IMAX Drops Evolutionist Films

Gunga, if memory serves, has suggested that Martian waters have flooded the earth. His notions of "science" are intriguing, to say the least.

Bring on the new Dark Ages!

but we gonna have NASCAR pitchers daaayum

Boy, howdy! Now that's our kind of science!

Random mutation and natural selection is the unifying field theory of evolutionary biology including agriculture, and is has stood there for 150 years and will remain there until at that unlikely event it succumbs to a better fitting, simpler evolutionary theory. And creationism will remain, at best, an "also ran" scientific hypothesis until it becomes supported and verified by observation, used to make predictions that later are shown to be valid, or used to make a valid explanation of some presently unexplained observed phenomena. Unfortunately, the creationist movement is not interested in the requirements to elevate their hypothesis to that of a theory. Instead creationism has become relegated to the ?'well but' corner of the popular pseudoscience. And it will remain in that scientific state regardless of the popularity of the Flat Earth.

Answering a few of your "evolutionist" whines

One---I find it somewhat loaded that you prefer the term "Evolutionists" as if science is a dogma. It isn't, evolution is a scientific theory, just as creationism is considered an unsupported scientific hypothesis.

Two---As for the effects of natural selection on agriculture, this along with the laws of Mendel, is a justification for scientific selective breeding that has resulted in the growth of corn production in the Ohio Valley from about 25 bus per acre in 1850 to almost 250 bus today. I realize that chemical fertilizers and machinery also contribute, but natural selection also contributes to the development of plants that can withstand the rigor of chemical and mechanical manipulation. I also realize that selected breeding existed before 1850, and in "On the Origin of Species" so did Darwin. Ol' Charlie Boy even defended his theory using historical natural selection as a counter argument. (On the Origin of Species is an amazing book--C.D. presented his theory with an amazing amount of criticism--so much though that it has lead to the "Pious Legend" that C.D. himself didn't believe his own 'then' hypothesis. BTW OOofS remains a model of scientific rigor)

Three---Somehow I sense that you have a truly misguided misunderstanding of the chaos and arbitrary. In times where there are no environmental cataclysms, random mutation is chaotic and not arbitrary. By this distinction, most mutations within a gene line during stable environments end up being fatal, and only a very small number of random mutations will be beneficial--and those beneficial mutations may not even be immediately apparent (except to the resulting gene line). In the event of environmental cataclysm, in many cases many new niches can be created as the top of the food chain dies off. During such stressful environmental times survival favors the quick, and if mutation makes you quick, well you live to fill that nifty new niche. As for the math?-it is more in line with chaos within Bayesian analysis, than anything I've read in creationism critiques (which tend back to a base state?-e.g. lacking Bayesian rigor)

Four?-Creationism is messy-it has the Big Kahuna returning periodically to correct flaws in his plans and designs. The invisible hand of the Big Kahuna has to correct the mistakes, make lungs, kill the dinosaurs, the mammoths, the saber toothed cat, the unicorn and the Dragons. And there's structural errors, the appendix, the prostrate gland, and other mistakes left with us (the horse for instance?-an animal that big with a brain the size of a peanut). No creationism isn't simple---it requires these endless refits.

Five-you mistake that critical part of the scientific method as damning. Science questions evolution because science questions everything and has ever5 since Aristotelian logic was shown to fail the test of Galileo ---Where all theories and hypotheses are equally up for grab. The question then becomes can the hypothesis of creationism withstand the scientific rigor that evolution has withstood?

As for the Odds of being?' I'm willing to admit that I won some lottery somewhere. So has Bill Gates, George Dwbya, Terry and Michael Shiavo. We're here aren't we?

Oh and Darwin wasn't alone, Just like Newton had Liebnetz with the Calculus, Charles Darwin had Wallace--If Charlie had waited a little longer it would be known as Wallace's Theory of Evolution. Although some critics would be asking how a geologist can make theories of biology.

Rap

My university degrees were in mathematics, batchelors and masters, around a hundred semester hours or thereabouts.

It might surprise you to learn that some of the most major opponents of evolutionism have consistently been mathematicians, simply because mathematicians understand the odds involved in evolution. In fact there were a series of famous symposia at which a number of the world's best mathematicians tried to explain the nature of reality to leading evolutionists and the later are still in states of shock and denial over it:

http://www.pathlights.com/ce_encyclopedia/20hist12.htm

And then you have statements by famous mathematicians like Sir Fred Hoyle



along with statements by other mathematicians:




I mean, the basic reality seems to be that evolutionism finds fewer friends amongst mathematicians than it does amongst Christians.

Here's another commentary on evolution by a famous mathematician which I've seen posted on other forums a couple of times:



Robert Bass comments on Evolutionism

Why cannot we agree to call what Darwin documented mere
"micro-evolution," and stipulate that literally NO ONE doubts the
reality of micro-evolution? As Michael Denton proves in his book
"Evolution, a Theory in Crisis," micro-evolution was a "Partial
Discovery," Adaptive resistance by bacteria to various drugs and
adaptation to different amounts of soot on trees by peppered moths
(Kettlewell) does not suggest that bacteria can ever become anything
other than bacteria nor that moths can ever become anything not
recognizably moths.

What the debate is about is whether or not any known or even
conceivable chance-mutation based plus natural-selection based
mechanism can lead to a radical increase in (or radical transformation
of) the information content of the genome of the species in question.
(This can be quantified via rigorous mathematics, as in "Mathematical
Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution,"
published by the famed Wistar Institute of the U of PA after a bunch
of the world's greatest mathematicians [including Ulam, the
co-inventor of the H-bomb] debated a group of neo-Darwinian
biologists.)

Further, the infinite unlikelihood of stochastic increase in the
information content of a genome can be proved rigorously as a
mathematical theorem in Information Theory (as published by Yockey,
who wilfully avoids the theistic implications), which is almost the
same as the Law of Increasing Entropy in Thermodynamics (and the
hand-waving high-school-level efforts of neo-Darwinian efforts to
discredit this creatonist argument are truly pathetic).

The great palaeontologist Schindewolf let the cat out of the bag once
and for all when in hiis monumental "Grundfragen der Paleontologie" he
demonstrated painstakingly that the Fossil Record, objectively viewed
(without preconceptions) is _precisely the opposite_ of what one would
expect if all living creatures had a common ancestry.

After this, honest palaeontologists had no choice but to admit what
Gould & Eldridge confessed in their Punctuated Equilibrium model in
the early 1970s: the fossil record, far from looking like a bush with
branches joining everything and proceeding backwards in time to a
central trunk, looks like a bunch of unrelated parallel straight
lines! That is, genera appear abruptly, persist _almost_ unchanged
over allegedly (uniformitarian-clocked) "vast" periods of time, and
then suddenly become extinct. [They would still be telling us with
straight faces that the Coelecanth became extinct "65 million years
ago" if living specimens had not been found recently, off of
Madagascar, by the dozens.]

G&E faked the punk-eek diagram to look something like a bush by
postulating that there are hidden horizontal jumps [shown in dotted
lines] which connect the vertical straight lines! In other words, the
creature goes off stage to some unseen anteroom where a
Goldschmidt-Schindewolf ("hopeful monster") macro-mutation takes
place. (G&S admitted that an intellectually honest student of the
fossil record can only postulate that "one day a reptile egg cracked
open and a bird walked out.") But the number of _simultaneous_
point-codon misreplications (or other random accidents to points of
the genome) which would have to take place in order to introduce a
step toward a new organ or a new body plan, while at the same time
providing the hopeful-monster with a _differential reproductive
advantage_ (the essence of stochastic neo-Darwinism) is so unlikely
that it is a better hypothesis (if one shaves regularly with Occam's
Razor) to postulate a sort of "miracle" (e.g. Divine Intervention or
else deliberate genetic engineering by intelligent Space Aliens) than
to hope that stochastic neo-Darwinism can cut it [in view of the now
plainly apparent existence in Molecular Biology of "irreducible
complexity" as documented in their books by Denton, Behe, ReMine and
others].

I had been studying the evidence from the historical chronometer
provided by Amino Acid Racemization, according to which the entire
alleged "geological column's" life-forms-history cannot be longer than
100,000 years, when I chanced upon the Gould-Eldridge paper right
after they published the "punk-eek" doctrine, and since I saw that the
vertical lines would have to be collapsed from "millions" of years to
a much shorter time-scale, I decided that their theory was "Collapsed
Equilibrium" and laughed out loud.

Many intellectually honest students of the history of life have
exclaimed, "if you are going to postulate Macro-Mutations you might as
well go back to Special Creation and have done with it!"

Of course, vitalists like Cambridge biochemist Rupert Sheldrake can
claim that the collective unconscious of the genus in question can
prompt a macro-mutation, which Ev Cochrane's favorite neo-Lamarkians
would call "Lamarkian evolution," but once you allow invisible
spiritual forces (such as Sheldrake's _resonances_ in "biomorphic
fields" [pretty much equivalent to E.H. Walker's thesis that
consciousness is "real but non-physical" and constitutes the
mysterious "hidden variables" in quantum mechanics, which via the
resolution of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox via Bell's
Inequalities has "proved" the "NON-LOCALITY OF REALITY[!]"]) then you
have admitted the existence of both Satan and the Holy Spirit! In
fact, if you take 3 accepted propositions of 3 great psychiatrists
(Freud, Jung, Rhine), namely that the _unconscious_ mind has an "id"
which is in tension between "eros" and "thanatos," then you can point
out that "Holy Spirit" = "telepathic collective unconscious eros" and
"Satan" = "telepathic collective unconscious thanatos," but the
National Academy of Science will then blow the whistle and certify to
the Supreme Court that you are an "unscientific" & contemptible
"fundamentalist" who should not be allowed to speak, much less deserve
equal time to expose to the children of the taxpayers that the
government is brainwashing them with an explicitly atheistic doctrine
[see the NAS position paper submitted to the Supreme Court during the
"Scopes II" trial's appeal] and thus using tax dollars to create an
Established Religion in violation of our Constitution.

This is why the rulers of publicly permitted speech will not admit
Rhine into the same pantheon with Freud & Jung, and why the "Skeptical
Inquirer" crowd so desperately wants to disparage Walker, and why
"Nature" pronounced Sheldrake's book "fit for burning." Once the
biologists can be forced to admit what Berkeley nuclear physicist
Stapp calls "the greatest discovery of modern science" (EPR
non-locality of reality), or what Einstein disparaged as 'spooky
instantaneous action-at-a-distance,' then it is all over for the
Reductionist-Materialists and the most perceptive of them will
perceive what Sheldrake has already noted, namely that the proposition
"if two particles ever interact then they are forever linked
[instantaneously] through space & time" leads one via impeccable
Aristotelion syllogisms to the realization that it is _unavoidable_ to
admit the validity of and to endorse the Catholic doctrine of the
"Real Presence" in the Sacrament of the Mass [visualize a chain of
Bishops with each having his hand on the shoulder of his predecessor
in an unbroken chain of Apostolic Succession back to Jesus].

I spoke yesterday with a Catholic Priest who used to be a District
Attorney and knows how to present a case to a jury, and he told me
that "nuclear physicists who work daily with sub-atomic
'transubstantation' [transmutation] have no difficulty with the Real
Presence, it is the ignorant biologists whose world-view is frozen
into a 19th-century view of billiard-ball mechanics, who insist that
only Reductionist Materialism is 'scientific'."

In the 1930's, Richard Goldschmidt, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm
Insititute for Genetics, was considered a world-class expert, but
Hitler pasted on the wall a genealogical chart showing that
Goldschmidt's ancestry included many famous medieval Rabbis, and so he
was chased out of Germany. His book "The Material Basis of Evolution"
(Yale U Press) opens with a list of challenges to neo-Darwinism which,
without postulation of macro-mutations, Goldschmidt prophesies cannot
and never will be answered. His list includes the hollow tooth of a
snake, and the correlated poison glands. Where is the differental
reproductive advantage in a hollow tooth absent poison? How will the
poison be injected absent a hollow tooth?

Most of you are too young to remember the Luftwaffe's Me-163B
rocket-plane which literally flew circles around Allied bombers toward
the end of the War, but its powerful liquid fuels consisted of a
hypergolic [self-igniting] combination of Hydrogen Peroxide (the
oxidant) and Hydrazine (the fuel). Now the Bombardier Beetle (as
presented in detail in both secular & creationist literature) happens
to have two parallel tanks toward its rear, together with a Combustion
Chamber into which the H2O2 & carbonate are inserted and produce a
fiery steam-blast that incapacitates the predatory frog's tongue for
several hours. This miracle of hypergolic biochemistry actually
includes two additional miraculous enzymes, one of which renders the
H2O2 non-explosive until it is injected into the Combustion Chamber,
and the other of which reactivates the H2O2 and allows it to
explosively oxidize the fuel _after_ they have both been injected into
the beetle's rear-directed Combustion Chamber (complete with
Venturi-shaped Exhaust Nozzle). To believe in the intellectually
bankrupt dogmas of the Church of Neo-Darwinism, one has to believe
that each of these 5 miraculous elements of the beetle's rocket-flame
defense system came into existence as a random accident of
point-mutation of a SINGLE codon [i.e. one letter of a 4-letter
alphabet whose words & sentences define the Genetic Code] which just
happened to have a _differential-reproductive advantage_(!) and so
spread throughout the entire population's genome _separately_, just
waiting for the day when all 5 elements would be operably in place
(_and_ functionally wired to its nervous system in order to be
switched on when needed) so that Mr. Beetle can suddenly escape death
by singeing Mr. Frog for the first time!

Honestly, is it not more plausible to admit that YHWH said "let there
be Bombardier Beetles"?

Bob Bass

Still using evolutionism. How Droll.

Fred Hoyle and his partner, Chandra Wickramasinghe's, argument was that "as a result of the probabilities involved that all life on Earth was the result of an interstellar bacteria," and not (necessarily) the product of an intelligent creator.

As for Evolution (as a Darwinian process) from Bacteria to whatever, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe were in agreement. Their major critique was with the abiogenesis, a topic that interestingly is never addressed in the Origin of Species.

IOW according to Hoyle the universe remains incredibly old and decidedly not that described in Genesis.

Oh and since you like Bob Bass try this link Creationists and Evolutionary Theory

Rap

Gunga,

A personal observation and a question, if I may...

You seem obsessed with Evolution and Democrats.

If your background is in mathematics, why don't you participate in the mathematical and scientific discussions on this forum?

There are some interesting topics that aren't so narrow and controversial.

Rob Bass != Bob Bass. Different people.

Re: IMAX Drops Evolutionist Films


Oh brother, maybe if the fundamentalists cover their eyes and plug their ears the whole world will just go away and quit conflicting with their view of things.... Not.

This is payback because _The Passion of the Christ_ never even made it onto an IMAX screen anywhere

I'll have to email a pal who has edited a few IMax films, I bet he has a trenchant point of view. I'll post it if within the Terms of Service and he okays it.

I'm so glad I don't live in the US.
You guys really got the god bug bad.
This is the saddest news I've seen here so far.

huh? not meeeee.

Lol - indeed Osso!!!!

Nonetheless, it seems a strong lobby group is able to strip your popular and educational culture of the fruits of the enlightenment in all too many cases.

This seems a sad step for the US.

Surely I agree.

I meant the country has the bug and all of you are suffering the consequences...not just the "carriers"

Just a few points before gunga gets full of himself. Most mathematicians are not critics of the OCCURENCE of evolution. There is even a journal
l on population mathematics and evolution which is essentially a constant reassesment of rate constants and mechanisms of population statistics and genetic STR alleles.

What gunga wants to paint is the cheap childish approach that, because scientists critique each others work and try to refine and better it, they are, somehow undermining the basic tenets of the theory. Nothing is further from the truth.'
For example, Gish used Fred Hoyle as a "see? this great astronomer critcizes the basic belief of evolutionary scientists that evolution even exists"
Gunga, that is so much BULLLL.
Fred Hoyle was always one who understood and followed the data of evolution through time. His big dog in the fight is that hes been the chief proponent of PANSPERMIA as the basic mechanism in lifes origin.Hes always been a poster child that Life came to earth on an intergalactic taxi, like a meteorite or comet.As a qualified scientist, he can make a point. BUT hes gotta take a ticket, stand in line, and take the heat like any post doc paleontologist
His additions were always a bit ill conceived because he truly believed in a "CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION" where life with hard parts first appeared in the basal Cambrian fossil record. (Now we know that the preCambrian assemblages were just as diverse, and more importantly, the really big developments in evolution of Classes and phyla came after the explosion)
Freds always been ok with evolution so theres a bit of a fibby by "Duanes God Squad" (as I like to call em).
-------------------------------------------------------------

In the early 50s, there appeared a whole bunch of molecular "dating" techniques that were based upon an early assumption that chemicals in life forms changed after an animal died and began to be fossilized. Oakley discovered that bones began to change from a phospho-apatite to a flouro-apatite in a (seemingly) fixed rate constant. Similarly Abelson discovered the presence of amino acids (Dextro and levo rotated) in fossil bone and shells.This all created a belief in a novel way for relatively cheap chemical analyses that would give us data on "chemical geochronology"
As we later found out, molecular reactions are environmentally dependent, controlled by things like temperature, hydrolysis, pH, etc etc.
Flourine dating was chucked out in the 70s after it was discovered that even with the Arhenius corrections and curve fitiing we had Quaternary bones that would be chemically, older than the sediments they were emplaced
. Racemization (changing from Right handed to left handed amino acids after death) was also tried all over the map. Rutter tried wood, Wehmiller tried seashells. The outcome was variable, although racemization was a fairly good tool for local environmental reconstruction, it was not, by any means, a rigorous dating technique. So please, lets not criticize a technique that was found by science to be limited many years ago(about 25 now). Theres no truth to the "following racemization data made me deny evolution"
As a scientist I get more and more amazed at how the Creationists mix and match their various critiques sciences. They make bold swipes at techniques that were, at best, novel and transient, as if we use them on a daily basis. So theres a great deal of , shall I say, FRAUD, in your cuts and pastes. I think gunga, that you honestly believe all this crap, but you dont have enough of the foundations in the science to have a vested criticism thats based on your own experience other than reading those Answers in Genesis posts which are, at best , dismally peer reviewed. Probably by
the 6wise men from Hindustan
To learning much inclined
who came to see the elephant
though all of them were blind

deb, dont worry, we learn to live with it. It gives our culture a rich diversity.
Besides, the real topic of this thread was "HOW TA GIT MORE NASCAR PITCHERS INA IMAXES "
Its pure profit potential. If we wanna learn **** we got libaries, yeeee dawgies.

Lol! If Imax has fallen, shall learning long prosper even in libraries?

Re: IMAX Drops Evolutionist Films



You know, I get differing views on this one, but the view which strikes me as most believable is that Mel Gibson isn't the only movie director who is hated in Hollywood.

Ever watch Tarantino's "True Romance"? The next2final scene (the Mexican standoff scene) basically amounts to a statement, i.e. Tarantino saying to the world something like



"True Romance" is Tarantino's best film in my view. Check it out if you haven't already.