Your view on Creation and the Creator?

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That's a straw-man's argument if I ever saw one. Announcing one's support for the scientific method does not imply that he or she is willing to accept it with the blind faith of doctrinal piety.

Nice try, though. And for the record, I agree completely with Odin.

Being under intense pressure to recall it reliably and comprehensively is even better for memory.

Glad? This depends on how much you're interested in learning about polychaetes...they squirm when you poke them...

Oh, and have you ever read anything about comb jellies? Ctenophores. They're really amazing. They are far more advanced than true jellyfish, and they're not even considered phylogenically related. Externally, they look similar to jellyfish, but they actually have a well developed gut. They're really not a very diverse bunch, though. There's only 150 describes species.

The symbiosis between the ancestors of plant cells and the ancestors of chloroplasts goes back way earlier than multicellular life, though, and the ancestors of mitochondria, which inhabit both plant and animal cells, are even older. It's weird to think about, but they're really a weird intracellular symbiote.

In any case, it's a lot easier to think about phylogenetics if you break yourself of thinking about life in terms like "animals are related to plants." The way that plants and animals are organized, even at the cellular level, is different in principle simply because plants and animals have very different needs. Their cells are descended from a common ancestor, though. As hard as it may be to wrap your mind around, our cells are still logistically capable of holding a cloroplast, such as in the case of species Elysia Chlorotica.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=yQNIpW0LlsU

This isn't what my zoology professor is studying at the moment, though. Last I heard, Professor van Tuinen was analyzing the DNA of different bird species in an effort to form a complete phylogenetic tree based on it. I don't think he really likes his work, though, because he explained his desert sand desktop background as, "a lot like how I feel in the morning when I come to work: dry and barren." The thing is, though, he does like the subject matter. He gets very excited sometimes and goes off on these nice tangents.

It's the tangents that really make a lecture worth going to. Not the planned portions of the lectures. It's the spontaneous stuff that really makes it neat. It's those rarefied times that you really see a fire behind the professor's eyes, and you get an earful about a subject that you didn't even know it was possible for someone to get excited about. That's where you learn the stuff that you aren't going to find in your everyday textbook.

I'm not a machine that spends its days computing truths, though. This is just one of millions of things that I can do. I can do other things, and they're just as important to me.

We'd have to get into a theological discussion. This stems from differences in our interpretations. I might have gotten this idea from the Methodists, though, and they've been accused of being psychofanatics for as long as they have existed. Psychofanatics or not, though, they tend to be very nice people. That's been my experience with the bunch, anyway. When I want to wander in someone else's forest, I generally talk to them.

Old Earth Creationism (Genesis is historical).