The Barbarian

Since we observe it happening constantly, there's really no hope of killing it. The reason almost all scientists accept evolutionary theory is because of the numerous verified predictions of the theory. Last time I checked, using numbers from the IDers and Project Steve, about 0.3 percent of all scientists with a doctorate in biology or a related field don't accept evolutionary theory as it is today. That's not 3 percent; it's three-tenths of a percent. With even many YE creationists now admitting to speciation and a limited amount of common descent, it's clear that YE creation is not doing well. And it's not just scientists; most Americans accept some form of evolution: https://news.gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism-intelligent-design.aspx

Same thing, really. What matters, is genes. Until Darwin and Mendel, many scientists thought so, too. Even Darwin was originally open to the idea. But not after we learned how heredity works.

Darwin didn't accept spontaneous generation leading to evolution, either. Pasteur, like Darwin, rejected spontaneous generation, and accepted the fact of evolution, as you see in the quote from Pasteur.

Mutation is a cause of descent with modification. However, it would have to be passed on to new generations to actually amount to evolutionary change.

A physician thinks that evolution is about spontaneous generation? This shows why you should never ask a physician for his opinion on anything but medicine. If you were wondering, nothing in evolutionary theory is about how life began; nor does any particular way that it began, matter to evolutionary theory. Darwin, for example, just thought that God created the first living things. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator 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. Charles Darwin, last sentence of On the Origin of Species, 1872

Pasteur acknowledged evolution: Virulence appears in a new light which cannot but be alarming to humanity; unless nature, in her evolution down the ages (an evolution which, as we now know, has been going on for millions, nay, hundreds of millions of years), has finally exhausted all the possibilities of producing virulent or contagious diseases -- which does not seem very likely. Cuny, Hilaire. 1965. Louis Pasteur: The man and his theories. Translated by P. Evans. London: The Scientific Book Club. Clearly, a lot of scientists who were not biologists and who lived before Darwin's discoveries, did not think of evolution. Today, almost all scientists, even non-biologists, accept evolution. There's an important thing to consider in those facts. Prior to J.J. Thompson, the existence of atoms was controversial. For the same reason.

Breeding is merely sexual reproduction. Which (in sexually reproducing populations) can be part of evolution, called recombination. But it's not the only thing that causes evolution. Mutation is also a major source of evolutionary change. Whatever causes the population genome to change, is a process of evolution. Immigration of individuals of the same species from other populations would also qualify, which is why that must be controlled for in doing population genetics with Hardy-Weinberg analyses.

No. Mutation is a change in genes. Descent with modification is a change in population genome. Mutation can do that. So can recombination of alleles. Descent with modification is the way scientists described things before they knew about genetics. Today, it is referred to as "a change in allele frequency in a population over time."

Perhaps it would be less confusing, if you used Darwin's term. "Descent with modification."

It's like saying that where you're sitting is the center of the Earth's surface, because each way you look, it's the same distance to the horizon. Space is like the Earth's surface; finite, but unbounded. For the same reason.

Perhaps you don't know what "theory" means. Part of the problem is that the word "theory" means something very different in lay language than it does in science: A scientific theory is an explanation of some aspect of the natural world that has been substantiated through repeated experiments or testing. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/just-a-theory-7-misused-science-words/ And evolution isn't a theory. It's a natural phenomenon, which we directly observe happening. There is a theory of evolution that explains it. There are agents of evolution like natural selection, and there are consequences of evolution, like increased fitness in a population, and common descent. So many people get these all confused.

It would have to be really, really far back. The Greeks knew about it before they were writing; at the very beginning of Greek history, they cite a number of ways to know the Earth is spherical. Hundred of years before Christ, one of them very accurately calculated it's circumference.

The evidence shows no dinosaurs at all, above the worldwide layer of iridium, which came from a large object hitting the Earth. However, dinosaurs were in a decline long before that event. It seems that the object applied the final blow to dinosaurs.

It was billions of years ago, but how many, I personally don't know. Iso-propyl cyanide has been detected in a star-forming cloud 27,000 light-years from Earth. Its branched carbon structure is closer to the complex organic molecules of life than any previous finding from interstellar space. The discovery suggests the building blocks of life may be widespread throughout our galaxy. Various organic molecules have previously been discovered in interstellar space, but i-propyl cyanide is the first with a branched carbon backbone. The branched structure is important as it shows that interstellar space could be the origin of more complex branched molecules, such as amino acids, that are necessary for life on Earth. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29368984 And the Murchison Meteorite, about 4 billion years old, had numerous amino acids within it, including some not found on Earth. In the study, set to be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analytical chemist Philippe Schmitt-Kopplin of the Helmholtz German Research Center for Environmental Health in Munich and his colleagues used high-resolution mass spectrometry to look at the organic (carbon-based) content of three Murchison samples. The group found more than 14,000 unique molecular compositions, or collections of atoms, in the samples; there may be 50,000 or more such compositions, if the limited scope of the mass spectrometry analysis is taken into account. And because each collection of atoms can be arranged in numerous ways, the authors estimate that there may be millions of distinct organic compounds in the meteorite. Many researchers have analyzed the chondritic meteorite for amino acids and other possible precursors to life, because some theories hold that life on Earth began with the delivery of prebiotic organic compounds from space via asteroids or comets. Schmitt-Kopplin says that he and his colleagues took a less targeted approach to try to unlock the meteorite's full chemical complexity and, by extension, the chemical complexity of the early solar system. "What we've seen out of this is that we had such a multitude of signals as we never saw in any other sample before," he says. "Even in petroleum, you have really complex materials, but not necessarily as complex as this." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/murchison-meteorite/

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Yes. Romans 2:14 For when the Gentiles, who have not the law, do by nature those things that are of the law; these having not the law are a law to themselves Romans 1:20 For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; his eternal power also, and divinity: so that they are inexcusable.

Any new mutation in a population increases information in that population. It's fairly easy to calculate the information for a given gene locus. Would you like to see an example?

Near my house, polystrate fossils are forming now. A dam produced a lake, and the dead trees in the shallows are slowly being buried in sediment. Eventually you could have polystrate fossils. Paleontologists figured this out a long time ago.

Dinosaurs were reptiles, but they were indeed warm-blooded. That's not surprising. There are, for example, warm-blooded fish. Tuna are warm-blooded as is one species of shark, IIRC. It turns out that scutes (scales found on birds, dinosaurs, and crocodiles can be transformed into feathers by blocking certain genes. This could be why Kulindadromeus seems to have both, with intermediate "sceathers."

The question comes down to: "Is God capable of making a universe in which life could come forth from the Earth?" I believe so. On the other hand, evolutionary theory is indifferent to that. It would work the same way if God just poofed life into existence, or if he used the air,earth, and waters to do so. Darwin just supposed that God created the first living things.

There is no conflict between Adam and Eve being actual people from which we all descended, and evolution. Seems like much ado about nothing.

BTW, a good discussion of the various holes in Humphrey's zircon diffusion argument can be found here: http://theologyweb.com/forum/showthread.ph...&threadid=13112

Nowhere does scripture say that the 'days' in Genesis were literal 24-hour ones. In fact, the text itself tells us that they cannot be, since it speaks of mornings and evenings before there was a sun to have them. I would certainly be interested in seeing the extra Biblical proofs as well. Genesis certainly rules out a literal creation week.

Incidentally, the Mena connection has now been definitely tied to the Nicarauguan Contras, and... Well, take a look... http://www.wealth4freedom.com/truth/13/Mena.htm The last three US presidents have been implicated.

An atheist once told me I didn't realize what a "barbaric" religion Christianity was. So I took the name. He wasn't amused.