Arete

But were they using a secure email server?

Of course not. Mountains upon mountains of observational, empirical evidence strongly support it being so. Btw's: 1) New genetic information can and is created de novo through evolutionary processes - see gene duplication, pseudogene, recombination and transposable element for a start. 2) Complex traits can emerge through stochastic evolutionary processes - see citrate metabolism in E. coli 3) The argument that "evolution is faith based because no one was there to see it" is a poor argument - we infer past events based on contemporary evidence on a daily basis. For e.g. I can infer that the cleaner emptied my office trash can last night by the fact it is empty and we have cleaning staff employed to do so. An argument that a trash goblin who lives in my filing cabinet ate it after I left for the day is not an equivalently evidenced argument simply because I did physically see the cleaner empty my trash can.

Nope. For e.g. you can take a naturally occurring trait like thermotolerance (i.e. it evolves in nature) and simulate selective conditions to generate evolutionary changes observed in nature. Btw's fish don't fit in test tubes, not that it matters or is relevant. Regardless, the claim that evolution cannot be directly observed is comprehensively wrong.

Experimental Evolution is an entire field of study in which direct observations of evolution are made. E.g. http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/285289 http://www.pnas.org/content/109/5/1595.short https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/31/2/364/997936/Massive-Habitat-Specific-Genomic-Response-in-D http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/evo.13193/full etc. Actually, as previously explained ad infinitum there is tonnes of evidence from many independent lines for common ancestry. Ignoring it does not make it go away. http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/101586-evolution-evidence/?p=969449

Genetics. K means clustering - e.g. https://web.stanford.edu/group/rosenberglab/papers/popstruct.pdf

The art of the deal was ghost written by an author named Tony Schwartz. THe book wasn't even written by Donald Trump. I've not read it so I have no idea if it's worth reading or not,but if the goal is to learn about/from Donald Trump, it has no value.

I have a number of undergrads working in my lab, and many more than I can take on apply. I ask about research interests, career goals, GPA and how much time you can invest. 1. Research interests - I'm making sure what you are interested in aligns with what my lab does. If you express a strong interest in neurobiology, I'll point you in the direction of someone who does that, because it's not what my lab does. Talking about your interests with a professor can be very helpful, even if it turns out their lab is not a good fit for you. 2. Career goals - I don't care so much if your ideas aren't solid, so long as you're open to a STEM career, and you're not a pre-med student looking to tick the "letter of rec from a professor" box and move on. 3. GPA - taking on research adds to your workload and takes away study time. If a student is already struggling with their courses, their research is likely to wind up a mess. I generally won't take on a student with a GPA less than 3. 4. I expect 6 hours a week commitment and enrolment in research credits. If someone is unwilling to commit to that, I'm generally unwilling to commit the time of my postdocs and grad students in training them. Also of note is that I generally like to recruit undergrads early in their programs. That way I can get them trained and have them be useful for a couple of years.

No to mention that one of the major causes of the subprime mortgage crisis was the repackaging of high risk investments in order to make them appear low risk. Regulations preventing such manipulation and deception make it easier for investors to determine the correct level of risk an investment represents, and make more accurate decisions.

So, even if, as you say, the original sin created all the suffering in the world today (as opposed to the myriad of conditions outside of human control that result in suffering), our omnipotent God, sat on his hands and watched it happen for several millennia, which rather negates omnibenevolence. Why? collective punishment of an entire species for hundreds of generations based on a single action by two individuals?

I see no fathomable link between people's actions and the degree of suffering they experience.

Even with in house pricing a paired end lane of Illumina HiSeq will run about $2k USD plus library prep. Of course the caveat is the data is worthless if you don't know how to analyse it or have the computational power - in which case the 23andme/ancestry/etc microrarrays are probably a better idea.

What choice does an infant have in the matter?

Ok, so let's take an example: Angola's infant mortality rate is almost 1 in 5. Major killers are malaria and gastroenteritis compounded by starvation. So we have two competing hypotheses as per above: either God created plasmodium and norovirus to make Angolans suffer and therefore turn to him, or he created them to punish us for the sins of Adam and Eve. Either circumstance is incompatible with omnibenevolence - and we're left with a deity who is not only OK with certain people suffering, but actually wishes it. As a result, I personally, do not have the ability to believe in an omnibenevolent Christian God. To be clear - it's not a choice. When faced with the claims of the nature of God, and faced with the reality of the world I find them incompatible. It's like unicorns, or the Loch Ness monster. It's not that I choose not to believe in them, it's that if find the evidence uncompelling and am unable to accept their existence as plausible. Additional or different evidence may alter my ability to believe in the future, but currently that is not the case.

To be in the top 1% in the US, one needs to earn over $344,000 pa and have a net worth of over $13.98 million. As I'm at a public university, salaries are publicly available in a searchable database. Only one person on campus earns enough to be in the 1% and that's the chancellor.

No it really doesn't. That's the point. Empirical observations are consistent with contemporary theory and we do not need magic to explain them.

What do you think the fossil record, biogeography, molecular clocks, phylogenetics, vestigial organs, shared developmental and metabolic pathways, conserved DNA regions, etc etc etc that we base evolutionary theory on are? Do you honestly not understand that there is a wealth of empirical evidence for the theory? How about plate tectonics, astronomy, particle physics, quantum mechanics, etc etc? Are you actually suggesting we pulled all these things out of thin air?

1) Plenty of suffering is independent of free will - natural disasters, disease, famine etc. 2) An omnipotent being can allow free will without suffering. "Another line of extended criticism of free will defense has been that if God is perfectly powerful, knowing and loving, then he could have actualized a world with free creatures without moral evil where everyone chooses good, is always full of loving-kindness, is compassionate, always non-violent and full of joy, where earth were just like the monotheistic concept of heaven" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil

The OP implies that belief is a choice - it is not. If a person does not find the evidence for something compelling, no amount of wishful thinking is going to change their belief in the subject. To offer a personal anecdote - I was raised in a Christian household, went to Sunday school, etc. About the age I started to critically think about what adults told me (11 or so, maybe?), I inadvertently stumbled upon the Epicurean problem of evil in my own thinking: 1. There is evil/suffering in the world. 2. God is omniscient, so it knows there is evil/suffering. 3. God is omnipotent, so God can end evil/suffering. 4. God is omnibenevolent, so God cares that there is evil/suffering. 5. Therefore God is either not omniscient/omnipotent/omnibenevolent, or does not exist. When I came to my supposed religious mentors with this issue, I was treated as a troublemaker, or I was told not to try and understand God. The spell was broken. As I began to doubt, further inconsistencies appeared - how could a perfect being create an imperfect world? Doesn't that make the being itself imperfect? How come the Bible has so many inconsistencies? How come so many Bible stories contradict reality? Ultimately the belief system itself collapsed under the scrutiny of a curious pre teen. With so many unanswered questions I was simply unable to continue believing. It wasn't an active choice I made.

- We have direct observational evidence, like the Lenski experiment which has evolved E. coli populations for 25 years and shown how through evolutionary processes, they can develop new phenotypic traits. We also have instances where a population of organisms has diverged into two species during historical tiime, like the apple maggot fly and the yellow fever mosquito. - We have biogeographical evidence that organisms share common ancestry. For example, many of the organisms which are found on the former continents which made up Gondwana are more related to each other than the places they are near to now, providing evidence of common ancestry. - We have macro-morphological evidence, like vestigial organs like tail bones in humans and leg bones in whales, which support common ancestry with animals with tails and legs, respectively. - On the cellular level, the evidence for common ancestry becomes even more compelling. Despite the obvious differences between say an dandelion and a horse, when you look at the the structural components of the cells, they are largely the same. This suggests that, despite the massive differences in external morphology you see today, they share common ancestry. - Prehaps the most elegant (or maybe I'm just biased by working in genetics) evidence comes from genetics. All organisms on earth share the same basic structure and code for their blueprint. The study of genetics provides a comprehensive understanding of the mechanism by which phenotypic traits are inherited, how they can change, and provide the co-ordinates required to map the evolution of life. This is not an exhaustive list of the lines of evidence we have for evolution - but when you "overlay" each of these "jigsaws" with each other, you can put together a more complete picture of the overall evidence, and the image we get is overwhelmingly consistent with evolutionary theory. As we look more, get more pieces of each puzzle, learn how to reshuffle the pieces we have more accurately, we get a better overall picture, and it only keeps looking more and more like evolution is the right fit for the data. As an ending, I don't believe that evolutionary theory is exclusive of religion - it would seem that the Pope strongly agrees, calling the argument "absurd". You can believe in evolution and God - I have had the pleasure of collaborating with Professor Francisco Ayala who is a former Dominican Priest, a Professor of Evolutionary Biology at UC Irvine and former president of the AAAS. You might find some of his essays on religion and science interesting, especially, his book - "Am I a monkey?" which addresses the question of what evolution is and whether it is compatible with belief in God. http://www.washingto...0042603381.html http://www.faculty.u...faculty_id=2134

Of course the flaw in these types of analogies is that there is no such thing as a codon which cannot be transcribed. There are 64 possible codons, 3 encode "stop" and 61 encode 20 amino acids with considerable redundancy. It is therefore not possible to have a genetic code which is incapable of translating a protein, and the majority of changes to the code will not alter the translation. Even so, the ex post facto use of low probability of an event to claim the event is impossible is unconvincing. Say I rolled a dice 100 times and got 100 sixes. The probability of that outcome is 1/(1/6x10100). The problem with claiming divine intervention is that EVERY outcome of 100 dice rolls has the same probability, and an outcome is inevitable if you were to conduct the experiment. Claiming impossibility of an event based on a low probability of the event is never a compelling argument, as it's a argumentum ad ignorantium logical fallacy. Of course the problem we have here is the use of strawman argument. Evolutionary theory does not predict spontaneous parthenogenesis in ruminants (although if you had of used a lizard or a fish as your example we could have identified examples of them cloning themselves). Evolution, is simply the change in allele frequency (i.e., genetic variation) in a population, over time. We routinely observe this in all organisms. Evolutionary theory postulates that changes in allele frequency over time explain the diversity of life on earth. divergence between populations, resulting in the creation of new species has been directly observed.

Citation needed.

You have the concept of burden of proof backwards. It's not up to our data, or science, or anyone to disprove biblical creation. Ala Russel's teapot.

If you're talking about NSF/NIH grants - the government does not select which grants do and do not get funded. Panels of independent (i.e., not generally government employees) experts review, rank and ultimately determine which grants get funded. The scale at which government is involved is in determining how much funding is directed to each agency (e.g,. NSF vs NIH vs USDA vs DOE etc.) and sometimes within divisions within each agency (e.g., for NIH - NI Allergies and infectious diseases vs NI Arthritis, musculoskeletal and skin diseases vs NI Aging vs NI Drug abuse, and so on) So the government could decide to spend less on research overall, or move money away from DOE alternative energy and towards Aging research in NIH, etc. but not precisely what each project is, or the outcomes of those projects. Edit: punctuation

And the question still hasn't been answered....