Perhaps we should all just concede that in the end we REALLY just dont know because, truthfully, there is only 1 real way to find out.

Quote:Original post by d000hg
Yet despite this, there are doctors in physics, biology etc who hold young-Earth beliefs and have scientific theories to try and validate this. Personally I find them unconvincing but it makes it less easy to say anyone with such views hasn't thought about it, or that there is no scientific basis for such theories.

Like who?

No reputable scientist would posit young earth creationism or attempt to suggest it as a valid theory, because a)it is fundamentally unscientific and b) it can be debunked in seconds by anyone with half a clue what they're talking about.

Quote:I don't see that as anything like a multicellular organism. Any single-celled organism which is in a good environment can multiply to the point where you get a big 'lump' of it. If the ones in the centre are in different conditions to the ones at the edge, they may mutate differently. But they aren't linked to each other - if you started a new colony with a mutated organism from the centre, it would grow a whole colony the same as itself, which might then mutate into other single-celled varieties.

Colonial forms are the first step from single celled to multicelled life. It's not quite as simple as you say - a true colonial form will always break up into colonies of roughly similar size.

Quote:
That has nothing to do with evolution. Evolution doesn't suggest you can get such huge changes in a single generation. It talks about single mutations happening in a generation, typically. Cross-breeding simply illustrates genetics. Breeding for a specific trait isn't evolution because the children aren't better suited for the environment - humans take the most suitable and choose them to breed further.

Remember the definition of evolution I posted earlier?

Specialized dog breeding can certainly be described as evolution. However, it's not natural selection that is driving it, but human selection. It's exactly the same principle at heart, but the end results are very different - the selection criteria are not to do with survivability in the wild, but desirability/suitability to a particular task in the service of humans.

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However, most people (or at least a very significant minority) do believe in a god with some ability to influence the universe, from surveys I've seen. So the fact that all of science works on the basis that there is no god is odd.

It doesn't matter how many people believe in God, his existence is still untestable and therefore has no place in science.

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Sure, explaining how natural processes work shouldn't have any link to God - but imagining that everything can be explained naturalistically is making the claim that there is no God.

Not really, but as I've said before it's an essential assumption in order to make any scientific progress. We cannot rely on any untestable hypotheses for our explanations, because there is no way of telling if one is any more valid than another, and we have no incentive to make further inquiry.

For example, suppose we observe a phenomenon that we can't explain with current science. So someone comes along and says "Science can't explain it, therefore it must be God!"

Then someone else comes along and says "Don't be silly, that has nothing to do with God. It was caused by Satan!" Then another comes along and insists that it was caused by invisible magical Moon Penguins from Mars.

How would you prove it was God, and not Satan or the Moon Penguins? You can't, they're all equally untestable, and everyone would have a big unresolvable argument over whether it was God, Satan or Moon Penguins that were behind it, all the while ignoring the possibility that there could be a perfectly naturalistic explanation that we simply don't have the scientific framework in place to understand just yet.

Quote:Original post by d000hg
It's not about mutating/adapting though. It's just inbreeding to concentrate the likelyhood of certain genes being expressed. And inbreeding is generally reckoned to be bad for a species...

So?

It's still a heritable change in a lifeform over time. It's still evolution. It's just a subtly different mechanism of evolution.

Remember, Darwin's natural selection theory is evolution, but evolution is not necessarily always darwinian natural selection. Natural selection is a mechanism explaining one way in which evolution can occur naturally. It does not rule out the existence of other mechanisms. Human selection is another method.

Also, inbreeding concentrates the effects of random mutations in the genes. And yes, it is often bad for the species, which is why so many breeds of dog suffer from all kinds of horrible problems, some from the sheer amount of physical deformity that's been bred into them, and some from invisible genetic changes that leave them susceptible to all kinds of illness.

This happens, because human selection does not generally select for survivability, whereas natural selection does. In fact, human selection makes it possible to breed animals that would never survive in the wild - take bulldogs for example. They can't even give birth naturally, litters have to be delivered by caesarian - and even then there is an abnormally high rate of hydrocephalus in the pups.

Quote:Original post by d000hg

Quote:
Specialized dog breeding can certainly be described as evolution. However, it's not natural selection that is driving it, but human selection. It's exactly the same principle at heart, but the end results are very different - the selection criteria are not to do with survivability in the wild, but desirability/suitability to a particular task in the service of humans.

It's not about mutating/adapting though. It's just inbreeding to concentrate the likelyhood of certain genes being expressed. And inbreeding is generally reckoned to be bad for a species...

I'm not talking about cross-breeding. This actually happens when you take dogs of the same breed and use (as Sandman put it) human selection. They actually change, drastically, through many generations. Now, it's not spawning a new species (would blow me away if I could see that in MY lifetime) but it is showing that living creatures mutate to conform to their environment.

Seriously, this is a forum of mainly programmers. Hasn't ANYONE worked with genetic programming. I haven't written genetic code myself but I have worked with other test programs. It's amazing. The "objects" start off completely useless and after MANY mutations become incredibly efficient. It makes our coming to being seem less enigmatic.

Quote:Original post by d000hg
There are very small multi-celled creatures. They are much smaller but more specialised than colonies - how can colonies be the mid-stage?

You have me in an obvious bind here. Since larger organisms always follow smaller ones, we are not the pinnacle of evolution. We must actually be older than every organism that is larger than us and we must have evolved from a smaller species. Since dinosaurs (which I know you don't believe in) and whales (which you should believe in) are both larger than us, they must be decendents of ours.[rolleyes]</sarcasm>

Evolution implies that more complex creatures come from simpler ones. That little nemotode is actually fairly more complex than your average pond scum.

A sponge is actually a good next step in the evolution line. It is composed of two types of cells. The first type paddles water through the structure, the second type eats the single celled organisms that are unlucky enough to be carried along. The second type of cell then provides energy for the first. Want more information?

Quote:Original post by uckevin111
Actually, based on evolution theory, this is incorrect. The mutations are random; the species does not control the mutation to conform to an environment. A mutation can be good, bad, or neutral. But never does a species mutate to conform, they are all random occurrences.

- Kevin

That's exactly what I said in my earlier posts. ULTIMATELY the species conforms to it's environment. This is after many generations of trial and error mutations.