#1021: — 03/10  at  10:20 AM
Ohio has been infected by the IQ-lowering ID disease.

http://www.channelcincinnati.com/education/2907320/detail.html

#1022: — 03/10  at  10:27 AM
That article on the Ohio School Board was written before the Board voted... it passed. Ohio school children are now to be taught voodoo as science.

http://www.chillicothegazette.com/news/stories/20040310/localnews/49459.html

#1023: — 03/10  at  12:46 PM
If you have a minute PLEASE google "Governor of Ohio", go to his website, and send him a message using his comments page. I sent him one about how American children are falling behind the children of other developed countries in terms of their scientific literacy, and this recent action to promote "intelligent design" was another step in that direction.

#1024: Reed A. Cartwright — 03/10  at  01:20 PM
+ Crow + Avise + Nei + Charlesworth + Charlesworth + Ohta

#1025: Morat — 03/10  at  01:25 PM
It's not their fault. They were homeschooled, after all.

#1026: — 03/12  at  01:16 AM
Darwinistic Evolution is scientifically impossible!

(1) The random assimilation of the first single-celled organism is mathematically impossible. The simplest known single-celled organism has about 200 proteins. Due to know necessities, scientists can scale this back (in theory) to a bare MINIMUM of about 100 proteins. The chances of just A SINGLE protein coming together by chance is roughly 1 over 10 to the 60th power. To put this in perspective:

(number of atoms in the universe)
X
(number of seconds universe existed)
X
(number of metabolic processes in a cell per second)

...is a number with about ONLY about 125 zeros.

To get 100 of these proteins to come together in the simplest single-celled organism imaginable would need the following chances:
at best, one over 10 to the 600th power!

This number blows away Carl Sagan's "billions and Billions". This is like blowing up an alphabet soup factory and having the letters fall in the order of a Webster's unabridged dictionary. Impossible. Plus, what are the chances of survival and reproduction for this ONE cell... What would it "eat" in a world void of other creatures and their by-products? So much could go wrong here and, given the impossible odds in the first place, a 2nd chance is especially impossible!

(2) Mutations have NEVER produced additional DNA structures. NEVER! Even as scientists study mutations in fruit flies or viruses... the mutations sometime just scramble existing DNA... but MORE OFTEN, they DELETE DNA structures. Certainly, "survival of the fittest" is a means by which nature purges the gene pool of bad mutations, but NO evolution occurs here. (This alone is a DEATH BLOW to Evolution.) I repeat... not a SINGLE scientist in the entire world has EVER recorded a mutation which produced additional DNA structures or material.... but DELETIONS are recorded ALL THE TIME!!!

(3) As a result, when evolutionists say that mutations combined with natural selection only requires a great deal of time to produce Evolution... this is like a storekeeper who loses a little bit of money on each sale and then says, "don't worry, I'll make it up on volume".

(4) Because the process of Evolution depends on mutations adding DNA and being "selected" through survival of the fittest... it is, by definition, a very, very slow process. Too many mutations in one generation and who is that creature going to mate with? (not to mention, this usually produces a "miscarriage"). As a result of this process being SO slow, the fossil record should have so many imperceptible different variations on each species that paleontologists should have extreme difficulty even classifying ANY newly dug up fossil ("this is 40% the way from creature A to creature B", for example). Instead, in the fossil record, we find fully formed types with little to no variation in between these forms.

(5) The whole dating process is deceptive. The geologists use the fossils found nearby to date their rocks. The paleontologists use the nearby rocks to date their fossils. Circular reasoning! Also, carbon dating only goes back a couple of thousand years. Radiometric dating is a joke because it DEPENDS on several factors being a certain way and these factors are conveniently assumed and are NOT provable or testable.

(6) Regarding dating, many, many things are found in the "wrong" layers all the time. Also, Charles Lyell's geological layers are almost always in the wrong order or have missing layers. The geological record we have is better explained by a flood (as in Noah) rather than millions of years and with an Ice Age. A world-wide & roughly year-long flood would "lay down" sedimentary layers in a very inconsistent way... many strong tendencies, but with a lot of inconsistencies. Millions of years, on the other hand, would be MUCH more uniform. The geological evidence, therefore, points more to a flood. Also, the EXCELLENT PRESERVATION of so many fossils is better explained by a huge flood. Ironically, the largest major dinosaur parks across the world claim that their dinosaurs died in a catastrophic flood. (Obviously, THEY don't consider this to be Noah's flood... but the coincidence is breathtaking).

(7) As a result of these things, the science of evolution has degenerated into a pseudo-science. Unlike REAL science, it fails to make risky predictions. For example, Darwin did make risky predictions about what the fossil record would look like after more digging is done... and these predictions failed! ...absent better evidence, and in the face of such opposing evidence, Evolutionists ought to at least say "we don't know". You never see other areas of science stick to provably false theories just because they haven't figured it out. Thank God medical science didn't go this route. (We know that this particular brain surgery procedure will kill you, but we still haven't found a better method... so we'll proceed with the surgery.)

#1027: — 03/12  at  01:42 AM
What a magnificent steaming pile of creationist bull feces!

1. Those are only probabilities of exact duplication.

2. Genes can get duplicated by miscopying -- whole genomes sometimes get duplicated in that way.

3. It's more like climbing a mountain. One step does not take you very much higher, but all the steps combined can take you to its peak.

4. Evolution can be slow by familiar standards and fast by geological standards.

5. Radiometric dating can be cross-checked by using more than one isotope; serious rate variations would require the isotopes' decay rates to vary in nearly exact sync. Also, directly-observed continental-drift rates are in agreement with those inferred from geology and radiometric dating.

6. Which things are found in the "wrong" layers? Also, the "inconsistencies" of the Earth's strata are MUCH more consistent with a long and complicated geological history than with a single big flood. As to dinosaurs dying in floods, local floods happen all the time, and flood after flood after flood can pile up layer after layer after layer of bones.

7. Here's a sort-of prediction of evolutionary biology: that molecular-evolution methods would produce phylogenies that agree with those inferred from macroscopic features. A prediction that has been largely successful, at least in the case of well-determined macroscopic-feature phylogenies.

#1028: — 03/12  at  10:01 AM
Rob would be horrified to learn that medical science IS taking the same route as those wacky evolutionists. Crazy health researchers, such as myself, actually think that using the theory of evolution might help us improve the quality of Rob's life. I have participated in using health outcome data from mice (and other organisms) with specific gene abnormalities to guide research into polymorphisms in the same type of human genes. The craziest thing is that it seems to work. Thank God Noah saved the mice, or at least thank God the animals were created just as evolution would have predicted.

#1029: — 03/12  at  04:49 PM
`Instead, in the fossil record, we find fully formed types with little to no variation in between these forms.'

Utter, utter nonsense, sorry. In the fossil record, among those species which are fossilised in great enough numbers, we find variations as minute as we care to look for.
(The classic example is ammonites.)

One other point: it's highly unlikely that we've ever dug up anything's *ancestor*, merely the cousin of an ancestral form; so expecting exact missing links is foolish.

(Many fossils of land-dwelling organisms are fossils of animals that died in floods or volcanic eruptions, because in that situation you are liable to get covered in anoxic mud quite fast, and then microorganisms won't eat you. This doesn't mean that everything died in a flood or an eruption, just that things that didn't were eaten or decayed.)

#1030: — 03/12  at  09:51 PM
In my childhood, I was swimming in a lake in Pennsylvania when I dredged up with my feet some leaves from the lake floor. They were black, but they were flexible and they kept their shape and did not disintegrate, as if they were only partially decomposed.