h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There's one problem with the theory that the egg came first from two non-chickens. When the chick from the egg hatched and grew up , what the hell did it mate with ? They can't reproduce with just one chicken.
If it just happened to have been born from two non-chickens , how likely is it that another just happened to have evolved in the same way ?

It mated with a non-chicken. It wasn't sufficiently different from the non-chicken to prevent mating. But all its children were chickens.

This happens all the time. The first Rex cat (curly-haired cat) was born from in England in the 20th Century from two straight-haired cats. All the children of the Rex cat are Rex themselves, even when it mates with normal cats. If there was some advantage to being Rex, soon all the cats in the world would be, as the others would die out.

The problem is that you confuse mutation with evolution, a mutation is small. A dog that lives in southern california may never grow a winter coat, or special hair between their toes to help keep them warm, but take that dog to canada for a winter and it will grow a coat to help keep it warm, just because it grew a bit of extra fur dosn't make it a mutation, it dosnt mean it evolved to a higher form, it just means that the dog has a capability to adapt to it's surroundings. Why is it so hard to accept that we were created, I have read many books with scientific facts that confirm a perfect that mutated from God's original design.

What I mainly have a problem with is that as an evolutionary idea becomes disproven the only thing that remains constant is the belief that we evolved while everything that is out there prooves creation and our understanding of how things happend is corrected or made more clear. It all seems murky to me, I would rather say that the chicken came first because though an egg may be laid dont count your chickens until they hatch... it solves a lot to understand that the chickens were counted as they were created, then who cares how many eggs they lay as long as I have enough to make an omlette or a breakfast burrito?

I am sorry I cant provide more in my argument but I am lacking some of my materials that would help me to illistrate my point.

>>The problem is that you confuse mutation with evolution, a mutation is small.

I don't confuse them. They are the same thing. When enough mutations have occurred a new species is formed. The evidence is all around us.

>>it dosnt mean it evolved to a higher form

In evolution there are no higher forms.

>>Why is it so hard to accept that we were created[?]

Because this does not explain anything. It fits none of the known facts. Evolution fits the facts. Since animals are evolving at the moment, why is it so hard to believe it happened in the past?

>>I have read many books with scientific facts that confirm a perfect that mutated from God's original design. It can't be scientific if it talks about God's original design. There is no evidence for an original design.

>>What I mainly have a problem with is that as an evolutionary idea becomes disproven ...

That hasn't happened yet

>>everything that is out there prooves creation

That hasn't happened yet either.

>>It all seems murky to me.

That's because you haven't understood what is happening at all. It is quite simple.

>>it solves a lot to understand that the chickens were counted as they were created

It doesn't solve anything to say they were created. They weren't created, because I've seen chickens being born.

>>I am sorry I cant provide more in my argument

For "more" read "anything at all".

Fossil turtles confound evolutionists [Excerpts]
By Dr. Terry Mortenson, Answers in Genesis, April 18, 2005

Australian scientists announced in February the discovery of dozens of fossilized sea turtles that they say have exciting implications for evolution. However, the exciting implications seem rather to be against evolution!

The fossils are "believed" to be 110 millions years old. But contrary to evolutionary expectations, they look "basically the same as sea turtles do today."

Evolutionists have no idea where the sea turtles came from or what they are related to. They just appear in the fossil record (the oldest, a single specimen found in Brazil in 1998, is "dated" at 115 million years), fully formed and fully recognizable. They have since "remained virtually unchanged for over 100 million years," "Discovery" reports.

How do the evolutionists explain this? The Australian researchers are quoted as saying that the "sea turtles have hit on the winning design . . . [and] cracked the winning code." Notice how the evolutionists describe the turtles -- as if they are highly intelligent, creative, forward-looking engineers, which they are not, of course. Evolution is supposedly based on natural selection and mutations, which are mindless, directionless, blind natural processes.

But these are not the only living fossils that refute evolution and millions of years. Many examples could be cited. Regarding slamander fossils recently found in China, we learn that "Despite its Bathonian age, the new cryptobranchid [salamander] shows extraordinary morphological similarity to its living relatives. This similarity underscores the stasis [no change] within salamander anatomical evolution. Indeed, extant cryptobranchid salamanders can be regarded as living fossils whose structures have remained little changed for over 160 million years."

Scientists have found from microscopic examination of blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) fossils, dated to be 3.5 billion years old, that they are essentially identical to the blue-green algae that are still living today. Microscopic algae didn't change over 3.5 billion years of evolution? Who's kidding whom?

References
1. animal.discovery.com/news/afp/20050221/seaturtles.html.

2. Ke-Qin Gao & Neil H. Shubin, "Earliest known crown-group salamanders," "Nature" 422 :428, March 27, 2003.

3. www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/bacteria/cyanointro.html. This is the website of the Museum of Paleontology at the Univ. of Calif., Berkeley.

This sort of rubbish shows that the writer does not understand evolution, which says that the strongest/best/fittest survive. If conditions change, new species evolve. If conditions stay the same, the existing species continue unchanged.

"The Australian researchers are quoted as saying that the "sea turtles have hit on the winning design . . . [and] cracked the winning code." Notice how the evolutionists describe the turtles -- as if they are highly intelligent, creative, forward-looking engineers, which they are not, of course. Evolution is supposedly based on natural selection and mutations, which are mindless, directionless, blind natural processes."

Hitting the winning design, cracking the winning code, is rather like cracking the winning lottery numbers. Not done by intelligence.

What came first, The DNA or the enzymes? The Parrot fish or the Coral? The Chicken or the Egg?

My Challange to you, why is it called the THEORY of evolution if is is undeniable fact? Also, I bring you a clipping from the New York Times.

Startling Scientists, Plant Fixes Flawed Gene
BY NICHOLAS WADE

In a startling discovery, geneticists at Purdue University say they have found plants that possess a corrected version of a defective gene inherited from both their parents, as if some handy backup copy with the right version had been made in the grandparents’ generation or earlier.

The finding implies that organisms may contain a cryptic backup copy of their genome that bypasses the usual mechanisms of heredity. If confirmed, it would present an unprecedented exception to the laws of inheritance discovered by Gregor Mendel in the 19th century.

Equally surprising, the cryptic genome appears not to be made of DNA, the standard hereditary material. The discovery also raises interesting biological questions - including whether it gets in the way of evolution, which depends on mutations changing an organism, not being put right by a backup system.

“It looks like a marvelous discovery,” said Dr. Elliott Meyerowitz, a plant geneticist at the California Institute of technology. Dr. David Haig, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, described the finding as “a really strange and unexpected result,” which would be important if the observation holds up and applies widely in nature.

The new result, reported online Tuesday in the journal Nature by Dr. Robert E. Pruitt, Dr. Susan J. Lolle and colleagues at Purdue, has been found in a single species, the mustardlike plant called arabidopsis that is the standard laboratory organism of plant geneticists.

But there are hints that the same mechanism may occur in people, according to a commentary by Dr. Detlef Weigel of the Max-Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany. Weigel describes the Purdue work as “a spectacular discovery.”

The finding grew out of a research project started three years ago in which Pruitt and Lolle were trying to understand the genes that control the plant’s outer skin, or cuticle.
-END-

Yet another little piece of proof of intelligent design. The only reason man doesn't want to admit to being designed is because they are egotistic and big headed.

Well the world is full of surprises. It would be strange if it weren't; that is, if we had been given a complete theory that explained everything without having to deal with unexpected data.

Oh, I forgot you don't like the word "theory". Why not?

My specialism is the theory of music. I find nothing derogatory in calling the collected knowledge of the fundamentals of musical composition "theory" -- should I?

>>My Challange to you, why is it called the THEORY of evolution if is is undeniable fact?

It's called a Theory because it explains the world in a satisfactory way.

"Theory: a set of hypotheses related by logical or mathematical arguments to explain a wide variety of connected phenomena in general terms."

The Theory of Evolution satisfactorily explains the diversity of life on this planet and has stood up to all tests so far to check its validity. There is no other theory which does this.

As for the other thing. Great! Life has a self-correcting mechanism. It isn't a proof of intelligent design though.

>>The only reason man doesn't want to admit to being designed is because they are egotistic and big headed.

No, there are two reasons man doesn't want to admit to being designed:

1. There is a perfectly good explanation of how man and other "higher" lifeforms arose without intelligent design.

2. There is no evidence that man has been designed.

i'm sorry, but how do 'living fossils' prove the 'theory of creation'? it doesn't in any way at all, no matter what that article says.

the theory of evolution states, among other things, that creatures will be influenced by their environments, and if there is one creature that suits the area better than another then it will survive better and breed more. 'living fossils' simply show that those animals that existed millions of years ago were sufficiently adapted to their environments and required no further evolution. this is not to say that the mutations that 'cause' evolution didn't happen, but since these mutations are completely random it is possible in the cases of the living fossils that the creatures that were born with mutations were less adapted and so they died out quicker and the original species continued to flourish.

also, if you don't like the word THEORY in regard to evolution, then why don't you consider the fact that the creation is also a THEORY. it, like evolution, is an argument put forward by MAN. merely a hypothesis. just because it's in a book that's really old doesn't make it right. let us not forget that other things that have been thought to be right for many years have been proved wrong in modern times.

Galigan, I completely agree with you about living fossils and the theory of evolution.

I don't like the word theory for evolution because creationists seem to think it means that evolution is an idea without any evidence, whereas in fact theory means an idea with a lot of evidence. I try to get around this misapprehension by calling it Evolution rather than the Theory of Evolution.

Creationism is not a theory. It is not a set of hypotheses related by logical or mathematical arguments to explain a wide variety of connected phenomena in general terms. It doesn't explain anything at all, because it is completely unverifiable. No matter what you find in the world, it is possible to say: yes, that is the way God created it. So you are left no wiser than you were before.

so for evolution there is a theory that is supported by many arguments, but with creation it's just a lot of people going around and saying 'god did this, god did that' with no scientific or rational reasoning behind the claims.

yeah that sounds about right.

Creationism is like the theory of predestination; as Wittgenstein said of that, it's not a theory, it's more like a sigh or a cry than a theory.

When things become unbearably painful, it can sometimes help to tell yourself that all things are somehow how they were meant to be; that someone knows what is going on, and that in some way that we cannot understand, all is well.

It was *never meant* to be scientific.

predestination is all very well and good and gives an example of something people do or think to make themselves feel better, but creationism states that the world was created by god etc. and has little to do with the future.

creationisn is only like the 'theory' of predestination because neither are theorys, according to that last post. after that the similarities end, so really creationism isn't anything like the theory of predestination.

understandable predestination isn't and wasn't meant to be scientific. i'm not trying to say it was. but creationism is something different altogether and there are people who impose their views of it on other people with no scientific or rational reasoning.

if you want to beleive it fine but don't go aroung telling everyone else they're wrong without sufficient evidence, scientific or otherwise.

Creationism says

"Tell me why the stars do shine
Tell me why the ivy twines
Tell me why the sky's so blue
And I will tell you why I love you.

Because God made the stars to shine
Because God made the ivy twine
Because God made the sky so blue
Because God made you, I love you."

It's not what you would call logical. But it is charming. Dan Dennett quoted it at the beginning of "Consciousness Explained", in a wistful kind of way.

Let's stop hitting creationists. If they are flipping a lot, that's because they feel deprived of oxygen.

<>

ok i don't really get that bit, but the rest is basically a poem. although the post confuses me because i can't tell if it's pro creationist or not. you seem rather impartial if that's the right word (not committing to either side). by the way the 3 things in the first 3 lines of that poem are easily explained (just don't ask because i can't be bothered).

as i've heard someone say before,

"if you read the bible as a set of stories it's actually quite good, a bit slow in parts, but as a factual document it's complete pants."

i think that quote about sums it up.

The poem may be in "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", rather than "Consciousness Explained". It is, as you say, a conversation-stopper; not so much "I can't be bothered" as "It's far too much to try and explain now". I certainly remember as a child taking things on trust but knowing that I would get around to questioning them later. Not that conversation-stopping can't be done in a bullying way; that's our objection to today's vocal creationists.

I am very much a Darwinian; but I expect religion is not just going to fade away because of science. Old sayings may have their meanings severely challenged, but they don't have to lose all their utility. And after all it's not about nothing.