But you don't believe in God, so you comments were unusual to say the least.


KT

Fahrenheit or Celsius?

My comments? I was actually being honest. ID - on the surface - has some appeal from an emotional standpoint. Just like belief in god(s). It sure would nice if there was some benevolent being up there looking over me to protect me. Some things (like biology) are complex enough that it sure would be easier to just believe that some "intelligent creator" designed all of these things rather than go through the painstaking tedium of actually trying to figure it out for ourselves based on sometimes crappy and elusive physical evidence. It's the path of least resistance from an academic standpoint.

Unfortunately, I have come to the conclusion that just because something is emotionally comforting, that doesn't mean it is true.

Careful, someone might confuse you with Dawkins:D.

ID is intellectual laziness of the worst kind. It is also part of a greater anti-intellectual ideology aimed at imposing theocracy on us.

An interesting quote form a non-review of the movie:

"The “intelligent design” hoax is not merely non-science, nor even merely anti-science; it is anti-civilization. It is an appeal to barbarism, to the sensibilities of those Apaches, made by people who lack the imaginative power to know the horrors of true barbarism. (A thing that cannot be said of Darwin. See Chapter X of Voyage of the Beagle.)"
John Derbyshire; what he calls a "blood libel on our civilization".

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZGYwMzdjOWRmNGRhOWQ4MTQyZDMxNjNhYTU1YTE5Njk=&w= MA==

Read what I wrote in the context of what I was replying to. You seemed to be saying that cloning was proof of intelligent design. You are posting in support of intelligent design but you seem to lack clarity and perception of what it implies.



Or it's something else. Are you pretending or do you really not understand what a transitional species is?

One of my degrees, an MSEE is from a CA university, so I guess it dosen't count for much, considering the sorry state of education in CA.

The sorry, inept responses to my statements about ID seem to show that a lot of CA educated people read this thread.

Their inability to reason stands out. ID requires basic reasoning. A total lack of reason permeates this thread.

Master of Social Engineering and Evolution? Cool...

Master of high school logic. Actually I remember mastering this subject at age 7, so I must be some kind of genus.

It seems apparent that some people lack the knowledge or smarts to understand the human condition. Why are we here? Where did we come from? Who, what was the first? Some people just do not get it. I assume that this condition is a deficiency in their brain, they have not evolved to the same state I and many others have.

..

MHSL? I thought you said MSEE. I think you're pulling our legs...

San Diego, 1987 Look me up via my profile

I think most people don't have any problem with the concept of a power or God in the universe. For me, the problems begin when they tell me that the Earth is 6000 yrs old & that dinosaurs & humans co-existed. I also don't think God needs as much money as "men of God" would lead me to believe.

"If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?....For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark

First off, 5 million years is an amazingly SHORT time if you look at the total time that scientists postulate life was evolving on earth. From what we currently know, life sort of sat there in single cell form for billions of years. That's billions with a B. Then over just 50 million years we had a sudden appearance of multicellular, complex life forms. Most of these seem to have sprung up fully formed into their phylogenies, not a mis-mash of transitional forms as evolution would predict. Saying "5 million years is a long time" doesn't cut it when we are talking about evolution and the age of the earth.

Second, I am not saying there are no species that can be called "transitional forms" that have been found in the fossil record. What I am saying is that those transitional form species should equal or possibly even outnumber the amount of fully formed species we see in the fossil record. That simply isn't the case. Why is that?

Lastly, why do you say that the chances of fossilization don't apply to all species equally? Obviously species without bony structures are less likely, but lets just take vertebrates as an example. Why would a transitional form vertebrate be any less likely to form a fossil than a full species vertebrate?

It's not true. A transitional species implies continual environmental pressure for selective change. At one point the total African population of humans may have been as low as a few thousand when Africa's human population was separated by desert and drought. These "transitional" humans might not be well represented in the fossil record.

Also, it is thought that the reptile/bird transitions may have been very small forest dwellers. Poor candidates for fossil preservation.

1. The genome/protein sequence dating suggests divergence of these lineages before the Cambrian and there are trace fossils suggestive of this.

2. Huge numbers of incremental transitional fossils exist in marine sediments where fossilization of hard parts is favored. Compare that to terrestrial forrest environments where fossilization virtually never happens without some catastrophe (volcanic eruption, massive flood, etc.). This is why many of our terrestrial fossils are from lake/river/stream sediments.

3. Speciation events (not drift) most likely occur during population contraction events whether by isolation or environmental catastrophe and therefore, transitional forms would be localized geographically and be would be relatively rare. This means you have to get incredibly lucky to find the right location of sediments if they even exist.

4.What percentage of the available sediment material has been searched? Over the past 40 years that I have been following this, huge numbers of fossils have been added to our inventory. There is no reason to think that we have even scratched the "surface" of what is to come with continued exploration. Simply look at the explosion of data out of China in the last couple of decades and the recent discovery of Tiktalik (how long did that search take and at what expenditures of resources?).

I made this statement because I think different environments have better conditions for fossilization than other environments. So, it depends where the species live to a great extent.

If nothing else, IMHO the Cambrian "explosion" provides excellent evidence for evolution as it presents a point in time long after we know life began where large numbers of new species arose. Not many people dispute this as even the ID and creationist folks like to point out how the Cambrian explosion presents problems for the theory of evolution - they don't deny it occurred - they try and use it against proponents for a naturalistic explanation. So, either there was some naturalistic explanation for this rapid increase in species or some "creator" is stopping back by every once in awhile and tweaking the knobs of his creation. I still think a naturalistic explanation is the logical choice.

What you call reason is just your very strong feeling that your god exists. This feeling, intuition, gut-feel, emotion, whatever you want to call it, is so strong in you that it seems entirely obvious to you that your god exists. This same feeling also leads you to the conclusion that there is obviously an intelligence behind the design in universe, and that your god is the I in ID.

There is no logic or reason that can conclude that god exists or that there is an intelligent design to the universe. The only possible way to come to these conclusions is via emotions. Your emotion that these things are true is just so strong it makes you think these truths are as obvious as 2+2=4.

Well now hold on a sec Moses. Even if you assert that the Cambrian explosion occurred because of a change in environment that favored diversification, there still should be transitional species in abundance. Just because environment changes does not change the fundamental way evolution occurs, i.e. random mutation of genetic material and further natural selection favoring advantageous phenotypes.

Thus if we take this reptile to bird scenario, if an animal is 99% reptile and 1% bird, in actuality it is more like 99.9999999999% reptile and .00000000001% bird at the start, then taking this simple example, there should be at least 50 (again, in reality more like a million events, but I'm trying to keep it simple here) separate mutation events prior to the animal being 51% bird and thus classified as a new species. Obviously the lines are grayer, but the premise still holds.

If that is the case, and we take into account that genetic mutation 1) takes many generations to develop, 2) is going to be either a non-factor or disadvantageous the majority of the time due to simple chance and 3) it takes multiple generations for those mutations to build; then there should be thousands if not hundreds of thousands of generations of these transitional animals for each first generation of a new species. These animals should outnumber the new species by a good amount. Thus, even in the fossil records we should see something like 1) Reptile----millions of years of transitional forms----Bird. This is not the case though, what we see is reptile---reptile---reptile---reptile---whoops, here's a bird all of a sudden.

Is the scientific answer really as simple as "we haven't found it yet"? If so, isn't THAT a "God of the gaps"?