Posted on 05/01/2006 8:29:14 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
booo! hissss! a man who puns would pick a pocket!
That's what he said. You even quoted him!
Let's not let facts get in the way of an opinion.
Death is a result of decay, caused by the curse, found in Genesis 3. Would God call any kind of decay, death destruction, Good? What type God do you serve?
What evidence do you have for this assertion?
"If humans evolved, then so did language."
Exactly.
"Because all available evidence indicates that language did not evolve, then humans probably did not evolve."
All available evidence is written. By the time a language develops a written form, it must, by definition, be pretty complex. Can you go back in time a few 10's of thousands of years, and study the languages/communications of the time?
Incidentally, ever studied any cave drawings? They sure seem like a primitive precursor to written language to me. Doesn't that show an evolution of language skills?
Apparently you (like most evolution defenders who have some level of faith) have built a wall between science and faith.
I don't know what if any Biblical history you do consider accurate but I'm certain that my wall did not begin to tumble down until I put more faith in God than men. With each falling brick I began to question evolution piece by piece until I came to a fork in the road.
Funny thing is you think it's all faith for me while I'm just trying to show that there are literally hundreds of anomolies that evolution can't answer truthfully. Walt Brown is the creator of the website I've been referencing http://www.creationscience.com/ - a website that also provides multiple other refences. I'd rather pick his brain for science than all of the catholic popes throughout history.
Languages don't evolve? What a silly thing to say. This, for instance, is English, specifically West Saxon, although there is also a Northumbrian version:
Nu sculon herigean heofonrices weard,
meotodes meahte and his modgeþanc,
weorc wuldorfæder, swa he wundra gehwæs,
ece drihten, or onstealde.
He ærest sceop eorðan bearnum
heofon to hrofe, halig scyppend;
þa middangeard moncynnes weard,
ece drihten, æfter teode
firum foldan, frea ælmihtig.
And, this is also English. As a matter of fact, it's the same poem:
Now let me praise the keeper of Heaven's kingdom,
the might of the Creator, and his thought,
the work of the Father of glory, how each of wonders
the Eternal Lord established in the beginning.
He first created for the sons of men
Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator,
then Middle-earth the keeper of mankind,
the Eternal Lord, afterwards made,
the earth for men, the Almighty Lord.
I would have used a selection from Beowulf, but I thought you might enjoy Caedmon's Hymn more. Now, what were you saying about how languages don't evolve?
Sorry, what was I thinking...
Meant to ping you on this.
A little quote mining from another list.
"C-14 dating was being discussed at a symposium on the prehistory of the Nile Valley. A famous American colleague, Professor Brew, briefly summarized a common attitude among archaeologists toward it, as follows:'If a C-14 date supports our theories, we put it in the main text. If it does not entirely contradict them, we put it in a footnote. And if it is completely "out-of-date," we just drop it.'" – T. Save-Soderbergh and Ingrid U. Olsson, "C-14 Dating and Egyptian Chronology." [This source is from 1970.]
Indeed, most of the radiocarbon results are tossed out:
"It may come as a shock to some, but fewer than 50 percent of the radiocarbon dates from geological and archaeological samples in northeastern North America have been adopted as `acceptable' by investigators." – J. Ogden III, "The Use and Abuse of Radiocarbon." [This source is from 1977.]
Yep, it's pretty bad.
Woodmorappe responds to Morton.
http://www.trueorigin.org/ca_jw_02.asp
Woodmorappe on National Geographic
http://www.trueorigin.org/natgeo_jw01.asp
"Languages don't evolve? What a silly thing to say."
Yes, but they are still language. They haven't evolved over time into some radically new entity. They can have different characteristics but they are still of the same original base type.
That's really interesting. It's always assumed that there are virtually no conflicting data for dating methods but it looks like the verification data was cherry-picked to give the expected results. He even mentions the assumption about closed systems, which is a central point to the whole discussion.
But here's the sentence from the article that really sets off the evos: "Who was there when the universe or Earth formed?" Doesn't he know we aren't supposed to even ask this question? ;-)
And how does this relate at all to whether biological evolution happens? Oh that's right, it doesn't.
"I'm just trying to show that there are literally hundreds of anomolies that evolution can't answer truthfully."
Yet your very postings contain myriad examples of science doing EXACTLY that - answering anomolies.
This is how science works. Data is found. It is analyzed. A theory is put forth. Predictions are made as to the finding of future data. Data is found which meets the predictions. Other data is found, which doesn't quite fit the theory. The theory is amended. More predictions are made. The process repeats. That is the scientific method, in a nutshell.
Evolution's predictions have been supported through many decades, through many, many "anomolies", and the basic concept is unchallenged. Yes, the interpretation of some small details has changed - that's the way it is supposed to work. The basic truth, that organisms have changed over time, that species have evolved, has not changed. All your fervent wishing will not make it so.
The same could be said of living things. The data contained in the genome changes over time, but the cellular machinery is pretty much the same for all living things, and the genome for an amoeba is actually longer that that for a human.
The kind of evolution that most anti-evolutionists fret about does not increase complexity or information content. It mostly just involves gradual changes in allele frequency in populations.
What would they evolve into?
Hee, hee, hee, hee!!!
(Classic)
No, I'm not. You are asserting that there are precursors to Cambrian organisms that have been discovered, and further, that such fossils were not discovered earlier because they were soft bodied and thus not easily fossilized. I am assuming that you mean some sort of transitional precursors in the sense of lineage, ancestry, or common descent.
I think the implication that the fossil record is incomplete because soft bodied organisms are not easily fossilized is belied by the tremendous variety of soft bodied fossil finds in the Burgess Shale and elsewhere, such as the Wheeler and Marjum Formations in Utah, and Early Cambrian Chengjiang China Fossils
"The Maotianshan shale known as Chengjiang ranks as one of the most important Lagerstätten fossil sites in the world. The Chengjiang site is located in the Yunnan Province of China in the villages of Ercaicun and Chengjiang near the city of Kunming. Some 50 meters of mudstone sediment are exposed, yielded many excellently preserved soft-bodied creatures of the Cambrian Explosion. Dated at 525 million years ago, it lies just above the Precambrian-Cambrian boundary at 544 million years ago."
Fossil evidence of purported transitional forms is lacking, not because the organisms were soft bodied, but because the theory requires major phyla to have supposedly appeared very deep in the Precambrian, hundreds of millions of years before the oldest fossils in the fossil record. And some of these alleged "precursors" fossils that are being found are further compounding the problem, not only by complete absence of fossil evidence of the origin of these complex invertebrates, which by themselves constitute about 95% of the entire fossil record, but by compressing the available time for invertebrate to vertebrate evolution down to an incredible 2 or 3 million years.
If there is evidence for these purported transitions, it is not in the fossil record, and the reason is not because the organisms were soft bodied.
Cordially,
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