Err, I did say that instinct was a reaction to stimuli, but just on a highly complex degree.
Pavlov’s paramecia? 
That’s cool. But that’s not an innate instinct. Hrm. Perhaps the paramecia has photoreceptors which through lamarkian evolution has adapted to cause a production of some sorta protein which changes the shape of the cytoskeleton?
~capacitor
Read my speciation err lecture? =)
Avalongod,
I believe that the sentiments you have expressed about God acting through evolution is something that should be examined further.
Why cannot the 6 days of creation be symbolic representations of the millenia it took nature to develop living organisms.
We can allow Nature to be Gods creation for the purposes of reconciling Evolutionists and creationists.
I have in the past presented this deistic arguement to ardent creationalists. In some cases I have seen the idea give pause for thought. In very rare cases I have seen people satisfied that they now had a rationlisation for believing in evolution while not needing to be an atheist
or feeling guilty.
What think ye ?
BTW Thanks for the links folks, but I think í’m on a loser over there anyhows.
Damha: welcome to the SDMB! 1st posts in GD? You’ve got guts. 
Capacitor, you take offense to some of the categorizations of you and your responses, perhaps rightly so in some instances. But as an interested observor (till this point) of this discussion, I can tell you it has been frustrating to see you simply ignore rebuttals and direct questions (David B’s, if you want an example) that seem absolutely on point. It’s difficult to come to any other conclusion–at times–than you are conveniently ignoring that which does not support your “argument,” which is bad darts in a debate, I think.
In answer to the God question posed earlier, I absolutely believe that God’s plan includes evolution and it continues to unfold before us. The inexorable progression from one cell life to the present, in a religious sense, does not represent randomness but one hell of an elegant and complicated blueprint. If God wanted birds to appear as a result of 200 million years of evolution, having transformed from dinosaurs, He can pull it off, on time and on budget. No scientific measurement will capture this, nor should it. Nothing here–science and religion–is at odds, from my perspective.
It is possible. Most people consider this to be something untestable and therefore outside the province of science. Hell, it’s possible that a Supreme Being created the universe a microsecond ago.
Thre are creationists that believe that “symbolic representation” theory. There’s a proposed taxonomy of creationits here. Two categories seem to apply:
“Day-age creationists interpret each day of creation as a long period of time, even thousands or millions of years. They see a parallel between the order of events presented in Genesis 1 and the order accepted by mainstream science. Day-Age Creationism was more popular than Gap Creationism in the 19th and and early 20th centuries.”
“Theistic Evolution says that God creates through evolution. Theistic Evolutionists vary in beliefs about how much God intervenes in the process. It accepts most or all of modern science, but it invokes God for some things outside the realm of science, such as the creation of the human soul. This position is promoted by the Pope and taught at mainline Protestant seminaries.”
Agree wholeheartedly with you.
I asked a learned aquantance of mine , a Jesuit priest, with whom I worked on the Human Genome Project, how it was that he could reconcile his beliefs with his work and his pronoucements on the validity of evolutionary theory.
He , it transpired , was a Deist. Similar in thinking to the theists you speak of, his opinion was that God did indeed work through evolution. There are substantial differences between the two approaches but in essence both provide a way to reconcile creationism and evolutionism.
A question,
As the great Messiah , you choose from an ancient race 4 men to tell your story. You explain to them as best you can theories and principles and concepts that are beyond even modern day comprehension at times in spite all of our education and development.
Do you imagine that something might get lost in the translation , and would you use symbology to try to help these fishermen to understand the spirit of the message if not the letter?
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David B, You said that Charles Darwin never began to question evolution himself, but he did. It was in the book “Origin of Species” that Darwin said,
“view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one.”
Thus, the subject of origins was still open and is still open to examination. Why would you wholeheartedly beleive something when it’s originator was even in doubt?
The scientific magazine <i>Discover</i> put the situation this way,“Evolution…is not only under attack by fundamentalist Christians, but is also being questioned by reputable scientists. Among paleontologists there is growing dissent from the prevailing view of Darwinism.”
Also, Christopher Booker, who accepts evolution, said this about it,“It was a beutifully simple and attractive theory. The only trouble was that, as Darwin was himself at least partly aware, it was full of colossal holes.” Regarding the book <i>“Origin of Species”</i> he observed,“We have here the supreme irony that a book which has become famous for explaining the origin of species in fact does nothing of the time.” He also said,“A century after Darwin’s death, we still have not the slightest demonstratable or even plausible idea of how evolution really took place-and in recent years this has led to an extraordinary series of battles over the whole question…a state of almost open war exists among the evolutionists themselves, with every kind of [evolutionary] sect urging some new modifications.” He concluded,“As to how and why it really happened, we have not the slightest idea and probably never shall.”
Now let’s move on to the fossil record. It is stated in many science books that an animal named <i>Eohippus</i> evolved into the horse, but I say that is very unlikely for two reasons. 1)There are no fossil records showing the link between the two and 2)A shy, fox like animal called a Daman lives in the African bush looks just like your Eohippus. Insects appeared suddenly in the fossil record without any evolutionary ancestors. The Fossil Record has too many gaps and unexplained occurences in it to prove evolution.
Shagadelic, you are wrong on so many counts. For one thing, “The Origin of Species” merely states Darwin’s idea that given populations adapt to their environment through gradual change. Since 1859, an overwhelming mountain of evidence has shown that evolution has occurred, and continues to occur.
You are wrong about the paucity of evidence in the fossil record for equine evolution, although you are correct that the modern horse didn’t evolve in a straight line from its earliest ancestors. You should check out this link for more info,http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/horses.html.
While there is vehement disagreement among evolutionary biologists on the mechanics of evolution, no reputable scientist disagrees that evolution happens. I suspect you misunderstood the article you read. You might try reading refereed journals which are more authoritative sources of information than Discover.
Who is Christopher Booker? What source are you citing? All I can say to Capacitor, Shagadelic and all the other fundies is drop your Bibles for a moment and hie thee to a biology class.
Damnha, I wholeheartedly agree, and in fact that is pretty much the same conclusion I came to (oddly enought I think of myself as a deist as well)
I kinda had the same conflict at one point…trying to reconcile the dogma of religion with the evidence of science, when it just kinda occurred to me that all this neat stuff we were finding out in science didn’t refute the existance of god(s) but perhaps quite the opposite.
I think even Einstein once said something to the effect of “God wouldn’t miss the chance to make things work so simply”
> A tree is as good as the shade it gives, the habitat it
> provides, the strength of its wood, and its fruits.
> Unfortunately, Social Darwinism is a fruit that came from
> Darwin’s studies. So no I do not separate the
> two just as you don’t separate humans from rest of the
> animals in transpecies evolution.
This is the dumbest thing I’ve heard in a good while.
So…
therefore,
Evolution can’t really be happening.
This is like saying
Nuclear war is bad
therefore,
First of all Christopher Booker was a London Times Columnist as well as an avid evolutionist. Now, if you would have taken the time to read the first post on the board by David B instead of attacking me, you would have known what I was talking about with Darwin doubting evolution. David B said that wasn’t true, but as I stated Darwin did doubt it to some degree. I know that what the Origin of Species is about, We had it in 10th grade science this year. I never stated that it wasn’t about the idea that organisms adapt to their environments gradually over time. I’d like to see where I said that. On to the fossil record. It is claimed that you have found “neanderthal” mans skull. Scientists say that they show how homosapiens has evolved. How do you know that maybe the skull’s didn’t come from difformed human beings? And the drawings of Ape-Men. Where do those come from? The book The Biology of Race answers:“The flesh and hair on such reconstructions have to be filled in by resorting to the imagination.” It adds:“Skin color; the color, form and distribution of the hair; the form of the features; and the aspect of the face-of these characters we know absolutely nothing for any prehistoric men.” Why then do you follow something so falliable that even Darwin and well know scientists are in doubt about? And you go off of drawings that come strictly from imagination. It is also said that man decended originally from a shrew like animal, then Aegyptopithecus- Egypt Ape, then Ramapithecus- Rama’s Ape.
A magazine called Origins originally stated that,“As far as one can say at the moment, it is the first representative of the human family.” But, it went on to say,“The evidence concerning Ramapithecus is considerable- though in absolute terms it remains tantalizingly small: fragments of upper and lower jaws, plus a collection of teeth.”
How could you get an ape man from teeth and jaw fragments? Later finds revealed that Ramapithecus closely resembled the present-day ape family.
The magazine New Scientist now declares,"Ramapithecus cannot have been the first member of the human line. Then came Australopithecus- southern ape which was found in africa in the 1920’s. It was long believed to be a human ancestor. But just like Ramapithecus, Australopithecus was discontinued as the missing link between humans and apes. It was noted that it’s skull differed from that of humans in more ways than it’s smaller brain capacity.
An Anatomist named Zuckerman wrote:“When compared with human and simian(ape) skulls, the Australopithecine skull is in appearence oferwhelmingly simian- not human.” He also said,“Our findings leave little doubt that…Australopithecus resembles no Homo Sapiens but the living monkeys and apes.”
It was also well thought off that when Neanderthal Man was found, he was originally apelike and that he proved the link between man and monkey, but it is now known that the reconstruction was made from a fossil skeleton badly deformed by disease. Later neanderthal fossils have been found and they show that they were indeed human. Also Cro-Magnon man was thought to be the link, but the book Lucy, which was about the fossils linking man to monkey, said,“the specimens were so virtually indistinguishable from those of today that even the most skeptical had to concede that they were humans.”
A biologist named Francis Hitching said,“The curious thing is that there is a consistency about the fossil gaps: the fossils go missing in all the important places.”
The important places he refers to are the gaps between the major divisions of animal life. An example of this is that fish are thought to have evolved from the invertebrates. But Hitching obeserved,“Fish jump into the fossil record seemingly from nowhere: mysteriously, suddenly, full formed.”
Zoologist N.J. Berrill commented on his own evolutionarey explaination of how the fish arrived, by saying,“In a sense this account is science fiction.”
But goboy, you said that their were no gaps in the fossil record. What i’ve quoted above comes from educated scientist and evolutionists. There are indeed gaps in the fossil record, which leads me to question the validity of the theory of evolution.
Shag, 10th grade science this year? Say no more. BTW, re-read my post, I was talking about the fossil record of equine evolution, not the entire fossil record.
shagadelicmysteryman:
I don’t know if that is indded a quote from Darwin, but I’ll assume that it is.
Darwin’s book was entitled “The Origin of Species”, not “The Origin of Life”. The theory of evolution is independent of how life arose; it’s about what happens after life arose. That quote is not about doubts of the theory of evolution.
A reply, as a great Messiah one can use one’s supernatural powers to force comprehension of anything. A Messiah that doesn’t do this is purposly not allowing comprehension, if it -wants- to deliver the message and fails it must be faling on purpose or really not have any supernatural powers at all or be very limited. So limited it cannot see the problems of delivering ambigious information to a race that can only misuse the various translations. In other words your Messiah, if real, is a complete and utter moron.
When it comes to taking traditional religious issues seriously and applying to real world situations is that your assumptions and experience with religion simply aren’t representative of the entire spectrum of possible explanations. Most evolution vs. creationism debates focus of the western father-figure Christianity god because most vocal westerners are either fixated with god, darwin, or a uncreative mix of both.
Everytime someone puts the word god as a possible explanation for this or that mystery of life you can also substitute it with lots of “illogical” ideas like the theory of starseeding (aliens creating animals/man or just dropping off DNA), a pantheon of gods, an impersonal animating force, reincarnation, etc.
I can’t take any creationist or deist argument seriously because its just a way for westerners to feel good about Christianity while ignoring other just as plausible explanations like star-seeding. Most people see star-seeding as ridiculous and New Age-ish, but take the concept of God(s) seriously. Both beliefs are completely lacking in the proof department, but one has a better PR department.
Taking quotes from your religious book of choice and demanding it’s proof or representative of reality is really childish and shows a complete lack of sincerity because of your obvious bias that disgregards ‘foriegn’ religious ideas or ‘wakcy’ New Age ones.
I don’t see why these vocal creationists and deists can’t give up their terrible and ignorant arguments and understand that spiritualism and science are mutually exclusive, accept current science as lacking (as it always will be as its always slowly changing) but representative of the physical world and spiritualism as the attempts to give meaning and ethics to humanity.
If you want to believe in supernatural creators or reincarnation than do so, but also understand that your beliefs are about as plausible as the ones you don’t believe (like starseeding) and trying to push a faith-based theory onto a experimentaly-based discipline shows your ignorance on how both religion and science work.
HorseloverFat:
I have to admit I thought this thread was getting a little dull until you showed up.
quote:
A reply, as a great Messiah one can use one’s supernatural powers to force comprehension of anything
quote:
In other words your Messiah, if real, is a complete and utter moron.
~~~If I were Christian I would put you first in line for the stake. :) Seriously though, this is a pretty unsophisticated line of reasoning (no offense) and seems to lack much serious thought. It boils down to the "If God wants us to believe in him, why doesn't he just MAKE us." That argument is silly.
quote:
most vocal westerners are either fixated with god, darwin, or a uncreative mix of both.
~~~So because we don't subscribe to your beliefs we are uncreative?
quote:
I can't take any creationist or deist argument seriously because its just a way for westerners to feel good about Christianity while ignoring other just as plausible explanations like star-seeding.
~~~Yep you have summed up deism pretty nice there. The only question I have left for you is: What the Hell are you talking about? do you even know the basics of what deism is? Deism and creationism have NOTHING in common. Hell you can be a deist and believe in starseeding just fine. Deism simply is a philosophical viewpoint that suggests that the nature of god(s) is fundamentally too difficult to understand for humans at the present time. God(s) created a world with scientific principles and simply stepped back to let things unfold in a "natural" way. This is a far cry from creationism.
quote:
Taking quotes from your religious book of choice and demanding it's proof or representative of reality is really childish and shows a complete lack of sincerity because of your obvious bias that disgregards 'foriegn' religious ideas or 'wakcy' New Age ones.
~~~Although deists don't tend to be big on new age (though some might be) usually a respect for all religions is inherent. There ain't no deist book of religion either. Or were you speaking about creationists here.
quote:
I don't see why these vocal creationists and deists can't give up their terrible and ignorant arguments and understand that spiritualism and science are mutually exclusive
~~~uuuhhh....because they're not?
quote:
accept current science as lacking (as it always will be as its always slowly changing) but representative of the physical world
~~~this is true. Wisdom from the mouth of babes. But in coming to understand science, could it not be we gradually come to understand the mind of god. Even S. Hawking suggests this (A Brief History of Time)
quote:
trying to push a faith-based theory onto a experimentaly-based discipline shows your ignorance on how both religion and science work.
Ummm....I AM a scientist, and from this post I am not sure that YOU understand how science works.
Have a nice day. :)A Messiah without supernatural powers of saving or providing leadership would fall more into the category of prophet. The rest of your paragraph completely ignores the question I replied, a hypthetical situation of a Messiah ouright telling people things, not through scientific discovery.
Again read the post I’m refering to, the Messiah is trying to make people believe. Again if a god wants something to happen it will, what you’re trying to say is god wants to people to believe but under certain circumstances, ways, etc…
Where did this come from, where did I state my beliefs? Combining your society’s 2 popular cosmologies really is uncreative, if you don’t think so that’s subjective.
Deism presupposes a creator than doesn’t interfere with the natural law. Maybe your deism doesn’t involve a creator, but I’ll stick to the popular definition, thanks.
One of my main points is that a modern person can really see that science is interested in the physical world while religion is interested in spiritual manners. Ancient mythical cosmologies aren’t science and physics isn’t religious.
Celebrities don’t impress me much, that statement presupposes a creator like a good deist should. Scientific inquiry doesn’t guarantee a god. Regardless, this is really off track.
So you are all for mixing science with faith-based theories, I really can’t see the logic in mixing religion and science maybe you could explain how reincarnational dynamics affect spacetime? Nice post though, I almost completely disagree with everything you’ve written.
Capacitor, as you may or may not have seen, my Mailbag item on micro/macroevolution is now posted (I got it pushed ahead just for you). Take a look:
Shag, just curious: Where are you getting all these quotes? I’m betting you didn’t read the actual source material.
Horselover:
Your penchant for sheer idiocy stuns me:
quote:
Again if a god wants something to happen it will
~~this sounded better in the Roger Waters song “What god wants, god gets” which was a joke…much like most of your posts, but of a different kind.
quote:
what you’re trying to say is god wants to people to believe but under certain circumstances, ways, etc…
quote:
Where did this come from, where did I state my beliefs?
~~~Um in your last post? You prefer creative? Become a scientologist. Perhaps I am naive but I don't think the point of either science or religion is to "create" wild new theories without some basis.
quote:
Deism presupposes a creator than doesn't interfere with the natural law. Maybe your deism doesn't involve a creator, but I'll stick to the popular definition, thanks.
Ummm...if you actually READ my last post you would have noticed that this is exactly what I mentioned deism as holding to. This bears little resemblance to strict biblical creationism my poor confused friend.
quote:
One of my main points is that a modern person can really see that science is interested in the physical world while religion is interested in spiritual manners.
~~~an amatuer mistake, one devoid of understanding of either mode of inquiry. Both religion and science seeks to understand the world as it is (physical or otherwise)...in essence to know and to understands. You might argue one does it better than the other (or perhaps in different realms each have strengths) but the fundamental goal is the same. This is why they so often come into conflict.
quote:
Ancient mythical cosmologies aren't science and physics isn't religious.
~~~in fact their is a long history of intermingling of the two. Seperation of church and science is fairly recent (and a good move in my opinion). Nonetheless they still seek to answer many of the same questions.
quote:
Celebrities don't impress me much
~~~doubt they'd wet their pants much at the thought of you either.
quote:
Scientific inquiry doesn't guarantee a god.
~~~nope, neither does it preclude one.
quote:
maybe you could explain how reincarnational dynamics affect spacetime?
~~~what the hell are you talking about.
quote:
I almost completely disagree with everything you've written.
~~~whew!