On Mon, Dec 02, 2002 at 12:53:47AM -0800, Caliann the Elf wrote: > In that, science hasn't disproved creationism. So can I talk about the > theory of Creationism? Can you generate any testable hypotheses with Creationism? Can you conceive of disproving Creationism? There's a famous statement from someone: "It isn't even wrong." E.g. the idea that we're really running in a big computer simulation. Not disprovable. Not useful, either. > Selective breeding is NOT evolution. You can breed both a daschund and a > Great Dane, but they are both dogs. They are not going to change into, say, > cats...or even coyotes, any million years soon. You're that confident of what can happenin a million years? > Besides, the fossil record is still VERY far from complete and still missing > those oh-so-necessary transitional fossils. Even the poor horse, most noted > of the evolutionary findings, has been blown out of the water when it was > discovered that Eohippus is not extinct at all, nor the ancestor of our > horses, but it alive and well in the brushlands of Africa. > > Of course, it didn't help when later findings came about that placed > Neohipparion and Pliohippus as living in the same time period. What used to be the standard story of a single horse species evolving into the next one seems to be incorrect, yes. I saw this in the American Museum of Natural History a couple of years ago. Instead of a straight line the picture is now of a bush: one species radiates into many, with later pruning. The same thing has happened with the human story: many australopithecines and hominids, eventually all going extinct save for Homo sapiens. I have no opinion on whether the okapi really is so similar to Eohippus, as some creationist websites claim (I just googled for 'Eohippus Africa'.) Others seem to mention the hyrax instead, which seems like a jump. But Eohippus surviving and Neohipparion and Pliohippus coexisting in no way fails to challenge evolution, just the linear textbook story. Radiation and bush-like diagrams are right there in _The Origin of Species_. Eohippus which stay in the African brush stay like Eohippus; Eohippus which migrate towards the Asian steppes evolve to forms better suited for those. Ancestral species don't have to be replaced; new niches and new spaces can be found. Otherwise we wouldn't have gone from one ancestral cell to millions of species! > Okay, I'll buy that. One must be able to prove or disprove God before one > can prove or disprove creationism. Or use it. > Can we call it a draw? I will need proof to believe in evolution, you will > need proof to believe in creationism. Niether one of us is going to get a > reasonable facsimile of either. Read any Dawkins, or Darwin, or the talk.origins FAQ? -xx- Damien X-)