I can only respond to one post for now. Must sleep.

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Not religion and science. Only creationism and science. When I estimate that there are about 6 million scientists in the world (10 scientists per 10,000 people), your list means that about 0.001% scientists and engineers believe in creationism. Thats even well below the usual 2% whacko rate.



This is an argument in spite of data, and it makes a bit of a straw man out of what Dan said. What Dan's list was meant to do is show there are creationists in science. By no means is it a scientific way of telling HOW MANY creation scientists there are. Your statement only makes sense if we believe that that list is entirely representative of all creation scientists everywhere.

Not that I think the whole argument is worth a grain of salt anyway.

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The fact that you can't observe the back side of the moon does not mean that the back side of the moon does not exist.



This is shifting the burden of proof. We always observe these animals building nests relatively the same way. My proof is in the observation. You can't make a claim and then call it substantial because no one can disprove it. Make a claim thats contrary to what we see, and then prove it.

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As a kid I owned an electronics experiments kit, consisting of a number of components like transistors, capacitors, batteries, lights, a loudspeaker, and so on. The components were placed in plastic cubes with magnetic contacts along the edges, so you could build all sorts of electronic devices by just placing the cubes together in the form of the desired circuit.

I noticed that when shuffling the cubes so that they fell together in a random order, mostly nothing happened, but sometimes the loudspeaker would produce a tone, like clicking, beeping or humming, or sometimes the light was flickering. The random cluster of components formed circuits like oscillators, phase shifters, or amplifiers.



This disregards everything we know about the nature of DNA information, and organisms. Normally the idea of a metaphor is to be a simplified representation, but in this case I think its oversimplified.

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We can see more than 2000 stars with the bare eye, but due to the illumination with electric light we normally only see about 300..400. With a good telescope you can see and count all the billions of stars that are not too close to the center of the galaxy. You can even see single stars in other galaxies, like Andromeda.



I wasn't taking into account the fact that some of them are just going to be too hard to see without an aid.

That explains it.

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new information means that a new feature (replacing an old one in an individual) is added to the gene pool, as in the Milano mutation.



Not with respect to genetics. And what the milano mutation did is actually a great example of the harm of mutations (I mean harm relatively, since it turned out to be good, but was harmful to the genome).

I won't get back into the debate on milano mutations unless you really want to, but suffice it to say that this mutation didn't offer a new feature. Depending on your definition of feature.

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I am not sure what you want to prove with that quote. Mutations happen by randomly changing DNA sequences, but also by inserting parts from foreign DNA or from the own DNA.



I'm only saying that bacteria can gain antibiotic resistance without mutations, and in fact that's how it happens. The insertion from foreign DNA is quite different from the kind of insertion caused by mutations. By the way, getting the DNA from somewhere else (assuming an external 'insertion' which is a really bad term to use for what happens) doesn't go to show how it was written in the first place, so I fail to see how that helps the mutation argument.


I must ask a question. If the universe is so old, how come comets give it an age of around 10,000 years? Excluding assumptions like the Oort cloud, how can you resolve this problem knowing what we know today? I'm just trying to iron things out in my head, astronomy has never been a huge interest of mine, but I do like to learn about it from time to time.

Last edited by Irish_Farmer; 05/17/06 06:47.
"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."