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Joined: Feb 2004
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Wisconsin
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A belief, practice, or rite irrationally maintained by ignorance of the laws of nature or by faith in magic or chance.
For the rest of this post, I'm going to assume that the specific definition of superstition is:
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A belief, practice, or rite irrationally maintained by ignorance of the laws of nature or by faith in magic or chance.
None of the other definitions really seemed to fit the context. So, here goes.
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No, atheists have no problem with the bible. You can interpret the bible in two ways:
a) Religious interpretation: The bible is a book of parables that contain a deeper wisdom.
b) Superstitious interpretation: The bible is a book of miracle stories that literally happened.
I'll recognize that my belief is, according to the definition, a superstition. However, I do recognize that it goes against the laws of nature. But I also recognize that the laws of nature had a beginning, and that that beginning was started by a creator. There's no two ways around it. So assuming that a creator can create the universe, I also assume that he can bend the laws of the universe. You don't believe in the creator, so this isn't your bag of tea. It really doesn't matter.
But, this gets to a bigger point.
Atheists don't have a problem with the bible, maybe. They have a problem that people believe what the bible says. It irks them. However, I'll admit that my belief is superstitious, according to definition. That's fine.
Its just as superstitious as the belief that life can start randomly, and just as superstitious as the belief that the universe can create itself out of nothing. So your belief in the Big Bang (not the evidence for it, but the actual event), and the origin of life is superstitious too. Technically, its also superstitious to believe that mutations can 'write' creatures, since its never happened, nor is there any physical evidence of its possibility, but we'll have to deal with that seperately.
NO ONE can escape superstition if they want to have ANY kind of belief on these events. If you don't want to be superstitious, deal only with what you know day in and day out, with your own eyes. I don't want to be that way, and there's only two possibilities for an answer. God, or nature. I've made my choice, but they're both just as irrational.
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Biology normally attributes seemingly intelligent animal behavior to instinct. Thus I do not think that crows understand vehicles and traffic lights. If that were the case, they'd developed that behavior as soon as traffic lights were invented - but it was observed only sice 20 years.
Well, this is kind of a sticky topic. I don't think they understand traffic lights per se.
However, many experiments have been done on birds (less 'intelligent' than the crow) and they have shown that animals (birds in this case) can problem solve, and learn. They took several small birds of the same species, and had one group of them go through a puzzle that kept growing in complexity. As they went through the puzzle step by step, they eventually were able to solve the most difficult puzzle which the other birds could not without the step-by-step process.
I don't think all animal behavior can be attributed to instinct. I don't think experimentation supports it. And I don't think mutations had anything to do with these crows learning to put their food under car tires.
There's another example of birds using motion detectors on doors to open them up and get food before returning, opening the door again, and bringing the food back to a nest inside a hardware store.
If such arbitrary behavior can be endowed with mutations, we should randomly see birds behaving very strangely. After all, the mutations don't know that the crows need to put the food under car tires. We should see some birds that put the nut under a tree, do a dance around it, and then expect it to be cracked open. I don't know, but it seems the possibilities for strange behavior would be endless, until they happened to mutate to figure out that car tires open up nuts.
I guess I'm going to have to drop out of the debate on the distance of stars. You win. Some of the things you said seemed pretty circular. But in general I won't disagree that we really are seeing things that are that far away. The most compelling evidence being that are galaxy MUST be pretty large (larger in distance than time allowed for YECreation) and we probably see objects outside of it.
I believe that time dialation can explain this, and that relatively the universe is alternately billions of years old and thousands of years old. Frankly, the evidence on our own planet that it isn't much more than a handful of thousands of years old is more compelling to our own existence.
I do have to wonder. If the Milky Way galaxy is about 80,000 to 100,000 light years in diameter, and contains about 200 to 400 billion stars, why are there so few stars in the sky? Even in photographs from the moon (with little unnatural light, and no atmosphere) the number of stars doesn't seem to match up. Actually in a lot of the photos of moon landings I didn't see any stars, which is strange because they're always visible (even during 'day'), but I assume there's a physical explanation for that.
Anyway, I don't really have much time left, so I want to move on to the other points.
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Yes, this is the basic creationist belief, but as they failed so far to give any proof for this other than their faith, I consider this belief unfounded.
Its just an observed fact that mutations don't add information. I think anyone without a bias watching this debate can plainly see that there has yet to be an example of new information.
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Simple math tells you that a random mutation mostly is information neutral, but sometimes adds information ("alleles") to the gene pool.
In that case, a mutation can lose information, add it to the gene pool and be called new information. Its relative to the genome. You can't look at it any other way, or you're ignoring genetic science.
A loss of information doesn't have to mean a complete loss of purpose. If I say, wash my bedroom window, compared to, wash my window, I'm still saying close to the same thing. However, one has less information than the other. Let's say that by not referencing a specific window, I get the person I'm talking to, to wash my car window instead by coincidence. This may work out for the best, because my car's window needed washing, but the specific information was still lost.
This is consistent with information theory, which evolution is not, and its consistent with what we observe. The only objection to this is that it doesn't fit evolution. Maybe evolution doesn't happen. You can't force the data to fit the theory, that's not how science works.
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antibiotics resistence, temperature resistence, Milano mutation
I think we'll have to get back on these, because they weren't quite resolved like I thought they were.
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Transformation May Combine DNA from Different Bacterial Species
Bacteria employ several methods of recombination that allow gene transfer between unrelated species. A process called transformation allows bacteria to pick up free DNA from the environment. The free DNA may be part of the chromosome of another bacterium, including DNA from a bacterium of another species. Transformation may also occur when bacteria pick up tiny circular DNA molecules called plasmids (Fig. 13-1). Plasmids, which range in size from about 1000 to 100,000 nucleotides, are self-replicating lengths of DNA normally found in the cytoplasm of many types of bacteria and some yeasts. A single bacterium--a host cell--may contain dozens or even hundreds of copies of a plasmid. Although the bacterium’s “own” chromosome contains all the genes the cell normally needs for survival, the genes carried by the plasmid may also be useful. For example, some plasmids contain genes that code for enzymes that digest certain antibodies, such as penicillin. In environments where exposure to antibiotics is high, such as hospitals, these plasmids spread quickly, conferring a major advantage to their bacterial hosts and making antibiotic-resistant infections a serious problem (see Chapter 19). A bacterium may acquire plasmids from its own strain or from other types of bacteria. These plasmids are either liberated into the environment when a bacterium dies or are exchanged between living bacteria.
Viruses May Transfer DNA between Bacteria and between Eukaryotic Species
Viruses, which are little more than genetic material encased in a protein coat, transfer their genetic material to cells. Their viral genes replicate and direct the synthesis of viral proteins. New virus particles are assembled inside the cell, then released to repeat the cycle (Fig 13-2). Viruses may transfer genes among bacteria and among eukaryotic organisms, such as plants, as well. Bacteriophages, specialized viruses that infect bacteria, occasionally acquire pieces of bacterial DNA. The bacteriophages, or phages, then release this DNA into other bacteria that they infect. In some cases, the transferred bacterial DNA becomes incorporated into the host bacterial chromosome, adding new genetic material.
Audesirk & Audesirk, Biology, 5th edition, 1999, pages 230 - 231
That's a college textbook, I believe. Creationists don't dispute bacterial resistance via mutation, science does.
Heat resistance I can't argue. I don't know how the bacteria got the resistance. So I don't know how its done, what changes have to be made, and if those changes have to be brought about by mutation or natural genetic change.
Milano mutation I thought was already solved. I don't understand how going from producing HDLs to doing nothing is considered new information. But maybe that's because I don't believe in the impossible.
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The materialist view is that a complex enough brain automatically develops consciousness.
This is really a dead end argument. We can't debate something neither side really understands. But it is an interesting topic.
"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."
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