Falconsgyre said:
There are tons of transitional fossils we find everywhere. Futurama showed this one the best, but I unfortunately can't find the link.
http://www.myvidster.com/video/316851
Missing link bit starts as 1:15, but the whole clip is great, especially "may I remind you that evolution is just a theory, like gravity or the shape of the Earth."
Sterling: Your points have been quite well refuted already, but you make it so easy I just couldn't resist...
May I start by saying
evolution is science. Scientists tend to be rational. If there was no evidence for evolution, or if there was evidence that contradicted evolution, then scientists would reject evolution.
Sterling|D-Reaver said:
1) First Law of Thermodynamics. This law (note: not a theory but a scientific law)
Other theories include: the Earth orbits the Sun, living things are made of cells, earthquakes are caused by the movements of tectonic plates.
A law is something that can be stated in a few short sentences, while a theory is something that has a longer explanation. It has nothing to do with how well proven they are.
In other words, an honest scientist will tell you that there is nothing in the observable universe that can explain either the origin of energy or matter.
But if such a thing were found, we would simply modify the laws of thermodynamics to include this new discovery. The thing about science is that it reflects what we observe with our eyes and ears, not what we imagine with our imaginations.
Not relevant to evolution.
where did that incredibly dense ball of matter come from?
We don't know.
Is that so shocking?
The reason we don't know is that we have no evidence to tell us where it came from. The same reason we can know nothing about any god. But maybe one day we will find some evidence. Until then, it is pointless to make wild guesses.
Evolution teaches that the universe is headed toward increasing complexity and order.
Evolution doesn't "teach" anything, you are talking about evolution using the language of religion, as if there are Evolutionist sermons and established dogma.
Besides, evolution says nothing about increasing complexity and order. It just happens to produce complexity and order sometimes.
but the 2nd Law of thermodynamics says that the universe is headed toward increasing randomness and decay.
Yeah, entropy increases
in a closed system. The Earth's not a closed system, it recieves energy from the Sun.
If you were right, then the 2nd law would also disprove the theory that oak trees grow from acorns, or that tadpoles become frogs.
I'll go with the proven law of science this time...
Again, a law is not more proven that a theory, just easier to summarise.
Darwin said there should be innumerable transitional forms, but there are none, period.
See that Futurama clip. There are
loads of transitional forms. Everything can be said to be a transitional form. It's a red herring.
Demanding that we find every transitional fossil is like demanding that we measure the acceleration of every falling object in the universe before you will accept the law of gravity.
Also, very few dead animals actually get fossilised, so even if we could find every human ancestor fossil going back to our common ancestor with our closest extant species the chimpanzee, 5 million years ago, we still wouldn't have anywhere near all the links in the chain. But none of the millions of fossils yet found has contradicted evolution. None has contradicted ID either, but then ID makes no testable predictions which
could ever be contradicted.
"Throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another...
Speciation is largely an illusion brought on by our urge to categorise things as being of this species or that species. There is no clear line that could mark the point at which something can be said to have become a new species. That Professor Linton either does not know this, or chooses to ignore it, tells us all we need to know.
Since there is no evidence for species changes between the simplest forms of unicellular life, it is not surprising that there is no evidence for evolution from prokaryotic [i.e., bacterial] to eukaryotic [i.e., plant and animal] cells
No, the reason why no missing link between single-celled and multicellular organisms is that it's like looking for a needle in a haystack, except the needle is smaller than you can imagine, and the haystack is the entire Earth. It's never going to happen and it's stupid to suggest that it could, if only evolution were correct.
Of course there is evidence that there was a progression, though: the similarities between single-celled organisms and the cells of our multicellular bodies.
let alone throughout the whole array of higher multicellular organisms."
- Alan H. Linton
Of course there is evidence. Would scientists believe it if there was no evidence? No they would not. The quote is from a book review, of a book that presented the evidence, so there is really no excuse for Professor Linton to be so dishonest. He is clearly a nut.
Read some C. S. Lewis, he set out as an Atheist to disprove God through logic
A foolish thing to attempt. Religious beliefs cannot be disproven, as they make no testable predictions about the world.
These articles make the same mistakes you have done, and some more to boot (unsurprising really, since they are where you got your arguments from).
From one of the articles:
evolution teaches that everything that exists is the product of the random collision of atoms, this logically includes the thoughts I am thinking about evolution.
There's that "evolution teaches" thing again. And
the movement of atoms is not random. Brownian motion is probabalistic and stems from the well understood processes of the standard model of particle physics.
And it is not evolution that says everything around us is made of atoms; that is a more general scientific principle. If you want to turn this into a more general argument for or against science as a whole, then be my guest. Do you really want to argue against the existence of atoms? It's worse than I thought, then.
