String theory is just a theory. In fact, if M theory is correct, it is just one of many sub-theories of M theory. According to M theory there are an infinity of universes, so all infinite possiblities exist in one or more of them. According to that logic, in one or more of these infinite universes, God did create man in his own image. M theory predicts it. Therefore science predicts Intelligent design as being factual somewhere.

At any rate, as you said yourself, "All this is hypothetical at this point."

IOW, it's all a big fat edumacated guess that 'appears' to fit -at least on some levels- with what we think we already know. Just like evolution.

I said "diversity" of life not "formation" of life. Focus! ;) Big difference. There is plenty of evidence for evolution being responsible for the diversity of life on Earth.

I don't know, either. The difference, though, is that if your supernatural being flipped the switch and then walked away as you seem to suggest (which I admit, could be true - I don't know), then what's difference between a supernatural being that might or might not have flipped the switch (you yourself admit you don't know) and no supernatural being at all? You seem to have "created" the need for this supernatural being on your own. There is no evidence for it and you admit you don't know, so why is the basis of your theory that it exists?

What you describe is not cloning. A clone has the identical DNA sequence of the donor.

It would prove that mankind is able to intelligently create a universe that it first predicted it could make.

How do we know our iniverse doesn't exist in some particle accelerator somewhere? We really don't, and we really never will.

I guess it depends on your perspective.

It could be used to advance the idea that we can make a universe, so there need not be a god, or it could advance the idea that to create a universe that a god is needed, and that in fact, we had just played the part ourselves.

If life evolved in one of these created universes that scientists hypothesize they can create, then we would in fact be the de-facto creator that made it all possible. The physicist who built the machine that made it all possible would be their God...even though they would never be able to prove or disprove his existence.

Extending that line of thinking to it's natural conclusions, one could say that if evolution can be proven to create life from lifelessness in the universe and that man can be shown to create a universe, that the concept of Intelligent design would be validated.

We've got a pretty good sized accelerator (1 GeV linac) right here at my facility. Maybe god works in my building? :)

Here is the quote from your source:

"Paleontologists who study fossils think the first modern birds evolved from dinosaurs about 60 million to 65 million years ago, right about the time most dinosaurs went extinct."

This statement is so factually wrong it is hilarious.

Now here is a statement from the actual research paper:

"Determining an absolute timescale for avian evolutionary history has proven contentious. The two sources of information available, paleontological data and inference from extant molecular genetic sequences (colloquially, 'rocks' and 'clocks'), have appeared irreconcilable; the fossil record supports a Cenozoic origin for most modern lineages, whereas molecular genetic estimates suggest that these same lineages originated deep within the Cretaceous and survived the K-Pg (Cretaceous-Paleogene; formerly Cretaceous-Tertiary or K-T) mass-extinction event. These two sources of data therefore appear to support fundamentally different models of avian evolution. The paradox has been speculated to reflect deficiencies in the fossil record, unrecognized biases in the treatment of genetic data or both. Here we attempt to explore uncertainty and limit bias entering into molecular divergence time estimates through: (i) improved taxon (n = 135) and character (n = 4594 bp mtDNA) sampling; (ii) inclusion of multiple cladistically tested internal fossil calibration points (n = 18); (iii) correction for lineage-specific rate heterogeneity using a variety of methods (n = 5); (iv) accommodation of uncertainty in tree topology; and (v) testing for possible effects of episodic evolution"

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/6/6/abstract

This paper clearly is discussing modern bird speciations, not the origin of the first bird species. No where does this article claim that anyone had argued that birds evolved from dinosaurs in the Cretaceous or Cenozoic.

You are arguing based on a single flawed second-hand source and did not even bother to confirm the veracity of the information you so ignorantly quoted.

For your simple edification (I realize it is a "wiki" source):

"Birds (class Aves) are bipedal, endothermic (warm-blooded), vertebrate animals that lay eggs. There are around 10,000 living species, making them the most numerous tetrapod vertebrates. They inhabit ecosystems across the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Birds range in size from the 5 cm (2 in) Bee Hummingbird to the 2.7 m (9 ft) Ostrich. The fossil record indicates that birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs during the Jurassic period, around 150–200 Ma (million years ago), and the earliest known bird is the Late Jurassic Archaeopteryx, c 155–150 Ma. Most paleontologists regard birds as the only clade of dinosaurs that survived the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event approximately 65.5 Ma."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird

The "Reference" section on that Bird Wiki is voluminous - challenges of the data should address the references, not the Wiki entry, as you would certainly agree:

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So, who is guilty of spreading ignorance? Who is guilty of academic laziness? Who is owed an apology?

All the information you kind lads just cited is out of date. The study i've cited (from January 2008) is the most recent on the topic, it relied on 5 statistical models- all of which provided the same answer- that birds are 100,000,000 years old, and has relegated them all to the dustbin, as the author so clearly stated.

That's the way this works you know. New finds and studies can often relegate entire generations of previous thought to obsolesence.

You are clinging to outdated information and notions. You seem to be having a hard time with that.

Shrug.

And yes, at it's essence, a scientist seeks to fill in the blanks with his best guesses based on all available evidence AT THAT TIME. As the evidence(or the perception of it) changes, so to do the guesses of the scientific community.

So now you're clinging to semantics. Fine, if you wish it, we can replace the term "cloning" with the term "Genetic manipulation" or "Genetic Splicing" if you like. Or we can use some other term that you prefer. The end result is the same- we can deliberately, and intelligently alter life at the genetic level- thereby altering natures blueprint in favor of one of our own. Ergo, intelligent design exists.

Interesting thoughts, I guess a lot of it depends on how you define god. Most people think of something that is all powerful, all knowing, benevolent, that sort of thing. Even if we can create a universe, we certainly are not all powerful and all knowing. Perhaps your god is not these things either?

Even if we could create a universe, there is no mention of being able to control what goes on in it after it’s created. Is your god like this? No control at all after pushing the “start” button?

Say our universe was created in a lab of some other scientists from some other universe. By your definition, they are our god. Are they worthy of the worship you grant the god you believe in?

I have no problem with your explanation Moses, because of one little word.

"Seems".

By including the word "seems" you are reasonably allowing for the possiblity that our interpretation of what we are observing may in some way be flawed.

I also like your inclusion of the term "feasible". I agree it is "feasible." I do not agree that there is no other possible explanation.

Kudos to you my friend.

You are making an argument based on second-hand information from a news article (note, not peer-reviewed) written by a journalist (note, non-scientist) who is alluding to a study published by real scientists. You have clearly not read the actual peer-reviewed journal article. You clearly know nothing of paleontology, avian evolution, or evolution in general and then you make a sweeping claim that a journalist has single-handedly overturned the current avian evolutionary paradigm.
This is academic dishonesty/fraud as only the Discovery Institute or Institute for Creation Research can commit. You are an example of what is wrong with the state of science education and critical thinking (lack there of) in our country.

So how much "cloning" or whatever you want to do it have you actually done in the lab?

You throw around these terms like you actually understand the underlying science and the implications. I doubt you grok either.

I "designed" a metal sensor protein. Computer modeled it, mutated the gene, expressed it, and tested it. There is no way in hell I'd equate that to the commonly held definition of "intelligent design."

Evolution works by pressure and randomness, not by design. We are ham-fisted in our "engineering" of biological systems. And in fact we often will leverage randomness to our benefit.

We're back to semantics again I suppose...

I agree. A lot of it depends how you define anything.

I am smart enough to acknowledge that if there is a God(which i believe to be true), that i have no clue what it's true nature is.

Unfortunately, the big bang makes a true understanding of our specific universe's creator impossible to achieve. It may be that each universe has it's own creator. Maybe we are a universe existing somewhere in a particle accelerator. Our universe would behave exactly the same, wouldn't it? Maybe? Who knows? Not us.

This is impossible to determine because it's not possible to look out of our universe- the universe is expanding so fast that even if we could penetrate it's borders we cannot catch up to them anyway and even if we did by the time we got a return signal our sun would have long since burned out, and our galaxy would've long since collided with Andromeda- we'd all be dead. Furthermore it is impossible to look past the big bang, because time as we know it did not exist.

I seriously doubt that "God" has any interest or control over what goes on past the point of creation of the universe, but i could be totally wrong. Perhaps those instances that scientists have observed where you can take an entire sample of frogs all of one sex, and watch as some spontaneously transform into the opposite sex(I wonder if this has ever been observed at the exact moment of transformation), is actually God dwelling in the 27th dimension and using his 'magic' on the frogs and giving them little peckers. It's extremely unlikely to say the least, but it is possible. Again, if M theory (some derisively say the "M" stands for "Magic") is correct, in some universes it is not just possible- it's just the way it is.

M theory is science's latest, greatest attempt of fulfilling Einstien's dream of a "Theory of Everything." Yet, if it is right, it essentially states that literally anything is not only possible, and not only probable, but that every possible permutation and outcome has happened, or is happening now.

M theory has what many would consider to be massive support at the mathematical level, in that it can be shown to mathematically resolve all kinds of conflicts in all kinds of previously competing theories, showing them to actually all be supporting theories of M theory itself, thus seemingly unifying them all.

And what does M theory predict? It predicts that everything is.

One question that all this leads me to ask is "what's bigger than a universe", as for M theory to be true in reality a universe is downright tiny compared to what is housing them all. It also raises serious and most likely completely unanswerable questions about the true nature of time.

I guess by my 'definition' they would be our Creator, aka God, but no, i would not worship them any more than i don't worship our creator now.

To put it into scientific terms:

I do not worship God, i only acknowledge the probability of it's existence.

I personally believe that the notion that religious people have of God is completely ridiculous. Heaven, Hell, all that god stuff to me is just silliness.
But the religious among us should take solace in science, because M theory predicts that in at least SOME universes, the Catholics are right.

Spooky stuff. :D

No, what I have read is around 30-50 million years, after billions of years of nothing at all happening on the multicellular level. Even more interesting, many diverse species seem to just appear over a 5-10 million year period. Why would there be an explosion of evolutionary diversity all at once like that? In the context of an earth that is billions of years old, 50 million years is a drop in the bucket.

I still haven't seem any intelligent discussion over the lack of transitional fossils beyond the "fossils are really hard to find" argument. Again, this simply doesn't hold water since ALL fossils are hard to form and find. Looking at vertebrates, any vertebrate should have approximately the same chance of forming a fossil upon its death. Of course 99.9% of animals will not form fossils when they die, but those chances apply to all animals equally. Can anyone come up with an argument as to why transitional species would be less likely to form fossils? If not, then why the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record?