implying that you should test your arguments with the same degree of scrutiny as the ideas you're dismissing, is not an appeal to authority. in case you hadn't realised the world of science isn't really shaped by posting on stardock's messageboards.

why are you letting the world go on in ignorance when you could contribute to the understanding of mankind?

Your entire argument is an appeal to authority - and apparently you're using your own authority, as you won't even reference anyone else's work, or supply data other than your personal assurances that such data exists. I've looked up quite a bit on creationist/ID "science" in the last few days, and I want to know exactly what you're basing your ideas on; maybe you found a few gems in the mountain of hog feces I just attempted to sift. Maybe I just missed the earth-shattering relevance of some part of it?

implying that you should test your arguments with the same degree of scrutiny as the ideas you're dismissing, is not an appeal to authority. in case you hadn't realised the world of science isn't really shaped by posting on stardock's messageboards.

why are you letting the world go on in ignorance when you could contribute to the understanding of mankind?

I have worked in science before, too, and I'm exercising my right not to show any evidence of it, either.   One has to gauge how much winning some argument on an internet board with people you've never met is a priority in your life.   I just know that I'm stuck at in-laws and I'm bored to tears.   People can think I'm lying and I'm really a pimp for all I care.

AGENT kharma, omg.

Do you know what occams razor is? It means that you should strife for the simplest theory possible. An complex being suddnly appearing is not logical. Simple things making complex things are. HOW HARD IS THIS? 

Occam's razor is sometimes applied to the existence of God; if the concept of God does not help to explain the universe, it is argued, God is irrelevant and should be cut away (Schmitt 2005). It is argued to imply that, in the absence of compelling reasons to believe in God, disbelief should be preferred.

Also you dumb dumb person. Why would evolution not be proven? There is evidence, which you calim to be untrue:

Also becaouse you're clearly deaf blind or dyslectic:  CITE YOUR SOURCES. CITE THEM. CITE THEM. CITE CITE CITE.

GODDAMNIT I shoudlnt even take yyou seriosuly anymore.

<deleted dupe>

Your entire argument is an appeal to authority - and apparently you're using your own authority, as you won't even reference anyone else's work, or supply data other than your personal assurances that such data exists. I've looked up quite a bit on creationist/ID "science" in the last few days, and I want to know exactly what you're basing your ideas on; maybe you found a few gems in the mountain of hog feces I just attempted to sift. Maybe I just missed the earth-shattering relevance of some part of it?

One has to gauge how much winning an argument on an internet message board is a priority in your life.   I worked in science before, too, but if some people don't want to believe it, they can believe I'm really a pimp for all I care.   Besides--I never said I wasn't.

Right now I've got some moron on the internet of my own demanding that I present evidence that the melting tundra is releasing methane.   Like that is really that hard to find online--let alone dig up the white papers if you truly were interested in researching the topic.   You don't want to believe it because I don't post it on stardock?   Fine--go live in your own happy little world.   I've got bigger priorities, like a cup of coffee.  I'm at my in-laws for Christmas and I'm bored.

Deja vu all over again. Are we witnessing a time discontinuity?

It's so easy on the internet isn't it? You can make any wild claims you like and not back them up with fact because, um, you don't have to...

This is the way it is. Why? Because I said so...

Indeed.

All that aside, I do find your picture quite appropriate to this evolution discussion (a caveman, LOL), so you get points for that in my book, if nothing else.

Is there an incentive? Then there is someone obfuscating the reality of the situation for their own gain.

Pollution = bad

Global Warming = a way to feed your friends $$$

Fix the pollution problem first. Worry about global warming 'science' afterwords.

This is exactly it for me in a nutshell.

Thing is, if I were quoting some ultra-obscure reference from some fringe scientist somewhere, I might feel a little more inclined to throw up some text, sources, etc.  But for God's sake, I was quoting Darwin himself, the Godfather of Evolution, and it is well-known that he said what he said about the fossil record.  So I figure if I have to spoonfeed THAT to them, what the hell else will I have to spoonfeed to them?  And even if I did spoonfeed it to them, it's not like they would accept it.

Also, if I were having this discussion with people who really wanted to have an honest, genuine discussion, I might also be a little more inclined to go out of my way to spoonfeed them things I shouldn't have to spoonfeed.  But these people sure don't fit into that category, LOL.  I mean, I don't take any of them seriously.

Argh these duplicate posts.   SD's app server is screwing up.   The fact that they chose Microsoft for their app server isn't helping.

For the spectators, this is a fine example of psychoak's strength as a rhetorician trumping his rhetorical love of being 'smart.' Facts are facts, whether or not you have postmodern problems with the etymology of that particular English word. Rhetoric is the high art of speaking (or writing) persuasively in a way that includes facts, but does not limit you to using facts as part of a rigorous logical analysis.

Rhetoric has a bad rep in these post-Enlightenment days, but it is a true humanist art form and a very useful complement to scientific thinking. Facts about how things work are all well and good, but here we are using still-fundamentally-mysterious ugly bags of mostly-water to observe, abstract, and discuss those facts. Until such a (possibly horrible) day as science presents truly rigorous explanations for human consciousness and social interaction, real science deserves a worthy jousting partner that represents the chaotic psedo-computers in all our Homo sapiens neuroanatomy (not to mention the hormonal stuff).

Speaking of traditions that have undeservedly gained a bad rep in modern culture, WIlly's point here applies to scholarship in general, not just science; it don't count widdout proper references. Master rhetoricians of old could not only wield 'facts' in effective, illogical constructions, they could cite other people's work precisely and choose whether to use that work in the spirit its author probably intended or to simply mooch some of the glamour of a great name like Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas. Figuring out which was what and whether you liked that or not was part of the fun of being in the audience.

AGENT kharma, omg.


Do you know what occams razor is? It means that you should strife for the simplest theory possible. An complex being suddnly appearing is not logical. Simple things making complex things are. HOW HARD IS THIS? 
Occam's razor is sometimes applied to the existence of God; if the concept of God does not help to explain the universe, it is argued, God is irrelevant and should be cut away (Schmitt 2005). It is argued to imply that, in the absence of compelling reasons to believe in God, disbelief should be preferred.


Also you dumb dumb person. Why would evolution not be proven? There is evidence, which you claim to be untrue:



Also becaouse you're clearly deaf blind or dyslectic:  CITE YOUR SOURCES. CITE THEM. CITE THEM. CITE CITE CITE.
GODDAMNIT I shoudlnt even take yyou seriosuly anymore. If you think evidence is false  you should SHOW IT.

From my looking at it there in fact *may* be some *infinitesimal* neanderthal contribution to the human genome. Anything else is certainly a possibility but there's simply no preponderance of evidence that indicates any kind of intentional cover-up of the "fact" of human neanderthal interbreeding. If at some point there is sufficient evidence of human neanderthal interbreeding then I'm sure we'll all hear about it, until then all we have is that you read an article somewhere and sometime. Big Whoop.

I appear to have an exceptional memory for the written word.  Oh well, it's probably making up for my thirty second short term memory for anything verbal.  If you're going to pick at a point from an unrelated statement, do try to remember where it's coming from.

Frogboy said he liked the picture, I said I would too if it weren't part of a plethora of misinformation.  It's an old and likely incorrect guess.  You're the one that ran off with the tangential discussion trying to get me to disprove evolution.  Although I guess since you were the one to post the picture, I should be blaming you for posting a wrong picture to prove a point.

Would you like me to shred something else to make up for it?  For instance, I can readily find evidence contradicting the ages, the oldest North American settlement has already hit the 50k year mark.  It will also be entirely irrelevant to whether evolution is true or not, and you can happily debunk my non-existant attempt to do so by using the sources I wont have trouble finding.

From a couple of pages back...

I read through the more recent strips and it seems very hit and miss. Sometimes the irony can be, well, a bit too subtle. Or alternatively, cut a bit too close to the heart. I prefer heavy handedness in my social and political commentary. 

To be fair, things haven't changed that much. Medieval theologians composed their arguments and then dispatched their assistants to find appropriate Biblical passages. Nowadays, professors have grad students write their literature reviews.

I'll just hop into your rhetorical wake here to mention that the ID crowd's complaint that the fossil record doesn't 'prove' evolution is a red herring because we haven't (and probably never will) retrieve a 'complete' fossil record. For any life form to become a fossil is a bit of a miracle, if you'll forgive a non-theist using the term. The problem is highly similar for paleontology and archeology. Up until a few thousand years ago, our ancestors just didn't do all that much stuff that left obvious, lasting traces. At least according to the All-Knowing, Always-Lying Wikipedia...

zigzag, I might be a couple of decades older than you, and the history might be the difference for a new Doonesbury reader. Plus I try hard to be a raging moderate or a practical lefty or whatever, and I just don't need a lot of encouragement to get feisty about politics. I ration Maureen Dowd articles on that account. The saucy wench is right up my alley when it comes to talking trash DC-style, and I have enough trouble remember that you can catch more flies with honey, yada-yada...

My rhetoric rant was probably as much about the faux-populist power of sciency prattle as anything else. But I definitely enjoy disrupting a conversation by proclaiming that the first European doctors were priests who didn't want to be bothered by much contact with a congregation. Ah, professional culture.

Nope, you're mischaracterizing my argument and what I said. I said that no theory is perfect, and things like points of infinite density are actually a problem, but they are left as problems until observation clears things up. There are model refinements to quantum mechanics and general relativity that, if they pass experimentation, will provide a natural explanation for how the universe we observe got started.

Likewise if you must invoke a designer, how the designer got there is a problem that needs to be solved next. So either the designer was created by another designer (as ID professes - complex things are only made by intelligent, complex things), or he arose naturally somehow, such as by a process possibly like evolution and abiogenesis, or even arose out of quantum fluctuations, but that's far less likely than your claims of evolution even work by a factor of 10^150 or so, so it won't pass your own mathmatical argument against evolution.

Good. Show me. I've asked and you haven't delivered. As I said, I'm sure you can a find an accurate web link to save yourself a lot of typing. Although, a link to some actual reserach would probably be a big stretch, since there isn't any for ID. I do know there's a badly written paper out there though.

Then I've disproved General Relativity then. Boy are is the physics community going to be surprised... Or wait, perhaps I'll look like a fool because I dismissed the merits of the theory out of hand.

And how have you disproven evolution? I'm still waiting. You seem to think you know your stuff, I'm waiting for you to demonstrate it. Enumerate. I can find good web sources for theories that I follow closely, I'm sure you can do the same.

Of course you won't read it, it points out how wrong you are, in painstaking detail.

BTW, it's an article on ID. Oh and if you think that just because it's on the web, it's somehow invalid, I'll point out to you that the wikipedia Einstein Field Equation article is actually more detailed than most texts I've used on the subject, so clearly there are good sources on wikipedia. If the ID article is off base I'm sure you (think you) can deconstruct it.

I'm sorry you're anal.

I know, I couldn't help it.  It calls to me so.

Yes.  Evolutionists should try to apply it to their own theory sometime.

You see, the real philosophial basis for the theory of evolution was an attempt to avoid the last ditch explanation of "shit happens" to explain life (complex biological machines).  You can always try to explain anything by "shit happens" (i.e. random chance), but people didn't find such explanations intellectually satisfying back in Darwin's day.  So Darwin proposed a mechanical process to explain life, and kudos to him for attempting to do so.

Unfortunately, as people have pointed out here, it doesn't explain how the first life got here, rather it attempts to explain how life derived from other life.  So how did the first life get here?  Darwin himself, in a letter to a colleague (I read the text) constructed the iconic "promordial pool" - an icon which has been used ever since.  You know, some warm primeval pool with salts, minerals, mud, energy in the form of heat or electricity, etc.  Throw in some random chance and "BOOM" - the first life.  "Shit happens."

So what's my point?  In attempting to avoid "shit happens," we find it at the root of evolution regardless.  Well, "shit happens" plus "something else" (in this case, exotic mechanical process called "evolution/natural selection") is just "shit happens" - you don't need the "something else" attached.  This is much the same as "infinity + 1" - you don't need the "+ 1," just say "infinity" and be done with it.

Occam's razor would have excised out Darwin's exotic mechanical process from the get go.  If you ever need to appeal to "shit happens," just stick with that as an overall explanation, as it is simpler and subsumes everything else into it.

It was evolutionists' idea to go tearing through the fossil record looking for evidence to support evolution.  When they didn't find it, they said what you just said, i.e. "well the fossil record is incomplete, this is all a red herring, blah blah."  In other words, evolution can't be falsified, so don't even try.  Heads, you win, tails, everybody else loses.  If the fossil record had supported you, you would have cited it.  Since it didn't, you claim it's irrelevant.  This isn't objective science.  It's dogma.

Nope.  I deny that children looking like their parents proves that an amoeba transformed into a man, an elephant, a whale, a dog, a tree, and every other life form on the planet.  LOL.  Nice try though, I guess.

Nope.  I deny that errors in the copying process will build complex, specified machines, while at the same time also building the blueprints for such complex, specified machines.

Errors in the copying process almost always either harm the organism in question, or have little effect because it wasn't a relevant gene, or the genes were duplicated elsewhere, etc.  Very hard to find an example of a beneficial mutation.  4 winged fruit flies aren't a good example to use to try to make your case.

Yeah, that's the problem.

Yeah, I keep asking for things that haven't been delivered too.  I asked someone to show me how a simple machine is constructed step by step according to evolution.  All I got was a steaming mass of horseshit for one attempted explanation, a "you expect me to actually try to explain how my theory works?  screw you!" as another response, and text pasted from some stupid web site as another response, which I cannot challenge because the original author of the text isn't here for me to challenge him.  I ask for someone HERE to explain how this can happen IN THEIR WORDS yet I get nothing.

I'll say it again - the fossil record doesn't support evolution.  If you want examples of famous evolutionists who agree with this, go read Charles Darwin, go read Stephen J. Gould, etc. (the reason Gould came up with "Punctuated Equilibrium" is BECAUSE the fossil record doesn't show evolution, or a "tree of life).

You will tell me to go find where these people have said these things, and present it to you.  I will say "no."  My reason?  One reason is, if you people are serious about studying evolution and thinking about this stuff, then you should ALREADY KNOW it.  I don't think you should even be participating in a debate if you don't know it.  It's like, you aren't even qualified.  You should be embarassed.  It shows that you people aren't serious about any of this stuff, and shouldn't be taken seriously.

I threw you two big names in evolution.  If you are too lazy to go find where they say the fossil record doesn't match up with evolution, I think it's safe to say you aren't serious about this.  The funnier thing is, even if you did read what they said, it won't matter a hill of beans to you anyway.  You will just do what the guy above does - say "well the fossil record doesn't matter anyway."  Like I said, you people aren't objective scientists, you're dogmatists.

Congratulations.

It isn't up to me to disprove anything.  In fact, as far as I know, it is impossible to disprove anything (you can't prove a negative).  It isn't up to me to disprove, it is up to evolutionists to prove.  The burden of proof is on you, not me.

HINT: All theories start out with the "disproven" label attached by default.  The "disproven" label is removed when the theory is proven.  Evolution hasn't been proven.

Anyway, I challenged you to show me how a machine is constructed according to your theory.  Nothing was forthcoming.

LOL.  I won't do you the discourtesy of forwarding you other people's texts to argue my points.  If I have a point to argue with you, I will argue it with you, using my brain and my own words.  Kindly reciprocate.