Theory of Evolution

[infinitelord1]

is it ok to have hair on lyour back? Maybe im not far enough along the process of evolution

[Laudate_Dominum]

Things like that are just little adaptations, and don't imply that you are more ape-like than any of us monkeys. hehe j/k
Maybe your ancestors slept on the cold ground and needed hairy backs. haha

just playing.

[Brother Adam]

[quote name='infinitelord1' date='Aug 7 2005, 06:00 PM']is it ok to have hair on lyour back? Maybe im not far enough along the process of evolution
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[EcceNovaFacioOmni]

Got a book on evolution this weekend. Forget the title though... Hope to get to reading it after a pile of other things get out of the way.

[Laudate_Dominum]

that's creepy dude! I wonder which text it is.. hmm..

[EcceNovaFacioOmni]

What Darwin Didn't Know. That's the title. Is anyone else watching the History Channel's premiere of the new documentary "Ape to Man" on right now!

[EcceNovaFacioOmni]

It was sort of a cursory glance over the history of "hominid" fossil discoveries...

[peach_cube]

[quote name='Laudate_Dominum' date='Aug 7 2005, 05:27 PM']Rock strata are formed at an angle or slope, not a horizontal plane.

Think of the beach. Beaches tend to slope down into the edge of the water. And ever notice how you will find only the finest sand close to the edge, but if you go higher up a sloping beach the particles become larger?
This demonstrates the behaviour involved in granular deposits sorting themselves.
Now suppose there are two shells, one is at the edge of the sea and another is up the slope. In the future that upper shell will appear in a higher tier in the rock strata, even though they are the same age.
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This is somewhat incorrect. Gravity entails that all rock layers are deposited horizontally. It's the principle of original horizontality. It often leads to simple geologic correlations of rock strata using the simple "layer cake" idea. (Kind of like how Italian dressing settles) However, at the edges of any strata the rock layer will pinch off, or gradually become thinner until it ends. The sorting of sediment from large to small occurs in any catastrophic flood event, and is most readily observed on the continental slope. Not all sediment is required to be sorted. Floods tend to come quickly and then slowly drain away. In areas that the water rushes through and rushes out there is significantly less silt to clay sized sediment, but the rest will be poorly sorted. Also, sedimentary rocks formed without the aid of liquid water will display no sorting.

The sorting that you see on a beach has to do with the natural process in shoreline dynamics. When waves reach the surf zone they begin to crash when they reach the swash zone they "stir up" the sediment. Depending on the ocean currents strength either overall deposition or overall erosion will occur. However, both occur throughout the year. Erosion occurs in winter. If you go to a beach in the winter, most of the fine sand has been washed away. In summer it is deposited. So if you go in the begining of summer the beach will feel more coarse then it would at the end.

Also, Radiometric dating was mentioned. Carbon dating is useless as it is only accurate back to 14,000 years. It is never used it giving the age of the earth or any fossil prior to this time.

Decay schemes that are used with their corresponding half lives:

K40 ----- 1.25 x 10^9 yrs
Rb 87 ----- 48.8 x 10^9yrs
Sm 147 ---- 1.06 x 10^9yrs
Lu 176 ----- 3.50 x10^9yrs
Th 232 -----14.0 x10^9yrs
U235 ------ 0.703 x10^9yrs
U238 ------4.47x 10^9yrs

The age of fossils are determined by the association of their general strata with other strata. For example a sedimentary sandstone would need to have a igneous dike or sill intruding into to it in order to generalize the age of the fossils.

Edited August 8, 2005 by peach_cube

[Laudate_Dominum]

thanks peach_cube. My understanding is that current research suggest that rock layers do not form horizontally. I could be wrong but there was some research lab in the 1990's that published something about this.

God bless.

[peach_cube]

Well,there will be some exceptions, such ca be seen in herring bone cross sedimentation and any wind deposited structure. My Sed/strat knowledge dates to 2001-2002. (so there could be a window there that I missed research, although I do try and keep up with current research) Layer cake geology is an oversimplification of the processes involved, but it is applicable to the overwhelming majority of stratigraphic sequences.

[Laudate_Dominum]

However, the only point I was trying to make is that a fossil higher up in the strata could be younger than something below it. This happens a lot from what I understand.

Thanks.

[peach_cube]

[quote name='Laudate_Dominum' date='Aug 8 2005, 05:20 PM']However, the only point I was trying to make is that a fossil higher up in the strata could be younger than something below it. This happens a lot from what I understand.

Thanks.
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Definitely, you can usually assume that anything below a rock strata is older than it. The most common exception is overturned bedding in folded mountain belts.

[White Knight]

Darwin's name has been thrown off the Evolutionists credit, they now disreguard anything to do with Darwin and have a different point of view on Evolution, same theory, just without his name on the theory.


If you look at Darwin's Theory of Evolution and look at the Creation Evidence out there, you find that both uncapable of being able to work together clearly. Its ethier one or the other.

[reelguy227]

Evolution hasnt ever been proven ,thats why its a theory.

They dont call it the Theory of Evolution for nothing.

Edited August 11, 2005 by reelguy227

[cappie]

Cardinal Ratzinger's Thoughts on Evolution
An Excerpt From "Truth and Tolerance"

ROME, SEPT. 1, 2005 (Zenit.org).- Cardinal Christoph Schönborn's July 7 editorial in the New York Times entitled "Finding Design in Nature" provoked a flurry of reactions, both supportive and critical.

Requests have begun to arrive in Rome for Benedict XVI to make some sort of clarification on the Church's stand regarding evolution.

The following text, delivered in 1999 as part of a lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the future Benedict XVI) and subsequently published in the 2004 book "Truth and Tolerance" (Ignatius), can give some clue as to the Holy Father's thoughts on the question. The length of the paragraphs was adapted here slightly for easier reading.

* * *

The separation of physics from metaphysics achieved by Christian thinking is being steadily canceled. Everything is to become "physics" again. The theory of evolution has increasingly emerged as the way to make metaphysics disappear, to make "the hypothesis of God" (Laplace) superfluous, and to formulate a strictly "scientific" explanation of the world. A comprehensive theory of evolution, intended to explain the whole of reality, has become a kind of "first philosophy," which represents, as it were, the true foundation for an enlightened understanding of the world. Any attempt to involve any basic elements other than those worked out within the terms of such a "positive" theory, any attempt at "metaphysics," necessarily appears as a relapse from the standards of enlightenment, as abandoning the universal claims of science.

Thus the Christian idea of God is necessarily regarded as unscientific. There is no longer any "theologia physica" that corresponds to it: in this view, the doctrine of evolution is the only "theologia naturalis," and that knows of no God, either a creator in the Christian (or Jewish or Islamic) sense or a world-soul or moving spirit in the Stoic sense. One could, at any rate, regard this whole world as mere appearance and nothingness as the true reality and, thus, justify some forms of mystical religion, which are at least not in direct competition with enlightenment.

Has the last word been spoken? Have Christianity and reason permanently parted company? There is at any rate no getting around the dispute about the extent of the claims of the doctrine of evolution as a fundamental philosophy and about the exclusive validity of the positive method as the sole indicator of systematic knowledge and of rationality. This dispute has therefore to be approached objectively and with a willingness to listen, by both sides -- something that has hitherto been undertaken only to a limited extent. No one will be able to cast serious doubt upon the scientific evidence for micro-evolutionary processes. R. Junker and S. Scherer, in their "critical reader" on evolution, have this to say: "Many examples of such developmental steps [microevolutionary processes] are known to us from natural processes of variation and development. The research done on them by evolutionary biologists produced significant knowledge of the adaptive capacity of living systems, which seems marvelous."

They tell us, accordingly, that one would therefore be quite justified in describing the research of early development as the reigning monarch among biological disciplines. It is not toward that point, therefore, that a believer will direct the questions he puts to modern rationality but rather toward the development of evolutionary theory into a generalized "philosophia universalis," which claims to constitute a universal explanation of reality and is unwilling to allow the continuing existence of any other level of thinking. Within the teaching about evolution itself, the problem emerges at the point of transition from micro to macro-evolution, on which point Szathmary and Maynard Smith, both convinced supporters of an all-embracing theory of evolution, nonetheless declare that: "There is no theoretical basis for believing that evolutionary lines become more complex with time; and there is also no empirical evidence that this happens."

The question that has now to be put certainly delves deeper: it is whether the theory of evolution can be presented as a universal theory concerning all reality, beyond which further questions about the origin and the nature of things are no longer admissible and indeed no longer necessary, or whether such ultimate questions do not after all go beyond the realm of what can be entirely the object of research and knowledge by natural science. I should like to put the question in still more concrete form. Has everything been said with the kind of answer that we find thus formulated by Popper: "Life as we know it consists of physical 'bodies' (more precisely, structures) which are problem solving. This the various species have 'learned' by natural selection, that is to say by the method of reproduction plus variation, which itself has been learned by the same method. This regress is not necessarily infinite." I do not think so. In the end this concerns a choice that can no longer be made on purely scientific grounds or basically on philosophical grounds.

The question is whether reason, or rationality, stands at the beginning of all things and is grounded in the basis of all things or not. The question is whether reality originated on the basis of chance and necessity (or, as Popper says, in agreement with Butler, on the basis of luck and cunning) and, thus, from what is irrational; that is, whether reason, being a chance by-product of irrationality and floating in an ocean of irrationality, is ultimately just as meaningless; or whether the principle that represents the fundamental conviction of Christian faith and of its philosophy remains true: "In principio erat Verbum" -- at the beginning of all things stands the creative power of reason. Now as then, Christian faith represents the choice in favor of the priority of reason and of rationality. This ultimate question, as we have already said, can no longer be decided by arguments from natural science, and even philosophical thought reaches its limits here. In that sense, there is no ultimate demonstration that the basic choice involved in Christianity is correct. Yet, can reason really renounce its claim to the priority of what is rational over the irrational, the claim that the Logos is at the ultimate origin of things, without abolishing itself?

The explanatory model presented by Popper, which reappears in different variations in the various accounts of the "basic philosophy," shows that reason cannot do other than to think of irrationality according to its own standards, that is, those of reason (solving problems, learning methods!), so that it implicitly reintroduces nonetheless the primacy of reason, which has just been denied. Even today, by reason of its choosing to assert the primacy of reason, Christianity remains "enlightened," and I think that any enlightenment that cancels this choice must, contrary to all appearances, mean, not an evolution, but an involution, a shrinking, of enlightenment.

We saw before that in the way early Christianity saw things, the concepts of nature, man, God, ethics and religion were indissolubly linked together and that this very interlinking contributed to make Christianity appear the obvious choice in the crisis concerning the gods and in the crisis concerning the enlightenment of the ancient world. The orientation of religion toward a rational view of reality as a whole, ethics as a part of this vision, and its concrete application under the primacy of love became closely associated. The primacy of the Logos and the primacy of love proved to be identical. The Logos was seen to be, not merely a mathematical reason at the basis of all things, but a creative love taken to the point of becoming sympathy, suffering with the creature. The cosmic aspect of religion, which reverences the Creator in the power of being, and its existential aspect, the question of redemption, merged together and became one.

Every explanation of reality that cannot at the same time provide a meaningful and comprehensible basis for ethics necessarily remains inadequate. Now the theory of evolution, in the cases where people have tried to extend it to a "philosophia universalis," has in fact been used for an attempt at a new ethos based on evolution. Yet this evolutionary ethic that inevitably takes as its key concept the model of selectivity, that is, the struggle for survival, the victory of the fittest, successful adaptation, has little comfort to offer. Even when people try to make it more attractive in various ways, it ultimately remains a bloodthirsty ethic. Here, the attempt to distill rationality out of what is in itself irrational quite visibly fails. All this is of very little use for an ethic of universal peace, of practical love of one's neighbor, and of the necessary overcoming of oneself, which is what we need.