Accepted by the scientific community.
People who don’t accept it don’t understand it. You’ve demonstrated this with your own words throughout this thread. If you don’t understand evolution you don’t have a viable opinion on the matter.
By the way, I said the world would be better off with out religion. Your neocon tactics don’t work here.
More name calling?
What is it I don’t understand about evolution? So far you have offered nothing but your opinion. Please clue me in.
Where did I ever say I don’t accept evolution? Just because you close your eyes and wish real hard does not make your idiotic assumptions true.
The only thing I don’t accept is ignorant bigotry such as yours.
[quote]rainjack wrote:
…
[/quote]
Wake up RJ! It’s the 21st century. There’s no way you can have as much as a iota of critical thinking and still deny evolution. It makes you look foolish (though I’m sure the feeling is a familiar one for you).
I’m a believer and see nothing with evolution that clashes with my faith. I had no idea you believed in God, let alone be one of those radicals who put their fingers in their ears when presented with stone cold evidence.
Anyway, I have a couple of questions for you in light of this revelations: Doesn’t your faith condemn violence? In which case, how can you support wars of aggression being waged in your name and with your money on the other side of the globe? And how do you reconciliate whatever faith you adopted with the individualist stance you so prevailingly display? I’ll get you a cookie if you even answer these.
Keep dodging, wise.
[quote]Fitnessdiva wrote:
Accepted by the scientific community.
People who don’t accept it don’t understand it. You’ve demonstrated this with your own words throughout this thread. If you don’t understand evolution you don’t have a viable opinion on the matter.[/quote]
Oh really?
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=660
These people all seem to have the credential to say that they looked at it and disagreed don’t you think? I’d say they have a perfect understanding of what it is and what it means.
[quote]lixy wrote:
rainjack wrote:
…
Wake up RJ! It’s the 21st century. There’s no way you can have as much as a iota of critical thinking and still deny evolution. It makes you look foolish (though I’m sure the feeling is a familiar one for you).
I’m a believer and see nothing with evolution that clashes with my faith. I had no idea you believed in God, let alone be one of those radicals who put their fingers in their ears when presented with stone cold evidence.
Anyway, I have a couple of questions for you in light of this revelations: Doesn’t your faith condemn violence? In which case, how can you support wars of aggression being waged in your name and with your money on the other side of the globe? And how do you reconciliate whatever faith you adopted with the individualist stance you so prevailingly display? I’ll get you a cookie if you even answer these.[/quote]
I have never denied evolution. Show me one quote. In fact - I believe if you actually read what I wrote - you see I said the opposite.
Who said anything about faith? You know nothing about me. Making assumptions as stupid as the fitness chick’s is hilarious.
I hate bigotry in the form of intellectual elitism as displayed by the fitness chick.
[quote]Fitnessdiva wrote:
Keep dodging, wise.[/quote]
Dodging what?
I asked you questions that you seem to be ignoring.
[quote]Fitnessdiva wrote:
Also, there is no debate over creationism and evolution. The jury has been in for a long time for everyone who has any understanding of the two. Evolution is the accepted theory.
Creationism has no scientific support to back it up at all. All geologic and biological evidence is contrary to creationism. [/quote]
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?id=119
As for issues in biology:
[quote]FreedomFighterXL wrote:
Fitnessdiva wrote:
Also, there is no debate over creationism and evolution. The jury has been in for a long time for everyone who has any understanding of the two. Evolution is the accepted theory.
Creationism has no scientific support to back it up at all. All geologic and biological evidence is contrary to creationism.
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?id=119
As for issues in biology:
http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Black-Box-Biochemical-Challenge/dp/0684834936 [/quote]
The same type of people that try to prove these concocted theories will be the same types of people that eventually disprove them. Irony?
"From Publishers Weekly
Charles Darwin’s theory of life’s evolution through natural selection and random mutation fails to account for the origin of astonishingly complex biomolecular systems, argues Behe, associate professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University. In this spirited, witty critique of neo-Darwinian thinking, he focuses on five phenomena: blood clotting; cilia, oar-like bundles of fibers; the human immune system; transport of materials within the cell; and the synthesis of nucleotides, building blocks of DNA.
In each case, he finds systems that are irreducibly complex?no gradual, step-by-step, Darwinian route led to their creation. As an alternative explanation, Behe infers that complex biochemical systems (i.e., life) were designed by an intelligent agent, whether God, extraterrestrials or a universal force. He notes that Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA’s double-helix structure, proposed that life began when aliens from another planet sent a rocket ship containing spores to seed Earth. Perhaps Behe’s plea for incorporating a “theory of intelligent design” into mainstream biology will spark interest. Illustrated.
Translation and U.K. rights: Simon & Schuster.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title." ~from FreedomFighterXL post link
merlin
[quote]rainjack wrote:
I have never denied evolution. Show me one quote. In fact - I believe if you actually read what I wrote - you see I said the opposite. [/quote]
My bad.
That paper is encouraging research into mechanisms of evolution, not the entirety of evolutionary theory. It supports evolution. There is no reason to not to believe that additional, possibly unknown mechanisms assist evolution. You fail to understand that challenging mechanisms of evolution does not mean that evolutionary theory is invalid. Also that paper in no way supports or suggests creationism as a valid alternative.
Your creationist propaganda book by Behe holds no merit. Someone pushing creationism is not a valid source of skeptism. Like I said, the jury has been in for a while regardless of what a person with a religious motive has to say. Just look him up on wikipedia if you want to see that he has no merit among his peers. He’s a quack.
[quote]Fitnessdiva wrote:
That paper is encouraging research into mechanisms of evolution, not the entirety of evolutionary theory. It supports evolution. There is no reason to not to believe that additional, possibly unknown mechanisms assist evolution. You fail to understand that challenging mechanisms of evolution does not mean that evolutionary theory is invalid. Also that paper in no way supports or suggests creationism as a valid alternative.
Your creationist propaganda book by Behe holds no merit. Someone pushing creationism is not a valid source of skeptism. Like I said, the jury has been in for a while regardless of what a person with a religious motive has to say. Just look him up on wikipedia if you want to see that he has no merit among his peers. He’s a quack.[/quote]
Wikipedia is well known to be the standard of objectivity.
How about answering a couple of my questions? You are long on opinion, and very short on proof.
Let me try one more that doesn’t require you to actually prove anything seeing as how you have such difficulty with those: Do you believe in any type of higher power be it God, Allah, a force, a master energy, or anything of the sort?
This is a yes/no question - so hopefully you can answer it.
I believe in science.
you don’t have to look up Behe on wikipedia, he’s everywhere else, too, for his quackery.
What were your questions? There isn’t a whole lot on evolution that I can say that isn’t published in scientific journals or, for easy access, websites.
Here is a well written response from www.talkorgins.org to many creationist arguements against evolution. I suggest anyone arguing against evolution take a look at their site. You can search just about any question you have in their search engine and get several well written responses from people working in the field. You can even contact those scientists if you feel the need.
A large part of the reason why Creationist arguments against evolution can sound so persuasive is because they don’t address evolution, but rather argue against a set of misunderstandings that people are right to consider ludicrous. The Creationists wrongly believe that their understanding of evolution is what the theory of evolution really says, and declare evolution banished. In fact, they haven’t even addressed the topic of evolution. (The situation isn’t helped by poor science education generally. Even most beginning college biology students don’t understand the theory of evolution.)
The five propositions below seem to be the most common misconceptions based on a Creationist straw-man version of evolution. If you hear anyone making any of them, chances are excellent that they don’t know enough about the real theory of evolution to make informed opinions about it.
Evolution has never been observed.
Evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
There are no transitional fossils.
The theory of evolution says that life originated, and evolution proceeds, by random chance.
Evolution is only a theory; it hasn’t been proved.
Explanations of why these statements are wrong are given below. They are brief and therefore somewhat simplified; consult the references at the end for more thorough explanations.
“Evolution has never been observed.”
Biologists define evolution as a change in the gene pool of a population over time. One example is insects developing a resistance to pesticides over the period of a few years. Even most Creationists recognize that evolution at this level is a fact. What they don’t appreciate is that this rate of evolution is all that is required to produce the diversity of all living things from a common ancestor.
The origin of new species by evolution has also been observed, both in the laboratory and in the wild. See, for example, (Weinberg, J.R., V.R. Starczak, and D. Jorg, 1992, “Evidence for rapid speciation following a founder event in the laboratory.” Evolution 46: 1214-1220). The “Observed Instances of Speciation” FAQ in the talk.origins archives gives several additional examples.
Even without these direct observations, it would be wrong to say that evolution hasn’t been observed. Evidence isn’t limited to seeing something happen before your eyes. Evolution makes predictions about what we would expect to see in the fossil record, comparative anatomy, genetic sequences, geographical distribution of species, etc., and these predictions have been verified many times over. The number of observations supporting evolution is overwhelming.
What hasn’t been observed is one animal abruptly changing into a radically different one, such as a frog changing into a cow. This is not a problem for evolution because evolution doesn’t propose occurrences even remotely like that. In fact, if we ever observed a frog turn into a cow, it would be very strong evidence against evolution.
“Evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics.”
This shows more a misconception about thermodynamics than about evolution. The second law of thermodynamics says, “No process is possible in which the sole result is the transfer of energy from a cooler to a hotter body.” [Atkins, 1984, The Second Law, pg. 25] Now you may be scratching your head wondering what this has to do with evolution. The confusion arises when the 2nd law is phrased in another equivalent way, “The entropy of a closed system cannot decrease.” Entropy is an indication of unusable energy and often (but not always!) corresponds to intuitive notions of disorder or randomness. Creationists thus misinterpret the 2nd law to say that things invariably progress from order to disorder.
However, they neglect the fact that life is not a closed system. The sun provides more than enough energy to drive things. If a mature tomato plant can have more usable energy than the seed it grew from, why should anyone expect that the next generation of tomatoes can’t have more usable energy still? Creationists sometimes try to get around this by claiming that the information carried by living things lets them create order. However, not only is life irrelevant to the 2nd law, but order from disorder is common in nonliving systems, too. Snowflakes, sand dunes, tornadoes, stalactites, graded river beds, and lightning are just a few examples of order coming from disorder in nature; none require an intelligent program to achieve that order. In any nontrivial system with lots of energy flowing through it, you are almost certain to find order arising somewhere in the system. If order from disorder is supposed to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, why is it ubiquitous in nature?
The thermodynamics argument against evolution displays a misconception about evolution as well as about thermodynamics, since a clear understanding of how evolution works should reveal major flaws in the argument. Evolution says that organisms reproduce with only small changes between generations (after their own kind, so to speak). For example, animals might have appendages which are longer or shorter, thicker or flatter, lighter or darker than their parents. Occasionally, a change might be on the order of having four or six fingers instead of five. Once the differences appear, the theory of evolution calls for differential reproductive success. For example, maybe the animals with longer appendages survive to have more offspring than short-appendaged ones. All of these processes can be observed today. They obviously don’t violate any physical laws.
“There are no transitional fossils.”
A transitional fossil is one that looks like it’s from an organism intermediate between two lineages, meaning it has some characteristics of lineage A, some characteristics of lineage B, and probably some characteristics part way between the two. Transitional fossils can occur between groups of any taxonomic level, such as between species, between orders, etc. Ideally, the transitional fossil should be found stratigraphically between the first occurrence of the ancestral lineage and the first occurrence of the descendent lineage, but evolution also predicts the occurrence of some fossils with transitional morphology that occur after both lineages. There’s nothing in the theory of evolution which says an intermediate form (or any organism, for that matter) can have only one line of descendents, or that the intermediate form itself has to go extinct when a line of descendents evolves.
To say there are no transitional fossils is simply false. Paleontology has progressed a bit since Origin of Species was published, uncovering thousands of transitional fossils, by both the temporally restrictive and the less restrictive definitions. The fossil record is still spotty and always will be; erosion and the rarity of conditions favorable to fossilization make that inevitable. Also, transitions may occur in a small population, in a small area, and/or in a relatively short amount of time; when any of these conditions hold, the chances of finding the transitional fossils goes down. Still, there are still many instances where excellent sequences of transitional fossils exist. Some notable examples are the transitions from reptile to mammal, from land animal to early whale, and from early ape to human. For many more examples, see the transitional fossils FAQ in the talk.origins archive, and see http://www.geo.ucalgary.ca/~macrae/talk_origins.html for sample images for some invertebrate groups.
The misconception about the lack of transitional fossils is perpetuated in part by a common way of thinking about categories. When people think about a category like “dog” or “ant,” they often subconsciously believe that there is a well-defined boundary around the category, or that there is some eternal ideal form (for philosophers, the Platonic idea) which defines the category. This kind of thinking leads people to declare that Archaeopteryx is “100% bird,” when it is clearly a mix of bird and reptile features (with more reptile than bird features, in fact). In truth, categories are man-made and artificial. Nature is not constrained to follow them, and it doesn’t.
Some Creationists claim that the hypothesis of punctuated equilibrium was proposed (by Eldredge and Gould) to explain gaps in the fossil record. Actually, it was proposed to explain the relative rarity of transitional forms, not their total absence, and to explain why speciation appears to happen relatively quickly in some cases, gradually in others, and not at all during some periods for some species. In no way does it deny that transitional sequences exist. In fact, both Gould and Eldredge are outspoken opponents of Creationism.
“But paleontologists have discovered several superb examples of intermediary forms and sequences, more than enough to convince any fair-minded skeptic about the reality of life’s physical genealogy.” - Stephen Jay Gould, Natural History, May 1994
“The theory of evolution says that life originated, and evolution proceeds, by random chance.”
There is probably no other statement which is a better indication that the arguer doesn’t understand evolution. Chance certainly plays a large part in evolution, but this argument completely ignores the fundamental role of natural selection, and selection is the very opposite of chance. Chance, in the form of mutations, provides genetic variation, which is the raw material that natural selection has to work with. From there, natural selection sorts out certain variations. Those variations which give greater reproductive success to their possessors (and chance ensures that such beneficial mutations will be inevitable) are retained, and less successful variations are weeded out. When the environment changes, or when organisms move to a different environment, different variations are selected, leading eventually to different species. Harmful mutations usually die out quickly, so they don’t interfere with the process of beneficial mutations accumulating.
Nor is abiogenesis (the origin of the first life) due purely to chance. Atoms and molecules arrange themselves not purely randomly, but according to their chemical properties. In the case of carbon atoms especially, this means complex molecules are sure to form spontaneously, and these complex molecules can influence each other to create even more complex molecules. Once a molecule forms that is approximately self-replicating, natural selection will guide the formation of ever more efficient replicators. The first self-replicating object didn’t need to be as complex as a modern cell or even a strand of DNA. Some self-replicating molecules are not really all that complex (as organic molecules go).
Some people still argue that it is wildly improbable for a given self-replicating molecule to form at a given point (although they usually don’t state the “givens,” but leave them implicit in their calculations). This is true, but there were oceans of molecules working on the problem, and no one knows how many possible self-replicating molecules could have served as the first one. A calculation of the odds of abiogenesis is worthless unless it recognizes the immense range of starting materials that the first replicator might have formed from, the probably innumerable different forms that the first replicator might have taken, and the fact that much of the construction of the replicating molecule would have been non-random to start with.
(One should also note that the theory of evolution doesn’t depend on how the first life began. The truth or falsity of any theory of abiogenesis wouldn’t affect evolution in the least.)
“Evolution is only a theory; it hasn’t been proved.”
First, we should clarify what “evolution” means. Like so many other words, it has more than one meaning. Its strict biological definition is “a change in allele frequencies over time.” By that definition, evolution is an indisputable fact. Most people seem to associate the word “evolution” mainly with common descent, the theory that all life arose from one common ancestor. Many people believe that there is enough evidence to call this a fact, too. However, common descent is still not the theory of evolution, but just a fraction of it (and a part of several quite different theories as well). The theory of evolution not only says that life evolved, it also includes mechanisms, like mutations, natural selection, and genetic drift, which go a long way towards explaining how life evolved.
Calling the theory of evolution “only a theory” is, strictly speaking, true, but the idea it tries to convey is completely wrong. The argument rests on a confusion between what “theory” means in informal usage and in a scientific context. A theory, in the scientific sense, is “a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena” [Random House American College Dictionary]. The term does not imply tentativeness or lack of certainty. Generally speaking, scientific theories differ from scientific laws only in that laws can be expressed more tersely. Being a theory implies self-consistency, agreement with observations, and usefulness. (Creationism fails to be a theory mainly because of the last point; it makes few or no specific claims about what we would expect to find, so it can’t be used for anything. When it does make falsifiable predictions, they prove to be false.)
Lack of proof isn’t a weakness, either. On the contrary, claiming infallibility for one’s conclusions is a sign of hubris. Nothing in the real world has ever been rigorously proved, or ever will be. Proof, in the mathematical sense, is possible only if you have the luxury of defining the universe you’re operating in. In the real world, we must deal with levels of certainty based on observed evidence. The more and better evidence we have for something, the more certainty we assign to it; when there is enough evidence, we label the something a fact, even though it still isn’t 100% certain.
What evolution has is what any good scientific claim has–evidence, and lots of it. Evolution is supported by a wide range of observations throughout the fields of genetics, anatomy, ecology, animal behavior, paleontology, and others. If you wish to challenge the theory of evolution, you must address that evidence. You must show that the evidence is either wrong or irrelevant or that it fits another theory better. Of course, to do this, you must know both the theory and the evidence.
Conclusion
These are not the only misconceptions about evolution by any means. Other common misunderstandings include how geological dating techniques work, implications to morality and religion, the meaning of “uniformitarianism,” and many more. To address all these objections here would be impossible.
But consider: About a hundred years ago, scientists, who were then mostly creationists, looked at the world to figure out how God did things. These creationists came to the conclusions of an old earth and species originating by evolution. Since then, thousands of scientists have been studying evolution with increasingly more sophisticated tools. Many of these scientists have excellent understandings of the laws of thermodynamics, how fossil finds are interpreted, etc., and finding a better alternative to evolution would win them fame and fortune. Sometimes their work has changed our understanding of significant details of how evolution operates, but the theory of evolution still has essentially unanimous agreement from the people who work on it.
I love arguments against evolution. It’s like listening to someone argue against a round earth, plate tectonics, or quantum mechanics. Inevitably, they are never biologist.
Another good site debunking creationist arguments is http://www.noanswersingenesis.org.au/
Hey fitness diva, are you actually in th army are did you just steal the shirt?
[quote]Fitnessdiva wrote:
What were your questions? There isn’t a whole lot on evolution that I can say that isn’t published in scientific journals or, for easy access, websites.[/quote]
My questions are quite accessible if you simply use the scroll button. You might have to use the back button - but I am sure you can handle it.
Sounds to me like you are being a tad lazy.
My BF is a Captain in the army.
Fitnessdiva,
Questions for you… if you can answer these questions with a logical explanation, you would have some credibility.
Lets poke some more holes in that chunk of cheese…
-
Where has macro evolution ever been observed? What’s the mechanism for getting new complexity such as new vital organs? How, for example, could a caterpillar evolve into a butterfly?
-
Where are the billions of transitional fossils that should be there if your theory is right? Billions! Not a handful of questionable transitions. Why don’t we see a reasonably smooth continuum among all living creatures, or in the fossil record, or both?
-Who are the evolutionary ancestors of the insects? The evolutionary tree that’s in the textbook: where’s its trunk and where are its branches?
-
What evidence is there that information, such as that in DNA, could ever assemble itself? What about the 4000 books of coded information that are in a tiny part of each of your 100 trillion cells? If astronomers received an intelligent radio signal from some distant galaxy, most people would conclude that it came from an intelligent source.
-
Why then doesn’t the vast information sequence in the DNA molecule of just a bacteria also imply an intelligent source?
-
How could organs as complicated as the eye or the ear or the brain of even a tiny bird ever come about by chance or natural processes? How could a bacterial motor evolve?
-
If the solar system evolved, why do three planets spin backwards? Why do at least 6 moons revolve backwards?
-
Why do we have comets if the solar system is billions of years old?
-
Where did all the helium go?
-
How did sexual reproduction evolve?
-
If the big bang occurred, where did all the information around us and in us come from? Has an explosion ever produced order? Or as Sir Isaac Newton said, “Who wound up the clock?”
-
Why do so many of the earth’s ancient cultures have flood legends?
-
Where did matter come from? What about space, time, energy, and even the laws of physics?
-
How did the first living cell begin? That’s a greater miracle than for a bacteria to evolve to a man. How did that first cell reproduce?
-
Just before life appeared, did the atmosphere have oxygen or did it not have oxygen?
-
Why aren’t meteorites found in supposedly old rocks?
-
If it takes intelligence to make an arrowhead, why doesn’t it take vastly more intelligence to create a human? Do you really believe that hydrogen will turn into people if you wait long enough?
-
Which came first, DNA or the proteins needed by DNA–which can only be produced by DNA?
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Can you name one reasonable hypothesis on how the moon got there–any hypothesis that is consistent with all the data? Why aren’t students told the scientific reasons for rejecting all the evolutionary theories for the moon’s origin?
-
Why won’t qualified evolutionists enter into a written scientific debate?
-
Would you like to explain the origin of any of the following twenty-one features of the earth:
The Grand Canyon and Other Canyons
Mid-Oceanic Ridge
Continental Shelves and Slopes
Ocean Trenches
Seamounts and Tablemounts
Earthquakes
Magnetic Variations on the Ocean Floor
Submarine Canyons
Coal and Oil Formations
Glaciers and the Ice Ages
Frozen Mammoths
Major Mountain Ranges
Overthrusts
Volcanoes and Lava
Geothermal Heat
Metamorphic Rock
Strata
Plateaus
Salt Domes
Jigsaw Fit of the Continents
Fossil Graveyards…
…if so, I must remind you that they all can be explained as a result of a global flood.
"In 1981 22 British Museum biologists said ‘Evolution is not a fact’ yet still today we are being bombarded by evolution as the only credible way man came to be on the earth. It is a fact that more scientists today believe evolution as a theory it can no longer be taken seriously. So why are we still being forced fed this ‘theory’.
The answer is Money - There are too many people making too much money in careers dedicated to evolution. It is a science that has not evolved with evidence, it hides what it does not like, destroys what it fears and invents what it needs. It has the clout to silence the truth, and anyone who dares to question."
merlin