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Chuck: Ooh! Pretty birds! Pretty birds with big beaks! Pretty birds with little beaks! Pretty birds with curved beaks! Pretty birds with straight beaks!

Chuck: Therefore, at some point, a bird with no beak gave birth to a bird with a beak.

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And the doctine of 'intelligent design' is the most lazy and pathetic nonsense masquerading for science I have ever heard. 'Irreducable complexity' indeed - the various open riddles of the evolution of life should serve as impetuses to study and learning, not to hand-waving and declaration of divine intercession.

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Originally written by Major:

but we've seen macroevolution happen too.

I'd like you to show me that.

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The only defense left is that we've only seen evolution from bird to another bird or insect to another insect, not from insect to bird.

Have you ever been taught the basics of genes?

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No, it hasn't been proven. I'll try to give a example of how they teach you it has been proven: Look at all the different types of dogs do you see how they change? there's the wolf the fox regular dogs and... This is evolution. And science has proven that they can change. Part 2: evolution takes billions of years to change animals such as dogs to cats and other creatures this is evolution.
Since science has proven evolution creationism is wrong.
Alorael, your post cotained the most twisted truths, messed up facts, and showed more signs of somebody being brainwashed than I have ever seen on this forum so far. (Sorry for having to put it so bluntly.)

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Originally written by Zeviz:

EDIT: To clarify, there is a big difference between "Bible is the literal word of God" and "Bible should be taken literally". God can use metaphors too. So the disagreement here isn't between atheists and religious people, but between different interpretations of the Bible. That's why I think theological arguments could be more effective here than scientific ones.

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Originally written by Major:

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What if I were to rephrase the offending statement as, "Come on you people should be able to distort a distorted theory wherein the stronger force the weaker to use their language."? There's absolutely no religion in there

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Oh, yes there is it's called "Chance".

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Originally written by Kelandon
Well, I'm at least pretty

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Originally written by Kelandon
Well, I'm at least pretty

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Originally written by URL=hotmail.com:
Hot Male[/URL]
Since everyone else has jumped in, I'll just argue about the one part which concerns me.

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Originally written by Major:

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What if I were to rephrase the offending statement as, "Come on you people should be able to distort a distorted theory wherein the stronger force the weaker to use their language."? There's absolutely no religion in there

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Oh, yes there is it's called "Chance".

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You only typed one sentence and I've already found the meaning hard to understand. Are you saying that belief in "chance" as opposed to God is religious? Okay, I can handle that. But the problem is that "chance" has nothing to do with my quoted post. It is not luck or chance that a stronger person can defeat a weaker one. So unless you're seeing things or can show me something in my post that I missed, I'll have to conclude that the idea I tried to communicate in my post was lost on you despite my best intentions.

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Originally written by Dintiradan:

In real life, our flies aren't being bred in a lab; they're struggling to survive. Even the slightest detriment to an organism will cause its type to die out over the thousands of years that evolution proposes as its timeframe.

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Major, are you supporting hard creationism? Not ID? The "world was made 6000 years ago" theory?

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Originally written by Josty:

To Kelandon: a difference between linguistic and biological evolution is the relative importance of network effects in linguistic evolution. If a subgroup of the population makes some changes to its language, the other members may not understand the `new' part of the language. If I decide that from now on I will call a chair `stoel', then that only works if you understand what I mean by `stoel'. This may be less important in biological evolution.

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First, (Dintiradan hit this point) macro evolution is the adding of genes. This is what I disagree with.
Second, micro evolution is the changing of genes. I agree with this.
Third, mutations just take away genes. This, I agree with too.

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Most mutations are neutral. Nachman and Crowell estimate around 3 deleterious mutations out of 175 per generation in humans (2000). Of those that have significant effect, most are harmful, but a significant fraction are beneficial. The harmful mutations do not survive long, and the beneficial mutations survive much longer, so when you consider only surviving mutations, most are beneficial.

Beneficial mutations are commonly observed. They are common enough to be problems in the cases of antibiotic resistance in disease-causing organisms and pesticide resistance in agricultural pests (e.g., Newcomb et al. 1997; these are not merely selection of pre-existing variation.) They can be repeatedly observed in laboratory populations (Wichman et al. 1999). Other examples include the following:
Mutations have given bacteria the ability to degrade nylon (Prijambada et al. 1995).
Plant breeders have used mutation breeding to induce mutations and select the beneficial ones (FAO/IAEA 1977).
Certain mutations in humans confer resistance to AIDS (Dean et al. 1996; Sullivan et al. 2001) or to heart disease (Long 1994; Weisgraber et al. 1983).
A mutation in humans makes bones strong (Boyden et al. 2002).
Transposons are common, especially in plants, and help to provide beneficial diversity (Moffat 2000).
In vitro mutation and selection can be used to evolve substantially improved function of RNA molecules, such as a ribozyme (Wright and Joyce 1997).

Whether a mutation is beneficial or not depends on environment. A mutation that helps the organism in one circumstance could harm it in another. When the environment changes, variations that once were counteradaptive suddenly become favored. Since environments are constantly changing, variation helps populations survive, even if some of those variations do not do as well as others. When beneficial mutations occur in a changed environment, they generally sweep through the population rapidly (Elena et al. 1996).

High mutation rates are advantageous in some environments. Hypermutable strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa are found more commonly in the lungs of cystic fibrosis patients, where antibiotics and other stresses increase selection pressure and variability, than in patients without cystic fibrosis (Oliver et al. 2000).

Note that the existence of any beneficial mutations is a falsification of the young-earth creationism model (Morris 1985, 13).

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It is hard to understand how anyone could make this claim, since anything mutations can do, mutations can undo. Some mutations add information to a genome; some subtract it. Creationists get by with this claim only by leaving the term "information" undefined, impossibly vague, or constantly shifting. By any reasonable definition, increases in information have been observed to evolve. We have observed the evolution of

increased genetic variety in a population (Lenski 1995; Lenski et al. 1991)
increased genetic material (Alves et al. 2001; Brown et al. 1998; Hughes and Friedman 2003; Lynch and Conery 2000; Ohta 2003)
novel genetic material (Knox et al. 1996; Park et al. 1996)
novel genetically-regulated abilities (Prijambada et al. 1995)

If these do not qualify as information, then nothing about information is relevant to evolution in the first place.

A mechanism that is likely to be particularly common for adding information is gene duplication, in which a long stretch of DNA is copied, followed by point mutations that change one or both of the copies. Genetic sequencing has revealed several instances in which this is likely the origin of some proteins. For example:
Two enzymes in the histidine biosynthesis pathway that are barrel-shaped, structural and sequence evidence suggests, were formed via gene duplication and fusion of two half-barrel ancestors (Lang et al. 2000).
RNASE1, a gene for a pancreatic enzyme, was duplicated, and in langur monkeys one of the copies mutated into RNASE1B, which works better in the more acidic small intestine of the langur. (Zhang et al. 2002)
Yeast was put in a medium with very little sugar. After 450 generations, hexose transport genes had duplicated several times, and some of the duplicated versions had mutated further. (Brown et al. 1998)
The biological literature is full of additional examples. A PubMed search (at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi) on "gene duplication" gives more than 3000 references.

According to Shannon-Weaver information theory, random noise maximizes information. This is not just playing word games. The random variation that mutations add to populations is the variation on which selection acts. Mutation alone will not cause adaptive evolution, but by eliminating nonadaptive variation, natural selection communicates information about the environment to the organism so that the organism becomes better adapted to it. Natural selection is the process by which information about the environment is transferred to an organism's genome and thus to the organism (Adami et al. 2000).

The process of mutation and selection is observed to increase information and complexity in simulations (Adami et al. 2000; Schneider 2000).

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Originally written by Major:

Yes, but, not 6,000 years ago more like 8,000-15,000 years ago.

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