Oh man. Where to get started? I've got my hands full, but I was busy with my brother's wedding, which was absolutely great.

Anyway.

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"Someone who doesn't even believe in God has outsmarted me."

Does one need the permission of a God-believer to read the bible?
I grow up with the bible, within a christian family and a parish, the fact that I don't believe your believe doesn't mean that I didn't read the bible with the same seriousness as you.



No, but you obviously don't believe it. If you don't believe the bible, then why are you trying to use it as leverage? However, don't argue that you do believe the bible. I'm not going to get off on that tangent. Its unimportant. Bible-creationists have plenty of material on the incompatibility of evolution and christianity. Atheists also have a bunch of material on the incompatibility.

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Have there been examples within the discussion in this thread? I must have missed them.



You did miss them. If I remember correctly from skimming over the posts, I'll have to bring a couple of them up before I'm done with this post.

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Biology says, that all we CAN look for are natural causes, that's its base.



Which is why people believe the Big Bang, because we all know of the many natural processes that can cause nothing to explode into something. I know, the big bang has nothing to do with biology, but both are based on science, and apparently science is all about materialism these days.

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About the dna thing, eventhough repeating patterns (that's basically what they've discovered) where found, doesn't mean it has been proven that it has a purpose at this time.



Ok, you're right, scientists are wrong. You got me there.

Unfortunately for you, you can't claim this is speculation. This is real, observable, stuff. We don't understand it yet, but we know it has a purpose. A reason for existing, if you will (most of it).

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Every animal's presence has it's effect on the foodchain. Take one or a few species out, and some others could die out pretty soon too.



Strictly speaking, that's not a symbiotic relationship.

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As for the tube worm, at this time it could not survive without the bacteria, but it could very well be that there wasn't always a symbiotic relation. What if at first the worm did have a mouth, anuses and means to survive on it's own? What if the bacteria came along later and the symbiotic relation grew, mutations causing the worm to loose certain features, which he didn't needed because the newly acquired benefits from the co-existing bacteria replaced them fully?



I hope everyone caught what happened here. In order to give a rational explanation of how this relationship could relate to evolution he had to talk about the worm losing genetic data or specificity. That cracks me up.

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but remember eventhough we might think of it as something amazing, aren't we very subjective?



This is a copout if I ever saw one. The ability for the octopus is only amazing from the perspective of intelligence. Actually, its pretty amazing either way, but it comes with its own set of problems that I won't address here.

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For any behavior to occure, there's a long road of building up experience through trial and error and also mimicking others and parents.



Some behavior has nothing to do with trial and error. Its just programmed in. Some behavior is learned, and is limited only by the intelligence of the creature, which directly relates to the crow example, and I'll get to that later.

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b.) did it witness how it's parents build it



I hope not, because nests are preparation for the eggs. Certainly they weren't even alive when the nest was built. So this would probably be an example of pre-programmed bahavior.

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Why are physical evolution and intelligence linked at all?



Because intelligence would have had to evolve.

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A mutation which as a result affects an arm or leg, doesn't mean the being suddenly becomes stupid.



Wow.

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Like I said, we don't know much about that worm. For worms in general scientists have determined their behavior relies much on trial-and-error behavior, or at least experiments seem to suggest that. The amount of intelligence for the worm is not really relevant, it just lives for survival, take for example ants, they don't need to rely on their intelligence to survive. Sheer number and cooperation with eachother as one big 'animal', every little ant does helps in the survival of the colony. Yes, those ants must have sort of an instinct, and I do think evolution has it's effects on it. Like I said, these questions by Dan do not make evolution more or less unlikely in my opinion.



Maybe, but they certainly add to the already astronomical impossibility of evolution.

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Some creatures only react to direct things in their environments and don't actually need to think.



I'm sorry, you simply don't know this. I don't think anyone claims to know what goes on in the mind of an ant.

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The only relevant part of intelligence for those kind of species would be pure being able to move around, smell and that kind of basic stuff.



Which goes back to its central nervous system, which is what a brain is. Although ours is more sophisticated than an ant's. You can't smell without the CNS to react to the smell, you can't walk without the inclination in the CNS to do so and the ability of the CNS to tell the body to move.

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What other option do you suggest? *poof* and there the animal get's his instinct? LOL!



Isn't that kind of what happens when a person is born? They're a lump of cells, and then poof they have a human brain capable of thinking and all that fun stuff. I could 'lol' a lot of the ridiculous crap you believe, but that would get rather pointless. It would be fun though, because all you can lol is the creation. I've got a laundry list of things I can laugh at that you believe (I assume you believe).

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The evolution is seldom a prozess of perfectionizing or a prozess which is 'aiming' at completeness.



Its rather strange, then, that even in our cursed world that is pretty much all we find. Sure, there's the odd mutation that causes lost data which manages to be beneficial, but that's certainly not evolution. You have a huge problem. For a blind, random process, evolution sure has managed to do a good job of creating creatures that seem to be pretty perfect, complete, whatever you want to call it.

Don't bring up similarities. Those aren't proof of evolution, they're proof that animals are similar.

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And there are evolutionists who accuse Darwin that he only stressed this sentence, because it rectified the colonization politics of the european nations at that time.



No, he only believed it because he was ignorant. He thought that giraffes got their necks because they used to be short and they kept stretching them to reach food. He didn't know anything about genetics, so he didn't think there were mutations. Mutations are just a last ditch effort of evolutionists to save their theory. Tiny, losses of information or scrambling of genomes will never lead to anything new, because unless you can take all pressure off of animals until they're 'done changing' they'll never survive the huge gap in genomes.

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This is part of the neurobiology whereof I don't know much.



You don't have to talk about the specifics of the mind, just how it would have evolved. The evolution of the brain, and the workings of the brain are two completely seperate fields. But I don't really care.

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If a robin builds a certain nest, what would happen to that instinct if the robin evolved to a new species?



Don't you know?! Random tinkering somehow causes all of these changes to occur at once.......Or something...It doesn't really matter because: fossils!

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The evolution of instincts is indeed fascinating. Heritable instincts can evolve and change very fast - within a few generations.



I love your proof of this. I'll leave my response for your 'proof.'

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I remember having read about crows. They eat walnuts that they usually drop on stones for cracking them open. Since the second half of the 20th century, crows living close to streets were observed to wait at crossings until the traffic lights turn red. Then they place nuts in front of vehicle wheels. When the lights turn green, they fly away and vehicles drive over the nuts. At the next red time the crows pick up the cracked nuts.

This is quite a complex behavior developed in a short time, not more than a century. Evolution explains this by a mutation or gene shift (= one crow develops a new hereditary instinct) followed by natural selection (= crows with this instinct have an evolutionary advantage). Of course, creationists have certainly a different explanation (= God has foreseen vehicles and traffic and made crows already with this instinct).



Evolution explains this with mutations or gene shift? Mutations need not cause this. When I'm getting trained on how to flip burgers at McDonald's, is it because my brain is mutating? Or do I just have the natural intelligence capacity to learn how to do my job?

Yeah, crows who do this might have an advantage, but they have existed without it for how long? Do you really think that they die off just because they don't know to put a nut under a wheel?

Or is it possible that they just learned how to do it because they're intelligent.

Unless you can actually provide evidence of mutations somehow writing this behavior, I'll stick with a real, scientific explanation.

It is strange to note that monkeys really aren't that close to us in behavior. They tend to have sex with many, many partners naturally whereas a lot of birds pick one partner for life. Birds are probably some of the closest to us in intelligence. Some birds have an english vocabulary of about 2000 words! Monkeys scratch their anus with their finger nails and pee into their mouths.

Birds can fashion their own tools, use more elaborate tools, and use more logic than monkeys can. We must have evolved from birds........

Now, since monkeys are a lot closer in DNA to our 'ancestors', that means that our larger difference is filled with mutations that are neutral. In other words, if a broken down human can survive just as well, where is natural selection in all of this? This is a problem for evolutionists, but there is no disregarding the theory, so we'll just have to wait until they find a way to make the data fit the theory....again.

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Hubble observed that the spectra are shifted to the red. The darker the galaxy was, i.e. the more distant, the more its spectrum was shifted.



How did they know the star isn't just less bright, smaller, etc?

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When all galaxies are moving away from each other, there must have been a time when they all were together at the same position.



A gigantic assumption. For all you know, they've only been moving away from each other for 6000 years. If I see a car driving east past my house, I'm not going to just say, "Oh, it MUST have driven all the way from the west coast." I don't know where it started.

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The universe had a beginning.



Clearly.

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Now astronomy had a quite reliable method to calculate the distance of stars from their directly observed temperature-brightness-relation.



How do they know, without making a few correlations or assumptions, what the temperature of an object billions of lightyears away is? How do they know what the 'initial mass' is?

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More precise distance measurements and comparisions with supernova records led to the discovery that the red shift was not caused by a doppler effect, as Hubble assumed, but by an expansion of space itself.



We've seen space expanding? Or did this assumption just make more sense within the frame of the theory?

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This happened 1964. Two US physicists discovered the cosmic background radiation. This was considered the final proof of the Big Bang. The background radiation has a temperature of 2.7 Kelvin, which puts the age of the universe at about 10..20 billion years.



Except it was decided that the big bang would produce variations in this temperature, and lo and behold they found variations (certain 'tropics' if you will). So how do we know what temperature to base this off of?

The one that fits the age of the universe best?

Again, this is another one of those assumptions that the cooling of the universe is proof of anything other than that the universe is cooling. Unless you can point something out, it could just have arrived at this temperature after 6000 years of existence.

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This led to the discovery that some galaxies were older than the 10 billion years assumed so far for the age of the universe. This puzzle was solved by the discovery that the universe is expanding with increasing velocity.



Expanding faster because if they aren't then the theory is bunk? Or because we have proof. Why did we only find this proof after the evidence contradicted the theory?

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In the 1990s the age of the universe was again calculated with a complete different method, measuring uranium isotopes. Uranium came into existence through the nuclear process in the first stars. This put the age of the universe at 14.5 (+/- 1.1) billion years.



See what I mean. You can come up with all sorts of answers if you come up with assumptions first. You have to assume the way that uranium was created.

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So we have three different methods for calculating the age of the universe, all producing the same result and thus giving creationists a hard time.



I'm not too worried about it. If you can only prove your theory by first assuming that its true, then that's pretty bunk. But I look forward to persuing this line of discussion.

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his is not a speciality of evolution theory, this is part of neurobiology and medicin.



Neurobiology doesn't study the evolution of the brain. It just studies the brain. Evolution speculates as to how that brain evolved. So its not reinventing the wheel, its looking at the wheel from a different perspective. So, you can't avoid this one, and neither can evolution.

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it signs responsible for a concept which puts the obvious similarities (for instance between the mammals)



You'd like to stay within this line of thought because its more comfortable to point out that animals are similar, than wonder how, within reason, evolution could possibly account for behavior and appearance.

Its also fun to focus on the similarities between mammals, than say the huge differences. Some live on land, some in water. Some walk, others have wings. Some walk and glide. Some lay eggs, some don't. Some are parasitic, some aren't. Some are venomous, some aren't. Some have duck-like bills, some don't. Some are nocturnal, some aren't (I've love someone to explain the evolution of nocturnal animals). I could go on and on. Its interesting to note that mammals have a species (or many species) to represent most of the major physical attributes of all animals, and a lot of the non-physical attributes. Excluding some of the more exotic ones like exoskeletons which by their nature exclude mammals.

That doesn't disprove evolution, but the point is that you find all kinds of variety in life. That doesn't make any speculation on animals more or less true.

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As long as you are looking at God's creation and world, making observations and theories about how everything in it is working and connected, this is not contradicting with an 'inscrutable God', it is not contradicting with the principles of scientific theory, as well.



It is if you do it without proof, and only assumptions.

'But animals really are similar!' I can't imagine you would have any other response.

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then you include God within the subject of the investigations, and this contradicts with an 'inscrutable God',



Ok, if that verse uses the word 'inscrutable' then we have to take a look at the meaning of the word, and exactly what we're doing. Scrutiny is kind of like examining, or studying something. If we're scrutinizing God's creation, are we scrutinizing Him? I don't see where you're making the connection. This is what I meant when I say the bible says we were given a mind to understand His creation. He wants us to KNOW and ENJOY His creation. He also wants us to KNOW and ENJOY Him, but we can't just pull Him out of the sky and put Him under a microscope. So I fail to see the contradiction between creationism and the bible.

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it contradicts with scientific theory which requires that any of its explanations are included within the theory's context,



If animals can't change beyond their originally programmed limits, and if mutations simply cause errors which aren't necessarily deleterious, then that fits within the mold of creation and debunks evolution. And yet nowhere in there did I pull God out of the sky to come to these conclusions , we just performed experiments, etc.. We observed His creation. Evolutionists fail to admit these two things because they're opposed to their theory, but its still true.

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while putting a God within a theory actually claims that there are other reasons which can't be understood from the principles and their co-relations of the theory itself.



Its a good thing no one does that. Creationism says that biology matches up with the account from the bible. That animals produce after their kind. This is what we see. Creationism predicts (outside the bible which never approached the subject) that mutations could never hope to even come close to writing a new kind of animal. This is what we see. These line up with what the bible says. Whereas, your invisible, and unobservable (magical) changes are being inserted into good science, I have the courtesy to keep God out of science because I know I can keep him out without contradicting His word. You have to add your god in just so that your theory makes sense. Neither of our deities are observable (per se), but at least mine makes sense in the context of science.

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I don't see any problems with changing instincts and evolution causing them



Did you ever think that if bird's brains were evolving that rapidly (in the context of random mutations), that we would see birds in confusion, or absolutely mentally retarded, or unable to function normally, more than we would see these 'good' behaviors being evolved? You guys seem to forget that brains have the wonderful ability to learn, and that this doesn't have anything to do with evolution.

Evolutionists say this all the time, "Mutations are mostly bad." So where are all the bad mutations? Surely, if it happened this quick we would still be able to observe the deleterious ones. We're back to Darwin's problem. Why is all of nature not a mass of confusion?

"The task force finds that...the unborn child is a whole human being from the moment of fertilization, that all abortions terminate the life of a human being, and that the unborn child is a separate human patient under the care of modern medicine."