Attenborough seeks to prove evolution

[Fenster]

BBC iPlayer - Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life

This is the programme. Can people not in Britain watch this or download it?

Nice one. That was worth the watch.

The last 10mins, when he explained how everything came to be, makes it understandable why people like Bilbo get bothered by these programs.

I wonder how many years it will be - after we are long dead - that that program will be viewed as totally dated?

[Kev]

BBC iPlayer - Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life

This is the programme. Can people not in Britain watch this or download it?

Nice one. That was worth the watch.

The last 10mins, when he explained how everything came to be, makes it understandable why people like Bilbo get bothered by these programs.

I wonder how many years it will be - after we are long dead - that that program will be viewed as totally dated?

I've not watched it yet Fenster, what happened in the last 10 minutes?

[Kev]

BBC iPlayer - Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life

This is the programme. Can people not in Britain watch this or download it?

Nice one. That was worth the watch.

The last 10mins, when he explained how everything came to be, makes it understandable why people like Bilbo get bothered by these programs.

I wonder how many years it will be - after we are long dead - that that program will be viewed as totally dated?

I just watched the last 10 mins now and you are right mate, I don't really like it all. The elements of evolutionary theory such as natural selection, speciation and the idea that animals change and adapt over time are indeed proven beyond doubt, and actually essential to creationist theory as well.

But the jump to macro evolution, and the wonderful story told in the last 10 minutes is sheer conjecture and mythology, not based on any empirical evidence.

An organism is basically like a computer program. The DNA within it allows for great variation and change within an organism, size, shape, colour, behaviour for example can all be modified to suit the enviroment just as Microsoft Windows can be personalised, user defined backgrounds, wallpaper, sounds, font sizes, disability features, the addition or removal of programs for example. You can taylor Windows to suit your needs and preferences but it will always be Windows, it cannot become Linux, or the latest GTA game as the coding required for that simply isn't containted within the windows program.

This is EXACTLY like life on this planet. A creature cannot do anything or evolve anything that wasn't already coded within its DNA to begin with. There is not a shred of factual evidence or a known hypothesis to substantiate this claim that entirely new information, like the instructions to build a wing can be added to the DNA of a dog for example over time.

So although all the ideas presented regarding evolution, natural selection, adaptation, the survival of the fittest etc are all excellent observations and have been documented to be true, this leap of faith into life spontaneously appearing 3.8 billion years ago and then evolving over millions of years into all the diversity of life we have today is just a belief system, a religious story and that's what I object to.

It's a religion that elevates nature to the level of a deity and fundamentally alters how we perceive our place on this world. I certainly don't say people arn't welcome to that belief and that it shouldn't be taught, by I really hate the way they can just indoctrinate like Attenborough did in the those last 10 minutes with his wonderful humanist creation story.

It was no different to presenting the Biblical story as fact, with Adam and Eve, the expulsion from the Garden, the coming flood, the rebuild, Tower of Babel, the dispersion of man over the whole earth, the creation of the state of Israel, the reign of Judges and Kings, the warnings of the prophets and the prediction of the Messiah, the exile into Babylon and the rebuilding of the temple etc. All wondeful stuff, but a faith based story nonetheless and so not presented on television as matters of historical fact.

Yet the humanists can present their own 'creation' myth with the full endorsment of science and thus as real truth.

People watch it and assume it's just the way things happened and that's indoctrination and mind control imo.

The alternatives and all the problems with evolutionary theory, the total lack of transitional fossils, the problem of polystrate fossils, the abscence of any method of getting new information in an organisms DNA via mutation or any other means etc just don't get discussed.

Ah well never mind, as you said yourself in 50 years they will be telling another story and they will use the fact that their story has changed completely as powerful evidence that science is constantly updating its methods and discoveries and therefore 'reliable and to be trusted'