Laurens

Read 'Climbing Mount Improbable' by Richard Dawkins, he explains how the eye could have evolved. It's really not much of a problem for evolution.

I don't see how that relates directly to time travel.

Apologies, I just read and responded to the OP

It's slightly unrelated, but if we had bright yellow plants would we get blue fruit? I understood that fruit and berries evolved colours that were a high contrast against the green background (reds and oranges etc) so that animals could see them more easily... I thought it would be cool to write a sci-fi book about a planet with yellow trees that produced blue fruit... EDIT: Obviously I need to work that into a story somehow first

From what I hear the asteroid impact seems the most likely explanation - it explains the sudden extinction found at the K - T boundary, and the high levels of iridium. Plus we have the Chicxulub Crater... For me these all provide strong evidence for an asteroid impact. How does the predation hypothesis account for these observations?

You might enjoy this documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuNFZTQGXCs

William Lane Craig has admitted that nothing you could show him would challenge his faith There is no reason why the faithful cling to God, it's completely irrational - that's exactly the problem with it!

There are many explanations for this that do not involve the supernatural. He could have been using a similar technique to the one that Peter Popoff was exposed as using by James Randi - basically having an earpiece with a person on the other end giving information about audience members. Or he could have obtained some information about some of the things audience members were expecting to have healed, and where in the arena they would be sitting (if the tickets were given out with specific seats on them). Or it could have been a setup. Or he could have made a wild guess and got lucky. Whatever happened it wasn't a miracle, and the poor lady was not cured of cancer. Faith "healers" disgust me, making money off people's desires to be cured of their ailments. I'd have him thrown in jail if I had any authority...

We went through it in class today, it turns out I didn't actually have to answer the question that I was struggling with! (Which might explain a lot) - I have got to grips with it now though. Thanks for the help people

Birds can eat a lot of berries that we can't. Even if you don't eat the actual seed, you'd still be taking it away from the tree and discarding them somewhere!

Plants don't have goals, natural selection has selected for advantageous traits. It's not as though a plant could think 'I know, I want to get my seeds transported further away, I will make some fruit so that animals can transport them in their stomachs' - although I'm sure you're aware of this. Questions of purpose, and goals in evolution don't really make sense. This is speculation on my part, so don't take it as fact, but it provides an example of how fruit might have evolved. If there was a plant that developed seeds, perhaps in a small juicy case (adapted for other purposes) that animals adapted to eat and subsequently poop out in a different area, inadvertently that plant would have created a means of spreading its seeds across a wider range - this would have an impact upon its success. The plants that provided the tastiest, most visible fruits would have an advantage over others, so there would be a trend towards sweeter, more nutritious fruit that was brightly coloured to stand out in high contrast against the green background. Over time fruit would get bigger and juicier because the bigger and juicier fruits would be more likely to get eaten, and thus have their seeds germinated (ensuring the survival of their genes into the next generation). Its not as though the goal of the plant is to have it's fruit eaten, its just an advantageous way of doing things therefore it was selected for by natural selection. It's similar to how some plants use insects to transport their pollen by bribing them with nectar or adapting to look like an insect (so that the insect will attempt to mate with it). They don't do so purposefully, it was just that natural selection blindly stumbled upon an advantageous way of doing things.

Before the Big Bang - Brian Clegg

I'm reading Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond at the moment. It's a very interesting read.

Why I Became An Atheist - John W. Loftus This book is written by an ex student of William Lane Craig (or as I like to call him, the world's greatest example of the Dunning/Kruger effect) turned atheist - he knows all the apologist arguments, and dismantles them in this book. Jesus Interrupted - Bart D. Ehrman A decent account of exactly why the Gospels aren't reliable. I'd also recommend 'God's Problem' by the same author - in which he looks into the Bible and how it deals with the problem of suffering.