Greg H.

It seems to me most strange that men should fear, Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come. --Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare No point being depressed about it - given the history of our planet, it was unlikely the human race was going to spin on forever anyway, unless we make a concerted effort to be somewhere else when the next extinction level event happens.

You get larger error bars on resistors used in high tech electronics. I think we're close enough to call it.

In general, yes, I think the human species could diverge. Personally, and this is simply an opinion, but the science seems sound, I think the next big speciation event for humans would occur after we finally move off Earth on a permanent and long term basis. Given enough time, and separation, diverse populations on diverse bodies could tend to develop more in line with the body they live on - adaptations to gravity, solar radiation, light levels, etc. But again, this would require both a mutation and a selective pressure maintained over time, to realize. Or genetic engineering.

So basically, what you're saying is, "If I reduce the map to a single line, it's useless." Well, no shit. Why on earth would you ever try and use a map that only has one line on it? 80 timezones - um. No. There are only half that many recognized UTC offsets. I get hyperbole, but you're being a tad excessive. As for overhanging cliffs, we already have a standard way of depicting them, and it's not even complex. If you don't like it, or agree with it, that's really your problem, not everyone else's. Oddly, I found that a screwdriver makes an effective hammer though, if you hold the wrong end, and the board is reasonably soft.

Don't apologize. I wasn't intending to chastize you, merely trying to make sure I clarified whichever point was confusing to you. Hopefully I did so.

What part was confusing? You seemed to be implying that you were aware of new claims or discoveries in the field of evolution (or were interested in such). I told you where to find it. Scientific research is published regularly, usually once a month or once a quarter, in journals. For example, the Annals of Physics is one such journal that concerns the field of physics. If you want up to date discoveries and research in a particular field (such as evolution) you need to read the journals covering that field. Hunting around on the interwebs will only get you stuff that's been digested and rebroadcast, so to speak.

If you want to get up to date information about the new discoveries/research in the field of evolution (or any scientific field) you would need to subscribe to one of the scholarly journals on the topic.

I wish people would stop confusing modern and better. They really don't even look the same.

More to the point, they want proof that backs up their already set view of how things work - even if that view is not even wrong. I garuntee you if you showed a creationist two dogs giving birth to a litter of camels, they'd claim you interfered with your heathen magic science. And while they wouldn't be wrong, the point I'm trying to make is there is no evidence or proof that will satisfy them if it disagrees even slightly with their "I already drank all the Kool Aid" world view. Never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It was not reasoned into him, and cannot be reasoned out.

Arguing with a creationist is like trying to stop the tides. That said, publically hanging them out for ridicule is not a great way to change their mind.

You are correct, of course (artificial genetic engineering not withstanding), and it was not my intention to imply that. I was trying to point out that, even if the mutation did occur (or already existed within the population), it may not necessarily matter in the seleciton process because of our species predaliction for using technology to overcome obstacles that might otherwise prevent us from passing on our genes..

And humans are, by and large a very bad example - we tend to overcome our selection pressures, for the most part, either through technology or through cooperation.. For example, in a low light environment, most animals would evolve better low light vision. Humans might do that, but only if there was no way for us to produce artificial light, and if the selection pressures for better low light vision kept enough people from reproducing for the low light vision to become dominant in the genome. Stature is another area that could be impacted. For a given horizontal length, a tunnel that is shorter veritically will require less time and energy to build, which would favor smaller statured people. But would we bother to build tunnels shorter, or would we just build them the same height anyway -and if we did build them shorter, would that really provide any real selection pressure? At this point in our history, the argument could be made that, outside of a massive global catatrophe, humans have effective removed themselves from the process of natural selection, with the possible exceptions of disease resistance and gentic anomolies.

That may be the problem. If you're too old to care, are you also too old to change your mind when you're wrong? Regardless, I think this is diverging off the topic of the OP.

What you think is, by and large, immaterial. Law, Theory, and Hypothesis have strict definitions within the scientific community. Changing those definitions to try and prove your point doesn't prove your point. If you want to be able to communicate effectively with others, you can't just redefine terms willy nilly - although if you're open to that sort of thing, I'd love to talk to you about why the fluffly green cheese in the sky is mostly made up of circlets of potato rind. (See what I mean about redefining terms?)

No one is bullying you, but there's really no reason to play devil's advocate with established science, unless you have new evidence that contradicts the established model. And the longer the established model has been around, the more compelling your evidence will need to be. Reinterpreting experiments done a couple hundred years ago isn't enough. You need new models, with supporting maths, that better explains ALL of the existing evidence, not just a small fraction of it. On a topic like geocentrism, it's trivally easy to disprove, assuming you objectively review all of the evidence. The fact that Sungenis has to be intellectually dishonest to find experts that appear to agree with his proposals doesn't help his case at all. As it says in my signature, If reality and your theory disagree, it is not reality that's wrong.

I am by no means an expert on biology or evolution, but I can tell you that anything you read on answersingenesis should be considered to be biased to the point of being garbage. The mission statement of their organization pretty much says it all: They're not looking for scientific truth, they're defending the Christian faith from it.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with believing in God, so long as you don't base your scientific conclusions on that belief. My signature is applicable here: As long as you don't mix the two up, you're fine.

Except they wouldn't appear identical. One (the overhanging cliff) would have intersecting countour lines. The other would not. This isn't rocket science. It's not even science. Do these lines cross each other? A first grader could answer the question, even if they didn't understand the context. Guess which type of cliff this is?

You're asking the wrong question, and then acting surprised when you get the wrong answer. The number of apples the tree produced in the last 2 years has absolutely nothing to do with how many apples I currently have. I could have a truckload of apples currently to hand, or I could have none. Now, if you asked, "This tree produced 2 apples last year, and 2 apples this year. How many apples has this tree produced in the last two years?" Then I could answer 4. If you ask the wrong question, you will never get the right answer. You are also failing to account for (or just completely ignoring, I can't decide which) the idea of acceptable precision. If the distance between St Louis and New Orleans changes a fraction of an inch due to some crustal shift in the earth no one really cares except maybe a hyper precise GPS. I certainly don't when I am travelling there - if the roadsign says NOLA is 300 miles away, I honestly do not care if it's 300 miles one inch, or 299 miles 5279 feet 11 inches. The difference has absolutely no impact at the precision I care about.

What really irks me about this is that if you bring up another creation myth, they dismiss it as being just a story, but they have the correct one, because the bible says so. At this point, I find I usually need a stiff drink to just to keep from strangling someone.

I think it has something to do with a particular religious group trying to impose their creation myth as science, and those of the general population who know better going "WTF are you doing?"

Do you have try very hard to be this wrong? Source: http://www.extension.org/pages/9695/topography-and-understanding-topographic-maps The more probable reason is that the map they used was just wrong, or they landed in the wrong place. The USGS has been around since the 1870s. I'm pretty sure overhanging cliffs didn't suddenly spring into existence right before the Normady invasion.

Normally, whenever I hit the word "conspiracy" in a post about science or math, I assume the rest of it is quackery, and move on with my day. However, this one interested me enough to actually go looking for information and, John succinctly puts it, it depends on the context. In everday math, 0^0 = 1 is perfectly fine, and keeps things (like the binomial theorem) working as expected. However, in certain scenarios (the source I read lists limiting forms as one such scenario), you can consider it to be undefined. In addition to John's resources, you can also review the findings at https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~alopez-o/math-faq/mathtext/node14.html

I;m going to comment on this, despite my better judgement. Racial distinctions are social constructs based on morphological differences, and have nothing to do with the actual potential of any human being. I have had the joy of working with some very intelligent people of a wide variety of races, and I have seen some frighteningly stupid representatives of a lot of them as well. Apparent intelligence can vary depending on the situation, and intelligence tests can be (intentionally or not) biased by how they are constructed. The idea that otherwise normal human beings are somehow less intelligent because of morphology is not only offensive, it's poor science, and I would strenuously question any methodology that purports to show otherwise.

No. Mass is mass. Weight is a force normally defined as mass times the value of a gravity vector. Though it's not surprising people get this confused - people in the United States tend to learn the Force measurement in one system (pounds) and the mass measurement in the other (grams, kilograms), and are taught early on how to convert between them, leading to the implication that they are measuring the same thing. For example, your weight is 220 pounds. Your mass, assuming earth normal gravity, would be 6.837 slugs (not the garden variety). In the metric system, your mass would be measured in kilograms, while your weight would be more appropriately measured in Newtons (IIRC). Think about it like this: If you go from earth to the moon, your weight will change. Your mass will not (unless you leave an arm behind or something).