1. Write to UCF

Comment #219428 by Sconnor on July 27, 2008 at 12:45 am

Steve Zara,

I think you will find PZ's argument quite compelling HERE .


--S.

2. Write to UCF

Comment #219426 by Sconnor on July 27, 2008 at 12:34 am

This is what I wrote:

Dear sir,

The next time you bite into a juicy, hamburger or cook a big, thick, steak on the grill, remember, you are desecrating the sacred cow of Hinduism.

Can you now see how ridiculous UCF is, handling Webster Cook's supposed desecration of a cracker?

Get ready, I see lawsuits in UCF's near future.

--Scott

3. Losing Sight of Progress

Comment #215505 by Sconnor on July 22, 2008 at 3:09 am

"To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."

Of course, this quote is always taken out of context. Darwin was making a rhetorical comment, saying, yes this is odd, but indeed, it happened and then concludes with the rest of the quote, how it's possible for light-sensitive cells could become eyes over time.

"When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certain the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility." --Darwin