flynn23 wrote:

I will take exception to the phrase "Evolution is a theory that has scientific evidence behind it." That's not true. There's very little 'evidence' to back up evolution (as a likely concept of how human beings arrived at their current state), which is typically what people refer to when they say "evolution theory". This is why everyone gets all up in arms about teaching this in schools - mostly because people (including the teachers) don't understand what the hell evolutionary theory really is.

What is proved, and what Darwin actually meant by 'evolution theory' is that species do adapt to their situations and characteristics which will be most suitable ultimately win over time. And that characteristics which are unsuitable will die out quickly. This is why fruit flies that have 2 sets of wings can't reproduce, and fruit flies that have good eyesight tend to be dominant reproducers. That doesn't prove that we 'evolved' from primates, or that any species has migrated along a continuum over millenia, which is typically how this theory is misused. There's not been one fossil or anecdotal observation which has yielded anything that substantiates that aspect of the theory.

This is where I get my hackles up when people present this as science versus faith. Saying that man evolved from primates is not science. There's no scientific proof other than the dynamic that I just cited. You could put as much scientific research and rigor against trying to prove or disproof that God exists and you'd end up with the same amount of scientific proof that evolution has. It's not about science versus faith. It's about science accepting faith - that just because you cannot prove it doesn't make it incorrect or even unacceptable. Lots of people thought the world was round before it was scientifically proven. Are we gonna still prevent them from being heard?

I'm all for thinking of the possibilities here. You could (and should) say that if we've mostly proven that species can adapt, then you can conclude that this dynamic might be powerful enough to have brought life from something very basic and primitive (amino acids) into a full life form. Of course if you ran the math to determine the probability of that, you'd quickly find that it's about as close to impossible as you could possibly calculate. Kinda like taking the pieces of a watch and throwing them into a box for 10 million years and hoping that they eventually reassemble into a watch. And I'd like to think that something like a fruit fly is far far more complex than a watch. But okay, let's present it as a mental exercise.

I like the idea that string theory represents. That there is one unifying concept to represent the universe and that macro forces and micro forces are related to each other. I WANT to believe that it's leading to a full understanding. Perhaps that's wishful thinking, but it seems to make intuitive sense and I can put faith behind that.

That feeling has strong parallels with intelligent design and evolution. You CAN have both, and it tends to be reasonable to think that BOTH is the most likely reality. If we were designed, it makes sense that such a fantastic engineer would've also built into the system the ability to evolve and adapt.

This is exactly why ID has no business in a classroom outside of Oral Roberts U. Not only are there literally dozens of those "intermediary forms" that ID people seem to keep asking for and ignoring when they show up (everything from dinosaurs with feathers, early aquatic reptiles and early primates) but with the exception of the coelecanth, not a single pre-devonian animal is walking around today, and ZERO modern animals are walking around with the dinosaurs. None. Not a one.

Now lets also ignore the fact that across ALL primates, humans included, there is less than 2% genetic deviation. In fact our good neighbor of the evolutionary tree, the chimpanzee, is so close to us on the genetic level, it's Ivory Soap pure! 99.4%!

In SCIENCE, a theory is for all purposes, law. It is not "grassy knoll, who shot Kennedy" theory. It is. Newton's theory of gravity is right, but not perfect. Einstein added a lot to it because space has some weirdness. Relativity did not flat out invalidate Newtonian mechanics, the math in Newton is still more than good enough for most things. It doesn't explain oddities though, which general relativity did. Einstein still didn't cover everything though, so quantum mechanics showed up. That still has issues, so now things like string theory are showing up. The point of SCIENCE is finding things that BREAK the LAW. In evolution, finding something to break the law is easy. Find me a modern hippo from 75 million years ago, and I'll be happy to say evolution is wrong.

ID cannot be disproven. Because of that it is not science. In fact, there is no data that supports that proposition in any way shape or form. Where ID pisses me off is that they take arguments like Traditional Darwinism, vs Neo-traditional Darwinism vs Punctuated Equilibrium and say "Look! Here's a controversy, and you should teach ID with it!"

BULLSHIT.

Not only is there a shit pile of evidence, you can even SEE where it was happening with humans. There is a reason for the differing phenotypes you see in humans. People from equatorial areas, Africa and South America especially, where the skin is darker because it provides a better defense against the sun. Massive sunburn will kill just as surely as starvation, and so darker skin is an adaptation that is more effective. If anything, the human race may have hit it's evolutionary maximum because by becoming the world travellers we are, there are no longer isolated populations that would eventually become sufficiently differentiated to speciate.

ID was created to continue the idea that we are special in the eyes of god because he created us. No. Both of those may be true, but this isn't the whole cloth that the ID people are talking about. If it is, he did it by setting up the world in such a way that we would be the result. He's not sitting up there going, "Hmmm.... 4 odd billion years, I think I'll drop 200,000 of these human things down there."

The watchmaker idea is just flat wrong. Yes, the odds of something ending up as us are bad, but in a universe the size of this one, the odds of it happening somewhere aren't just betting odds, they're so good that it's a mathmatical certainty to not just happen here, but happen A LOT. Is it going to be bipedal mammalian life like us? Maybe. Maybe it'll be more intelligent ants. Maybe it'll be silcon based instead of carbon. Maybe it'll be something that came from something like one of the failed pre-Cambrian creatures like Anomalocaris or Wiwaxia or maybe it'll be something totally different. The odds of it happening like us are incredibly bad. The odds of it happening is a certainty.

You want to think about where god plays into this? Look at the Big Bang and physics, and keep this bogus ID crap the hell out of biology classrooms. STOP MAKING US MORE IGNORANT!

RE: Dark matter highlights extra dimensions