red sox 777 posted...
Evolution really isn't like gravity. We can't make predictions about future evolution, and we cannot test it on a macro level.
As for the fossil record, can the fossil record distinguish between evolution and periodic acts of direct species transformation by God?
We have stuff like 100+ animal phyla appearing in a 30 million year period 500 million years ago, and zero since. Well, can you be sure that they appeared gradually over that 30 year period, and didn't all appear on a single day? No, because our dating of fossils that old and the completeness of the fossil record is not nearly good enough.
To address the second point first, no, we can't test that. (okay, we actually DO have better resolution than that but to my knowledge it's worse than +/- 1 million years) We also can't test that God isn't mystically enforcing gravity only when people are looking and half-asses to the point where we can't tell whenever we're not, so it's more or less a useless point of discussion.
As to the first point, it is my understanding that we have shown significant mating isolation and genetic drift in organisms with a fast turn-around time. (ie. insects and bacteria)
As I understand it, Creationists believe that the world has only existed for like 5 thousand years or so? Something like that?
I can't speak for anyone else, but I have never found a person that attended any post-secondary school (including JUST seminary school) that believed that, so I've always taken that to be an extreme outlier opinion. Like, every creationist that I know believes the earth is older than that and I know some just outright don't believe in speciation of any form.
Does anyone really believe that P=NP though?
It's something like 5-10%. I know for certain it's higher than the number of people that suspect it is indepedent of current axioms, which is a pretty reasonable position in my opinion. (that's like 1% IIRC)
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