Title Author Date

Your website -- Part 1 kendemyer@hotmail.com Nov 16, 2003

Dear Sir:

I read your site and you are now on my friends list so I can receive you emails. I updated some personal information I compiled and I think it gives a very thorough answer to something that you posted on your site which many people alledge is a contradiction in the Bible. If you could post some of this information on your site I would be indebted to you. Here is a partial copy of a letter I sent someone regarding the issue that was posted on your site:

Thank you for being so prompt regarding getting back to me regarding the 3 inadvertant errors I found on your website.....

The second inadvertant mistake you made was saying that the rock badger does not regurgitate and rechew its food (The New American Standard Bible translates the hebrew word shaphan into rock badger. The King James Bible uses the word coney). A more precise term for rock badger from a scientific point of view is the word hyrax. And according to the Biological Abstracts and a German biology journal the hyrax definitely regurgitates and rechews its food:

http://www.adam.com.au/bstett/BHyrax18May1991.htm

Also, the hyrax apparently spends about an hour regurgitating and rechewing its food:

http://www.adam.com.au/bstett/BWilliamsvsAnon71to73.htm

So Moses actually was ahead of the Biological Abstacts by about 3,000 years!!!!

The third mistake you made was in saying that rabbits (actually hares) do not regurgitate and rechew their food.

This is what Wycliffe Bible Encylopedia says about the hare:

" While not a true ruminant according to modern classification in that it does not have a four chambered stomach, the hare does rechew its food. There is a process of partial regurgitation of material that it is too hard for little cells in the stomach to absorb initially; thus there hare actually chews food previously swallowed (E.P. Schulze, "The Ruminating Hare,"Bible-Science Newsletter, VIII [Jan. 15, 1970], 6).

You can look up the Bible-Science Newsletter via your librarian in a catalogue that librarians refer to as worldcat. According to worldcat the Minnesota Historical Society keeps copies of the Bible-Science Newsletter. You should be able to obtain a copy through your library through interlibrary loan. The Bible-Science Newletter is now published by Creation Moments, P.O. Box 260, Zimmerman, MN 55398. The phone number for Creation Moments is 763-856-2552. By the way, Creation Moments used to be known as Bible Science Association.

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A List of Some Problematic Issues

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Exodus numbers... a question Crowl , Adam Nov 09, 2003

Hi

While I am a sceptic about affairs of religion I have an interest in ancient history and the potential historical nucleus of traditions. I think there is sufficient evidence to, firstly, doubt the blanket scepticism against the Exodus stories and, secondly, sufficient evidence to re-date much of circum-Mediterranean pre-600 BCE. Egyptian history seems to be inflated by 200 - 300 years and this has thrown the rest of Near Eastern history into disarray.

However I am not suggesting that the Torah and related Jewish tradition got all of the underlying history correct either. A gross error is the figure for the Exodus population - over 600,000 males. But a truer figure for the Exodus might be hidden in another part of the text. In Numbers 3:39-43 all the Levites and the numbers of Israelite First-born males are counted and found to be similar.

What male commentators neglect is the fact that a first-born male child is a proxy count for the number of mothers - in this case a mere 22,000. I suspect that this is a more accurate count of the number of Israelite males, and is more believeable figure for surviving the Sinai under the leadership of a desert-savvy leader like the Midianite-trained Moses.

Textual criticism has a number of sources contributing to the final story as we have it in Ezra's Torah, but there is plenty of evidence suggesting traditions that have survived from an originally non-sedentary population. Whether the miracles in the text occurred or not, or reflect striking natural events utilised by a sharp leadership, shouldn't cause the text to be cast into the scrap-heap of history.

Adam

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A List of Some Problematic Issues

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Article "A List of Some Problematic Issues" 200X, Adrian Nov 16, 2003

Hello,
I'm interested in a spanish version of this article, and if it does not exist I'm planning to do the translation by my self.
Could you send me the e-mail of Naftali Zeligman to ask if this article has been translated to spanish, or otherwise forward this message to him so he can tell me if there is such a translation if he wants to ?
BTW, I've found the site very interesting.
TIA & Regards ...

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A List of Some Problematic Issues

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Hmmmmmmmmmmm? Qasim, Adib Nov 09, 2003

as-alaam alaikum wa rathmatulla,

My name is Adib and I am a Muslim living in Britain. I just thuoght I would write and point out a few errors on this site with how you address the Quran and the guy called Harun Yahya.

"I would be the first to admit that he is a very annoying book where every point he makes is rounded of with this proves that God exists and created every thing".

But at the same time he does write some Good articles if you give them thought.

Anyway to get to my main problem is when I first came on to this site. I read your first page and found it quite laughable.

You go on about the Quran as if you understand it or have read it where as you have not and so you can not comment about it.

Firstly when your pointing out about how God makes feotus's out of clay. Point one is it is not literally made out of clay it is a analicy. Sorry my spelling is very bad.

God reveleed this book over 4000 years ago and so he had to make sure it was written in away that all people from that time to the future could understand.

point two the Quran is written in Arabic and not in English. English does not have the words to give a 100% perfect translation, infact it does not even come close. I could not even begin to explain it to you in a way you
could under stand.

The Quran should be read in Arabic if you are looking for faults in it as thats the language it is supposed to be read in. A lot of the Quran's meaning is lost due to the lack of words to translate properly in other
languages.

The second grudge is where you say that people have written a sura like that found in the Quran, but they have not. They have written some thing that goes in English and sounds similier next to the English translation, but if you translate there Sura'a into Arabic
then they do not even come close to the Quran's beauty.

As for scientific data in the Quran, well firstly its a religous book not a science book. Its a book of signs to man kind. secondly it has loads of scientific data in it if you bothered to pick it up and read it.

At the end of the day you can't prove evolution 100% and we can not prove to you that God exists so its actually a pointless discussion. When we die we will find out who was right.

Salaam
Adib

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Variance and probability in Nilsson and Pelger Berlinski, David Aug 23, 2003

Part I
In my Commentary essays, I argued that Nilsson and Pelger's theory, whatever else it might be, was certainly not Darwinian inasmuch as it lacked any feature corresponding to random variations. Mr. Downard disagrees. The fact that Nilsson and Pelger specified their coefficient of variance within a narrow range, he has argued, is sufficient to establish the Darwinian nature of their theory. The point is of great importance. If variations are not random, Darwin's theory is liable to a regress in which explaining the source of those variations becomes the very problem that Darwin's theory was intended to solve.

Although the existence of variations within (or between) populations is necessary to establish an underlying stochastic structure, it is hardly sufficient. The distribution of women’s shoe sizes has historically displayed a tightly bounded variation around a mean, but as women's feet have gotten larger, so, too, women's shoes, and so, too, the variations themselves. No one suggests that the fact that there is and has always been variations in the size of women's shoes implies that these variations are random. Within Nilsson and Pelger’s theory, moreover, the coefficient of variance - the ratio of the standard deviation to the mean - is obviously correlated to the mean itself, and since the mean rises in each generation by a constant factor by Falconer’s response statistic R, the coefficient of variance can hardly be considered as the expression of some random variable. Finally, since the mean rises monotonically throughout 330,000 generations, and since the coefficient of variance remains a constant percentage of the mean, new variations must be introduced into their sample population in each generation if variations are not to shrink to zero. Nilsson and Pelger say nothing about the source of these new variations, either in terms of mutations or sampling errors. But then, of course, if new variations lie in the range of a random variable, the mean itself could not possibly arise by a fixed percentage in each generation. Finally, it is easy enough to derive a contradiction from Nilsson and Pelger’s use of Falconer's response statistic R as the basis of a recurrence relationship. Thus assume, as Nilsson and Pelger do, that there is a fixed upper bound UB to visual acuity beyond which the mean m cannot rise. As their population approaches UB with respect to visual acuity, variations must shrink to the right of the mean until UB = m. At this point, or shortly thereafter, the true mean and the statistical mean will coincide and the population will exhibit no variations beyond sampling errors. From this it follows that the coefficient of variation cannot always be a constant percentage of a rising mean.

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Has Darwin met his match in Berlinski?

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