Ummmmm hahahahahahahahahahaha!

That's too ridiculous to even respond to.

wtf?

one and two-dimensional dna? Where is he getting this crap?

Too funny....

Shaun

My response, short and simple:

1. We have not seen any living organism adapt because that process takes a whole lot of time. We have however seen DNA modify itself, either through accident, or as a result of adaptation, and therefore we have concluded that evolution CAN occur, given there's enough time. Don't believe that? Google it. Don't believe that either? Sorry... (PS, if you want me to be more evil: You haven't seen anybody parting the Red Sea either).

2. What do 1, 2, ..., n-dimensional mollecules have to do with evolution exactly ... ?

3. We have empyrical proof and conceptual proof. You have none except for a book that has been written by man and selected by man.

Yes I remember this in High School Biology. However once you become aware that in many circles scientists want so badly to believe in evolution, that they will look for examples such as the brown moth and try to make it fit their belief, rather than objectively examining the facts.
In the example you cite the author claims there is a change in the gene pool. Rather there is a moth that is the same specie but has two different appearances. This is known more as a breed, rather than a proof of evolution. The moth didn't turn into a butterfly.
There are certain examples of breeds such as dogs, which can have many differenet appearances, but they are still dogs. You can't take a dog and breed him into a cat. There are limits within the gene pool. I wont bother to try to insult you, your ignorance already did.

Okay the ignorant claim we cant see evolution because it takes as Carl Sagan might say "Billions and Billions" of years. Whatever.
Okay so Man is a very complex life form and takes decades to reproduce, fine. Lets set Mans evolution on the scale of 3 billion years to go from sea monkeys to the near chimps they are today.
Fine.
Alright, now what about bacteria? They reproduce rather quickly, some in minutes. Why don't we study them. Gee we should be able to discover proof of evolution quicker, maybe even in our lifetime.
The fact of the matter is even bacteria, as crazy as this might seem have certain limits they can change or the proper word is adapt. The gene pool may provide for some bacteria to be able to reproduce and be penicillin resistant, the evolutionist scream SUCCESS!! So then they hit the bacteria with another anti-biotic and eventually they will raise a strain that is resistent to the new anti-biotic. The evoltionists screams SUCCESS again. But then they give this new bacteria penicillin and wamo their dead. And the evolutions scraches their head.
But a creatioinist just smiles and says see!
There is a variety in the gene pool, but the so called adaptation and proofs of evolution in bacteria have not been forthcoming. Evolution is a theory, not an empirical science.
You cannot prove evolution, it isn't real thats why.
Bill

I pretty much covered most of your points...
How does flu shots prove evolution?
Shure bacteria adapt, but there is a difference from it becoming a more complex animal, or a change in species.
Dogs have breeds, but they are still dogs. There is a variation allowed in the gene pool, but dogs cant be bred into cats...
There are no proofs to evolution. The missing link is still and will always be missing.
A computer program is a good example of creation. A program is highly complicated and requires intelligence to create. It cannot be written randomly by sending 1's and 0's to a computer hoping it will make something.
Another example is a picture. You cannot send random pixels to a computer screen and hope you get a picaso.
What you get is snow.
links for more info: http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/index.html
http://emporium.turnpike.net/C/cs/

Evolution must be accepted as truth first before one can become an Atheist. An Atheist does not believe in creation.

Bill

And you are certainly not guilty of trying to do the same, right Bill? Heh. Just checking. Ok, can you explain something such as this, taken from Live Science magazine:

Where did this pre-existing instruction come from, if it was not introduced recently?

The idea of breeds from what I've been exposed, deals back to Noah's Ark and how creationist attempt to explain the variations of species on the earth that we have compared to the number of animals the ark could have held. While you are correct in regards to species such as Dogs, you fail to acknowledge mutations that have taken place that contradict creationist teachings (such as these nylong eating bacteria). The creationist ultimate goal is to try to fit these mutations into some sort of pre-existing DNA instruction set. You might be in danger of doing the same things for your belief as you have accused evolutionist of doing in your comment above.

How do you think a species changes it's appearance? Makeup? A change in body type or appearance IS a genetic change. You are confusing genetics and taxonomy.

The difference between a breed and a species is a TAXONOMIC distinction. That is, we have decided, for the purposes of categorization, to draw the line at the point where two populations can no longer mate and produce fertile offspring and call those populations different species.

The KIND of change that is occuring is exactly the same - a change in the creature's DNA coding that causes it to develop a different appearance. When enough of these changes accumulate, the phenotypes become too different and individuals from the old population are no longer able to produce fertile offspring with the new.

We can see in nature this process in action. There are gulls that live in the arctic. As you travel in a circle around the top of the earth, each neighbouring population of gulls is slightly different than the one before. Yet they can successfuly interbreed, meaning they are different breeds of the same species. However, gulls from one side of the ring around the pole cannot breed with gulls on the exact opposite side. The phenotypes are too different, and they must be considered different species, even though they can breed in a continuous link with every other population in the chain.

This example illustrates how evolution proceeds in incremental changes to produce much larger differences over time.

What the 2nd law of thermodynamics states is that the disorder of a closed system will increase over time. Life is not a closed system. The earliest proteins were acted upon by external forces (temperature, light, acidity, other proteins etc) and survived or ceased to exist according to their ability to replicate in the given conditions. This is a highly NONrandom process, selecting particular characteristics out of a generalized population.

Complexity refers to our ability or inability to understand something. It has no intrinsic meaning in nature.

We see bacteria evolve all the time. The fact that bacteria adapts to one drug then is killed by another means absolutely zero. Should we conclude that you don't have a functioning immune system because you can get over a cold but are killed by malaria? A drug that is particularly effective may kill off ALL the bacteria before they have a chance to produce enough to generations to evolve a defence.

Evolution is proven through empirical observation. A simple internet search will show you this.

I have a question for IDiots like you: given that you actually must know that you are misrepresenting facts here, I can only conclude that you are purposely lying. Why isn't hard to deduce: you have a religious political agenda and you wish to destroy the scientific theories that might limit your power to advance that agenda. What I'm wondering is how you convince yourselves that you are acting the best interests of the country when you know that you are attempting to dupe people into believing lies. I mean, if your position is so good, shouldn't the truth support it? Yet all I see from christcons is a lot of spin, weasel words and creative editing, if not outright lying. Care to comment?

 I met an atheist a few months ago that told me he didn't believe in evolution.   (for the record)

Amazing how they project too.

I have to learn to be patient with people who do not study or understand how evolution or basic genetics/chemicstry/biology work.

here you go Bill:

Researchers have learned how the immune system slices and dices genes so that B cells can program antibodies to seek out and destroy invaders. The new work suggests that an ancient DNA-repair mechanism that was designed to repair broken chromosomes may have evolved to play a key role in generating antibody diversity in the immune system.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher Frederick Alt and his colleagues published their findings December 14, 2006, in Science Express, which provides rapid online publication of select articles from the journal Science. Ali Zarrin, who is in Alt's laboratory at Children's Hospital Boston and the CBR Institute for Biomedical Research at Harvard Medical School, was the first author of the article.

“We were quite surprised at what we found, as I believe were other people in the field.”
Frederick W. Alt

B cells are the immune system's armories, where antibodies that attack viruses, bacteria and other invaders are produced. Before B cells are ready to take on specific pathogens, however, they must first tailor antibodies to recognize the invaders. To do this, B cells rearrange their antibody genes to make the highly variable, antigen-binding part of the antibody, through a process called V(D)J recombination. Later in development, B cells can also change the effector functions of antibodies that determine where antibodies go in the body and how they enlist the immune system's machinery to destroy their pathogen cargo.

To enable such programming, B cells undergo another type of gene rearrangement called class switch recombination (CSR). When undergoing CSR, B cells snip and recombine gene segments encoding the so-called constant region of antibody molecules that prescribes particular effector functions.

Alt and other researchers had shown previously that CSR requires two switch regions on the genomic immunoglobulin heavy (IgH) locus in order to work properly. B lymphocytes secrete antibodies composed of IgH and Ig light (IgL) chains. One type of switch region is called the donor and it contains specific stretches of DNA that are to undergo CSR. The other is called the acceptor and it accepts the excised gene when it is snipped apart. This cutting and joining of the two widely separated switch regions allows one type of antibody constant region gene to be cut out and replaced with another. CSR also requires the DNA-altering enzyme, activation induced cytidine deaminase (AID). This enzyme attacks switch regions and generates lesions that lead to cuts in the chromosome referred to as DNA double-stranded breaks, which are critical in the process of rearranging the genes.

“A major mystery was — once you had the breaks in switch regions, which are still separated by very long distances — why does the system join the donor switch region to an acceptor switch region?” asked Alt. “Why doesn't it just rejoin the breaks within one switch region and repair them right there?

“We wanted to figure out whether there was special machinery specific to CSR to join the chromosomal switch region breaks that are so far apart or whether there was general double-stranded-break-repair machinery that that might put them together,” said Alt. To understand the process in more detail, Zarrin set out to determine whether recombinational IgH class switching could still work even if he eliminated specific components. Zarrin removed the switch regions and AID and replaced them with very different types of components that could still generate chromosomal breaks in the IgH locus.

In an intricate set of experiments with mouse B cells, Zarrin replaced very large switch regions with short DNA sequences that would be recognized not by AID, but by a DNA-cutting enzyme from yeast called an endonuclease. When Zarrin introduced the yeast endonuclease into the mutant B cells with the replacements in place, IgH class switching still functioned, albeit at a lower-than-normal frequency.

“We were quite surprised at what we found, as I believe were other people in the field,” said Alt. “This was a major piece of work on Ali's part, and to be quite honest, while I suggested this experiment, I thought it highly probable that it wouldn't work.” Alt said that Zarrin designed his experiments so that he could independently determine whether either the switch regions or AID were required for recombinational class switching. In fact, neither was required for class switching in the mutant B cells, the experiments demonstrated, said Alt.

Zarrin also compared the relative ability of the yeast-enzyme version of IgH class switching to join both very close and distant DNA double-stranded breaks on the chromosome. He found that, while the close sites were joined at a higher frequency, the distant ones were still joined a significant amount of the time. “This told us that the cells have a general mechanism that finds chromosomal breaks far away from one another and enables them to get joined,” said Alt.

Thus, the findings with the altered B cells suggest that an existing general DNA repair mechanism that originally evolved to repair broken chromosomes has been adapted to join the widely separated DNA breaks generated in CSR, said Alt. In this model, the switch regions evolved in B cells as targets for DNA-snipping AID which already existed in more primitive animals like fish where it serves to mutate Ig genes. Studies by Alt's laboratory and others have already implicated the normal double-stranded DNA break-repair machinery in CSR, he said.

The findings also have implications for understanding the types of chromosomal rearrangements that underlie some cancers. In his experiments, Zarrin found that breaks in the DNA created by AID could rejoin with other breaks on the same chromosome created by the yeast enzyme. This observation implies that the mechanism that produces breaks in CSR may not “protect” them from joining to other types of breaks. In contrast, noted Alt, the V(D)J rearrangement mechanism in B cells tightly controls chromosomal breaks, enabling them to rejoin only with similar types of breaks.

However, the mechanism that brings together distant breaks on a given chromosome still might actually protect against breaks on one chromosome joining with those on another — a classic occurrence in cancer-causing chromosome rearrangements. “This mechanism might act as a sort of `glue' to hold chromosomes together so that breaks are not allowed to migrate and be joined to other chromosomes,” he said.

Sorry I didn't get the e-mail

send it to [email protected]

This guy seriously needs to go back to high school before opening his mouth. Educating him would cover basic science, biology, and some basic physics. Then you could get into the religion/evolution part of the discussion.

Hey Sapient thanks for the response.

I think you would have to have an irrational world view to be an atheist, but not believe in evolution. There is some kind of disconnect there. How does one who is an atheist explain life as we know it?

Any carbon dating for those prints? We already know there's an overlap between some dinosaurian species and our own. Including creatures that have remained relatively unchanged over time, such as alligators and sharks. Humans came to the americas approximately 12,000 years ago. It could very well turn out a dinosaur species lasted a bit longer than we thought. Fossil records are full of holes because it takes very specific conditions to form a fossil. Less than 1% of life that has died will form a fossil afterwards. There will be millions of species that existed that we'll never know about. And millions more that are still in the rock for us yet to find.

"Evolution is not something that can be observed."

Wrong. Venture into my links in the evolution and science forums. Are you seriously arguing against solid science semantically with a dictionary? Friggin' insanity. Please educate yourself on a subject before attempting to argue against it.

Here, try a few of these links:

  Salamanders and Songbirds

 More details on the salamanders, with additional links

London mosquitos

Another article on Himalayan song birds

Speciation by reinforcement

Lots of examples here

More examples

Speciation models

Links on examples and models More on the London mosquitos

Ringed-speciation model and examples, plus links

In Drosophila (fruit flies)

Carbon-14 is usually applicable to biological artifacts such as plant life, bones, etc.  Carbon dating of a print doesn't make sense to me, unless it was to prove the mud hardened at the same or different times.

Don't forget Cockroaches!! Actually these examples seem to support creation rather than evolution.

I agree. In fact I beleive that man and dinosaurs co-existed. For example in the book of Job 40.(one of the oldest books in the bible) the Behemonth is described as a large animal that dwells in the marshes, aparantly a herbivore. It is descibed as having a long tail "like a cedar".  Many commentators suggest it was a hippopotamus. But to me it seems to describe a sauropod. Also there are tales of men battling dragons in as late as the middle ages. Could these dragons have been Dinosaurs?

Proponents of Creation point to the Flood (Catastrophism) as the reason for many of the fossiles we have today. Generally if an animal is killed or dies naturally there is little chance that the remains will become fossilized before the body will decompose. But during the flood, or other catastrophy, animals would be covered quickly by dirt/silt which allowed them to be preserved.

I glanced at some of the links, but although they seem to focus on a very small and detailed study, they still don't prove cross species evolution. Evolution for many of these scientists is presumed true.

The scientific method requires that first a Theory be proposed, then studies are undertaken to test this theory, and most importantly these tests must be duplicatable. Evolution has remained a theory, in that it is impossible to duplicate the evolution of species with empirical results that can be duplicated.  The excuse is that it takes too long for someone to observe this process. Therefore it cannot be considered a solid science.

And secondly the use of a dictionary to define words is important if two people using the same word understand it to have different meanings. It then becomes confusing when the two try to have a rational conversation. I have used the word Adaptation from the understanding that it means simple adjustments to an organism to its environment, but that organism doesn't change. However to some on this forum, Adaptation is a stepping stone to evolution. In the websters dictionary example the eye is given as an example of adaption. It adapts to stimuli (light) and adjusts the iris accordingly. This change makes it continue to function under a change in environment. The eye however wont ever change into a toe.

As a hobby I used to breed cats. We adopted a cat that turned out to be pregnant and gave birth to 5 cats exactly the same as the mom. All bright red with medium length hair. But by interbreeding this new generation of cats I was able to selectively raise two different types of cats from the same cat. One was red with gold eyes, the other was pure white with blue eyes. Both breeds came from the same line. However by separating them based on color I was able to refine additional differences including short haired and long haired cats. It was an interesting experiment that lasted 5 years. Although these cats were quite precocious, I don't think any of them used makeup.

Surprise surprise, even athiests can resort to religious fundamentalism and terrorism.

 How, exactly, is this not evidence for speciation - the species at either end of the ringed speciation example in Himalayan song birds are taxonomically different species according to the taxonomic definition. Are you going to make some lame point of "micro" vs. "macro" evolution? Are you going to whine about "kinds" or make some strawman Hovindic point along the lines of "a dog has never given birth to a pine cone"? If you do, please be prepared to lay out the mechanism that prevents such changes.

Now, I'm happy to beat you over the head with other direct evidence for speciation and evolution, but let's beat this one to death first.

 Utterly wrong. The theory of evolution rest on three main tennets proposed by Darwin: 1) life on earth is ancient - this is a demonstrable FACT 2) life on earth is realated - a demonstrable fact (and I'm happy to get into this if you wish) 3) life on earth changes slowly via a process we call natural selection - a demonstrable fact. That's it. More generally, we can simply see evolution as changes in allelic frequencies over time. We have obseved evolution in the laboratory and in nature.

 You clearly do not understand what a theory is. Gravity is a theory as well.

 Please listen to this:

http://www.rationalresponders.com/media/Mailbag/David6-26-06.mp3

Fine, why don't you define the term "species" for us. In a scientifically accurate and context meaningful manner, if you please.

I dunno about you fellas, but I'd sure as hell like to see evidence of a god's involvement in creation.  What's that?  You don't have any?  Hmm, ever think that that's because there is none?  Hmm...  Yet you want to ask us for the tons of documented evidence supporting evolution.  Here's an idea - go read a fucking book besides the bible.  We've already established the bible to be full of shit.  How about reading a book full of facts for a change?  Might do you some good and help you to pull your head out of your ass.

Hey Sarge, thanks for stopping by. I was a seargeant in the AF back in the day.

But to answer your question, we don't have evidence that God was involved in the creation other than evidence given to us by man. However we do have evidence of the creation. Just look around. The creation is the fingerprint of God. Is evidence by man not good enough?  For example if someone told you that your M4 was made by David Sheffeild at Colt would you doubt it? Probably not, yet you take your M4 into combat without even thinking about it. What if David Sheffield no longer works at the company, and there is no proof that he made it?  Would you still doubt it? Wouldn't you take somebody's word for it at Colt if they told you he did? You obviously take man's word for it regarding evolution. Tons of documented evidence supporting evolution? Have you examined any of it? or are you just taking peoples word for it. It's amazing to me what people choose to believe.

If the Bible is full of shit, it's amazing how its changed so many lives, including people with their head up their ass.