Evolution

"I'll also treat Pro the fact that the shroud appears in the 1192-1195 AD Pray Manuscript, showing the 1260-1390 AD C-14 dating of the shroud to be in error." The Pray Codex "may serve as evidence for the existence of the Shroud of Turin prior to 1260"1390 AD". I quote directly from the source. This is not a definite answer, and does not automatically debunk the carbon dating. It is barely a theory. In my opponent's next National Geographic source, nothing definitive is said either. It merely says that a researcher believes that the wrong piece of cloth was tested and that the real shroud is actually older. He did not actually test the shroud, meaning that what he said is just an assumption. "Note, Pro ignored the three-dimensional encoded photo-negative image on the shroud. He can"t explain how this is possible naturally, for it"s a miracle" I ignored it because the source that my opponent provided does not directly say anything about this. It is a webpage that has links to about two dozen other webpages, and I'm not going to sift through all of them to find this information. "We can't see carbon decay." We actually can. There are many isotopes of different elements which have a half-life of a fraction of a second. Some have a half-life of several days. Not all have enormous half-lives that stretch over thousands of years. For example, Carbon-15 has a half-life of about two and a half seconds. This can easily be observed. From this kind of information, half-lives of other isotopes can be measured. http://en.wikipedia.org... I've been jumping around my opponent's argument and ignoring most of it because I am no longer going to waste time and space on something that is not the subject of debate. We are debating evolution, not the validity of the Bible, Jesus, and Christianity. So far, that is the only thing that my opponent has been debating and has provided virtually no arguments against evolution itself. "Yes, a virus can become immune to a vaccine, so how does this prove that 2 million years from now it won"t still be just a virus?" Because changes will build up. Simple as that. I don't understand what's so mind-blowing here. Changes build up, slowly transforming the organism until it is no longer what it used to be. "By proper diet and exercise humans can become less prone to catching the cold, this doesn"t show that we are slowly becoming anything other than human." This is a common, and slightly ignorant misconception. Proper diet and exercise have no impact on evolution and are completely irrelevant to the topic. Something acquired/done during the organism's lifetime does not affect evolution. Evolution is strictly genetic, and proper diet/exercise cannot be passed on to offspring through genetics. "I also wonder what are these "large" changes that Pro claims happened with E-coli? Previously he argued it takes millions of years to see radical changes, so I guess large doesn"t mean radical for him." An example of a large change that occurred with E. Coli is the development of heat resistance. This is a large change, but is not radical because it does not dramatically change E. Coli's characteristics. It would become radical if this trend continued and E. Coli became a thermophile. That would be radical, but has not yet occurred. http://www.technology-transfer-blog.com... I feel as if my opponent does not have a very solid grasp on the theory of evolution itself. I will clarify that (for the voters as well). Simply put, here are the steps: 1. There is a population of organisms. 2. A genetic mutation occurs in one/several of the organisms. 3. This mutation may be favorable and may help the organism. 4. The organism with the mutation begins mating with the regular population. 5. More organisms with this "mutated" characteristic appear. 6. This group of "mutated" organisms gets isolated from the main group for whatever reason, there can be many. 7. The "mutated" group has now formed its own population, dramatically changing the gene pool. 8. The "mutated" group mates within itself and slowly, a different organism begins to form. That is the basic process. Hope I cleared some things up. I await my opponent's response and I hope we will now move over to actually debating the topic at hand.