Ringer

First I would like to see the evidence of this. Second what if the person doing the punishing is a woman. Why would the person giving out punishment necessarily be male? It's hard to make a bold statement like that and back it up by saying, 'even though you may have evidence saying otherwise what I say is true.' True boys and girls are treated differently, but both get picked on quite a bit. My mother was raped when she was a child and many of her friends refused to be around her and even an aunt said it was her own fault. So in what why do you believe that girls don't have a fear of being stigmatized.

All right I can't sleep so back on to the Limited Evolutionary Potential link So pretty much what he is arguing is that since the bacteria didn't evolve a very specific enzyme, and because that's the enzyme we want it to evolve, it doesn't evolve. That's like me saying that I can disprove evolution by showing that dolphins could easily survive on land but haven't redeveloped legs. And again we go back to his analogies of language which I have already went over. Man I wish I could change the definition of words to suite my argument; I would win every time. Evolution (biological evolution) doesn't mean change in meaning or function, it means change in allele frequency over time. Again he goes back to the letter problem that is more and more meaningless. I apologize that I will not, paragraph by paragraph, pick apart every bit of his argument. But to summarize the rest of it he plucks numbers out of the air, he makes more opinions about how natural evolution isn't enough to give us the complexity we have now without anything more than his amazement, then goes back to IC as his main argument. Now your links to glial cells means two things. One, that we are learning new things about glial cells all the time. So glial cells work as more support than just structural, which was a theory of only one type of astrocyte, not to mention that only glial cells have the ability to create new cells that can differentiate into neurons (this is ridiculously oversimplified but you get the point). Two, so glial cells do more than we thought, how does that disprove evolution. Or if you were saying this in a big IC argument on the eyes how does this make the eyes more complex than they already were? [edit] dumb, tired spelling mistakes [/edit]

Actually mammals were around at the time of the dinosaurs (depending on which time frame you are referencing) they just weren't the prevalent species. If you want to know what mammals lived in the Jurassic that we are aware of here you go. Now how we know what animals mammals are descended from comes more from the shape of their hip/leg joints and their skulls than they way they give birth. Indeed the placentals and marsupials came along after mammals that laid eggs. On a side note Brontosaurus is a lie. [edit]Spelling[/edit]

Rot13 is just a simple inscription where you rotate the letters of the alphabet 13 times. Pretty much just changing letters, it's really simple. If you want something more difficult Futurama has 2 different alien language alphabets that you could use and not worry about someone knowing it unless they watch a lot of Futurama. http://www.omniglot.com/writing/futurama.htm http://slurmed.com/?p=aa/@aa&pag=2

Use good old ROT13

Just because you cut the bark off and use it, then get better does not mean that the bark is an effective drug.

I'm he (she?) could do both if they wanted. I have a friend who does personal training, teaches martial arts, goes to school, and plays in 3 bands. I couldn't imagine having his schedule but he enjoys it.

Wouldn't you have to flash freeze it for that?

Trying to look pretty for the picture

Wouldn't they have a hard time waking up to answer the phone?

I'm pretty sure the reason for polygamy laws has to do with tax breaks and the like that come with marriage, multiple marriage means multiple tax benefits. Plus you have the problems with sorting out the inheritances with multiple wives/husbands. At least that's how it was always explained to me way polygamy was outlawed, not because of the morality behind it.

I usually just ask them not to disprove what you believe, but to prove what they believe as well as give reproduced evidence that could do both of these things.

You just turned a decent analogy into a god awful one with lots of word salad and meaninglessness. Inheritance is evolution's memory, it doesn't matter what the traits do all that matters is what was inherited from the parents. Let's say that again, it doesn't matter if the traits are good, bad, ugly, useless, dirty, gross, helpful, or anything they will still be passed on from generation to generation so long as the progeny continues. Since you don't believe new features have evolved does that mean you believe that humans have always had the ability to digest lactose since they have existed? You also need to realize that evolution does not have a direction. That is the flaw in the maze analogy, that's why it's a simplified analogy, evolution doesn't have an end point or a correct solution, just animals that happen to survive and reproduce. My point was a single inserted letter could make an entirely new amino acid sequence thus making it obvious that a simple mutation could create an entirely novel function. ID's entire premise is that it is impossible to create novel functions through random mutation. So all we have to do to nullify ID is give examples of why it is possible. Every one here has been nice enough to give you evidence, papers, sites, ideas, etc. I believe it's about time you return the favor and start giving your own evidence, not that guys website, to show us why ID is a better alternative to evolution. As pointed out over and over again, you are wrong. Just because there is nothing to stop a deadly mutation from happening doesn't mean anything whatsoever, there's also nothing to stop beneficial mutations and they will be carried on by the parents children. Get out of abiogensis, if you want to talk about that first read the links I gave then talk to organic chemists. Really? Do you understand that natural selection isn't an actual entity just an idea? You can call it luck, chance, etc. it's still natural selection. I would talk about Axe's paper but I read a reaction to it on Panda's thumb that talked about it much better than I could. Oh, and how exactly do we establish which are further away and which are closer? By thinking, 'damn that must have been pretty difficult.' Indeed it does take evolution a very long time, if ever, to find an extremely useful trait that seems to be perfect. Luckily it has billions of years to do so and a virtually uncountable number of generations as well. It completely changes his, and your, point that something must be functionally well established to benefit future mechanisms. Then his analogy is just blatantly wrong and misleading. As I said before, evolution does get wet, it is you that say it can't not us. Prove to us that it can't with data and evidence not opinions. I could probably write an entire paper on things that are wrong with this analogy and the misconceptions therein. But to sum it up, it doesn't matter what's easy and organisms don't choose what to evolve. That is your idea, that something chooses how things evolve, not ours. All that matters is something happened to work not whether it was easy or if it was the best option. It worked, that's all that matters. Bolded words are meaningless to living things. There is no hierarchy within the animal kingdom to say we are higher organisms. If anything we are much lower because we are less successful and we would not be able to survive without these 'lower' organisms yet they could easily survive if our entire population were to die. But back to the main point, prove it. That they were designed that way and didn't and couldn't evolve that way. What penalties? If you mean that certain adaptations wouldn't work well outside of the niche associated with a certain organism, then I agree. But you know what that sounds like, evolution. Animals evolved certain traits to survive different evolutionary pressures. But how are they weaker? Because they produce an enzyme that breaks downs penicillin before it can kill it. Well this is an empirical question not a logical one. Immunity doesn't develop quickly, for the most part. Also even when the threat is gone the trait could remain for quite a long time. How is immunity associated with damage, examples please. Alright I am going to stop responding to you until you actually get to at least some of my earlier posts and links to show you are actually making an effort of seeing both sides of the argument and not just cherry-picking, moving the posts, and all the other things that ID proponents love to do. [edit] I will still go through your links when I have the time if only to show you that the guy you keep going to is full of it[/edit]

Just stumbled upon something I thought fit in with this discussion rather well. Behold A scientific look at dinosaur species using creationist hypothesis. Note that this isn't the actual paper just a report of it.

I'll add that My father lived in a rural area and my mother lived close to the city but not directly in it when I was growing up and I loved being away from the city. Ever since I moved into city limits for school and such I have hated being around this many people and not being able to just wander about in the wild and explore the diversity within it. I can't wait until I am out of school and can get a house of my own outside of the city.

I seem to be talking about misconceptions about evolution a lot lately. Men are not evolved from monkeys, you premise is false so all that follows is false. extant species didn't evolve from extant species. We have common ancestors with monkeys but our common ancestor was neither man nor monkey. If you want to actually learn about evidence for evolution read up on some things on Talk Origins FAQ.

I apologize for the spelling errors and such in my last post, I reread it and my Language Arts teachers would be horrified. For some reason it doesn't have an edit button ATM so the errors shall stay. On to the first link you posted. http://www.detectingdesign.com/steppingstones.html It's odd he doesn't mention what he means by not getting wet. Evolutionary theory, for this analogy, says something more like the stepping stones are far apart and some will have adaptations that survive the swim others will not. That progeny will pass on its 'swimming ability' so they can keep swimming from stone to stone and other adaptations will be produce that make the swim even easier. Getting wet happens all the time, as does drowning, the point is that some of them survive the swim. Him talking about how adding a letter does nothing because both are meaningless is a ridiculous analogy. In an intro bio course you find a sentence like 'the sad cat and bat', codons being paired in threes. now you will see that the addition of a single letter will yield 'ath esa dca tan dba t' which is fundamentally useless as a sentence and as a codon because it is no longer in pairs of 3. This is similar to the start/stop codon problem in my last post. Now there are many ways this sentence can change and still be functional, whether it is detrimental or helpful doesn't matter now, such as a codon switching positions 'the cat and sad bat' or 'sad cat and the bat' etc; even whole codons being inserted such as 'now the sad cat and bat'. All of these are still fully functional. You could even look at the sentences that have a somewhat semantically correct structure as helpful functions and semantically wrong mutations as harmful such as a single letter shift, 'tth esa dca tan dba'. Hopefully you get that there are huge amounts of different ways that are functionally sound as well as those that are functionally bunk. Another problem he is having is understanding that some evolutionary traits that don't necessarily give benefit now doesn't mean that they will never end up being beneficial. Even some things that are somewhat harmful can still be passed on and end up being beneficial in another sort of environments. Easily done if the animal is migratory. Man this one is tricky; not because he's right but because he's so vague as to be useless for any sort of retort. So let's look at some points, he says that there are so many useful stepping stones that can be used. What are these stepping stones, it's kind of useless to make a claim and just say, 'trust me, I know.' Then he talks about how antibiotics target specific areas of the bacteria. He makes points to show how unbelievable improbable that it is to evolve a certain genetic sequence toward a certain specific function, yet says it's perfectly acceptable for bacteria. . . odd. Anyway some fun facts about how else bacteria can do things like this, they have an amazing ability to incorporate genetic sequences into their own code. That's why they are so useful to culture bacteria for gene testing and such. You also have to realize by now that bacteria don't think, 'Oh, look, they're using penicillin. I sure wish I had some penicillinase so it wouldn't hurt me. Oh look, there's some. I think I'll give it to my children.' Some bacteria happen to have a resistance to penicillin, people stop taking it and that bacteria that has a slight resistance survives and infects others. They do the same and the next generation will have an even stronger resistance, ad infinitum. He may be right, if that's how it worked at all. A single bacteria doesn't just come about immune to penicillin, though it may happen by pure chance. The immune strain had parents that were unbelievably immune, which had parents who were extremely immune, which had parents who were ridiculously immune, etc, etc. This is oversimplified but hopefully you get the idea. Interesting but not at all as big as he thinks it is. Enzymes are extremely specific because they have been evolving with us for a very long time and have had time to become specialized. I've never heard a biologist say a fully functional specific enzyme just appears out of, although it could. All that matters for evolution is that something give some sort of advantage. Now if a non-specific enzyme that could fit multiple sugars but didn't bread them down as fast as we see now, but still act as a catalyst, there would be an advantage. The problem with saying that this shows evolution stopped is that it measured only the expected reaction rate with the enzyme lactase and not the reaction rate of lactose with bacteria compared to the reaction rate of lactose with no bacteria. If there is a significant measurable difference it could have evolved a novel enzyme that just doesn't work as fast as lactase. That's all I can get to today, hopefully I can keep doing this regularly when I have time to sit down

let's try to at least start this so there's not so much to do at once. indeed they have, and your link only talks about how the flagellum doesn't work without them. The problem is that just because the flagella no longer works doesn't mean that it is useless, it doesn't even mean that it's not doing anything. That is what IC argues is that all parts are useless without the whole not that a specific function no longer works without it. If that is it's stance than it misunderstands evolution that I could imagine. Your moving the goalposts, you are doing the same thing as when IDers ask for intermediate species from A to C. You then show them B and ask where the intermediate for that is. It's stupid to ask for ridiculously specific evidence when you provide non of your own. What principles do you keep talking about. Name the damned things already, we are not school children that need to be walked through something. If we don't understand it we know how to do research on our own. Just give these principles and evidence you keep talking about. BTW you would be amazed if you just sat down with a scientist and listened to the awe in his/her voice when they talked about there specialty. If you don't think scientists are incredulous about all of these things you are sorely mistaken, they just try to explain these things while being awed. While the IC and ID and creationists, etc. bow down to their incredulity and cry about not being able to understand. The problem with this comparison, although it could be worked into a very good analogy, is that you assume a starting point without knowledge of the previous generations explorations. I'll try to make it a better example. Say you have multiple G1 families and all of them can only take a single path with one try to get out of the maze. A few get out fast, some get out slow and some don't get out at all. Now those that got out get put back in the same maze except it was extended as you say with their children. Some of the children that had parents that got out fast will get out fast and find the fast way out of the extension, while some will get lost in the extension and get out slowly or not at all. The same goes with the children with slow parents, some may find a different way than their parents and get out fast, some will get out slower, and some will ignore their parents and get out fast. Then the same problem goes with the extension for them. Sooner or later the maze stops extending and the only remaining families will know how to get out of the maze fairly well. If the maze changes again the process will begin again. Apparently you don't realize that changing a single codon, even a single G A T or C, can drastically change the sequence of codons after it. If you change a single start codon, ATG into TTG, that whole sequence will no longer code, the opposite works as well, say GTA gets flipped or gains an AT before the G in crossover you have a new starting sequence and all new codons until it finds a stop codon, TAG TAA or TGA. Let's stop you right there. It has no memories huh? What is it with this whole inheritance thing? It must be incredibly unlikely for us to look like our parents without the genetic code having a 'memory' of sorts, right? Also, it is like a maze, just not the one you described. It's a little process called natural selection. If something is unhelpful the carrier usually dies or is unable to reproduce. Only the useful proteins are selected for. Let me but it this way, Bovine spongeform encephelopathy (I think that's the right term) or mad cow disease is caused by the secondary form of a folding protein, it's caused by multiple things but that's not the part we are focusing on. Now that unfortunate folding causes all sorts of problems for the cow that would not allow it to find a mate, and even if it did the calf would not be healthy enough to live in the wild. So that fold when mutated in the wild, not fed to other cattle that can absorb and incorporate the protein, it would die without being able to leave a healthy progeny that evolution need for it to succeed. I apologize for not getting to the articles yet, I have had much busier weekend than I had planned but will get to it ASAP

Well if we are talking about not replying to points how about you skipping every link I've sent your way without reading it, I can tell you didn't read them because they address plenty of your 'points', and completely ignoring every single call for evidence. I have personally asked for you to back up your statements with peer-reviewed evidence and you only send me back to the same site over and over again. But thank you for your so generous offer to talk me through the link, but, alas, I have a reason for not reading all of it. You see when someone starts off with a misunderstanding of what they are arguing against I see no reason to continue to waste my time reading a paper written by someone who doesn't understand what they are trying to refute. I see that the author understands the working of proteins and genetic mechanisms, but he misunderstands basic standpoints of evolution. Why would I continue reading a long paper that is introduced with a flawed premise? But, just for your pleasure, if I get extra time this weekend I will go over your link and give you, point by point, what I believe to be wrong with it. We have been waiting for you to produce something real, and I have personally refuted every misunderstanding or anything I don't believe is right. So far you have disputed me by just telling me there's all this evidence you know of that disagrees with what I am saying without ever showing it to me or just plain skipping over that part of my post. I have no idea why you would say it's unfortunate we have to go through your points and discuss them unless it makes you nervous to be shown that you are mistaken. I read most of it, and it doesn't give evidence. He had no trials, no data of his own, no supporting research, etc. All he has is pictures of how a flagellum is put together and speculation that it couldn't be that way because he can't think of a way that it could have come about. Supporting a hypothesis is not about speculation, it is about data and evidence. Sure he dresses it pretty fancy but it just still rubbish. We have linked ways in which it could have evolved naturally and your response is just, "Well that's just speculation too." The difference is you have to defend your theory against these types of things for it to hold up. We just defended ours and how it could work out that way and you just say you can't prove it. Well at least we have a feasible mechanism that actually explains something instead of throwing our hands up and exclaiming, "well darn I just can't figure it out, it must be impossible." I believe we have an explanation for the universe (that's probably not eternal by the way), but seeing as it is that you have a physics degree I'm sure you knew that. But on the other hand if you meant an explanation for why the universe is here is a pointless question. It is here, we know it's here because we are here. Asking why is philosophical, not scientific. Scientifically we ask if something is here, we know the universe is here so there's your explanation on that. And why do you say that it is more illogical to believe something came from nothing, your belief if you think that god created everything because he had nothing else to work with, than something always existing. Apparently you didn't read, surprise, my link about the yeast forming into proto-multicellularity if you don't think we have ever seen something go from simple to complex. Or maybe you don't believe that our ability to digest lactose into adulthood is a fairly recent incident. Sorry I forgot that the signals we produce are supernatural as well. I guess I should call the James Randi Foundation and claim my prize by making him listen to the radio. Extra-terrestrial life forms, in all likelihood, will be natural just like us. I'd like to hear your explanation on why they wouldn't be. How about you just use the vocabulary that we all agree on here instead of making your own uses. You have used mindless natural process or MNP when you mean that and that's fine. But when you try to hijack the word nature and use it as such you are creating a gap in our ability to communicate. Intelligence is natural and as such is part of nature. It may not be completely know, but that is what all the evidence points to, except your proof that you are so unwilling to provide. I apologize because I don't have the time to respond to the rest of this in detail at the moment as I would like to. So instead of giving you a crappy reply I will respond to it, as well as the link you provided and perhaps others you provided for other people if time allows, in due course.

I've heard a similar thing except I thought it was usually a dual and not really a wager. If one side won it was because the gods or God was on their side and were justified. I think the name was trial by combat

Since this wasn't addressed to me I wasn't going to respond but I thought I'd point some things out. The steps addressed are all about the complexity issues. Just because things work the way they do now doesn't mean that's how they have always worked. The bones in our ear are a modification of an ancestral jaw bone. That doesn't mean the ancestral jaw bone was made to become a bone in our inner ear, it just happened to be useful for that function. None of the parts of the flaggellum needed to be in the same form as they are now, the same proteins can be used in a different way with a different functions. Not all things have to be functionally beneficial, some things may not have a function at a certain time and just don't become selected out, this is called genetic drift. Those can just hang out with doing nothing until another mutation renders them functionally beneficial or not and allows selection to start. So even if the mechanisms of a flagellum were not beneficial, as long as they didn't hamper the survival of their barriers it wouldn't be a problem because they can still reproduce as well as the competition. For something to be selected out it many times has to be inherently harmful in some way. First, as we have been saying over and over, it doesn't matter what someone says, even if they have a Phd. What matters is the evidence. What evidence do they have that if the universe was made up of different fundamental rules and such that some sort of life wouldn't form. I'm sure even if there was another universe with radically different make-up and it had intelligent life there are some of them saying, "how do you explain our universe being perfectly made for use." Quite simply it's not, we are evolved from ancient ancestors who were made from this world. This world is made up of things in this universe. So we were made to form fit this universe, not the other way around. Asking what the chances are of something that happened is useless because by definition if something that has happened the chances of it happening are one. Scientists shouldn't fit the results to their worldview, that's called falsifying and it is frowned upon. The theories they propose should explain the evidence they see, not them explaining something then cherry picking evidence. That's the reason we have things like meta-studies to make sure that doesn't happen. People seeing different conclusions in the results is the reason the we have controls, peer-review, reproduction, etc. We can change controls to see what changes in the results to see if the data was interpreted properly. Peer-review to try to catch things before they are published and reproduction to make sure the results weren't falsified or something was messed up. Also, if another person has a better theory that can make more accurate predictions and explains the evidence that has been observed that is the 'worldview' science will have to end up taking to be able to continue to flourish.

And I like to think if we did outlaw all these things I would be more welcome to the idea. I still wouldn't like it, because who likes being told to stop doing what they do, but I hope I would be more open to the idea if the laws were at least consistent.

It's not about better science education vs religious education. It's about them attempting to discredit science and creating a dichotomy between science and religion.

I'm not at all saying that distracted driving doesn't kill people, it most certainly does. My problem with these laws is the assumption that it's purely being on the phone that is the cause of the distractions and, by extension, these deaths. Why would you outlaw phones when people can still legally read, eat, etc. which is just as dangerous. It's a problem with consistency. I realize that some countries do have laws against of most of these other things but I'm unfamiliar with those laws so I can't say anything about them. That's why I am only talking about the states.