<i>I remember reading about a fossil of human and dinosaur tracks, in the same rock, and even crossing each other, which would seem to contribute to your point A. Assuming my memory is not deficient and the evidence is valid, how many examples of this would we need? </i>

The dinosaur/’human’ tracks have been pretty convincingly explained (by my standards anyway). You can see a summary at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/paluxy.html.

If legitimate examples were found, I don’t have a hard number for ‘how many’; enough so that the mixing of organisms from different eras couldn’t be easily written off as a geological anomaly.

<i>Others, such as point E, don’t sound sufficient. Given similar inputs (for a given definition of “similar”), should we not expect similar outputs? </i>

What I was getting at is that if we got to another planet and found animals which didn’t just fill the same niches as our animals but were morphologically and genetically very similar, I’d take that as decent evidence of intelligent design. If the animals there were cross-fertile with the ones here, the way all hominids are on ‘Star Trek’, it’d be extremely convincing evidence that an intelligent designer was at work.

Some of the criteria seem to have been met in certain ways. For example, I remember reading about a fossil of human and dinosaur tracks, in the same rock, and even crossing each other, which would seem to contribute to your point A. Assuming my memory is not deficient and the evidence is valid, how many examples of this would we need?

Others sound a bit beyond the pale, such as your point B. By that criterion, no scientific theory is safe.

Others, such as point E, don’t sound sufficient. Given similar inputs (for a given definition of “similar”), should we not expect similar outputs? I suppose we wouldn’t know until such evidence is found, if it exists. Perhaps the mere use of DNA is “similar enough”, while off-planet humanoids with nearly identical DNA may not.

But I will have to think on this further. I cannot quibble; you have certainly met my challenge.

I think it’d be very unlikely for anyone to name a single piece of evidence that would falsify modern evolutionary theory overnight, but I can definitely imagine results which would eventually make it clear that it was not a good fit for the evidence. I’m not an evolutionary biologist, but here are some things which would cause me to consider macroevolution profoundly undermined, or possibly completely recontextualized (a la Newton/Einstein).

a) discovery of large numbers of new fossil deposits containing bones of animals with no age stratification whatsoever in current terms; hominids show up before dinosaurs and with trilobites, the dinosaurs have modern canine bones in their stomachs, etc.

b) the revelation that all current fossil evidence has been systematically faked somehow

c) the discovery that human DNA is more similar to, say, box turtle DNA than chimpanzee DNA

d) convincing evidence that the earth is only 10,000 years old

e) The discovery of animals on another planet possessing DNA and which are in other ways homologous to animals on our planet.

As if Darwinian macroevolution is any more provable or falsifiable than ID. Yet it is taught in nearly every biology class in the USA.

Don’t agree? Fine. Post your falsifiability criteria for macroevolution.

I’ve been looking for those criteria for a while now, and no one has taken me up on the offer.

What I don’t understand is how ID proponents and agnostics tend to nit-pick around established, proven, and useful theories such as Evolution and its engine, natural selection.

If you want to see a theory falling apart, look at the Standard Model of Cosmology. Contrarian evidence has been mounting for decades, and the whole issue of Dark Matter and Dark Energy stinks of the suggestion of “cosmic ether” posited pre-Einstein.

ID makes mountains out of molehills and when that fails, invents s**t up from scratch.

The whole fuss is because scientists have a theory which pretty nicely explains all life in general, and some of them absolutely can’t stand it when people don’t give them credit for this.

Depends. Pursuit is probably OK. Unless it persuades you that “there are things Man is not meant to know,” the tree-of-life part. May be true, but to find out what things we cannot learn we must find out what we can.

For myself, I fail to see why a putative God could not come up with a self-modifying system, which seems to be what is being said. Why should a Supreme Being be limited to only miracles, any more than far-from-supreme people must be limited to waiting for a lightning strike to cook food or crawling to travel?

As Bohr once said, “stop telling God what to do.”

Color me an idiot, but SCIENCE is what should be taught in a SCIENCE classroom–you know, things that meet the definition of science: things that are falsifiable or provable.

A humble question.

Neo-Darwinian synthesis posits that natural selection acting on random mutation is sufficient to explain the origin of new lifeforms, correct? Can you point me to a falsifiable or provable test of this? To date I’m not aware of any falsifiable or provable experiment that shows that natural selection acting on random mutation can produce completely new living cells, tissue, or organs. I’ve done some poking around talk.origins for such a study and could not find one but it’s conceivable I simply missed it.

In the absence of such a study I will be forced to conclude that the Neo-Darwinian claim that natural selection can produce completely new living matter is not real science by the very definition of science used by its proponents. Would that be unreasonable?

Bible: How the world was created

Cradle: It asks the interesting question of why do all the myths have such an active solar system? Nowadays, if we were to sui generis make a mythology, we probably would not assign the planets a major role.

Perhaps, after Noah, the repopulation of the Earth was during a time of great chaos in the solar system. Cradle speculates that Venus was spat out by Jupiter, as the myth says that a goddess came from the head of Zeus.

I really think the central idea of Cradle, i.e. lets admit we scientists really don’t know what we are doing in cosmology, and should start with a clean sheet of paper is a good one.

Its idle speculation, but it does answer two questions: 1)Why is the Bible account so different (its describing a different and earlier event) 2)Why do so many creation myths have such a wild start?

Anyways, I reccommend Cradle of Saturn as a prime example of out of the box thinking on this subject.

My question is this: What’s the deal, Dean? Have you made up your mind and want to know why I don’t want my kid taught ID in school – or is it that you haven’t made up your mind and want to be convinced that ID makes about as much sense being taught in the classroom as Astrology?

As for the DI article, that isn’t science either: that’s anecdotal evidence from an extremely biased source.

You’ve gotta hang with some normal scientists, Dean, and get away from the crazies.

And no, Duesberg is NOT one of the latter. You might want to ask what HIS opinion of ID is, BTW.