Strict creationism has been disproven to anyone with half a brain. Certainly there are less strict interpretations that cannot be disproven but where science and god disagree, god loses, assuming you have at least half a brain, which for anyone that believes in *strict* creationism is a rather large assumption.

That was faux-ho mode, not flaming homo mode; a subtle distinction, I admit.

I was also too terse. The numbers I'm curious about would describe the 'spewed misinformation.' Having grad students trawl through publications and tag things according to a coding schema is slightly more science-like than fucking opinion polls.

Seems like a bit of pot-kettle there. Makes me wish I'd stuck with my formal logic class so I maybe could hit you accurately with a big word like tautology. But given the general tenor of this thread, maybe it's better for me just to type the word without any real confidence about how I'm using it.

p.s. Using a sloppy slash-compound like conservatives/republicans is still basically stupid single-label thinking. Insulting groups and abstractions is part of the problem, not helpful at all. I admit that from my POV, there aren't very many sensible folks left on the front lines of the national GOP, but that puts them only slightly behind my own maddening excuse for a party. Sure, LBJ schooled us on how important it is to have people inside the tent pissing out vs. outside pissing in. But he had no answer for our great and enduring love of forming circular firing squads at crucial moments. See that--I named someone specifically. Is it so hard?

Oh, come on.  Don't go spoiling the fun just before Christmas!

Im a believer in God, but Genesis is obviously a fairytale. It was meant to convey a reason as to why things were so rough for mankind. Why we only lived for so long. Why we needed each other. Where we came from, being that we not only looked, but acted and thought differently then the animals around us.It was to explain that God had given us a gift. I fully believe evolution was a device of God. Nature being like a computer, it can only do as its programmed. And God being behind the keyboard making sure to keep the Computer on task.

People take Genesis literally because of 1 reason. Its in the bible, theyre brainwashed as young children (and sometimes adults) to believe every word of a book that was stitched together by a man looking to influence the rest of the world with his idea of what God was with a single manifestation of Gods word. I think people would be appalled to learn what the original Christians thought and practiced as Christianity. Infact, I think theyd be disillusioned with Jesus if they knew that his "feats" werent as mighty and infact were merely magic tricks that you could see at a Magic Show in Las Vegas.

Creationists are blind fools trying to lead other blind fools. I cant say I know for certian that my view is the real one. And I think both Creationists and Evolutionists are arrogant pieces of shit if they think they have all the answers. We have not been able to observe evolution as its described. So to say that its FACT just goes to show how much Science has lost its way by moving towards religions "my word is the law" concept. Both sides needs to STFU and STFD.

Look at the implications of the text. Naturalism is the thought that one natural process is caused by another natural process. Science actually doesn't work outside of this context.

I'll dig a bit more after this part:

While it may look to you as though science is accepting of the supernatural, it actually isn't. It does, however, filter out the supernatural very well.

Perhaps you are getting confused by definitions: Supernatural events are events that occur outside of nature. If you observed what you thought was supernatural event, you would not be able to model it.

Natural events, on the other hand, are the ones that can be modeled. You can predict their occurrence and measure them. There is a clear causal relationship around which you can build an experiment.

In other words, if you can create a reliable method to reproduce a certain effect, you've just described a rule (or more accurately, theory) that describes a property of the universe, automatically making it natural.

Really? You believe that everything was designed. That's all fine and dandy, unfortunately for you there are no scientific theories for it.

I haven't really seen a good ID argument against evolution. There are many back-and-forth websites about this. But that doesn't concern me. What concerns me is that there seems to be a basic misunderstanding of what the output of the scientific process is.

Well, it does matter, because you can't just stop at how we got here. If there was a designer and there was a workable theory for it, we'd now be tasked with explaining how the designer got here.

So let's say the designer turns out to be nothing supernatural, he's just an alien, say from Mars. The next question is, well, how did he get to be on Mars? Did me migrate there? Did he form spontaneously from quantum effects like a Boltzmann Brain? Did he evolve? Was he designed, and by what? And so on.

If it turns out he is supernatural, unfortunately for us we can't analyse him using the scientific method. We'd never get anywhere, and would require a completely new framework for the problem - science will break down. This hasn't happened yet. Personally, I doubt it ever will.

I'm not an evolutionist. I'm a physicist. I do know that the concept of ID is recent, and unfortunately for you it was an idea founded by creationists. It is bound by the same problems as creationism.

Do you have any evidence to present that suggests we were designed? A link with some real observational data would probably be just fine.

I understand the theory of evolution just a statement that traits are passed from parents to offspring, and sometimes errors pop up in the process which leads to mutations. Sometimes you get beneficial mutations. I also understand that there is a reasonable amount of evidence to support this, such as the fossil record. I also understand that there is a working model, though it it not yet complete. I can relate to that, General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are incompatible in certain situations, but that doesn't mean they don't work the rest of the time: We'll just keep building on them until we can figure out how to solve the incompatibilities.

I really like this graphic.  

Evolution is a great counter-example of the global warming argument because one does not have to resort to "the wise scientists have a consensus" to support the theory.  

The theory of evolution makes intuitive sense to me as well as makes a number of predictions that have been shown to be true.

When evolution was first a hypothesis, we did not even know what DNA was for instance.  As time has gone on and new technologies have come up, evolution becomes increasingly compelling.

By contrast, AGW is a pretty sketchy hypothesis.  I read this today http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2009/12/22/post-copenhagen-is-man-made-global-warming-a-dead-issue/ which argues that the CFCs have had a significant impact on temperature.

What most people of the "AGW" camp don't realize is that a lot of the objection to AGW has to do with its focus on CO2 and not the basic concept that humans might be affecting the climate (heck, humans have been affecting the climate for thousands of years). 

I feel pretty confident that further research will make the CO2 hypothesis look even sillier than it already is.

Darwinian evolution has been turned on its head. Its not even the same as it once was. The evolution scientists refer to is what was built off of Darwin ideas.

Obviously I need to simplify what I said

You said that a post debating supernatural origins (bad) versus science (good) summarized your arguments

The point that has been argued is Darwinian evolution which you accept as fact

My post made no claim that supernatural explanations are science.  None of my posts can be construed that way.  I do appreciate the irony that you invoke the name of God in your last sentence. 

While I am impressed you can quote Wikipedia; generally in a scientific debate it is acknowledged as good behavior to reference what you quote

Do you have any sort of evidence for this? And is this using the classical* definition of a species, or one of the many alternerative versions that mainly related to microbiology?

*The classical definition of a species in sexually reproducing organisms is a group of individuals capable of producing fertile offspring. For reference, closely similar species can often interbreed to form infertile offspring. To my knowledge there are no groups of humans known today that are not interfertile with the rest of the race, and given human behavioral tendencies it is extremely likely all possible combinations have been tried.

Maybe not, but you are the one playing fast and loose with intellectual history. Saying that "Homo Neanderthalensis is a alive and well" is not at all the same thing as saying you think that current taxonomy has some serious flaws, at least not in the terse and feisty terms you chose to raise the question.

You'll wait a long time.  Evolution is not a 'mechanical process.'  It doesn't 'need' to build anything.

The two following sources found no evidence of this but was based on mitochondrial DNA which as everyone knows is passed only through the female. Both of these sources are not particularly recent.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3023685.stm


http://www.promega.com/profiles/402/ProfilesinDNA_402_0...

I also recall a PBS special recently that claimed that everyone today is descended from a isolated population of about 600 individuals off the coast south africa that had a diet consisting largly of seafood. The following is the link of that show and you can click near the bottom of the page to view the transcript of Hour 3 of Becoming Human.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/beta/evolution/becoming-human-part-3.html

This aired in Nov, 2009 and indicates that the entire neanderthal genome has been mapped, that we share a common ancestor but that there is no evidence of interbreeding between neanderthals and modern humans.

The only thing I could find indicating a neanderthal human connection is the following which itself provided no links. Plus it's the telegraph which makes it somewhat suspect.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/evolution/6430494/Modern-man-had-sex-with-Neanderthals.html

Actually here's a bit more from the BBC.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7886477.stm

LOL.  What an idiot.

Any other takers?