Odd fly uncovers evolution secret [speciation]

Austin is not the only scientist to demonstrate flawed radiometric dating of lava flows. The labs have returned old ages for rock known to be young at 16 different volcanic sites. It's insufficient to say that rocks known to be young should not be submitted. The tests don't always return a date less than 2 million on young rock and if they can err on young rock, then how do we know they are accurate on old rock. We don't.

And Ichneumon's post addressed this in detail. Either you didn't read it, or you did but just can't bring yourself to admit to it.

Creationists are a lot like cuckolded men. They no they're being lied to by those they adore, but the just can't bring themselves to believe it.

So, speciation, if it takes place in a lab (as opposed to the wild) doesn't count?

Time to haul out selected parts from an oldie: Behold The Ten Laws of Creationism, for use when confronting those horrible eeee-voouuuu-luuuu-shunists:

1. The Law of Evidence: Everything is evidence of creationism; therefore nothing supports evolution.
2. The Law of Conservation of Arguments: Discredited arguments never die, they just get recycled ad infinitum.
3. The Law of Reproducable Results: Anything found in the wild means nothing unless it is reproduced in the lab. Anything done in a lab means nothing about what happens in the wild.

And here are some of The Laws of Itelligent Design:

The universe is made for life, therefore ID.
Life can't arise naturally, therefore ID.
Anything produced in the lab is proof of Intelligent Design.
Anything not produced in the lab is proof of Intelligent Design.

Head-full-of-rocks placemarker.

"Creationists are a lot like cuckolded men. They no they're being lied to by those they adore, but the just can't bring themselves to believe it."

We are being lied to by evolutionists. We care enough to tell you the truth, despite the condescending attitudes, but adore you? I don't think so.

We are being lied to by evolutionists.

Bull Puckey. Ichneumon has shown you where your "scientists" screwed their "research" up -- and did it in detail. Whenever Ichneumon posts a reply he goes into great detail. Bless his heart, but dirtboy (one of our resident geologists) in the past has shown you why the geology of the Grand Canyon is not like the geology of Mt. St. Helens -- and did it in great detail.

Whenever it is pointed out to you that divers scientific disciplines (physics, astronomy, geology, paleontology, biology, chemistry, whatnot) all complement one-another to draw the conclusion that the universe is several billion years old, the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and that all life on Earth evolved from a common ancestor over the past 3.8 billion years, you come back with some half-assed claim that all of science is lying to you. That, my dear boy, is the essence of paranoia.

I know, deep down inside, the avalanche of evidence against your position is starting to make an impact on you; you just won't admit to yourself which is why I made the "cuckold" remark.

"Now, if new species are only created by "Intelligent Design", why would there be this association?"

It appears that you need to at least learn what IDers and creationists actually say. They are two very different groups with very different idea. I am a creationist, but I will give you both views.

First of all, ID'ers for the most part have NO PROBLEM with evolution. The difference is that there are certain systems which they claim must be the result of design. They do not argue that ALL systems are the result of design, but that certain ones MUST be. They generally have no problem with universal common ancestry or most of the evolutionary ideas. In fact, the theory behind ID has nothing to do with evolution at all, but is instead a general method of detecting design in anything (for example, an anthropologist distinguishing between designed pottery and products of nature, and SETI astronomers distinguishing between natural radio waves from space and intelligently designed signals).

For more on ID, see:

http://crevo.blogspot.com/2005/03/setting-facts-straight-on-intelligent.html

Creationism, on the other hand, believes that the book of Genesis gives at least a somewhat reliable account of original creation (most believing it to be completely reliable, but others allowing for some error). They believe that God created original kinds, however, they also believe that the created kinds have a significant amount of potential diversity, both through selection (yes, breeding was around LOOOOOOONG before Darwin) and mutation. Creationists do not have a problem with speciation, but have several distinctions from evolutionists:

* believe that God created multiple starting points of life, not just one
* believe that mutations, while some can be beneficial, do not result in the creation of new biological systems, even with multiple beneficial mutations (a "benefit" is a long way from a complete system, combining regulatory genes and other complex mechanisms that are characteristic of biological pathways in life)
* believe that life on earth is relatively young (usually less than 10,000 years)

For the most part, creationists believe that, for vertebrates, those classified within the same family usually are all part of the same created kind. Breeding experiments as well as ANOPA and BDIST methods show evidence of this.

As for beneficial mutations, in this article:

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0404125101v1

"Our first data set shows that synergistic interactions among random mutations are neither stronger nor more common than antagonistic interactions."

So, not only is it EXTREMELY RARE to have beneficial mutations, but having two of them in synergy is even less common than having them antagonistic to each other. Add that to the fact that sexual reproduction minimizes the effects of mutations, and that on some occasions, children can REVERT mutations back to their original sequence, you have nearly no evidence that such a thing even COULD occur, much less that it occurs frequently enough to have brought all diversity out of microbes.

The final point is witnessed by the fact that carbon dating shows a young age of every fossil ever tested. Pretty much the maximum age of carbon-based material is 70,000 years. This was long conjectured to be the result of microbes penetrated the sources and contaminating them with new C14. However, recent tests have shown that DIAMONDS from THE BOTTOM OF THE GEOLOGIC COLUMN date to 50,000 years. Diamonds are impenetrable and not subject to the same types of contamination that bones are. If you take into account the change in C14 ratios that a global flood would have induced, that date moves closer to 6,000 years (the conversion from C12 to C14 is relatively stable, but the flood removed massive amounts of C12 from the biosphere, making the relative C14 concentrations much higher in the post-flood world).

The basics are that evolutionists believe that the observed discontinuities between organism groups (normally occurring at the family level for vertebrates, but at other points for other types of creatures) are imagined, while creationists believe that they are real, and the result of separate acts of creation.

If you want to debate someone who believes in the fixity of the species, you should go dig up Aristotle. The Bible speaks of independent acts of creation, but not on species fixity (or perfection, for that matter -- in fact, sin specifically caused many imperfections in creation).

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