Evolution or Creation

yes but look at all the evidence that refutes evolution

your comment is looking a bit 'orphan like' without the missing posts fM;
but to fill us in, could you enlarge on that last point for us?
Perhaps supply a little of the 'evidence' of which you speak.

The fossil lineages of the Ediacara and the Burgess shales show advanced orders of phyla that dont exist today. They are all "flood" horizons , since they occur in flysch type rocks.

How about trilobites, their most complex, therefore, most advanced , occured in the Devonian, not the later Permian

the chaotic assemblage of hominids, they seem to follow no lines of "advancement"

7 orders of mammals lived in the Mesozoic yet only 3 exist today.

there is evidence from cave drawings in Altimira that men and dinosaurs were contemporaries.

the half life of polonium argues against ancient granitic emplacements in the adirondacks. Polonium has a very short half life, yet pleichroic halos from one or two half life disintegrations can be seen in the micas of the Agameticus and Adirondack Granites. Presumably granites are remelted (anatectic) country rock, yet the granites are structurally dated at about Grenville age. how can we have old granites with very young features?

Im just kidding here , but these are the arguments that the Creationist "geoscientists and paleontologists" make. i wish to actually see the cave drawings that the CORNERSTONE PROJECT "scientists " ahve referred to.

AS I mentioned in a comment to Walter Hinteler before our slate went blank, JErry Bergman, a Creation historian, had published an excellent History of the Modern Creationist Movement in the 1993 Spring vol of CONTRA MUNDUM. (Its not a scholarly publication but the history is good and full of 'in context" literature sources-most Creationists are quite ipsidixitizmic when it comes to literqature)

could it be that the trilobites developed a technology that advanced beyond their ability to control it, and wiped them out?

Farmerman...ya had me goin' there for a minute.

I actually thought you had gone over to the dark side.

Whew!!!!

The thing is, only a tiny minority of creationists have any dispute with the scientific body of knowledge out there. The vast majority of us want our children to be taught all the science they can handle. But until the scientists can make a petunia seed that works, we'll continue to believe God had a hand in it all.

no Frank, Ive got too much career and personal interest in this crap. I still like the concept of taking both sides of the argument and just listening to good arguments.

foxfyre-thats a deal. In fact, most of the studies involving evolution and molecular biology dont want to draw the ire of the Churches. I know of no pure science papers that start out to ridicule Creation .
The job of evolutionary science isnt to create a petunia seed, its to understand how and when petunias got here.

All these misconceptions because of some jumpy Christans/Fundamentalists.



Please explain what you mean by more "advanced". There's no hierarchy in evolution, just genetic variations of an organism. Those plant forms you speak of may have a genetic variation that did not allow them to survive in the environment at that particular time, so they became extinct. Even if you term them "advanced", that doesn't mean they'll be able to adapt to any environment. Environment in an area can change.

Lucifer,advanced is more a morphological term conferred on the phenotype. For example, an advanced vertebrate structure recognizes that appendages with 5 digits per appendage are the top advance that we know. Advanced is a normal term of art in evolution-speak. There is plenty of "hierarchy", we , the self proclaimed pinnacle species, make the pronouncements subject to approbia by coloeagues. The Ediacara shows many forms of invertebrates that contained well devceloped body segments while all around, were assemblages of late precambrian "glop" forms with no defined segmentation.

The Burgess, a Cambrian assemblage contains a number of highly specialized forms that we consider advanced. Im not spieling anything thats not a normal term of art in the field.

the use of the term is an example of how Creationists take an example order and attempt to make the case that advanced forms (according to some chaotic presence in stratigraphy that "clearly argues for a flood) occupy a lower stratigraphic position than do lesser advanced forms, thats all. if the word has you concerned , you can take a trip through a number of recent evolution texts , including Goulds last work, and youll see the term peppered througfhout. As far as genetic variation, you are correct , but some genomes of very primitive (morphological) forms are larger than are , say, hum,ans. eg, a lungfish has a genome of over 140 million base pairs, while a human 's is only 3.5
(actually the number of coding sequences is larger in humans genome). Genetic variation is more a 'bookkeepers record of evolution" ,

The trilobites had an evolutionary trend to great spinosity during the Devonian, with body models like Terrataspis grandis, and a number of other really weird looking ones. Then, trilobites got "streamlined" , probably in response to adaptation to swifter waters of smaller seas of the carboniferous and the Permian. The Creationists have always stated that all forms of life were jumbled together as fossils in the flood. More advanced lie with less advanced. We know why and its not flood related its pure startigraphic evidence of changing environments.

remember, I was half jokingly presenting these as arguments used by Creationists and , Im not one. The 3rd principle of Darwins theory recognizes the rise in diversity by descent from common ancestors is a point that strict creationists abhor. They always have tried to demonstrate contemporaneous existence of the common ancestor forms as well as more "advanced" forms. This, they feel makes their argument. Lots of early evolution workers in the early 20th century had stated a "rule' that said
"Contemporaneous occurence precludes common ancestry". We know that its not a correct statement but , like many rules of the game, it too had an evolution of thought.

So, not to be long winded but the use of the term advanced is a conferred state based solely on the phenotype, not the genotype. I hope that clarifies my "position in my "straw man" arguments.

Thanks, but I was doing this as a practice. I'm in Biology at university and decided to apply what I learned here.

famerman writes:


I appreciate this Farmerman. Too many of the anti-religious do not want God/religion/belief in the supernatural to even be included in the discussion which is most of the debate as to whether Creationism should be taught in the schools. The correct answer of course for a teacher who is pressed on the subject is 'Sicence doesn't know' how it all began--science can only presume to verify the process.'

Science can rationalize such phenomenon as 'the big bang' based on observable criteria. We can know that Darwin probably got it mostly right based on the observable fossil record.

The one thing science cannot prove or even theorize using scientific criteria is the origin of life itself. It cannot be reproduced in any laboratory. A flower seed is an amazing thing, unreproducible by any means other than by a flower. So what put the spark of life into whatever primitive organism that eventually evolved into Petunias? Science can't answer that. The religious think it completely rational to believe the origin of life is via the supernatural or God.

I was told it is possible to get organic compounds together and react to form amino acids and proteins, the basic parts of a cell. Granted that they do come together, a variety of combinations can code for a living, functional cell. Please bear in mind that "living, functional cell" can be comprised of many combinations of amino acids and proteins, not just one particular type. Otherwise, we wouldn't have very much genetic variation, would we? I've heard there was an experiment related to this, but I don't remember much about it. It was successful though. As for science not knowing everything, what about religion? Do those minority of Christians think their god knows everything, so they ignore science? What do normal Christians think?

I certainly have no problem with that at all.

But...to insist that is so...crosses a line that should not be crossed.

Having "In God We Trust" on our currency...and "...one nation, under God" in our national pledge of allegience...

...both cross the line.

To Lucifer: I think that very tiny minority of Christians who make so much noise about teaching basic Creationism in the school in lieu of science are indeed ignorant enough to disbelieve science. But there are a fair number of people who are convinced they've been on board alien spaceships, who believe aliens built the pyramids and/or the rock formations at Easter Island, etc. and any number of other small groups with kooky ideas out there. To judge any whole by a small minority is disingenous however.

To Frank, I can't see how my (or anybody else) believing something you are not required to believe harms you in any way. As for the references to God in the pledge and on our currency, according to a recent Gallup poll, more than 90% of Americans do believe in some form of God and a substantial majority believe that the rich U.S. religious heritage should be included in history curriculums and it is as appropriate to include the symbolism of that on our currency etc. as it is to include the symbols of the flag or the eagle, etc. Again to acknowledge an important part of our heritage harms no one and the majority want it so.

Now, if a teacher were to use the phrases as a vehicle for teaching religious belief in the classroom, that would cross the line. To explain that they are symbols based on our historical past as are any national symbols is perfectly appropriate.

Frank (proof, if proof is needed that intelligent life still exits on earth) writes, "...both cross the line. "
At the Alamo, they all crossed the line!

Good to see you back, and keeping out of bother. :wink: Hope you are well.

foxfyre-having agreed with most of your post, Im now going to state that science must never be taught based on the poll results of whether people do or do not believe in a God. AS Indiana Jones said
"Archeology (here meaning other sciences) is the search for facts, not truth. If its truth you want, Dr Blebitch 's course in philosophy is right down the hall".

Most of theassault on science teaching in the schools today, is from the camp of intelligent Design. while the beliefs they pose are , seemingly reasonable, (they do believe in an old earth, they believe that fossils do show changes through time, they step over the objectivity line by asserting that
1 All life on the planet resulted from an intelligent planners directive> The time involved needed to create and evolve specific organisms is not sufficient to be pure chance. (yet, after the development of the notochord, life bloomed in less than 25% of the total elapsed time that the planet existed-not all the time was even needed)

2 Systems have been designed and put in place. (yet, the persistence of life in its many forms occupy niches that are still developing today, like small islands that were only above water in the last 20000 years)

3 irreducable complexity is a standard of organs and specific tissues of living forms. If you show me an example of such complexity, it would be possible to break it down even farther to sub cellular levels and DNA/RNA/ mDNA.

4 The Intelligent designer can preordain what life form will exist, (yet, as environments change,adaptation by a chaotic, opportunistic , perhaps random, replication and enlarging of a phenotypes genetic diversity, results in a new phenotypic form that , just by chance , seems to fit the environmnet, whereas , all the ones that dont fit, go extinct). The intelligent design crowd cant handle extinction, it doesnt fit their model, it assumes phenotypic 'tinkering" in different environments

farmerman wrote:

No quarrel from me here. I think science should be taught as science, not religion. My only hope, and I think it is shared by most Christians, is that science is never taught in such a way that it intentionally attacks the faith of children as I think that too is over he line.

So e.g. anything about blood transfusion should -in your opinion- never been taught with Jehova's Witnesses children in classes?

Science directly challenges faith because it has no room for the supernatural in the explanation of events. This is a problem in the middle east. For example in Saudi Arabia students are taught that chemical reactions occur because god (allah) intervenes to direct the molecular combinations. Thus their faith is not challanged. What you are suggesting is something similar for our educational system.