As it turns out, there are people that look at dubious claims like creationism and they put together sites that categorize points that in reality are so old that the last time they heard it they fell laughing out of their dinosaurs. 
The ignorance is in not being aware of sites that already reported on old points and the reply that scientists already made many years ago.
In this case the place to check is Talkorigins.org:
That’s not even close to true. Do you think there are male and female amoebas?
Missed the edit window to add this:
Think about it, when replies can be **categorized **and organized with supporting science it is IMHO a powerful sign that discussions in scientific circles already took place many, many times before, and the old points from pseudo science are essentially discredited.
We can figure out the current state of affairs in scientific circles with little problem in the era of the internet.
Oh, really. So I guess I was avoiding it by learning to read it in the original Greek, then? Argument FAIL!
Actually, no; there are lizards that reproduce both sexually and asexually, depending on circumstances. Sometimes, two lizards get together and mate; at other times, the female simply lays an egg, which hatches into a young female lizard.
The intermediate form is alive today, right now, in a desert not far from here.
Where you by any chance homeschooled?
There are also several species that will spontaneously change sexes to assure progeny. seee - Sex change - Wikipedia
Aha…we’re not at the top of the evolutionary chain. That female lizard seems much more advanced than we are. At least…she does not argue with her husband on a weekly basis.
Depends on who is doing the measuring. In some species the male bear the young. And we always have the praying mantis as an example. The male gives the female sex and dinner, in that order.
Why are you bringing this thread back from the dead?
Also, in the likely case you don’t know, there is no “top” to a chain, evolutionary or otherwise. There is no “ideal” evolutionary peak.
Further, in case the implication is not clear, there is no “top” to the food chain, either.
Well, I can imagine it being quite a shock for someone, who has lived his whole life thinking that man is God’s special creation and the best thing he could come up with, to realise this is wrong.
True, there is no real ‘top’ but there are a lot of things in which animals are better ‘designed’.
What made me blink espescially is the realisation that we, as mammals, are inferior to birds in a lot of respects. In the evolutionary chain mammals came before dinosaurs evolved.
Birds, the still living dinosaurs, have better eyes, a better oxygen regulation and lighter but stronger bones.
They can fly too.
I don’t believe it’s actually the atheists who want the Bible to be treated as a high school textbook. It’s, you know, the *other *guys (well, the ones at the other extreme).
The only people who treat the Bible as a textbook are the ones who are trying to get Christian theology taught as science in schools. Atheists treat the Bible for what it is: a book full of mythological stories written 2000 years ago.
This isn’t really true. Quite a few atheists, myself included, became atheists after a spiritual search. I was raised Catholic, looked around at other branch of Christianity, toyed with a few other religions like Wicca and Buddhism, and finally decided that none of them had the answers. It’s been said more than once that one of the best ways to become an atheist is to read the Bible from cover to cover, and that played a big part in my move away from Christianity.
It depends on how you mean ‘designed’. If you mean there have been and current are species that may be faster or stronger or better sighted, that’s true.
Many of those species are now extinct, leaving no descendant species. That’s not “better” in any evolutionary sense.
Either way, it shows the dangers of applying anthropomorphism to science and how a poor understanding of evolutionary science can be used to promote all sorts of strange ontological beliefs.
I am closing this, at least for now. pchaos has another all-purpose thread about atheism going while this one has been dormant. We don’t need two of those threads at once and I don’t want anyone dropping out of a conversation just to post snark in another thread.
I have to agree with you. Distilled down: No matter how many BILLIONS of years you give it, no amount of time can cause structured order and then life itself to form from mere chemical matter and a constant energy source. Natural tendancies are toward dis-order. Energy alone cannot reverse that. The missing factor is intelligence. Something has to drive intelligent organization and nobody has ever discovered anything or any process that can cause this to happen otherwise. The intelligence emanates from God. Hence the concept of intelligent design.
The evidence does not support that conclusion.
And not even close. It is still a huge mystery to scientists. Nobody can illustrate a process by which complex intelligent order can form spontaneously from matter and energy over time. There is simply no known physical property that drives order and intelligence.
Why does that imply an outside intelligence?
Intelligence cannot form out of nothing.
And, while the properties of entropy are often mis-represented, nevertheless you can naturally see that things naturally move toward disorganization. If you don’t heep up with things in your life, your world becomes more disorganized and chaotic. An old abandoned asphalt parking lot will disintegrate and be filled with weeds within 20 years. Take iodine crystals and apply a heat source (energy) and not only would they not become more organized over time, but actually the iodine sublimes and becomes scattered. Over time it becomes further scattered and random. A planet swimming in “premordial soup” and constant sunlight isn’t going to somehow create any intelligent organization despite how many eons of time that pass. Sure, there are hypotheses that suggest this may happen, but NEVER has there ever been proof of any kind that this can happen.
And what is intelligence ultimately? It is more than just successive order. It is probably order squared. Intelligence is infused into the equation and must come from somewhere.