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[Bauglir]

You can't compare 10 thousand years of history to 4 billion years of evolution. 10000 years would of generated 1/400000 of the new species that 4000000000 years created.

Well, not actually, the rate of speciation has a lot to do with various environmental pressures and it's not linear either, so that complicates it a good deal. Suffice to say though, given the relatively stable environmental conditions over human history, you're actually grossly overestimating the rate at which entirely new species would appear (I'm like 90% sure I'm just supporting your point, hopefully).

[CJ1145]

My gosh, more of this shit. *Sigh* I'll try to answer all of you. I doubt it will be satisfactory.

Speaking of which, do you know of such proof CJ? You also say there is proof that supports creation.

As I said before, I am NOT the guy to go to with this stuff. But frankly creationism's defense is all over the place. I can disprove some common supports of evolution, I can give some various little details that support historical accuracy within the Bible, but if you want proof in this particular subject matter I am not ashamed to say I cannot help you. You'll need to go to someone else for that.

Pre-post EDIT: Wait! I have one tiny tidbit, and I mean TINY, but here goes. Take the Tyrannosaurus Rex. It is supposed to be 65 million years old. Yes we have found well-preserved blood vessels and other bits of flesh on its remains. This is astounding and an absolute marvel of nature if the world is billions of years old, but what one would expect if the world was only ten thousand or so. A similar example is the mammoth. The wooly mammoth was around about ten thousand years or so ago, during the last big Ice Age. We have found mammoth carcasses well-preserved, but only because they were entirely encased in ice. As far as I know, the T-Rex was not encased in ice.

Well, birds didn't come from flying dinosaurs anyway (at least not the ones you're talking about). You could start with a velociraptor or something, a jumping dinosaur that could benefit from motion control after it's airborne so that it can hit prey with more accuracy. From there, it's not too hard to suppose that scales could grow more and more outward, eventually becoming shafts which could provide minimal advantages in controlling flight direction (EDIT: because each successive lengthening provides slightly more advantage). From there, you can imagine these shafts growing perpendicular shafts and so on until you reach modern feathers. After all, feathers and reptile scales are the essentially the same thing, in terms of their protein structure (yay for keratin, right?). At the same time, such animals might develop a hunting pattern that relies on ambush from above as they become more able to direct their falls, and they might have decreasing mass to help maneuverability further. Eventually, feathers became large enough to generate slight lift, and those on the limbs were ideally positioned for the movements necessary for flight. And so on. Birds are pretty easy, really.

First off, they are flying reptiles. They are NOT dinosaurs. (Why yes, I am an asshole about dinosaurs, it's a side effect of growing up studying them. Mention the word Brontosaurus and you DIE.)
True, Velociraptors would benefit from feathers, but not for a considerable amount of time, yes? There would be significant growth before there would be a noticeable effect. During the generations this took, what stopped the scales from simply reverting to their original stage either by chance, or by their elongation having a negligible effect?

[Bauglir]

My gosh, more of this shit. *Sigh* I'll try to answer all of you. I doubt it will be satisfactory.

Speaking of which, do you know of such proof CJ? You also say there is proof that supports creation.

As I said before, I am NOT the guy to go to with this stuff. But frankly creationism's defense is all over the place. I can disprove some common supports of evolution, I can give some various little details that support historical accuracy within the Bible, but if you want proof in this particular subject matter I am not ashamed to say I cannot help you. You'll need to go to someone else for that.

Pre-post EDIT: Wait! I have one tiny tidbit, and I mean TINY, but here goes. Take the Tyrannosaurus Rex. It is supposed to be 65 million years old. Yes we have found well-preserved blood vessels and other bits of flesh on its remains. This is astounding and an absolute marvel of nature if the world is billions of years old, but what one would expect if the world was only ten thousand or so. A similar example is the mammoth. The wooly mammoth was around about ten thousand years or so ago, during the last big Ice Age. We have found mammoth carcasses well-preserved, but only because they were entirely encased in ice. As far as I know, the T-Rex was not encased in ice.

Well, birds didn't come from flying dinosaurs anyway (at least not the ones you're talking about). You could start with a velociraptor or something, a jumping dinosaur that could benefit from motion control after it's airborne so that it can hit prey with more accuracy. From there, it's not too hard to suppose that scales could grow more and more outward, eventually becoming shafts which could provide minimal advantages in controlling flight direction (EDIT: because each successive lengthening provides slightly more advantage). From there, you can imagine these shafts growing perpendicular shafts and so on until you reach modern feathers. After all, feathers and reptile scales are the essentially the same thing, in terms of their protein structure (yay for keratin, right?). At the same time, such animals might develop a hunting pattern that relies on ambush from above as they become more able to direct their falls, and they might have decreasing mass to help maneuverability further. Eventually, feathers became large enough to generate slight lift, and those on the limbs were ideally positioned for the movements necessary for flight. And so on. Birds are pretty easy, really.

First off, they are flying reptiles. They are NOT dinosaurs. (Why yes, I am an asshole about dinosaurs, it's a side effect of growing up studying them. Mention the word Brontosaurus and you DIE.)
True, Velociraptors would benefit from feathers, but not for a considerable amount of time, yes? There would be significant growth before there would be a noticeable effect. During the generations this took, what stopped the scales from simply reverting to their original stage either by chance, or by their elongation having a negligible effect?

Really? I'd be interested to see a link to that T-Rex thing. It sounds pretty implausible, but I'll just go ahead and assure you that as far as meat is concerned 10000 years might as well be 65 million, and vice versa. If it was under sterile conditions somehow for the length of either period, it might have survived, otherwise no.

Anyway, moving on! You're right, I mischaracterized them. They're Archosaurs, and I mistook the point at which they branched. For some reason I thought they were saurischians. Anyway, you'd be surprised at what slight changes in surface texture will do to the aerodynamic properties of something. Just having raised scales instead of the keratinized bumps would provide a fair advantage, and those scales can just keep on getting optimized even if they do only provide a very slight effect each time. You'd probably actually be able to observe the change over, maybe, a hundred thousand years, because transitions like that move fast, since there's objective improvement involved.

[CJ1145]

First, the T-rex link.

Here.

And since I don't trust msnbc alone for shit, From Smithsonian Mag

Now, on to your post. That would be true, but at this point it seems like natural selection is becoming a designer all its own. The things attributed to it make it seem almost conscious. I thought, by definition, it was pure chance mixed with some advantaged weighing the dice, per se. Objective or otherwise, would a change having benefits really make all that large a change in the time it takes to improve a species?

[IronyOwl]

As I said before, I am NOT the guy to go to with this stuff. But frankly creationism's defense is all over the place.

So is evolution's. The point of a forum thread is to discuss it, not vaguely gesture at the evidence "over there somewhere."

Pre-post EDIT: Wait! I have one tiny tidbit, and I mean TINY, but here goes. Take the Tyrannosaurus Rex. It is supposed to be 65 million years old. Yes we have found well-preserved blood vessels and other bits of flesh on its remains. This is astounding and an absolute marvel of nature if the world is billions of years old, but what one would expect if the world was only ten thousand or so.

I really don't see what's so normal about ten THOUSAND year old delicate bits that's also incredible on 65 million year old ones. As far as biological material goes, I'd think it perfectly sensible for it to be gone in ten thousand years or around until something destroyed it. I mean, what's going to take 15,000 years to rot?

True, Velociraptors would benefit from feathers, but not for a considerable amount of time, yes? There would be significant growth before there would be a noticeable effect. During the generations this took, what stopped the scales from simply reverting to their original stage either by chance, or by their elongation having a negligible effect?

Most features are suspected of having intermediate use. Eyes are a good example of this- for a long time people thought "Now how in the hell could something GRADUALLY evolve eyes? How would something with half-eyes be better at surviving?" The simple answer is that eyes started as functional features and were gradually refined into the complex structures we see today. Similarly, feathers are generally assumed to have had some beneficial effect in terms of insulation, display, etc. That's not to say there was no chance involved, but remember that neutral features don't automatically revert right away, and sometimes it doesn't take much to give something an edge. A T-shirt is hardly effective against wind and cold weather, but it's still obviously and immediately better than no shirt. If you eventually go from a T-shirt to a bulletproof vest, that's a fairly logical series of evolutions that might seem rather odd in retrospect.

[Bauglir]

First, the T-rex link.

Here.

And since I don't trust msnbc alone for shit, From Smithsonian Mag

Now, on to your post. That would be true, but at this point it seems like natural selection is becoming a designer all its own. The things attributed to it make it seem almost conscious. I thought, by definition, it was pure chance mixed with some advantaged weighing the dice, per se. Objective or otherwise, would a change having benefits really make all that large a change in the time it takes to improve a species?

Well, I'll be damned. That's pretty impressive. Did you note her repeated statements that this doesn't actually demonstrate your point, though? It proves we don't understand fossilization as well as we thought we did, not that dinosaurs existed recently.

Anyway, I'm not sure why you're suggesting natural selection is a designer? Raised scales could just happen. People get skin conditions all the time, it's just that they're usually not beneficial.

And yes, objective or otherwise does make a difference. If there's an objective improvement, then selection is constant and in one direction, but things like coloration or the temperature at which you maintain your body are subject to a lot of variation in terms of what's useful. Such evolution is going to be very slow to lead to a stable result, and they're likelier to result in branching evolution than a direct path (a population of moths might split into two different colored species, but that one dinosaur with raised scales could trigger a series of optimizations toward feathers). Also, if for some reason nobody's written a paper on that, dibs. But I suspect somebody has.

[CJ1145]

The selection as designer was just my way of pointing out that for a random process a lot of semi-intelligent qualities seem to be thrust upon it to explain things.

As for the woman's explanation, I am not surprised. When I said the argument is futile, this is what I meant. When the woman discovered tissue that simply should not exist, her thoughts did not turn to "Maybe we've got this wrong. Maybe dinosaurs existed for longer than we thought." Her only thoughts were "Well, we already know our timeline cannot be wrong, so we just don't know the process of fossilization well enough." It's actually very frustrating for me. When asked for proof, creationists are willing to provide should we find any. But when we provide, it is typically cast aside with a wave and a thinly veiled insult (not necessarily from anyone on this forum. Just generally)

[Bauglir]

The selection as designer was just my way of pointing out that for a random process a lot of semi-intelligent qualities seem to be thrust upon it to explain things.

As for the woman's explanation, I am not surprised. When I said the argument is futile, this is what I meant. When the woman discovered tissue that simply should not exist, her thoughts did not turn to "Maybe we've got this wrong. Maybe dinosaurs existed for longer than we thought." Her only thoughts were "Well, we already know our timeline cannot be wrong, so we just don't know the process of fossilization well enough." It's actually very frustrating for me. When asked for proof, creationists are willing to provide should we find any. But when we provide, it is typically cast aside with a wave and a thinly veiled insult (not necessarily from anyone on this forum. Just generally)

I'd be much likelier to take her statements as likelier to be true than yours, though, considering she's the one working with the samples and participated in their excavation. You're misrepresenting the situation, too. She's not saying "our timeline cannot be wrong" because it conflicts with her existing beliefs about history, she's saying it because she has factual evidence (the age of the canyon, specifically, all of geology and astrophysics, generally) to support the timeline as it exists, and it's far likelier that some unknown process of fossilization occurred than that multiple fields of science have misinterpreted the data upon which their fundamentals are based.

And I'm not sure what semi-intelligent qualities are being thrust upon evolution. Could you point them out? I'm not saying that anything set out to evolve feathers because they're useful. I'm saying that feather precursors happened to evolve, and they happened to be useful in some capacity or another that caused them to become a permanent feature of the genetic line in which they evolved. That's not particularly implausible, as far as I'm aware, nor does it require any intelligence.

[CJ1145]

I'll reply to all this tomorrow. As for now I am too sleepy to be intelligent.

[RAM]

at this point it seems like natural selection is becoming a designer all its own. The things attributed to it make it seem almost conscious. I thought, by definition, it was pure chance mixed with some advantaged weighing the dice, per se.

This is why evolution is such a threat to religion. Religion is supported, to a significant extent, buy unfounded proof. People would support religion by stating that the complexity of the world requires intelligence. Evolution does not oppose religion in any way, it doesn't have to, evolution threatens religion simply by proving that complex and well-adapted constructs can occur without an intelligent design to them.
 Evolution does not entirely require life, the same processes of irregular entities combined with refinement occur in inanimate objects. If you break a piece of rock from a wall, it will have sharp edges, yet all the stones in a stream will have rounded surfaces. This isn't a deity filing them down to a nice surface, it is just a simple process of stone structures deteriorating in irregular fashions and individual stones becoming similar due to being subject to the same forces. Life really isn't too great a leap, and once you have life, nothing else in our world is unexpected...

I think that all is this argument on the existence of God is a moot point.  If such a being, that is capable of creating matter in all it's infinite complexities and combinations, existed it would be beyond our capablities to even fathom.  The Christian God, and others that I know of(not all of them), are really just anthropomorphisms of nature.  Attributing and projecting our ideas about things unto them so that they can be understood(or rather understood to be understood, meaning simply believed to be) in human terms.  Something that conceived our entire reality, if it indeed it is an entity, is beyond it and therefore entirely alien and not conceptually available to our thoughts.  To see God or believe that you know it is a rationalization and, ultimately, self-deception.

I feel that there is a great deal of overlap between what can be a creator and what can be understood, of course, the ones that can be understood can also be disproven, so that point also is also moot.




The simple fact is that there is, by definition, a single all-encompassing scenario. If there is just the universe we see, than that is it. If there is a multiverse, than that is it. If there is a deity that has separated itself into different projects, than that is it. If there is a diversity of spaces with which we have contact, and others with no contact to our space, no influence at all, no way we could ever know anything about them, in short, places that do not exist from our perspective, but do exist from their own, then they are part of the same all-encompassing scenario. The simple fact is that there absolutely needs to be precisely one, there is no other possibility, and whatever it is it needs no other justification. Time is not a factor, being outside of time does not address anything. The origin of everything, including any gods, is self-evident.
 In short, everything 'just is', gods(or a lack there of) are completely irrelevant to creation.

[Andir]

I had read at one time that our pinky toes are slowly getting smaller with each generation (I think it was stated that we didn't need them to grab hold of things anymore...) and our wisdom teeth are starting to not form as well.  That is... if you are looking for signs of evolution.  Of course, you won't see someone walking down the street and grow a pair of wings because a car is going to hit them kind of evolution speed... that's crazy talk.

[chaoticag]

That's more Lamarckian genetics, which has been disproven though, unless someone is going around killing people that get wisdom teeth and big pinkies. As always, a citation from a work of science is preferable.

[Vester]

I had read at one time that our pinky toes are slowly getting smaller with each generation (I think it was stated that we didn't need them to grab hold of things anymore...) and our wisdom teeth are starting to not form as well.  That is... if you are looking for signs of evolution.  Of course, you won't see someone walking down the street and grow a pair of wings because a car is going to hit them kind of evolution speed... that's crazy talk.

My personal favourite is that the Y chromosome is apparently deteriorating.

EDIT: I can't imagine a monogendered human race, honestly.

[Andir]

I had read at one time that our pinky toes are slowly getting smaller with each generation (I think it was stated that we didn't need them to grab hold of things anymore...) and our wisdom teeth are starting to not form as well.  That is... if you are looking for signs of evolution.  Of course, you won't see someone walking down the street and grow a pair of wings because a car is going to hit them kind of evolution speed... that's crazy talk.

My personal favourite is that the Y chromosome is apparently deteriorating.

EDIT: I can't imagine a monogendered human race, honestly.

I had to look that up... apparently they say now it's not degenerating, it's changing.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/y-chromosome-0114.html

[Phmcw]

I just came back from the university and  started thinking about what has been discussed in this thread.
An all at one my Wtf meter jumped to 10. Poeple are you seriously sugesting that god broadcast light and other stuff to make us belive that the universe is older than it seems.

Can you realy say that with a straigh face or are you just messing with us?

Because I don't know what to say. This is one of the many absolute proof that cannot be refuted unless "an all powerful  being" is being a **** and just want to **** with the scientific community by feeding us false data by a spectacular and unprovable medium.

Realy poeple you're ready to believe anything.
And if it's what to think stop doing science, becuse obviously your god hate it.