This would be called hedging your bets, or, in layman's terms, a complete cop-out.

As to the topic at hand, I don't know if I can believe the evidence of a single scientist against the overwhelming weight of so many others. I would love for them all to be proved wrong and for this maverick to be right. Living where I do, though, it is not hard to believe the majority are right.

It has to do with a species changing over time due to increased fitness. If a number of organisms happens to scrape by for awhile, beneficial traits are present and will become more prevalent due to increased breeding. This process is natural selection which occurs randomly. After awhile(a long, long, long, long, long while), these organisms become highly specialized for their environment.

They can't change(physically) to survive in the environment. They either survive or they die. Successive generations are influenced by who lives and dies and obtain those traits of the things that are good at living. One organism can't sponataneously evolve or decide what traits to pass on. Thus, it is random. Even if you were the best organism ever, a comet could hit you and now you're extinct. It's all about randomness, chance, and luck.

~Zoo

No, it isn't.

Please get that fact into your head.

As long as you are "sure" that evolution is random, you do not understand it and are talking about something else.

Genetic change is random, but evolution is not. Evolution is the result of some genetic changes surviving and others not. While both the genetic change and the environmental changes are random, evolution, which is the process that happens when the two react, is not random at all.

The gene better suited to get individuals to survive in a given environment WILL survive. Evolution does NOT randomly choose one gene over the other, evolution is the result of the reaction.

B'reshit bara Elohim et haShamaim v'et haAretz.

So far this is true. (In the beginning G-d created the heavens and the earth.)



That is true. Genesis is a bit earth-focused, but why wouldn't it be.



True. Noah didn't bring cangaroos, for example.



The text is a bit unclear. Noah was commanded to bring two or seven animals of each type. I assume they were his farm animals. He might have owned elephants. But he probably didn't keep them on a boat. He and his family probably survived the flood on a mountain top or other high-lying region. He probably used a boat to find out who else escaped the flood.

I don't think he had deer.

The flood was highly local, affecting, depending on what flood it was, today's black sea region (which was a fertile valley containing lakes 6000 years ago) or Mesopotamia (today's Iraq).



Not a whole lot, since the flood was only a few thousand years ago.

But I can see the argument, which is well-made. If Noah brought two of each animal and we have so many species now that two of each would be too many for any boat, there must have been creation of new species after the flood.

Since the Bible doesn't mention creation of new animals after the flood, those must have evolved from existing, already created, animals.

Whether you are hit by a comet is random.

But evolution is not about comets.

The comet hitting the animal is NOT evolution. Evolution is the sum of the lot. And the result IS (not could be) the survival of the genes best suited to the environment.

That doesn't mean that all good (fit) genes survive (keep on being present in new animals). It's more like a hot air baloon. Hot air will make the baloon go up, even though individual molecules of hot air might very well be helt down, due to, perhaps, being inside a house.

But even though individual hot air molecules will have a random chance of not being able to fly higher than cold air molecules, the hot air baloon rises and it is hardly the result of chance that it does.

For some reason people assume that evolution is different from other aspects of the world. It is not.

Gravity says that things fall towards the centre of gravity. But chance tells me that sometimes wind interferes and makes a feather fly high instead. But even though individual feathers can be randomly affected by wind, I would not call it a random event if a feather (or other thing) does fall to the ground.

I thought they demonstrate that very issue in American schools? The theory of gravity says that all objects fall at the same speed. Then the teacher goes and demonstrates how a pebble falls faster than a feather. Remove the air, and both fall at the same speed. And that is what the theory says. And while the presence of air that stops the feather from falling at its assigned speed is a random event (like a "comet" hitting and killing an animal), it is NOT a random event if, in the absence of air, pebble and feather fall at the same speed.

http://www.all-science-fair-projects.com/project697_57.html

the flood was the earths baptism. ie it had to be completely immersed or it didn't count.

Well, I guess it didn't count then.

Excellent. That clears up that issue.

OK before it is cleared up explain to me why almost ever ancient culture on the planet no matter where located has a flood wiping out planet story. if it was only a local occurrence. by the way the black sea flood would not have been about someone building a boat all they had to do was out run the tidal wave. and the Gilgamesh story doesn't fit because it only affected the merchant. yep i watched those stories too.

OK before it is cleared up explain to me why almost ever ancient culture on the planet no matter where located has a flood wiping out planet story. if it was only a local occurrence. by the way the black sea flood would not have been about someone building a boat all they had to do was out run the tidal wave. and the Gilgamesh story doesn't fit because it only affected the merchant. yep i watched those stories too.

Floods happen everywhere. And people tend to exagerate their own importance. I don't see how that is relevant. Most cultures very probably believed that the flood that wiped out their world wiped out the entire world.



I don't know how long the flooding would have taken. Do you? It might well have been prudent to build a boat to travel the area and find out whether the water withdraws or not.



There goes your wiping out planet story. If another flood story from the same region disagrees about the planet thing, how come you know it was the entire planet that was flooded?

Either way, most cultures assumed that the world they knew was the entire world. So any flood destroying their world was, obviously, a flood destroying the entire world. That doesn't mean that they knew anything about the flood's impact (or non-impact) on other regions.

doesn't matter the water only went up 100 feet. the level it is at now.



but that doesn't explain the similarities in the story.

only a small group of people survived the flood.

again Gilgamesh about a flood that washed a merchant out to sea. that would be a local flood.

the black sea would have destroyed the world around the black sea. but since it didn't cover any mountains. that doesn't correspond with the Noah story.

nor does it explain why there are only a small group of animals on the planet. there are only about 200 types of animals on the planet. yes there are thousands of species but their all related to each other.

Leauki, I hope this thread is a lesson to you that when you're looking for an analogy, you need to look for one that's less controversial than the argument you're already having, or you will be having a whole different argument far from your original point.

Anyway, on the crucial issue of kangaroos on the ark, I find it more plausible that there was Pangaea before the Flood and Noah got kangaroos that way. It is really, really stretching the idea of "microevolution" to say kangaroos got selected from the marsupial "kind" all in a few thousand years after the flood. Seems to me like creationist theory is now exactly like evolutionary theory except that the entire 100 million years of migration, speciation, and continental drift is compressed into 10,000 years.

Anyway, on the crucial issue of kangaroos on the ark,

maybe he cross bred some animals and that is where the Platypus came from.

Back to the topic at hand.

It is interesting that many on the left find the stuff reported & written by ex-insiders to be gospel, "first hand" and so self-evidently the truth that any doubters are simply called idiots. Particularly in the standard political realm (see Gene, Col.)

Here's an ex-insider debunking the left's current fave religion and whoa, Nellie, he's just a disgruntled has-been who didn't know shit from Shinola then & is only trying to justify his ignorance now.

Do I need to point out the hypocrisy here? Good, then I won't.   

we were talking about how man is the only cause of global warming and i am still waiting an answer to how we are causing global warming on mars and pluto. of course it may have been the other post that i asked that on. so if i hadn't asked it here. i have now.