Date:   8/22/2006 4:29:27 PM ( 18 years ago ago)
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URL:   https://www.curezone.org/forums/fm.asp?i=415067

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Nothing is really ever proven in science. At best we accept certain ideas as facts because it would be sheer stupidity to claim otherwise. Take gravity as an example. We can meassure the gravitational force of any two observable objects (apples, rocks, planets, stars) and we accept that all matter has this property. But have we proven it? Well by your standards no since that would require us to measure all matter in the universe for this gravitational force. You could easily claim that there is matter in this universe that does not have this property - you could not prove it, but you can claim it. Same with god, you can claim it but you can't prove it.

Nice strawman, there, Corinthian. You're trying to equate evolution to gravity with your strawman, and it won't fly.

Every bit of matter we can touch follows the rules of gravitational attraction. Very little of the DNA evidence, and certainly very little of the fossil record, however, shows evolution happening.

OTOH, evolution does have a mountain of material evidence across multiple fields of science.

No, it doesn't. Please, point out some proof of evolution.

The true extraordinary claim (and one without any evidence) is that of god. There is no proof for the existence of god, and even less for the idea that god created the universe, life and everything. There is at least some (I say plenty) proof for evolution. It is curious that the most extraordinary claim ever (ie. God) is accepted without evidence, yet a simple idea like evolution (and its evidence) is not.

I am not trying to prove or disprove God with my arguments against evolution. I certainly will not argue with you that there is very little (or no) scientific proof for Jehovah, Yahweh, and Allah. The historical evidence is pretty flimsy, too. Lots of evidence of humans killing each other; no proof that "God" commanded it, other than the writings of humans who did the killing and said God told them to do it.

Have you noticed that I don't argue with creationists about creationism? I don't argue with them because there is no point in doing so. They don't care about science or finding out; they're blinded by their belief that they already know. So there's no point, because they're going to believe what they want to believe and pretend that that constitutes knowledge regardless of all the reasons it shouldn't.

On the other hand, evoltionists typically fancy themselves scientists, and so I have this idea that perhaps reason would matter.

I bring up the monkey-to-humans thing because, genetically, there's pretty strong evidence that human bodies did "come from" monkey bodies, some how, some way (which annoys creationists). But there are still enough questions about it, and unanswered ones, and things that would not be predicted by evolutionary theory, that we nevertheless face in the monkey chromosomes 2p and 2q merger into human chromosome 2. Our chromosome 2 has two centromeres -- well, only one, really, but a second region that looks a lot like another one. Only... chromosomes can't have more than one centromere, so one of them was... disabled? Or so it appears. Only one of the centromeres is used, and the other looks a lot like a centromere, only it doesn't behave like one. Futher, there's a region of genetic material in the middle of chromosome 2 which looks a lot like a joined up pair of telomeres from the ends of the chromosomes where the two were merged, which should not be present in an actual chromosome (and is found in no other chromosomes that I'm aware of -- but that's not saying much) unless some sort of end-to-end joining took place.

So... the evidence strongly suggests that humans came from monkeys, and not only that they came from monkeys, but also that some particularly odd events took place to make it happen.

There aren't other species whose DNA we've evaluated which shares this particular characteristic with its alleged predecessors (are there?). If this were a common enough event that random chance has a chance to do it... perhaps we should see it more often? I mean, we find instances in nature where plants create hybrids by adding chromosomes, or by doubling their chromosomes... and clearly different kinds of creatures have all sorts of differing numbers of chromosomes (ferns with hundreds of pairs come to mind)... and some species with slightly different numbers of chromsomes can interbreed to produce hybrids with mismatched chromosomes... and even some species that don't have pairs but triplets of chromosomes (bananas come to mind)... but humans seem to be unique in that we're the only species who's alleged predecessor came about from genetic fusion.

That doesn't prove God -- far from it -- but it isn't predicted by theory and it isn't something that nature has oodles of evidence of support for. So how did it happen? A "random chance" event should be duplicable. How does one get chromosomes to randomly fuse together? Just solve that, and we're at least on the way. [Allegedly, stripping off the telomeres would produce a situation wherein this could occur, but recall that the characteristic sequences of telomeres were included in the middle of chromosome, as if the telomeres had not been stripped, but instead that this was simply some sort of genetic "hack". As a software engineer, this screams "hack" to me, actually -- as in, something one does to make something work quickly, no matter how inelegant it might be. Nature: Reality's Hacker.]

Then there's how does that produce viable offspring, and that entire line of questioning, but we can cross that bridge when we come to it.

You are falling to the god argument when faced with a question without a clear answer.

Nope. When faced with a question without a clear answer, I honesty say, "I don't know." Usually, anyway. *wink* I don't have some sort of compulsion to assert that my viewpoint is right anyway, in spite of the evidence. In fact, I'm begging for evidence of evolution. Just show me some evolution happening, and I'll be firmly in the evolutionary camp, OK?

Creationists? When faced with evidence that contradicts their beliefs, many of them turn to authorities who come up with explanations -- no matter how far-fetched -- and then adopt those explanations. The explanations invariably maintain the status quo. Heaven forbid we should learn something.

Evolutionists? When faced with evidence that contradicts their pet theory, they ignore it or deride it or -- like creationists -- come up with some sort of far-fetched explanation of how it could still support evolution, and then they go on believing their theory anyway, thus maintaining the status quo.

Which side will snap out of it first? I'm not placing any bets.

Update: I'm talking macro-evolution, fish-into-cat kind of stuff. Please don't keep harping on micro-evolution and trying to convince me that that's the same thing, OK? I know the species in an area tend to adopt the already available traits to that species/genus/family that most favor survival, if any traits are more favorable than others, and that, in this way, the environment impinges on genetics. That is what Darwin observed, that's what Darwin wrote about, and that's the basis for Darwin's as-yet-unproven inductive leap that evolution -- macro-evolution -- occurred and occurs. Fish into cat. Algae into shrimp. Whatever.

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