FlaSoxxJim

Agreed.

Bases loaded with no hits... :puke :fyou

Willie coughing it up on that potential DP could be the undoing.

Venus and Mars or something, I don't know. When I was maybe 7 years old I could rationalize that if here's no God then why do we care what we do, why don't we all become murderers, etc. But I don't, don't, don't get it when an adult says it. Who for a minute suggests you are not responsible for your actions while you're alive? Back to working to make the here and now the best possible if that's all there is, the attitude that it 'just doesn't matter what any of us do because if there's no God and no Salvation then what is the point' does not wash. There is morality without God. There is right and wrong without God and there is accountability for unjust actions even if any pennance doled out is confined to the material world alone. The Divine Carrot and Stick seems a childish approach to it all, and I don't mean to reduce your faith to that but if life divorced from a Divine Agent can't be seen as intrinsically meaningful and capable of being grounded in a humanistic morality, then there's a disconnect we'll not get around in this discussion.

Uribe is the leadoff guy and Willie is just another 9th hitter in my mind these days.

Willie's proving rather useless in that leadoff spot.

Jacque and suck me cacque :fyou

Way damaso! let's get it back! Do we have 5 solo shots tonight? I've lost track.

Is this the BP meltdown we've been dreading? I've been nervous about Pollitte each outing while most around here have pegged him as one of the sure things. Crap, Tying run Marte's suppose to be the other sure thing. No such thing, huh?

That does suck. About how many games are they carrying this year? And wasn't there supposed to be a ComCast deal that would have affected this?

Damn, I'll say.

And what's up with that? I cam ehome expecting my new, very expensive Extra Innings deal would carry the game, but no dice.

You're welcome - those that stayed awake (you can feel sorry for my students now...). But... As far as losing the agenda... Pally, ya gotta practice what you preach. your "what do we (Christians) fear" query is loaded because you answer your own question by deriding science as not "offering hope either way." Then you take a token stab at the flipside question by saying science has nothing to fear because, hey, who's not down with Rapture? Either way you slice it, yay for Christians! Fair enough, Go Christians!! It's the "offers no hope" barb that repeatedly irks me - we've been down this road before and several boardsters have been along for the ride. A secular humanist existence doesn't in any way equate to a hopeless, hapless existence despite the best efforts of some people of faith to paint it that way. If there's no Divine carrot at the end of the stick for me, then I had better bust ass to make the here and now the best here and now I can. If I'm not going to see the people I love for all eternity on the Big White Cloud, I had better make damn sure they know what they mean to me here and now. I can be blown away by the 70 sextillian stars shining down on me in a 14 billion year old universe without getting despondent over the smallness and accidental nature of our being. And I can be content and downright jazzed with my serindipitous existence in a cosmic grandness that is going to outlast us all human folly. You've admonished me for suggesting I understand anything of what your faith is to you, and I've taken that to heart. But you see no equivalent slight in suggesting that a human existence without a Divine Agent can not be meaningful, satisfying and all the salvation one expects or needs. Who is the one with the agenda?

Agreed. The Southtown, with Cowley and Ladewski, is easily the best print coverage of the Sox around.

Yep, that airplane bit is a common and useful analogy, and why Gould, Dawkins, I, and others regularly revisit it in the course of evolutionary debate. As far as the odds of life occurring here and apparently nowhere else in a 14 billion year old universe that is more expansive than we can comprehend, I think perhaps the airplane building itself, the roomful of monkeys cranking out the works of Shakespear, etc., are more likely. I mean, last year, astronomers calculated JUST the number of stars in the visible (with kick-ass telescopes) sky at 70 SEXTILLION! That's a 7 with 22 zeros after it, for anyone not yet sick of exponential notation. For all who have pondered the question of whether there are more stars in the sky or grains of sand on the beach, the answer is that just these visible stars are 10X more abundant than all the sand on all the beaches and all the deserts of the entire planet. Mind numbing to say the least. My personal belief (and continued props to all who hold their own differing views and allow others to do the same) is that it is human vanity for us to still consider ourselves to be the center of the universe, particularly since we've been around only for the last eyeblink of the life of the universe. And in fact, given the shear vastness of the universe, there are a lot of respectable people who think that life on other worlds would not be surprising and it would instead be the lack of life elsewhere that would be impossible to comprehend. The shortcoming of the creationist spin on the Evolution = the chances of the airplane self-assembling argument is exactly as I pointed out earlier. But people don't push a button and out pops a plane. It is built component by component in an integrated fashion. And the Wright Brothers didn't build the Concorde, but their simple original design did evolve into the Concorde over the course of about 70 years of gradually improving avionics. Evolution works in very mjuch the same way, with the only real difference being that the Wright Brothers and every airplane manufacturer afterward set out specifically to build a plane, whereas evolution (the "Blind Watchmaker," "Blind Planemaker," etc.) has no specified end-point in mind - never had and never will. Random mutations are tried on for size and if they confer a fitness advantage given the environment at that specific point in time, they are passed onto future generations. In this manner, they have the potential to accumulate and result in measurable change - variation within populations > subspecies > distinct species > distinct higher taxa... It only took 70 years to go from Kittyhawk to Concorde precicely because it is a directed, purposeful, end-point oriented avionic evolution. It only takes a few generations for animal and plant husbandry scientists to develop dramatically different strains of crops and livestock for the same reason. It has taken 4 billion years to get from single-celled pre-bacteria to modern Metazoan forms precicely because there is no direction in mind, and no defined end-point. When the environment (the filter of Natural Selection) changes, so do the rules as to what constitutes a fit variant in a population. As a downy feather-bearing Pro-Aves (a dinosaur well on the path toward true birds), I may have enjoyed new success as local environmental conditions changed and the climate cooled. But if the climate warmed again a few thousand years later, my descendants may well find themselves decidedly unsuited to the new conditions. but there is no planning ahead. There is only throwing down against the current environment with the genetic hand you have been dealt and seeing if you have a better habd than other individuals in the population. And wen the rules (environment) change, hopefully your line can cope with the changes or else the line will go extinct.

OK, I'll rebut. First, you are off by one '0' on your explanation of exponential notation - 10 E17 is a 1 followed by 17 zeros, not a 10 followed by 17 zeros. But hey what'a an order of magnitude between friends, right? (I guess if you consider a 10-win White Sox season versus a 100-win season, that extra zero is meaningful). And while correcting numbers, yiu can update the narrative: 2,500 million years ago is the currently speculated origin of eukaryotic life, but the earliest life showed up about 1,500 million years earlier. The big bang, according to a study published late last year, likely occurred 14,000 million years ago, so your number there is off by nearly a factor of three. All that is just housekeeping. As for the rest, the upshot is that this numbers game - and any numbers game - is going to favor an evolutionary argument. Evolution is ALL ABOUT THE NUMBERS, incomprehensibly large numbers. Billions of years of piling up the best outcomes of trillions of simultaneous experiments occurring in evgery cell of every organism that ever lived. The hemoglobin "debate" only holds water if Natural Selection were random, and in fact it is completely and absolutely non-random. This is one of the stumbling points for newcomers to evolution. The lolecular mechanisms are more or less random - point mutations, insertions, deletions, inversions, and base pair substitutions within the genetic code occur spontaneously and without regard for the outcome. But that is where the randomness element ends in evolution. Natural Selection is the environment acting as a merciless filter to weed out less fit variants. And the vast majority of mutatioanl events lead to less fit variants. But, given the billions and billions in the trillions and trillions and the (*Argh Claven!!* I sound like that dorky scientist on the Simpson's don't I?)... You get the picture. The first prokaryotes and eukaryotes (protistans) would not have had our hemoglobin, but did have their own highly specialized equivalents from which modern hemoglobin arose. That's 4 billion years of improving gradually improving on HIGHLY CONSERVED proteins by trying out various structural alterations, weeding out the ones that are not of selective advantage, and keeping those that work better. Work by Ross Hardison published in 1999 looked at ancestral hemoglobin forms and demonstrated how newly evolved proteins co-opt thee functional chemistry of older ones and through structural alterations evolve new or enhansed phenotypic function. Hardison and others have also showed that at least as much functional change emerges through evolutionary changes in the timing of expression (turning on/off genes) of hemoglobin-producing genes. Bottom line, The "improbability" of random selection of hemoglobin at 10E-654 is bulls***, because selection has been anything but random for 4 billion years. The mere fact that early life billions of years ago and their extant descendants from today had somewhat simpler but analogous hemoglobin-like molecules suggests that hemoglobin was pretty "easy" to evolve, yet so absolutely vital to life that it has been very highly conserved ever since. To borrow from Richard Dawkins, who borrowed from some Flat-earther, mouthbreather Creationists, Why are we not completely dumbfounded by the existence of Swiss watches and Boeing 747's? Because these were well designed and intentional form-to-function products, of course. The Creationists, being mentally very lazy, will leave the argument at that, God put the whole shebang together because its so unbelievably complex it couldn't be a random thing. Dawkins, being anything but lazy, pointed out what I did above - the raw material of evolution (muttation and variation) is random, but nithing else about evolution is. Nor is it directed or teleological, however. There is no preordained end-point (not even us ), but the twists and turns of Selection are absolutely directed by the selective filters of the environment acting on the phenotype (external manifestation of the genetic makeup) of individuals. It would indeed be amazing if hemoglobin just appeared, in all its glory, out of nowhere. But, that's noy how it happened, and it has never been suggested otherwise by anybodybut someone trying to play a numbers game to descredit evolution. If they want to throw us for a loop, ask how the hell the vertebrate eye arose... or the envenomation apparatus of snakes... or, as PA pondered earlier, the power human written and oral communication. The verdict is still out on all of these, but that just means we'll have jobs for a while.

Live by the sword, die by the sword. Divine agents are not testable by science and are out of the realm of scientific speculation. Science cannot prove OR disprove (see, we admit it) the existence of a Divine Agent. What we can do is come up with reasonable alternatives to a Divine Agent that ARE testable. That said, yes, I personally believe that the physical universe begat the biological universe in through non-divine means.

Damned if I know, but I like the Little Richard Theory quite a bit. I apologize in advance to everyone who would rather gnae their own leg off rather than reading this. But, hey, I was asked. Seriously, the biggest pain sometimes is that scientists have to live and die by the same sword. Which means that if we cannot find physical evidence from the time of the first life on Earth we can only speculate. The problem with the fossil record is that even rocks are not eternal, and the geological cycles and processes like subduction at tectonic plate margins means that the rocks that would have held fossil evidence of the very first terran life may not exist anymore. As far as where life originated, while I have romantic notions about panspermic (extraterrestrial) sources, I don't really buy it. Nor do I buy the classic Urey and Miller lightning/chemical soup/ammonia atmosphere shallow sea origin either. Right now the smart money may be on the first life starting at deep ocean hydrothermal vents and centering around chemosynthetic microbial life somewhat similar to bacteria. We would never have dreamed this scenario until such communities were first discovered in 1977 (so Urey and Miller are off the hook), but it solves a lot of problems. Oceans protect from harmful early Earth UV rays which would have been intense given the early atmosphere. Removed from the sun, and with no organic input to the early deep sea (no life to settle out there), a chemosynthetic origin is attractive. And because the larger deep sea (away from teh vents) is an extremely stable environment, there was the possibility of tens of millions of years of quiet organic experimentation. Literally, just today, a paper published in Science (probably the most respected journal tehre is) presented very good evidence for Archean (even more primitive than bacteria, and some still exist, in geysers, thermal ocean vents and other extreme environments) life that lived in tubes within volcanic rock at least as far back as 3.5 billion years ago. This was before there was anything they could have consumed as heterotrophs, and it occurred in an extreme environment on the ocean floor, so photosynthesis was out of the question. Like modern hot vent and methane seep organisms, these were apparently chemosynthetic organisms that used reduced compounds from the mineral rock as a carbon and/or energy source. There is good evidence for similar life back to about 3.9 billion years, and based on those fossils the researchers in that case think that they can extend back to maybe 4.2 billion years for a likely origin of prokaryotic (the primitive kind) life. For a long time, we have put the first eukaryotes (the modern kind of life, including protists, algae, and everything beyond that) at around 1.5 billion years, but there is strong and growing evidence that it started at least another billion years earlier than that. I love science and being a scientist because we aren't married to any of this. If a hypothesis holds up to scrutiny for a century but then gets refuted with sound science, you chuck the old hypothesis. Careers and entire schools of thought are turned on their ear with some regularity, but that's what we signed up for. Science Rocks!

You won't take heat from me on that at least. Even as Cdub has taken a lot of time to patiently explain to us that there is a clear continuity between OT and NT, in my past life as a spiritual person (now recovering ) I felt very comfortable in embracing the central Christian messages of the New Testament, while kind of taking most of the OT stories with a grain (or is that a pillar? Sorry, I like that joke a Lot).

Ach! I take back your high marks, Kid! If your grade school teacher's take on things was a Mechanistic, Divine Hand setting it in motion, then there's still hope. If, on the other hand, the view is a teleological one (i.e., that humans or any other slice of evolutionary time were somehow a preordained end-point), then it is completely irreconcilable with modern evolutionary theory. Just enjoy being a happy accident, and being conscious of the incredible unlikelihood of our very existence.

This is an entirely serious question. What historical (non-Biblical or non-quasi Biblical) references are there to the Ark or its mission are there? What historical or scientific references support a 40-day, 'worldwide' (yes, it would have been a small "world" back then) deluge? Again, I'm not asking sarcastically, I would greatly appreciate your pointing me in the direction of these sources because I would like to look into them. Some of the most amazing Creationist (or is it "Intelligent Voodoo Design" now?) slight of hand I have seen are references to climatalogical/geological 'anomalies' recorded on either short-term (i.e, last couple ice ages and maybe 100-200K years) or long-term (i.e., tectonic based changes over the last 260 million years) to try to bolster their "scientific" arguments. I've got a growing collection of Creationist pap that suggests that the Permean, K-T, and other extinction events are showed as evidence in support of a Great Flood? When Creationist doctrine itself doesn't allow that the planet os more than what, 10K years old or so? So, of course, accepted scientific dating methods are called into question as are the very constants pf the physical universe like the known rates of decay of various isotopes, BUT the physical evidence of fauna laid waste is held up in support of Biblical catastrophic events. It hardly even phases these authors that such evidence in support of a purported highly diverse ante-Deluvian fauna that suddenly becomes greatly impoverished and with the lost species NOT SHOWING UP AGAIN in the time and space of the fossil record or as modern species FLATLY CONTRADICTS suggestions that Noah and Co. did a very good job saving them all two-by-two and all that.

Yes?

I'll make it quick, sorta. FanOf14, you have it exactly right of course. NO evolutionary biologist - classical nor Neo-Darwinian EVER said man descended from monkeys. I think the words WayneGhost used... SCARED, STUBBORN, AND IGNORANT... are perfectly accurate descriptors of anyone who wants to dismiss >3.5 years of testable, verifiable life on Earth with statements along the lines of "Well, I didn't come from no damn monkey." What a bite in the ass for the Flat-Earther mouth-breathing set to find out humans are just a blip on the organic roadmap. PA, not in any way to say SCARED, STUBBORN, AND IGNORANT are terms I'd ever tag on to the vast majority of spiritually minded yet also simultaneously intelligent people. Just the SCARED, STUBBORN, AND IGNORANT ones (and they know who they are). I appreciate that you refrain from the evolutionary debates, but to casually toss around the 'man from monkeys' misconception while fully knowing it falsely represents evolutionary theory doesn't add anything of substance. As for Noah's Ark - sure, let a privately funded team of explorers look for that, unicorns, Leprechauns, or whatever else they want to. My research institution had a group contact them in all seriousness about hiring out our research ships and manned submersibles to go look for Atlantis (no lie). They had maps and everything, and if they come up with the scratch to pay for 30K a day in ship and sub-ops support, we'll do it. The research cruise schedule has been light the last two years due to Federal budget redirections, so what the heck. We won't be calling Discovery Channel about the old Atlantis mission though.

I really enjoyed the film. I was especially moved by the "Tiny Dancer" tour bus scene. Here's this disfunctional, egotistical group of people all at each other's throats and this one perfect song comes on the radio and for a brief moment all the crap disappears as they share that joy of music that brought them together in the first place.

"Junior," is that what you call it? Well, by all means get out there and get it educated, or frustrated, or whatever...