salamanders without eyes? try Kitchens without a brain....anyone knows that if you lift weights as a young person you gain muscle mass and if you stop lifting you lose it. Or, you have admirable calves but have a nerve injury that causes you to lose control of those muscles....they atrophy...it is not evolution....those salamanders chose to swim into dark places....they could not find their way out again but they did not die....they adapted and survived and reproduced. overtime the atrophy of their now unnecessary eyes became a discernable physical characteristic. Hey, it happens all the time with dog breeding....old chris is a prime example...his forefathers were probably smart but he is not.

Before you start freely calling people idiots, you might want to check your logic, since your post implies that if you stand around flapping your arms hard enough you'll eventually be able to fly.

Well, I agree that his post isn't the best, but I think you're misconstruing his greater point: ID people aren't too removed from theists, in that they see the universe as a great pocketwatch, with magnificent design. This isn't as constricting as one might hope, and is pretty hard to argue against, since ultimately you end up fighting something like "well, that's part of the design too." Now, most ID people are probably not smart enough to state this, but neither are most people in general able to discuss the wrestlings of Aristotle, Aquinas, Plato, Dostoyevsky, Kant, Nietzsche, and everyone else (Note I do not include Dawkins & co. Popularizers are not thinkers.) over this question.

nothing I said suggests anything abou wings and flying...your post suggest a few things which out of kindness I will not mention.

Try looking up Jean-Baptist de Lamarck and see if you can figure out who.

Kitchens?

But I'm guessing he understands evolution better than Yart.

If you took the blind salamanders out of their dark environment, they would breed salamanders without eyes. That is not atrophy, but the loss of the organ itself. If something atrophies, it is still there and the genetic information to make it remains intact.

Creationists are nothing if not ironically funny.

Of course 'ole Hiss Kitchens could probably get the name of the writer he's critiquing correct before beginning an open-ended, stream-of-consciousness tirade.

Honestly, rereading yart's last sentence hurts my head.

really, take a pill, and have your dog read for you.. what you fail to understand is that Kit...Hitchens...does not understand evolution....the whole theory is based upon the premise that simple organisms become more complex , single cell organisms become fish become human....but with the salamander the complex is becoming less so....you can't have it both ways. .

Actually, you don’t seem to understand evolution. It isn’t based on the premise that "simple organisms must become more complex", only on the observation that populations’ genetic composition are subject to change over generations. Any change in genetic composition of a population—whether it results in greater complexity, lesser complexity, or no change in complexity whatsoever—is evolution by definition. A loss of function as the result of change in allele frequencies is no less evolutionary change than a gain of function.

“anyone knows that if you lift weights as a young person you gain muscle mass and if you stop lifting you lose it.”

>>That’s adaptive change, not evolutionary change. It occurs at the level of the individual, not as a result of a change in genetic composition, and as such isn’t inheritable.

The salamander’s loss of vision, on the other hand, represents evolutionary change: it occurred at the level of the population, not the individual, as the result of an inheritable change in genetic composition.

Evolution means that simple organisms become more complex?

Is there a word in rhetoric for something that goes past the straw-man strategy of defining your opponent's terms in ways that make your argument stronger? Something that means making stuff up from nowhere? Or is that just lunacy?

"Yes, I'm crazy...if by 'crazy' you mean 'AWESOME!'"

oh, right, now I get it. if a monkey becomes a man it evolves....if a man becomes a monkey he evolves too. but since there is no evidence that either of those evolutions has occurred I guess I guess there is still room for debate. a single cell organism becomes a man....a man becomes a single cell organism...impossible you say? Nothing is impossible for God. That man was created out of the dust of the earth...impossible. No, we went through that before. some erstwhile physical therapist says that atrophy of an organ is not passed on....tell the blind salamander that. two seeing salamanders( male and female) locomote themselves to a dark spot for a romantic twist....no, not misspelled....they conclude and try to find their way back in the dark but only go deeper and deeper into the seemingly bottomless pit....they never see the light of day again....the offspring from their union is born with eyes but since they never see any light they overtime become useless....this is certainly not monkey to man evolution which is what Kitch...Hitchens wants to proclaim...indirectly of course, by debunking Genesis....make all the definitions you want and believe them to your peril.