Moontanman

New species of Sting Ray Evolving! Until recently there were no North American freshwater sting rays but in the St Johns river in Florida and several freshwater lakes and streams in the region a new species of sting ray is evolving. The Atlantic stingray (Dasyatis sabina) has populations that are now living permanently in freshwater, these new freshwater stingrays are both geographically isolated and reproductively isolated. This stingray normally inhabits marine environments and occasionally traveling into brackish and freshwater environments but always returning to the marine environment. This new population is land locked and lives in freshwater their entire lives, even reproducing in freshwater which the original species does not normally do. This is very good example of an animal population splitting up into two different species...

At one time the idea that lightning was the result of an anthropomorphic God throwing lightning bolts around to show his displeasure, i am quite certain if you tried you could still find people who considers that a valid assertion but it is none the less no longer accepted as a way to explain lightning...

Nitrogen fixing bacteria would be better and faster than lightning. I'm pretty sure these bacteria need the minerals in volcanic soil, Molybdenum is important to nitrogen fixing bacteria, I'm not sure if Molybdenum occurs more often in volcanic soils or not ... http://www.the-compost-gardener.com/actinomycetes.html

God on the side of an alligator..... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-400709/The-alligators-skin-spells-God.html Any depiction of Muhammad is prohibited or any other depiction of Allah or depictions of religious figures at all if i remember correctly, accuracy doesn't matter...

Wow, 84 replies just to blame it all on Skeptic, some how that doesn't surprise me at all....

The only thing that bothers me is that I tried to discuss this with a person who uses misrepresentation, lies, straw-man, arguments, and misleading appeals to authority in place of truth and evidence. Some one who cannot win with brilliance so he tries his best to baffle the opponent with bullshit....

Jackson I can hardly believe the hubris of even you saying something like that, do you really think that atheists suddenly start begging god for forgiveness on their death beds? For me eternity is divided quite neatly into three parts, before my existence, during my existence and after my existence, the idea of death is no problem but i can't imagine the horror of believing in God but never quite knowing for sure what he wants or if you have failed and will therefor spend eternity in horrific agony, the constant reading and studying something with no real evidence and trying to understand what you need to do to avoid hell. The idea that anyone will spend an eternity in hell is in of it's self a horror I prefer not to think about. I seriously prefer simple death to that scenario any day....

You're correct, I read the article but I missed the "kill" cancer in the title, sorry... for some reason i thought it said suppressed, I must be getting senile

My critiques are overwhelmingly correct, it's you proselytizing a totally outdated and falsified world view that is suffering. Your constant appeals to an authority that is not considered an authority by anyone but creationists is sad, my link was an attempt to show how flawed your appeals to Hoyle really were. You have been totally dishonest in this from the very beginning, from the time you straw-manned the discussion by being dishonest about what you wanted to discuss to the pitiful attempts at appeals to an authority that was never really an authority to begin with. This is your dog and pony show but it is sadly a one trick pony that everyone has seen multiple times and is no longer much of a show.

Cypress, Emilio, so you guys are going with Hoyle's Fallacy? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoyle%27s_fallacy Good luck with that

Not free oxygen emilio... See above Agreed No, you have a profound lack of knowledge about this emilio, no free oxygen is necessary for life or amino acids... Evidently not..... Your link only proves my point, did you read it at all? No, this is simply not true, this builds on all the other things you get wrong emilio, every link in your chain is broken... Not free oxygen. No, this is totally false This is true. And as I said before no this is not true... No you do not... This does not support your assertion in any way shape or form Making claims over and over doesn not make them true...

Again you display an amazing lack of understanding the true details of what life and evolution is and how it works, there was no abrupt change to oxygen, it took many millions of years and complex life did not evolve until there was oxygen, not the other way around. Read this closely, write it down, this is an important point, life did not and does not require oxygen... This is totally not true, life did and does quite well with out oxygen, the first life forms, in fact most life forms do not use oxygen, it took literally billions of years before life evolved that needed oxygen. No you are incorrect and making the claims here, you need to show this is true and you cannot. You need to show life did not have favorable odds, so far all you have shown is a profound misunderstanding of life, evolution, physics, statistics, and reality. You are simply deep in a large river in Egypt , if you want to believe in miracles feel free to do so but do not try to prove their existence with no evidence but that belief.

Like I've said before it's not God i have a problem with it's his fan club....

So cypress even though you told me you didn't want to discuss reality and that I should start my own thread if i wanted to discuss how things really work all you really wanted to do was assert your own off base version of reality, not discuss the probabilities out of context as you tried to claim. As i said earlier your contention of the odds is totally bogus. read the following closely, its how statistics and odds really work, not the bogus assertions you are trying to back because they support your world view of creationism. If you buy a lottery ticket, in a lottery where the odds are 1,000,000 to 1 and 1,000,000 tickets are sold your odds of winning is 1,000,000 to 1 but the odds that some one will will is 1 to 1, even on one planet your odds, if they were real which they are not, would not be some outrageous number because it is totally disingenuous to say that each variable is only tried once, the truth is that over the course of millions of years the number of tries out weighs the long odds, just like millions of lottery tickets being sold on the early Earth millions if not billions of "tickets' were being sold every second for millions of years so even very long odds events will take place many times. the absolute truth is that your assertion that the odds are long to begin with is simply not true, a source of energy does drive the simple toward the complex with no outside creator influence, now don't bullshit me and say a creator "God" is not what you are asserting because we all know that is exactly what you are asserting and the assertion has been shown to be unnecessary so many times it begins to look just like the bogus odds of 1/10^41,000,000, 000 or what ever it was.... You contention needs to be backed up, you made it now back it up don't try to make us follow some bullshit special conditions that only occur in your own personal universe, show the evidence from this reality.... You are the one displaying a fundamental lack understanding cypress, your failure to see that doesn't make you correct, as I said earlier you made the claims now give us some evidence or stop making the assertion!

Mica, a layered mineral with unusual properties could have helped form the template for organic molecules to come together for the formation of life says Helen Hansma of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Mica could have sheltered molecules that were the begining of cells, allowing the non living organic chemcials to come together in ways that helped form life. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100806093104.htm

What is your point with this? The study I provided did not say cannabis killed cancer cells....

oh contrare mon ami, the reducing atmosphere of the early Earth was perfectly suitable for life, maybe not for you but life is quite happy in a reducing atmosphere, evolution would change that atmosphere and allow complex life to evolve but a reducing atmosphere is no barrier to life in fact life could not come about in a oxidizing atmosphere ... I agree, the odds do not improve with each roll of the dice but many rolls insure that all possibilities will occur, if you by a lottery ticket your chances of winning are no better than any other ticket but none the less some one is far more likely to win than any particular one, but since the real odds are 1:1 I see no reason to consider the odds as a problem. Again this is true, you do not seem to have a really good grasp of statistics... As I pointed out at the beginning of this post you do not seem to have a good grasp of the requirements for life either...

Great article Bruce, thanks for finding it, I am guilty of misusing chaos and order as well but i think my point of chemical evolution from simple to complex driven by available energy is valid. I have been working on the idea of a terrestrial planet with a hydrogen atmosphere, maybe twice the diameter of the Earth, there used to be a site called alien planet maker or something like that where you could plug in the parameters and it would tell you what the conditions on the planet would be like, gravity, how long the atmosphere would last, plate tectonics duration, maximum mountain height, and basic stuff like that. I can't find it anymore does any one know what happened to it or if there is another site similar to it?

Here is an interesting little piece of information, I'm not sure just how "independent" it is but it seems from the assertion in this article that Cannabis or at least the chemicals in Cannabis including THC suppress cancer... Who knew!? Our government knew and has known for 36 years! http://www.gsalternative.com/2010/05/cannabinoids-kill-cancer/

I've followed the waffling back and forth on the Early Earth's atmosphere since i was a kid, about 40 years now since i became interested, everything from ammonia, CO, oxides of nitrogen, methane to just plain nitrogen. I always thought the idea of an extensive hydrogen atmosphere made sense, (nothing like the gas giants of course) a few psi partial pressure would be significant. I've seen figures of a many millions years of methane and ammonia, hydrogen should last a couple million at least The earth has a fairly deep gravity well and hydrogen wouldn't just leap off the earth in a few hours like gas escaping from an airlock. I'd love to read that paper if you can find a free read....

You are exactly correct Emilio, no matter how many times you roll the dice the odds are the same... The number of rolls do not matter nor does the time over which you roll the dice. However, your odds of 1/10^41,000 are a bit long, statistically the odds of life developing on the Earth are 1:1, 100% , we know of only one planet capable of supporting life and that one planet has life so the odds are 1:1. Statistically I don't see how you could come up with any other conclusion... So going by your own logic all Earth like planets will have life which is exactly what I would predict as well, great minds do indeed think alike

Is this an example of win at any cost behavior of the right? http://blogs.alternet.org/oleoleolson/2010/08/05/massive-censorship-of-digg-uncovered/ Ok, i admit i was digging at the Righties a little bit but isn't this disturbing no matter which "side" you are on? Trying to hide the truth to support your world view? To me it's inexcusable!

First off the idea that life is random process is totally bogus, every bit as bogus as th idea that order cannot arise from chaos. You continuously stating other wise will not change reality, I did say that if indeed your premise was true then life would be unlikely to happen, of courts the fact that it did happen at least once is obvious. I was not trying to hijack your thread, I was trying to participate in the only way I know how by stating an observable truth, two in this case. Order does arise from chaos and that a build up of chemical energy can give rise to complexity. now I'm sorry if I misinterpreted your OP but i did not make claims that could not be backed up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory http://nirmukta.com/2009/11/13/complexity-explained-9-how-did-complex-molecules-like-proteins-and-dna-emerge-spontaneously/

If the formation of life was a completely random thing then the probability of life occurring would be infinitesimally small, almost but not quite impossible. Fortunately we now know it isn't a random chance, not only does order tend to arise from chaos but in the presence of excess energy chemistry tends to form more and more complex chemical structures.

Your link is meaningless to this discussion, did you really mean to show a link to the word scowl? Russia and Africa have small amounts of religious activity? Africa is a hot bed of religion with American evangelicals going there and intensionally stirring up a culture of hatred against homosexuals by claiming out right that homosexuals are advocating molesting children and those same religious workers supporting the murder of homosexuals. Russia is deeply religious, always was, even when it was officially against the law, China I have no information on. Marriage is a religious tradition but religion is not part of the push to ban gay marriage? Are you sure you want to make that claim? Don't be insulting Jackson, we've been on opposite sides of this argument for along time across two forums at least. You know i am not a hit run poster who doesn't read the threads... if there are churches who are willing to marry homosexuals then why shouldn't they be allowed to marry? Right now they can't even get the secular version of marriage, marriage is not an additional right, many homosexuals have deep religious feelings, i personally don't understand why but they do, i go to a church that the congregation is mostly homosexual. if homosexuals could go to the JP and get the license and be united under the law you would have a point but they can't. i will state my point again so it is clear, as long as a church is willing to marry homosexuals then why not? You make a good point with the secular version of marriage but homosexuals can't get that either so your point does not hold water... You know I'm not implying that heterosexuals are abnormal Jackson, i never in any way shape or form suggested that, no activism is not necessarily the act of imposing your views on others, i don't care what others think, i want homosexuals to have the same rights as any other human being. If this is forcing my views on others then so is asserting racism is wrong or asserting any other rights as a human being are being denied to some one. Directed at you personally? no, it is directed at the people who support denying other humans of their basic rights simply because you feel like it's wrong instead of being able to show specific reasons why it's harmful to society in some way. My point would be that the religious do not have to defend their position all they have to do is evoke the vague emotional feelings of gays being wrong and trying to stuff their views down the throats of others when all they are really asking is the same basic human dignity anyone else has.