JW scientist banned from Institute's WebSite because of Creationistic Views (page 16)

Realist

thichi,

Your and Realist’s reply? Insults, and intellectually dishonest tactics and fallacies based on a hidden agenda.

i merely stated facts...its not my fault if you view them as insults (by the way....although your stubbornness is brainwrecking i truly enjoy our discussions on all topics! )

I have demmonstrated that even your Icons are more intellectually honest than you. An example:

"The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution." (Stephen J. Gould (Professor of Geology and Paleontology, Harvard University), 'Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?' Paleobiology, vol 6(1), January 1980, pg 127)

sorry, you simply didn'T understand what he is saying...he is not questioning evolution but emphasizes his point that in many cases quick changes occured.

I do know this as a fact, from a purely mathematically based perspective, if life does not qualify as a miracle, I do not know what does.

ok thats one last gem...just for your info...mathematically it is IMPOSSIBLE to calculate probabilities as long as the mechanisms involved in a certain process are not exactly described.

ThiChi

Realist:

Wow, you got to be kidding, right? Words mean things.

Here is your claim:

Reliest:

Here is a good example you are not in the real world:

"The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution." (Stephen J. Gould (Professor of Geology and Paleontology, Harvard University), 'Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?' Paleobiology, vol 6(1), January 1980, pg 127)

sorry, you simply didn'T understand what he is saying...he is not questioning evolution but emphasizes his point that in many cases quick changes occured.""

Please show where I said he was questioning Evolution? In fact, I stated He was a stanch Evolutionist. You not comprehending the points made that is so frustrating.

My only claim is that questions remain, and "nagging problem(s)" that need to be addressed remain. The Theory is not 100% solid. My claim.

You can infer all you want, but you are still wrong.

Excuse me, I have to get bact to the Islam thread to blast another false claim you made away!

Realist

thichi,

just as i said before ...there is an debate about certain aspects of evolution (the exact mechanism) NOT whether evolution is real or not (just like gravity is real although there is an debate about the exact way it works).

also maybe i misunderstood you....but i had the impression you were posting paragraphs to show that evolution as a whole is in question. sorry if i misunderstood your intentions!

ThiChi

""mathematically it is IMPOSSIBLE to calculate probabilities as long as the mechanisms involved in a certain process are not exactly described...."

Wow! Using your standards, most of your claims would be blown away! Thanks!

You are right the Math is mind Boggling:

We now know that the information content of one cell would fill about a hundred million pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Even a simple bacterial cell has thousands of different proteins, and each protein is structured on hundreds of amino acids, which must be in precise sequence. The proteins are run by the genetic code, which is far more complex than the codes for Windows 98. And cells have translation devices which translate the code.

The probability that all the items a cell requires might come about by chance has been estimated to be about one in 10 the power of 340 million--a number which is really beyond our comprehension. And suppose you did get a cell by random processes in the ancient ocean. One presumes that this first little cell would have been rather fragile and short-lived. Yet within the span of its single lifetime, it must have evolved the complete process of cellular reproduction--otherwise there never would have been another cell.

rem

ThiChi,

My only claim is that questions remain, and "nagging problem(s)" that need to be addressed remain. The Theory is not 100% solid. My claim.

No scientific theory has ever been, nor ever will be 100% solid! But that doesn't mean they are false, it just means we don't understand every detail. Relativity, QM, Germ Theory... it's all the same.

Why would you put your trust in non-falsifiable alternatives that aren't even scientific theories just because certain technicalities are being debated in the current theory? This is not rational behavior! This is evidence that your religious beliefs are overpowering your reasoning abilities.

If there were another theory that came close to the explanitory power of Evolution and made as many correct predictions as modern theories of evolution, you might have a point. Right now you don't. Relying on research from a Hindu Fundamentalist non-scientist who used tabloid magazines as a source (remember the Weekly World News?) doesn't do much to further your cause either.

You are way out of your league here. It's ok, I probably am too. But at least I understand the basics! Start from the bottom and learn the fundamentals of science, scientific method, and biology before you get overly ambitious. As has been shown time and again you have taken so many quotes out of context that there is no question that you have no idea of what you are arguing.

It would be like me arguing about engineering bridges. I don't know the first thing about it and I'd look pretty silly arguing the merits of a cantelever bridge over a suspension bridge. I could probably pull some web pages down to back my point, but people who actually know things about bridges would have no problem seeing right through me. They'd probably not take my arguments seriously because I hadn't taken the time to even learn the fundamentals of bridge building which probably isn't as simple as it sounds. Think about that and how it applies to you and how your 'arguments' are received on this thread (or any thread about evolution for that matter).

rem

ThiChi

REM:

I respect your rational, non-condescending reply. I agree. However, some in the field raise good points to explore.

Rem, honestly, I’m I that off base? I am open to constructive criticism

Let me give you a humble example and explain to me my unreasonableness:

The fossil record. Animals appear complete in it, without ancestral forms, which is excellent evidence for creation. Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, wrote a few years ago: ""Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. As a paleontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. . . . I will lay it on the line--there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.""

In recent years, some evolutionary paleontologists have begun to more strongly assert the existence of transitionals. But I think this reflects more of a reaction to the rise of creation science than to any significant change in the fossil record. Because 99 percent of the biology of an organism is in its soft anatomy, a fossil is easy to invest with subjective opinions. It is easy for the evolutionist to take a fossil of an extinct creature, and call it an ancestral form, because there is usually no way to test the claim. However, fossils such as the Piltdown Man, the Archaeoraptor and the coelacanth have shown how easily preconceived ideas can lead to fossil errors.

Is my thinking that off base? Am I a moron who has no business even thinking this way?

rem

ThiChi,

This is a great example that shows how just a little bit of knowledge on a complex subject can be dangerous. Yes, the quote you gave is correct - in context. The quote is talking about transitions between living kingdoms (animalia, fungi, plantae, etc.) not species or even phyla. This is what he means by 'ancestral forms'. This is important to understand because there are a huge number of transitional fossils within the kingdoms and phyla.

The problem is that during the "Cambrian Explosion" (which spanned millions of years) when we first see these kingdoms show up, they seem to be fully formed with no ancestors. There are some good reasons why this would be so - there really are transitionals, but they did not have as many hard parts, so they did not fossilize as easily. Also, many of the transitionals were microscopic. I believe many of these pre-cambrian fossils have now been located, even though they are extremely rare.

Seeing that this concern only has to do with ancient forms that are hundreds of millions of years old and does not have to do with the many documented transitionals between species and phyla in the fossil record, I don't personally see it as any type of evidence against evolution. The fact that creationists try to use issues such as this to cast doubt on Evolution makes my confidence in the theory even stronger, since they have to resort to strawmen tactics like these.

rem