I had planned a more comprehensive review of the all the direct questions that Z refuses to answer, with post by post descriptions of his evasions. He was evading all of my direct questions as well, but I just thought I'd let it go. However, after I stopped posting for a while, I noticed he was doing exactly the same thing to other postors, in exactly the same pattern; it usually ends in the kind of ad hominem attacks we see in the past 10 pages of this thread. However, in the past he didn't use the word stupid 30 times, which is my count in the past week or so. I just don't have the time to go back and compile it all... but, now that I have this cool new extension for Firefox (Scrapbook), I can save any webpage with a click of a button, so I can create a Z file and then just save the questions he is asked and his responses with one click. Again... why spend time on this? Because I am against the teaching of ID in schools, and I am against the idea that one can make assertions about something like this and then refuse to answer direct questions about those assertions. I am also against the type of intellectual dishonesty which seems, to me, to be exemplified by this postor.
This is belief, not science. PS. belief expressed by a PhD is not even 'crappy' science. It's common, unscientific, run of the mill belief. nononsense
Your statement here comes with no support other than your belief, which makes it little better than the statement from the person you discredit. Did you examine his findings or experiments, or merely conclude that the one statement takes the entire research project out of the realm of science and into the world of fantasy? Furthermore, you have ducked the direct question, that I posed, which is: What amount of genetic change in the bacteria will be required to satisfy you of the proof of evolution? Does the bacteria need to grow a wing, a hand, a toenail, a hair follicle or what? The bacteria have shown, among other things, marked changes in size, and digestive capabilities, and they can live in much different temperature conditions than was originally possible. All of this has occurred during the past 10 years. From an evolutionary standpoint, 10 years is a very short time period. I will merely repeat my prior comment to Z, because your comment here is a mere reflection of his prior comment to which my response was aimed: All science is speculative to the extent that, for example, if we measure the time that light takes to go from point A to B at one moment, then we will reasonably infer that it will take the same amount of time when the experiment is conducted again. So, if we proceed from your view that science is speculative unless every possible negative outcome is proven false, then there can never be any scientific conclusion on any hypothesis, and we should go back to just attributing everything to God, and cease all further experimentation. On the other hand, if we proceed from the view that no negative proof exists absent an actual experiment demonstrating such proof, then evolution is proved, at least to the extent which Lenski's experiments demonstrate mutational change in response to environmental stress. I think you have taken the principle of falsification to an unreasonable extreme, in order to maintain your philosophic view. Evolution is demonstrable in the lab. The question is simply how much inference one will reasonably allow, before the proof becomes speculative. I don't need Lenski's bacteria to grow a flagellum to infer that continued mutation is capable of producing a flagellum, because all of the barriers to that outcome that have, as yet, been proposed, have all been conclusively discredited. So, for me, there is no barrier and I can easily accept evolution as scientifically proven. That you can't, or won't, until you see a bacteria grow a beard and start shaving, is your prerogative.
Why not say: The existence of God is demonstrable in the lab. This makes about as much sense. kent, You just wrote about science being speculative. Clearly, very few people on a chit chat thread are equipped to get into any form of epistemological discussion. To cut a long story short, what you mean is that men need to posses and share a minimum amount of common sense before they can take on an even crude point of science. It took a very long time before men could begin to timidly express what constitutes knowledge of a scientific kind. Unfortunately, the Age of Reason is long gone. Look how materialistic atheistic communism had taken over most of our Earth. This gobbledegook theory was universally represented as SCIENTIFIC. Many philosophers, many of the West, still respected to this day, enthusiastically subscribed to it and never publicly expressed any reservations about this nonsense. The materialistic struggle for the minds of people, young people, has now spread to the US. Europe is written off already - Islam will most likely adjust their watch. The US had till about 50 years ago preserved the old tradition of having local teachers decide what and how to teach to the kids. This worked extremely well compared to other places on Earth. Now, this is decided by pressure groups of all kinds, aided by ideologically inspired know nothing judges pretending to help shove the RIGHT KIND OF SCIENCE down the kids' throats and into their minds. Who watches over those judges? Occult obediences with 30+ hierarchies? Coming back to your point of science being speculative. For reasonable man, it never has been. For ideological bigots, simply look at history, lots of examples abound. The general public is absolutely bamboozled by 'science' wielding devilishly clever ideologues pushing their aims with Lenin-like efficiency. A very recent article appeared in the NYT by Dennis Overbye, "New tests of Einstein's 'spooky' reality". This neatly sums up today's reality about scientific knowledge, belief and speculation. The evolution jazz is rather very crude street stuff compared to these questions. The judges who now meddle with what kids can and cannot be taught obviously don't have the foggiest understanding of all this. Poor kids. nononsense
In my view, the question of precisely how much mutational change under environmental stress that one will except as scientific evidence of evolution is the threshold issue. Most current design/theistic models of the development of life insist that something which the proponents refer to as "micro" evolution is scientifically proven, but that "macro" evolution is not. However, no proponent of this macro v. micro barrier has ever stated precisely the dividing line between the two concepts, nor proposed a precise description of the barrier that prevents genetic mutational change from being macro as opposed to micro. Absent a precise answer to my question, I will assume that the belief that "evolution is speculation" is merely an unsupported philosophic view, rather than any scientifically testable hypothesis. I will accord evolution at least as much proof as has occurred in Lenski's lab. Changes have occurred, those changes are reflected in the bacterial DNA, the changes are continuing, and there is simply no scientifically testable barrier proposed by anyone as of yet, as to why those changes should not continue. These changes are called in the aggregate: evolution. Not micro -- not macro -- just, evolution. And if the changes continue to alter the bacteria in response to environmental stress, then this evolutionary change continues with no endpoint in sight.