Is There A Contradiction Between believing avian flu can mutate

into a flu transmitted by humans and rejecting the theory of evolution? Can someone please explain how a true blue creationist/fundamentalist can believe that the avian flu, which is now known only to be transmitted by birds, could somehow mutate or evolve within humans to become a flu that could be transmitted between humans? Isn't Bush contradicting many of his followers by suggesting that this flu might mutate or evolve? How is he going to explain this? Just wondering.

You got him! However, there are creationists who believe that God made everything but evolution also works on the creatures God created.

"mutation" is by God's hand.

birth control (which might thwart God's Will) must also be opposed to flu vaccines? (Actually, in doing research on vaccination pros and cons, I found an 'opt out' form which cites this very belief, that prayer and God are all they need to protect their kids from serious diseases.)

Help me out here. I forget which day those were created on.

Most Americans don't understand or have the basis to understand the mechanisms of viral evolution - the mutation/recombination details are beyond them. They know an avian flu pandemic may happen and might get scared about it, but they are oblivious as to the why.

Dangerous, divorced-from-reality sociopaths see no...

Excuse me...

Creationists see no contradiction. A virus mutating to a human-contagious virus from an avian-contagious virus is an example of "microevolution," as they call it. It's analogous to a species of dog: a poodle and a mastiff are both dogs, so (to creationists) the two types of virus are both "flu virus." Ergo, no anti-doctrinal evolution has occurred.

That's bullshit, of course. There is no material distinction between micro- and macroevolution, and the two terms basically describe arbitrary distinctions between organisms with no immutable and clearly-defined "species line" to separate them.

But creationists, who fear and are hateful of science, like to pretend that humans are above and separate from the animal kingdom, and the way that they do this is by clinging to fantasies about macroevolution.

In short, creationists see no contradiction between accepting the mutation of a virus and rejecting the theory of evolution as a whole.

There can never be too many allies in the fight against creationist ignorance, even if we sometimes repeat each other's points!

evolution the other day. (Apropos of already extant species mutating and evolving.)

Oct. 4, 2004 – A University of Utah study showing how lice evolved with the people they infested reveals that a now-extinct species of early human came into direct contact with our species about 25,000 years ago and spread the parasites to our ancestors...

...The new study confirmed several events in primate and human evolution. The researchers found chimp lice and human lice diverged roughly 5.6 million years ago, consistent with previous evidence that chimps and human ancestors diverged from a common ancestor about 5.5 million years ago.

The study also supports the controversial view that there was a “bottleneck” or reduction in the global Homo sapiens population to only about 10,000 people about 100,000 to 50,000 years ago. Rogers and others have proposed the bottleneck may have occurred because of a mass die-off of early humans due to a globally catastrophic volcanic eruption. Others believe the population bottleneck seen in human genes happened because only a small group of human ancestors left Africa in the second wave 150,000 to 50,000 years ago, then reproduced to cause a sudden population expansion.

The new study used the mutation rate in lice and comparisons of genetic differences among lice to find a similar population bottleneck in the group of head lice that infested early Homo sapiens, but no such bottleneck in the population of the lice on the archaic human species. That means archaic humans didn’t go through the same population shrinkage and thus must have spread their lice to Homo sapiens sometime after 50,000 years ago. Rogers speculates contact occurred 25,000 or 30,000 years ago. http://www.utah.edu/unews/releases/04/oct/licemen.html

Some scientists question that homo sapiens and homo erectus interacted as suggested by the study's authors, but the divergence of lice in chimps and humans in interesting in itself.

A BBC article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3715132.stm

Another article: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20041004/lice.htm

I remember reading up on Creationism when it was in its first blush, and the Creationist idiots have managed to convince their followers that there's a difference between evolution (change from one species into another via mutation) and adaptation (non-speciating events of mutation).

Mind you, the fact that enough adaptations will lead to evolution was glossed over. I hate Creationists.

Thanks for the information. I will have to read more of their drivel because I had no idea they had figured out so many amazing ways to get around the obvious flaws in their belief system.