Scientific IMAX films too controversial for the South

Thanks Max. You are one of the fun conservatives on this board to listen to even if I do not always agree with you.

 

A few things.

1. You are a totally uncool Republican Moron...

I'm kidding! I appreciate your graciousness and open mind and its truly a pleasure to debate these issues with you.

Now seriously.

1. Evolution isn't necessarily a process where one species totally wipes out the species it evolved from. As I was pointing out with rats evolving into bats and whales the rats may still remain if they find a niche where there is no evolutionary advantage to becoming bats. So as another pointed out in a way were all transitory organisms and at the same time many of the transitory organisms are still with us. So you could say that water rats, otters, seals are transitory organism from rat to whale.

2. Fossilization among any dead organism is a rare event and finding any particular fossil is rare so there is still much to be learned from the fossil record. In general though the fossil record has supported evolution although it has shown it to be a very uneven process. Also in terms of proving evolution there is other evidence to support it besides the fossil records. Genetic studies and comparative anatomy have shown the interrelationship between different species that supports the idea that either they evolved from common ancestors or even could be evolutionary stepping stones to each other. For instance we and chimpanzees share about 98.5% of the same general genome so its very likely that we either descended from a common ancestor and that chimps might be the close to the common ancestor but they didn't evolve the human traits of intelligence and hairlessness since they were in an environment where that didn't prove to be an advantage in breeding.

Perhaps one way to prove if this is the case is to do an experiment where you get a population of chimps and kill the least intelligent of them before they can reproduce and repeat each generation and see if over a thousand generations you get humans.

 

Strictly speaking morality has nothing to do with science since the goal of science is to find the most likely explanation to any given phenomena. That that explanation might have huge moral implication is an issue that is left to philosophy and religion.

That said it would be a poor scientist who didn't follow Occam's Razor because it didn't fit their philosophy because their theory would be quickly overruled by another scientist who did follow Occam's Razor. Largely science has to be conducted without apriori beliefs that will rule out possibilities that conflict with those beliefs but best fit the evidence given.

One of the best examples of this is Darwin himself who was a firm believer in Christianity but still developed a theory that challenges the Biblical view of creation.

 

Here is some interesting links on evolution. I'm huge Stephen Jay Gould so I am biased in favor of arguments.

But these do discuss some of the different ideas surrounding macroevolution and the whole theory fact thing.

I posted the whole articles in the creation thread, but I'll just post the links here in case anyone cares to read the essays.

http://www.evolutionary.tripod.com/...h_86_22-30.html

http://www.stephenjaygould.org/libr...and-theory.html