Where, other than in your imagination, are you getting your "facts"? I gave the specific source of my statements, which are traceable to the US census and CDC death certificates. Where did yours come from? By the way, you do know that Baltimore, Chicago and LA are cities, not states, don't you?

http://www.factcheck.org/2015/10/gun-laws-deaths-and-crimes/
There is a more extended discussion there, but the trend is pretty clear, although statistical correlation does not necessarily imply causation, as they point out in the piece itself.

OK, let's try some facts: the 10 states with the highest age-adjusted gun-death rate have state governments in which republicans dominate democrats by 3-5 fold in state senators and representatives, while in the 10 states with the lowest age-adjusted gun-death rates democrats dominate the state governments by about 2-fold. Specifically, AR, LA, MI. Al, AK, WY, MO, OK, NM and TN have an average of 3.6 times more republicans than democrats in the state senate, whereas HI, MA, NY, CT, RI, NJ, NH, MN, CA and IA have 0.66 times fewer republicans than democrats in their senate. Don't you hate it when the facts get in the way of of your preconceptions.

Evolution via changes in cis-regulatory changes (enhancers) hasn't been an important idea for 40 years, so knocking it down is like knocking down the idea that there is a homunculus in every cell - true, but pointless. Here is a link to a more current view: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3826491/. What you are doing is the classic strawman tactic, and it won't work.

I believe that Alaska has the most gun-friendly laws, and yet it rates as the sixth most violent state for crimes.

You are threatening a major financial collapse with this statement. It would lead to the closing of most churches, synagogues and mosques, for, if interpretation were unnecessary most religious leaders would also be unnecessary. Consider the thousands (millions?) of unnecessary pages printed of the Talmud. "Oh, the humanity!"

In the case of the giraffe, no new structure is required, so your explanation fails. Giraffes (and their ancestors) are/were born with a variety of neck lengths. This is just natural variation. Natural selection favored those born with longer necks since they could graze on tree leaves that are/were unavailable to other animals. Thus, those giraffes with naturally occurring necks were favored, and passed that gene variant onto the next generation. The Lamarkian explanation would be that by trying to reach into trees caused the necks to elongate,and this trait was passed onto the next generation. The failure of that idea can be seen in our family dog, Gullliver. Gullie is a Bouvier des Flandres, a breed that has had its tail docked, probably for centuries. Nevertheless, Gullie's tail was surgically shortened when he was a newborn because he was born with a full-length tail, not the Lamarkian-predicted short tail.

Veith is articulate - in that you are right. But...he is not brilliant. The first two assertions is this video are just plain wrong, but he bases his presentation on them. He says that naturalistic science excludes the possibility a God who creates every organism. He is wrong, naturalistic science does not exclude such a possibility, it just says that such a being/event is outside of the realm of testability. The hypothesis of God may be true, but it just isn't testable by science. Second, he gives an example of the perfidy of Darwinists in using a Lamarkian explanation for the evolution of upright locomotion, while at the same time deriding Lamark. Again, Veith is wrong. Upright locomotion conferred a distinct advantage on those individuals who were better at it than others, so natural selection did its thing, and upright locomotion evolved to be a feature of modern man. When you start out a presentation with two wrong assertions, it does not bode well for the remainder of the talk. In other words, I'm calling BS on this video.

Rac: Life is short, so I only looked at the first page of the list of so-called peer reviewed articles. Most are in "Bio Complexity" which is an in-house organ, not a regularly published scientific journal. "Perspectives of Biology and Medicine" is a journal, but it primarily publishes theoretical pieces, not peer-reviewed research based on data. When I sat on tenure-review committees we would occasionally see junior faculty try to pad their resumes with house organs or theoretical "thought" pieces. We recognized them for what they were, and never granted them tenure. Science is about peer review of data and the conclusions one reaches from those data, not about reaching the conclusion first, then "developing" data to support that conclusion.

But, what are his "qualifications"? If you are talking about scientific qualifications, the gold standard is scientific productivity, as measured by peer-reviewed publications. That doesn't mean that what gets published is always true, but it does mean that the work has been exposed to skeptics who have not been able to find fault with the proposed publication. Sometimes something does get published that is incorrect, misinterpreted, or just plain fraudulent. That's where the system shines, because others, reading of the work, will try to replicate the reported findings. If the findings are not reproducible, that fact gets published. If a person does not publish in this forum, it becomes the convinced convincing the convinced, known on this thread as "whiteheading". I'm not saying that Dr. Whitehead is necessarily wrong (although that is, obviously what I do believe), but that he has not demonstrated that his ideas can withstand close scrutiny and experimental verification. In other words, take his word for it, why would he lie?

There are answers, if you understand both developmental biology and genetics. While identical twins begin at conception with identical DNA, even during development they begin to demonstrate subtle differences in genetic expression. It is unlikely, IMHO, that homosexuality is the consequence of a single dominant mutation, but probably reflects a range of genes interacting with environmental factors.

You said this about Neil
Whitehead, implying that he is highly credentialed in biochemistry. A search of the National Library of Medicine shows that Whitehead has no, that is zero, articles published in respected, peer reviewed journals. He lacks credentials, and credibility too.

Yes...and emphatically no. Nobody knows what matter comes from, but intelligence from non-intlelligence? My 2 year old grandson had no detectable intelligence 2 years ago, and now is gaining intelligence by leaps and bounds. I point this out because I hate to see poor logic in arguments, especially when they have nothing to do with the argument. Whether intelligence can come from non-intelligence (it can) has nothing to do with intelligent design. It sounds like some simplified argument based on a misrepresentation of the second law of thermodynamics, which is always misquoted and misunderstood by creationists.

Interesting comment on several fronts. You seem to imply that the lack of a moral compass in science is a bad thing, but my interpretation is just the opposite. Science tries to find the objective truth of an observation, rather than starting with a conclusion (dictated by a "moral compass" ) and rejecting observations that do not support that compass heading. Knowing the truth is always, always, better than acting on false information.

I am not a lawyer, but have spent considerable time in court, and have yet to hear a lawyer argue morality, as opposed to arguing points of the law. So, if the science eventually documents a genetic component to pedophilia, it will be up to the lawmakers to decide what to do about that information. Taking into consideration that pedophilia creates harm to the children (as contrasted with homosexuality), I suspect that there will not be much change from today's laws in this respect.

This thread is typical of creationist false logic: if "A" is false then "B" must be true. If there is a fault in some facet of evolutionary science, then it must be false, and creationism must be true. This is not so - it just means that science is moving closer to understanding what is true, while creationists remain locked in poorly reasoned mindsets.