transpired in Judge Jones' courtroom regarding the comparison between a flagella (complex) and a mechanical valve (complicated)?

Even Darwin commented on the extreme complexity of barnacles and other "lower organisms".

One of the oldest examples of writing was unearthed in Chaldea by Sir Henry Layard and thought to come from the Palace Library at Ninevah. The specimens have been dated, no doubt accurately, to around 4,000 B.C. They were written on clay tablets with a reed stylus probably similar to the metal ones that the priests, who had a significant hand in making me what I am today, insisted we used for our 3 or 4 hour nightly homework. They would look at nothing written with a ball-point pen. They thought them beneath their dignity as God's representatives on earth. As does the President when he signs an important document. I wonder how many pens used by the signatories of the United States Declaration of Independence are exhibited in museums today. As are relics of the Saints in various roadside attractions designed to catch the eye of a bored motorist.

One of these tablets is in the British Museum. It is an account of the Flood. Experts believe that the Hebrews founded the story of the Flood in the Book of Genesis on this Chaldean narrative written over 2,000 years previously. Obviously the story would get fancied up in the retelling over such a period of time.

It is a very elaborate work and seems unlikely to be the work of somebody having everybody on. Which then, by internal logic, makes a real Flood likely to be a real historical event. Those scoffing at the story are merely displaying their unscholarly fatuousness.

The value of such a story would be in the idea that the Flood was a punishment for behaving as animals do. And thus help persuade people to behave in a proper and decorous manner against all their inclinations. For that to work the people have to believe that the Flood was a punishment just as we are supposedly threatened by the Global Warmers to be going to be punished for our behaviour. "We" being mankind in this case. Not us on here. The pent up fury of the Lord on High takes a while to build up and includes warnings as He stays his hand in His merciful goodness. So an "I'm alright Jack" attitude is perfectly understandable.

Had we continued to behave as animals do, and there seems no particular reason why we shouldn't have done, except for this story, we wouldn't have pubs and high-definition television, lingerie, Slumberland mattresses and all these interesting tasks to accomplish.

That's why I treat these myths and legends with profound respect and grateful thanksgiving. As do all intellectuals above Gamma Plus.

spendi, Your education has failed you big time! According to every science known to man, there is no record of a world flood during that period. Also, your so-called tablet, no matter how old by centuries, is fiction. There was no way for man to have traveled around the world to record such an event during those times. Your imagination again is your achilles heel.

Now this is a quote--



It's from the 'dinosaur' entry of Conservapedia. A psuedopedia created by the same people who think Wikipedia is too far left.

Don't open the entry on 'Evolution' or you'll be damned to hades.

Rap

Going even further, there si no evidence of ANY time peeiod in which the planet was wholly underwater.
There was always some "dry land" , archpelagos , and mountain arcs around the planet at each particulr geological epoch. Millions of drill holes, age determinations, sedimentary analyses, fossil assemblages,and geomagnetic determinations confirm this pretty well.

I understand that if you open Evolution on Conservipedia, you get a freshh copy of the Confiker virus .

Can anyone imagine a world flood that covered Mt Everest? LOL Where did all that water go>?

But it was not always the same dry land. As Darwin found. He found "sea-food" fossils on mountains.

In those days the world was what you could see. Omar refers to the "dome" of the sky.

I think there is a record of a giant tsunami in the region caused by a volcano. I'm not sure about it though.

I don't expect any of you to actually get the point. Once you get stuck with "Millions of drill holes, age determinations, sedimentary analyses, fossil assemblages,and geomagnetic determinations" you can easily end up using a word like 'determinations' twice in one locution. So however good it might sound it actually grates on the artistic sensibility. "Age determinations, sedimentary analyses, fossil studies and geomagnetic measurements" reads much better. And doesn't require a lot of effort. Or intelligence. Otherwise I couldn't have managed it.

actually there are marine fossils on TOP of Mt Everest. The structure, dating, and stratigraphy show us that the top of Mt Everest was actually the BOttom of the Indian ocean. The subcontinent began to roatate into collision position about 30 My years ago and at about 25 mY the collision was underway and complete with all the Alpine Himalayan crust being the ocean basin which peeled like a "rug" and covered the landmass as it was pushing against Asia's underbelly. We can provide carefully measured dates and directions of movement from the rocks in the ALpine Himalayans and in the several major subduction chunks that lsammed against each other. Its a fascinating story that is well reasoned and evidenced. But the CReationists try to use the evidence that the"clam shells" on top of Everest are evidence opf a "Worldwide Flood" when it aint so at all.. As the ocean crust rocks were being pushed up into place, several layers of sediment would infill along the flanks of the rising landmass and make it look like there were much younger sediments on top of older sediments on top of younger sediments. Then there are a few granites.

We can accept that the Flood story is basically a myth. Starting from a local catastrophic flood and through the generations of the 2000 years interval between the record from Ninevah and the Hebrew story it had been embroidered for a moral purpose which, as I said, was to persuade people to stop behaving like beasts against their instinctive inclinations evolved in survival of the fittest situations.

We can accept it as an anachronism but scoffing at it is infantile.

And we know all that **** of fm's anyway. Who does he think he is addressing?

However, what I attempted to do was to put the flood of Mt Everest into perspective, because the world-wide flood happened, according to the bible, less than 10,000 years ago. The bible story fails on two facts; 1) Mt Everest would have been over 20,000 feet 10,000 years ago, and 2) there was no way anybody living in the Middle East when they wrote the bible knew of Mt Everest or the rest of the world geography. They wrote much of what they did living in a very small portion of the planet, and didn't know the arctic ice is over 630 million years old, and most of North America and Asia were covered in ice less than 20,000 years ago.