I don't know, Bill. That song was awfully persuasive.

As an engineer, I might look at the 99% similarity / 1% difference between the two groups as an extremely efficient (dare I say intelligent?) reuse of design.

For the record, I don’t. But I expect the argument will be made.

reuse of design

My mother, the biologist, made this point to me when I was a child, when I cheekiily defended my agnosticism pronouncing the Bible incompatible with the obvioius reality of evolution.

It's within the realm of possibility, she said, that God had a plan and a template for life, and that various expressions of it were all part of his design; that he created life to adapt and to fill every niche, and that it's ultimate expression was a race of conscious, intelligent beings.

She felt evolution was only in conflict with the most literal interpretations of the Bible by those refusing the possibility of any allegorical content. Once you got past that bump, faith and science could co-exist rather nicely, in her view.

What SarahW said.

Don't we share roughly 97% of our DNA with some member of the rodent family?

Sorry, I distrust scientific articles with political ramifications simply because they can be misleading.

Still, what SarahW said.

Takes an enormous amount of blind faith to believe that the 'big bang' just instantly happened whereby creating all things on earth.

Until science can prove where, how and why the big bang occurred, evolution will continue to be just a theory unproven by science.

OHNOES -

Humans only share about 60% of their DNA with mice. Humans and chimps are orders of magnitude more similar.

SarahW -

I'm not a believer, but I agree with the possibility of evolution and religion co-existing. (which is why I specified "Young Earth Creationism," which believes that life has not changed since it was created, around 10k years ago or so)

susan -

Who the Hell said anything about the Big Bang? You do know that evolution and the Big Bang are distinct theories, right? Ouch. Embarrassing.

I'm still waiting for the Bush/chimp jokes related to this story to start showing up.

Yeah, that young earth stuff is crap.

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It's insulting to the monkeys, Bill! Do you want a bunch of insulted monkeys running around? Huh? Do you? 'Cause I sure don't want any insulted monkeys running around. What's wrong with you people?

So sorry Bill, I should have just fast forwarded to it takes blind faith to believe in spontaneous combusion of RNA evolved into that which we determine to be human.

Curious, from where did the RNA evolve? How about the formation of earth itself?

Thus far science has only offered theories which themselves are constantly evolving.

Curious, from where did the RNA evolve? How about the formation of earth itself?

I find it "curious" that you think that you're proposing "ah-HA!" questions that somehow contradict my personal beliefs, or generally contradict putting stock in the theory of evolution.

Actually not really "curious" - sort of "ridiculous."

Beyond that, at this point, evolution doesn't pretend to have the definitive answer the ultimate question of what created the building blocks of life, it simply charts known and reasonably inferred data points about the permutations of life over time. A safe assertion utilizing evolution is that "biological organisms have undergone remarkable and divergent change over long periods of time."

Which is one set of evidence that invalidates the fairy tale of Young Earth Creationism, the literal interpretations of Genesis. You know, talking snake in the garden, one man, one woman, etc.

Whether God set the process of biological templates and change into motion is a perfectly debatable construct, in a religious context.

Thus far science has only offered theories which themselves are constantly evolving.

Uh, that's why they are called "theories." Subject to revision and falsifiability.

PS - Who designed the designer?

Rat wasn't it, may have been marsupials.

Anyway, after decades of global warming scares and countless other bits of science being used as a weapon rather than something impartial, I'm still jaded.

Then again, I'm still in the camp that views evolution as highly likely, so I think my distrust comes from the science news article (The sorts generally used as weapons.) rather than the science itself.

Actually, i think we will be found to be closer to bobonos, when their genome is mapped.

The really bad thing about ID is, it has absolutely no bones in science or academe. At this point in time ID is a state-sponsored pseudo-science. Exactly like Lysenkoism.

Who designed the designer?

That's pretty much what I asked Mom.

The standard answer to that question is that God, being God -- and therefore having all the attributes of a god such as self-sufficiency, omnipotence, no beginning and no end, etc. -- requires no designer...or else He wouldn't be God.

Not a perfect argument, to be sure, but it makes a certain amount of sense. A god who requires a designer would not really be a god...he/she would be a created being.

Let's see - 40 million differences in the genetic code between chimps and humans... on some planets that might be taken to say that the DNA strands are, well, different.

What a non-contextual comment that is. Those folks on other planets might almost think that you had an ideological agenda that predated your analysis of the science, what with the skipping over the relative differences in genetic codes among different species, the differences in the genome among humans, and the accounting for contextual clues that could show potential divergence between species along a previously theorized path of evolutionary change. This agenda you have might hinge upon, say, something like learning from your elders since you were knee-high to a grasshopper about the omnipotence of an all-powerful man who lives in the clouds and crafted you in His image?

Y'know... even when I believed in god, I never saw a conflict between that and evolution. Saying that god created people is kind of like saying Lee Iacocca created my car. The statement may be true, but it completely glosses over any process that may have been involved.

Of course, having been raised Catholic, I was never obliged to believe that the "days" in Genesis were actual 24 hour periods as we know them today. An idea that always struck me as particularly silly and limiting.

(NASTY COMMENTS THAT INSULT THE HOST - EVEN LACED WITH A COMPLIMENT - GET DELETED -- ED)

Actually, the question is slightly ambiguous; I'd probably answer yes without context, since "present form" could mean "generic carbon-based life forms of some sort", and "beginning of time" could be interpreted as historic time, time since life appeared, time since the Big Bang (or if you're into this sort of thing, the Book of Genesis), etc. (I'd always figured that time began when people started counting years and assigning labels to them, ie "The seventh year of Caesar Augustus' reign" or "1973 Anno Domini") If it were obvious that the question was about evolution, I'd answer no, but the question by itself isn't obviously about it.

I'm always wary of polls for this reason because the questions in them aren't carefully phrased.