quote:

It's natural selection.

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I don't think it's evolution,

These were said by the same person. Does anyone else see something wrong with this? Natural selection is a form of evolution.

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The problem is that IDers usually simply dicount the idea of Evolution outright and have an assumed bias towards the influence of a creator.

That's not always true, though. You could call me a proponent for ID, but that doesn't blind me to the facts of evolution. I'm no creationist.

That's essentially what I just said.

There is a tremendous debate about this question - scientists do not agree
on the answer. Some people consider them to be just a bunch of chemicals. Other
people consider them to be living parasites, because they require the metabolic
machinery of host cells to survive. But they do reproduce, and they do have genetic
material, so many people consider them to be the simplest living organisms. Probably
the safest answer is that viruses have both living and nonliving characteristics.
Source: BIOLOGY, by Neil Campbell, third edition

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Originally posted by riskbreaker86:
viruses are as alive as plants or insects.

What are you talking about? All a virus is a small protien casing and some RNA that it injects into host cells. They can't reproduce on thier own and have no means of eating or normal metabolic processes. They're a huge gray area on whether their "alive" or not.

viruses are as alive as plants or insects.

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another good example of evolution is looking at the HIV virus in response to drugs and anti-biotics, all the different HIV cells carry antigens to various antibiotics, after one drug is used for so long, only the ones imune to the drug develop and so on. Its evolution speeded up thousands of times.

Viruses aren't alive. Unalive things presumably don't evolve. As DrS said, that's just selective breeding.

The problem with all these examples you're using is that they don't demonstrate the development of new features that didn't exist before. The examples of viruses and bacteria becoming resistant to drugs is not an example of evolution, but rather of (in a sense) selective breeding. It's still the same species, the same thing, it's just that all the ones with certain traits and weaknesses have been killed off.

In order to effectively argue against intelligent designers, you need to find instances where new traits have arose where they did not previously exist. I can argue with the fossil record but that's not usually effective. The problem is that IDers usually simply dicount the idea of Evolution outright and have an assumed bias towards the influence of a creator. There's simply no evidence of an active influence of a creator, but they treat it as such in place of lack of evidence for certain facets of evolution.

another good example of evolution is looking at the HIV virus in response to drugs and anti-biotics, all the different HIV cells carry antigens to various antibiotics, after one drug is used for so long, only the ones imune to the drug develop and so on. Its evolution speeded up thousands of times.

It's natural selection. The 2 genes both already existed, it's just that the more reasonable on survives.

Ex- you have an island populated solely by mice and owls. (forget biodiversity on this one) There are white mice and black mice. In the night, the black mice are less likely to be seen, so the white mice are eaten. The black mice pass on the black gene, and the white mice continue to die off.

I don't think it's evolution, because both genes for the tusked and non-tusked animals already existed. It's still fascinating, and will hopefully cut down on poaching!

your right! that is evolution in action! hooray!

When humans starting bending the natural world to fit them like we have been doing the last few centuries, it has to either break or bend back. It's gonna be sad if we don't get our act together and hundreds of years from now species will either be gone or changed because of us.

Wow, that's really interesting. You'd think that would be enough to counter the whole "because of the Bombadier beetle" theory.