Yes, of course sometimes the government does choose to support private member's bills. I never said it doesn't. And you are right, with issues they are bent on forcing through such as abortion, they may exploit that mechanism. I just think it unlikely that it will happen this time around, but we will wait and see (and hope).

GA, this is a private member's bill and so it's not correct to say that the government is proposing national service (even though the member who introduced it is a Conservative MP).

Although it has to be debated as a matter of procedure, fortunately private member's bills are not all that often passed. This one is particularly unlikely to be, given how much more unpopular it stands to make the government, the Conservative party and the political class as a whole.

I wonder where the commenter you quoted got it. I may just be an awful Googler but I can't seem to identify an original source using the Internet. Brilliant news story on that site however.

Interesting quote especially considering who it's supposed to be from. Could you tell us where you found it?

I fully understand what you're saying. Their efficiency at this stage really does matter. I am saying that people who have not yet contacted them should not be put off from doing so because others have had late or non-existent replies: at least put the ball in the WS court before dismissing them.

It's early days yet - at least they haven't shown themselves to be completely incompetent and hopeless like so many recently-formed parties have.

However slow your progress is, it will be faster than that of a political party with no hope of getting even one person elected to Parliament in the foreseeable future when it really needs more than three hundred - and anyone honest from any of these parties will admit that.

Best of luck to all involved in WS.

It astonishes me that you could say such things having read what I typed in response to you. Of course, we both know that you haven't read it.

No, nowhere did I state that I watched evolution. To expect evolution to be watchable in the space of time of a video I could link you to, is to completely fail to understand what evolution is and I have explained the problem with that clearly.

I don't HAVE to explain how life started, as I've already stated, because evolution has diddly squat to do with that. I will say it once again, just in case you happen to READ this comment: evolution is a theory explaining the development of different species over time.

I'm not sure what you're quoting so I can't evaluate whether it is "the most up to date textbook theory". Frankly I don't care. No, we don't know exactly what series of chemical reactions led to the origin of life - we're still looking for viable answers.

You, on the other hand, are not looking for answers. You adopt the thoroughly boring and totally ignorant approach of saying that you already know all there is to know about it, and that your information comes from a two thousand year old collection of desert ramblings.

Many sources are listed in the book Why Evolution is True and you will find scientific articles all sourced online, if you care to go looking for it. I don't have time to spoon-feed someone who isn't willing to make the slightest effort to go and find anything nor to read rebuttals when they are posted.

Yes, there's proof and plenty of it. No, you haven't read every world renowned scientist or you'd have read their papers and wouldn't be saying such stupid things. Even popular science books should have prevented you from making some of the glaring mistakes you've made (thinking evolution includes the origin of life, for example) and this shows me that either you haven't read as much as you say, or you've not read it carefully enough.

No, I won't provide the physical evidence. I don't own the fossils or have readily available links to all the necessary documentation but if you are determined enough you can find it, as many many others have done.

If you've been in education for sixty years, disregarding your plethora of spelling mistakes and poorly-worded babble, you should know the difference between THEORY in the colloquial sense and THEORY in the scientific sense.

Ken Miller's argument is actually very strong and I notice you make absolutely no attempt to even begin to counter it. Can you provide an actual quote and a source showing that Ken Miller admitted that there was "NO proof"? Or am I supposed to take you at your word and throw down the entire theory based on that?

Yes, there's a fossil link. Yes, there's a chemical link. If you disbelieve it in the face of all the proof out there please do so in the privacy of your own head and stop trying to poison the minds of nationalists on this site against real science and in favour of your nutty stone age desert-dweller book.

Nobody worships Jerry Coyne (at least, nobody I know of). Perhaps you are confused because you are a religious person, and believe that truth can only come from beings worthy of worship. I can assure you that this isn't true in the real world.

Jerry Coyne: proven liar? Although I can't be certain, I think not, and I'm not going to read your link to find out if he really is. Why? Because the theory of evolution and the facts Coyne has written about do not depend on his credibility for their support. They depend instead on vast quantities of verifiable evidence and so Coyne's own reputation is completely irrelevant. What matters is what he has written and whether it is true.

“There is no provable theory of evolution.” Yes there is. It's called the theory of evolution.

The theory of evolution does not state that evolution started as a lightening bolt striking a pit of primordial slime. In fact, evolution has absolutely nothing to say about how life started. The theory of gravitation has nothing to say about how the Sun formed – it's just not part of what it was written to explain.

Regardless, I will go about correcting what you have said. I imagine your use of the term “pit of slime” is an attempt to imply that science tells us our origins are disgusting and low. Well, perhaps they are. I contend that it has absolutely no bearing on our standing and worth as a species today – we have in fact evolved a lot since then. In any case, I find it far more exciting to think that I might be the eventual result of a lightning strike on a pit of slime than that I was crafted from mud by a man with a garden.

Besides, whether we like the conclusions of science or not, that has no bearing on whether they are factual. It may cause me great distress to know that I have not won the lottery, and consequently my bank account remains very modest. However this does not mean I can ignore reality and embark upon an enormous spending spree. In the same way, a contempt for our own origins does not change our origins.

There is a very good reason no scientist should state that there is absolute proof. The truth is that in science there is no absolute proof for anything. We make observations about the universe, we build models and theories to explain them, we use those models and theories to make testable predictions and then we perform experiments to see whether our predictions were correct. If they were, then weight is added to the theory. If the predictions are wrong in a single instance, the theory is wrong.

Evolution has stood up to every single test and won. It is the best theory we have to explain the variety of life on this planet, but strictly speaking it is not absolutely proven: there may be a discovery tomorrow morning which absolutely blows it out of the water as a valid explanation. However, what is likely to replace it is very unlikely to be creationism or “intelligent design” and far more likely to be a modified version of the theory of evolution – perhaps the introduction of a new evolutionary mechanism.

Nothing is absolutely proven, not even the things we accept most readily. It is possible that everything you sense about the outside world is a lie, fed to you by an evil man manipulating electrical signals in wires connected to your brain in a jar of fluid, but how likely is it? We have different degrees of certainty for different theories about reality, and evolution is about as certain as a theory can get.