The Intelligent Designers - who were they?

As you know Ros, it is not empirical evidence that is under question, but the interpretation[/b] of evidence.

What's that lapping noise?

If evolution is a fact, then why isn't it occurring today?

Where are the examples of half formed organs that are currently 'evolving'?

After reading Tim Martin's article Oct. 11 on the State Board of Education, I could not restrain myself any longer, and must respond to the folly of evolution, an unproven theory. What does scripture in the Bible say? "How the mighty have fallen."

I think the board implied that creation science could not elevate itself to the higher thought and reason of evolution, this reasoning coming from men with doctorate as well as master's degrees. We who live and read and submit ourselves to wisdom, which can only come from our "Creator" and not from the dregs of the primordial slime, will again attempt to reason within the board's folly.

Do the words "quantum leap" or "mutant scenario" have any significance in your evolution doctrine? Well you might consider this premise and all its implications: "The life is in the blood."

The evolutionists cannot foist on us their concoction of misalliance of prehistoric bones and then formulate an educational agenda.

It would take a quantum leap to change the blood of a fish and have it eventually become an elephant or take the blood of a fish and change it to fit a human, etc. You may be getting the picture.

With cognitive thinking, logic and minimal analysis, we soon discover there is not enough time and conditions to formulate a successful transition from primordial slime to God's highest creation, "man."

So we leave you to your folly; I will be thinking of the board of education when I visit the Binder Park Zoo, when studying the monkey cage and considering which one may be a potential candidate for the board.

We who continue to honor our Creator, leave you higher educated ones to devise your downward spiral into oblivion.

real life wrote:

If evolution is a fact, then why isn't it occurring today?

What in the world makes you think it isn't?

real life wrote:

Where are the examples of half formed organs that are currently 'evolving'?

The only way somebody can say an organ is half-formed (whatever "formed" is supposed to mean) is to know what the fully-formed organ would look like. You are essentially asking people to view the future and report back an answer to you. Able2Know is a non-prophet forum.

real life wrote:
Do you have any examples of half completed organs or biological systems which are evolving in-progress presently?

Maybe -- but it's unknowable in advance, because evolution is not directed towards any pre-specified design goal. Instead, it's directed towards survival, no matter what physical features achieve it. Thus, our present eyes may well be half-completed infrared sensors; our arms may well be half-completed wings; our noses may well be half-completed, elephant-like trunks. I am sure that a million years in the future, some observer will look at our fossils and discover his contemporary organs in some half-completed state. But it's impossible to know in advance what they will be.

Snake legs and pelvis
Unusable wings on ground-dwelling beetles
Vestigial carotids
Whale legs
Descendant Testes in humans and other primates
Human Tails
Overlapping cone cells in snakes
Plantaris muscle (The muscle that helps monkeys clench their feet, but is vestigal in humans)
Vestigial wings in flightless birds
Vestigial flight feathers in flightless birds
Remnants of chambered shells in some cephalopods
Leg remnants in Legless Lizards
Snake Pelvises
Ovaries in some male frogs
Eyes and eye-moving muscles in caecillians
Gill slits in tetrapods
Ear rotating muscles in some humans
Nocturnal features in diurnal squirrels
Flowers of asexually-reproducing plants

megamanXplosion wrote:

real life wrote:

If evolution is a fact, then why isn't it occurring today?

What in the world makes you think it isn't?

real life wrote:

Where are the examples of half formed organs that are currently 'evolving'?

The only way somebody can say an organ is half-formed (whatever "formed" is supposed to mean) is to know what the fully-formed organ would look like. You are essentially asking people to view the future and report back an answer to you. Able2Know is a non-prophet forum.

Please.

Are you telling me that your eye or your arm or your intestine if it was half formed would be functional? That you could not tell it wasn't complete , based on the fact that it didn't work?

Explain your appendix RL? in light of Creation, its purpose is what?

Real Life keeps asking the same questions. He never responded when Thomas answered him on a different thread.

If evolution is a fact, then why isn't it occurring today?

Where are the examples of half formed organs that are currently 'evolving'?

There should be tens of thousands of examples of evolution in progress -- new organs, new biological systems being formed-- where are they?

Are you telling me that your eye or your arm or your intestine if it was half formed would be functional? That you could not tell it wasn't complete , based on the fact that it didn't work?

Here's how some scientists think some eyes may have evolved: The simple light-sensitive spot on the skin of some ancestral creature gave it some tiny survival advantage, perhaps allowing it to evade a predator. Random changes then created a depression in the light-sensitive patch, a deepening pit that made "vision" a little sharper. At the same time, the pit's opening gradually narrowed, so light entered through a small aperture, like a pinhole camera.

Every change had to confer a survival advantage, no matter how slight. Eventually, the light-sensitive spot evolved into a retina, the layer of cells and pigment at the back of the human eye. Over time a lens formed at the front of the eye. It could have arisen as a double-layered transparent tissue containing increasing amounts of liquid that gave it the convex curvature of the human eye.

In fact, eyes corresponding to every stage in this sequence have been found in existing living species. The existence of this range of less complex light-sensitive structures supports scientists' hypotheses about how complex eyes like ours could evolve. The first animals with anything resembling an eye lived about 550 million years ago. And, according to one scientist's calculations, only 364,000 years would have been needed for a camera-like eye to evolve from a light-sensitive patch.

I found this on the PBS website. It's really interesting.

Quote:

And, according to one scientist's calculations, only 364,000 years would have been needed for a camera-like eye to evolve from a light-sensitive patch.

If you cut an eye in half, that is equal to a half evolved eye. Obviously half an eye is useless, therefore my god created everything.

(Thought I'd just step in for real life for a sec. I'm sure he won't mind.)

The thing is though, he would have found a way to say the same thing, but make it look perfectly sensible.

In 1994, Dan-Eric Nilsson and Susanne Pelger presented the results of the experiments that they had been running on the evolution of the eye. They wrote computer simulations in order to analyse the rate at which such a complicated optical organ could evolve from a simple initial condition. The abstract of their paper contains the following description;

"Theoretical considerations of eye design allow us to find routes along which
the optical structures of eyes may have evolved. If selection constantly
favours an increase in the amount of detectable spatial information, a
light-sensitive patch will gradually turn into a focused lens eye through
continuous small improvements of design. An upper limit for the number of
generations required for the complete transformation can be calculated with
a minimum of assumptions. Even with a consistently pessimistic approach the
time required becomes amazingly short: only a few hundred thousand years."

Nilsson & Pelger used a few simplifying assumptions in order to carry out this modelling technique. Whenever they were required to make any important assumptions in terms of figures, timescales, rates etc. they always chose the most pessimistic value. That is, the value which would cause the estimated timescale for evolution to be the longest. Even through this technique they discovered that the timescale was of the order of 400,000 years, assuming generations of one year each, i.e. for fish.

This experiment is available in "Nilsson, D.-E., and Pelger, S. 1994. A pessimistic estimate of the time required for an eye to evolve. In Proc. Royal Soc. London, vol. 256 of Series B, 53--58". It can be downloaded from the following SITE.

Eorl wrote:

If you cut an eye in half, that is equal to a half evolved eye. Obviously half an eye is useless, therefore my god created everything.

(Thought I'd just step in for real life for a sec. I'm sure he won't mind.)

The thing is though, he would have found a way to say the same thing, but make it look perfectly sensible.

That's pretty good, but you're right, RL has a slicker spin.

Here, let me try one...

The scientist in the article said, each stage in the evolutionary process needed to be beneficial, but what good is a lens without a retina, and what good is a retina without a lens? How could two different things evolve randomly side by side to produce a single functioning organ. It's impossible.