Tranquility

Do you at least accept that the earth is ~4.5 billion years old?

Quantum Destiny

Interestingly, there are many who flippantly answer 'Christian', even when they do not believe in God - to many it's just a 'traditional' label or seen as part of our heritage.

Unless there are extremely high concentrations of theists in pockets of the nation I am yet to visit, I just can't see how Atheists can be in the minority in the UK.

Cindy Claveau

It's not that simple, Beau. You make it sound like we were amoebas once, then suddenly walked on land

When one species disappears from the record and one slightly similar but fundamentally different appears, is that speciation or magic? We may have difficulties recovering fossils of soft tissue creatures, but we do have evidence of a trail generally moving from prokaryote to metazoa to the first vertebrates -- a process that literally took billions of years. The one central, incontestible conclusion we can draw from that? It's that every form of life on this planet is derivative. Everything descended from a predecessor, and if you go back far enough the candidates for "original predecessor" become fewer and fewer until the only conclusion left is that we did, indeed, descend from the original cellular life forms.

Here's a good example of what I mean when I talk about how the mechanisms involved are still being discussed and debated -- this is a good counter-argument to the notion that scientists are close-minded about Evolution. There's debate, there's new evidence, there's more debate - but nobody is questioning the fact that human life owes its primal origins to microscopic creatures, whatever they might have been:

New cellular evolution theory rejects single cell beginning

Please note: Woese isn't just throwing an idea out there to see if it sticks. He's done research, found evidence he feels supports his idea, and then published it for peer review. If other biologists can replicate his work and find that it answers questions better than the traditional theory, his work will be adopted. Or maybe his work will be adapted to compensate for its own holes before being adopted - that's part of the scientific method. It isn't just any idea that is worthy. It's only ideas with proof behind them and which are openly debated. If they withstand the tests, they're in. Otherwise they are tossed in the bin with Cold Fusion.

But no matter what the decision is regarding Woese's work, there really are only two choices when considering our first primal ancestors: Either we are like every other form of life on Earth and descended through natural means from more primitive life (including cellular organisms) or we appeared by magic.

To paraphrase a common Creationist canard, "you can't make something from nothing".

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Beau Perkins

Could be. I question the accuracy of carbon dating. I am completely confident it is not 4000 years old or what ever creationist claim.

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Cindy Claveau

Beau: carbon dating has never been used to determine the age of the earth. It's only good out to about 50,000 years.

Other forms of radiometric dating, however, are very accurate - typically potassium-argon.

detrius

What I was trying to say is this: If you as a moderate Christian think of science and creationism, what do you think which side is actually trying to inject it's religious dogma into your churches, trying to establish a privilege of interpretation of your religious texts and attempting to indoctrinate your children?

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Aodhan McDunnough

Definitely not 4000. Chuck Norris is at least 10,000.

Tranquility

Ok, so you accept evolution and you accept that the earth is old enough to allow for evolution to occur.

Next question, do you accept that humans evolved from a lower life form?

Quantum Destiny

I find these stats hard to believe as being representative - they just don't jibe with my experience at all. The only factor I can think of which could be responsible for the discrepancy is age - Being under 40 myself, I've probably mixed with more people under that age in my life than those over, and it certainly makes sense to me that Atheism would be more prevalent within a younger demographic.

Beau Perkins

This is why I brought up the Tree Of Life Project. It is ued to back up these claims and it is filled with far reaching ideas.

I may have told this story once before but I was at Yale Peabody Museum with my daughter. They had an exhibit this summer on The Tree Of Life. During a quiz thing for kids it gave three animals and a plant and asked which one is closer related to a house cat. My daughter picked a squirl, it was the most obvious choice.

They said the plant was the best answer. When I asked why I got some insane technical answer that answered nothing for me.

The example you give here, seems like research with a predetermined conclusion. Science is working backwards. What type of genetic research can he do to prove we all derived from single cell organisms. I am going to Google and read more, I am curious.

On this topic. How far back can we prove with hard evidence? What is the most primitive fossil we can trace back to the evolution of man with no question what so ever?

Beau Perkins

It doesn't matter what the church or science tries to push on my kid. Unfortunetly they have me as their mentor who is having fun pushing his own warped opinion about this world on them

I teach my kids to question everything and think for themselves.

Honestly for me, where I live the Church is not trying to get into our schools. My state is very progressive in that sense, I never heard of anything pushing Creationism in my state, or in all of New England for that matter.

If my children hears about Creationism, it is only because I chose to send them to church. This is why I work hard at countering that with teaching them to be free thinkers. I am the last person to teach them my faith is not fallible.

Tyche Shepherd

It certainly is - I don't have those figures to hand but both Athiesm, Agnosticism and lack of affilation to a religion are all higher in younger age groups - Just remember there are plenty over 40 ,Though some of them like me are still Atheist

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Cindy Claveau

Perhaps it seems far-reaching to you, but if working biologists are doing it, I doubt they would agree.

I'd be interested in hearing their answer, too, because I've never seen a taxonomy that placed a cat closer to a plant than a squirrel. On the other hand, until paleontologists made some very key discoveries we had no idea that dinosaurs are more closely related to birds than they are to other modern life forms -- and that dinosaurs probably ran in herds like birds today run in flocks.

It's still taxonomy, Beau, which as I said earlier is pretty arbitrary. Don't confuse taxonomy with evolution - taxonomies can change drastically but it doesn't change the fact that evolution happens.

Please do, because I only stumbled on that article looking for examples to post here. I'm sure if one could decipher the June 18 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he'd offer the answers to your question.

Substitute "evolution of life", since the earliest fossils we have found which we can trace directly to homo sapiens are about 5 to 8 million years old. But that ignores our relationship with the rest of life on this planet, which existed for over 4 billion years before the first pre-human simians ran the savannahs of Africa:

EARTH'S EARLIEST FOSSILS:SOLUTION TO DARWIN'S DILEMMA

Quantum Destiny

Perhaps I shouldn't have picked a number - I certainly don't think that 40 is a magical number at which the stats should start to change, but the general pattern would make sense to me. Out of interest, do those stats jibe with your experience?

Beau Perkins

Cindy you are losing me here. These taxonomies are used to support evolution theories, so I should be questioning them.

Now when I say evolution, I want to be specific and state the evolution of man. Not the fact that evolution itself exists.

Wow, with fossils we can only go back 5 - 8 million years?

Cindy Claveau

No that's not how taxonomies work. We use combinations of species traits, DNA (when available), apparent structural function and so forth to determine relationships between species. It wasn't until someone realized that some of the dinosaur fossils we were finding actually had vestiges of feathers on them that we began looking into their relationship to birds, for example.

But cross-species relationships aren't a proof for evolution at all. The mechanisms of evolution (and genetic evidence) are used as guiding principles in trying to draw out a reasonable taxonomic tree. It's the opposite of how you're explaining it.

The earliest hominid fossils, yes, Australopithecus. (We have other fossils going back to the Cambrian epoch, 500+ million years ago.) The australopithecines were the transitional "link" between apes and Man.

Early Hominin Evolution: Discovery of Early Hominids

detrius

Well, but you can see that it's kinda hard for me to accept the claim that your faith is under attack by scientists when it's creationists who are squatting in your houses of worship, right? I mean, you just admitted that you have to actively protect your children from their dogma.


Was it a very primitive plant, like algae or something similar?

Aodhan McDunnough

Taxonomy is a by-product, not a data source. It is a collection of what scientist are guessing are related based on various evidence.

Go ahead and question taxonomy. Scientists constantly do that too. The tree shifts frequently enough everytime new stuff is found.

Taxonomy is like going to a friend's big family gathering and trying to figure out who are related and in what way. Except that unlike the party guests, you can't ask questions. You can only go on appearances and perhaps interactions.

Why can taxonomy change? It's similar to seeing two people who you think are twins, and turns out they are not even related. and two brothers that on first glance do not at all look related. I have such friends, I have not found anything about their features that tells me they are brothers.

The fact is that there IS a tree. The question is which branch goes where.

Taxonomy is an assistance to understanding possible relationships. While it most likely is wrong in a lot of places, it still serves its purpose. You, like scientists also do, must accept that it's something subject to change without notice.

Beau Perkins

Ok, well if the Theory has holes. The Theories we have about theories have holes. All we really know for sure is that over long periods of time, life forms change and adapt.

I can now introduce my theory of Digital Illusions.

Beau Perkins

My child. To me all life is equally and we should never look at any of God creations as lower.























ok ok. Yes, yes I do accept the possibility. It all sounds good as presented to me. Cindy is sexy enough to make me believe anything.

So Yes.

Mukatsuku

If all life is equal, are you a vegetarian?
If not, is cannabilism ok?

Everyone here knows my thoughts and beliefs

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Beau Perkins

Only if you use hot sauce. Taste better.

Mukatsuku

Either all life is equal or not.
I would as soon eat a human over another animal to survive, or do neither and die.

This is a huge problem I have with the bible - so much of it demands respect for god's creatures, then the rest of it is killing them in honour of god. Seriously, wtf? Anyone who commits a blood sacrifice deserves the same fate.

Beau Perkins

Muka. I think blood sacrifices ended a long time ago for the jews.

Mukatsuku

I am simply saying - you cannot say all life is equal if you are willing to eat creatures, human or animal.
I think very few people believe that all life is equal.