I've meant to check that out quite some time, actually. Thanks for reminding me. Might still be a while though, it always takes me forever to get around to checking out the really old electronic classics (like 70s and previous). I often find them quite noisy and difficult, so I tend to procrastinate on giving them a first listen.
I love Dominik Eulberg, but I really preferred his Kreucht & Freucht mix over Flora & Fauna. Good album, but I found it dragged a bit - too much filler.
Haha, awesome. Just please don't try to trick stupid people into forwarding it (IE: send this to 20 of your friends in the next 5 minutes, or an angry leopard will jump through your wall and rape you up the ass for the next 10 years).
I'll get back to you on this. My political views regarding economic policies are not quite as well formed as those touching on other topics - I have comparatively little knowledge on economics, so I'd like to read more about it first.
"I love making love while listening to Mozart. He just seems to make it much more passionate"
Haha, I totally would try it if I could stand Mozart - but I find his music overly "decorated" - all of his songs feel incredibly basic to me, with little decorations hung off of them. I know I'm in the minority on that one though, it's just a strange personal thing, and it might just be because so many teachers over the years seemed to think Mozart boosts your brain functioning (disproven, and in fact a media fabrication to begin with), and had to constantly listen to it in unpleasant school situations as a kid. However, I do have a lovemaking category - that's what "Romance" is code for.
Nice list of your own BTW - I'd be interested in seeing you expand it to a full list.
"Hope life is treating you well, and I hope your soon-to-be-wife is treating you nicely "
Life is hard right now - recession - but the fiance is certainly treating me well :D How about you?
You should make a list of your own of this sort :D
And you should also go to a club or rave, it's a lot of fun (well, EDM clubs are - and minimal is huge right now, so you'd get to hear a lot of stuff you like).
Greatest though? Really? All 5 above IMO are vastly superior. I mean, 6 Underground was classic, but what else that the Sneaker Pimps produced could be called really great?
Fantastic, thank you. There's a fair bit here I've never heard - I'll be doing quite a bit of downloading over the next few days. Although I don't know if I'd define all of the ones I know as trip-hop (IE Clint Eastwood?). Still, great list, I've been considering making/waiting for one for quite a while.
I agree with a lot of libertarianism (individual liberty, entirely, actually), but my main problem with it is the lack of a government safety net. Welfare of some sort benefits everyone, even the rich. If the poor are too desperate (something government social support mostly prevents), they are forced to turn to crime, and with drugs, prostitution, and gambling legal (I agree with legalizing these, BTW), the only illicit businesses to turn to are extortion and violence. This would lower the safety of everyone in the country - in countries without safety nets, the rich almost always have to live in gated communities, and large, dangerous ghettos spring up all over the place.
Also, what about the lack of free education? This would make it impossible to gain any measure of success if you're not born into a family that can afford to send you to school. Someone of, say, Albert Einstein's level of ability would never be able to use their gift if they were born into a ghetto - everyone would lose in this case.
My second issue is the lack of restrictions on business. Without it, massive monopolies and cartels would come to dominate almost every sector of business, and prices would skyrocket in all sectors. Since there would be no minimum wage or laws on how much various workers should be paid, the amount each person who is not high up in a company would make would plummet (if there are more desperate people willing to do a job for less, the company would hire them instead - wages would continuously drop). People would have to borrow huge amounts of money just to survive, and the economy would eventually crash when spending reached a standstill thanks to the debt - in fact, this already happened. It started in the US, which is perhaps the most economically unregulated of all first-world countries - a nice indicator of how important business restriction is. Another good example is Microsoft, which came to fruition in a time when computers were too new for governments to know how to deal with them by exploiting yet unregulated loopholes in the law that allowed for the formation of a monopoly (with its Windows operating system).
I'll break it into points again, and touch on the video last. I apologize for the length of my post, but you wanted me to comment on the video, and it was fairly long.
1)"The idea of evolution is the addition of genetic material" - there are numerous ways genetic material can be added to DNA, so many, actually, that I can't even begin to scratch the surface. I learned them in labs and in physical books, so (as much as I hate doing this, for numerous reasons) since I don't have unlimited time and space to locate good sources online or re-write it myself, I'll just point you to the wikipedia pages of some examples of a few general ones. These pages seem fairly accurate, from a cursory glance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insertion_(genetics) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_duplication http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muller%27s_morphs#Gain_of_function
Also note that most of our DNA is made up of transposons and other nonfunctional elements, so mutations that act to fuse together disparate parts of our genetic code, or rearrange them, are usually additive as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosomal_translocation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosomal_inversion
I can also send you links for the causes of these mutations if you'd like, but I think you get the idea. I'm really not sure where this "no addition of genetic material" thing comes from, there's plenty of very observable evidence that this is the case (IE: fruitfly experiments involving the breeding of hundreds of generations of flies - they breed fast - in which the DNA of members of the initial generation is compared to those of the final. These mutations are easily observed in such codes - plus phenotypic changes can be made to occur - some of them very drastic, such as additional functional limbs, etc.). Also, evolution involves both the addition and removal of genetic material. Anyway, due to dormant genetic phrases, removing genetic material can actually add physical traits to an animal. For example, if a stop codon is removed before a dormant phrase [a stop codon is a tiny piece of DNA that tells a cell's transcription factors to stop transcribing DNA to be transported to a ribosome for protein synthesis. Removing such a codon would cause the cell to keep transcribing until the next stop codon, and if there were no start codon before the next section, it would add a trait that was not there before. There's honestly no such thing as de-volution, it all falls under evolution.
2)You're right, no genetic progress would have been made without it, and life would still be in it's most simple, pre-evolutionary form. However, the study of where life actually came from to begin with is the field of abiogenesis, not evolution. Evolution only applies after life exists. Abiogenesis studies what came before evolution. This is irrelevant anyway, this is just a semantic argument. Abiogenesis theories have a lot of evidence for them, I was hoping you'd have something to say on them instead.
Video:
1) Supernova argument. They're omitting a lot of facts. Firstly, supernova remnants last only around a million years, at which point they have cool and dispersed enough that they are no longer distinguishable from the interstellar medium. Second, not all supernovae become supernova remnants - many become black holes or neutron stars. On top of this, not all stars eventually become supernovae. Also, where are they getting "we don't see a single one?" Where are their pictures of them coming from, then? I don't know exactly how many we've found, but there are a fair number of them, and in fact, we've even seen a good number of supernovae occur since observing the sky.
2)"If we're just re-arranged pond scum, why is it wrong to kill humans?" There is so much wrong with this, I don't know where to begin. For starters, having no religion doesn't mean having no life philosophy or values. IE Look up secular humanism. There are a massive load of reasons why it's wrong to kill humans if we're just "re-arranged pond scum" (which isn't really an accurate phrase, but whatever), but it depends on your philosophy. My own, for example, is that it would cause suffering to the person I kill, to that person's family and friends, and even to myself, and of which are undesirable. Anyway, this isn't an argument against evolution, it's an irrelevant point. Whether evolution is a socially desirable theory or not has no bearing on whether it's true or false. The same goes for their abortion "argument."
3)"The bible is the final authority on all statements of faith and practice." and
"It is the final say on all matters of ethics and morality..." "...final say in all matters it touches on..." etc..
I think you'll find this website interesting: http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/
Deuteronomy 22:28-29 is a particularly nice example (God declares that a raped woman must marry her rapist). There are tons more, actually, just read Deuteronomy in general, most of it is either evil or nonsensical. Same goes for the 10 commandments, there are like 4, that actually make sense as rules (the first 3: don't be part of another religion, 4: don't work on Sunday, 5: honor your mother and father. This means NO MATTER WHAT, as other sections of the bible make clear. 6, 7, 8, 9: makes sense, in most circumstances; 10: don't ever be envious. Oh, and the punishment for breaking any of them is death by stoning, and as the New Testament makes clear, also an eternity of being tortured). Great source, which also contradicts the host's implication that this book is required for someone to be moral. Anyway, what about the two entirely separate creation stories in genesis?
4)(*sarcasm*)"...like a lizard could gain the genetic information to turn into something like a bird."
Evolution doesn't claim anything of the sort. Over millions of years, through very tiny, incremental changes, yes, but it really doesn't work the way that statement implies.
5) Statements on how evolution and science affect church-going behaviours: irrelevant to the truth or falsity of the theory of evolution. Same reason as in point 2.
6)"Not a question of science versus faith, but faith versus faith."
Except one is based on observing the world, the other on a 2000 year old book.
7)"I don't want to believe in God. There I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible - spontaneous generation leading to evolution."
Urban legend: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-4.html
If you want you can dig up the article, but Creationists pull this sort of trick all the time. IE, constantly quoted out context from Charles Darwin's Origin of Species: http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Popular_quote_mines#The_Eye_and_Natural_Sel...
Except George Wald didn't say anything like it at all. Anyway, even if he had said it, one scientist's beliefs are irrelevant to whether something is true or false.
8)"Nobody's ever observed something spontaneously coming to life out of nowhere"
I explained this in my last post. In summary, we've seen many steps of this process occur spontaneously out of physical simulations (as in, in labs, not computer simulations) of the conditions that existed at the beginning of the early (which is actually not out of nowhere).
9)First Richard Dawkins quote: Irrelevant. Second: "We don't need evidence, we know it to be true." Here's the text he references: http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/...
This is deliberately con artistry. The original phrase is:
"The evolution of the vertebrate eye must have been progressive. Ancient ancestors had a very simple eye, containing only a few features good for seeing. We don’t need evidence for this (although it is nice that it is there). It has to be true because the alternative – an initially complex eye, well-endowed with features good for seeing – pitches us right back to Hoyle country and the sheer cliff of improbability. There must be a ramp of step-by-step progress towards the modern, multifeatured descendant of that optical prototype."
I'm going to stop. I can keep going if you'd like, but so far, it's been exactly the same arguments I've seen dozens of times before from other creationists, and the same deliberate manipulation and trickery, as you saw very clearly in the last example.
Hey blindsider, no offense taken at all from any of this - like I've said before, I genuinely enjoy debating. This is going to be a long response, though.
OK, several points:
1) Evolution absolutely has been observed, numerous times. It's even been produced in a lab. There are dozens of examples of direct observations of evolution occurring, and I could list a number of them for you if you'd like (I really will if you request it). For one particularly easy to explain example (and you may have heard this one - not the best example, but easy to explain), peppered moths were initially a white insect, pervasive in the forests around London in the late 1700s - this allowed them to blend in with the white birch trees and evade predators. When the industrial revolution came around, the birch trees became blanketed in soot, so being white was no longer a survival advantage, and the peppered moth population took a nosedive. However, on re-examining the forest many years later, the peppered moths were found to still exist - however, all those that remained were a blackish-brown colour. Genetic testing found a common mutation in all surviving peppered moths causing the change in colour - it was a huge survival advantage to be this colour rather than white, so while white peppered moths died out, the brownish-black ones flourished, and eventually were all that remained. All had a common ancestor, so the mutation appeared once, then survived due to the strong advantage it gave. I have more examples if you'd like, some even more compelling (IE a completely new species of fruitfly that was considerably different and unable to reproduce with its ancestral species was produced in a lab under a reproduction of natural conditions. In other words, no genetic engineering was done - natural selection was just allowed to occur). Hell, evolution occurs whenever we breed dogs or plants. I don't understand why people keep saying it hasn't been observed, it's one of the most observed phenomena in the entire history of science. (Check out my still very incomplete "complete evidence for evolution" list - the evidence for it is compelling to the point of being almost undeniable).
2) Evolution has nothing to do with the beginning of life - that's a field called abiogenesis, and it's beyond the scope of evolution to explain. However, while we're on the subject, no biologist would tell you that life at any point just randomly assembled itself. Even the simplest forms of life in existence had ancestors in complex chemical reactions, who had ancestors in simpler reactions, and so on. We even know quite a number of the pre-life steps - for example, some of the more complex building blocks of life spontaneously appear in labs that reproduce the earth's conditions around the time life appeared. Other research is suggesting that DNA based life was preceded by considerably simpler (and now extinct) RNA-based life. Other steps have been discovered, hinted at, or theorized, but those are particularly poignant examples. More pre-life steps are being discovered all the time. The "isolated bundle of wood and steel turning into a house" is analogous is no way to the formation of life - the formation of life is governed by the natural laws of chemistry (and physics to a lesser extent), it's not random in any way.
3)If people just accept things at face value, whether it's the bible, or the theory of evolution, they're not doing science. One should examine the arguments made by scientists before simply accepting a theory as absolutely true (which is never really done anyway). Still, I'd argue that even scientists who just accept evolution because they're told it (and I am not one of them - nor is anyone in biology, as it's completely impossible to do any research in biology without a highly detailed and advanced understanding of evolution, since it's the basis of the entire field) are displaying a very different sort of faith than someone following the bible. I mean, science has obviously been right many times before (all modern technology that everyone takes for granted is based on science - we see these principles at work every day), and we know the scientific method was used to come to the conclusions made, so it's an act of earned trust rather than of faith. I know people are quick to point out times when science was "wrong" - but even then it wasn't wrong in the way creationists like to present it - most of the ideas science supposedly changed its mind about were not, in fact, scientifically derived, but dogma (IE flat earth, matter being "fluid" rather than made of atoms). Even things science was actually incorrect about were still much more correct than any alternatives around at the time - IE Newton's laws, while inaccurate, work almost perfectly unless you approach the speed of light or examine the subatomic world.
I can't find this youtube video you've mentioned, could you post a link to it?
I've meant to check that out quite some time, actually. Thanks for reminding me. Might still be a while though, it always takes me forever to get around to checking out the really old electronic classics (like 70s and previous). I often find them quite noisy and difficult, so I tend to procrastinate on giving them a first listen.
I love Dominik Eulberg, but I really preferred his Kreucht & Freucht mix over Flora & Fauna. Good album, but I found it dragged a bit - too much filler.
It is indeed fun :D
Haha, awesome. Just please don't try to trick stupid people into forwarding it (IE: send this to 20 of your friends in the next 5 minutes, or an angry leopard will jump through your wall and rape you up the ass for the next 10 years).
That's the original mix, without a doubt.
I'll get back to you on this. My political views regarding economic policies are not quite as well formed as those touching on other topics - I have comparatively little knowledge on economics, so I'd like to read more about it first.
SPAM
Is there any way I can erase this?
"I love making love while listening to Mozart. He just seems to make it much more passionate"
Haha, I totally would try it if I could stand Mozart - but I find his music overly "decorated" - all of his songs feel incredibly basic to me, with little decorations hung off of them. I know I'm in the minority on that one though, it's just a strange personal thing, and it might just be because so many teachers over the years seemed to think Mozart boosts your brain functioning (disproven, and in fact a media fabrication to begin with), and had to constantly listen to it in unpleasant school situations as a kid. However, I do have a lovemaking category - that's what "Romance" is code for.
Nice list of your own BTW - I'd be interested in seeing you expand it to a full list.
"Hope life is treating you well, and I hope your soon-to-be-wife is treating you nicely "
Life is hard right now - recession - but the fiance is certainly treating me well :D How about you?
You should make a list of your own of this sort :D
And you should also go to a club or rave, it's a lot of fun (well, EDM clubs are - and minimal is huge right now, so you'd get to hear a lot of stuff you like).
Greatest though? Really? All 5 above IMO are vastly superior. I mean, 6 Underground was classic, but what else that the Sneaker Pimps produced could be called really great?
Fantastic, thank you. There's a fair bit here I've never heard - I'll be doing quite a bit of downloading over the next few days. Although I don't know if I'd define all of the ones I know as trip-hop (IE Clint Eastwood?). Still, great list, I've been considering making/waiting for one for quite a while.
I agree with a lot of libertarianism (individual liberty, entirely, actually), but my main problem with it is the lack of a government safety net. Welfare of some sort benefits everyone, even the rich. If the poor are too desperate (something government social support mostly prevents), they are forced to turn to crime, and with drugs, prostitution, and gambling legal (I agree with legalizing these, BTW), the only illicit businesses to turn to are extortion and violence. This would lower the safety of everyone in the country - in countries without safety nets, the rich almost always have to live in gated communities, and large, dangerous ghettos spring up all over the place.
Also, what about the lack of free education? This would make it impossible to gain any measure of success if you're not born into a family that can afford to send you to school. Someone of, say, Albert Einstein's level of ability would never be able to use their gift if they were born into a ghetto - everyone would lose in this case.
My second issue is the lack of restrictions on business. Without it, massive monopolies and cartels would come to dominate almost every sector of business, and prices would skyrocket in all sectors. Since there would be no minimum wage or laws on how much various workers should be paid, the amount each person who is not high up in a company would make would plummet (if there are more desperate people willing to do a job for less, the company would hire them instead - wages would continuously drop). People would have to borrow huge amounts of money just to survive, and the economy would eventually crash when spending reached a standstill thanks to the debt - in fact, this already happened. It started in the US, which is perhaps the most economically unregulated of all first-world countries - a nice indicator of how important business restriction is. Another good example is Microsoft, which came to fruition in a time when computers were too new for governments to know how to deal with them by exploiting yet unregulated loopholes in the law that allowed for the formation of a monopoly (with its Windows operating system).
I'll break it into points again, and touch on the video last. I apologize for the length of my post, but you wanted me to comment on the video, and it was fairly long.
1)"The idea of evolution is the addition of genetic material" - there are numerous ways genetic material can be added to DNA, so many, actually, that I can't even begin to scratch the surface. I learned them in labs and in physical books, so (as much as I hate doing this, for numerous reasons) since I don't have unlimited time and space to locate good sources online or re-write it myself, I'll just point you to the wikipedia pages of some examples of a few general ones. These pages seem fairly accurate, from a cursory glance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insertion_(genetics)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_duplication
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muller%27s_morphs#Gain_of_function
Also note that most of our DNA is made up of transposons and other nonfunctional elements, so mutations that act to fuse together disparate parts of our genetic code, or rearrange them, are usually additive as well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosomal_translocation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosomal_inversion
I can also send you links for the causes of these mutations if you'd like, but I think you get the idea. I'm really not sure where this "no addition of genetic material" thing comes from, there's plenty of very observable evidence that this is the case (IE: fruitfly experiments involving the breeding of hundreds of generations of flies - they breed fast - in which the DNA of members of the initial generation is compared to those of the final. These mutations are easily observed in such codes - plus phenotypic changes can be made to occur - some of them very drastic, such as additional functional limbs, etc.). Also, evolution involves both the addition and removal of genetic material. Anyway, due to dormant genetic phrases, removing genetic material can actually add physical traits to an animal. For example, if a stop codon is removed before a dormant phrase [a stop codon is a tiny piece of DNA that tells a cell's transcription factors to stop transcribing DNA to be transported to a ribosome for protein synthesis. Removing such a codon would cause the cell to keep transcribing until the next stop codon, and if there were no start codon before the next section, it would add a trait that was not there before. There's honestly no such thing as de-volution, it all falls under evolution.
2)You're right, no genetic progress would have been made without it, and life would still be in it's most simple, pre-evolutionary form. However, the study of where life actually came from to begin with is the field of abiogenesis, not evolution. Evolution only applies after life exists. Abiogenesis studies what came before evolution. This is irrelevant anyway, this is just a semantic argument. Abiogenesis theories have a lot of evidence for them, I was hoping you'd have something to say on them instead.
Video:
1) Supernova argument. They're omitting a lot of facts. Firstly, supernova remnants last only around a million years, at which point they have cool and dispersed enough that they are no longer distinguishable from the interstellar medium. Second, not all supernovae become supernova remnants - many become black holes or neutron stars. On top of this, not all stars eventually become supernovae. Also, where are they getting "we don't see a single one?" Where are their pictures of them coming from, then? I don't know exactly how many we've found, but there are a fair number of them, and in fact, we've even seen a good number of supernovae occur since observing the sky.
2)"If we're just re-arranged pond scum, why is it wrong to kill humans?" There is so much wrong with this, I don't know where to begin. For starters, having no religion doesn't mean having no life philosophy or values. IE Look up secular humanism. There are a massive load of reasons why it's wrong to kill humans if we're just "re-arranged pond scum" (which isn't really an accurate phrase, but whatever), but it depends on your philosophy. My own, for example, is that it would cause suffering to the person I kill, to that person's family and friends, and even to myself, and of which are undesirable. Anyway, this isn't an argument against evolution, it's an irrelevant point. Whether evolution is a socially desirable theory or not has no bearing on whether it's true or false. The same goes for their abortion "argument."
3)"The bible is the final authority on all statements of faith and practice." and
"It is the final say on all matters of ethics and morality..." "...final say in all matters it touches on..." etc..
I think you'll find this website interesting:
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/
Deuteronomy 22:28-29 is a particularly nice example (God declares that a raped woman must marry her rapist). There are tons more, actually, just read Deuteronomy in general, most of it is either evil or nonsensical. Same goes for the 10 commandments, there are like 4, that actually make sense as rules (the first 3: don't be part of another religion, 4: don't work on Sunday, 5: honor your mother and father. This means NO MATTER WHAT, as other sections of the bible make clear. 6, 7, 8, 9: makes sense, in most circumstances; 10: don't ever be envious. Oh, and the punishment for breaking any of them is death by stoning, and as the New Testament makes clear, also an eternity of being tortured). Great source, which also contradicts the host's implication that this book is required for someone to be moral. Anyway, what about the two entirely separate creation stories in genesis?
4)(*sarcasm*)"...like a lizard could gain the genetic information to turn into something like a bird."
Evolution doesn't claim anything of the sort. Over millions of years, through very tiny, incremental changes, yes, but it really doesn't work the way that statement implies.
5) Statements on how evolution and science affect church-going behaviours: irrelevant to the truth or falsity of the theory of evolution. Same reason as in point 2.
6)"Not a question of science versus faith, but faith versus faith."
Except one is based on observing the world, the other on a 2000 year old book.
7)"I don't want to believe in God. There I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible - spontaneous generation leading to evolution."
Urban legend:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-4.html
If you want you can dig up the article, but Creationists pull this sort of trick all the time. IE, constantly quoted out context from Charles Darwin's Origin of Species:
http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Popular_quote_mines#The_Eye_and_Natural_Sel...
Except George Wald didn't say anything like it at all. Anyway, even if he had said it, one scientist's beliefs are irrelevant to whether something is true or false.
8)"Nobody's ever observed something spontaneously coming to life out of nowhere"
I explained this in my last post. In summary, we've seen many steps of this process occur spontaneously out of physical simulations (as in, in labs, not computer simulations) of the conditions that existed at the beginning of the early (which is actually not out of nowhere).
9)First Richard Dawkins quote: Irrelevant. Second: "We don't need evidence, we know it to be true." Here's the text he references: http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/...
This is deliberately con artistry. The original phrase is:
"The evolution of the vertebrate eye must have been progressive. Ancient ancestors had a very simple eye, containing only a few features good for seeing. We don’t need evidence for this (although it is nice that it is there). It has to be true because the alternative – an initially complex eye, well-endowed with features good for seeing – pitches us right back to Hoyle country and the sheer cliff of improbability. There must be a ramp of step-by-step progress towards the modern, multifeatured descendant of that optical prototype."
I'm going to stop. I can keep going if you'd like, but so far, it's been exactly the same arguments I've seen dozens of times before from other creationists, and the same deliberate manipulation and trickery, as you saw very clearly in the last example.
Hey blindsider, no offense taken at all from any of this - like I've said before, I genuinely enjoy debating. This is going to be a long response, though.
OK, several points:
1) Evolution absolutely has been observed, numerous times. It's even been produced in a lab. There are dozens of examples of direct observations of evolution occurring, and I could list a number of them for you if you'd like (I really will if you request it). For one particularly easy to explain example (and you may have heard this one - not the best example, but easy to explain), peppered moths were initially a white insect, pervasive in the forests around London in the late 1700s - this allowed them to blend in with the white birch trees and evade predators. When the industrial revolution came around, the birch trees became blanketed in soot, so being white was no longer a survival advantage, and the peppered moth population took a nosedive. However, on re-examining the forest many years later, the peppered moths were found to still exist - however, all those that remained were a blackish-brown colour. Genetic testing found a common mutation in all surviving peppered moths causing the change in colour - it was a huge survival advantage to be this colour rather than white, so while white peppered moths died out, the brownish-black ones flourished, and eventually were all that remained. All had a common ancestor, so the mutation appeared once, then survived due to the strong advantage it gave. I have more examples if you'd like, some even more compelling (IE a completely new species of fruitfly that was considerably different and unable to reproduce with its ancestral species was produced in a lab under a reproduction of natural conditions. In other words, no genetic engineering was done - natural selection was just allowed to occur). Hell, evolution occurs whenever we breed dogs or plants. I don't understand why people keep saying it hasn't been observed, it's one of the most observed phenomena in the entire history of science. (Check out my still very incomplete "complete evidence for evolution" list - the evidence for it is compelling to the point of being almost undeniable).
2) Evolution has nothing to do with the beginning of life - that's a field called abiogenesis, and it's beyond the scope of evolution to explain. However, while we're on the subject, no biologist would tell you that life at any point just randomly assembled itself. Even the simplest forms of life in existence had ancestors in complex chemical reactions, who had ancestors in simpler reactions, and so on. We even know quite a number of the pre-life steps - for example, some of the more complex building blocks of life spontaneously appear in labs that reproduce the earth's conditions around the time life appeared. Other research is suggesting that DNA based life was preceded by considerably simpler (and now extinct) RNA-based life. Other steps have been discovered, hinted at, or theorized, but those are particularly poignant examples. More pre-life steps are being discovered all the time. The "isolated bundle of wood and steel turning into a house" is analogous is no way to the formation of life - the formation of life is governed by the natural laws of chemistry (and physics to a lesser extent), it's not random in any way.
3)If people just accept things at face value, whether it's the bible, or the theory of evolution, they're not doing science. One should examine the arguments made by scientists before simply accepting a theory as absolutely true (which is never really done anyway). Still, I'd argue that even scientists who just accept evolution because they're told it (and I am not one of them - nor is anyone in biology, as it's completely impossible to do any research in biology without a highly detailed and advanced understanding of evolution, since it's the basis of the entire field) are displaying a very different sort of faith than someone following the bible. I mean, science has obviously been right many times before (all modern technology that everyone takes for granted is based on science - we see these principles at work every day), and we know the scientific method was used to come to the conclusions made, so it's an act of earned trust rather than of faith. I know people are quick to point out times when science was "wrong" - but even then it wasn't wrong in the way creationists like to present it - most of the ideas science supposedly changed its mind about were not, in fact, scientifically derived, but dogma (IE flat earth, matter being "fluid" rather than made of atoms). Even things science was actually incorrect about were still much more correct than any alternatives around at the time - IE Newton's laws, while inaccurate, work almost perfectly unless you approach the speed of light or examine the subatomic world.
I can't find this youtube video you've mentioned, could you post a link to it?
Sure, I'll give them a listen at some point.