Actually, it is unlikely that giraffes got their long necks to get more food in tough times because the female giraffe is so much shorter that they should have all died during these proposed droughts when the taller males survived.

Um, no: “To test the theory, he led a team of researchers who studied 17 male and 21 female giraffes in Zimbabwe. They measured height, weight, and the length of necks and legs – but found little variation between the sexes.”

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/2814

I haven’t read any recent papers that demonstrate natural selection has any relevance at all.

Ya see that is the whole point- NS is like the wizard behind the curtain- don’t pull back the curtain for you will expose NS for what it really is.

The big bang might be simple to imagine – but not so easy explain.

Is there anything simple about the “atom”. It is directly involved in all four forces: gravity, magnetic, strong and weak nuclear forces, and all material. It is made up of many particle or wave components (possibly as many as 120 separate things). This complexity is hardly understood.

Scientist do not understand fully the foundational elements and how there functions came into being. Or the complexity of protein machines in the living cells.

Scientist do not understand the complexity of DNA and how it came into being.

Science is extremely limited outside the controlled lab setting, especially in the understanding of how, why, what, where, and when questions especially in the discussion of the simplistic.

Darwinisnt do not use any logic in order to maintain and propagate nonsense about “natural selection did it”.

http://cadra.wordpress.com/

You are right. IDers accept natural selection to the degree that it allows limited, trivial change in an organism to adapt to its environment. NS is that humble maintenance junkie, scrambling to find the right mix of adjustments to keep the machine whirling.

The modern synthesis attempted (apparently very successfully) to aggrandize adaption by tagging it with the name ‘micro evolution’, in order to resurrect the now defunct evolution, thereby puffing up Darwin’s insightful albeit hardly earth shattering intuition. But as they say, a rose by any other name…..

As to the accident assertion, how is it not true? Dawkins is essentially saying that the initial events were random but after time, using the concept of emergence, where complexity takes on ‘a life of its own’, he attempts to convince us that randomness has ‘somehow’ now been transformed into non-randomness ; NS acting on RM+GV not being random yet still neither directional nor goal oriented.

So how can a scientist justify using emergence concepts as supporting evidence. Emergence never answers concretely what is taking place. It is the same thing as saying “Emergence did it. You will just have to take my word for it cuz I’, a tenured professor and I know better”.

I love it. He covers all the bases, doesn’t he? “Catch me if you can!” Who could ever listen to Dawkins and say with a straight face that he is credible? It’s insane.

I did not call him an idiot, or a religious nut. My accusation that he doesn’t understand ToE stems from the well-worn assertion that ToE states life just came about ‘by accident’. Even ID-ers here, I am often reminded, accept natural selection to some degree.

The argument that beauty being the result of sexual selection is interesting but what about the beauty in things that have no relation to reproduction? Like sunsets or a starry night for example.