LOL.  Go back to your friends playing on the swing set and the teeter-totters.  It's recess, and there's lots of snow outside.  Better hurry!   ....you do, um, have friends, don't you?

katana, I suspect that you and I have many areas of political agreement, but your basic behavior in this thread is why Stardock's pre-forum-sprawl guidelines discouraged religious and political discussions at any site other than joeuser. More importantly to me as a former civics instructor and a worried-but-still-engaged citizen, civility (being at least vaguely polite) is essential for democratic governments.

Your profile says you're from the Netherlands. I had a friend for several years who was born in the same Florida town I was, but unlike me he is fluent in several languages and had lived for a while in the Netherlands. One of the many interesting things he told me about the Dutch is that you have at least three(?) different words for what we in US English just call "reasonable."

Sadly, I can't remember those Dutch words or the specific nuances that distinguish them, but the story he told to try illustrating one was striking to a boy born and raised in the US South. One evening, my friend and his lover were waiting in line to get into a night club and a very intoxicated couple had decided to step out of line, lay down, and fuck. The surrounding nearly-all-Dutch crowd apparently responded by starting numerous discussions about whether or not what that couple were doing was "reasonable." Plenty of folks thought it wasn't "reasonable," but apparently it also wasn't "reasonable" to attack the rude couple or to call the authorities. I thought that made the crowd waiting in line sound very "reasonable," and I really do wish I remembered the Dutch word I was thinking at the time.

Getting into flame-fights on Stardock boards is not reasonable. And it doesn't do a fucking thing to help what I believe is your real concern, namely trying as much as possible to purge blatant irrationality and lies from national and international political dialogues. I obviously feel a regular need to express contempt for certain ideas and practices, but I do my very best to avoid directly insulting or baiting strangers.

p.s. Apologies for sounding paternalistic there. If it is any consolation, I'm a lapsed anarchist, queer, and feminist. But my one of my grandfathers was a preacher and the other was a general, so I often have an irresistable impulse to tell other people how they ought to live their lives...

They say people have multiple words for describing various specifics of items important to them as a culture, the trope namer being the "Inuit have a dozen names for Snow" .

Man, if I could find a place that had a dozen words for Reasonable I'd move there in a heartbeat -  .

Jonnan

You didn´t have to do all this. Very nice writeup hehe. The reason I'm so angry at Teleytea is that he claimed absolutely ludicrous things about Einstein theories and physics in general and claimed to work at a particle collider. Although I have no degree in the field in physics I can tell you that what he claimed was absolutely bull. (also throwing around formulas to impress the public). He tried to convince everyone he was some physics expert by writing some formulas and hard words.

After calling him out on this multiple times I got insulted and he ignored it.

Even if something *were* perfectly adapted for its environment, well this whole nonsense started due to an argument about environmental changes, correct?

Besides, evolution can be observed directly at the microbiology level - and in doing so also shits on the creationist argument "if man evolved from monkeys, why are monkeys still here?" Take one petri dish full of bacteria and split it in two. Let one grow in the original conditions and add a tiny amount of an antibacterial agent to the other. Not enough to kill it entirely, but enough to retard growth. After a while the dish treated with the poison will tolerate it better, and be able to withstand higher and higher doses, unitl that strain is effectively immune to that particular poison. At that point, you could say the bacteria has evolved to meet its new surroundings, but the half of the tray never exposed has not. WTF, evolution and the original species is still here? Wierd.

As for real-world proof, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphylococcus_aureus. You'll note the standard variety of staph is still around, even after the resistant forms evolved.

How about no? In no way can my post be construed as supporting a creationist veiwpoint. In fact, I was using it to argue AGAINST one of the prevailing arguments for ID.

Meh, for something factual in nature and easily verified Wikipedia is fine. Resistant staph is hardly a controversial topic.

LOL.  I think you oversimplified it just a tad.

If you want to make an appeal to authority, fine.  But then you also have to bow out of the debate, and sit on the sidelines.

The same question can be asked of all the theories on "your" side of the issue.  For instance...

Classical Darwinian evolution needs life to already exist before it can operate.  So what made the first life?

The big bang needs an infinitesmally dense, hot, small, compact singularity containing all matter and energy in the universe to explode.  So what created that?  On and on.

If your point is that we don't have all the answers, I agree with you.  You don't either.  None of us do.

Uh, just about everything.

1. Don't attribute "god" to anything I said.

2. You are also subject to "infinite regress" in any theories you propose (see above).

3. You are arbitrarily and irrationally picking a demarcation point (biology) so as to try to divorce yourself from the "infinite regress."  I've often pondered why it is so obvious to evolutionists that an internal combustion engine was designed and built, yet so inobvious to them that a biological machine was.  I think it comes down to a bias against highly-advanced nanomolecular composite materials (skin, bone, etc).  In other words, if I were made of metal, wires, plastic, etc. and spoke in a monotone robotic voice, you'd think I was designed and built.  The difference is the materials used, and the technology in the materials.

Evolution is most certainly based on random chance.  Yes, there is a mechanial process operating over that random chance (natural selection), but the basis is random chance.  If you don't know that, then you don't know your own theory.

LOL.  Because you say it did?  Sounds like magic.

Nope.  No evolution took place.

Fine, show me another precedent for how information came into being.

It most certainly does.

No.  If you want to discuss the bible or creationism, that's fine, but you are talking to the wrong guy.  I'm not the guy to be talking to on that.

I'm not citing any sources, because I am literally halfway around the world from all of my accumulated information on this subject, and it's not my job to spoon feed you this stuff anyway.  If you want to know more about the fossil record, do your own research and reading.  Look up the most famous cambrian paleontologist in China, read what he has to say about the fossil record there.  Look up what Stephen J. Gould had to say.  Why the hell do you think Stephen J. Gould proposed his theory of "Punctuated Equilibrium?"  Because there isn't a tree of life in the fossil record, and he's trying to explain it, that's why.  For that matter, like I said before, look up what Charles Darwin himself had to say on this.

Like I said, I'm not here to spoonfeed anything to you.  You either know the subject you are trying to argue, or you don't.  My recommendation is to be as informed on a subject as possible before having an opinion on it, or arguing or debating it.

LOL.  See above statement.

Right.  Anything that doesn't support evolution can be dismissed with a wave of the hand as being a "tricky thing."  But if the fossil record HAD supported evolution, the tree of life, etc. boy, you'd never hear the end of it.

Right!  Nothing is an argument against evolution!  I understand that.

LOL.  If you believe that, and apparently you do, then I guess this discussion is over.  YES, we agree that the statistical population will change from mixed to black, but NO, no "evolution" takes place, you are simply killing off all the whites and leaving the blacks!

You can do the exact same thing with nonliving things.  You can have 5 white rocks and 5 black rocks.  You can then destroy the 5 white rocks, leaving only the 5 black rocks.  I guess you must be jumping for joy at this moment.  You just made a new discovery, didn't you?  Non-living things evolve just like living things do, apparently!  LOL!

This is essentially correct.  I've seen this done in the laboratory many times.  What happens is, if you have an entire test tube of e-coli, there might be one bacterium in that entire test tube that is a mutant.  The mutation is actually in the lactose-processing mechanism of the bacterium.  The mechanism is broken, and no longer works - the mutant bacterium is actually crippled.  So the mutant bacterium uses an inefficient back-up mechanism it already possesses to process the food that it eats.

This is why it survives when the normal bacteria around it die to the antibiotics.  You see, the antibiotics are taken up into the bacteria through the lactose-processing mechanism, and then those bacteria die.  But the mutant bacterium can't take up anything through its lactose-processing mechanism because that mechanism is broken and doesn't work, so it doesn't die to the antibiotics.

If you have a couple trillion bacteria in a test tube, one might have this crippling mutation.  Expose all the bacteria to the antibiotics, all will die but the one.  You can then culture that one bacteria, and it will grow into an entire colony that share the same crippling mutation.  The organisms aren't fit, however, and when you mix them back in with a normal population, they are outcompeted and out-reproduced and the statistical population returns back to normal.

It's the same exact "filter" I was speaking of earlier.  It's quite hillarious, but evolutionists think that "evolution" is happening if you take a gun and kill all the white people in the room, leaving the blacks.  The same with bacteria (instead of a gun to do the selecting, you use an antibiotic).

(As an aside, I have an evolutionist friend who claims that cars evolve.  He really does claim this.  As evidence, he will show you past models of cars, and then show you progressively newer models of cars, and show you how they "evolved" from one type of car into another, LOL.)

Wikipedia is neither leftist nor rightist (though there have been specific instances of 'inconvenient facts' being removed), just not always very reliable as a factual basis for supporting any given argument.  Most academic institutions decline to accept it as a valid reference in support of academic submissions due to its changing nature.

Climate science has no method of empirical testing - only hypothetical testing using different mathematical models which can only yield certain outcome probabilities given certain inputs.  Small errors in input can yield very large errors in output, depending on the number of iterations and particular statistical methods being used; or not.  Climate science depends entirely on statistical analysis for its hypothetical conclusions.  Professional statisticians have raised credible doubts about the validity of the particular methods and models used by the climatologists whose work constituted the principal basis of the IPCC recommendations.

Throw in the uncertainties about the quality of the raw data & the methodology of applying adjustments to that data before it was plugged into the hypothetical statistical models, and I think a reasonable person could be forgiven for having reservations about the validity of proposals to 'fix' this hypothetical 'fact,' not to mention man's capacity to 'get it right' on a global scale, assuming you accept the proposals as valid.

IPCC is more politics and 'foreign aid turned on its head' than science, if it is science at all.  It is an excuse for poor nations to demand a transfer of wealth, as opposed to being grateful & thankful for the immense amount of aid wealthy nations already provide voluntarily.  It's about a blatant money grab - one that won't do squat to solve, in actuality, the alleged problem being used as justification.  It seems pathetically obvious to me.  I don't need any 'peer-reviewed' articles to see what is happening.  I don't understand how allegedly intelligent leaders of first world countries can propose to act against the interests of their own citizens on such a flimsy basis.  The 'success' of IPCC depends on holding together a house of cards.  I found shocking & bizarro the comparative treatment of leaders of third world thugocracies (which have no money & can't do squat) and leaders of first world democracies who might have the money & might be convinced to help - talk about biting the hand that feeds you.  We should have walked out after Chavez & Mugabe, told the delegates to help themselves to everything the two of them could provide, have a nice (freezing) day.

All for now.

Actually the only flaw in the statement is that the room compromises a population.  A similiar comparable situation such as the Nazi holocaust can accurately be described by definition as evolution in that the genetic distribution of the human race did change.

The Holocaust is as natural as exposing a population of E. coli to antibiotics.

Note however I am not claiming that either are natural selection, but evolution as defined by most biologists which only requires a change in allelic distribution across a population

In a pure biological sense, the sentience or complexity of the population doesn't matter.  On the character issue I completely agree with you.  However my point was that neither are "natural" selection pressures, the biological definition of evolution doesn't differentiate between natural and artifical selection.