This house would believe the dominant pardigm is flawed.

I'll take the first couple of paragraphs to respond to what my opponent has claimed, and forthwith I shall enter some points of my own. 1. A) This, to be honest, strikes me as more of a question than a criticism of evolution. Variation occurred for several reasons, primarily because of adaptive radiation, where organisms isolated in different environments adapted to those environments through natural selection - this is why species on different islands/land masses etc. seem related but are obviously different - they have adapted to their conditions, fur for foxes in the Arctic, very little for desert foxes. I think this point was brought up due to a need for an explanation of the variation itself. This occurs due to random mutations in the DNA of new organisms, which is why they are different from their parents. If these traits are selected for, the species becomes more and more likely to have these minor differences until the entire species becomes like this. When they are geographically isolated, populations obviously will variate in a different way and go down a different path so to speak. Another mistake 1A makes is to place differential reproduction WITHIN natural selection - differential reproduction IS natural selection. It is frankly the fact that traits will be differentially reproduced in terms of their desirability. Therefore there is no flaw in natural selection. 2. A) Things are proven every day, from medical facts to historical facts. In fact, if nothing was proven (in some sense of the word at least) our world would never work! What scientists mean is that they CAN be disproven - even if the likelihood of this is near zero. You are welcome to suggest that all paradigms are flawed, but if this means you choose not to accept them at least as relative truths then you should never go to a hospital again, as their medicine is "flawed." To use flawed in the sense that you are using it here is to stop searching for the truth. Also your argument that evolution is "flawed" would be "flawed" because it is an argument! This is just a word game. B) On the contrary, most scientists would be horrified to see anyone set out to "disprove" something. The purpose of the scientific method is to avoid bias IN ANY WAY for or against the result. Trying to disprove something would infringe deeply upon scientific ethics. 3. Albert Einstein accepted that the dominant paradigms in mathematics were true, otherwise he wouldn't have been able to question higher paradigms. We accept such paradigms every day, and thus we may question higher ones. In order to be a "great" medical researcher, one must accept that cells exist and have certain structures. Not sure that I can take Kepler, the guy who tried to summon demons to help him reach space seriously, Darwin accepted that cells existed etc. However, even if biology itself was defined ONLY by the idea of creationism, that being the only dominant paradigm, questioning it would not immediately make it a falsehood, just as questioning evolution does not immediately make it a falsehood. If this were truly the way of science, as I say, medical science would fall and we would be in very bad straits indeed. A concept must be considered to be a truth even if it may not be, and the fact of it being a truth does not preclude it being questioned, or, in terms of the scientific method, new experiments being conducted in regards to it - that's what happens in biology classrooms. It is more productive for the scientific community to accept evolution in the same way that it is more productive for the scientific community to accept that math works, that volcanoes erupt, that gravity exists in some sense. Not accepting evolution might have results akin to not accepting that volcanoes erupt. If we didn't accept that volcanoes erupted, then we wouldn't be able to find out A) Why they erupt B) What the results of eruption are, both long term and short term C) How to predict when they erupt Note that point C has very direct implications in the real world. You may question evolution, but if your questioning fails to find a flaw in evolution then you are merely wasting your time. The same would be true of creationism if reationism was factual - say some mythological god, allah, or zeus came down to earth and said "yes, I created all of you!!!!" you might still question that, but such questionings would be in vain, as one would know. However, since the scientific method is unbiased, there is no measure of how many experiments may be run, even if they all have the same results and we KNOW they will have the same results. Using the scientific method to "question" evolution, say by breeding mice, breeding only the fastest, to find if faster ones would results in the newer populations being faster, is not wrong, however, it slows things down because you already know the answer to the experiment - the mice DO become faster through the generations! In fact, evolution may be observed through many things. One of them is immunity - when a disease ravages a population, the survivors are immune, their ancestors will have the disease as a minor cold, because they have the right DNA to ward off the disease. This is why smallpox so ravaged the Americas - because it had never existed there so the inhabitants were not immune to it, as the Europeans were. Tragically, for the story of the humans race, this tale spins both ways. In terms of disease, bacteria strains that are resistant to antibiotics survive. Antibiotics only work for a time before new strains of antibiotic - resistant bacteria become common - this is because the antibiotics kill off all but the most antibiotic - resistant bacteria, and those ones reproduce. Evolution is therefore necessarily accepted scientific theory. In the same light, you can question whether one plus one equals two, but it won't get you anywhere. You will go in, of course, unbiased, not assuming anything, in adding two ones. But those two ones will still add to two, and you will be going over ground trodden many, many times before. I look forward to your response!