“Don't laugh, I beg you. It's all of a piece with my whole argument, for I have said all along that it is easy for natural selection to fit any animal for any changed habits whatever.”

Oh don’t worry, I am others are laughing, but not with you, but at you. Firstly, Darwin made as best an educated guess as anyone of his time could have made regarding to how whales & dolphins which are fully mammals came to inhabit water. At the time the evidence for how mammals became modern whales wasn’t very collectively convincing, times they have changed though. Over time more evidence is gathered, tested and based on their results and further predictions it reveals the truer picture of what transpired.

Today we know not only from genetic evidence but also from fossil evidence that the early whales like ambulocetus and rhodocetus demonstrated that cetations were actually descendants from a group of small/medium sized deer like mammals (see packicetus). Early on the paleontologists weren’t sure where to look for these fossils, but now we know where their type evolved, therefore the collection of intermediates is growing; Indohyus, Ambulocetus, Dalanistes, Rodhocetus, Tackracetus, Gaviocetus, Dorudon, and Basilosaurus, and others but you get the point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodhocetus

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambulocetus

Today with the evidence we can make testable predictions on what these intermediates should look like if evolution be true. Two such predictions are how the inner ear structure must have changed over time to allow for hearing under water and the migration of the nostrils from the front of the skull, towards the middle and lastly on top as modern cetations are. If evolution is true an these mammals were the ancestors of modern whales we should be able to find fossils with ears which aren’t fully whale like and not fully mammal like, additionally we should also find the location of the nostrils migrate with succession towards their current position. Do we find such evidence? Yes, indeed we do the newest intermediates back up such predictions and reaffirm that indeed these groups of mammals are the ancestors to modern whales.

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/mammal/cetacea/cetacean.html

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/03/4/l_034_05.html

And to follow up, Natural Selection does have some limitations for how drastic and quick such evolutionary changes can occur, if at all. IE, there are physically limitations on how large an animal can be, most of this relates to allometry, for instance, invertebrates in comparison to vertebrates can’t grow nearly as large due to the fact that they have endoskeletons, and therefore no insect could ever rival vertebrates in sheer size, this is directly why vertebrates came to dominate the land even though they weren’t the first to inhabit land.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allometry

"All The Articles Of The Darwin Faith By The Rev. F.O. Morris, B.A.

I believe in a bear "swimming for hours with a widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects on the water." "Very like a whale!" I think I hear you saying, but I can't help it if you do. "I see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered by natural selection more and more aquatic in their habits, with longer and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale."

Don't laugh, I beg you. It's all of a piece with my whole argument, for I have said all along that it is easy for natural selection to fit any animal for any changed habits whatever. “It is difficult to tell, and immaterial for us, whether habits generally change first and structure afterwards, or whether slight modifications of structure lead to changed habits." How can I tell you? All is fish that comes to my net. [End quote]

The Darwin faith is a dead faith indeed, for “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). “…When will ye be wise? He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see?” (Ps 94:8, 9)."

I am curious. Do you have any argument against the validity of the theory of evolution that is not an appeal to the logical fallacy of ridicule, or an appeal to the logical fallacy of question begging?

All The Articles Of The Darwin Faith By The Rev. F.O. Morris, B.A.

I believe in a bear "swimming for hours with a widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects on the water." "Very like a whale!" I think I hear you saying, but I can't help it if you do. "I see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered by natural selection more and more aquatic in their habits, with longer and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale."

Don't laugh, I beg you. It's all of a piece with my whole argument, for I have said all along that it is easy for natural selection to fit any animal for any changed habits whatever. “It is difficult to tell, and immaterial for us, whether habits generally change first and structure afterwards, or whether slight modifications of structure lead to changed habits." How can I tell you? All is fish that comes to my net. [End quote]

The Darwin faith is a dead faith indeed, for “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). “…When will ye be wise? He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see?” (Ps 94:8, 9).

"It's actually rather amazing the leaps of logic one can achieve when viewing the anecdotal evidence of random biological relationships while ignoring the billions of others where, glaringly, no such evidence exists."

Please explain the "leaps of logic" to which you refer. Please identify the "anecdotal" evidence to which you refer, and identify the "billions" of biological relationships that have been ignored.


"Perhaps one day, true academic freedom will allow the "religion" of spontaneous generation to go the way of alchemy.""

Spontaneous generation is a rejected biological concept. It is not a religion. Moreover, I do not understand why you reference it, as it has no direct relevance to the current topic of discussion.

It's actually rather amazing the leaps of logic one can achieve when viewing the anecdotal evidence of random biological relationships while ignoring the billions of others where, glaringly, no such evidence exists.

Perhaps one day, true academic freedom will allow the "religion" of spontaneous generation to go the way of alchemy.

Dimensio, or as another recently put it.

“Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

"Listen Einstein wanna be take your pseudo intellectual persona and redirect your attention to someone else Im done with you."

If you are unwilling to justify your assertions with evidence, then why should your claims be considered credible?

"Please explain the specific physical processes involved in such a "design" mechanism, and cite the direct observed instances of these processer or explain the observed events that from which the processes of the "design" mechanism have been directly derived."

and this is also why ID isn't falsifiable or sciencetific. they can't describe the designer as doing so would make it unteachable in schools, and paradoxically but not defining the designer and the methods he/she uses to build things it makes it unscientific as its can't make falsifiable testable examples. i toyed with an ID person a month ago asking him to explain the processes by which the designer built such organisms, or how the designer would explain human chromosome 2 fusions or ERV's and making them falsifiable. Needless to say he couldn't come up with a falsifiable explanation for those examples and so the 'design inference' becomes nothing more than subjective inference of statistical patterns.

“Common Design by the Creator can also explain the similarities between life forms, the existence vestigial organs, the validity of comparative biology, genetics.”

This proposal of yours requires some explanation star, like why would the designer purposely leave such evidence like fossils around or genetic evidence like ERV’s and Human Chromosome 2, which collectively spanning across all those hundreds of millions and billions of years suggest not common design, but common shared ancestry. After all, why would the designer continually come back to keep designing and building organisms, which would be quite similar, both to extinct species and soon to be living species according to the fossil record?

Moreover, if you’re arguing they are designed and intelligently at that, why are some 99% of all species, which have ever existed, extinct? To me, when 99% of your work is no longer around it doesn’t suggest the work was very intelligently built.

“I agree here but Biblical creation should also be taught because…”

Sorry, constitutional law forbids it, also the evidence for it is quite lacking star. We teach what the evidence supports and not what pleases people or fits their religion. If we did, we would have to teach about Xenu and scientology nonsense.

‘There is no evidence for Biblical creation but, by the same token, there is no evidence for macroevolution.”

Yup, except for all those collections of fossils and genetics which collectively can only be explained by notions such as common descent or modification with descent.

“Wrong, there is no direct observation of macro-evolution, it requires timescales that effectively prevent direct observation,”

Cough* Fossils*cough. Fossils are more of a direction observation then we have of atoms and their properties star. Besides, macroevolution as I’ve stated endlessly has been observed with microorganisms, flies and others. These species reproduce faster so the results are more readily obvious in our short life timescales.

"Common Design by the Creator can also explain the similarities between life forms, the existence vestigial organs, the validity of comparative biology, genetics."

Please explain the specific physical processes involved in such a "design" mechanism, and cite the direct observed instances of these processer or explain the observed events that from which the processes of the "design" mechanism have been directly derived.