Moontanman

Of course the Victor Zammit enthusiast I have been "debating" claims that Victor has been unfairly targeted by fundamentalist atheists who cannot bring themselves to believe in reincarnation

I bet he is a good lawyer, I googled Victor Zammit debunked and got twelve pages of him debunking the debunkers...

Is anyone familiar with the claims of Victor Zammit and past lives? I have been searching all afternoon and he has so dominated all information feeds in 12 pages of google all you get is his stuff and no real opposition to his claims...

Not working for me either...

You can also have animals with internal skeletons but no back bones, in some areas of the deep sea they have become swimming animals...

A gun in a bar, what could possibly go wrong? I am in NC, do not doubt that guns are in bars...

Where to sea squirts keep their spinal cords? It's important to acknowledge that vertebrates only evolved once, no other "convergent" evolutionary species are found.

I'd like to see those proofs as well, any chance you can back up what you assert?

Generally radiometric dating is done by more than one means and if they don't match more tests are done with other dating methods. I was aware of this in Jr high school nearly 50 years ago. Didymus, on 10 Feb 2014 - 03:40 AM, said: Hmm no, in fact it is well known that not all layers were laid down in millions of years, you are strawmanning this particular idea. Again you are not up to date on this, the origin of that soft tissue is still being studied, we don't know yet if it is really what it looks like or bacterial in origin. The best thing about science is that new evidence is studied to see how it fits before it is proclaimed as part of reality. The soft tissue did indeed come as a surprize but at this time it's not been included as fact until it is better understood. That is far more reasonable that just taking it at face value, until we have more information it is still speculative... Would it be better to make sweepIng pronouncements from evidence we don't yet understand?

I apologize, a late night migraine is my only excuse and i signed out early due to it but evidently not early enough..

Haven't rocks of nearly 4 billion years been dated from the Earth? If so the idea that deep time is flawed is debunked. The problems with dating methods is that the correct one has to be used in the correct circumstances. C-14 dating is not considered accurate in dating marine organisms due to their carbon not coming directly from the atmosphere. Dinosaur bones cannot be carbon dated because they are too old and don't contain carbon. The tree trunks Ken Ham mentioned that were encased in millions of year old rock but dated a few tens of years old was misdated due to the natural radioactivity of the basalt, radioactivity turns C-12 into C-14 and will give you erroneous readings. These are well known problems and can be compensated for.

Hey Mooeypoo, long time no hear from you, yes my OP was so fatally flawed the thread had kind of drifted around, I think the idea of aliens looking like humans was the point of no return and the prospect of parallel evolution of alien life or even life on this planet... just wondering around like a rat in a maze I guess...

Well then, I guess you are glad i provided a link to that info...

I guess the question is how similar, I say superficially maybe... If the dinosaurs hadn't become extinct you would have neither bats or primates much less humanoids...

Your understanding of black holes is a bit simplistic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole

other animals did indeed take this course, cephalopods comes to mind, squid can very fish like in their movement but extant fish suppress the animals that would compete, take away vertebrates and i just don't think it's likely anything similar would evolve...

There is no distinction between micro and macro evolution except time...

Possibly but Pikaia was the only stem vertebrate in a sea full of arthropods, if it had gone it probably would have been a very long time before that body plan tried to arise again and arthropods would have had complete dominance by then, along with cephalopods using the long thin body shape and in direct competition with any other life form with that shape, the when of evolving can be as important as the form... Even if that is a given when you take away the extinction of the dinosaurs which was a random chance event, you don't get primates much less an animal that looks that much like a human. The idea that something close enough to human to resemble it more than totally superficially is remote in the extreme, even primates is remote...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderful_Life_(book) Actually i think we can say that evolution doesn't repeat it's self, can you show two identical groups that evolved separately? Yes but they don't arise twice, behavior and body plans are not the same thing...

Why did it only evolve once in only one tiny group? Arthropods evolved several times into many diverse groups, only one linage for vertebrates... In the Cambrian explosion many different types of arthropods were extant, but only two vertebrates are known, one of them had compound eyes and didn't go on, one of them was a tiny creature that could easily have gone extinct, if it had there would be no vertebrates, no other line was evolving in that direction that we know of but many external skeleton animals were present. it would have been a simple thing to have a world full of invertebrates but no vertebrates. As i said, internal skeletons might have gone on but vertebrates look like a bad bet... I have to admit i am basing most of my argument on the Book, Wonderful Life by Gould... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderful_Life_(book)

Those traits are found in many complex animals with or with out back bones, you might get animals with internal skeletons but a complex trait like a back bone is not as likely...

But it does refute YEC and if people want their children taught religion they should take them to church. All the available evidence points to a big bang, nothing points to a god...

Once eukaryotes came into existence and then complex animals you might be able to make that assertion with worms and maybe arthropods but vertebrates were on a razors edge for a while after the Cambrian explosion. Even if you assume vertebrates, some vertebrates didn't have a spinal cord, just a stiff rod of cartilage. Something equivalent might have evolved, like huge arthropods but I still say vertebrates were a hit and miss possibility..