That's an old trick, one of the oldest tricks in the book. Considering you are in your seventieth year, it is unlikely that your father is still alive. Disgusting that you would invoke your father's name in order to score a point on an anonymous message board.
Nice job, Zeleologist. I assumed james_bond knew what he was talking about - apparently he doesn't. Bad assumption on my part. That said, it's not exactly a ringing endorsement.... by the way, Z... still waiting for the link to the material which elucidates the evidence in favour of ID. This thread has been going on for quite a while, and you started it - has such a link been provided here at all?
there is a US-centric context there: http://elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=1262738&highlight=creationist+wackos#post1262738 http://elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=1263164&highlight=darwin#post1263164 but basically, yeah, jb3 got carried away... never make assumptions...
my condolences for your loss some reading for you my son: http://www.amazon.com/Third-Chimpanzee-Evolution-Future-Animal/dp/0060984031 replete with facts etc
OH MY GOD!! 2cents, congratulations. You have officially become a member of the club - those who have owned Z so badly that he will no longer respond to them!! Wow, you accomplished the task in a few days - it took me months of constant ownage before he started responding to me with bizarre images. Too bad Z doesn't understand that 'random' doesn't mean what it meant when he was a young lad in short pants (around 1935). His main objection to evolution seems to be that it suggests that chance plays a part in the process which continues to result in speciation. I'm sure that the name Mandelbrot means nothing to him. It's interesting that he is unable to tell us why this is so objectionable to him. After all, chance plays a huge role in all kinds of natural processes. The fact is that it is objectionable to him because it contradicts his faith. I would love to see the look on Z's face as a physicist laid this one on him "We tried to figure out whether photons were particles or more wave-like. Sometimes they seemed to act like a particle, but then we did experiments that suggested that light behaves like a wave. In the end we found out that light is best describes as a wave... but not the kind of wave you're thinking of. It's like a probability wave, in the sense that the likelihood that an individual photon can be found at any particular point in space is variable; the most likely points are represented by the peak of the wave and the least likely locations are represented by the tails of the wave. Roughly the same thing can be said about electrons and their position in space". Z turns crimson and starts yelling about his personal saviour and anal penetration.
I had not read this interview. The passage I quoted earlier was from one of his books, in which he properly defined "Darwinist" as a slander. Your quote bothers me. I also found this sentence in the same interview: " I'm becoming increasingly interested in computer models and artificial life, because I'm interested in Darwinism as a general phenomenon: what will Darwinism have to be like, in principle, anywhere in the universe." This is more troublesome. I think Dawkins maybe overstepping here. Unless he is substituting "Darwinism" for "evolution," which I think is dangerous. It's analogous to subsituting "Newtonian" for "gravity." In my view, Darwinism is a fixed doctrine (a dogma if you like) whereas evolution is a scientific theory that is constantly revised and refined. I'm not going to rationalize why Dawkins had two entirely different views on "Darwinism." His personal views aside, it doesn't change the fact that you religious zealots are attacking a strawman that is outdated and unscientific. Modern theory of evolution is well supported by experimental evidence in the same way as modern theory of gravity is supported. We're not talking about apples dropping to the ground any more. We're talking about well-designed experiments that complements the observations that had been made in the past. The anti-evolution crowd seem to only know a little about the observations, but know nothing modern experiments that verifies the evolution theory. If someone uncovers experimental evidence that evolution theory is incorrect, then Nobel Prize in biology would almost be a certainty for that discovery. The incentive for a scientist is tremendous. OTOH, if someone discovers evidence that evolution works just as the way people (scientists) expect, then yawn, so what? No big deal. So you see, the way science works is that unconventional discoveries are hugely rewarded. There are many examples of this. The 1956 discovery of the violation of parity, for example, was awarded Nobel Prize the next year. Parity is one of those things that scientists held dear - it was one of the fundamental symmetries that scientists believed in. So when two young physicists from Columbia University proposed that parity could be violated, it was a very daring act. People rushed to do the experiment because everyone knew that this was Nobel Prize work. The experimental proof came a few months later, and the Nobel Prize was awarded next year. Any discovery that can lead to the disproof of evolution, would also cause a mad rush by the scientists. To think that these scientists would conform to some dogma (so that they deprive themselves a chance at glory) is sheer nonsense. So far we have not heard of any evidence that can disprove the theory of evolution.