[sassyT]

Hello again, tom:

You still want to play word games. Not interested.

excon

Stop avoiding the question... lol You believe in th despite your inability to explain the gaps. So you have FAITH in that we evolved from an ape like creature.

[achampio21]

It is possible that some people just don't want to play ring-around-the-rosie on this thread.

[excon]

stop avoiding the question...lol You believe in th despite your inability to explain the gaps. So you have FAITH in that we evolved from an ape like creature.

Hello again,

The gaps are being filled in as we speak. The science is happening in the present tense. The gaps are what keep them going. Will there ever be enough evidence to convince a religious fanatic like yourself? No.

That doesn't stop me from revealing the truth to you. Maybe someday you'll embrace it. Here's my final truth:

We didn't evolve FROM an ape like creature. We ARE an ape like creature.

excon

[sassyT]

Hello again,

The gaps are being filled in as we speak.

Hello again Exon

The fossils being found are only transitional forms if you assume evolution is true, however Darwinsist have not been able to distinguish between tranistional creatures and extinct lineages. So the so called tranisitional forms could very well be an extinct form of life. So until Darwinists provide evidence that distiguishes these forms as "transitional" , your above statement hold no wieght.

The science is happening in the present tense. The gaps are what keep them going. Will there ever be enough evidence to convince a religious fanatic like yourself? No.

Darwinism is not science it is a theory on origins that has not been proven therefore those who believe it to be true, it is merely by FAITH.

As I told Michaelb, my disbelief in the theory of evolution is completely independent of my religious beliefs. My disbelief in the theory is simply because of what knowledge I have gained through studying biology (which I have a strong passion for) and realising that the evidence for Macro evolution is non existent in both findings from lab research as well as the fossil evidence, to name a few. So your condescending remarks about my religion just fly right over my head, because I was a non-believer in evolution long before I became a saved Christian so there is no agenda there, I just don't believe based on what has been observed in biology.

That doesn't stop me from revealing the truth to you. Maybe someday you'll embrace it. Here's my final truth:

It is the truth of your FAITH, however the reality is the evidence for Macro evolution does not exist. Darwinists like yourself tend to try and pass off evidence for Micro evo as evidence for Macro, however I am too educated to be fooled by that.

Right now all you are doing is making declairations of your faith in evolution. To qualify your claims that the theory is "truth" please provide irrefutable evidence for the theory.
Thank you.

We didn't evolve FROM an ape like creature. We ARE an ape like creature.

Again, until you provide irrefutable evidence for claims like these, I will take it as part of the doctrine of your faith.

[jillianleab]

Are we back to the Gap God again?

I remember last time we talked about the Gap God... I said I like Gap God's jeans, excon said he likes the boxers.

Ahhh... Gap God... you take so much of my hard-earned money...

[simoneaugie]

It is my belief, faith, thought, assuption that excon is simply a realist who is beyond playing with words. Be careful labeling people. The real world tends to intrude and affect most of us. Darwinism is a label, so is the term religious fanatic. Magic is a label, a symbol that can be defined, but each one of us reading the definition comes up with our own interpretation.

The real world did not affect Jesus much. I wonder if he would be on this thread, arguing.

[tomder55]

Good guestion... when he was but a lad of 12 he sat down in the temple and discussed /debated /whatever with the religious leaders/theologians ;and got so caught up in the debate that he was missing for 3 days.

I'd like to think that maybe he would take the time to participate in these types of discussions.

[tomder55]

Jillian

Refresh my memory . Isn' t the Gap thing about fossile evidence ? If that is true then that is not my contention . I certainly think that eventually all the dots will be connected regarding the fossil history . Those of us who don't think that there is an inherent conflict between religion and science are comfortable with the theory of evolution.

The "gap " that interest me is the one that explains the rapid rate of evolution of the human compared to any other species.

[jillianleab]

"Gap God" or, "God of the Gaps" is saying "God did it" when you don't know or understand how something actually works. It wasn't specifically directed at you. Here's a nice wiki article about it:

God of the gaps - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The "Gap God" I speak of makes jeans, sweaters and t-shirts. And takes a lot of my money. :)

As to your question about why humans evolved at a different rate than other species, I'm afraid I'm not qualified to answer that. I simply don't know. Perhaps we didn't evolve at a different rate, we just evolved differently. Have you considered that? Remember, we didn't descend from modern apes, so looking at modern man and modern apes poses no "gap"; we're two different things. The thing you must remember about evolution is it didn't happen in a neat little line, with one single creature on the front line. There is even question on if it began with ONE single-celled organism, or a BUNCH of single-celled organisms (more likely, IMO). There was a program on The Science Channel or something recently about all of this... I'll try and remember the name and find a link, if you're interested.

[WVHiflyer]

FYI the golden rule came from religious teaching, from the Bible. Jesus's words to be exact.

Matthew 7:12
12 Therefore, whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.

FYI the 'rule' predates Jesus by probably centuries. There's a form of it in almost every organized religion.

[WVHiflyer]

excerpts f/
Science, Religion, and Evolution
by Eugenie C. Scott

Most scientists... restrict themselves to explanation through natural cause because it works. The evangelical theologian Alvin Plantinga has said that "Ascribing something to the direct action of God tends to cut off further inquiry", i.e. it's a "science stopper" (Plantinga 1997). By continuing to seek a natural explanation, scientists are more likely to find one. There also are philosophical reasons for restricting science to methodological materialism... If science requires testing explanations against the natural world, and testing requires some ability to hold constant some variables, then divine intervention can never be part of science.. . In doing science, one has to proceed as if there were no supernatural interference in the operations of nature. This has worked remarkably well, resulting in an ever-expanding amount of knowledge of how the universe works.

Augustine (354 - 430 AD) admonished Catholics not to "talk nonsense", i.e., accept statements in the Bible about natural phenomena as true when they contradict "reason and experience". When Scripture is contradicted by empirical evidence, it is the duty of a Christian to scrupulously examine the argument, and if it cannot be refuted, then to accept it. Augustine was concerned that potential converts would not accept the spiritual message of Christianity if the Scriptures were found to be in error on empirical matters:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.
Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, while presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics. ... If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well, and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about the Scriptures, how then are they going to believe those Scriptures in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven? How indeed, when they think that their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? (Taylor, 1983)

It is ironic, perhaps, that Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle, two of the scientists who led the move to exclude all natural theology from science... did so for theological reasons. Their Calvinist doctrine of God's transcendence led them to make a radical distinction between God the Creator and the operation of the created universe, and hence to seek to protect theology from contamination by science. The metaphysical mixing of science and religion, Boyle and Newton believed, corrupted true religion (Murphy, 1993:33).

[WVHiflyer]

"Gap God" or, "God of the Gaps" is saying "God did it" when you don't know or understand how something actually works...

One of my fav Sydney Harris cartoons show 2 sci types at a blackboard filled w/ equations. In the middle of them is written "a miracle happens." The one sci sez to other, "I think you have to be more specific.":D

... There is even question on if it began with ONE single-celled organism, or a BUNCH of single-celled organisms (more likely, IMO). There was a program on The Science Channel or something recently about all of this... I'll try and remember the name and find a link, if you're interested.

I think you mean How Life Began. It was on History Channel lately.

[inthebox]

Perhaps you did not read that eyes do not preserve well in the fossil record.... but here's another link for you about having "half" an eye:

CB921.1: Half an eye

And just for kicks - here are a few on mutations:

CB101: Most mutations harmful?
CB101.1: Mutations as accidents
CB101.2: Mutations and new features.
CB102: Mutations adding information

Like I said, browse the site a bit.

Certain mutations in humans confer resistance to AIDS (Dean et al. 1996; Sullivan et al. 2001) or to heart disease (Long 1994; Weisgraber et al. 1983).

Here is a link to the actual article:

http://www.pnas.org/content/98/18/10214.full.pdf

The protection is due to a deletion. Loss of genetic information.

[WVHiflyer]

SassyT -
On the inside cover of every issue of Free Inquiry is the "Afirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles. It has 21 points. None affirm faith in any form; in fact, the 2nd "[D]eplore[s] efforts to denigrate human intelligence, to seek to explain the world in supernatural terms, and to look outside nature for salvation."

The Council for Secular Humanism describes itself as a "nonprofit educational corporation" and no fees or dues are tax deductable (tho it's possible that donations to some extent are).

So you can stop spreading that bit of dis- & misinformation that humanism is a religion.

SassyT> my disbelief in the theory of evolution is completely independent of my religious beliefs.

Then why are all your attempts at refutation taken from Creationist sources?

[WVHiflyer]

As a result of random fluctuations in biochemistry, identical cells in same environment exhibit distinct characteristics and use them to their benefit. This is called stochasticity (noise). Minor fluctuations determine whether a gene is expressed and therefore if a protein is created. Some aspects are left to chance forcing cells to evolve backup plans.

In Bacillus subtilis colonies, 1/5 are in state called competence where they stop growing and incorporate DNA from the environment into genome through stochasticity. Competence is an evolutionary advantage since it lets the colony gain characteristics from environment and improve fitness for environmental changes.

Fruit fly Drosophilia melaganogaster uses the choice a cell makes when it develops, determined by whether a certain regulatory protein is present, to develop its eyes. Random expression of the protein ensures that 2 different cell types are randomly distributed so repetitive patterns don't interfere with vision.

--from Scientific American based on scientific work of Richard Losick (Harvard biologist), Mads Kaern (U of Ottawa systems biologist), and Edo Russell (NYU biophysicist)

--------------------

Ancient transposons are 'DNA relics' - genes able to cut themselves out of the genome and transplant themselves elsewhere. There are only traces of it in modern humans but it is still active in many other organisms. They are described as "self-serving parasites and only encode enough machinery to keep moving themselves around the genome." In lab studies, one molecule encoded was similar to another protein. When it was added to a culture of human cells and it started manufacturing the transposon's protein. It uses an enzyme transposase to cut and paste genes in the DNA. --f/work of Zoltan Ivics (Max Delbruck Ctr f/ Molecular Medicine)

===================================

Guardian proteins called heat shock proteins (HST) are in all forms of life and assume a critical role in immune responses. They have a central role from the cellular level to organisms to whole populations. Their core job is to help cells cope with stressful situations: chaparoning other proteins, aid amino acid chains in folding to the correct configuration, assemble correct & disassemble incorrectly formed proteins and peptides, and aid antigens in IDing invaders. They are among the most ancient of survival mechanisms, conserved thruout evolution and "been shown to facilitate evolution itself."

When HSP90 is suppressed in fruit flies, genetic mutations were revealed, showing the policing effects. These mutations quietly accumulate and when HSP90 malfunctions (as in extreme stress), "variant traits emerge and then natural selection can act on them. Thus, HSP90, by fostering genetic variation, potentiates evolution."
Further evidence is in the rapid evolution of novel traits such as resistance to drugs in diverse species of fungi.

"From a wider perspective, these primitive, abundant molecules have been maintained since the very dawn of life because they were needed for the basic infrastructure of life as we know it... As newer biological functions emerged... the evolutionary process made use of what was already plentiful by employing HSPs as an antigen presentation."

--quotes from "New Jobs for Ancient Chaperones," Pramod K Srivastava; Scientific American, July 2008

[WVHiflyer]

inthebox> Sociology with the help of evolutionary studies - conflict of interest there, right?

Lets us assume that evolution is true and do studies with that preconception.

Good scientific method and argument there.

No assumption necessary when you accept the evidence (yeah, I know, you don't). Read Evolution for Everyone by David Sloan. I dare you.


BTW - Thanks jillianleab f/ eye links. I've got prob with stable connection.

[WVHiflyer]

excon> When I look outside, I see overwhelming evidence that the Earth is flat. But it isn't, no matter how much I claim my evidence is valid. .

I can't remember who's quote it is, but one of my favs is: "You can't teach logic to a world who thinks the sun is setting when actually the horizon is rising."

We didn't evolve FROM an ape like creature. We ARE an ape like creature.

Excon

Bravo!

[WVHiflyer]

=========================

/QUOTE]tomder55>... give me a scientific reason WHY there is such a huge gap in evolutionary development between humans and primates or for that matter any other animal species. [/QUOTE]


There is no huge gap between large apes and humans. It just looks that way. Depending on who you ask, we share either 98 or 99% of ouor genes. The differences are due to gene expression - which enzymes etc turn on which genes when. That diference doesn't take much to tamper with.

[inthebox]

http://units.aps.org/units/dbp/newsletter/jun02.pdf

once you start with a light sensitive cell

Again start with an assumption. The author then goes on to describe photoreceptors in crayfish and butterflies, the use of which is not for sight.

suppose you have a few light sensitive cells...

This is in the first page alone.



All these assumptions and prerconditions --again evolutionary day dreaming



Maybe those who think critically should look at what is put out as "science" as critically as they do the Bible.

[inthebox]

As a result of random fluctuations in biochemistry, identical cells in same environment exhibit distinct characteristics and use them to their benefit. This is called stochasticity (noise). Minor fluctuations determine whether a gene is expressed and therefore if a protein is created. Some aspects are left to chance forcing cells to evolve backup plans.

In Bacillus subtilis colonies, 1/5 are in state called competence where they stop growing and incorporate DNA from the environment into genome through stochasticity. Competence is an evolutionary advantage since it lets the colony gain characteristics from environment and improve fitness for environmental changes.

Fruit fly Drosophilia melaganogaster uses the choice a cell makes when it develops, determined by whether a certain regulatory protein is present, to develop its eyes. Random expression of the protein ensures that 2 different cell types are randomly distributed so repetitive patterns don't interfere with vision.

--from Scientific American based on scientific work of Richard Losick (Harvard biologist), Mads Kaern (U of Ottawa systems biologist), and Edo Russell (NYU biophysicist)

--------------------

Ancient transposons are 'DNA relics' - genes able to cut themselves out of the genome and transplant themselves elsewhere. There are only traces of it in modern humans but it is still active in many other organisms. They are described as "self-serving parasites and only encode enough machinery to keep moving themselves around the genome." In lab studies, one molecule encoded was similar to another protein. When it was added to a culture of human cells and it started manufacturing the transposon's protein. It uses an enzyme transposase to cut and paste genes in the DNA. --f/work of Zoltan Ivics (Max Delbruck Ctr f/ Molecular Medicine)

===================================

Guardian proteins called heat shock proteins (HST) are in all forms of life and assume a critical role in immune responses. They have a central role from the cellular level to organisms to whole populations. Their core job is to help cells cope with stressful situations: chaparoning other proteins, aid amino acid chains in folding to the correct configuration, assemble correct & disassemble incorrectly formed proteins and peptides, and aid antigens in IDing invaders. They are among the most ancient of survival mechanisms, conserved thruout evolution and "been shown to facilitate evolution itself."

When HSP90 is suppressed in fruit flies, genetic mutations were revealed, showing the policing effects. These mutations quietly accumulate and when HSP90 malfunctions (as in extreme stress), "variant traits emerge and then natural selection can act on them. Thus, HSP90, by fostering genetic variation, potentiates evolution."
Further evidence is in the rapid evolution of novel traits such as resistance to drugs in diverse species of fungi.

"From a wider perspective, these primitive, abundant molecules have been maintained since the very dawn of life because they were needed for the basic infrastructure of life as we know it... As newer biological functions emerged... the evolutionary process made use of what was already plentiful by employing HSPs as an antigen presentation."

--quotes from "New Jobs for Ancient Chaperones," Pramod K Srivastava; Scientific American, July 2008

Do you understand what you paste?

Minor fluctuations determine whether a gene is expressed and therefore if a protein is created

Ancient transposons are 'DNA relics'

Guardian proteins called heat shock proteins (HST)... these primitive, abundant molecules have been maintained since the very dawn of life because they were needed for the basic infrastructure of life as we know it...

how did these genes come about in the first place?

Just like a computer responding to different inputs through an
intelligently designed preprogramed algorithm.