Valoran

Some types of sedimentation can obviously be deposited rapidly. Some types can't, and this conflicting background information was precisely what the link I gave you explains, which you might have found out if you'd bothered to read it. As for the rest of your post, all you seem to be trying to do is claiming that you have good and sound arguments, it's just that you're not going to show them. Well - as usual, that's your choice.

You're welcome. The glaringly obvious flaw in your logic is that you assume that just because SOME sediments are rapidly deposited, ALL of them are. Just to satisfy myself that you're actually aware of what the geological evidence against YEC-ism is, here's a brief primer: http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CH/CH550.html I'm sure you're capable of googling whatever other details you might need to know, or raise them in the form of questions/challenges here. I'll need to ask you to explain in further detail, since I'm afraid I'm quite ignorant on how local floods and fossils are incompatible with each other.

As opposed to the merits of the heterosexual lifestyle? I'm really not sure that's what they teach kids in school. Adult TV programming, perhaps. Children's shows? Heterosexual couplings aren't even a main point in TV programs for kids yet - if ever. As long as they're only barred from doing so publicly, I welcome that law fully. If the same law oppresses the right of the church to express its doctrine behind its own doors, however, I suppose I'll have to vote for amending that law. You mean the same way they have to hire blacks and women, and - God forbid - black women? Such a law is definitely way past due. Or maybe because it's not allowed because children are generally not mature enough to understand the consequences of sex, hence it's illegal even with "willing" children. I suppose that makes sense. I can't say I'm particularly knowledgeable on animal behavioral patterns, though, so I'll refrain from judgment. If a corpse is nothing more than inanimate matter, then what's the point of burial rituals, or even treating a corpse with respect? Cultures attach values and feelings to the bodies of deceased loved ones, not to mention that many of us presumably abhor the thought of our own bodies being used in such a way after our death. Yes, there is. Just because X is allowed doesn't mean that everything else must be allowed as well. That's a ridiculous and weak argument.

The point was that "if you guys follow the rules, everything's gonna be just peachy" doesn't really excuse harsh and arbitrary laws, nor do those harsh and arbitrary laws coming from God instead of man make them any easier more pleasant to live with.

You're aware that that line of reasoning is the exact same one used by every fascist government in the history of mankind... right?

OES, I just want to confirm something at this point to make sure we're still even on the same page, because I don't know whether you're serious anymore. Are you trying to argue that polystrate fossils debunk geological evidence against a young Earth, or do you just want me to concede that you scored a point off me? Because if it's the latter, I've repeatedly told you that I'm happy to admit you got the better of me. Wear it with pride, or do whatever you want with it. But if it's the former, have you really read the links I posted instead of simply jumping on a sentence and triumphantly going "ah ha!"? There's no element of ad hominem whatsoever regarding my comments regarding Behe. He is a sham who has been repeatedly defeated by both the courts and the scientific community. If I were really resorting to ad hominems, I would have simply dismissed his research out of hand instead of constantly asking you to link us to his work so we can read and discuss it. Why haven't you done that, by the way?

Truth be told, there are quite a few believers I respect; my partner and her pastor and shepherd are three examples. Now you may be a long way off from making the cut, but that doesn't mean you need to try to justify it by making the false accusation that I resent all believers, you know. Not to mention that you're up to your same antics of trying to get this thread locked with your gutter-level comments, as usual. Talk about a one-trick pony. I can't remember if I've informed of you about it before, but I'd just like to give you a courtesy notice that you'll henceforth be ignored unless you actually have anything useful or relevant to say.

Do you understand what the word "respectful" means? If you can't discuss the subject without taking pot shots, stay out of the discussion. To be honest I find it strange that you would interpret a straightforward description of the YEC belief as a "disrespectful pot shot". Are creationists usually offended when their own beliefs are described back to them?

You mean organisms like C. vulgaris (Boraas et al, 1998)? It's already been done more than a decade ago, where unicellular eukaryotes evolved into multicellularity in order to increase their size and avoid being eaten by small-mouthed protozoan predators. Whether yeast evolved from multicellular ancestors is irrelevant. The question is whether the yeast genome contains any genes for multicellularity today before the experiment was performed on the samples. Yeast has gone for hundreds of millions of years, replicating at a rate of several thousand generations per day in its unicellular state. You also continue to ignore the fact that the yeast genome has been entirely sequenced since 15 years ago and is publicly available. If you want to argue that multicellularity is part of the yeast genome, can you please tell us which sequences are you talking about, exactly? Oh wait, that's right, I'm talking to a YEC who cannot possibly accept the fact that yeast has been around in its unicellular state for hundreds of millions of years. D'oh! It's always easy to tell who didn't even read the experiment report at all before trying to discredit it. They're the ones who come up with defenses saying that the researchers should have done this and that when the "this and that" has already been laid out in detail in the report. The experiment was performed on 10 separate yeast populations. All evolved into multicellularity at the end of the experiment. Besides, are we really still hedging our bets on the "it wasn't caused by mutation!" theory? The yeast specimens all demonstrated the same phenotype of their parent generations and continued to iterate on those phenotypes with each generation. If the phenotype changes were not caused by mutation, it means they weren't genetic, and hence cannot be passed to subsequent generations. That would mean that each generation spontaneously developed the exact same snowflake phenotype as their predecessors all by themselves and improved upon it, and their children all spontaneously develop the same improvements as well and also iterate on further improvements. Can you please explain to us how this is supposed to make any sense? Can you also please explain, after you initially argue how incredible and difficult and impossible it is for organisms to change from unicellularity to multicellularity, you're now trying to claim that such a change can take place without mutation, and hence - by extension - without any change in the yeast genome? Can you give us an example of a cluster of symbiotic cells who do not form using any aggregation mechanism but rely on successive division of component cells attached to each other instead, react to selection forces as a whole instead of as individual cells, and exhibit controlled cellular suicide in correlation with cluster fitness and optimal propagule size?

Ah, I see you've stumbled across the obvious, well done. Thanks for pointing it out as well, some of us here might not have your keen analytical mind and Holmes-esque powers of observation needed to notice that. Valoran, that doesn't even make sense. It makes you look crazy. It means that, for some reason, you are asking whether I skipped over irrelevant parts in your post, when the very obvious fact is that I did. Sarcasm is wasted on the stupid. I need to keep that in mind. OES, I'm perfectly happy to admit that you won a meaningless game of semantics, and I've already said so. You're not going to get any argument out of me when you try to argue that ash and soil can be deposited rapidly. I trusted a YEC to engage in honest debate, and I've been shown the folly of my ways. So yes, you did get me to affirm that sedimentary layers can be laid down rapidly. But any time you're going to present actual evidence that sedimentary rock layers can be laid down rapidly, which is the geological evidence that blows YEC-ism out of the water, or actual historical evidence for Jesus' resurrection, I'll be willing to listen, though I can't say I'll be holding my breath waiting for it. And I'm an engineer by degree and science teacher by profession who is here to learn how to debunk creationist nonsense. I'm quite sure you're more than aware of that, given how you turned out multiple posts' worth of ad hominems about it before, so I'm not sure what's the point of your pretending to be ignorant and stupid in an attempt to look smart. You're a creationist, and you're here to talk creationism. I'm an evolutionist, and I'm here to talk evolution. I'm glad you're finding it so obvious and simple now, but it'd be great if you tried to engage your brain and arrive at the obvious and simple answer before I had to ask you a rhetorical question to guide you towards it because I wasn't sure what you were trying to accomplish by playing dumb. So if you "knew" - and I use that term loosely - that I'm here to "convert" you, what were you hoping to accomplish by pretending to be stupid and crazy and asking me what I'm here for? That's a rhetorical question, by the way. The obvious answer is that you're trying to turn this discussion towards ad hominem, as usual, because your bag of tricks is running dangerously low by now. Your attempt of bringing up Behe's work has backfired so badly that you don't even dare to link us to it. You're unable to discuss the evidence for creationism and against evolution other than copying and pasting links and snippets you apparently have no understanding of, much less refute arguments against. And you've tried to score a personal one-up by claiming to not care what I have to say, except that it's turning out that you care so much you apparently can't stop yourself from replying to me. What's next? When do the desperate ad hominems, meaningless word games, and your pattern of running away pretending to not care but unable to stay away because you care so badly going to commence once more, OES? What's your and MorningGlory's best shot at trying to get this thread locked again because you cannot answer the evidence against your position? Or dare I hope for an actual evidence-based refutation of my arguments I have made in response to your link?

Ah, I see you've stumbled across the obvious, well done. Thanks for pointing it out as well, some of us here might not have your keen analytical mind and Holmes-esque powers of observation needed to notice that. If you don't believe in evolution, then why waste your time? I don't go around trying to convince people there's no Santa Claus, or that the moon landing was real. Why do you dedicate all this time and energy talking incessantly about evolution? If you don't want to hear from me and don't care about my opinion, why are you replying to me and saying that you want me to answer questions? Besides the obvious answer, of course: you just want to make absolutely sure other people here know how much you supposedly don't want to hear from me and don't care about my opinion. Personally, I think it'd be great if you're going to engage in the discussion and defend your arguments with honest debate instead of playing meaningless word games and/or running away all the time. But if you're going to simply turn tail - hey, it's your choice, and truth be told it's just going to make debunking your nonsense that much easier for me.

Let's inspect the main arguments made by that article. If this assertion is true, then larger yeast clusters should consistently exhibit higher rates of cell death, since centripetal force is directly proportional to mass. What we see, on the other hand, is that there is little to no correlation between cluster size and cell death rates during the early generations of snowflake yeast. This correlation, however, grows gradually until there is a strong correlation by the 60th generation of snowflake yeast, showing that this cell death was not caused by mechanical factors (otherwise the correlation would be present in every generation since the mechanical factors are constant), but that it evolved over time. I'm afraid you'll have to come up with a better explanation that actually fits the facts. How do you expect epigenetics or or RNA expression changes to account for such a chasm between unicellularity and multicellularity? First you argue how difficult and impossible it is for multicellular organisms to evolve, and now you claim that such a change can occur without any change in the genome? Incredible. Even if it is true, does it really matter? As long as the changes are heritable and can be acted upon by selection forces, then evolution can occur. Quibbling on this point is simply a red herring that does nothing to change the significance of the experiment. What is really beyond credulity is that you expect us to accept the alternative explanation that every single generation evolved all the same characteristics of the parent generation and more, all from scratch, all within a single generation, and that every successive generation did the same. (Or perhaps you're trying to posit the one-size-fits-all excuse of "God did it!" to cover the far-fetched alternative?) The author of the article admits that pseudohyphae is quite unlike the morphology of snowflake yeast. That's an understatement, considering how pseudohyphae are little more than mitotic daughter cells with no cytoplasmic connection whatsoever failing to completely break off from the parent cell, while snowflake yeast are true multicellular organisms which react as a whole to selection pressures instead of just having individual cells exhibit such reactions. I suspect the author of the article knows this very well. And yet he comes up with the ridiculous proposition that multicellularity can be hand-waved away by yeast pseudohyphae. Even for the rare few creationists who are intelligent enough to know that the data is squarely against their delusions, the only option they have is to come up with all sorts of absurd assertions and pretend that it's good science, so as to shore up their own faith as well as that of the ignorant, gullible public who looks up to them as stalwart defenders against the satanic influence of scientific research. Admit the facts, and all that will happen is that they get vilified as "traitors" and face rejection from friends, leaders, and even family - their own parents, spouse, children. Which is why you just can't help but pity creationists, especially the smart ones who knows what's really going on but are trapped by their circumstances and forced to deny the truth. I'm still waiting for a link to Behe's work, by the way. I'm really curious now what sort of sham Behe is cooking up this time when even creationists are afraid to show his work to shore up their arguments.

What do Ascomycota and Basidomycota being multicellular have to do with S. cerviseae being multicellular or otherwise? You might care to know that yeast is prominent as an example of being a unicellular fungus, and that it was actually the first eukaryotic organism to have its genome fully sequenced back in the 90s. Can you show us where are these latent multicellular genes in the yeast genome? What is the basis of your claim that yeast once used to be multicellular and it was simply drawing on its latent genomes to revert back to its previous multicellular form? I'm sorry, I didn't know I was supposed to read your mind and guess what you really intended to post. If you want to argue that soil and ash can be rapidly deposited, be my guest. I have no objections whatsoever. What I started off with was the assumption that you were going to present evidence for the YEC position since that was what you went into the previous discussion with, having assumed that you were interested in honest debate instead of playing word games. If you ever feel like providing evidence of rock sedimentary layers being formed rapidly, I'll be willing to listen. You talk of irrationality and trolling, but you turn tail and run when asked to link to Behe's work? I'm not even asking you to explain his research since that's only a waste of time given how you display the apparent lack of ability to analyze what you're copying and pasting, all I'm asking for is a link to it so we can read it for ourselves, and you immediately throw insults and run away with your tail between your legs. Even for a creationist, this is hopelessly incompetent of you.

I suggest you might want to try actually reading what you're copying and pasting. If "their yeast" weren't utilizing 'latent' multicellular genes, what then is the basis of your claim that the yeast was multicellular in the first place if they didn't utilize multicellular genes? What we have here is a blindly copied and pasted snippet that actually works against your own claims, and assertions from you about Behe's work which you refuse to link to for some reason so that we can read it. What exactly did Behe's experiment involve, and how does one reconcile it with the fact that we actually have direct observational evidence of multicellular organisms evolving from previously unicellular ones? Behe's sham science that has been repeatedly defeated by both the courts and the scientific community and his prancing around masquerading as a legitimate scientist offends my intellect as well. Unlike you, however, I'm willing to look at his research and discuss whatever merits it may have instead of simply running away - if you'd be so kind as to link us to it.

I won't comment on this recent work of Behe's that you're referring to since I'm not familiar with it and it isn't linked to so I can read it for myself, but the fact is that Behe is a sham whose work has been debunked by both the courts and the scientific community. As for your claim that single-celled organisms cannot evolve into multicellularity, we actually have direct evidence that proves otherwise: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/evolution-of-multicellularity/ So either you're misinterpreting Behe's work, or Behe is simply up to his old tricks again.

I guess you pretty much nailed it on the head. The evidence for macroevolution has been provided repeatedly in this thread. They have been repeatedly ignored. I doubt reposting them again is going to change anything, but I guess it can't hurt to try. *links removed* Can you either refute the evidence or explain how to re-interpret them to support creationism? Can you provide any evidence to support the claims of the article linked to by the OP, which as far as I can tell is unfortunately nothing but an empty assertion elaborated out using pages of pseudo-scientific babbling in an attempt to lend it an air of credibility?

It's remarkable how we can see predictable patterns in how God uses those blueprints then. Apparently God started off with the most basic and rudimentary blueprints for early prokaryotes, modified his blueprints bit by bit over thousands of millions of years, gradually killed off his early blueprints as he ever-so-slowly introduced more and more complex ones, branching them off into various kingdoms and phylums and families according to an order that is completely different from what Gen 1 of the Bible tells us, whereas at the onset of modern science where we actually have knowledge about genetics and the principles of Mendelian heredity and the ability to actually measure changes in organisms, God abruptly ceased his interfering and let nature take its course so that His hand cannot be detected and recorded by science. It's really remarkable how creationists invariably falls back on "we can't understand God!" to excuse facts that punch holes all over their nonsensical, baseless speculations. I've never really understood how the creationist can bear to live with the shame of such intellectual dishonesty, or if they feel any shame at all... but that's just me.

nebula, it's easy to pick out single pieces of evidence and argue that one can interpret it multiple ways. Unfortunately, it's also dishonest because the modern evolutionary synthesis isn't founded on isolated bits of evidence like dogs' paws, it's a cohesive theory that unifies a wide range of evidence offered by paleontology to mathematics to genetics. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_common_descent Can you explain to us how can we possibly interpret the entire set of evidence available to us today in order to fit creationism?

What makes you think that evolution is triggered by throwing fishes onto beaches, or that fishes are supposed to evolve into monkeys? Given that speciation (the process of one species evolving into another) has been directly observed numerous times with different species, what makes you think that science proves that "one species can not turn into another species"? Why are you trying to discuss evolution when you apparently don't even understand the relationship between the genotype and phenotype of organisms? ***Edited to remove the personal attack ***

It is a pet peeve I have. But really, word games are what evolutionists excel at - if we do not describe things satisfactorily, you all harp on us to explain things properly. So I find it amusing that you find my protest offensive. There is a difference between your failing to describe things satisfactorily, and your constructing your entire argument around viole's choice of words when the real meaning has been explained to you. Which parts of the arguments which have been presented to you do you not understand, so we can explain it to you again? Or is it that all you're going to post about is how viole used "want" in her post?

I don't work in the field, but I paid attention during biology class in high school. Assuming you're from the United States, I think you can easily find the answers to your own questions by flipping through a high school or college textbook.

The thing is, we trust Christians to debate honestly instead of engaging in pointless word games. It appears you're trying to prove that that trust is misplaced.

... as well as phenotypes developed in response to external stimuli (e.g. physical exercise). Yes, I believe I forgot to mention those. Thanks for pointing that out.

I'm sure that there are people here who would love to drag this thread into the realm of insults and personal insinuations instead of sticking to a technical discussion, and have been trying to do exactly that, but what I'm really interested is in hearing the creationist viewpoint on this issue. I assume that even the staunchest anti-evolutionist is sufficiently educated to know that the phenotype of an organism is entirely dependent on the genetic "blueprint". What then makes it so impossible to believe that changing an organism's genes will also change its physical appearance, behavior, and characteristics? Anti-evolutionists constantly insist that there is a barrier that limits mutation and prevents organisms from evolving into other "kinds" - putting aside the ever-flexible creationist definition of "kinds" for the moment, what exactly is this barrier, how does it work, what are its limits, when and how has it ever been studied, and where is the evidence for it?

In most instances, the common ancestor of X and Y would most likely be classified in the same family as either X or Y. There is nothing to say that the common ancestor must suddenly become extinct after it spawns a new branch of organisms. As for your other questions: as have been pointed out, they're nonsensical because you apparently have no understanding of how genetics and taxonomy works. First off, there is no exact correlation between a genotype and a phenotype. How many genes are needed to affect any particular change depends on the type of change and organism in question, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution to your question. Secondly, you need to remember that the Linnaeus taxonomy system precedes our knowledge of evolution. It does not allow for in-betweens, as organisms must be classified as either one species or another. At borderline cases, where a transitional species displays characteristics of both the species preceding and succeeding it, its classification is often arbitrary. It's really like asking the question: at which point does the color red become the color orange?