richard wrote on Sep 3, 2008 11:21 AM:This post and an earlier one on Lucy suffer from the fact that the information does not prove anything. It is comforting to hear the truth, that Darwin didn't prove speciation. But we need to extend that truth more explictly. There is no proof that mice and people had a comon ancestor, and just because Lucy bones may be those of an ape that had human-like features does not mean that all humans descended from Lucy, rather than from Eve, as the original author believes, which is just as good, in fact a better argument, if the argument is to be based only on observable data.

John the Baptist wrote on Sep 3, 2008 11:42 AM:Re Let's just let them be he/shes: Marian Cowles brings up a subject that most people are unaware of, or don't want to talk about.

A small percentage of newborns, about 1.7 percent, display ambiguous gender that includes varying degrees of both female and male physical characteristics. Even if one of the genders is more physically prominent, the internal workings may not be in agreement. In earlier times, the delivering doctor would select a gender and perform surgery to correspond. The trend now is to wait until the child is old enough to self-identify. For more info, Google "The Intersex Society of North America",
Regards

John the Baptist wrote on Sep 3, 2008 11:46 AM:to Richard: I must have missed it. Say again how the diversity of life on earth came about?
Regards

Richard wrote on Sep 3, 2008 12:00 PM:And that observable data being, that all humans ever born were born from humans, and all apes ever born were born from apes, for all recorded observational history spanning vast millennia of time. And the same is true for all the eggs ever produced, whether fertilized or not, again all being the same species as the one they were produced from.

Richard wrote on Sep 3, 2008 12:14 PM:I've already told you. Microevolution of vast varieties of dogs, from huskies to weiners, of people, from Chinese to Aborigine, of apes, apples, vast varieities of cichlid fish, etc. are formed from genetic mixing and the processes that select and express particular key genes that go on from one generation to another, in addition to environmental insults that may determine that certain gene products are preferred over another. In cichlid fish, again, there are thousands of stable varieties with different colorations in a variety of patterns and features that are determined by a select handful of key genes that are expressed in a particular variety. However, neither you nor I can claim that scientific data exist that demonstrates how original genera of livng things first appeared. In fact, you keep posting that 'evolution' has no requirement to explain abiogenesis or spontaneous generation or how life first came to exist, so I think I here have answered your question. if you want something else, then please ask that something else more clearly or else it could not possibly be ansered anyway.

John the Baptist wrote on Sep 3, 2008 2:00 PM:to Richard: You say: "all humans ever born were born from humans" How about the first human? Was the first human not born?
Regards

to Richard wrote on Sep 3, 2008 2:30 PM:Please submit your research immediately to a peer reviewed journal. Your take on the lack of evidence for evolution could be seen as revolutionary. Your seminal understanding of where hundreds of thousands of scientists who have dedicated their lives to advance our knowledge of biology are completely wrong may, nay should, win you a Nobel.

Richard wrote on Sep 3, 2008 2:59 PM:If you want an answer from scientific experimentation or observation, no one was there to observe the first human who appeared. Since you seem most interested in science, that's my answer.

Richard wrote on Sep 3, 2008 3:09 PM:I have. Secular journals such as Nature didn't want it because they already pre-believe that all living things came from some unknown premordial archebacterium thorugh an unobserved process called 'speciation'. My data showing that bristlecone pine trees are now documented to live more than 5,000 years old per generation, and that yet these trees are still producing viable progeny from seeds cultivated by naturalists, that remian bristlecones, not some other species, all while being exposed to pretty high levesl of UV radiation for millennia at high altitude, was viewed as interesting but not useful. When I submitted it to a Christian naturalist publication, I was told that the tree couldn't be that old because it would have been destroyed by any floods; this, in spite of data I provided them collected here locally for an orchard that survived full flooding under a lake for over a week. The orchard was still fine after the lake re-dried. There will be no Nobel, just the usual criticism, and the only publishing will be that done at an online publishing house.

neighbor wrote on Sep 3, 2008 4:27 PM:Thought the information from Fred Bartz was very enlightening about Granite Construction. Boy, we had better watch out who becomes our neighbor. We don't need neighbors like that.

Three D wrote on Sep 3, 2008 4:45 PM:Richard, we have been over this before, but your comment at 2:59 p.m. demonstrates a lack of understanding of what scientific "observation" entails. His comment assumes that a person has to actually watch something happen to conclude that it occurred.
"Observation" means the direct observation of evidence, not necessarily of events themselves. For example, if you are in the kitchen with little 3-year-old Johnny and a plate of freshly cooked brownies, and no one else is around, and you step out of the room for one minute and step back into the room and two of the brownies are gone from the plate and little Johnny's hands and face are covered with chocolate smudge, it is a reasonable deduction to conclude that Johnny snitched a couple of brownies. You did not see it, but it is a rational conclusion.
Similarly, while no one has actually observed the transition of one species into another, there is extensive DIRECT, observable evidence from which evolution, however caused, by a deity or otherwise (which is not an issue of science), can be deduced. Such evidence includes an ever-expanding litany of transitional fossils, not in isolation, but linked by the chain of related DNA evidence (which is also sufficiently certain as to determine paternity without direct eyewitness of, um, fatherhood or guilt or innocence as to events without direct eyewitnesses).
Again, this is as to how one species evolves into another species. It does not address the origin of life which is a different, unrelated question.
Your comments about the peer-reviewed journal Nature were unnecessary and gratuitious. They do not have pre-determined conclusions. They are based on incontrovertible, objective and replicable OBSERVATIONS.
Blessings,
3D

to Richard wrote on Sep 3, 2008 7:31 PM:You might have good data. You might be a schizophrenic with delusions of grandeur and other delusions as well. Can you tell us why, since we know nothing about you, we should believe anything you say? You might start with telling us what were, specifically, the reasons that Nature rejected your claims. I know YOU say it was because they pre-believed something. What did THEY say? And after you tell us that, tell us how their specific reasons for rejection were erroneous. Thanks in advance. You've not given me a single reason to think you are correct. Please do. Or else, do yourself and us a favor and go away.

Amber wrote on Sep 4, 2008 9:53 AM:"The thing I am trying to say is we have people that are he/she and
they were born that way."

He/she, is an insulting statement.

Jeanette wrote on Sep 4, 2008 10:24 AM:I'm Transgender and will never return back to what the doctor said I was the day of my birth. I have lived little more than half my life now this way and am still trying to understand what it is, why we can't not live together in a world that God made. That God said that each of us was made the way we are before the world was.Psalms 139
All my important papers and ID have F, on them. I am a straight. A Christian. And know the in my confession to the Lord. I have no doubt that my relation with the Lord is right now.

Richard wrote on Sep 4, 2008 5:26 PM:But that's my point. How do you know, without seeing the act, that it was not a dog or rat that ate the brownie, or that the brownie was never eaten at all, that it was hidden or thrown away?
It's forensics data.
And for an enormous, complicated question like 'how did all the genera of life come to exist?', to answer it with forensics type observations is not possible. Sure there are lots of stories, each requiring their assumptions to make a 'conclusion'. But again, your own example does not prove who ate it, or even if it was eaten. You made my point for me.
And the data are most indeed relevant. The very long lifespan of bristlecones, coupled with data like millions of generations of fruit flies remaining fruit flies (apples, bacteria remaining varieties of bacteria, etc.)for millennia, tell us that the earth couldn't possibly be old enough to have bristlecones speciate from something else and then from something else, etc., back to a primordial organism. Most know the earth is not of such a vast age that would allow such a thing to have happened. 5,000 years each, times millions of generations per speciating event, means that drastic stories must be invented that have not been observed to invoke the idea that all life speciated from some single common ancestor. Such a story is a theory, not a fact proven with scientific data.
Peer-reviewed Nature's comments were from only one editor and they do not provide names. One of the worst I received on a controversial issue was that 'they don't want to deal with the hate mail they would receive if this were published'. By your own admission, claiming the macroevolution belief is fact being based on incontrovertible observations, is your way of saying what they also say. Why do you doubt they believe as you do? The evidence is overwhelming to them and you, but not to me.