Jon55, you seem like a relatively intelligent fellow.
You also state that you have ‘problems’ with the current theory of Evolution.
Do you have any alternative hypotheses that fit the observed data better than the standard theory? Do you question the basic foundations of biological evolution?
Please elucidate a positive proposition of your own that contradicts the current theory and gives a plausible mechanism for your thesis. That is not too much to ask. After all, you must have a clear understanding of the current theory in order to make judgement as to its effectiveness as a scientific theory. Surely you have come up with some alternative hypotheses. I, for one, would be pleased to see such presented here. It would be a refreshing change from the usual dreck excreted by other posters who lack your insight into the matter.
The best evidence for an intelligent creator for life would be the presence of some sort of easter egg, or message from the creator. If a particular strand of DNA is ever translated into a code that says something like “Created by God on the 5th day of creation” or something like that, then wham, you’ve got a slam-dunk case for intelligent design.
Without some piece of evidence, a message, or something, there is just absolutely no reason to create a theory involving an intelligent designer.
I’m a computer scientist who wrote a compiler for my dissertation, but who has worked on hardware for over 30 years, and I can tell you that hardware is much easier. Hardware has a very limited set of inputs, and doesn’t have to deal with users.
But actually, software evolves also. Windows was designed for standalone single user PCs, and so has all sorts of horrid features - like DLLs - which made sense back 20 years ago and no sense now. UNIX, which was designed as a multiuser system from scratch, does much better. I think it is problematic that big-multigeneration systems are intelligently designed. People may work at each stage, but there is no overriding supervision. Thus we get the kind of junk you see.
I don’t think I’m allowed to give my opinion of HP stuff.
A creator God is everywhere and can do all this design perfectly. It would be a real bad design if it had to be tweaked all the time, wouldn’t it? And if I were divine I would know all the surprises people have thrown at me in advance and could have designed for them, That would save time. I actually almost have, but that comes from a lack of trust in the sanity of users which I have learned from long experience.
I’m no expert, but it seems to me that sounding the alarm would help protect the rest of the community, including that monkeys children. From an evolutionary perspective, it doens’t really matter what happens to the alarm-sounding monkey, as long as it’s already reproduced.
Besides, it’s a tradeoff; slight chance of being killed while sounding an alarm, vs. hugely better odds of survival by belonging to a troop. And of course any troop without an alarm-sounder would probably be ambushed and destroyed. So monkeys without the alarm-sounding behavior got killed more, because their entire troop got killed, and the alarm-sounding troops were more succesful, stayed alive longer, had more children, and thus the trait became more common.
First, why do you think the explanation in the article fails? I suggest you read “The Selfish Gene” which is cited in the references and which is an easier to understand and longer discussion of some of this stuff. There is a lot of mathematical genetics now, in that various strategies can be simulated and that which comes out best determined.
The problem in your first paragraph is that this noble gene is spread throughout the monkey tribe, and if one sounding the alarm saves monkey lives on the average, the gene will continue to spread.
If you look at it from the gene’s perspective, the lives of individuals are not as important as the eventual promulgation of the gene. Therefore, we get certain behaviors like altruism.
More about the source for this may be found at The Selfish Gene - Wikipedia
Interesting side note: this is the work wherein the word ‘meme’ first appeared.
ETA: DAMMIT! Ninjaed by Voyager!
<shakes fist in the air>
Khaaaaaaaaaaaaannnn!
Thing is, history tells us that the godless approach will get results at least some of the time - i.e. what is a mystery to the creationist today will remain a mystery forever, with at best an ungrounded promise that an individual will receive revelation after death, while the scientist can observe reality and come up with useful applications.
Why does a human knee sometimes give out during the human’s lifetime? A creationist doesn’t know and has no means of finding out. A scientist can at least explain how the decay happens, and come up with ways to mitigate it (i.e. anti-inflammatory medications) or fix it (i.e. surgical replacement, which though not yet as durable as the biological original, is slowly getting there).
You’re basically insulting scientists while indulging in the benefits they provide. This strikes me as, at the very least, a misdirection of the gratitude you instead lavish on your invisible sky-pixie.
Actually, any number of atheists have noted the good points that several Christians, (or Jews), have made in this thread.
What one will never see is an atheist acknowledging that a Creationist, arguing against facts and relying on rhetoric that even other Christians reject, has made a valid point when no such “good point” has actually been made.
Confusing Creationists with Christians is one of the errors that a great many Creationists make on a pretty regular basis. Just because one rejects 2000 years of Christian thought and belief regarding the stories of Genesis for a version invented in the nineteenth century does not make one a spokesperson for all Christians.
I’m guessing it’s an analogy based on a naive or grossly simplistic view of what constitutes ‘similarity’ when it comes to empirical study of the relatedness of any two organisms.
i.e. the process of examining two forms and deducing that either [they share a common ancestor] or [one is ancestral of the other] is being likened to very superficially examining salt and sugar and concluding that they are related, on the basis that they are both colourless crystalline solids.
Needless to say, comparing salt and sugar like that isn’t anything like the multitude of different ways we can compare organisms to one another (including, but not limited to: morphology, embryology, bioregiography, the fossil record, and a whole heap of different genetic methods).
(But that is a common creationist tactic - vastly oversimplify something, stripping it of all important details in the process, to the point that it no longer makes sense, then drily observe that it is nonsense. A specific kind of straw man argument, I guess.
That’s what my stumbling block was on that statement. Once you actually look at salt and sugar, you wil see that they are not “related” in any way.
Crystal structure (analogous to morphology), production processes (analogous to embryology), and chemical composition (analogous to genetics) are all so very different that only the most unobservant could ever propose that they are related.
If you use the Bible as proof of anything regarding God, or a God, you are using the words and beliefs of some other human.Even if it comes from your own mind, it is just a human thinking. There is no proof of God, just belief that there is,when(an if) belief is proven then it would be fact, since there is no way to prove anything except the human mind, it just remains belief.That is a matter of choice.
Jesus is also quoted as saying the world would end in that generation, and that he would ‘RETURN’ in his father’s glory with his angels, while some of them standing there listening to him were still alive…it didn’t happen…wonder why?
In other words, “Christians” win the admiration and support of atheists as long as they agree with atheistic ideology. Gotcha.
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You’re just distorting & ignoring what people are saying again. You’re doing exactly what tomndebb was complaining of; equating creationist with Christian.
And evolution isn’t ideology, atheistic or otherwise. It’s a scientific fact, like gravity.
