Redwall

Yes, in many ways Darwin was wrong. That doesn't mean that what he said didn't get us thinking; modern evolutionary biologists and scientists in non-related disciplines generally agree that evolution takes place via random mutation and (somewhat more deterministic) natural selection. (In some sense all scientific theories are "wrong," since we don't really have an ab initio, exact explanation for everything. Richard Feynman said in his namesake lectures, "Each piece, or part, of the whole nature is always an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected...The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific 'truth'" That doesn't mean said scientific theories can't do an adequate job of explaining observable data; George Box is known for saying that "all models are wrong, but some are useful".) I was told there would be holes. But OK, let's try to view creationism as science. For anything to be considered science, it *must* be falsifiable in principle. Evolution can be falsified in any number of ways, such as discovering a fossil of a mammal (or some more advanced life form) in the same stratum as a that of a trilobite. Whereas with intelligent design, we can only really falsify it if we prove God doesn't exist, which is impossible (and no, that doesn't prove God exists). In an attempt to dress up ID as falsifiable, Michael Behe has generated the concept of irreducible complexity. Claiming something to be "irreducibly complex" still isn't scientific since it's simply an appeal to ignorance rather than the result of rigorous testing (a somewhat weaker supporting argument is the fact that people have proposed evolutionary mechanisms for Behe's alleged examples of irreducibly complex systems...actually I guess this does highlight the fact that declaring something IC is indeed an argument from ignorance). And really, I assure you that people even in the applied sciences (and not just strictly the fundamental sciences) have verified evolution for themselves; in the emerging field of synthetic biology, Frances Arnold, a member of the NAS and NAE, uses directed evolution to get the products she desires. The fact that her products have become patented (http://cheme.che.caltech.edu/groups/fha/Patents.htm) ought to convince you that, yes, evolution has survived the test of industry. And no, I doubt very much that she, or most of her other colleagues at Caltech, is defrauding us; Caltech takes its Honor Code very seriously. A somewhat more fundamental approach to understanding evolution is practiced in the Lenski lab (http://myxo.css.msu.edu/). A recent paper in PNAS demonstrated that they were able to take a sample of E. coli (which doesn't metabolize citrate) to metabolize citrate; you can read about it on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment

OK, so share with us some of those holes (real holes that falsify evolution, not wrinkles that are merely left unexplained by our knowledge of evolution being too coarse). BTW the majority of Christians in the US don't even believe in intelligent design. Neither the Big Bang theory nor the theory of evolution precludes the existence of the Abrahamic God, so I always get confused when I see folks so convinced that scientists are co-conspirators in some sinister plot. Francis Collins, the director of the NIH, is a Catholic.

(Not gonna bother quoting stuff from the original post) Dude, spontaneous generation and abiogenesis are not the same. Abiogenesis has not yet been falsified, and many (real, current) scientists still do relevant work on it : http://en.wikipedia....iki/Abiogenesis And I don't understand what you mean when you say you "don't trust the half-life methodology." The differential equation is pretty simple: dc/dt = -kc, and this holds for nuclear decay processes in general, not just carbon-14. There is no "proof" in science the way there is in mathematics; whereas we "invented" mathematics and can therefore prove things rigorously, we didn't invent the laws of nature. Either some god figure did it or nature did it; either way, it means that scientists cannot prove scientific claims. On the other hand, we can certainly *disprove* scientific claims, and that is what distinguishes scientific theories: they must be falsifiable in principle. For this reason, the Big Bang is considered science (since it is, in principle, falsifiable), whereas religious claims, whether or not they are true, cannot be falsified short of dying and meeting our makers, and hence cannot be considered science. The reason the BBT is the prevailing explanation for the start of the universe is that it has not yet been disproven by anything we've thrown at it.

I read a thread from a while back suggesting that Sorcerers are pretty much game-breaking even in Insane/Insane+ mode--like, a doubled-up Sorcerer MU is apparently capable of single(double?)-handedly clearing entire maps on any difficulty setting via Nosferatu. This is giving me second thoughts on whether or not I should purchase the game. I realize I could do some sort of challenge run, but I generally don't like having to artificially constrain myself. I don't like the idea of only effectively getting a third of the game (Nosferatu first appears a third of the way through, right?) to go all-out before having to go out of my way to make the game fun. Hmm. Do those of you who have played the game feel that Nosferatanking completely sucks all the fun out of it? Do you anticipate that LTC runs will rely on Nosferatanking, or do you feel that a sufficiently ambitious player could beat a Nosferatu-dependent benchmark using more balanced and diverse approaches?