Amazingly enough he actually responded again. I’m going to post my last reply to him here along with his latest missive so you can see things in context, then I’ll send him a reply pointing to this thread. We’ll see if he’s willing to take the discussion public. First, my last reply to him:
- Paolo wrote:
- The common polymers of life. Despite the amazing diversity of form life takes it all uses the same polymers to accomplish the four basic functions I listed above. There’s all manner of polymers out there, we’ve even invented a few never seen before, but all life relies on the same basic set consisting of polynucleotides, polypeptides, and polysaccharides.
- Nucleic acids are the genetic material of life. All known life uses the same polymer (polynucleotide) for storing data (DNA) about the species. All known organisms base replication on the duplication of that molecule. All known life uses the same four nucleosides to make DNA despite the fact that there are dozens of nucleosides that could have been used.
- Protein catalysis. In order for the functions of life to take place all organisms must be able to catalyze chemical reactions. In all known life enzymatic catalysis is possible because of the abilities provided by protein molecules. Despite there being over 390 naturally occurring amino acids all known life uses the same set of 22 to work their magic.
- The Universal Genetic Code. All known organisms use the same genetic code for transmitting information from the genetic material to the catalytic material.
- Common Metabolism. Almost all known life uses the same metabolic pathways and metabolic enzymes in processing energy-containing molecules.
Hi Les,
Just quote me 1 fact in support of evolution! just one!
Sure thing.
The Theory of Evolution makes a number of predictions one of which is the fundamental nature of life, also known as common descent. It proposes that all of life is descended from a single species at some point in the past. All living things share four things in common (1) replication, (2) heritability (characteristics of descendents are correlated with those of ancestors), (3) catalysis, and (4) energy utilization (metabolism). There are five confirmations of this prediction:
All five of the above statements are facts about all known life discovered to date. All five of those facts support the prediction of common decent. You asked for one fact and I’ve given you five and that’s not even scratching the surface.
It´s a religion and in order to believe it you have to have faith.
It is not a religion and your claim that it is a religion shows your ignorance not only of what the Theory of Evolution actually is, but what a religion actually is. Show me the Evolution Churches or examples of the hymns sung to its glory. It doesn’t take faith to accept Evolution as true, it just takes a decent education.
Evolution keeps on adjusting its statements as soon as new evidence that disproves it come up.
Here’s a shocker: All scientific theories adjust their statements when new evidence comes along. Aspects of the theory have had to be revised or discarded as new evidence came to be known, but the entire theory as a whole has held up remarkably well. Revision with new evidence is the nature of science, as opposed to a religion where no matter what kind of evidence might show it to be wrong people still believe in it anyway.
Look for instance at the finding of soft tissues and blood vessels of dinosaurs recently, instead of dismissing that dinosaurs have lived 65 millions of years ago they say :” Wow blood vessels can keep soft for that long ??!...”
It beggars belief that elastic tissue like this could have lasted for 65 million years.
Soft tissues like blood vessels should not be there if the bones were 65 million years old.
How could these cells last for 65 million years?
That’s not what they said at all. Those tissues were not soft when they were found. They were rehydrated by the process of removing the surrounding mineral components of the bone. It’s also not known if the soft tissues were even original material from the fossil.
The really idiotic part of your claim, however, is the simple fact that if the age of the Earth is only 6,000 years or so then we should expect to find examples of soft tissue in fossils quite often. Samples of DNA have been recovered from fossils more than 300,000 years old so anything in the 6,000 range would stand a pretty good chance of having soft tissues and it wouldn’t be a major news story.
Unfortunately, the long-age paradigm is so dominant that facts alone will not readily overturn it. What generally happens when a discovery contradicts a paradigm is that the paradigm is not discarded but modified, usually by making secondary assumptions, to accommodate the new evidence.
So will this new evidence cause anyone to stand up and say there’s something funny about the emperor’s clothes? Not likely. Instead, it will almost certainly become an “accepted” phenomenon that even “stretchy” soft tissues must be somehow capable of surviving for millions of years.
That’s a pretty laughable statement for you to make when it’s clear you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.
I am amazed at the faith of certain people, it would make fanatic fundamentalist out of them and in fact they are !
They keep on beliving against all odds .
So we can add ignorance of how to calculate odds to your list of skills, eh? Figures.
Les
His latest reply is after the jump.
- Paolo writes…
Hi Les,
how are you doing?
I see you did your home work,
very good, here we go…
To prove the common descent theory you need a commodity such as time, that´s why you guys love long numbers when you talk about life on earth.
But paradoxically the very thing you need the most turns out to be your worst enemy especially in the common descent theory.
If it´s true that we all come from a common ancestor
where are the transitional forms ?
Shouldn´t we be submerged with missing links proving the GREAT TRUTH after billions of years of life ?
(by the way you don´t need a church or to sing hymns to be religious.
believing without seing it´s enough)
Look at what your friend says:
“… if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking closely together all the species of the same group, must assuredly have existed; ........... Consequently evidence of their former existence could be found only amongst fossil remains ......”
(Darwin,Origin, Chapter Six: Absence or Rarity of Transitional Varieties.)
Les if evolution did occur, one would expect to find a gradual series of fossils embedded in the rocks, from simple to one-celled creatures, then two-celled creatures, on and on with greater complexity until you have the sponges and algae, the chordates and the trilobites and all of the invertebrates, then the vertebrates appearing , these last including fish, amphibians, reptiles, and man. That is only the Animal Kingdom, there is still the Plant Kingdom to be considered, with grapes and giant sequoia trees, carrots and flowers, potatoes and lawngrass, all of which supposedly evolved from the same common ancestor, according to evolutionists.
I leave you with Darwin´s own admission:
Have a great weekend Les.
To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system I can give no satisfactory answer . . . Nevertheless, the difficulty of assigning any good reason for the absence of vast piles of strata rich in fossils beneath the Cambrian system is very great.
You’ll note he simply ignores everything in my reply to him and moves on to the next idiotic argument cut and pasted from his favorite Creationist website. Facts don’t phase him, logic can’t penetrate his thick skull, he’s completely reality immune. Have at it.
Posted on 10/05/2006 at 11:42 PM 
If the guy is so ignorant that he cannot understand “facts” and “science” and “scientific theory” then I would say that’s a failure of his brain and our educational system.
As for examples of intermediary forms, there are lots and lots and lots of them.
I know the next thing our friend is going to say: “Well, it is all fine and dandy that Eohippus and Mesohippus existed, but if they’re related, where’s the intermediate form for them?” Rinse, repeat.
The short answer is, of course, that the fossil record is incomplete because it takes an incredibly large number of conditions that must be exactly right for a creature’s body to be fossilized. For hominids, we have a tiny, tiny number of fossilized individuals---I’m guessing no more than a hundred--compared to the millions that lived. Not every form of every creature will be preserved. Some creature cannot ever be fossilized because they have no exo- or endo-skeletons (jellyfish, worms, etc).
My answer to this would be to pose to our friend this simple question: can he construct his family lineage going back 10 centuries? Why not? Could it be that there are gaps in his lineage--even big ones?
According to the KJB, God only created “Adam” and “Eve"--the rest of the schlubs sprang from their loins. Therefore, our friend’s lineage goes back to Adam and Eve. If this is true, by using his logic, where is the physical evidence? (psst: the bible is not physical evidence)