Originally posted by Omniscaper
Big surprise, the same old, same old, high horse attitudes are popping up. My statement did not bash evolution, yet a number of you still ATTACK perspectives different from your own. Name calling and assumptions of lack of education. Very adult of you.
Your comment about science being a matter of faith shows a very deep ignorance about what science actually is. There is no faith whatsoever in science. None. At all.
I explained what science was on another thread. Let me dig up the response.
Originally posted on another thread
Science is in many ways the continuous application of Occam's Razor (i.e the simplest explaination that explains all the observable facts is the likeliest one to be true).
When there are multiple theories for something the simplest one is chosen. For instance in choosing whether I exist or am a computer simulation of myself I choose that I exist because otherwise my explaination has to include who built the mainframe, why they built it and also how their universe came to exist.
This choice isn't a matter of belief. I don't choose to believe I exist. The fact is that the balance of probabilities lies much further on the side of me being real than me being a computer simulation. There is no choice involved here. Just simple probability.
Now that this logical question is resolved I go about my day never wondering whether I exist or not. That I exist is taken as a fact (this doesn't actually make it one though). Until the day I die I will continue to act as if whether I exist or not is a fact until I get some evidence that contradicts this. If ever I see my dog get a general protection fault then the theory that I exist now bears examination. It's possible I hallucinated it or it's possible that I really don't.
Now lets take something that is a lot more controversial like evolution. There is a hell of a lot of supporting evidence for evolution. When compared against the other alternating theories there is more evidence in favour of Darwinian evolution than there are for every other theory. That doesn't mean that the other theories are definately wrong any more than it means that I'm not a computer simulation but the fact remains that given the possibilities evolution is way ahead of it's rivals. So again evolution is taken as a fact until evidence turns up that disputes it. So far there isn't any.
What might be confusing some people is that they confuse the words theory and hypothesis and assume that a theory is just a popular hypothesis. A hypothesis is never taken as fact. Anything that is done relying on a hypothesis is always done keeping an eye on the rivals in case they explain the events better than the this one did.
The reason a hypothesis is not equal to a theory is because either a hypothesis hasn't got much evidence to support it or there are peices of evidence it can't quite explain away yet.
However evolution is not a hypothesis. Many creationists argue against it as if it was and this is a fundemental mistake. There aren't many biologists who don't treat evolution as a fact. There aren't any who can provide as much supporting evidence for an alternative explaination.
Where is the faith in that?
Originally posted by Omniscaper
My main point was to keep an open mind because neither concepts can present conclusive scientific evidence. To suggest that there is no such thing as scientific fact anymore is just relativism BULL.
Again with the misunderstanding of what science is. Sorry to say it again but there is no such thing as a scientific fact. There never was and there never can be. All science can do is prove that certain things are or aren't true under certain conditions. Those are the limits imposed by what science fundementally is.
Originally posted by Omniscaper
From MY perspective:
There is still not enough hard evidence to move evolution from the back of my mind to the front. There is still no evidence of transitional missing links
I'm sorry but what the hell do you think Archaeopteryx is then?
In fact why don't you take a look at
this page rather than quoting from the creationist playbook.
Originally posted by Omniscaper
or observable chains of favorable genetic mutations.
What do you want? Someone to duplicate several hundred thousand years worth of evolution under laboratory conditions? Not going to happen.
However in bacteria and viri which do breed astonishingly quickly it can be proved under those conditions.
An example of a real life situation was posted a while back where small mouthed toads where suddenly doing better because they weren't eating a poisonous food source.
Originally posted by Omniscaper
The mathematical probablilities behind the random formation of the first (supposedly simple, lol) single celled organism requires much MUCH more time than what Einstein's general relativity theory, which suggests a begining of space-time, would allow.
Of course it does. Same way that the chance of sand on a beach randomly making a pentium chip is similarly improbable. Your two basic mistakes are in the assumption that a simple single celled organism needs to arise all at once and that evolution is random. Evolution is absolutely not random. Mutation is random. Natural selection is anything but.
The first cells would not have been anywhere near as complex as even the single celled organisms present today.
The fact that RNA is a liquid crystal under the right conditions should speak volumes to you about the lack of a need for phospholipids in the first cells for instance.
Originally posted by Omniscaper
There are also many other reasons that I do not blindly accept evolution as cold hard fact. It being from improbable constant formation of favorable amino acid chirality to environmental inhospitablility to random DNA development.
Very few biologists believe that DNA or even RNA was replictor. It's pretty obvious that replicator was a much more simple compound and might even have been inorganic (read up on Cairn-Smith's inorganic clays theory if you're interested). It also has an interesting explaination for the chirality of biological molecules built in IIRC.
