http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/6187320/Snake-with-foot-found-in-China.html
Interesting. A snake that has a 'foot' (or hand or claw, depending how you might classify such things) growing out of its side.
Does this confirm, or deny, the theory of evolution?
On one hand it confirms it, since we can see a change in a life form from one generation to the next. (whether it can be passed on to another generation will probably have to wait for a full autopsy - and if it actually goes into the genome)
On the other hand, nearly all of these anomalies are very short lived and do not reproduce much (if at all). More common for snakes is to be born with two heads, which tend bite each other to death.
I wonder, with the amount of time we humans have had to observe and record such things, why we haven't seen more direct evidence of 'evolution in action' actually producing new viable species.
If someone can show me something I am unaware of... please do. Because personally, I can't see how random mutations of a single-celled lifeform, in a mere 3.5-4 billion years, can account for the diverse and interdependant life that we have on this planet.
I was going to jump in with the ancestral throwback stuff, but other people have gotten there first, and with much better detail than I would have been able to provide. Thanks for the education guys.
What other theories for the "mechanism" of evolution are there besides natural selection? Just curious.
I, as an agnostic, consider why evolution and God cannot both co-exist? Why does it have to be one or the other? Our own "laws" of thermodynamics seem to fall apart when you consider that if all the "stuff" here wasn't created (matter cannot be created or destroyed), then where the hell did all this matter come from? Has it really just "always been here"? Also, the 2nd law of thermodynamics basically says that in any energy transformation, the net "usefullness" of the energy tends toward a more chaotic or more dis-orderly state. So how do you account for our present level of "energy quality"? How did giant suns with God knows how much high quality energy in them arise from total chaos? How does a superheated cup of coffee arise from a vast freezing ocean without intelligent intervention (eg, humans setting up a tidal powerplant which turns a generator which provides electricity which then powers a coffee maker)? The big bang? Oh, well that explains everything. Instead of "magic man done it!!!" "Its big KABOOM done it!!!!"
As an agnostic, I don't know a damn thing about the unknown, and I don't pretend to know. I just ask questions. Maybe God exists and maybe he doesn't. However, I am amazed at religious people who know for certain that God does exist and at aetheists who know for certain that God doesn't exist.
Like what? Alternatives to the theory of electromagnetism or the germ theory of disease? That certain social groups aren't worthy of life? Science and morality aren't going to grind to a halt because of what a few hundred million people may mistakenly believe. Even pre-evolutionists accepted many of the practical consequences of evolutionary theory through their intuiting of a basic understanding of the principles of heredity.
And, aside from evolutionary biology's practical spinoffs, it's not as though believers of intelligent design lead more impoverished lives than, say, the ichthyologist who spends her life arguing whether C. megalodon properly belongs in Charcharocles or Charcarodon.
The atheists you speak of will probably tell you as well, that they're atheist with respect to whatever God you are referring to, as they are atheists to unicorns and fairies. We cannot know for sure, just like there are countless things we cannot know for sure. We can, however, go by consistency, logic, and evidence. I'd bet you don't believe in Zeus or Thor do you? Why not?
With regards to magic man vs big kaboom, we have evidence consistent with the big kaboom and none for magic man. Besides, even if big kaboom turns out wrong, magic man has to stand on it's own, with it's own body of evidence to support it. Also, they know that the big bang isn't "knowledge". Nothing in science is absolute knowledge.
Like anything else you'd want him/her to believe. Perhaps that if he/she blows him/herself up as a martyr, he/she gets to go to a paradise of 79 virgins/hunks/Demigod v1.2 patch or what have you.
I said nothing of anyone leading impoverished lives. Much more often than not, it's the religious that accuse atheists of that. However, don't you think life's too short to waste on hocus pocus? I certainly do.
But the vast majority of those who believe in intelligent design don't because intelligent design is so far removed from your examples of violent religious extremism. The relationship between believing in intelligent design and believing in religious martyrdom is extraordinarily weak -- that's why the Discovery Institute doesn't conduct suicide bombings against the AAAS. Religious extremists would probably commit violence anyway even if believed in mechanistic evolution.
To be honest, not really. I think that life's too short to worry overmuch about truth. At least, think that truth shouldn't be a necessary condition for belief.
You have that a bit wrong.
It is energy that can not be created or destroyed. Matter is simply an altered form of energy, and it can be created and destroyed. If it is destroyed (like when matter and anti-matter combine) it simply reverts back to its original state of energy.
Yup. Never worry about how true something is.
Truth only gets in the way of believing whatever you really want to believe.
Perhaps not usually, but sometimes it's 'better' to believe a lie.
Okay, both of these seem to be expressing similar points, which is basically that "everything's so complicated, who's to say there it wouldn't take a god to make them happen?"
The problem is that a god making everything happen is NOT simpler than everything occuring either randomly or according to popular theories/hypothesis. If god exists it either always existed or had to come from somewhere, and then it has to be powerful and intelligent enough to understand and create the entire universe, so really all you do when you try to resort to god as the simpler alternative is resort to something even more miraculous and less explicable.
Please give an example.
Any case involving the placebo effect.
I suppose I might as well throw in my 2 cents In all honesty its can be, at times, far eaisier to belive in Creation, or a God than in evolotion or some other theory. I dont say that because of the sterotypical "Oh God created everything, so i dont need to explain it" type of thing. Most people blow the Bible and the whole Creationist theory off, because its not "scientific" In reality this is not the case, but merely just an excuse to not see it as a viable option. There are many more evidences of a Creator than there is for an evolutionistic theory. Take the salinity of the ocean, if it had been around for millions of years its salinity would be MUCH higher than it is now, and its not, in fact its right about where it should be if the earth was a few thousand years old! Also, take moon dust for example... when the astonauts first landed on the moon, it was expected that there would be about 30-40 ft. of dust to account for millions of years of accumilation.... but again it was only a few inches, or a few thousand years worth. And where is the evolutionary proccess in the fossil record? there isnt any! Beleive what you will belive, but i personaly am convinced otherwise
This is a common, but outdated and incorrect claim. It was based on a bad calculation in 1960 by H. Patterson in a Scientific American article which was debunked first in 1984. Patterson made an incorrect assumption about nickel content in meteors (assuming that all nickel in airborne terrestrial dust was meteoric, when it was actually largely terrestrial), and creationists apply this number to the Moon, where, in fact, the meteoric dust influx rate is even less due to the lesser gravity. Since the Apollo program, instruments on the Moon (and many other methods of confirmation) indicate that the lunar influx rate is on the order of a thousand times smaller than Patterson claimed.Further, although the Apollo lander’s disked feet only sank in a few inches, on Youtube you can see a video of an astronaut jamming a 1 meter rod into the lunar soil, indicating more compacted dust than normally is seen as astronauts kick up the top few inches.Lastly, moon rocks retrieved by Apollo astronauts and photos of lunar mountains show clear evidence of erosion (moonrocks are jagged under the soil level, and eroded where exposed). Evidence indicates this occurred due to micrometeroid strikes, and at the glacial pace that these occur, this couldn’t have happened in thousands of years, but many millions or billions.Interestingly, many creationists (e.g., creationontheweb.com), are abandoning booksmaking these claims, saying about one book: "Despite its good intentions, it seemed to be focusing heavily on material that was incorrect, outdated by many decades,speculative, poorly documented, and usually not peer-reviewed by the creationist scientific journals."
As for the salinity of the ocean, that's a 300 year old concept that's been thoroughly discredited.
You're kidding, right?
@ Obscenitor-
Ok, I admit that I suppose I used irrelevant/otdated proof.. but still there's plenty of evidence
There is no known scientific law that would allow one kind of creature to turn naturally into a completely different kind. Insects don't evolve into more complex non-insects for instance, because they don't have the genes to do it.
To show that all life evolved from a single cell, which itself came from some type of chemical soup, there would have had to be massive genetic information gains.
But evolutionists have failed to show how this gain of new information occurred. Where did the information come from for the first bristles, stomachs, spines, intestines, complex blood circulation systems, intricate mouthpieces to strain special foods out of the water, and so on, when these were supposedly not present in the ancestral species?
The theory of evolution teaches that simple life-forms evolved into more complex life-forms, such as fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. There is no natural law known that could allow this to happen. The best that evolutionists can come up with to try to explain how this might have happened is to propose that it happened by mutations and natural selection.
But mutations and natural selection do not show gain in information, just rearrangement or loss of what is already there — therefore there may be beneficial mutations without an increase in genetic information.
Mutations overwhelmingly destroy genetic information and produce creatures more handicapped than the parents. (See our article on TNR, the Totally Naked Rooster.) And natural selection simply weeds out unfit creatures. Natural selection may explain why light-colored moths decrease and dark moths proliferate, but it cannot show that moths could ever turn into effective, totally different, non-moth creatures. Moths do not have the genetic information to evolve into something that is not a moth, no matter how much time you give them.
That was a copy paste, since im not sophisticated enough t say it myself
@ Coelocanth
Frankly, no
Where did God come from? God is not the simplest solution, because a god capable of making not only our own complex world but the universe which is so large we can't really even comprehend it infinitely more complicated.
There's a lot of answers we're just never going to get from science, but adherence to the scientific method is critical when trying to understand our world and the universe.
There may be a god, obviously I don't know, but resorting to faith to understand the world simply slows down the process of learning about it.
@ Obscenitor -
God is infinite, no begining, no end. Therefore He need not come from anywhere. Our minds are not even close to being able to comprehend the idea of "infinite" So there's no use trying to explain it.
By the way Coelocanth... http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/fossil.htm thats what im talking about
Clearly God is more complex than the universe itself, thus it's not a simpler explanation than evolution and other theories about the universe's origin.
I never said it was "simple" merely "easier" or "more logical"
Too bad it's spelled incorrectly, its Coelacanth, heh
SyDaemon, A THEORY IS A HYPOTHISIS. If your gonna throw around science to argue God doesnt exist atleast get it right. A Theory made by scientists doesnt make it RIGHT just makes it a LOGICAL GUESS. Usually they are proven very wrong because they only have ideas of how things could have happened. NOT ACTUAL EVIDENCE. That makes it a theory.
If you want to ramble on about your ANTI God rheteric then take it else where.
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