I'm not sure what you're asking.

If you're asking how much cloning i have personally done, i would say it's as irrelevant as how many fossils you may or may not have personally dug up in the Montana Badlands.

Although i am unsure what a "grok" is, i am pretty sure you do not grasp all the disciplines and theories being discussed here either. This is a far ranging thread by now. Then again, i don't think one needs a miniscule understanding of the details to form a reasonable opinion on an issue anyway. If that were the case anyone who has not been to Iraq could not have a reasonable opinion on the matter. Obviously, that's a silly view.

I clearly wasn't using the "commonly held" definition of "intelligent design", was i? And i qualified all my remarks by "it could be said to be defined as"(or words to the effect).

Except evolution in machines- which are designed. So when machines are alive, and evolve via direct design, then what? PS, you forgot to say "We think evolution works by".... ;)

Well i do agree we are in the very early stages of playing God, but playing at God is what we're doing.

We are intelligently and deliberately modifying genes to create a predicted and more desirable configuration in living beings. Soon we will almost certainly do the same with machines, but from scratch- a far, far more impressive feat.

All i'm saying is it's pretty silly to dismiss something that is obviously going on all around us. I don't dismiss evolution. I just feel our understanding of it is not very firm, in a relative sense(in 200 years we will scoff at what we thought we knew in the year 2008 in all fields of science). New finds come everyday, and some of them show the old predictions to be completely off-base.

Like the age of birds. All those studies that were posted above, and one new one comes out in January 2008 using sound science and 5 statistical models, and boom...we have a whole new timetable. That's the nature of the beast IMO.

I quoted the actual study authors comments, they are quite clear- a dead monkey could understand them.

Those are actual quotes from the studies author. If his findings are erroneous we will find out soon enough, won't we?
If you take issue with the Author's findings, perhaps you should write her a letter and urge her to make corrections in her story. If she is as totally wrong as you say, it should be easy to accomplish.

If you don't think i have any qualifications to discuss the subject, stop reading and responding to my posts. Pellican has an ignore function, yes? Use it.

Simple.

Wow! Another identical thread now counting over 700 posts!

Above all I am impressed by the energy and persistence in the scientific camp. Never getting tired of banging your head bloody against the unbreakable wall built up by the counterpart.

PM me when any of you have managed to 'convert' one from the other persuasion! I´ll be dead and gone long ago, but still.. :D

Amazing and amusing. :)

That has been and will continue to be my strategy. :)

Some people put the "explosion" at 5 million years and some at 80 million. Either way 5 million years is still a long time.

I don't think the chances of fossilization apply to all animals equally, but again I don't think that's the real point here. Are you trying to say, for instance, that there are no "transitional forms" in what is commonly referred to as the Cambrian explosion?

Hmmm, then how did you see my comments to know to respond? SmileWavy

I think the larger question is "why did life suddenly explode" in that timeframe.

The only honest answer is, "We don't know (yet), but we think..."

Since i already believe that evolution occurs, perhaps you can tell me what you're trying to convert me to?

There has long been a controversy about the origin of modern birds as the fossil record appears to show an abrupt radiation after the KT extinction. However, there are fossils of modern like birds from the Cretaceous.
You are claiming that this article suggests that scientists thought birds evolved from dinosaurs at about the KT extinction (65,500,000 years ago). That is wrong. Birds evolved from dinosaurs in the Jurassic at least and possibly the Triassic. What this article shows (you would know this if you had any technical reading skills and background education) is that modern bird lineages did not originate after the KT extinction but before. This was not new. There are fossil specimens that corroborate this and these were known before the "molecular clock" data was published.
You are completely confused about what you are arguing and why.

From 2005:

"Long-standing controversy1–9 surrounds the question of whether
living bird lineages emerged after non-avian dinosaur extinction
at the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) boundary1,6 or whether these
lineages coexisted with other dinosaurs and passed through this
mass extinction event2–5,7–9. Inferences from biogeography4,8 and
molecular sequence data2,3,5,9 (but see ref. 10) project major avian
lineages deep into the Cretaceous period, implying their ‘mass
survival’3 at the K/T boundary. By contrast, it has been argued
that the fossil record refutes this hypothesis, placing a ‘big bang’
of avian radiation only after the end of the Cretaceous1,6.
However, other fossil data—fragmentary bones referred to extant
bird lineages11–13—have been considered inconclusive1,6,14. These
data have never been subjected to phylogenetic analysis. Here we
identify a rare, partial skeleton from the Maastrichtian of
Antarctica15 as the first Cretaceous fossil definitively placed
within the extant bird radiation. Several phylogenetic analyses
supported by independent histological data indicate that a new
species, Vegavis iaai, is a part of Anseriformes (waterfowl) and is
most closely related to Anatidae, which includes true ducks. A
minimum of five divergences within Aves before the K/T boundary
are inferred from the placement of Vegavis; at least duck,
chicken and ratite bird relatives were coextant with non-avian
dinosaurs."

http://www.digimorph.org/specimens/Vegavis_iaai/nature03150.pdf

From 1998:

"The fossilized jaw of a parrot dating from the last days of the dinosaurs is the earliest known fossil of a modern land bird, says Thomas Stidham, a graduate student in the Department of Integrative Biology. The find provides the strongest evidence to date that modern birds evolved long before most scientists thought.

An analysis of the find, excavated from Cretaceous deposits in eastern Wyoming, appeared in the Nov. 5 issue of the British journal Nature. "

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/1998/1118/fossil.html

Abstract from the actual article in Nature:

"All known Cretaceous bird fossils representing modern higher taxa are from the aquatic groups Anseriformes1,3, Gaviiformes4,5, Procellariiformes1 and Charadriiformes1,6. Here I describe a toothless avian dentary symphysis (fused jawbone) from the latest Cretaceous of Wyoming, United States. This symphysis appears to represent the oldest known parrot and is, to my knowledge, the first known fossil of a 'terrestrial' modern bird group from the Cretaceous. The existence of this fossil supports the hypothesis, based on molecular divergence data7,8, that most or all of the major modern bird groups were present in the Cretaceous."

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v396/n6706/abs/396029a0.html

So you are one of those people who think god just pressed the start button, and then sat back and did nothing?

You are very different from most believers in a god, in that you “seriously doubt that "God" has any interest or control over what goes on past the point of creation of the universe.” Most believers feel god somehow muddles with things, like prayer, the seven days of creation (far different that just pushing the start button), flooding the entire earth, the human sacrifice of his son, etc. I take it you don’t think any of these myths are to be taken literally?

You also state that you believe in evolution is true, and is something that happened some time after the start button was pushed.

Let me ask you, why do you believe in such a god, as opposed to the god most mainstream Christians believe in? What makes you think this god exists? Do you think that perhaps your particular belief system, the belief in a god very different from mainstream religion, is the result of a subconscious feeling or intuition that god exists, and your logical, rational mind that tells you things like evolution are true and the global flood and ark myth are not?

http://www.livescience.com/animals/080208-birds-began.html

Now, let us examine this article:
1. Is it peer-reviewed? No
2. Is the author a scientist? No
3. Is there a bibliography? No
4. Is there a statement of falsifiability? No

Now let us examine the contents.

First quote:

"Birds are living dinosaurs, nearly all scientists agree, but a debate still continues about when that first early bird glided or flew into the Mesozoic scene. " By the author of the news article.
This is a true statement. The Mesozoic covers the era of 251,000,000 years ago to 65,000,000 mya, covering the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesozoic

Second quote:

"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." By the author of the news article.
This statement is false. The author is confusing modern bird lineages with avian evolution. I have already included numerous references above.

Third quote:

""It's a robust estimate now," said Joseph Brown, a biology graduate student at the University of Michigan who led the study. "We know that this gap between the fossil record and the molecular data is a real gap. In the past people in both camps would just assume that the other side had gotten it wrong. But it seems now that the discrepancy is really genuine."
The actual author of the study.

Where does this quote imply dinosaur to bird evolution in the late Cretaceous? The author is discussing origin of extant avian lineages from archaic avian lineages, not therapods.

Quote 4:

"The fossil record is never complete — just because diggers have yet to find fossils of birds from earlier than roughly 65 million years ago doesn't mean there were none. " From the author of the news article.
This statement is false. I have already provided references refuting this.

Quote 5:

"If the new study is correct and birds really did originate 100 million years ago, then they were able to survive whatever event killed off the dinosaurs. Scientists think the impact of a large space rock into Earth 65 million years ago probably was the primary cause of the destruction of the non-avian dinosaurs, as well as at least 50 percent of land-dwelling animals." By the author of the news article.
This statement is conditionally true (context and semantic sensitive).
This statement, however, is too vague and does not define birds as modern or archaic, nor, does it state that this was the actual time of divergence from therapods. The correct statement would have been: "modern bird lineages originated from a split with archaic bird lineages 100,000,000 mya"

Quote 6:

"All methods employed here agree that the basal divergences within Neornithes occurred in the Cretaceous (Table 3, nodes A-E), supporting the refutation of a Cenozoic origin of modern lineages [8,9] mandated by the discovery of the 66 MY duck Vegavis iaai [10], which minimally forces five basal divergences into the Cretaceous. Moreover, our results are not dependent on this oldest fossil calibration, as analyses in r8s, PATHd8 and Multidivtime without using the Vegavis constraint returned nearly identical results to those reported here (data not shown); indeed, we must paradoxically conclude that this oldest undisputed neornithean fossil was essentially uninformative in our molecular dating analyses. Given the consensus across 'relaxed clock' methods employing very different assumptions about how molecular substitution rate evolves, we regard an Early Cretaceous origin of Neornithes as robustly supported. This inferred Cretaceous origin, and consequent survival of several avian lineages across the K-Pg boundary [68], is consistent with previous molecular studies [4,16-26] and is supported by historical biogeography reconstructions [69]."

This is from the actual article. http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/6/6
Notice that the discussion is about the origin of Neornithes. Neornithes are commonly known as modern birds. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neornithes

So you are taking a factual error on the part of the journalist, coupling it with your own ignorance of the subject and trying to impeach science with it.

Sniper,

I meant both ways. A Darwin fan into a Bible fan and vice versa.

Yes it is :D.

One of the many problems in our PC society is that we tolerate or even celebrate ignorance. I am not PC.

A friend of mine was a Professor of microbiology at UCSD. He believes in ID. If he an idiot? I think not. I have advanced degrees in engineering and physics, I beleive in ID, why because it makes sense and nothing else does.

ID does not require belief in a God of any kind. Only Darwin zealots state otherwise. Science demands logic. Darwinism, applied to creation, is not logical. Evolution is real, but limited in scope, it cannot and does not account for creation in any way. ID does. ID also includes evolution as a subset, ie ii is an inclusive not exclusive idea, whereas Darwinism is totally exclusive of all reason, and blind to facts and data that have been presented in todays world.

In which book does Darwin account for creation?

..

Only Darwin zealots and Wikipedia: :)

"Intelligent design is the assertion that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection".[1][2] It is a modern form of the traditional teleological argument for the existence of God, modified to avoid specifying the nature or identity of the designer.[3] Its primary proponents, all of whom are associated with the Discovery Institute,[4][5] believe the designer to be the God of Christianity."

It may not require a belief in god of any kind but the overwhelming majority of its proponents sure seem to think it's the Christian god...

BTW, if you don't like Wikipedia's definition, go edit it.

Behe, the inventor of ID, believes in an old earth, old life, and evolution. He merely considers some aspects of biological complexity designed, not all. He makes strange bedfellows with the rest of the DI since most of them are hard core YEC types. He has built his entire career on this and it makes you wonder if he is still a "believer" or if he is just protecting himself now.

ID="god of gaps"="argument from incredulity"=intellectual laziness=ignorance.

The "science" of ID relies on one concept only and that is "irreducible complexity". IC is not yet defined in any meaningful scientific terms, makes no real testable scientific predictions, and is still ultimately an "argument from ignorance" (a negative argument) and has been disproved in their flagship example, the bacterial flagellum.

The sad truth is that even the brightest individuals can corrupt their intellectual integrity trying to force nature to match up with their fairy-tale religious biases. This is especially true in the non-biological sciences (Snowedman). It is sad that they cannot see beyond the abusive programming that they received as children. It is sad that they cannot recognize the insidiously blinding effect of their own incredulity/ignorance on one hand and yet swallow something even more ludicrous on the other.

Yes, biological systems are complex and at first glance, especially to the under-educated, appear irreducibly complex. However, the wonders of science have exposed biology for what it is, and it is not designed by anything but time and "nature".

The funny thing to me is that ID, on the surface, seems like such a neat idea (oh look at how complicated an eyeball is!) until you really think about it and realize that the designer (if he existed) must have been inept and mean spirited. 90% of everything he ever "designed" has become extinct. He designed diseases, etc. to kill off his other designs and many designs rely on eating the others to survive.

So, 90% of everything he designed died off and the 10% left is killing each other to survive. Add in the fact that the environment he also "designed" for his creatures to live in is harsh and leads to the death/extinction of his designs. All-powerful, all-loving deity? No, inept and mean-spirited.

Too bad you feel that way.



KT