Saying that the model of horse evolution presented over the years is wrong is very much oversimplified.
It is not wrong, it is completely correct, if you were to get pictures of fossils, put dates next to them, and note the progression as time went on, you would see a clear evolution.

The way in which the model is lacking is in it’s detail. In fact horse evolution occured down many separate branches, the majority of which died off. This is where the creationist site you sourced can be seen to be misleading. Statements such as “the three toed” and “the next creature” are most easily refuted by asking “which three toed?” or “which next creature?”

Different evolutionary branches evolve at different rates due to different external selective pressures caused by geographical isolation.
While agreeably it is false for a model to postulate that all horses evolved along a certain pathway. It is equally false for a creationist to use this assumption to “disprove evolution”.

Your statement that horse evolution is an example of microevolution at best is…well, it’s wrong. Assuming that you use Macroevolution in terms of evolution of one species to another (rather than the creationist usage which merely refers to “things they disagree with”) then this is a clear case of Macroevolution.

A distinction between two species can be demonstrated by an inability of the species to successfully breed (or by the demonstrable preference of a species not to breed in nature, though fertilisation could theoretically occur). This combined with morphological differences would clearly indicate speciation.

Now, this established, would it not be sensible to surmise that a modern horse, would be inable to breed successfully, in nature, with it’s DOG SIZED ancestor? And would this not suggest that speciation, and thus macroevolution has clearly occured?

Furthermore, your helpful observation that each of the individual changes could be attributed to Microevolution, while the overall effect is one of Macroevolution, succesfully debunks the common creationist dogma that Microevolution can not add up to Macroevolution.

Still, it’s true i suppose, God might have made it all up, who needs evidence anyway?

Hey, david isn’t a bully, he is just basically intellectually dishonest. He couldn’t best my wish to improve the world, so he resorted to accusing me of worshipping progress, like there is actually anything wrong with wanting to make the world a better place.

He is incapable of grasping that science is a methadology – which includes self-correction and means of minimising bias-based error which have been learned over a long period.

Also, he accused me of being a scientist, which I find rather amusing. Though I am well read due to my real job I am not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination.

Austin: slime capital of Texas

Comment by LandSurveyor — May 19, 2007 @ 9:16 am

Don’t worry, Bush sent the army to protect you from that.

Comment by david — May 20, 2007 @ 7:55 pm

This statement alone proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are missing an education regarding scientific methods, research, standards and concrete conclusions where proven and the search for more knowledge always.Do you like being stupid in public? Just asking…

It is Corporare America and NOT, I repeat NOT Science that has failed the grade when it comes to pharmaceuticals. You’re blaming the wrong thing as we keep pointing out an you keep refusing to consider while bashing Science for being narrow-minded. Ah the irony…

Here’s the real problem with useless and dangerous pharmaceuticals – Drug Companies are pressured by marketing, competition and profit margins to get drugs on the market that they don’t fully research, develop and test their products. That’s not the fault of Science, it’s the fault of human greed.

Stop blaming a method for human frailties. If anything has failed you, it isn’t Science.

Sheesh…

Only philosophers, trained in philosophical, conceptual, and logical analysis, are in a position to understand the distinctions, principles, and arguments that I make in my book. If someone doesn’t have the requisite training, he’s in no position to understand, let alone evaluate, such philosophical content. It’s nothing but arrogance to claim otherwise.

Such a nice little closed system he’s created. How wonderfully democratic of him!

It is interesting that you have spent your greatest efforts trying to frame the terms of the debate. An open forum doesn’t work that way. As much as you’d like to say that only “trained philosophers” can quarrel with you, I think you’ll find that won’t cut it in a free and open debate.

Pathetic fallacy is a literary device. When last I checked I was typing the English language. If you are more comfortable with the equations of symbolic logic, I doubt anyone would understand. So you like poetry. Both you and unbelievable claim to be lovers of the arts and yet you don’t really seem to know anything but your own field and unbelievable talks of fiction and literature in ways that would make an English prof wince. Why don’t you transhumanists upload yourselves into a computer and have done with your meaningless lives.

I see that you just referred to Polkinghorne’s book. Among other purposes, my own book refutes his claims. His basic weakness is his intellectual inability to address the vast conceptual and logical differences between science and religion, which I attribute to his lack of adequate philosophical training.

Of course, you are quite ignorant and gullible if you think I’m a member of the Christian Right. I have no quarrel with Evolution, I do not see the Bible as the inerrant Word of God, I do not consider Jesus His only begotten son, and I am a socialist and have been a member of Canada’s social democratic party (NDP) for years. And I can heartily recommend the works of Canada’s Anglican minister Tom Harpur –he’s one on wine and another on Jesus as myth: The Pagan Christ.

But then there is very much an element of totalitarianism in all those who cannot see the peaceful coexistence of science and religion. One might try reading John Polkinghorne’s Has Science made religion redundant?

I could equally accuse you of having flunked critical thinking in college. Personification is a fallacy when applied to non-persons like natural forces, animals or even abstract entities like concepts, principles, and rules. It’s called the fallacy of anthropomorphism or the pathetic fallacy. This matter has nothing to do with English composition. (You seem determined to introduce irrelevant concepts and claims to our dispute.)

As for whether or not science exhibits progress, would you deny that Einsteinian physics is an advance over Newtonian physics in that it provides a more adequate model for predicting and retrodicting natural phenomena? If you deny this, then what, if anything, makes Einsteinian physics preferable? Why is phlogiston no longer a plausible hypothesis? The ether? Why is a heliocentric model of the solar system explanatorily superior to a geocentric one? You’re free to accept or reject any distinction you want, but there’s a certain intellectual price you should expect to pay if you want to reject standard distinctions made by intellectual specialists, especially if you don’t even understand why these specialists have made these distinctions in the first place. This price is the vice of wantonness. You pick and choose your distinctions on the basis of your unchecked ideology. I try to follow a higher, more impartial standard.

As for peer review, my peers are fellow professional philosophers, not scientists, and religionists and theologians least of all. Only philosophers, trained in philosophical, conceptual, and logical analysis, are in a position to understand the distinctions, principles, and arguments that I make in my book. If someone doesn’t have the requisite training, he’s in no position to understand, let alone evaluate, such philosophical content. It’s nothing but arrogance to claim otherwise. (Even Kant, as devout as he was, recognized that all claims about divine morality must be submitted to the tribunal of secular human reason in order to curb human pretensions to claim knowledge where such knowledge is impossible to possess.) When you’ve had philosophical training, you’ll be in a position to judge whether I’ve allowed bias to cloud my judgment; in the meantime, I stand by my graduate training and many years of teaching a wide range of courses, including philosophy of religion, epistemology, Kant, and critical thinking.

Your citing poetry involves the fallacy of the red herring since poetry has nothing to do with the substance of my arguments against you. By the way, I do like poetry–so much for your attempt to reduce my considered philosophical views to subjective, logically irrelevant personal factors in order for you to dismiss them (the ad hominem fallacy and the fallacy of mind reading since you don’t know me and don’t know anything about my extra-philosophical interests). I would just remind you of the logical distinction between poetry and logical discourse. One is expressive, the other cognitive. But perhaps you reject this distinction too.

You need to seek help, advice, insight, knowledge and a way to escape the religious ignorance in which you were raised.

There’s a great big, wonderful world out here beyond the boundries of your ignorance of and hatred for science. I hope you can visit it some day soon!!

Let me thank you for helping keep alive a topic here that helps point out the silly, shallow thinking of the fundamentalists riech-wing christianistas regarding scientific methods, etc. Get’r'dun!!

The book has been added to my wishlist :)

You know I’m with you on this. And I feel the same way that you do that if we don’t stand up to them, no one else will. The liberal Christians aren’t standing up to them. And I get the feeling that 90% of them won’t. There are expections, but they are all in the Jesus Club for the most part and refuse to condemn anyone but us non-believers…

I like when people like david show up – they give us a plaform for debunking their arguments. :D

No, the problem is that you don’t know what you’re talking about and those of us here have seen through your pretense.

“unbelievable claims to love art and literature, but she then expresses disdain for “fiction” and bows down to “fact” in the sort of degrading sadism of Dickens’ Mr Gradgrind.”

Stop comparing me to some fictional prototype. I’m a real person who cannot be neatly catagorize into your ridiculous anthology of ‘characters’.

I never expressed a disdain for fiction. I expressed a disdain that you base your life upon it rather than reality (non-fiction), because it’s dangerous to the rest of us who are forced to inhabit this planet with you.

“Nothing depresses me more than to see literature taught in schools as a secondary resource: that is, the novel as springboard to discussions of racism or feminism or the morality of war.”

Dude – you are delusional. Literature is not real. It’s pretend people in pretend environments. How awful is your life to romanticize literature, rejecting reality and then hating those of us who not only find solace in the truth, but reject your demented views…

“It is a very “scientific” approach to literature that merely delivers up every great work of art to the student’s desk as something dead and to be dissected. It’s very dehumanizing.
Comment by david — May 20, 2007 @ 4:22 pm”

No it isn’t. It is what it is. Nothing more. And as long as you live in the world you wish existed rather than the one that does, it is you who is your own somber puppet master and not Science.

You’ve dehumanized yourself. As I said before, you hate reality therefore you ultimately hate yourself. Get professional help. You desperately need it.

The only hysterical one around here is you david.

Science IS reality, which is why it’s the OPPOSITE from religion, which is fantasy.

“I am not confused. I do not see that there is a distinction. We live in a finite world and so all our perceptions are limited and constrained by our particular existence.”

You are only limited by your refusal to consider anything outside of your own fanatical point of view.

“I would, of course, contend that, unless you’re an AI being, it is impossible to exclude all human motives from science.”

But if the motive is to find the truth, and not to be “right” at any cost, then that human motive does not taintthe experiements.

You’ve not heard of double-blind trials? Where there is no ability for human motive to influence the outcomes. It’s why Science is honest and factual. Unlike religion that is nothing but human motive.

“And, because human observation is imperfect, it becomes necessary to revise or even replace the so-called axioms of the logical institution. And I can call the Law of Non-contradiction smug because it is an non-provable assertion.”

Revisions to theories are rare and minor that do not affect the basis of what the theories establish. It’s not as you claim – that theories are totally chucked – because in order for them to become theories they ahd to stand the test of time.

“Any poet could tell you we live in a world of Both/And and not Either/Or.”

Poet? What is your obesssion with fantasy writers as a basis for your personal ideology? That’s utterly infantile.

“Or, since I’m being pegged as a Christian when I’m not , I’ll use the humorous line “Yes, of course God can indeed construct a stone that He cannot lift—and what’s more, He can lift it!”

If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck… must be a duck.

“I also find the premise of your book very unscientific. (You don’t seem to be able to exclude the human motive.)”

Considering your comtempt for Science, you’re in no position to judge.

“And, although you have a groupie in unbelievable, I find your enterprise worthless –probably forced upon you by the publish or perish world of academia.”

Groupie? F*ck you. I’m a grown woman with thoughts of my own, who enjoys the thoughts of other intelligent people.

“It seems to me disengenuous of you to begin with a contention and then seek out random quotes to prove it. This would seem to prove Steven Pinker’s assertion that the conscious mind is a spin doctor and not a critical thinker. What will you call your book? Begging the Question??? And I could easily be you. Names here are easily hijacked and the anonymity of handles makes it difficult to verify sources. How does on cite the authority of sk8trgrrl69?”

No, you could NOT be Professor Colby. Not on his worst day.

“I shall close with a comment directed at unbelievable. Earlier you said I must be a Christian because Only Christians defend Christianty. Where do you get crap like that?”

Life experience. Get some and then you’ll understand… maybe… I’m not certain your tiny pea brain can handle the input.

“I have spent a wearying 20 odd posts defending Islam on another thread.”

No david, you defended your idea of god. The monotheistic god that is shared by the Judeo-Islamic-Christian branch of religion.

“Of course atheists and pantheists can defend others from irrational and derogatory attacks.”

Except that I simply quotes the bible and you FREAKED OUT. My post was both rational and factual. It was you who became unhinged and derogatory by insulting me instead of debating the issues. 90% of your posts are crazed, foaming-at-the-mouth fanaticism based on wishful thinking and ZERO facts.

“Our quarrel began when you attacked Benedictine nuns who were protesting the war in Iraq.”

I didn’t attack them, I simply pointed out the misogynistic regard for women in the bible, which I verified with bible quotes, and from logic concluded that no Christian woman could be a role model because Christian oppressed women. But, logic offends you david, and that’s the point here. Either we all agree with you or you flip out and think you’re entitled to degrade us. Wrong.

“You seemed more interested in proselytizing your irreligion than engaging with the story.”

You really need to take a course on logic. That statement was ridiculous.

And if I want to preach Atheism, it is my right. In fact, just because you want me to stop, I’ll do it more. And will you defend my right as you defend the right of Christians to do the same? Of course not – you’re a hypocrite.

“You reminded me of the Stalinists in Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia –more interested in total ideological control than in victory. You might consider reading Karen Armstrong for a more interesting overview of why religion matters. (Gore Vidal’s Creation is also a good read.)”

Again, my goal is to get the Fundies to stop taking over our country. If you wanna absurdly link that to nonsense, then, really david, you should consider reading the brochure for an asylum that specializes in mental disorders. You’re deranged.

‘t a parting shot at Bruce Gorton. America is NOT a democracy. It is a ‘representative’ democracy. Which is a polite way of saying that it’s a pretend democracy. How 300 million people can be said to be governing when all decisions are made by less than 600 in Washington, DC is something I really don’t know. It’s a fraud.
Comment by david — May 20, 2007 @ 3:45 pm”

Piss off david – you’re a bully and you hide behind your faux cloak of literary and philosophical nominclature without having teh slightest clue what any of ot actually means.

You’re offically a “whack-a-troll” now.

BTW, I can tell you flunked English Composition in high school since you otherwise would know that one can attribute smugness to the Law of Non-contradiction; it’s called ‘personification’. The Law is as ’self-satisfied’ as Science is ’self-correcting’. Science cannot be self-correcting as it does not exist as an entity apart from human consciousness. Collectives of humans can correct hypotheses, but they can as easily falsify them. And this progress/regress has happened.

I’m afraid I am not as confident of the Scientific Progress as you are. It seems to me to be a case of two steps forward and one step back. sometime two steps back. There is no One True Religion and there is no One True Science. What works is what works. And science must make do with logical inconsistences while searching for a better model. However, there will always be logical inconsistencies. And the models we do work with now are far more complex and prone to error than the simple scientific discoveries of the 18th & 19th Centuries.

I could have guessed you didn’t like poetry. It is this inability to see paraphrasing as a method of enquiry that dooms modern American science to a cabal of commerce and careerists. And I should take your book on Science & the Public and run it past an Episcopalian ThD, a Unitarian minister, and a Rabbi before declaring it “peer reviewed”; I can already tell you’ve allowed bias to cloud your judgement.

Thanks for the insight.

A nice thing about the internet is that there are so many more of us that you’d realize (not religious). Nice to know :)

David expresses the typical views of a fundamentalist right-wing Christian regarding science and evolution. I don’t care what his religious beliefs are. I’m just making an observation regarding his rehtoric. Fundamentalism is the true enemy of science. Intelligent, main stream denominationists have no problem finding truth in science and thier religious views.

It is those who believe in the inerrancy(sp?) of the Bible who present the greatest problems in this country. Their beliefs are helping to fuel a downward spiralling(sp?) society where ignorance will help the powerful few to gain more power against their very own interests.

Fundamentalists must be resisted in every religion. It matters not if the fundamentalist is a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddahist.

Please read The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America to gain a very deep insight to the dangers of fundamentalism in this country. They openly speak of and seek a theocracy and no one among us will call them treasonist. However, I do! They are an enemy within; an enemy of the state.