Ping!
The theory can and will be adjusted in the face of any new evidence.
It’s based on epistemology that recognizes the primacy of reality—not the primacy of an explanation (regardless of the source).
One would think.
Kind of makes you wonder how all the web spinning equipment and instinct just happened to evolve before there was a use for it.
Oh, let me guess, it was one of those beneficial mutations just waiting around for the right conditions for it to be selected for.
Uh...well, what we MEANT to say was...
Yeah, okay. I still like hydroplate. That makes me one of those radical right-wing Christians the military is lousy with. Oh, well.
Colonel, USAFR
I anxiously await the point-by-point refutation of the above article by the evos. I’m sure I’ll STILL be waiting after the 50th comment.
Let me give it a try: Oh yeah! But still. You dumb religious hicks...ect...
And the navy guy will say, “This doesn’t prove the earth is 6,000 years old.”
God is a great engineer...................
You’re just a liar.
Oldest flying insect fossil predates your spider by about 150,000,000 years. Oops.
You can lead a spider to 100 million years but you cannot make it evolve ...
And to think I am mocked for being a young earther ...
Then he writes, "For Brasier and his colleagues to maintain that even a single generation of these spiders evolved prior to insects..." But Brasier gave the web an age of 140 million years, and "the oldest identifiable insect fossil is a 390-million year old bristletail." And "the oldest known fossils of winged insects are about 320 million years old." Brasier's even quoted in the story Brian footnotes, saying "it was at this time [the time the web was made] flies, butterflies and moths were beginning to evolve!" So the idea that Brasier said the spiders evolved before insects is just something Brian made up.
So Brian's question, "With no lunch as a payoff, wouldn't that generation of spiders have gone extinct?" is based on a false premise: there was plenty of lunch around.
I stayed out of the "are creationists liars?" thread. But this one certainly is, unless you think Brian just doesn't understand what he reads. His patterns of distortion and deception are too consistent for me to believe that, though. He's a very good propagandist.
Spider, insect, and flowering plant fossils are near the top layers of Flood-year strata not because they evolved in later eras, but because they were part of mid-continental ecosystems that were the last areas to be inundated by the Flood.
Hadn't heard that knee-slapper before. Now the flowering plants were in the continent interiors....because plants would never grow near the ocean. DO TELL, BTMS*, why are there flying insect fossils in the 300 million years ago strata?
There is no shortage of things that science should quit teaching as conclusions and instead should start acknowledging as only theories.
Scientific analysis is not harmed by such a change.
To do any scientific analysis a well grounded theory, recognized as a theory - not a conclusion - is enough.
The life scientists have previously held theories and beliefs about the conditions necessary for life, any life; theories that suggested where life could and could not exist.
In the past few decades though, they have found unanticipated life forms at ocean depths and under extreme temperature and pressure conditions once believed impossible for life, any life, to survive.
Recently they have discovered living, and fossilized remnants of living, organisms in rock formations deep in the earth; suggesting that “life” (in some sense) can exist even in an environment where the entire life cycle related to sunlight (not just a life-form but all the life-forms related to it’s existence) has never existed.
Now, as far as theories go, you can expect the evolution theory to not rebuke these new findings but to accept them, in an unanticipated shift, appending the evolution theory with the possibility that whenever the “water-sun” climate on earth became established in earth history that “life”, pre-existent life, gradually migrated “out of the rocks”.
The extreme extension of that theory, in the future, may be that “life” arrived in the rocks, the very “rocks” from which the infant earth was “born”.
Full disclosure. I am not advocating any of the above theories. I’m only providing an armchair view of where they all may be going.
So what are you saying, that God created spiders 100 million years ago? Does it mean that the number 6,000 does not apply anymore?
All one needs to do it to make a few simple checks to arrive at the truth. Flying insects, such as mosquitoes were prevalent were so web spinning (something you do seem to know a lot about) spiders occupied a niche. With the explosion in the numbers and kinds of flying insects that resulted from the "evolution" of flowering plant species, web spinning spiders were poised to dominate. As natural selection also points out had flying insects disappeared web-spinning spiders would have disappeared with them.
Evolution was scientifically discredited LONG ago. But the “faithful” continue to believe.