I don't even know if I could claim to be that though I did tentatively for a while. I don't have any quarrel with evolution but I also don't have any with any other positions on origins questions. I know they use evolution in medicine but I don't have a good enough grasp on science for it to be a determining factor for me personally though I've turned up things like the VMAT-2 gene seeking to find out more.

That's fair. Hope you enjoy the videos.

quoted for truth

You might like checking into John C. Sanford's ideas zumby. He's a famous geneticist. You'll probably follow his ideas better than I do if you like science.

Genetic Entropy: Is the Human Race Degenerating?

http://www.emmanuelmsu.org/index.php...d=98&showall=1

Mmm, he's a proponent of Intelligent Design. That page doesn't go into any detail on his specific hypotheses so I can't really go into any detail with a rebuttal from a scientific perspective but here's why I think you should treat ID with more skepticism that you seem to:

1. The Nobel Prize can be more than $1,000,000. That's a big cash incentive for any biologist to disprove evolution. Despite this, only a handful of biologists disagree with the fundamentals of Darwinism.
2. If you think that the scientific community is capable of falsifying the evidence en masse, why wouldn't they have done it for abiogenesis and/or whatever caused the Big Bang?
3. The major Christian churches tend to accept evolution. There is no scriptural reason for them to do so, but they understand that evolution is a 'fact' and therefore their credibility would be undermined by denying it.

I think people have gotten too politically polarized in groups on the study of origins.

I didn't think of his observation as disproving all of evolution as much as I was caught by the idea that the human race is degenerating.

The human race could be degenerating and we have not spotted it because they keep coming up with more and more classifications for diseases which make them seem like new ones. In fact our advancement as humans in knowledge could cause us to degenerate faster physically. Studying requires sedentary activities like reading, sitting, using computers, etc. A lot of diseases today are related to sedentary activities. Alzheimers, for example. They say our minds are affected by how healthy our bodies are.

Did you know a few hundred years ago an English bowman could pull a bow almost effortlessly and a man today can't? They say today's men are lucky if they can get that bow half way back.

Agreed, facts are facts, regardless of politics or religion.

A good and easy to understand example is that some infertility treatments may increase infertility in successive generations which would otherwise have been selected against.

Lol....I'm going to have to learn this better.

I've been digging around and coming up with terms like devolution. Sanford argues for devolution. He even has 2 papers on it. Hard to access them though. See #31 and 32 in the footnotes of this link on Devolution (biology):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Scheele

There's also Scheele's book to read:
"Degeneration - the end of the evolution theory"

I have to check it out.

http://evolution-is-degeneration.com...?PaginaID=2577

Look up evolutionary suicide

I think this causes for a new thread.

Also, this reminds me about a circular thought process that I have been thinking about recently:

1. What you do is based on your knowledge which is based on your experience
2. What you (choose to) experience is based on your knowledge.

"choose to" is in parenthesis because you might to things not based on your experience e.g. you might do something for no reason/randomly.

I think the main issue with this argument of "entrapment" or "limitations" of what you can do is to realize that the type of experience in (1) is not the same as the type of experience in (2).

I think God must have a sense of humor. Look at Jean Baptiste LaMarck. I noticed he's the Chevalier de la Marck. Marck...hmmm....Sin means "missing the mark" in the bible.

John The Baptist of (on) the Mark?

Lamarck has a lot of theories discussed by evolutionary students and they use evolution in medicine.

What if God has used the theory of evolution to correct for degeneracy?

Lamarck is one of the pre-Darwinian people who discussed degeneracy in the 1800s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degeneration

Btw, God's mark is the Cross. Some people like Dr. Stephen E. Jones say the cross is God's signature...."X" marks the spot.

Some people like Gould consider Lamarck the real father of evolution not Darwin.

wikiquote:
Stephen Jay Gould argues that Lamarck was the "primary evolutionary theorist", in that his ideas, and the way in which he structured his theory set the tone for much of the subsequent thinking in evolutionary biology, through to the present day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Lamarck

No wonder Gould and Richard Dawkins disagree on certain critical things. They're following different father's explanations.

Will the real father of evolution please stand up?

There's a few errors in your reading here:

Gould says "primary" meaning "first in a sequence". Let me add back in the part of the Wikipedia article you omitted
Again, there are multiple issues with these statements

1) No-one claims that Darwin invented evolution. There is a long history of evolutionary thought stretching back to the ancient Greeks. Darwin simply proposed the fundamental mechanism (natural selection) by which evolution happens.
2) Both Gould and Dawkins are Darwinists, not LaMarckians.
3) As far as I know, the disagreement between Dawkins & Gould over Punctuated Equilibrium is primarily that Dawkins felt Gould was strawmanning Darwin as a phyletic gradualist in order to make PE sound more novel/interesting than it was.

I don't know what this means, but assuming it's some sort of pun.

I don't know what the significance of these statements are, but Lamarckian evolution was widely discredited (though epigenetics suggest that some aspects might play a role) and is certainly not applied in medicine. It's Darwinian natural selection that applies to medicine/vaccines etc.

Again, this a bit of a misreading. Lamarckian evolution proposed that characteristics acquired in one's lifetime could be passed to one's children. E.g. if you spend a lot of time at the gym you give birth to muscley babies.* It's Bénédict Morel who is specifically arguing for degeneration and is referring back to Lamarkian evolution as a mechanism for it. Note that Morel was arguing this point some years before Darwin published On The Origin of Species.

It's also worth noting that there's nothing in Darwinian evolution that would prevent undesirable characteristics being passed down provided that those characteristics didn't reduce the organisms chance of successfully reproducing.

Doesn't evolution have a "flow" to it?

Doesn't speaking the world into creation have a "flow" to it too?

Hmmm...

Some people think too narrowly, some people think too widely...

People look all over the place finding a different point (mental idea) to focus on...

Just look at Gould and Dawkins:

Part I—Battle Joined

In the introductory chapter the author points out that there have been many conflicts in biology. Still, few have been as public or as polemical as the one between Dawkins and Gould. Dawkins sees evolution as a competition between gene lineages, where organisms are vehicles for those genes. Gould, a paleontologist in the tradition of George Gaylord Simpson, has a different perspective. For example, he sees chance as very important, and views organisms as being more important than genes. Their broader world views also differ, for instance they have very different beliefs about the relationship between religion and science.

[edit] Part II—Dawkins' World

This begins with a discussion on genes and gene lineages (chapter 2). Dawkins' view on the nature of evolution, as outlined in The Selfish Gene, has genes as the units of selection, both in the first replicators and in more complex organisms, where alliances of genes are formed (and sometimes broken). He then discusses in chapter 3, Dawkins' view of heritability, with genes as difference makers that satisfy replicator principles and have phenotypic power, increasing the likelihood of phenotypic expression, depending on environmental context. In chapter 4, he discusses aspects of genomes and genetic replication, using various examples. He notes that in a story about magpie aggression, "Dawkins' story will be about genes and vehicles", whereas Gould and others will describe it in terms of phenotypic fitness. (p. 39) He discusses ways in which genes "lever their way into the next generation", including genes that are loners, or 'Outlaws', and which promote their own replication at the expense of other genes in their organism's genome. He then discusses the role of extended phenotypes, in which genotypes that influence their environment further increase the like likelihood of replication (chapter 4). Chapter 5 explores selfish genes and the selection within the animal kingdom of cooperation as opposed to altruism, levels of selection, and the evolution of evolvability itself. Sterelny notes that on the issue of high-level selection, "Dawkins and Gould are less sharp than they once were." (p. 65)

In chapter 6, Sterelny notes that "despite the heat of some recent rhetoric, the same is true of the role of selection in generating evolutionary change", (p. 67) and naive adaptationism. "Everyone accepts that many characteristics of organisms are not the direct result of selection", as in the example of redness of blood, which is a by-product of its oxygen-carrying properties. (p. 70) Numerous general truths are uncontroversial "though their application to particular cases may be. Nor is there disagreement between Gould and Dawkins on core cases", such as echolocation in bats, which "everyone agrees is an adaptation". (p. 71) They do however differ on the relative role of selection and variation. For example, they have different emphases on development. Developmental constraints are fundamental to Gould's approach. Dawkins gives this less weight, and has been more interested in enhanced possibilities open to lineages as a result of developmental revolutions. For example, the evolution of segmentation increases variation possibilities. He discusses this in Climbing Mount Improbable, and "returns to similar themes at the end of The Ancestor's Tale: major transitions in evolution are developmental transitions, transitions that make new variants possible, and hence new adaptive complexes possible". (pp. 77–78)

"Gould, on the other hand, is inclined to bet that the array of possibilities open to a lineage is tightly restricted, often to minor variants of its current state." (p. 78) Gould sees morphological stability as "probably explained by constraints on the supply of variation to selection". (p. 78) But whereas in his earlier work Gould considered variation supply as a brake on evolutionary change, in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory he carefully notes that it can also enhance possibilities for change. "So while both Dawkins and Gould recognise the central role of developmental biology in an explanation of evolutionary change, they make different bets as to what the role will be. Gould but not Dawkins thinks that one of these roles is as a brake", damping down change possibilities. (p. 78) Another difference is Dawkins conception of evolutionary biology's central problem as the explanation of adaptive complexity, whereas Gould has largely focused on the existence of large-scale patterns in the history of life that are not explained by natural selection. "A further disagreement concerns the existence and importance of these patterns", (p. 79) which leads on to Part III.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawkins_vs._Gould