Evolution

[thrasher]

Well, I finally did read through this entire thread, and wow. I'm convinced. Evolution does not occur. You know, I wasn't aware that DNA was only composed of four nucleic acids. In my molecular bio course, we were taught it is composed of a deoxyribose sugar, triphosphate and a nucleic acid. Huh, I guess my molecular bio profs were wrong. DNA is a protein? I guess that makes sense too. Never mind that proteins have no way of interacting directly with genetic material. Never mind that proteins are coded for by mature mRNA, that must first be transcribed from DNA. I guess somehow the DNA protein becomes a RNA sequence that isn't a protein, and is then translated BACK into a protein. Or maybe I'm basically saying that just about everything you posted is scientifically flawed. I don't care what Darwin said 150 years ago about the fossil record. The first transitional fossils in human evolution weren't even found until well into the 20th century. I have seen them with my own eyes. Anyone who says transitional fossils don't exist quite frankly is wrong. What do you call Australopithecus afarensis? Homo habilis? Orrorin tugenensis?

BTW, when "we" speak of evolution, we speak of the definition of evolution. That is, a change in allele frequency in a population over generations.

If you can provide an adequate answer to the ecological problems I posed in my previous post, I will accept the possibility that macroevolution does not occur. Let me save you the time. You can't.

[lazysmurff]

Originally Posted by thrasher

Anyone who says transitional fossils don't exist quite frankly is wrong. What do you call Australopithecus afarensis? Homo habilis? Orrorin tugenensis?

for that matter, my aunt mildred....hairiest ape youve ever seen

definatly the missing link

[bighauns]

I dont think that this is going to go anywhere, I am tired of seriously dealing with the same arguments over and over. I want to move on from this subject. I don't care feel free to believe what you want to believe, the evidence still stands. Please do not go attacking people in the way that you have, that is what has turned me off from this thread. Now it is just a personal attack game and not an acutaly informative conversation. I appreciate what you are saying, and I have provided the same sort of evidence elsewhere, as I am sure other have too.

thanks everyone for your feedback and comments, hopefully people had a good time discussing and thought about both side a lot, I know i did. I have learned a lot as well.

Thanks for the informative and sophisticated disscussions up until as of late.

Take Care!

[Jay!]

Originally Posted by bighauns

Please do not go attacking people in the way that you have, that is what has turned me off from this thread. Now it is just a personal attack game and not an acutaly informative conversation.

Would you please be so kind as to point out the personal attack? I didn't see it.

[Schister66]

Thrasher, again dude YOU RULE!!!!!!!!!! That was the smartest burn i've ever read and if i had paid better attention in AP Bio, i could;ve done that, but damn that was harsh. NICE work. Dare i say a "thrashing". That was lame.

[Schister66]

Thanks for the informative and sophisticated disscussions up until as of late.

Don't you mean since Thrasher proved a point that you couldn't match. That's when the discussion became 'unsophisticated'. It sounded pretty technical and very accurate to me and i have taken advanced biology classes and micro biology as well. Don't knock our theory until you can prove a better one.

[TEXSRT4]

just one question for you boys.

where did it come from. we humans evolved from monkeys - or more technically we diverged from the ancestrial line of greater apes a couple million years ago. but where were we before that? if you can run us back to the beginning then and only then will your idea be better than someone elses. an idea is better only when someone who is more knowledgeable can prove it is better. you all seem very intelligent, so tell me where it came from. if you can than i can do no better than learn from you!

[bighauns]

And that is where the circle continues, basically no one can prove that point, I admit it, as I have from the start. And no, it is not a point that I cant match, it is starting similar conversations over again. Oh yeah, I apologize for my grammatical error, I know I can't live up to you guys.

Personal attack? well I guess that is the wrong thing to say. It is more in regards to the obvious attitude of the post, that suggests to me the insinuation that I am an idiot, or creation is a load of crap with no evidence or anything like that. Sorry, but it just hit me the wrong way I guess.

I can throw things at you in the same way you throw stuff at me saying, as texsrt4 said above.

The point where it became unsophisticated is when started talking about how "creation is a load of crap" and such. Why do I want to talk with someone who is going to act like that, at no point did anyone else conduct themselves in that manner and there was no reason for it. That is what I would call unsophistacted an immature. I have not knocked "your" theory, as you say, I have been totally open to every single argument that every person has brought forward in regards to that, and not once have I discounted it as a load of crap, for example.

So, I say lets just end it here and move on, really because there is now an argumement out there for both sides that neither can really prove entirely but still have backing to them.

[bighauns]

As well, I really don't want to leave this thread with any harsh feelings toward me or anyone else, I can just see this happening now. That is my main concern and cause for wanting to get out, in addition to the fact that we have quite exhausted this subject (I am kind of tired of talking about it).

I would like to move on with no hard feelings toward me and I would like to learn from all of you elsewhere on this website in the future as well.

Thanks again

[Schister66]

Yeah, i didn't mean any personal attacks, the "load of crap" thing was a bad day and what seemed like an ignorant comment on your part, but idk...sorry if you were offended, but youre right, im really tired of the subject since no one can see anyone elses point (your side or ours) and nobody, including myself, is willing to try. I think we should more or less abandon this thread so that nobody gets angry with anybody and we can go back to talking about something important.....cars!

[Schister66]

Well Thrasher, Bighauns, and Texsrt4 its been nice discussing this with you guys, i don't plan to return to this post......ever, so i guess i'll see ya'll around.

[DGB454]

Originally Posted by Schister66

I'm sorry, but creationism is not only a load of crap, but it doesn't have any scientific backing whatsoever. You may get mad at this post, but seriously do some research and you'll find that im in the right and youre the in the small group of people that go through life with blinders on so that they don't see anyhting that they don't want to.

Small group of people? You must live on a tiny island somewhere in the middle of the Pacific.

If you take a look at the whole picture, you'll see that it doesn't make sense for people to just spring up out of the ground.

You're are absolutely right. It makes no sense at all. Yet non creationist continue to believe in it. I guess you could extend that arguement just a bit further and say that it doesn't make sense for life to just spring up out of the sea. How about this. It doesn't make sense for something to just appear in the vast nothing and then suddenly explode and create life. I think you get my drift.





Anyway, beyond that I believe your small group have lost one of your kind. This is just a beginning for this man and hopefully not an end.
He was a champion against creationism and intelligent design and now he has changed his mind. Granted he hasn't completely altered his attitude towards a being that not only can create us can also care for us but given time who knows.



"Famous Atheist Now Believes in God
One of World's Leading Atheists Now Believes in God, More or Less, Based on Scientific Evidence
The Associated Press

NEW YORK Dec 9, 2004 — A British philosophy professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than a half-century has changed his mind. He now believes in God more or less based on scientific evidence, and says so on a video released Thursday.

At age 81, after decades of insisting belief is a mistake, Antony Flew has concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have created the universe. A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature, Flew said in a telephone interview from England.

Flew said he's best labeled a deist like Thomas Jefferson, whose God was not actively involved in people's lives.

"I'm thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins," he said. "It could be a person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and a purpose, I suppose."

Flew first made his mark with the 1950 article "Theology and Falsification," based on a paper for the Socratic Club, a weekly Oxford religious forum led by writer and Christian thinker C.S. Lewis.

Over the years, Flew proclaimed the lack of evidence for God while teaching at Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele, and Reading universities in Britain, in visits to numerous U.S. and Canadian campuses and in books, articles, lectures and debates.

There was no one moment of change but a gradual conclusion over recent months for Flew, a spry man who still does not believe in an afterlife.

Yet biologists' investigation of DNA "has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved," Flew says in the new video, "Has Science Discovered God?"

The video draws from a New York discussion last May organized by author Roy Abraham Varghese's Institute for Metascientific Research in Garland, Texas. Participants were Flew; Varghese; Israeli physicist Gerald Schroeder, an Orthodox Jew; and Roman Catholic philosopher John Haldane of Scotland's University of St. Andrews.

The first hint of Flew's turn was a letter to the August-September issue of Britain's Philosophy Now magazine. "It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism," he wrote.

The letter commended arguments in Schroeder's "The Hidden Face of God" and "The Wonder of the World" by Varghese, an Eastern Rite Catholic layman.

This week, Flew finished writing the first formal account of his new outlook for the introduction to a new edition of his "God and Philosophy," scheduled for release next year by Prometheus Press.

Prometheus specializes in skeptical thought, but if his belief upsets people, well "that's too bad," Flew said. "My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato's Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads."

Last week, Richard Carrier, a writer and Columbia University graduate student, posted new material based on correspondence with Flew on the atheistic www.infidels.org Web page. Carrier assured atheists that Flew accepts only a "minimal God" and believes in no afterlife.

Flew's "name and stature are big. Whenever you hear people talk about atheists, Flew always comes up," Carrier said. Still, when it comes to Flew's reversal, "apart from curiosity, I don't think it's like a big deal."

Flew told The Associated Press his current ideas have some similarity with American "intelligent design" theorists, who see evidence for a guiding force in the construction of the universe. He accepts Darwinian evolution but doubts it can explain the ultimate origins of life.

A Methodist minister's son, Flew became an atheist at 15.

Early in his career, he argued that no conceivable events could constitute proof against God for believers, so skeptics were right to wonder whether the concept of God meant anything at all.

Another landmark was his 1984 "The Presumption of Atheism," playing off the presumption of innocence in criminal law. Flew said the debate over God must begin by presuming atheism, putting the burden of proof on those arguing that God exists.

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press."

[bighauns]

That is very cool, thanks for the article. It is only one of many stories around. However, I believe that we are all done with this.

yes, thanks to all who participated and yeah I am glad there is no hard feelings.