Where did those aliens come from? I know you weren't really trying to get into this, Jeff, but have you ever heard someone sidestep the problem of the improbability of life on earth being spontaneously generated by saying that it was planted on earth by alien life? I've never understood that as a sufficient answer for the origin of life. It is one possible explanation for the origin of life on Earth, but it doesn't explain the origin of life, period. It just transfers the problem to another venue (i.e., some other world). I don't know, I've just always found that interesting. ------------------ The sky is falling!
Comets are known to have water. Comets collided with earth way back when, thus, life began. ------------------ "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."- (Aldous Huxley)
So we should fire all the history teachers and allocate all spending to future technology? About the Hindu/Buddist thing, i was not trying to bring them into this topic, only to show that I acknowledge someones believe as opposed to actually believing it. But thanks for the tid bit of info <takes a moment of silence for the piece of cow finished off at lunch> Good thought Traj! I didn't catch that one right away. ------------------ Nice guys finish last ... and im surely not going to finish last!
Knowing where we were helps us know where we are. Know what I mean? ------------------ "Relax... kids swallow quarters all the time. If she craps out two dimes and a nickel then start worrying!" -Grumpier Old Men
Speaking of Pangea, has anyone ever seen or heard that the pyramids/temples in South America are very similar to the ones in Egypt. Also that the type of rocks that appear in both places are also very similar, as if both were once connected. Very interesting stuff... ------------------ "Relax... kids swallow quarters all the time. If she craps out two dimes and a nickel then start worrying!" -Grumpier Old Men
I didn't want to get into this. You were right. However, I'll just comment on two things... First off, I realize that the alien argument doesn't address where life comes from. It was really just a joke. Second, of course I realize the importance of history, probably more than most because it is of great importance to me. And, Space, you should know that I am not suggesting we completely dismiss our past. If your "firing all history teachers" was a joke, I apologize if I mis-read it. The problem I have is the insistance that we live by our history. Tradition and "that's how we've always done it" have produced some of the greatest opporession and atrocity the human race has ever known. I'm glad we can see it for what it is, but it isn't the ultimate answer. Our greatest problem as a society is that we spend most of our time focused either on what has happened, which only exists in our minds and in our history books, or on what is to come, which has yet to be determined. All we have is the very moment in which we live. No one is guaranteed anything more and everything that happened before is gone. This is not to say we shouldn't honor or respect our past as a teacher. It is one of our greatest teachers. However, to live beholden to those past beliefs and occurrances is not good either. Learning from and living by are two very different ideals. If learning history brings us a greater understanding of our present and a chance at a better future, I'm all for it. If it serves simply to keep us set in our old beliefs and patterns, I'll pass. BK: Still laughing!!! ------------------ "You know what they say about the music business. Here today, gone TODAY! - Chris Rock at the MTV Music Video Awards
Pangea ceased to exist long before primates showed up, so having similar pyramids in two parts of the world could in no way be explained by the one continent phenomenon. ------------------ Don't come in Bullard's house!
I wasn't attempting to explain it as so, simply pointing at the peculiarity that two land masses appear to have at one time been linked and that similar pyramids also happen to appear on those two masses. Why aren't there any in North America, Europe, Asia, etc. ------------------ "Relax... kids swallow quarters all the time. If she craps out two dimes and a nickel then start worrying!" -Grumpier Old Men
Ok, Who stole the pyramids! The nice folks the first inhabited North America were almost wiped out in a matter of a couple centries ... and you expect them to build something larger than a T-pee? Just a joke. Please, nobody get offended! ------------------ Nice guys finish last ... and im surely not going to finish last!
Jeff, I understood the joke just fine. But it reminded me of something ------------------ The sky is falling!
What difference does all of this make, exactly? We can't prove anything anyway. For all we know, aliens created us in a test tube on an asteroid and then planted us here. We cannot prove the existence of God. We cannot prove the validity of evolution. We can't, when broken down to its bareset essentials, even prove the existence of ourselves!!! As Shakespeare put it so deftly, "There are far more things in heaven and on earth, Horatio, then are dreamt of in your philosophy." I always felt it was more important to concentrate on where we are now than on where we were, but carry on... ------------------ "You know what they say about the music business. Here today, gone TODAY! - Chris Rock at the MTV Music Video Awards
Let me explain; I do not believe in Buddah or Hindiumism, but I do understand (one of them) that they do not believe in eating cows because that is what they will become in the afterlife. Just like if I did not believe in God, I would still understand He is undefinatable. This is incorrect. Hindus do not eat cows because they believe that animal is a sacred incarnation. Hindus, in fact, do not believe in an afterlife, per se. They believe in the "endless cycle of death and re-birth" or reincarnation. They believe that, at some point, we will eventually, to use a crude but effective wording, become one with the universe or God. Buddhists are not all vegetarians. They believe in the sacredness of life. The Dalai Lama, for example, eats meat of many forms because he is from a region of the world where plants simply do not grow in enough abundance for human survival. They believe, in a similar fashion to Native Americans, that all living things - plants, animals, humans - as well as all things connected to the earth - dirt, rocks, the sky, air, etc - are sacred. They believe that, if they require the use of these things for survival, they only take what they need and pray for its enlightenment. In essence, they believe we are all endowed with the whole of the universe - if God is omnipresent, he/she is within everything including us making us all part of one big spiritual reality. That is why Buddhism is considered a non-theistic (no god) religion. ------------------ "You know what they say about the music business. Here today, gone TODAY! - Chris Rock at the MTV Music Video Awards
Exactly, Hydra! This is the main proof that I have always used to justify my belief in Creationism, despite evidence towards evolution. The fact is, while there is proof that apes and monkeys are likely our ancestors, there is no explanation as to how man evolved from single-celled organsims in such a short time (geologically). By the rules of natural selection and by calculating the average rate of mutations and percentage of useful mutations in animals that might generate new species, mankind should not have evolved even near as far as it has in the time it has. My theory on this is that the driving force behind "evolution" is merely God and his work. The bible claims that the world was created in seven days. However, in the times when the Bible was written, a "day" was not 24 hours, it was merely a measurment of time, meaning it was variable. Who's to say that day in this instance was not thousands and thousands of years? Until someone can show me absolute proof that evolution is purely scientific and has no unexplainable outside factors, I see no reason to abandon my "evolved" form of Creationism. ------------------ "all your base are belong to us!" "you have no chance to survive make your time!"
Tiny Clues, Big Answers Chet Raymo, Globe Correspondent and professor of physics at Stonehill College and the author of several books on science Published in the Boston Globe on 02/01/99 Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? To ask these questions is to be human. As far as we know, we are the only species on Earth that asks them. Ultimate answers are matters for intuition or religious faith. But the methods of science can take us a long way toward finding partial answers. We have discovered, for example, that we are related to all life on Earth by common descent, that we share a biochemistry with all other creatures, and that our earliest humanoid ancestors appeared several million years ago in Africa and from there radiated across the planet. We know about our earliest ancestors primarily through fossilized bones - a jaw, a skull fragment, a femur, a tooth. Only rarely do we find anything approaching a complete skeleton. Nevertheless, the powerful methods of science enable us to extract knowledge from these bits of bone about how our ancestors lived, what they ate, how they obtained their food, how long they lived, how they died. Building a picture of life in those far away times is a slow, painstaking task, involving the separate disciplines of many scientists. We will never know everything about the origin of our species, but each generation of researchers adds more details to the story. In a recent issue of the journal Science, paleoanthropologist Julia Lee-Thorp of the University of Cape Town in South Africa and graduate student Matt Sponheimer of Rutgers University in New Jersey reported a remarkable deduction about the diet of Australopithecus africanus, a humanlike creature that may have been a direct ancestor of modern humans. Members of this species lived in Africa about 3 million years ago. They walked erect, but were probably also at home in the trees. As far as we know, they did not make stone tools. They disappear from the fossil record about the time of the appearance of the first Homo, or true human, about 2.5 million years ago. Previously, researchers thought that A. africanus ate forest leaves, nuts and fruits. Lee-Thorp and Sponheimer conclude that they were more eclectic in their diet, including either grassland plants or the flesh of grazing animals. Here's how they figured it out. Plants convert carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into sugar and tissue by the process known as photosynthesis. It happens that carbon has two stable forms, carbon 12 and carbon 13, called isotopes. Carbon 13 has an extra neutron in the atomic nucleus, and this additional mass has a slight influence on the chemistry of photosynthesis. Trees, bushes and shrubs discriminate against the heavier isotope of carbon when they take carbon from the air. Grasses and sedges incorporate carbon 13 into their tissue more readily. Therefore, the relative numbers of carbon 12 and carbon 13 atoms differ in the tissue of these two categories of plants, and these differences can be measured with an instrument called a mass spectrometer that sorts atoms according to their weight. We are what we eat. An animal that dines exclusively on leaves, seeds or roots of grasses, or upon the flesh of grass-grazing animals, will have in its tissue a ratio of carbon isotopes similar to that of grassland plants. An animal that has an arboreal diet, or eats animals with a woodland diet, bear the isotopic signature of woodier plants. Lee-Thorp and Sponheimer did a carbon isotope analysis of an assemblage of 3-million-year-old bones from the Makapansgat Limeworks in South Africa. The bones included fragments from four A. africanus individuals, and 65 individual specimens from 19 other species of animals. Most of the Makapansgat species fell into two categories: grassland grazers and woodland browsers. Two species showed mixed feeding habits. One carnivore, a scavenging hyena, appears to have dined mostly on grassland grazers. And A. africanus, our possible ancestor? An isotopic ratio heavy on carbon 13. Apparently, A. africanus ate grassland plants or the flesh of grazing animals. But tooth wear patterns of A. africanus are not typical of animals that eat grasses and sedges. This leads Lee-Thorp and Sponheimer to tentatively suggest that A. africanus was at least an occasional carnivore. If so, these potential human ancestors was more resourceful and eclectic in their diet than anyone realized. The adoption of a meat-rich diet by A. africanus may have contributed to an increase in brain power that led eventually to the curiosity, imagination and intelligence of our own species. What is extraordinary about this work is that a minuscule bit of enamel powder extracted from a 3-million-year-old tooth can bear clues to diet, by implication to lifestyle and habitat, and ultimately to the story of human origins. This is science at its best - curiosity, imagination and intelligence in the service of the big questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? ------------------ "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."- (Aldous Huxley)
The earth is not old enough argument is an old one. Please read some more information on this before using one random statisticians arguments. They have shown in many ways that the earth is certainly old enough to support evolution of the human species. Granted, I havent read this statisticans work, but perhaps he was confused by the concept of evolution. It is an additive process. Adaptations such as our eye didnt evolve randomly in one step, but overtime. The famous example is of a monkey trying to write a line from a Shakespearean play. Take a line from Macbeth. Now sit a monkey down and have him randomly hit keys. How long (how many times/interations==generations here) would it take for the monkey to randmomly hit the successful keys to make the line---something like 10^40 or so. Now, do the same thing, but after each try, lock in all the letters that are correct in the right place in the sequence. Now how many times randomly would it take? The number drops drastically to something like 50 generations or so. Im not saying you shouldnt still believe in creationism, cause neither can be proved--they can only really be disproved--but dont use the earth isnt old enough argument. ------------------
Exerpt from : Creation vs Evolution: Scientific and Religious Considerations I am sure it`s not for all, but it`s a good read................PS-I will stick with my faith and the Bible ============================================= The choice of which theory to accept becomes a matter of faith. To accept something without evidence requires faith. Hebrews 11:1-3 states, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen…By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.” The Christian believes that God created the universe, life and man, while the evolutionist believes that the universe, life and man somehow evolved without any supernatural direction. “Evolution cannot be proved or tested, it can only be believed.” Considering the majesty, beauty and complexity of the earth and universe, it is relatively easy to believe in Creation. But to believe that dead matter could create life, and have absolutely no evidence, requires faith of another order. Some believe that a cosmic egg of energy exploded to form chemical elements, stars , galaxies and finally people. Some even have the faith to believe that life was planted on earth by an unknown civilization from outer space. Since evolution cannot be observed, repeated or verified, it is no more “scientific” and no less “religious” than Creation. One person was asked, “Why aren’t you an evolutionist?” His reply was, “I don’t have enough faith to believe that random particles arranged themselves into ordered life.” ------------------
JZ, That presupposes that every time that a gene that would eventually lead to a human being occured, that it would be "locked in" and passed down to the next generation. Now, let us say that there is no benefit to having a gene hat would eventually lead to the formation of eyes in combination with other genes. That could easily be lost when the carrier of that gene is not selected as a mate, or dies in a fire, or is eaten by a toad, or whatever. The letter has become unlocked. So, in the rare cases where an intermediate step could help a creature be more competitive, AND the creature does not die before it can pass the gene on, AND the mutation causing the gene happens often enough for it to become widespread, then it would be locked in. All of these factors being a requirement would tend to push the timeback much further. In recorded history, there has not been a documented case of one species evolving into another. To assume based on the fact that we are built from the same stuff that we all evolved from a common ancestry is a big leap. I think until there is an actual documented case of evolution, or even more compelling a cross genus evolution, creationism is at least as valid a theory. ------------------ Don't come in Bullard's house!
But youre argument also works the other way. Think of just random mutations that happen to be beneficial or random mating that happens to preselect for "competitive advantages" Sure, someone can randomly be eaten by a toad, but who would be mroe likely to be eaten, the individual with the eye, who can see the toad coming, or the one without it. The one with th ecompetitve advatage survives to reproduce, hence calling it a competitive advatange. Also, there have been documented cases of one species evolving into another. The Galapagos Island birds are a good example. ------------------
