Atheist Theology: It's a hoax folk!

There's also a big difference between supplementing your diet with something and relying on it solely for almost all your nutrition. Apparantly corn and rabbit can be very harmful if you just eat them without anything else. The sheep evolved to exist on grass, not seaweed.

Btw, the Welsh have been eating seaweed for centuries, they call it lava bread.
http://www.welshicons.org.uk/html/lava_bread.php

What is the problem to selection mechanisms?
What we dont know is how many of the original population of sheep on the island actually survived at the time of the wall building or immediately thereafter. A sheeps rumen doesnt usually adapt to quick diaetary cjhanges but, having said that, the changes I speak of are measured in days and weeks. To quickly change a sheeps diest by starvation puts the rumentotally out of wack and then taking in entirly new food would manifest itself by a certain percentage of the flock dying or becoming stressed to exhaustion.
We have examples of this in the west where sheep have taken to actually browsing (which is foreign to their habits cause sheep dont have upper teeth and arent really designed for efficient browsing.
Sheep in the south had to quickly learn to survive on KUDZU (the plant that is eating the south).
As far as eating seaweed, if sheep are very hungry they will eat anything laying about including bits of wood. Whenever we have a lamb that exhibits eating habits foreign to its age, we always segeregate that lamb and do some interessions for possible diseases or infections.

Eating seaweed isnt so miraculous and the article stated something that was actually incorrect. ALL SHEEP are susceptible to copper toxicity, its a breed characteristic and thats the reason ALL sheep feed mixtures must be free of copper down to a few parts per million. In most cases the copper toxicity manifests itself as a condition si,ilar to parasitic anemia (worms) and you copuld medicate the **** out of em and they would die on you anyway. It takes a while for the sheeps rumen to handlecopper and often its a quick generational thing that the early (foundation poplulation) would suffer in the first few years and then it would be less acute and more oif a chronic condition.

Navajo Jacob sheep eat a diest rich in copper too and theyve evolved a resistance to the acute toxicity but they still have chronic toxicity reactions that are an "inconvenience" to them (they are constantly having diahrrea and show their inner eyelids with less than bright red circum orbital tissue).
Weve been raising sheep for about 30 yers now and my wife gives lectures to the vet students over at New Bolton on Copper toxicity and what to look for.

Sheep and most all ruminents are reaallyopportunistic feeders and, especially since theyve had over 150 years to adapt to eating good seaweed, Im not sure that the "DArwinists are confounded". Im certain that some kid at EDinburgh whose in the genetics porogram has published something on this in the grey literature. Id be surprised if its not old hat and youre just repeating some mantra from local legends.

All in all however, Id have kicked the first guy ass down the road for stressing his sheep herd by segregating them from good pasture (Although the article did say that , during lambing, the mothers are allowed pasture access) Hell, Ive known sheep that will prefer prickly pear cactii.
Ill bet cowdoc will agree with me

PT II
sheep will exist and thrive on whats available. The herd will exploit their environment until it reaches "carrying capacity" and the number of lambs susbsequently born will be a measure of the sustainability of that resulting environment.Several varieties of sheep in the rockies eat only lichens, Navajo jacobs survive mostly on desert thorn and prickly pear. The out Island Romneys of the Maine oastal islands exist nicely on rockweed (a seaweed) and samfire weed. The grasses are actually kept awy from the sheep by net fencing because the bunch grasses and sedges protect against severe erosion.

I wish that we could find something that purports to be a look see at the foundation population (how many original sheep, how many survived the first few years, how quickly did the sheep begin to subsist on the seaweeds etc) Id like to see some definitive genetic data on a typical population of non-island sheep and the island sheep, to see whether in the space of the 30 or so generations, any gene traits were fixed into the island population. 30 generations is pretty long

I think you're quite right in that thinking, but the guy who did it was rich and powerful.

30 generations may be quite long, but this change did not take 30 generations, Overall I think it points out how little we still know about the process of evolution. I'm not claiming divine intervention or anything like that. However, I would suggest that this case does more to support the theory of evolution than disprove it.

Yes but you are claiming that a physiological evolution has occured here. Im not sure because of the reasons Ive already stated. Sheep are opportunistic and will eat anything including gravel if thwyre hungry enough. The fact that 30 generations of sheep et seweed means that the first guys who ate it were the pioneers whove been transmitting that behaviro through successive generations. NOW , is this genetically fixed or is it just an adaptation thats been enhanced . ?
If anyone wants to do the genetics, Im sure a PhD conferral awaits if something is (or isnt found).

I think that the clip you presented was made up by some folks who were just overly impressed with adaptive behavior.

Well you do know more about the subject than me, but that particular clip was just what I googled, I can't find the original BBC documentary that prompted my response. Overall I think you're right about it being a good topic for a PHD thesis. Do you have your doctorate yet?

FM are a geologist, he ain't no damned sheep doctor . . .

Questions like these indicate a very deep misunderstanding of the basic principles of evolution.

Evolution isn't guided toward particular results (like Humans), and organisms whether it be apes or bacteria shouldn't be thought of as "inferior" or "superior" to one another. They are each well adapted to their current environment. There is no inherent comparison of relative "value" implied in evolution or in its results.

So... did they believe in God before he revealed himself to them?

Hes asking a question that, if we were to change species, hed be saying. We have chickens and eagles, how come eagles arent evolving into chickens? Or how come eagles arent extinct yet?

For soe reason, these shallow thinkers wish to gang up and affix the "rules" to only pertain to apes and humans but not finches and hummingbirds

Which came first, the chicken or the velociraptor?

see that velociraptor with the feathers all over his mouth? hes been to the Colonels

Claw lickin' good ! ! !

They believed as they were created...there was no before, and after they had sinned and were cast out, they knew the wrath of God....

Genesis...

27 So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

Good question, since I am a shallow thinker, why does a finch exist, and a hummingbird exist, if they evolved from one another? What is the need for one of them to still be? Isn't Dawin's theory of evolution...the strong will survive...and the weak, or not needed will die off??

Ape-like hominids died off did they not? and we are what we are today...Why do we not see this happening today if it is true?

apparently what you dont understand is that nothing evolves from another species that is extant. Several rules: Number one is

Coexistence precludes mutual descent.

COMMON DESCENT is different, it means that both finches and hummingbirds evolved from a common ancestor that split off into several (two or more) separate species with different characteristics and niches.

People and apes live at the same time, one didnt evolve from the other. Rather, both evolved from some common ancestor that we have only recently found the fossils of . The concept is simple also

Also, that teleological thingy that you seem to like hasnt ever been shown to even be worth consideration. Dinosaurs were probably the apex of the "design" that lizards could achieve. They didnt even fit into the family that includes modern reptiles. THEY WERE An EVOLVED and adapted class that was at the peak of its morpholigical clan (its clade). They went away based upon a simple thing like the change of their environment. (It became hostile and life threatening) . All of this is easily evidenced by looking at the chemistry of the rocks in which dinosaur fossils are found

many of the great apes ARE going extinct due to habitat loss. You seem to deny what you can see happening all around you. We dont need to only look at rocks and bones to see the action of evolution. Rocks and bones are only like snapshots of time. We can look at an animals genome and see that it carries the relict genes of many of its ancestral species.

We havent only evolved from apes, weve evolved from all the animals that apes evolved from. We carry a chimapnzees genome, except ours (in chromosome 2) is fused into one. Chmps had 2 chromosomes and 2A and 2b and we only have 2 which is the fusion of their two. We can see this by the arrangement of the nucletotides on the string and the pavement of centromeres exons and telomeres.
Go google a huiman genome and with it a side by side comparison with a chimps. Youll say "How could I miss this(or deny it) now that genetics has provided such a powerful tool"?

They didn't evolve from one another. They both evolved from a common ancestor. That common ancestor is now gone, replaced many times over by at least two different lines of its descendants. In point of fact, it was probably replaced by thousands of lines of its descendants, some of which are still around, but many of which have also gone extinct.

The same is true of hominid evolution. The common ancestor to humans and apes produced thousands of lines, only a few of which are represented today. Each of those surviving lines represents the crest of a biological wave of variation which propagates through time.

So, do you believe if enough time goes by humans will be extinct??, and Some other life form will exist to replace us, and our thousands of ancestors we came from??

ANything we do is rank speculation. However,(its only my personal opinion) I think that our species of hominim will go on because weve learned pretty much to cpontrol our environments. We re still evolving in several fashions however. The most important is our multi gene responses to such things as disease susceptibility and temperature. What would we look like in several hundred thousand years?
I think we will have a huge generally ight brownish population with bad eyesight, as well as prostate problems in most all men. AS we live longer (past our genetic "mission") some of these genetic conditions would be manifest in the human population. Most diseases of old age dont affect our abilities to breed and they dont seem to have any negative effects to our success as a species. Socially, we will have to address the expanding costs of a huge population of older people who will need intensive interventions to stay alive. Will some benevolent despot really impose the "deth panel" dictum wherein governments not only pose a "1 child limit" but also a "mandatory terminus" age? Its all just spec though

I think that we have to worry about some form of exo-cataclism where we could be wiped out by a super volcano, limited in land space by a creeping Ice Age, or getting wacked in a moment by some chunk of te asteroid belt.

Id like to be able to come back in say, two million years and see what we look like.