I think 'morality' is 'absolute' ......... Morality may 'adapt' ......

That's easy. The right thing to do is try to save the stranger. To attempt nothing would be the result of fear or apathy and would have no moral value whatsoever. While doing nothing is technically not wrong (from a utilitarian point of view), it obviously isn't the right thing to do. The difference between right and "wrong" is a difference between being ruled by courage or fear.

It extends beyond people to animals, plants and even rocks.

Ok, then where is the line between moral and immoral

Say you didn’t have to risk your life to help the guy in the burning house. Say he was locked in, and you had the key.

Are you now immoral for letting him burn to death? What about the individual ability to decide for yourself in this case?

And if you have the right to decide for yourself whether or not the person burns to death, do you also have the right to decide for yourself whether to kill the person or not? Are you not guilty of killing the person either way?

Didn’t know we were talking about the charter of rights.

Animals are not listed in human laws as having rights.

If you are talking about unwritten laws, then animals have the same rights as us.

if we become the suppressed at the hand of another race, country, people, species, it is because we have laid down the precedent that a situation of suppressor/suppressed is acceptable, even normal.

This simple principal is at the foundation of all unwritten morality.

Gravitational redshift...Infact, anything that causes light (photons) to lose energy will cause redshift ... Dopler Redshift is but 1 example and that can only be caused by an object moving away...dear God have all the scientists gone to the bar or something.

A special relativistic redshift formula (and its Newtonian approximation) is used when spacetime is flat. Where gravitational effects are important, redshift must be calculated using general relativity. Two important special-case formulas are the so-called gravitational redshift formula which applies to any stationary (that is, unchanging with time) gravitational field, and the cosmological redshift formula which applies to the expanding universe of Big Bang cosmology.[3]

Special relativistic, gravitational, and cosmological redshifts can be understood under the umbrella of frame transformation laws. There exist other physical processes that can lead to a shift in the frequency of electromagnetic radiation that are not generally referred to as "redshifts", including scattering and optical effects (for more see section on physical optics and radiative transfer).

The way to compute gravitational redshift is:

z_gr = 1.0 / sqrt{1 - 2GM/(rc^2)} - 1.0

You multiply (1 + z_gr) by the emitted wavelength to compute the wavelength observed at effective infinity (very far away from the massive object). So yes, we can observe GR occuring at a neutron star, near stellar black holes or even near supermassive black holes (SMBH) in quasars very far away.

The typical mass of the SMBH hole in quasars is 10^9 solar masses. The typical MINIMUM distance of the gas that emits the observed ultraviolet and optical emission lines (that we use to compute the cosmological redshift) from the supermassive blackhole is perhaps 3 light weeks (how we know these things is another story). Let's do the math:

z_gr = 0.00273.

And that only acts upon the emission line gas lying ~21 light days from the SMBH. The vast majority of the emission line gas will lie at factors of 10 or more further than that, resulting in smaller (factor of ~10) still shifts due to the gravity of the SMBH. In fact the emission line peak is hardly affected at all by this redshift.

The measured cosmological redshifts of quasars range from 0.156 to 6.4. The ratio of the measured redshift to the gravitational one ranges then ranges from ~50 to over 2300. Is the gravitational redshift important for understanding the shapes of the broad emission lines of quasars -- probably, but usually only mildly so. Is it important to the observed redshift of the emission lines? Not at all. As has been said many times on this board.

What's more, we observe emision lines from iron at X-ray wavelengths, and this line is probably emitted still closer to the SMBH, and EVEN THEN the z_gr is not significant compared to the observed redshift of the line.

Radiocarbon dating is accurate to about 50,000 years...Incorrect and a common misconception. Radio Carbon dating is only relatively accurate when cross referenced with tree rings of known age,

I assume the plastic phase would respond in a similar way to cornstarch molecules

"We do now have electromagnetic heat shields,"

We do? I can find nothing about this on the web

Ok, so lets compare omnivore to omnivore.

Humans according to you are omnivores, even though we generally do not eat raw meat, which is the trait of an omnivore.

So lets say that as an omnivore we eat a diet of roughly 50% meat.

Compare humans then to the bear who eats a diet of only 20 – 30% meat. This should be a fair comparison of omnivore to omnivore.

In general, bears exhibit anatomical features consistent with a carnivorous diet. The small intestine is short ( less than five times body length) like that of the pure carnivores, and the colon is simple, smooth and short.

human beings on the other hand have the gastrointestinal tract structure of a "committed" herbivore. Humankind does not show the mixed structural features one expects and finds in anatomical omnivores such as bears and raccoons.

Thus, from comparing the gastrointestinal tract of humans to that of carnivores, herbivores and omnivores we must conclude that humankind's GI tract is designed for a purely plant-food diet.

Facial Muscles
CARNIVORE: Reduced to allow wide mouth gape
HERBIVORE: Well-developed
OMNIVORE: Reduced
HUMAN: Well-developed

Jaw Type
CARNIVORE: Angle not expanded
HERBIVORE: Expanded angle
OMNIVORE: Angle not expanded
HUMAN: Expanded angle

Jaw Joint Location
CARNIVORE: On same plane as molar teeth
HERBIVORE: Above the plane of the molars
OMNIVORE: On same plane as molar teeth
HUMAN: Above the plane of the molars

Jaw Motion
CARNIVORE: Shearing; minimal side-to-side motion
HERBIVORE: No shear; good side-to-side, front-to-back
OMNIVORE: Shearing; minimal side-to-side
HUMAN: No shear; good side-to-side, front-to-back

Major Jaw Muscles
CARNIVORE: Temporalis
HERBIVORE: Masseter and pterygoids
OMNIVORE: Temporalis
HUMAN: Masseter and pterygoids

Stomach Acidity
CARNIVORE: Less than or equal to pH 1 with food in stomach
HERBIVORE: pH 4 to 5 with food in stomach
OMNIVORE: Less than or equal to pH 1 with food in stomach
HUMAN: pH 4 to 5 with food in stomach

Stomach Capacity
CARNIVORE: 60% to 70% of total volume of digestive tract
HERBIVORE: Less than 30% of total volume of digestive tract
OMNIVORE: 60% to 70% of total volume of digestive tract
HUMAN: 21% to 27% of total volume of digestive tract

Length of Small Intestine
CARNIVORE: 3 to 6 times body length
HERBIVORE: 10 to more than 12 times body length
OMNIVORE: 4 to 6 times body length
HUMAN: 10 to 11 times body length

Colon
CARNIVORE: Simple, short and smooth
HERBIVORE: Long, complex; may be sacculated
OMNIVORE: Simple, short and smooth
HUMAN: Long, sacculated

Liver
CARNIVORE: Can detoxify vitamin A
HERBIVORE: Cannot detoxify vitamin A
OMNIVORE: Can detoxify vitamin A
HUMAN: Cannot detoxify vitamin A

Kidney
CARNIVORE: Extremely concentrated urine
HERBIVORE: Moderately concentrated urine
OMNIVORE: Extremely concentrated urine
HUMAN: Moderately concentrated urine

Nails
CARNIVORE: Sharp claws
HERBIVORE: Flattened nails or blunt hooves
OMNIVORE: Sharp claws
HUMAN: Flattened nails

Why are you getting so up in arms about this. I don’t eat meat.

I never eat farmed fish. I had fish a couple of times last year. Once at Christmas. Once at thanksgiving. I have had shrimp meat at least a couple of times this year.

And I eat vegetable meat all the time.

The Inuit of the north are being advised not to eat much fish because of Mercury pollution.

There is hardly a fish species in the world that is safe to eat in abundance.

It makes me sick.

large part of this is because of the run off of factory farms. Some of it is leaching of fertilizers and pesticides.

Farmed fish are fed other fish that have been caught by driftnets.

It takes many times more fish to produce one farmed fish.

Farmed fish also are a major threat to wild fish stock, and also a major source of pollution,

So I have no choice but to quit eating fish altogether.

Is that ok?

I also claim to not be a drinker, however I have had a glass of wine about a month ago. I guess that makes me a liar about that as well.

Everyone sees it as a personal attack.

When people ask why I don’t eat meat, I just shrug my shoulders and say “Just something I wanted to do”

You know it is wrong, so you go on the attack.

You have to justify your actions. If not the internal conflict will become too great. Human nature.

If I were able to eat only wild meat and not farmed meat, I probably would.

I have no problem killing animals.

This includes freedom from imprisonment,

I really don’t see how anyone can argue with this, although you are giving it your best shot.

And this makes you qualified to dispute evolution with people who have degrees in biology... how?

Go back to problem #1. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200.

I don't eat meat. I eat fish.

Genetic Problem #1. Naturally occurring, random genetic mutations that are proposed to have worked together to beneficially change/evolve the shape of an existing protein have never been demonstrated or observed.

Sentient beings are capable of higher mental functions such as forethought, planning and self awareness. I have not seen any evidence of this in any of the livestock I have ever observed.

as it states that adam and eve were the first living things on the planet,

the human brain is estimated to run of the equivelant of 100 terabytes i know mine has certainly more then a measly 2-3 GB

The information content of even a "simple" cell has been established as around 10^12 bits, comparable to about a hundred million pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica”~Carl Sagan.

It would seem better if you used another word in scientific studies , so as not to confuse the issue .

how can you make a simple two number combination into something like alanguage ,and involving many permutations of just two numbers ?

what is called bi-nary code ?

Surely there are just so many combinations of two numbers ... it would seem only at the maximum , say , 10 or so ?

Maybe in your country. But not in mine.

Might take a few years, but it will slowly keep sinking, and the only thing that saves it is re-doing the foundations.

You cannot say that religious texts are "written" by people, but mathematics and science are "written" by the universe, but both are recorded by man, without any explanation as to why you differentiate between them, and you have not provided that.

Probably you "fit in" much better than I do, because you wouldn't make waves half as much as me, which is probably an incentive to keep doing what you've been doing, and never to change. It "works" for you.

Either G-d DOES or DOES NOT control something, and whether or not we understand it or not, makes absolutely no difference.

that religions are self-correcting, just as much as science is self-correcting.

All you need is a degree and maybe a PhD, and that's not that hard for almost anyone to get today.

it's massive weight would crush it's legs if it stood on two back legs.

Makes me wonder how it came to be dinos ended up with hollow bones like that of the ultra light weight birds.

I sort of see the difference but it is still essentially the same isn't it ?

By 'special properies ' I mean those things about a word or situation that define it .. that make it itself .

get your point now. But I still think its premature to state it as an argument because we don't know the mechanism behind it and things are poorly clarified.

I'm sure you're aware of the uncertainty principle. The location and properties of an atom cannot be known at the same time. Quantum information is not the same as classical information and renders your argument irrelevant because quantum information is not convertible like classical information or the information on a DVD.

The information encoded in the DNA molecule is not the same kind of information as contained in any other molecule; it's much more than that.

The 18 mm/year excess was considered to be an error in atmospheric correction, so was simply zeroed out. What must be appreciated is that without an acknowledgment of a potential increase in Earth radius NASA had no option but to correct this value to zero, and hence adopt a static Earth radius premise. From an Expansion Tectonic Earth perspective, however, the 18 mm/year excess equates with a present day value of 22 mm/year increase in Earth radius, determined independently from measurements of areas of sea floor spreading." ~James Maxlow

Nothing that we know of compares to the blue whale today... certainly nothing from the reptile community. If there was a huge shift in earths gravity, it's possible the blue whales 4 chamber heart gave it an evolutionary advantage over all those dinosaurs with a theorized 3 chamber heart.

Oxygen levels aside... you really think a creature with an exoskeleton and a 14" wing span could get off the ground today? Thinking about this... that might be fun model to try making :)

They figure the T-Rex... Hallow Bones and all could have weighed as much as 6.8 tonnes... So that awesome king of the dinosaurs you saw chasing down cars in Jurrasic Park couldn't have run much faster than 20-30km an hour... or so say those that figure this stuff out.

I think if he was asked "Why?" he believes it's expanding, he would probably respond with something like "Because it is!" He also talks about several possibility's to how it could be expanding, but also acknowledges that all the theories are speculative at best...

But we haven't evolved beyond the point where we don't call out 'God help me ' when in dire distress , say when you are drowning ? This is often laughed about but it is a fact that humans scream for 'god's' help if they believe they're going to die . I'm going to ask the question ... WHY ?

Yeah, since his five paragraphs somehow failed to reflect the theme of the article entitled,"Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life".

It wasn't titled, "How Darwin was right yet again".

You think that an article that quotes an evolutionary biologist as saying, “We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality” is providing evidence for anything but the need to toss out the current model?

Of course it doesn't "hurt" evolution; because it's an unfalsifiable belief system.
Nothing hurts it.

I guess biologist David Hillis isn't a member of the "we" club, because he apparently still refers to himself as one of the “world’s leading experts on the tree of life”.

Those phylogenetic"trees" still appear in textbooks as if they represented some sort of empirical truth and not what they are proving to be, namely a just another post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy connected to the theory.

A molecule, called glycolaldehyde, was found around in a habitable zone, about 26,000 light-years from Earth.

By the way, as long as we're on the topic of abiogenesis, the replication of Glycolaldehyde is nothing new.

"It applies to macro organisms"?? Are you making this stuff up as you go along?

Why do you think they're talking about it's demise

not just "tinkering" with it?

“If you don’t have a tree of life, what does it mean for evolutionary biology?” asks Bapteste. “At first it’s very scary… but in the past couple of years people have begun to free their minds.” Both he and Doolittle are at pains to stress that downgrading the tree of life doesn’t mean that the theory of evolution is wrong - just that evolution is not as tidy as we would like to believe. Some evolutionary relationships are tree-like; many others are not. “We should relax a bit on this,” says Doolittle. “We understand evolution pretty well - it’s just that it is more complex than Darwin imagined. The tree isn’t the only pattern.”

So now it's a "web" and not a "tree"?

That's odd, because ... biologist David Hillis referred to himself as one of the “world’s leading experts on the tree of life”

and later told the Board that there is “overwhelming agreement correspondence as you go from protein to protein, DNA sequence to DNA sequence” when reconstructing evolutionary history using biological molecules."

Apparently Hillis could have used your expert input before he made a fool of himself in that speech.

So it's called a "web" now according to you?

Your cherry picking quotes from the article and misrepresenting their statements just proves how deluded you are

"Today the project lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence.

Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded.

“We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality"

The main problem with this mythical darwinian "tree of life" is that it's still being taught in the schools as if it actually had anything to do with reality.

That's for sure, like the fantasy of aBiogeneSis, where all of life supposedly emerges from a primordial soup of inorganic matter with no known cause or explanation!

Consider the fact that there is no known law of nature, no known process and no known sequence of events which can cause information to originate by itself in matter. If you disagree with this statement, PROVE it.

while using "Randomness"

and "Time" as their patch.

**Excerpt from the 2009 cover story from New Scientist titled, “Darwin was Wrong”:

“We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality,” says Bapteste. That bombshell has even persuaded some that our fundamental view of biology needs to change."

The problems began in the early 1990s when it became possible to sequence actual bacterial and archaeal genes rather than just RNA. Everybody expected these DNA sequences to confirm the RNA tree, and sometimes they did but, crucially, sometimes they did not. RNA, for example, might suggest that species A was more closely related to species B than species C, but a tree made from DNA would suggest the reverse.

Which was correct? Paradoxically, both - but only if the main premise underpinning Darwin’s tree was incorrect. Darwin assumed that descent was exclusively “vertical”, with organisms passing traits down to their offspring. But what if species also routinely swapped genetic material with other species, or hybridised with them? Then that neat branching pattern would quickly degenerate into an impenetrable thicket of interrelatedness, with species being closely related in some respects but not others.

We now know that this is exactly what happens. As more and more genes were sequenced, it became clear that the patterns of relatedness could only be explained if bacteria and archaea were routinely swapping genetic material with other species - often across huge taxonomic distances - in a process called horizontal gene transfer (HGT).

.......
.......

Rose goes even further. “The tree of life is being politely buried, we all know that,” he says. “What’s less accepted is that our whole fundamental view of biology needs to change.” Biology is vastly more complex than we thought, he says, and facing up to this complexity will be as scary as the conceptual upheavals physicists had to take on board in the early 20th century.

If he is right, the tree concept could become biology’s equivalent of Newtonian mechanics: revolutionary and hugely successful in its time, but ultimately too simplistic to deal with the messy real world. “The tree of life was useful,” says Bapteste. “It helped us to understand that evolution was real. But now we know more about evolution, it’s time to move on.”

.

Two reputable sources not enough? How about another?:

Like I said, impossible (as of now) to remove (as in delete) emotions.

So he admits to FEELING at peace with no emotions.

If there where ways to test for the actual cause of growth expansionist reports are proving... I would love to hear them.

Or the average size of every living creature wasn't more than 4x what it is today?

Or that some bugs didn't have over 4' wingspans?

It's not hard to surmise that if the planet was half the mass it is today... it would also be half the gravity... easily explaining WHY we don't understand how those monsters could support their body weight, or even hold their heads up.

Interestingly enough tho... it's the biggest of natural satellites that we know of... and it's a lot closer to the earth than any other satellite is to it's planet.

You start factoring in the amount of energy we pick up from the space... the numbers get a lot more interesting.

His theory is pretty clear about how the earth expands, and that rate of expansion is increasing... not a constant

Most of his numbers are based on the rates of the ocean of ages of the ocean floors.

I would love to hear you opinion on James Maxlows numbers after you read them over.

this would mean that the gravitational forces between the Earth and Moon and the Earth and the Sun would have effectively been doubled. Causing as I mentioned before, much tighter orbits with these two bodies.

In a conversation I had with Neal Adams, he believes the earth will increase to the size of Saturn before the rate of growth slows down.

How much will that effect the orbits... I'm betting a lot... What does it mean for humans living on earth... probably a thought that it might be worth looking into.

A tree grown from seed will have different genes from the fruit it came from, and will thus produce different fruit.

"WE COULD NOT IDENTIFY A SPECIFIC SELECTIVE FACTOR DRIVING EVOLUTION".

a MUTATION IN ANY CELL OTHER THAN THE REPRODUCING CELL DOES NOT HAVE ANY INFLUENCE ON SUCCEEDING GENERATIONS.

The cyclical and repetitive nature of this thread demonstrates how the topic of evolution has become an abstract and philosophical "dialogue of the deaf" between Creationists and Darwinists.

Shapiro himself has been labeled as a "Creationist"

intelligent cellular action in evolution

who still dogmatically cling to the old evolutionary models in spite of the emerging evidence to the contrary.

The new -Modern Synthesis will include a deeper understanding of the intelligent mechanisms behind genetic change that "randomness" has not been able to define.

Then we can move the discussion to the source of this intelligence, and bring in the philosophers.

Upsetting the oversimplified views of cellular organization and function held at mid-century, the molecular revolution has revealed an unanticipated realm of complexity and interaction more consistent with computer technology than with the mechanical viewpoint

How all of this modularity, complexity, and integration arose and changed during the history of life on earth is a central evolutionary question.

Localized random mutation, selection operating "one gene at a time" (John Maynard Smith's formulation), and gradual modification of individual functions are unable to provide satisfactory explanations for the molecular data, no matter how much time for change is assumed.

There are simply too many potential degrees of freedom for random variability and too many interconnections to account for." ~Shapiro

So this "Ida" is the missing link huh?

Look a bit closer. It's more the case of "Ida, another example of a hyped up fossil link that upon more careful examination is not what they claim it is."

"This fossil has been hailed as the eighth wonder of the world. Frankly, I've got 10 more in my basement,"

One of the more obvious dangers of quoting yourself is that you're taking the chance of illustrating how wrong you were the first time.

a planet without oxygen (air) would not be able to sustain life since life NEEDS water to form.

but it wont be able to evolve in the conditions that mars sets forth.

Mars is too harsh and it is outside of the habitable zone which means its too cold and the water on mars is frozen.