You asking if a dog and a rat are members of the same species is a serious question? LOL.... Try the bait somewhere else or on someone else.....
Oh, so you think you know that I "know damn well what the answer is..." Then why bother with the stupid question? Call it whatever you want, however the fact is that I am not evading your stupid question, I have acknowledged that it is a question...though quite stupid in my estimation, and as such I see no reason to answer this stupid question..... My momma taught me that I didn't have to answer stupid questions.....no matter how demanding the inquisitor was....
I "bothered" with the question because I thought, I was dreaming of course, that if I could get you to take one step down the path of sound thinking, maybe I could get you to take two, three, and then perhaps I could take you to the end and you'd forced by power of reason to accept the conclusion. Silly of me. Anyway, I answered your diversionary question. Calling the question "stupid" I've already pointed out is evading. Bringing in your mom's ancient wisdom is, hmm, not sure what to call it yet, lame for sure. Anyway, it's also evasion. You're still evading.
You are sticking to your story, fine by me. When a telemarketer calls and asks a stupid question, and I hang up without answering.....that is not evasion, it is common sense. p.s. "that if I could get you to take one step down the path of sound thinking" Now you envision yourself as the guide on the path of "sound thinking." You are kent should get a room....though you will have to make sure it it big enough to allow both your egos to fit in it at the same time.....
It was believed to be a few centuries back, you know when lighting seemed to complex to possibly have a natural cause. So do you know that lightening is not the anger of God? Too complex to have had a natural cause? Really..... So it had an "unnatural" cause? So ironic that you are typing that on a computer.. I don't see the irony at all.... I see design. skepticism is allowed, what isn't regarded very highly are so-called skeptics who aren't at all skeptical of their own claims. Who is not skeptical? It is logically possible to hold an intellectual skepticism for the sake of argument, yet hold a solid belief solid in ones heart at the same time. Attorneys do this all the time, argue a position intellectually they may not hold in their hearts as true. It is the difference between a pure intellectual process, in which there are a defined set of intellectual rules, and living a full life which incorporates more than pure intellectualism. Theories that aren't falsifiable aren't theories. Show me how you falsify natural selection, show me how this is proved to be false. It is a logical possibility that natural selection is false, that the species are by design and not some random result of chance mutations and interactions with the environment. Please demonstrate a test to verify that it is only design, or only non design. Polls show that about 50% of people in the US accept evolution, and that number if far higher in other places in the world. Clearly the proportion of atheists is nowhere near 50% so the obvious conclusion is that the majority of people who accept evolution are not atheists. People accept that scientists believe evolution. I wager if you ask the following question in a polling process: Did man come to be as he is as result of a random ignorant chance process, not by design or the work of God's will? My wager is that you will see the response reflective of the actual beliefs of most people, that most do not believe in some Godless universe, that man is actually by design of God. So the teaching of a Godless evolution of man from lower species by an ignorant chance process is atheistic in nature. And even if a certain scientific principle tended to make more people atheists, would that be a reason not to teach it if it were true? If it were true. And if it were true that this was by design? Let's take the teaching of "if" theories out of science classes, and just teach what we know through direct observation and exact, predictive mathematical formulations. Of course those biological processes are a consensus view.. What is seen happening is not in question. What is in question is the cause of the measurable effects, and the wildly speculative theory of evolution of species by natural selection from the lowest species up to man. The periodic table is a scientific consensus. Yes. It is not a speculative theory, it is an observational and mathematically verifiable categorization process. Most of science courses involve teaching scientific consensus. For example it is the scientific consensus that the earth orbits the sun. Should that not be taught? Speculative consensus should not be taught to kids in public schools, no. Not unless we also include alternative theories. Teach what is known, and teach the method of scientific speculation and theorizing, and teach how we can test or not test such theories, but to teach the speculations as somehow conclusive or facts to be accepted simply because the present majority of scientists embrace the theory is not really science, it is dogmatism. Which is odd because evolution theory and big bang theory are falsifiable theories. If they weren't they wouldn't be theories at all. Show me the test that falsifies both big bang theory and Darwinism. Evolution has quite a bit of math behind it too, and there is a consistency in the use of language too. Comparing Darwin's theories to gravitational theory in terms of math and language is a joke, a complete joke. All you have to do is predict exactly when this "evolutionary" force will do its magic, and where this will happen... Adaptation by a species to survive is not the same as evolution, that's why they don't call it adaption of the species, as there is an implication that it is more than simple adaptation. Adaptation (which is factual) is only one aspect of evolutionary theory. Big bang is a theory in physics by the way, so I guess you don't actually mean what you wrote here. I mean what I write, thanks for guessing anyway... Many ape-human transitional fossils have been found. Just one example: http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigins/ha/WT15k.html Ape human? LOL.... You mean Johnny Damon? <img src=http://www.onthejohnnews.com/images/damon.jpg> See, the fallacy is the argument itself for transitional fossils, with no proof that there was in fact a transition process, or if there was that such a transition process was not by design. The entire concept of transition is taken from the work human beings have done in their design efforts. We look at the early tools of mankind, and we watch them transition to more sophisticated and more sophisticated tools. Was this by design, or chance? 100% design of human beings. Sure, human beings may have been fooling around and lucked into some new inventions by chance, but everything was a product of human effort, human intelligence seeking to improve its condition, by design of an intelligent mind. Monkeys and apes have not been able to develop new tools, even by chance or luck...they don't have the ability for Intelligent Design, we do. This transitional process is an example of Intelligent Design, not ignorant chance. The Darwinists take a speculative theory to begin with, then they look for evidence to support it, and they make up terms like "transitional fossil record" when they have no way to prove or disprove that any transition actually took place in the species of which they have fossil records, or took place without a design, or designer. It is an assumptive case built on assumptive conclusions, lacking any real falsification test along the way. I am not saying that Darwinism is false or true. I am saying it is a theory only, a speculative theory, and if we are going to teach a theory that can't be verified as true or false, then teach alternative theories.
Yes that was the assumption. For example people who hear the argument that evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and simply repeat it without being skeptical of that argument. The amount of misinformation and urban legends are coming from anti-evolution websites indicates that they are not skeptical enough of their own claims. Anything that sounds like it attacks evolution is taken as fact without checking. Finding patterns such as the same ERV sequences in human and gorilla but not chimpanzee would do it. The only way the same ERV sequences could be present in the same places in different species under natural selection is if they were inherited. So natural selection would predict those ERV sequences are inherited. This has implications. If humans and gorillas share the same ERV sequences then this would mean the ERV insertion was before the gorilla and human lineages split. As the chimpanzee-human split was after this event therefore chimpanzees should also have inherited the same ERV sequences. If not then ERVs could not have been inherited - and that falsifies natural selection. This is no different to logic used to detect plagerism. If you hypothesise that student B copied student A's essay, and then student C copied student B's, then if student A and C have the same 3 unusual spelling mistakes in the same place in their essays then the hypothesis would predict student B must also have the same spelling mistakes. This is because the only way student C could have got the same mistakes as student A is by getting them from student B (it is too unlikely that student C and A would create those same errors independantly). The hypothesis will be falsified if none of those errors are in student B's work. Sure, but the determination is based on what we would expect to see if natural selection were true, and what we would expect to see if design were true. Out of all the potential observations that could happen, not many at all are compatible with natural selection. For example natural selection requires the fossil record to have a certain type of pattern, and genetic sequences between species to follow a certain type of pattern. So that these are both compatible is very interesting indeed. On the otherhand there is nothing we would expect if design were true. Design would be compatible with any potential observation. Cow fossils on the moon - that's compatible. Mammal fossils in the cambrian - that's compatible. No nested heirarcy of DNA - that's compatible with design. A random fossil record - that's compatible with design. So it isn't remarkable at all that what we see is compatible with design. It couldn't possibly not be compatible. How would the universe be godless just because god didn't personally change species over time? yes teaching of *godless* evolution is clearly atheistic. Of course *godless* evolution is not what is taught. It isn't a black and white issue of "things we know" and "things we don't know". Different scientific theories have different grades of certainty. Nothing in science is 100% certain, not even laws. Some things are very uncertain, other things are very certain indeed. For example take the existance of the dinosaurs. Noone has directly observed them - there is no maths to prove they existed. So strictly following you above argument would mean we should stop teaching the "if theory" that they exited. All we have is fossils. The existance of the dinosaurs is an inference from directly observing fossils. This could be called speculation by some people. That is why I don't like the word "speculation" - it's use is subjective. Science is defined by scientific consensus. That is if someone came through time to the present and asked "what is the state of science today?" we would give them the consensus of present day scientists. That is also what should be taught in a science class. If a consensus of biologists thinks the theory of evolution is important to biology then it should be taught in biology. But you haven't offered any way in which we can determine between regular consensus and "speculative" consensus. The young earth creationists would claim for example that a 4.5 billion year old earth is "speculative consensus" and therefore shouldn't be taught. If they shouldn't be the judge of what and what is not speculative, then who should? Finding a galaxy which contradicts the expansion model of the big bang Darwinism would be falsified by finding modern mammal fossils in the cambrian. Actually I was comparing it to atomic theory. Look up population genetics - loads of maths. It's not a joke at all. Evolution encompasses any genetic change to populations over time, so it does include adaptation. A transitional fossil is an intermediate form between two other types. Evolution predicts these must exist, and they do. That is all that matters. You can no more prove that a fossil is an actual transitional between two others than you can prove a fossil t-rex was once a living t-rex. I am talking about biology, not human built tools. I am talking about the change of life over time - the transitional series in the fossil record indicating that life has changed over time. It isn't simply speculation, there are millions of data points to compare any theory that explains the diversity of life against. Evolution puts forward a mechanisms that could easily be falsified if it didn't fit those millions of data points. That the data points, including new ones added all the time generally agree with evolution is nothing short of amazing. For example what stops us finding an elephant fossil in cambrian strata tommorow? Evolution puts its ass on the line here, as noone can be sure such a thing won't be found.
Dude, anyone to you is a guide to sound thinking. Another self appointed music critic.....yawn.... Btw, you're still evading. Sticking to your imaginations, eh?
Ya know Z, if you didn't HAVE to have the last word, you could evade by just ignoring me. Anyway, answer the question. It's here: http://elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=60861&perpage=6&pagenumber=93