Posted on 09/19/2005 3:24:26 AM PDT by snarks_when_bored
Edited on 09/19/2005 3:36:21 AM PDT by Sidebar Moderator. [history]
" My view of the liberal agenda leads me to believe that we already have 'humans with mouse brains.'"
That's an insult to mice everywhere.
I hope you haven't given either of those huckster sites too much of your money.
If you want to know about evolution can I suggest that you get a scientific education. Only someone without one can fall prey to the deceitful nonsense on CreationSafaris, AiG, ICR, or DrDino. It is all designed specifically to appeal to people who don't really understand science, and to place money in the pockets of the site owners.
Those sites would have us reject not just modern biology, but atomic physics, astronomy, paleontology, archeology, geography, cosmology, and geology. (and I've probably missed some ologys out.) Essentially if AiG is right then most science for the last 150 years is wrong and must be thrown away. To contend that this is likely on an internet discussion forum (which only works because of our modern scientific understanding) is beyond parody.
If you want to find out what happens when a dedicated creationist with scientific training who writes papers for AiG comes up against the real scientific data try googling on "Glenn Morton's Story".
That would be a pretty boring story though. Everyone knows the ending.
I agree with your general point absolutely. But I was very interested to discover (from Radio Astronomer the Freeper) that Newton is *not* enough for piloting rockets to Mars. He does this for a living. Use Newton and he'll miss his orbit. You've got to use Einsteinian mechanics to travel that distance.
Also GPS devices operate according to Einsteinian physics, or your location would be off by a few metres.
DrDino is my personal favorite. Unlike other people who take that sort of stuff on the road, he's actually not a comedian.
Speaking of good creationist comedy, here's my personal favorite from AiG that I like to post once in a rare while:
I have to admit I feel a little guilty doing this (not for giving AiG a hard time but for giving them another tally on their site's hit counter).
Funny. Einstein needed to call a reference body something in his special theory and so used a train. For the general theory the train wouldn't do, because it wasn't sufficiently deformable, so he used a mollusk.
They'll have to *start* working on it before they can *keep* working on it. As of now I've not yet seen any evidence of work on a theory of intelligent design. They don't construct any experiments that might disprove it. They don't come up with any useful predictions. Zip, zilch, nada. All they try to do is end-run round the scientific process to get their hypothesis into the classroom.
The day they start doing some science I'll be the first to applaud them.
Step wise additions to previous code.
One of the great successes of General Relativity was its accounting for the precession of the perihelion of the orbit of Mercury, a phenomenon that Newton's theory couldn't account for:
I think you missed the point.
You might be right, but before I am willing to yield on this point, I propose a controlled scientific experiment, viz:
Let's test liberals in a large, T-shaped Skinner maze. The right fork is labelled, "Get the Facts," and leads to a chocolate bar. The left fork is labelled, "Blame Bush", and taking it leads to a nasty electric shock.
So: the prediction from your hypothesis (that mice are smarter than liberals) is, the liberal will keep turning left no matter how many times he gets a shock?
Golly, I hope you are right!
experts on birds, beetles, mollusks and the likeFunny. Einstein needed to call a reference body something in his special theory and so used a train. For the general theory the train wouldn't do, because it wasn't sufficiently deformable, so he used a mollusk.
(laughing)
Of all the things I've read on these threads, this is the funniest. Darwin causes human inequality and inequality causes welfare. The Onion couldn't do better.
Neither of the sites linked to have a good grasp of science and much of what they spew has been debunked by scientists many times.
Onion writers are out in force today. Who makes this stuff up?
After 3.5 billion years? Why would they?
Let me clarify, and please allow me to step away from "macro" and "micro" since those terms may have baggage.
In a lot of discussions about ToE, someone will bring up an experiment in which a population of fruit flies was created to all have a specific trait. The starting population did not have that trait, but the current population certainly does. Voila! Evolution confirmed in the lab!
I was merely trying to point out that a new specicies is not described in the above paragraph. The Origin of Species is not of great interest if it discusses red hair or blue eyes (allele variation within a population, I believe is the term).
The real meat of ToE is when one species gives rise to a new species which can no longer interbreed with the original species. Ring species are of interest here.
But to reiterate the point I was trying to make. In a lab, a chemist can absolutely substantiate Avogadro's law. As often as you like. But a biologist cannot great a new species, and thereby substantiate ToE in a controlled laboratory setting.
Substantiating ToE cannot be done in the same way as the laws of physics of chemistry can be substantiated.
For this reason non-rigid reference-bodies are used which are as a whole not only moving in any way whatsoever, but which also suffer alterations in form ad lib. during their motion. Clocks, for which the law of motion is any kind, however irregular, serve for the definition of time. We have to imagine each of these clocks fixed at a point on the non-rigid reference-body. These clocks satisfy only the one condition, that the “readings” which are observed simultaneously on adjacent clocks (in space) differ from each other by an indefinitely small amount. This non-rigid reference-body, which might appropriately be termed a “reference-mollusk,” is in the main equivalent to a Gaussian four-dimensional co-ordinate system chosen arbitrarily. That which gives the “mollusk” a certain comprehensibleness as compared with the Gauss co-ordinate system is the (really unqualified) formal retention of the separate existence of the space co-ordinate. Every point on the mollusk is treated as a space-point, and every material point which is at rest relatively to it as at rest, so long as the mollusk is considered as reference-body. The general principle of relativity requires that all these mollusks can be used as reference-bodies with equal right and equal success in the formulation of the general laws of nature; the laws themselves must be quite independent of the choice of mollusk.
Trigonometry and set theory?
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