This Week in Evolution

Don't let the trolls discourage or derail you.

This whole "creationists vs. scientists" debate is something you can get all over blogspace. Your blog's theme is original.

I've added your blog to my sidebar and my google reader because I thought it would be fun to put that debate aside for a bit and get a taste of what the researchers are talking about, and not just the biggest science news.

This is the cool thing about blogspace -- you can find all sorts of fun and interesting topics that aren't general-interest enough for the mainstream media to bother with...

Jesus rode dinosaurs! That means dinosaurs were around when humans were around and that they survived on a big boat!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bar-art/414998399/

Apparently today has been declared the National Day of Reason (http://www.nationaldayofreason.org/index.html), in response to the National Day of Prayer. Can't we use our reason year-round? As for prayer, I don't care where hypotheses come from, so long as they're tested in ways that others can repeat. If Bush had prayed to find the location of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and then UN inspectors had confirmed their presence, that would have been very different from "God told me to invade Iraq, but I accidentally erased the email."

Author writes [in Darwinian Agriculture III]:
"50 million years is a long time, even for those evolutionary biologists who study the history of life. (Other scientists focus on evolutionary changes over much shorter periods of time: sometimes less than one day, for bacteria with generation times of less than an hour.)"

The changes seen in bacteria is NOT an example of Darwinian Evolution. It is simply a change within kind, and would never develop into another KIND. God provided for this type of change and it has strict limits. Imagine what confusion we would have if every human on earth looked exactly alike. God foresaw this eventuality and designed living things with this built in mini change.

James,

I agree that there must be some limits on evolution by natural selection. For example, life based on DNA might never evolve into life using a completely different molecule for heredity, even if the latter would thrive in a particular environment, because intermediate stages might not be viable. But, given that wild cabbage evolved into both cauliflower, kohlrabi, etc. in less than 100 years (under selection imposed by a handful of humans on a few plant populations, rather than worldwide natural selection), what would prevent much larger changes in 100 million years?

Is there a list of KINDS that is widely accepted by those who believe in discrete KINDS?

"You could claim that ANYTHING'S real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody's PROVED it doesn't exist."

If evolutionists want to end the arguments all they have to do is, get their brilliant heads together and assemble a 'simple' living cell. This should be possible, since they certainly have a very great amount of knowledge about what is inside the 'simple' cell.

After all, shouldn't all the combined Intelligence of all the worlds scientist be able the do what chance encounters with random chemicals, without a set of instructions, accomplished about 4 billion years ago,according to the evolutionists, having no intelligence at all available to help them along in their quest to become a living entity. Surely then the evolutionists scientists today should be able to make us a 'simple' cell.

If it weren't so pitiful it would be humorous, that intelligent people have swallowed the evolution mythology.

[More along these lines deleted, as this is an exact cut-and-paste of something posted earlier...]

James,

I expect this to happen within my lifetime. This has already been done for a virus (Science 310: 77-80). However, I wouldn't expect making a living cell from scratch to end the "debate", if I can so dignify a disagreement where one side publishes data and the other side whines.

Furthermore, even if we set up a tank with early-Earth conditions, left it alone, and got simple life in only a few years (rather than the millions of years and millions of square kilometers available in the prebiotic world), that wouldn't disprove miraculous intervention the first time around, only that such intervention isn't essential. I think the experiment would be worth doing, because IF we got life (before funding runs out!) it would be cool to see any similarities and differences from "life as we know it."

I notice that you haven't come forward with a list of KINDS.

Eesh! What is a random chemical? What is a non-random chemical?

BTW, if scientists did that (and I agree with the blog owner that is probably going to occur sooner than we think), creationists would come up and say: see that's proving Intelligent Design. Though they would have to admit that there might well be a lot of Designers and not just one...