: : : Well, heck, no, we haven't discovered any major new species in the last 4000 years, in much the same way that we haven't discovered any new moons of Earth in the last 4000 years.What do you mean, "discovered"? Humans have discovered a whole bunch of speceis in the last thirty years. The Chaco peccary, the Vu Quang ox, the suntailed guenon,. a new kind of dolphin, etc....
Plenty of new species have originated within recorded hsitory as well. The red wolf, a new species, was formed by hybridization bwteen th egray wlf and the coyote. Cichlids have speciated liek crazy in teh Rift Valley lakes. Speciation is going on right now.
: : Well count the years to the Cambrian Explosion and count the number of species since. I think that you'd have to agree that it would have to be a speciation rate greater than one new one per year. Let's see, then we should see conservatively 13,000 x 1 = 13,000 new species since Adam. The fact of the matter is that there is zilch to show. Now, who's eyes are closed?
: Hah. How many insect species are there? Perhaps if you can tell me that, you might have an idea of how many species evolve in what timescale...
Where does Robert get this idea? I thought there were 2-10 million speceis in the world. the time back to the Cambrian explosion is several hundred million years, isn't it? that gives a speciation rate of about 1 speceis per century. And as stated above, plenty of species have originated in the last century....The rate of speciation is more tah adequate to explain things. Plus, according to some people, evolution doesn't occur at a steady rate but in fits and starts. But Mr. Gould explains himself better than I ever could, so I won't touch that.
: : Moreover, given that the extinction rate is estimated at 5 to 50 species per day, Darwin better stop dilly-dallying around.
see above.
: :
: : : To expect that new species would suddenly arise out of nothingness in 4000 years (a geological heartbeat) is ludicruous. Do you expect to see park benches spring into fully formed existence? No.
: : Again, God has rested.
: Why? Isn't God tireless?
: :
: : : Evolution is a gradual process; microevolution; as observed in bacteria and simple lifeforms *can* be observed in the wild. But we don't have breeding records going back further than 300 years; expecting any complex animal to show major variation in that time is unrealistic.
: : So you admit that your "science" is based on a lack of evidence. Thank you very much indeed.
: Science can never provide 100% of the evidence. Granted. Can you give any more evidence of the life of Jesus than eyewitness accounts?
well, everything in hsitory, mroe or elss, comes down to eyewitness accounts. However, things make more sense to me in the light of both evolution and God than tehy do without either one. Perhaps we can't ahve "proof", but we can have some damned strong "evidence"....
: :
: : : : : 13. There is no evidence for the rapid development of new species in nature.
: : Why then do evolutionistists call it the Cambrian Explosion?
: You obviously haven't even bothered to look at the page I quoted, so I'll quote the answer;
:
The Cambrian explosion is a sure sign of the activity of the Creator, suddenly creating a multitude of complex forms out of nothing. There are no fossils before the explosion. There are plenty of fossils of organisms that lived in the Precambrian, such as jellyfish, coelenterates, annelids, and even cyanobacteria that date back as far as 3.4 billion years (McGowan, 1984, 103). The Cambrian period marks the advent of shelled organisms like trilobites and brachiopods. The ancestors of the organisms appearing in the Cambrian explosion were soft-bodied and did not leave fossils as easily as the shelled Cambrian organisms. Precambrian rocks are also subjected to a disproportionately large amount of deformation, which destroys fossils. It is for these reasons, not creation, that the fossil record seems to display a sudden "explosion" of shelled organisms at the base of the Cambrian. Moreover, the "explosion" took around 15 million years, so it is not quite the instantaneous event creationists would expect, and is definitely inconsistent with young-earth creationism (Ecker, 1990,46-48), since young-earth creationists hold that the earth is no more than several thousand years old - far less than the time involved in the Cambrian explosion.
: :
: : : Yes it is. In fact, it's what speciation is all about, according to the sciences. The point at which two similar races can no longer interbreed is when they become separate species; thus, the above is a valid example.
: : Races as different species? Sounds a bit Aryan to me. Seems like we've been down this road once before this century with the Ubermann concept, eh hem.
: FUD. To quote that page again;
:
"Evolution is the basis for Naziism and laissez-faire capitalism.: Carl Sagan gets it right when he says:
: ...the Darwinian insight can be turned upside down and grotesquely misused: Voracious robber barons may explain their cutthroat practices by an appeal to Social Darwinism; Nazis and other racists may call on "survival of the fittest" to justify genocide. But Darwin did not make John D. Rockefeller or Adolf Hitler. Greed, the Industrial Revolution, the free enterprise system, and corruption of government by the monied are adequate to explain nineteenth-century capitalism. Ethnocentrism, xenophobia, social hierarchies, the long history of anti-Semitism in Germany, the Versailles Treaty, German child-rearing practices, inflation, and the Depression seem adequate to explain Hitler's rise to power. Very likely these or similar events would have transpired with or without Darwin. And modern Darwinism makes it abundantly clear that many less ruthless traits, some not always admired by robber barns and Fuhrers - altruism, general intelligence, compassion - may be the key to survival. (Sagan, 1995, 260).
: There's nothing fundamentally fascist about saying that different races will eventually become different species; it is when you start to suggest that one group is fundamentally and inherently superior that fascism occurs.
: An example of this; take two groups of people, group A and group B. If group B declares group A to be a different species, there's nothing fascist about that; it may be true or false.
Actually, not true. It is fundamnentally fascist, more than that it's fundamentally inane. Humans are much more similar than most people would believe. the concept of human races is biologically ,meaningless., because you could take any arbitrary characteristic, slice up humanity a few different way, and you'd have a whole new set of "races". Do you think Swedes and Fulanis belong to the same race? They do if your sorting criterion is lactose intolerance. Etc, etc. It's OK to talk about races in a speceis of fish or something, but to talk about huamn races is an absurd misuse of teh world. there is only one race, teh human race.
: If group B declares that group A is inferior because they do not agree with group B; if they declare that group A are all going to Hell because of their beliefs and that group B is better than group A _for that reason_, that's fascism. Now, how many times has a certain large religious organization done that?
No, that's not fascism. fascism is based on persecuting people for inherent biological reasons. Persecuting people for their beliefs, though it's usually done fro perniciosu reasons, is different. For example, I can see being intolerant towards Nazis.
