[ni'k]

the universe depends on its own existance and none existance. why do i look with eyes and see things before me? because they are all one and that one depends on two depends on the existance of nothing.

[noumenal]

I have some comments to make on this subject. First of all, my original post was a joke and a bad one, as most of my jokes are, but I did intend for this thread to be for discussion on evolution, even though its been discussed here several times before.

Moving on, this is untrue:

"No one has ever observed the origin of a new species by selection, natural or otherwise. "

Here is a book recommendation:

The Beak of The Finch by Jonathan Weiner


And a link to the wikipedia article on speciation, which glosses over some of the artificial speciation experiements and observations in nature:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciation

Check out the external links on that page, there's some interesting stuff.

Really though, its not worth discussing like this. The word that come to mind right now is ludicrous.

Oh, about Darwin and Einstein's religious views. As an atheist, I've always found their comments inspiring, and tend to agree with everything they say. Neither were theists, and Einstein was more or less a Pantheist, which is just a dressed-up atheist. I lean that way. I won't post many Einstein quotes because Atari has probably already posted every Einstein quote in existence at least once, but here are some good ones.

Darwin at the end of The Origin:

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

Einstein: "I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism."

[atari 2600]

Where did life come from?
Natural selection explains how organisms that already exist evolve in response to changes in their environment. But Darwin’s theory is silent on how organisms came into being in the first place, which he considered a deep mystery. What creates life out of the inanimate compounds that make up living things? No one knows. How were the first organisms assembled? Nature hasn’t given us the slightest hint.
If anything, the mystery has deepened over time. After all, if life began unaided under primordial conditions in a natural system containing zero knowledge, then it should be possible - it should be easy - to create life in a laboratory today. But determined attempts have failed. International fame, a likely Nobel Prize, and $1 million from the Gene Emergence Project await the researcher who makes life on a lab bench. Still, no one has come close.
Experiments have created some basic materials of life. Famously, in 1952 Harold Urey and Stanley Miller mixed the elements thought to exist in Earth’s primordial atmosphere, exposed them to electricity to simulate lightning, and found that amino acids self-assembled in the researchers’ test tubes. Amino acids are essential to life. But the ones in the 1952 experiment did not come to life. Building-block compounds have been shown to result from many natural processes; they even float in huge clouds in space. But no test has given any indication of how they begin to live - or how, in early tentative forms, they could have resisted being frozen or fried by Earth’s harsh prehistoric conditions.
Some researchers have backed the hypothesis that an unknown primordial “soup” of naturally occurring chemicals was able to self-organize and become animate through a natural mechanism that no longer exists. Some advance the “RNA first” idea, which holds that RNA formed and lived on its own before DNA - but that doesn’t explain where the RNA came from. Others suppose life began around hot deep-sea vents, where very high temperatures and pressures cause a chemical maelstrom. Still others have proposed that some as-yet-unknown natural law causes complexity - and that when this natural law is discovered, the origin of life will become imaginable.
Did God or some other higher being create life? Did it begin on another world, to be transported later to ours? Until such time as a wholly natural origin of life is found, these questions have power. We’re improbable, we’re here, and we have no idea why. Or how.
- Gregg Easterbrook, author of The Progress Paradox

[kingcoffee]

We have only been studying evolution for less than 200 years. The universe is 15 billion years old. Earth is 6 billion. We're not gonna catch up to it any time soon. It's going to take a very long time before we figure out all there is to know about evolution of life on earth.

[kingcoffee]

P.S. Creationism is bullshit.

[Rob Instigator]

Originally Posted by kingcoffee

We have only been studying evolution for less than 200 years. The universe is 15 billion years old. Earth is 6 billion. We're not gonna catch up to it any time soon. It's going to take a very long time before we figure out all there is to know about evolution of life on earth.

EXACTLY!

Long live kingcoffee!

[kingcoffee]

Dynomite!!

[Massenvernichtungswaffen]

religion - man's interpretations on their own "spiritual" existence. religions vary like the weather. religions evolve on cultural levels due to changes in PARADIGM (ex: society drops animism- moves on to polytheism-then on to monotheism) all of this driven by man's need to understand and to philosophize their existence.

science - man's interpretations on their environment and it's variations. facts vary like the weather. science also evolves as social norms and cultural paradigms change. (ex: genetics, once considered bad science and anti-christian, is now a leading field in health and nutrition studies.) Science differs from religion in that it's variations are driven by the ruling out of obsolete facts and figures, unlike religion, in which interpretations have been known to change simply because the community has left the church behind. (ex: various religious scholars tried to change church doctrine after the scientific revolution left them in the dust- the sun does not revolve around us.)

humans - overly intelligent apes with opposable thumbs and ego problems. they have minds and opinions. Opinions, however, can change like the weather... or when convenient for the opinion holder.


Which of the three do you trust???