Originally Posted by jimeigh are you talkin' Intelligent Design, or are you personifying Natural Selection? Since natural selection can only select from what's availble, its power over design is quite limited. Only an intelligent creator can design a complex organism. Cars did not evolve from the sides of iron-rich mountains. ...
10-04-2007, 12:46 PM
| #41 | ||||
| Deuteronomy 32:41  Paleolibertarian USA 
| Originally Posted by jimeigh Since natural selection can only select from what's availble, its power over design is quite limited.
Only an intelligent creator can design a complex organism. Cars did not evolve from the sides of iron-rich mountains. People did not evolve from carbon-rich goo ponds.
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10-04-2007, 02:44 PM
| #42 | ||||
| laissez-faire  Capitalist
| Originally Posted by AVengeance oh boy.
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10-04-2007, 04:19 PM
| #43 | ||||
| Member  Liberal
| Originally Posted by AVengeance Some dinosaurs did have "scales", we have impressions of their skin in the fossil record. It is rare to find, but we have them. We have good evidence to suggest that they were lizard skinned. The big debate is over if they were cold blooded, warm blooded, or a mix of the two.
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10-04-2007, 04:35 PM
| #44 | ||||
| Member Liberal
| Originally Posted by AVengeance You ever hear of Archaeopteryx? Sinosauropteryx? Shuvuuia? Caudipteryx? Dilong? Jinfengopteryx? Scansoriopteryx?
That's just to name a few, there are many others.
 Pterosaurs (your triassic flying "birds") were not dinosaurs, they belong to a different clade. We know that dinosaurs are more closely related to aves due to their homologous anatomy. Just because something else was flying around back then doesn't mean that they evolved into birds. Analogous anatomy =! evolutionary ancestor. (as you supported via your bat v. bird comparison) By the way, there is no fossil evidence that I know of that suggests that Pterosaurs ever had feathers.
Of course I could be missing something. Care to give me the names of these "birds?" Last edited by Dylith; 10-04-2007 at 04:41 PM. | ||||
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10-04-2007, 07:13 PM
| #45 | ||||
| General Asshole Moderate
| So what kind of scientist are you AVengeance? | ||||
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10-04-2007, 07:43 PM
| #46 | ||||
| laissez-faire Capitalist
| Originally Posted by Grouch ibpseudoscientist
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10-07-2007, 05:46 PM
| #47 | ||||
| General Asshole Moderate
| Originally Posted by jimeigh
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10-08-2007, 10:58 AM
| #48 | ||||
| Deuteronomy 32:41 Paleolibertarian USA
| Originally Posted by Grouch Make your question clearer. Are you asking if I wear a lab coat, spending my time mixing blue water and green water and making yellow water?
Because the answer would be NO. I work in the real world. I work with chemistry, physics, electronics, computer sciences, and more. My "day job" consists of developing, coding, and implimenting web services and client-side computer programs. I also build and maintain server systems. As a hobby / part-time job, I also design and prototype parts for race cars. I have a keen grasp on the scientific method and its practical application. In addition, working with computer programs, it is easy to see how difficult it is to make something work right, and how easy it is for one "mutation" (error in the code) to just fuck up the whole thing. Biologists have demonstrated this. What biologists have not done, nor will be able to do, is prove macroevolution can take place. I get paid for being scientific (not religious). What do you get paid for, jimeigh ? And then try this experiment at home. Get some Lego blocks. Then pretend YOU are the forces of nature. You can select any blocks you like. Big ones, little ones, red ones and blue ones. You can put them together, take them apart. You can leave some out, and organize them in groups by similarity. You can put them in boxes and shake them. That's "natural selection" at work. Let me know when you come up with marbles. Last edited by AVengeance; 10-08-2007 at 11:08 AM. | ||||
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10-08-2007, 11:18 AM
| #49 | ||||
| Deuteronomy 32:41 Paleolibertarian USA
| Originally Posted by Dylith Do you believe that ontogeny or homology recapitulates phylogeny?
Because you don't "know" that dinos are more closely related (in the tree of evolution) to birds. They could have come from completely different evolutionary branches, couldn't they have? Think of how many times over the eye or the stomach (as we define them by function) have independently evolved to what we see in living things today. Similarity does not equal causality. I realize that scientists used to preach that evolution was a tree. I believed it. In this tree, you have the trunk, the very first proto-organisms. Then you have sea creatures, and then you have monkeys, and then you have people. It is not necessary for the older branch to die for the newer branch to sprout, although it sometimes happens when one loses in competition to the other, more "advanced" organism. The thing is, I started looking back down the tree. I thought that it must be possible (easy, even) to put things in this tree so that you can see how it all started, recreate something similar, and observe it evolve. In fact, I have seen simplified versions of this "tree" with various creatures on the branches, in numerous science texts as I went through school. Why not create the whole tree, on a computer, just like a family tree. I realized that there's no way to figure out which of many things came first, and that organs like eyes and skin must have developed, somehow the exact same way, numerous different times in different aeons. It is mathematically impossible for such things to happen once. To say that they happened numerous times, it is quickly understood why they keep changing the age of the Earth. They HAVE TO, to keep the math out of "impossible" and in the realm of "highly improbable". Last edited by AVengeance; 10-08-2007 at 11:26 AM. | ||||
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10-08-2007, 01:55 PM
| #50 | ||||
| General Asshole Moderate
| Originally Posted by AVengeance The short of it is that you are in no way a scientist any more than anyone that works in any semi technical field.
Try again sir. And stop pretending to have credentials that you haven't earned. Evolution is too much for you.  | ||||
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10-08-2007, 02:01 PM
| #51 | ||||
| General Asshole Moderate
| I would love it Av, if you could please prove this wrong. Mr. Science man. The Short Proof of Evolution We live, we are constantly told, in a scientific age. We look to science to help us achieve the good life, to solve our problems (especially our medical aches and pains), and to tell us about the world. A great deal of our education system, particularly the post-secondary curriculum, is organized as science or social science. And yet, curiously enough, there is one major scientific truth which vast numbers of people refuse to accept (by some news accounts a majority of people in North America)--the fact of evolution. Yet it is as plain as plain can be that the scientific truth of evolution is so overwhelmingly established, that it is virtually impossible to refute within the bounds of reason. No major scientific truth, in fact, is easier to present, explain, and defend. Before demonstrating this claim, let me make it clear what I mean by evolution, since there often is some confusion about the term. By evolution I mean, very simply, the development of animal and plant species out of other species not at all like them, for example, the process by which, say, a species of fish gets transformed (or evolves) through various stages into a cow, a kangaroo, or an eagle. This definition, it should be noted, makes no claims about how the process might occur, and thus it certainly does not equate the concept of evolution with Darwinian Natural Selection, as so many people seem to do. It simply defines the term by its effects (not by how those effects are produced, which could well be the subject of another argument). The first step in demonstrating the truth of evolution is to make the claim that all living creatures must have a living parent. This point has been overwhelmingly established in the past century and a half, ever since the French scientist Louis Pasteur demonstrated how fermentation took place and thus laid to rest centuries of stories about beetles arising spontaneously out of dung or gut worms being miraculously produced from non-living material. There is absolutely no evidence for this ancient belief. Living creatures must come from other living creatures. It does no damage to this point to claim that life must have had some origin way back in time, perhaps in a chemical reaction of inorganic materials (in some primordial soup) or in some invasion from outer space. That may well be true. But what is clear is that any such origin for living things or living material must result in a very simple organism. There is no evidence whatsoever (except in science fiction like Frankenstein) that inorganic chemical processes can produce complex, multi-cellular living creatures (the recent experiments cloning sheep, of course, are based on living tissue from other sheep). The second important point in the case for evolution is that some living creatures are very different from some others. This, I take it, is self-evident. Let me cite a common example: many animals have what we call an internal skeletal structure featuring a backbone and skull. We call these animals vertebrates. Most animals do not have these features (we call them invertebrates). The distinction between vertebrates and invertebrates is something no one who cares to look at samples of both can reasonably deny, and, so far as I am aware, no one hostile to evolution has ever denied a fact so apparent to anyone who observes the world for a few moments. The final point in the case for evolution is this: simple animals and plants existed on earth long before more complex ones (invertebrate animals, for example, were around for a very long time before there were any vertebrates). Here again, the evidence from fossils is overwhelming. In the deepest rock layers, there are no signs of life. The first fossil remains are of very simple living things. As the strata get more recent, the variety and complexity of life increase (although not at a uniform rate). And no human fossils have ever been found except in the most superficial layers of the earth (e.g., battlefields, graveyards, flood deposits, and so on). In all the countless geological excavations and inspections (for example, of the Grand Canyon), no one has ever come up with a genuine fossil remnant which goes against this general principle (and it would only take one genuine find to overturn this principle). Well, if we put these three points together, the rational case for evolution is air tight. If all living creatures must have a living parent, if living creatures are different, and if simpler forms were around before the more complex forms, then the more complex forms must have come from the simpler forms (e.g., vertebrates from invertebrates). There is simply no other way of dealing reasonably with the evidence we have. Of course, one might deny (as some do) that the layers of the earth represent a succession of very lengthy epochs and claim, for example, that the Grand Canyon was created in a matter of days, but this surely violates scientific observation and all known scientific processes as much as does the claim that, say, vertebrates just, well, appeared one day out of a spontaneous combination of chemicals. To make the claim for the scientific truth of evolution in this way is to assert nothing about how it might occur. Darwin provides one answer (through natural selection), but others have been suggested, too (including some which see a divine agency at work in the transforming process). The above argument is intended, however, to demonstrate that the general principle of evolution is, given the scientific evidence, logically unassailable and that, thus, the concept is a law of nature as truly established as is, say, gravitation. That scientific certainty makes the widespread rejection of evolution in our modern age something of a puzzle (but that's a subject for another essay). In a modern liberal democracy, of course, one is perfectly free to reject that conclusion, but one is not legitimately able to claim that such a rejection is a reasonable scientific stance. | ||||
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10-08-2007, 03:06 PM
| #52 | ||||
| Deuteronomy 32:41 Paleolibertarian USA
| Allthatshitbyyou None of that is "proof" or even "evidence" of anything. Just meandering philosophy. Attacking my credentials (did I call myself Dr. Avengeance somewhere?) does not make your worldview more valid. Actually, Dr. Avengeance sounds cool. I'm gonna hook up with one of them Internet Colleges and get my doctorate now. | ||||
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10-08-2007, 03:17 PM
| #53 | ||||
| Dirty Liberal  Democrat South Jersey
| Originally Posted by AVengeance That is a completly irrational conclusion. You basicaly revert back to the dawn of humanity and anything that you can not explain you attribute to a god.
Your reasoning is that because you don't understand it, it must be god is the polar opposite of the scientific method. It is no more valid, from a rational standpoint than if I were to posit that a magical unicorn created the universe. You can not make such claims and then call it science. It's not science, it's religion. | ||||
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10-08-2007, 03:37 PM
| #54 | ||||
| General Asshole Moderate
| Originally Posted by AVengeance Meandering philosophy?
 There is no philosophy there, you didn't even read it did you? Afraid it's going to kill your world view?  If you're to much of a coward to even make an attempt to disspove evolution, as I just posted a very short and clear proof of it, or make the claim that evolution doesn't happen, or that only micro evolution happens; without a single ounce of substance to support this claim. Then get the fuck out of the forum, you're just wasting our time with your unscientific nonsense. You claimed to be a scientist. You've admitted to not being one now. Own up to the fact you pretended to be something you don't have the credentials to be. Working in IT does not make you a scientist. Sorry bud, try again. | ||||
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10-08-2007, 03:41 PM
| #55 | ||||
| General Asshole Moderate
| I just realized that the 5 years of subwoofer building nukegoat and I did qualifies us to be scientists too. | ||||
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10-09-2007, 08:58 AM
| #56 | ||||
| Member Liberal
| Originally Posted by AVengeance Why not both? But when we look at these fossils that are many millions of years apart, homology is one of the things that we use. Don't think that scientists just look at a bird and then look at a dinosaur and go "hey this body part looks similar they must have evolved from one another!"
That is silly, I listed some intermediary forms for you and would gladly list more if you need them. We don't just have the complete forms of both sides to compare to, but many intermediary fossils as well. You didn't even coment on them by the way.
So tell me, what evolution do you believe in? Do you disbelieve in all macro-evolution? Were Humans always humans to you? How do you take into account vestigial parts? Did God give whales a pelvice just for shits and giggles? Did he give us a Vomeronasal Organ and a Subclavius Muscle just for kicks? If God designed me he really screwed up, and I would like to have a few words with him regarding his engineering abilities. By the way, you never gave me the names of your triassic "birds." | ||||
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10-09-2007, 09:12 AM
| #57 | ||||
| Deuteronomy 32:41 Paleolibertarian USA
| Originally Posted by WickedLou9 We see evidence of intelligent designers creating things all the time. What we do not see is naturalistic forces creating such complex things. One is observed, the other is fantasy. You fantasize that naturalistic processes can create DNA, yet we have not observed anything NEARLY that complex being created in such a way.
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10-09-2007, 09:21 AM
| #58 | ||||
| Deuteronomy 32:41 Paleolibertarian USA
| Originally Posted by Dylith I've had this "vestigal" argument before. It was once believed that the human appendix was "vestigal". We now know it protects the intestines from infection and secretes antibodies. It's absence increases the risk of Hodgkin's, leukemia, and various cancers. It is not "vestigal"... or is it? So, evolutionists, realizing they NEEDED vestigal organs to continue to provide "proof" of evolution, changed the definition. So now, vestigal doesn't mean useless anymore. It just means whatever they want it to mean, and they call whatever organs they want to call, vestigal. This way, they can look at two different organs providing two different functions, but in similar locations, and call one an evolution of the other. Look, this one's the "real" organ, and this one's "vestigal". What a bunch of bullshit.
I would talk about the whale "pelvic bones" being necessary for reproduction (might want to get a newer biology book if you think those bones are not useful) but then someone would chime in "vestigal != useless". You can live with only one lung. Is the other vestigal? Think your tailbone is just an unnecessary remnant of a monkey tail? Have it removed, and let me know how much you're enjoying life. Tonsils? Sure, you can live without them. Vestigal? Nope. The list goes on and on. Point? We're always learning more about the way living creatures work. That's a good thing! I don't look at something and get satisfied with the answer "God did it". I could never think through the complex processes of data management and manipulation if I depended on GOD to remove duplicates from a database. The more we learn about structure and function of living organisms, the more we learn how intertwined, complex, perfectly balanced things are. Last edited by AVengeance; 10-09-2007 at 09:28 AM. | ||||
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