Yeah, that's my worry, which is why I'm not going to actively pursue it. Leave it in God's hands.
The mitosis argument reminds me of what AltHyp was dealing with from Atheistkult - their refusal to believe in human evolution until he could "show the genes" that cause differences between the races.
You don't need to show genes to prove that certain traits are inheritable; in fact, to even demonstrate that the genes lead to this or that trait, you first need to demonstrate the heritability of said trait through pure statistics, and then correlate said genes to said phenotype. The demands they were making were paradoxical!
Similarly, even if JF had no response to the mitosis mutation rate - that doesn't disprove evolution at all, it merely demonstrates that we don't understand by which mechanism it's working. Darwin didn't know what DNA was when he wrote Origin - he didn't need to. The observations were sufficient. Heck, St Augustine used Greek philosophy to figure out the broad strokes of evolution back in 400 AD.
Has anybody listened to Owen's moon landing theory? I looked into this one years back - asked some guys who were insisting on it to give me the best data they could - and the documentary they linked me to was so full of nonsense that I haven't looked back since.
EDIT: an even easier way to prove the Earth is round? Have your buddy travel a few hours north. Both of you put a yardstick into the ground so it's perfectly vertical. Track the shadow during the day, and mark off it's highest point. The differences in your measurement can be used to calculate the circumference of the Earth. They did this in 2500 BC, and got a number within 5% of today's estimate.
The mitosis argument reminds me of what AltHyp was dealing with from Atheistkult - their refusal to believe in human evolution until he could "show the genes" that cause differences between the races.
You don't need to show genes to prove that certain traits are inheritable; in fact, to even demonstrate that the genes lead to this or that trait, you first need to demonstrate the heritability of said trait through pure statistics, and then correlate said genes to said phenotype. The demands they were making were paradoxical!
Similarly, even if JF had no response to the mitosis mutation rate - that doesn't disprove evolution at all, it merely demonstrates that we don't understand by which mechanism it's working. Darwin didn't know what DNA was when he wrote Origin - he didn't need to. The observations were sufficient. Heck, St Augustine used Greek philosophy to figure out the broad strokes of evolution back in 400 AD.
Has anybody listened to Owen's moon landing theory? I looked into this one years back - asked some guys who were insisting on it to give me the best data they could - and the documentary they linked me to was so full of nonsense that I haven't looked back since.
EDIT: an even easier way to prove the Earth is round? Have your buddy travel a few hours north. Both of you put a yardstick into the ground so it's perfectly vertical. Track the shadow during the day, and mark off it's highest point. The differences in your measurement can be used to calculate the circumference of the Earth. They did this in 2500 BC, and got a number within 5% of today's estimate.