As Wooter mentioned the apparent absence of half-zebra/half-horse animals as a major point against evolution, can I mention the Quagga?

How to Be a Good Atheist explains the five types of atheism

I'm guessing type 1 is the type that doesn't believe in any gods.

Anyone know what the other 4 are?

That was a goal-post shift worthy of wooter! Evolution is disproved because we haven't bred talking cows?

after all, people have been breeding animals for millenia.

Is that really the same thing?

In the wild, animals have sex and make babies. In captivity, animals have sex and make babies.

What makes you think this isn't the same thing?

http://richarddawkins.net/article,2215,Sprinting-down-the-evolutionary-highway,The-Star

So, because we control who we breed with and when, somehow that means the genes of people who produce more offspring will not have greater representation in the next generation?

I like the way woot unquestioningly accepts scientists' assertion that no two snowflakes are identical, but flatly rejects the idea of common descent in organisms.

And I love the idea that bees have to hold a prayer meeting before building their combs to ask for divine guidance.

Complexity requires a designer.

You keep saying this over and over and over again, but it's simply not true. The best you can say is that some complex things are designed. Perhaps your upbringing has been so sheltered that you've only encountered designed things.

People who get out a bit more know of many, many complex things that are definitely not designed. Who "designed" the Mandelbrot set (BTW, people will laugh if you claim Benoit Mandelbrot designed it!) Infact any non-linear system with feedback will produce complex behaviour all on its own. Depending on the exact parameters that behaviour might be random or it might have clearly discernable patterns (ever watched a lava lamp warm up from cold? its behaviour is random, but it definitely changes what it does as it gets hotter).

There's also this lie that evolution starts from the assumption that there is no God. (I like the kettle logic here - christians also like to claim that ALL of modern science derives from christianity!) Of course this is rubbish, Darwin and all the other scientists involved in the framing of evolution were christians - you simply couldn't participate in academic life in Victorian Britain if you weren't a member of the C of E - they started from the assumption that life is designed and discovered that this assumption is false.

tO: robert s

You just click on the web page and check the reality yourself.

http://www.dhushara.com/book/evol/trevol.jpg

Thank-you, that is an absolutely gorgeous rendering of the tree of common descent. I can't see why you think it helps your case, though. In every case the organisms are obviously related to their ancestors by incremental changes. There are no sudden appearances of entirely novel forms created from nothing.

And it illustrates my point about the absence of logic in your comment about 'show me a worm evolve into a fish...' As you can see, fish did not evolve from worms. The worms are down low on the left ('worm' is a rather vague term, but the nematoda, cheatognatha and annelida would all qualify). The fish are up in the upper panel with the other vertebrates. The last common ancestor between fish and worms would probably have been a very simple multi-celled organism.

The evolution tree is a self-denial proof. How come millions of creatures can evolve from one another?

Can you expand on the 'self-denial proof'? I'm sure it's obvious to you, but I, and about a billion biologists, seem to have missed it.

What is the great mystery about evolution? When animals reproduce, the offspring are slightly different to the parents (are you identical to your father?). Over many generations the changes accumulate to the point where we call them a different species.

You say worm stopped evolving? Why? Who is the decision maker?

This is what I love about creationists. People are worried about the minutae of what Richard and the other experts say. They worry that creationists will use them as propaganda. But here's the truth - if you don't say what a creationist wants you to say to make his point, they will just make up a quote and attribute it to you.

So no, I didn't say worms stopped evolving. I even speculated about what worms might evolve into in the future.

Indeed there was a time when being a churchman was a handy and lucrative little number, not requiring any kind of true piety.

There was? When did this period end?

Well, I didn't know that. Which church was it and when did they do this?

The Christian Orthodox Church, for about 1,000 years starting in AD 300.

There's some interesting stuff about science and religion here

This brings me to one of the very few points I disagree with Richard on. In a debate at the end of last year, he commented that he wasn't impressed by the Christian claim that science had proved their claim that the universe had a beginning. They had a 50-50 chance of guessing right.

Of course, there's no 50-50 chance here. If the universe had be shown to be eternal, the Christians would simply claim that that proved them right. There's no scenario where they admit to being wrong.

134. Comment #125714 by wooter on February 11, 2008 at 10:49 pm

Have you seen a worm turned to be a fish? You do it in a lab then I will quit what I believe.

Sorry to rewind so far, but this comment is annoying me. I would critique the whole post, but not all of it is intelligible. The next 2 sentences are:

Forget about turning worm into a fish? Can you make a leg of an ant in lab through evolution?

Which I can't make enough sense of to interact with (how do you breed legs?).

wooter seems to be conflating two similar questions. "Did fish evolve from worms?" and "can worms evolve into fish?" The trouble is, of course, that the truths of these questions are independent. Fish could have evolved from worms, but modern worms may have lost the ability to repeat the feat, conversely, fish could have evolved from something different, but worms might have the ability, given enough time, to evolve into something we might call a fish. (As far as I know, the answer to both questions is 'no'. Fish didn't evolve from worms and worms can't evolve into fish, although they might be able to evolve into something that could occupy one or more ecological niches that are currently occupied by fish, given several million years and the right evolutionary pressures).

Given that wooter will, in all likelihood be dead before a several million year experiment could be run, his offer to change his beliefs seems a little hollow. (Given the general psychology of fundamentalists, I doubt that even if his conditions were met, any change of belief would occur. Some trivial rationalisation would be presented that would let him continue to believe his fairytale).

Now why would you assume that?

Because you, apparently inadvertently, made the preamble to what could be a valid argument against evolution by natural selection. One of the key predictions of that theory is that fitness can only go up, therefore, if organisms lost fitness by losing their ability to regenerate limbs, that would be a real problem for evolutionists.

However, reproductive fitness is a difficult metric to calculate, so I would guess that our distant ancestors gained something by shutting off their ability regenerate their limbs.

I note that reptiles and amphibians have a generally much lower metabolic rate than mammals. Perhaps with the higher metabolic rate comes greater risks of cancers. Shutting down developmental pathways early in life might have the effect of raising extra barriers to runaway cell division later on.

It sounds like your typical anime plotline.

Specifically, it sounds like Claymore

I wish all you so-called 'fans' would spell Ike's name right!

The real test for claims of this sort is reproducibility. If someone else can construct a similar machine, then skeptics have a case to answer.

Putting on a dog-and-pony show, even for an MIT professor, doesn't mean anyone has to prove him wrong.

IMHO, calling something a theory is not an expression of confidence. There are plenty of disproved theories (eg Hoyle's original Steady State Theory of cosmology) and plenty of currently untestable ones (eg String Theory).

Try reading 'theory' as 'mental model'. (Or, compare the concept of 'theory of music' with the practice of playing an instrument).

This usage makes the subject of the current discussion much clearer: Darwin's mental model explains how species change over time.

If you believe that species have changed over a timescale greater than ~10,000 years, then clearly you will have issues with Young Earth Creationism.

Maybe Josh could add something, to either the thread page or the comment box to indicate that a six-month old thread has been brought back from the dead?

I'm not advocating closing threads, but it's weird having people arguing with posts from people who are clearly long gone.

it's like a Zeno's Paradox for the 21st Century.

Given that the Daily Mail and the Vatican contradict each other, which do you believe less?

I was going to say it's a shame the Archbishop of Wales doesn't read the Guardian, but his comments so closely follow Polly's list of Christian lies that one can only assume that he did read the piece and used it as the basis for his speech.

Indeed, parthenogensis is not uncommon in vertebrates, although I don't know of a case of it being observed in mammals.

However, in species where gender is genetically determined, the offspring are always female.

wooter: Sorry, it's probably me being dense, but it still looks to me like you're still equivocating abiogenesis and evolution. I'm sure you can't possibly so stupid as to regard such totally different things as the same, it's probably just my poor reading comprehension skills.

Could you please state clearly whether you want to talk about abiogenesis or evolution?

wooter, your question conflates abiogenesis and Darwinian evolution. Perhaps you could rephrase it to remove this equivocation?

Has Libby Purves ever sung Jerusalem?

Like the previous flea, he's forgotten to add bars to tell us which of the specks of light on the cover is the one that corresponds to the phenomenon discussed in the thesis. They all look like ordinary stars and galaxies to me.

Science is the search for concise explanations for phenomena. Therefore one shouldn't be surprised if a scientist offers an explanation in place of an argument (I'll admit to not entirely grasping the distinction you're making).

The non-existence of the gods in question is not a presupposition, the appearance that it is is simply a side-effect of parsimony (what steve99 et al are discussing). If a religion can be explained as simply humans doing what they do, then there's no evidential cause to posit a deity.

An example for emphasis: The electrical theory of lightning isn't an argument against Thor, it 'presupposes' the non-existence of the Norse deities. In addition to a knowledge of physics (and maybe a Van de Graaf generator), what should someone arguing for the motion 'lightning is a natural phenomenon' bring to the debate?

Don't forget to start your questions with "how you answer this question will tell us everything we need to know about you..."

For now all we can do is enjoy the 'kettle logic' of theists who berate us for not believing in anything beyond the observable universe and for positing external universes as a hypothetical solution to the fine-tuning issue (via the anthropic principle).

No, there are exactly two universes, according to the theists. Thinking there are more or less makes you insane...

Tagred: Or have i missed some incredibly simple thing here?

Yeah, the sorts of problems the fine-tuning avoids are things like a universe that recollapses very quickly or blows itself up to enormous size. Obviously in either of those cases you don't get large-scale, complex structures.

Some of them are more subtle and cause problems with fusion in the cores of stars (without fusion not only do the stars not radiate energy, but they also don't synthesise heavy elements from the primordial hydrogen).

There are a lot of examples of that kind of thing, and it certainly does need an explanation.

ISTM that 'goddidit' doesn't explain much of anything, though.

However parsimonous or otherwise they might have been, neutrinos and GR only became accepted as scientific fact once they had passed empirical tests - modifying NM to incorporate light being affected by gravity is much less parsimonious than GR.

spikie, that story is covered here.