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<p>Aquinas was debunked almost three hundred years ago. I would recommend that you read Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, a text that was an unbelievably pioneering effort.</p>
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<p>It’s funny how you are attempting to masquerade about as someone well-learned regarding biological matters after conceding that you have no secondary education in the subject. Anyways, the above quote is patently wrong. Recombination and reassortment do not affect allele frequencies, but rather alter their associations, thereby producing progeny with new and unique allelic combinations. If this wasn’t the case (the inability for alleles to separate), harmful mutations would accumulate. Sexual reproduction, due to the process of chromosomal crossover, expedites the process of evolution by increasing genetic variation and facilitates the retention of mutations that yield survival value. </p>
<p>[Current</a> Biology - Evolution of Sexual Reproduction: Why Do Organisms Shuffle Their Genotypes?](<a href=“http://www.cell.com/current-biology/retrieve/pii/S096098220601918X]Current”>http://www.cell.com/current-biology/retrieve/pii/S096098220601918X)</p>
<p>[Liberating</a> genetic variance - Peters - 2003 - BioEssays - Wiley Online Library](<a href=“http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.10291/abstract;jsessionid=9C8930C472593AF1D3A52FF10E7EDF96.d01t01?systemMessage=Due+to+scheduled+maintenance+access+to+the+Wiley+Online+Library+may+be+disrupted+as+follows%3A+Monday%2C+6+September+-+New+York+0400+EDT+to+0500+EDT%3B+London+0900+BST+to+1000+BST%3B+Singapore+1600+to+1700]Liberating”>http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.10291/abstract;jsessionid=9C8930C472593AF1D3A52FF10E7EDF96.d01t01?systemMessage=Due+to+scheduled+maintenance+access+to+the+Wiley+Online+Library+may+be+disrupted+as+follows%3A+Monday%2C+6+September+-+New+York+0400+EDT+to+0500+EDT%3B+London+0900+BST+to+1000+BST%3B+Singapore+1600+to+1700)</p>
<p>[The</a> advantages of segregation and the evolution of sexual reproduction.](<a href=“The advantages of segregation and the evolution of sex. - PMC”>The advantages of segregation and the evolution of sex. - PMC)</p>
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<p>No, mutation is the main but not exclusive source of DNA alteration. Moreover, mutations are not exclusively copy errors.</p>
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<p>I was picking an element from your dichotomy that best fit the phenomenon. </p>
<p>Yes, antibiotics work to inhibit ribosomal function. But you fallaciously assume that all antibiotic resistance is derived from ribosomal mutation; that was the case in the example I provided of bacterial evolution in favor of streptomycin resistance, but such is not an exclusive source of resistance. </p>
<p>And saying that “there’s no new function in the ribosome” is almost invariably wrong. It’s been widely established that on multiple accounts antibiotic resistance comes at a biological detriment. Typically, protein synthesis is altered and nearly always in a way that reduces fitness outside the context of the antibiotic environment. However, additional mutations may compensate for the fitness reduction. </p>
<p>Much of your “interpretation” of science resides on the basis of what you personally think, not what actually occurs. But anyone should be skeptical of a biology lesson provided from someone who utterly denies the fundamental unifying force of biology – a fundamental fact of nature beyond any reasonable doubt – in favor of ancient, mind-shrinking mythology. </p>
<p>[ScienceDirect</a> - Current Opinion in Microbiology : The biological cost of mutational antibiotic resistance: any practical conclusions?](<a href=“http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VS2-4KJTNSV-1&_user=10&_coverDate=10%2F31%2F2006&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=13e95f915b75059402c539f5d39cbb66&searchtype=a]ScienceDirect”>http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VS2-4KJTNSV-1&_user=10&_coverDate=10%2F31%2F2006&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=13e95f915b75059402c539f5d39cbb66&searchtype=a)</p>
<p>My understanding of science is that it seeks to explain “what” while religion seeks to explain “why” and “how” we should live our lives. Those who believe that religion is all based on faith without reason apparently have not heard of the Incorruptibles, the Shroud of Turin, and Our Lady of Guadalupe. Not to mention the fact that Jesus did exist, and there are some arguments that follow from his life for the existence of God.</p>
<p>By classifying religion in the way that I have, fundamentalist beliefs that seek to explain what the world was like 6000 years ago do clash with evolution on a scientific ground.</p>
<p>Also, why would it be so wrong to believe fundamentalist doctrine (I do not) if it helps you to live your life in a beneficial way to yourself and the rest of the world? There are many aspects of religion that actually benefit people more than religious services and “believing the lie” damage them. Not limited to, but including no STD’s, higher likelihood of successful (happy) marriage, which most of us as social beings long for, and good relationships. Of course, these result only from the proper application of religion (I am mainly using Catholicism here) not a hypocritical application. As we all know, faults tend to be magnified, and benefits minimized when a position conflicts with our desires.</p>
<p>I remember when I heard on NPR that they had created the first living cell, and I thought, “No way!” Then they continued and said that they created the DNA from another organism and transferred it to another cell. That’s when I chuckled to myself at their silly headline.</p>
<p>I know it’s probably impossible for you to believe at this point in time, Mifune. However, due to probability as Monsieur Pascal didn’t once put it, “It pays to believe.”</p>
<p>Finally, who is Richard Dawkins?</p>
<p>:P</p>
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<p>You are completely missing the point of the “TOBEORNOTTOBE” demonstration and it’s not a very difficult concept to understand. “TOBEORNOTTOBE” represents the set of idealized features in this particular “organism” if applied to biological natural selection. It could be any arbitrary sequence of thirteen letters (or any number), from “ILIKETHISBOOK” to “NHBKIWSCQXPLZ.” But the point remains the same. It illustrates the central concept that natural selection exploits nonrandom alteration by preserving desirable, adaptive traits and eliminating maladaptive features. The computer worked in a fashion where letters that were correctly iterated remained placed since those alterations were deemed most favorable. If natural selection were a randomized process, forming “TOBEORNOTTOBE” (or “ILIKETHISBOOK” or “NHBKIWSCQXPLZ”) would be quite unlikely given the 26^13 sequences of that precise length. But overall, the program created the phrase in just 335.2 iterations (on average). Based on extrapolation from these results and the time used by the program to recreate all of Hamlet, it should have taken approximately 1,451,000 iterations, far lower than the 26^(the number of letters present in Hamlet) (for all intents and purposes, an infinite quantity of sequences), demonstrating that biological complexity, although outstanding, isn’t quite as baffling as it superficially seems.</p>
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<p>You badly need to read this post: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1065511114-post1764.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1065511114-post1764.html</a></p>
<p>Cowardly, fundamentally insincere bet-hedging isn’t quite as ideal as you think it is.</p>
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<p>Eastfrobeauty, the sheer degree of fatuous delusion in your posts never ceases to amaze me. </p>
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<p>Quoting something from Harun Yahya is not a very prudent maneuver. For those who aren’t aware, Yahya authored the *Atlas of Creation<a href=“again,%20without%20question,%20the%20most%20absurdly%20stupid%20and%20factually%20wrong%20book%20ever%20produced”>/i</a> and distributed it to science educators across the globe. He is an Old Earth creationist and a Holocaust denier (as are most Muslims). He has also denounced Zionism as a racist faction and believes that Darwinism is the source of modern-day terrorism. He also has an extensive record of legal issues. I believe he is incarcerated at the moment for the operation of a coercive prostitution ring.</p>
<p>Economically speaking you assume that the chance that there is a God is far outweighed by the benefit of not-believing. Even though a remarkable number of people around the globe believe something, it is still improbable in your mind. Unfortunately, I did not read the whole post because it looked long…and boring…Just call me ignorant. Oh wait, you did.</p>
<p>Let’s ride bikes!</p>
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<p>It’s funny how you’re attempting to twist the findings of synthetic biology as “proof” for creationism. </p>
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<p>Creationism originates from a particular theological stance, adherence to biblical authority, and belief in the revelation. Is it honestly not that obvious to you from where your indoctrination is derived?</p>
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<p>Yes, that’s fine. </p>
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<p>Yes, the Qur’an is essentially a creationist text. For those implacably brainwashed into their faith, if something contravenes their holy book, it isn’t true.</p>
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<p>Pascal’s Wager resides on a tenuous series of baseless assumptions, not the reversal. Regarding your second sentence, do you honestly believe truth is a popularity contest? Religious belief is simply psychologically comforting and largely governed by epigenetic rules.</p>
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<p>First of all, not all of those are scientific ventures. Geocentrism is derived from the Bible, not objective findings. Phrenology is pseudoscience. The plum pudding model, as it has come to be known, was simply a hypothesized proposal. Newton’s laws of gravity shouldn’t be included as “wrong” since it provides excellent approximations in a countless variety of scenarios. You could have included better examples, like phlogiston and luminiferous ether, which were random speculations that were never rooted in any form of empirical or analytical rigor.</p>
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This illustrates my point perfectly.</p>
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<p>Indeed, it was. I would greatly think that she’ll be inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in the time ahead and she will certainly be a worthy candidate for the Nobel considering the potential benefits of her work. </p>
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<p>Yes, if you wish to become more rigorous with the definition, then I will readily agree with that.</p>
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<p>I never explicitly intimated that religion somehow forbids the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the world. That’s obviously untrue. But religious assertion is often at factual odds with scientific endeavor. To intuit from common experience is always wrong.</p>
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<p>Could you explain more precisely as to what makes these religions religions? To describe as such doesn’t make one. The hold the “accurate and impartial examination of nature, emphasizing causality and empiricism” in the highest regard is essentially a synopsis of the prevailing wisdom of methodological naturalism, a very successful philosophy that has underlain scientific endeavor. Indeed, the diversity in religious opinion is quite extensive and rife with nuanced interdenominational opinion. I posted much on the defining characteristics of religious belief previously, but to put in shortly, religions, by necessity of definition, require tradition, ritual, associated narrative, symbology, sanctified histories, ethical standards, preference in conduct, or specific convictions governing thought towards the cosmos and humanity (or a combination of some or all those elements). Most commonly, is the belief and deference to a superhuman controlling force, whether that be a deity endowed with the ultimate features of power and influence, multiple deities segregated by ordinance over a particular realm of nature or understanding, or animistic worship. However, some religious traditions (predominantly derived from Eastern thought) don’t endorse the god concept whatsoever (i.e. Jainism).</p>
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<p>Not necessarily. The mythology and religious traditions of ancient cultures are often today’s literary entertainments, but scientific endeavor won’t be. Science idealizes the globalization and democratization of a common understanding independent of culture and many things in science are very very factual indeed despite constructivist rubbish. For example, the causal influence of certain mechanisms of evolution will be studied further and present evolutionary perplexities will be evaluated and resolved, but the fact of evolution itself won’t change no matter how rigid the opinion of religious fundamentalism.</p>
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I agree with the ridiculousness of that argument. One ought not believe in one thing or another because it’s the “safe bet”, they should do so because they think it is true. Plus, if there was a God, I doubt He would particularly like people believing because they thought it was the way to trick the system with the choice.</p>
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Not originally, and far from exclusively. There were ancient Greek philosophers drawing geocentric models of the Universe far before the Bible was even assembled at the Council of Nicaea. Granted, Genesis preexisted that, but pretty much every culture looked up at a “dome” of a sky and what appeared to be things traveling around the Earth. Saying it was derived from the Bible is misleading.</p>
<p>I personally like the model of the Earth being a disk, on the back of four giant elephants, who stand on the back of a turtle that swims in the sea of space that is within a bowl. Nobody knows what’s outside the bowl. Someone was very creative (and then Terry Pratchett took this model for his Discworld series).</p>
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<p>hey back off!!! I’m not brainwashed OR a fundamentalist Muslim. I genuinely have the religion close to heart and don’t see any flaws or holes in the religion. Now tell me, have you ever opened up a Qu’ran yourself? And what is it that you find disapproving in its text?</p>
<p>mifune:</p>
<p>“You say there isn’t any real scientific evidence to support it because you simply aren’t aware of it, not because it doesn’t exist. If you were more enlightened on the matter, you wouldn’t state that (unless you refuse to believe the available evidence). The most famous, of course, pertaining to this topic is the Miller-Urey experiment, which demonstrated the assemblage of amino acids and organic compounds by sending an electrical discharge through a medium that best emulated the conditions of the primitive Earth.”</p>
<p>First, you are assuming things about me in the first few sentences.
Second, that theory has numerous problems:</p>
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<li><p>no oxygen was included because that would destroy the experiment</p></li>
<li><p>no oxygen was included because it was assumed the primitive atmosphere had less than 1% oxygen (which would be enough to destroy the experiment); this is bad science.</p></li>
<li><p>there is no scientific evidence that the atmosphere assumed in the experiment was even close to the atmosphere on primitive earth.</p></li>
<li><p>it is now believed that the early earth’s atmosphere did not contain predominantly reductant molecules, as the experiment assumed. The scientists have admitted this. </p></li>
<li><p>the experiment required enormous amounts of energy; to explain this, the experiment assumed lightning storms were continous on early earth but there is no evidence to support this. This may have rpoduced some amino acids, but not in the numbers that the experiment found.</p></li>
<li><p>the experiment assumed significant amounts of methane, hydrogen, ammonia, and water vapor to be present in the atmosphere; both methane and ammonia were chosen not based off any evidence that they existed in the atmosphere, but were expressedley chosen to produce a desired effect. There is evidence against this assumption.</p></li>
<li><p>UV rays would have destroyed ammonia faster than it could form.</p></li>
<li><p>there is evidence that the early earth atmosphere contained heavy xenon and krypton gases and that these escaped from the atmosphere; why would lighter ammonia and methane gases escaped as well?</p></li>
<li><p>even if the above were all not true and the experiment was valid, it would not disprove God but merely the fundamentalist theoires of creation, which I have said are wrong and you seem to persist in thinking that I am arguing. No one here is. </p></li>
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<p>Third, you cannot simply say Aquinas was “debunked” centuries ago and leave it at that. Explain yourself. Actually argue, don’t just hide behind names and sneer at somebody smarter than you are (meaning Aquinas).</p>
<p>Fourth, I repeat: are you familiar with actual interpretations of the Bible, or are you going to persist in only limiting the Bible to fundamentalistic conclusions? That is an erroneus attitude my friend. </p>
<p>Fifth, Stephen Hawking is a nutcase who can do physics. He has no grasp on philosophy or theology at all. He is a physicist, that is the field where he should stay. I suppose you believe in the certainty of aliens as well? Again, you hide behind names to prove your point without arguing. </p>
<p>Sixth, David Hume attempted to understand morality without any objective basis and without any idea of God, which is ridculous. Our morality comes from God. Our morality is determined by more than what impression it gives, it is determined by a standard existing outside of ourselves. Otherwise morality would be subjective to the emotions, and then we would all end up living like animals. </p>
<p>Finally, though you will not accept this, religion is better than science because the former gives happiness, the latter does not. I have seen numerous religious people who positively radiate waves of happiness. I have seen far less “scientific” people who do so. If religion is wrong, everyone who truly practiced would still be happier. Of course this is generalization, but everyone I have seen truly follow and practice Catholicism are generally extraordinarily happy people. Science, by itself, also leaves a feeling of emptiness precisely because it only provides satisfaction but not joy. </p>
<p>I would rather be Aquinas than Hume in that regard.</p>
<p>^ The first half of your post was better than the second, but I mostly agree.</p>
<p>Abiogenesis is no more credible than Spontaneous Generation: Evolutionists assume their theory is true, and then attempt to devise a way it could have happened. This is the exact opposite of normal science, and is exactly what evolutionists accuse creationists of doing. Either both are valid or both are invalid: you can’t discredit a method and then use it as support for your own views.</p>
<p>I don’t really agree with you on Stephen Hawking though. I admire him greatly, though I disagree with some of his views. He is more reasonable than many atheists, as he realizes that science has not and can not explain the origin of existence, or in his words “why there is something instead of nothing”.</p>
<p>EDIT: I see that he has recently stated that he now believes that it is possible for the universe to create itself. So he may not be as reasonable as I previously thought.</p>
<p>I agree that morality without some belief in the supernatural (not neccesarily a monotheistic or even a personal “god”), morality makes no sense. However, this is not obvious or self evident, but requires some serious thought to explain.</p>
<p>I also agree that religion can give happiness, but it can also give unhappiness. Also, it is uneccesary to chose between religion and science, as they are not incompatible, unless your religion demands that you believe a certain science before you can join (as some have in the past).</p>
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<p>I entirely agree. But the actions of pathetic Christians are irrelevant to the actions of other Christians.</p>