A few things:

This has nothing to do with death. During any painful interaction, your body releases these "stored endorphins" into the synaptic gap in order to lessen the pain. Hell, during sex... your body releases "stored endorphins." It has nothing to do with the death, but the pain preceeding the death. Patients who died in their sleep habe no noticable increase of neurotransmitters in the brain at the time of death. It's a defense mechanism for pain/increased pleasure -- not Divine "I want you to feel good on the way to Heaven.."

This really has nothing to do with evolution at all, but the ORIGIN of life -- something we'll all admit is relatively unprovable.

They didn't have the cognitive, social, or economic abilities that we do? Can you imagine building a space ship big enough to hold 8 T-Rexes? That's a big fucking flight suit, too.

In our Solar System? 'cuz. There's trillions of planets in the Universe who could be just as likely to be the same distance.

You got me here, I dunno how or why we became sexual instead of asexual. I don't know enough about it. If there is a God, this is one thing I'm thankful for.

This is a question more suited for an anthropologist, but I believe this is natural selection as well. The homo-series that had more efficient lungs could more effectively catch fish, and therefore lived to reproduce.

Two similar organisms? You know.. like a eagle and a falcon? Those fossils in SA (as far as I know) are much older and have an entirely different bone structures than our ancestors who crossed the Bering Strait.

How do you know they didn't? no human made artifact or building or whatever would survive 64 mio. years. (exeption may be the moon landers, but the could also be hit be Asteroid) ;)

We have found 156 Extrasolar planets so far (May 2005). There are more to come and ou methodes to detect them will be better. Soon we will be able to detect earth sized planets as well. So why do you think there is only one? We are just at the very beginning.

The going theory (last I read) involves research that points to the Black Sea having been much smaller and not connected to the Mediterranian Sea, and when the Ice Age ended the oceans had raised in level enough and broken away the land barrier to the Black Sea. This would have caused a huge raise in water level and enlarged the Black Sea, which was likely surrounded by coastal populations who had to ditch. They ditched in all directions, leading to the tales of "The Great Flood" being spread all over.


And in answer to Bill O'Rights question: http://www.snopes.com/lost/fraction.htm
I know it's unfair to lump all southern states together, but the common thread of degrading the knowledge that's passed on to children in school sticks out.

Intelligent design isn't mentioned anywhere in the bible.

The ancient Egyptians would see the sun rise and set every morning without fail and would notice the life giving properties of the light frm the sun, 'that's clever' they thought it can't be an accident - there must be something behind that and so Ra the god of the sun who journeyed through the sky in his golden chariot every day was born.
Years ahead we have developed rational, measurable explanations for the suns daily rise and fall and the idea of a sun-god is no longer plausible. Yet people are still looking around thinking: this whole creation of life business 'that's clever' it can't be an accident - there must be something behind it and so intelligent design the creator of life who journeyed through the sky in his golden chariot every day was born.

This is the best reply to ID I have ever seen....thanx

The argument against ID in science is simple. Science is the study of the natural world. Science is not the study of the supernatural. ID is an assertion about the supernatural. Therefore it is not science.

You can discuss it all you want in a public school religion or myths class. But it is not science, so it is completely inappropriate for science classes.

I've always had a problem with the first premise of ID, that we are just "too complicated" to be existant without design. To me, it seems to be a very egotistical view to think that you're-so-goddamned-perfect that you must have been Designed by a higher power. Well, I was watching Animal Planet today, and it made me think back to this thread.

If we're so "Perfect" that it must be design by a higher power, then why are we missing so many features that other animals have? Did he not think about these powers when he designed us? They'd be pretty handy to have.. or wait -- could it simply be that evolution only "naturally selected" for us the things that were absolutely critical to our survival?

The show I watched on Animal Planet was about the Hammerhead Shark and how it searches for its prey. It was a study between the Hammerhead and another shark who have identical features, minus the huge hammer. In explaining the value of the hammer, they showed the tiny little pores on the front side of the hammer. The pores were actually little electrical sensors, capable of picking up electrical and magnetic fields generated by living organisms. They're sensitive up to NANOwatts, which would be enough that they could literally "sense" the electricity flowing through our brain. If we're so perfect, why do we only have 5 senses? Sharks have 7. Damn, we must have been designed by a pretty dumb Designer.

Later I was watching a show on Birds of Prey, and they mounted an optical camera to a Peregine Falcon. The PF is a really neat bird, and I actually attended a day long seminar on them when I was a little kid. They're capable of 200 + mph dives. Well, in this video.. the camera mounted to the falcon was barely able to keep up in a series of dives the falcon made at a predetermined target. They had video of the falcon taking out another smaller bird at 140+, just grabbing them right outta the air. The most impressive was a dive at about 180 mph, straight at the target. At about 10 or 20 feet off the ground, the falcon "pulled up" at 10 Gs, grabbing the target and soaring back up into the sky within seconds. The second run, the falcon overshot the target and did a split-second barrel roll at 150 to keep the target in sight. Now then -- if we're so perfect, why can the average person only take 5 G's of acceleration? Couldn't our blood-pumping system be more efficient?

Now I understand the argument that we're not fish and we're not birds, so we inherently don't need those abilities. But if we're so "perfect," as ID purports -- why do we not have better ancillary abilities? Like the ability to breath longer underwater? Throughout man's lifetime we've had water, and there have been millions upon millions of drownings over the ages. If the all-powerful creator knew this would happen, why didn't he endow us with 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 minutes of air for underwater navigation? Why only give the one or two minutes (average) that we have now?

Please. This has nothing to do with a so-called "liberal agenda of constantly attacking christianity". Please remove your tin foil conspiracy protecting hat.

This is simply an attempt to keep public schools secular, as they should be.

ID, as has been pointed out, does not automatically point to GOD. No one says, GOD but really... let's be honest here. That's the only reason it has the support of so many in the camp that wants to see more religion in schools.

Again, I am fine with religion, ID, etc. in a philosphy class but it really has no place in a science class.


I can agree, however, that we do not know where life sprang from. Most scientists will list a litany of ideas as to where life came from and will even give a wink and a nod to some "higher form of life" being responsible for this... This only becomes an issue when it is the ONLY answer to this question.

Here's a great political cartoon on this subject by The Philadelphia Enquirer's Tony Auth:
http://www.ucomics.com/tonyauth/2005/08/04/

It's a great cartoon. Here it is:

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/ta/2005/ta050804.gif


In other words, if science includes the supernatural, then ID is just the beginning.

I, for one, want functional wings, a protective exoskeleton, and razor-sharp teeth and claws. Sort of like a cross between a Bengal tiger, an armadillo, and a duck. :lol:

As for ID/creationism, I think it belongs in the church. A place for everything, and everything in its place, so to speak. You don't hear scientists clamoring for equal time in the pulpit, and in Sunday school. That's because they understand evolution has no place in the church. Why can't the church understand creationism has no place in a science class?

Here, here!!!

BTW, I wish Creationists would quit insisting that their beliefs are self-evident. It’s just as self-evident that the sun revolves around the earth.

Religion is important. Science is important. When they converge, there is danger in confusing one for the other. This confusion breaks down what each important subject represents. If we lose science or religion, we will have lost something extremly important.

That's about as simple as I can put it.

And to add to that:


To keep them from converging, it is proper that we acknowledge that there is a time and place to teach each one. School is the place to teach science. Church is the place to teach religion.

This whole debate is an extension of the "get church into the schools" movement. Whether it's posting the 10 commandments in the halls, teaching intelligent design, or anything else the religious sector wants to do, it all boils down to the same thing - they want the schools to teach what the church should be teaching.

If you believe God created the earth in 7 days and then planted all those fossils to test us, that's your perogative. If you want your kids to believe that, teach it to them. If you want a higher authority than you to teach it, turn to your church. If they're not doing a good enough job, the correct action is not to expect the schools to do it for the church, but to work to make sure your church does the job right in the first place.

If you want to raise your kid to hold to ancient beliefs even when faced with mountains of evidence that they may not be correct, that is your perogative, but you do not have the right to force my kid to listen to it too.

A-HA
The best argument, yet, against Intelligent Design.
Teenage girls.
Noone with any kind of intelligence would design such a being to contain so many hormones, in such a small container.
It's instant attitude in a can. Just add oxygen and sit back and watch the fun.

Teenage girls? How about teenage boys? Geez!!!
BTW, no one can truly appreciate teenagers until they've raised some of their own--holy crap!

The best argument against ID just has to be the human body itself; or for that matter any living creature. Ever studied anatomy? What a fiasco! No intelligent person would ever design such a thing that way on purpose.

It's easy to attack creationism. Let's just be honest. It's not just full of holes, it practically is a hole.

There is a reason evolutionists fight creationists so hard. We've fought for more than a century against creationists. We saw the creationists as fools who believed that the earth was made in 4004 B.C. during six literal 24 hour days; that fossils, if they had any validity at all, were remnants of Noah's flood. They say that a deceptive God created the universe with starlight already on it's way (giving the illusion of great distances).

To allow for the possibility of any guiding intelligence would open the floodgates. Well, maybe it's time to take a peek out of the flood gates, if just for a moment.

When Darwain first proposed his brilliant theory, scientists assumed the fossil record would bear it out. We should be ablee to see the gradual progression from form to form, with slow changes accumulating over time untila new species emerged. But as most scientists know, thereality is that the fossil record DOES NOT show that. Ohj, there are transitional forms - take ichthyostega, which seems intermediate between fish and amphibians, or caudipteryx the median between dionsaur and bird, even the australopithecus 'ape/man'. The problem is that these are not gradual changes. These are not accumulations of tiny mutations over time. Sharks have been sharks for almost 400 million years, turtles have been turtles for 200 million years, and snakes have been snakes for 800 million years. In fact the fossil ecord is mostly lacking in gradual steps. The only good vertebrate sequence we have is that of a horse (which is why most museums have displays of equine evolution).

Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge responded to such claims, putting fourth a theory of punctuated equilibria (or 'punky-E', as it's sometimes called). Speciaes are stable for long periods of time, and then sudddenly, when environmental conditions change, they rapidly evolve into new forms! The problem is that punky-E states that environments stay the same for extended periods of time, which is absurd. When I lived in St. Louis I enjoyed 20 degree temperatures with snow almost hip deep. Fast forward to 6 months later and the temperature is breaking 100 and the humidity is making it impossible to dry off after a shower.

Of course, evolutionists keep on going. We tried to incorporate punky-E into our understanding of evolution in order for everything to still make sense. We longed for the sense that it all made when someone originally explained it to us. "It all makes so much sense!" we'd say to ourselves. We were even condescending to people who asked about missingh links. Of course this isn't the first time we've been smug...

I remember my grandfather (the inspiration of my early evolutionism) telling me about when Harold Urey and Stanly Miller created amino acids by putting an electric discharge through a primordial soup (what they thought, then, Earth's early atmosphere might have been like). We were half way to creating life in a jar. This was the triumph of evolutionary theory! If we zap the soup just rright, real self-replicating organsms might just appear.

Except we never did. We STILL don't know how to go from amino acids to self replication.

When I look under an electron microscope at things like cilia that turn out to be extremly complex, Darwin must be turning in his grave. The single-step evolution theory can't account for cilia.

We ignored the biochemical argument, too. We all hear about the cascade sequence that causes blood to clot, or the complexity of the human eye, or the ATP driven system of cellular metabolism.


My point?> creationism isn't fact or law. There are big wide gaps all over the theory. Evolution isn't fact or law. There are big wide gaps in the theory.

Newton's seventeenth-century laws of physics are mostly correct; you can use them to reliabally predict all sorts of things. We didn't disgard them; rather, in the 20th century, we subsumed them into a new, more comprehensive physics, a physics of relativity and quantum mechanics. Evolution is a 19th century notion, outlined in the famous "On the Orgin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life". But the more we learn, the more natural selection seems inadequate on its own as a mechanism for the creation of a new species; even our best attempts at artificial, intelligently guided selection apparently aren't up to the task-all dogs are still canis familiaris.

And now at the start of the 21st century surtely it's not unreasonable to think that it's POSSIBLE that Darwin's ideas, like Newtons, can be subsumed into a greater whole, a more comprehensive understanding?

look at the homo tree... you call the differences between the different species in that tree major? htere may be ancestors still missing, but there aren't any major jumps between species. and we've got fossils of animals that look like snakes but have legs, etc. a lot of your argument here isn't factually correct. there are some 'jumps' in the fossil record that do seem to use puncutated equilibrium, and even if that is incorrect that doesn't mean 'god did it!'. turtles, sharks and snakes haven't evolved much at all in a long time because they haven't had a need to.

hmm... lets see... in a one year time span, how many generations do you spawn? normally zero. occasionally one (unless you get lucky and have twins or triplets, etc). you're not going to have any mutations in that time and you're not going to pass them on because you're not reproducing. but when there's a sudden climate shift, like from a quick onset of an ice age, a normally warm or moderate area becomes super cold real quick, the animals have to evolve in a very quick time span relative to the norm because if they don't they'll die out. also, there is something that animals do during the normal year that you're talking about... it's kinda crazy... migration.

pot meet kettle. puncutated equilibrium makes a lot of sense if you take the time to learn about it.

the time it took for the primordial ooze to go from just lots of elements and a gaseous atmosphere to amino acids to the first self-replicating amino acids or whatever to cellular organisms was something like 3 billion years of random interactions. and you're complaining that we haven't replicated that in 50 years?

read 'the blind watchmaker' for a start. and do some googling for info about cilia evolution and cascades. there are good theories out there that you seem to be discounting. based on the rest of your post, i have to assume it's due to a mis- or lack of understanding of the topics.


creationism isn't a theory. it's a myth. it's not that there are holes in it as a 'theory' but that the 'theory' is a hole. a big black hole full of nothingness. evolution is a theory, and a fact in the same that gravity is a theory and a fact. yes, there are holes, but few of them are 'wide gaps' and people are actively trying to expand our knowledge about evolution to close those gaps. hell, punctuated equilibrium is one such theory (so far backed up by increased knowledge of the fossil record) and you decide to criticize it. i guess adding ideas to try to explain facts just doesn't cut it for you, eh?

again, punc. e. i just doing what we did with newtons. modifying the theory to include new information. in newtons case it was that his was encompassed by a new theory. in evolutions case it adds information into it. i don't really understadn your 'favoured races' thing. are you perpetuating the lie that darwin was racist? or are you misconstruing evolution to say that it deals with races? it doesn't, it deals with species, and white or black or yellow or pink with purple polka dots we're all human.

it's completely possibe for evolution to be subsumed into a greater understanding, but unlike ID or creationism, newton was subsumed by <b>science</b> whereas you're asking us to invoke the <b>supernatural (aka not science)</b> and include evo into that.


/i should be in bed.

I'll admit it: it's really hard to play devil's advocate, espically if you don't agree with your own argument. No one was playing devils advocate here, so the conversation seemed to be going nowhere. I thought I'd shoot out some of the common arguments. Did anyuone notice I said 'we' when referring to evolutionists? That suggests that I am, in fact, an evolutionist. I've read and reread The Blind Watchmaker. Good read, if a bit harsh. A lot of it makes good sense. Maybe someone can do a better job than I did trying to defend ID or creationism (or puting evolutionism under the microscope, no pun intended).