Evolution is real. Its a real thing that really does happen and did happen. Gah!
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You have some serious misunderstandings of what evolution actually is, and what the theory of evolution actually means. Likely this is because you've spent too much time listening to the likes of Ken Ham, Kent Hovind, and/or Ray Comfort.texanarob said:
Here, have a look at the NCSE's evolution primers [http://ncse.com/evolution/science/evolution-primers], and/or the evolution FAQs at Talk Origins [http://talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-evolution.html]. If you prefer audiovisual material, I suggest potholer54's Made Easy series [http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDB23537556D7AADB&feature=plcp], or for more detail, cdk007's evolution playlist [http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF626DD5B2C1F0A87&feature=plcp]. Of particular interest is cdk007's How Evolution Causes an Increase in Information [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I14KTshLUkg&feature=plcp].
However if you want to directly address the creationist mistakes, misrepresentations, and outright fabrications that you seem to cling to, you may want to look at the following:
Textual:
The Talk Origins Index to Creationist Claims [http://talkorigins.org/indexcc/]
Audiovisual:
AronRa's Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism series [http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL126AFB53A6F002CC&feature=plcp]
Thunderf00t's Why Do People Laugh at Creationists? series [http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAC3481305829426D&feature=plcp]
Honestly, it will take me a while to read all that. I'm sure it will be interesting, but I'm unlikely to hunt out this thread again once I'm finished. Thanks for the links, whether I agree with them or not I'm sure they will prove informative, and I always like to learn something new.evilneko said:
We're members of the great apes, actually.evilneko said:Why are there still monkeys?
Because my friend, we are monkeys.
Also,
This thread will reach 20+ pages.
The most significant difference between apes and monkeys is that the latter have tails.
by the way, im not a creationist. i just hate when people whine about other people being a creationist because like in the original post, it comes off as narrow minded whining.Stagnant said:
If they so choose not to believe in Evolution, let them, it isnt hurting you. if it is, you need some thicker skin.
Evolution is not a theory. There have been significant experiments proving both micro and macro evolution, and it's apparent through fossils that help map out how species developed. Evolution is a fundamental fact of biology with several fields of research dedicated to studying it.EcoEclipse said:
And you shouldn't accuse someone of arrogance for relying on evidence. It's the opposite of arrogance, the arrogant people are the ones who believe in something with no evidence for it when there's an extremely likely scientifically proven explanation.
1. Resent experiments seem to indicate that proteins necessary for the development of life develop naturally under certain conditions from certain chemicals that were pretty much covering the oceans around exactly the time when life started to develop. As for the reproduction, well there we're probably about a billion dead micro organisms before the ones that could reproduce started getting around.lacktheknack said:
2. They died. They were inferior members of a species and thus didn't get to reproduce, there was no place for them. The fossils are still there.
3. I observe, therefore the universe is. You wouldn't be asking that question if the universe wasn't fine tuned enough for you to ask that question, therefore the question is only asked when the universe is fine tuned.
4. I'll admit I'm not exactly an expert on the subject but I'm fairly sure it was the fact that there were millions of things mutating into millions of things and only the things that mutated something usefull that actually worked are still there because the rest died. So only the rat that evolved perfectly into the bird lived, and the rat that evolved a slight physical mutation that resembled a wing but didn't actually allow flight was abandoned by the herd and eaten by predators.
Keep in mind that I didn't go to high school, but the point is all of these questions are answered or being answered, and that you shouldn't deny evidence because some bits of the larger picture are missing. As long as nothing is contradictory with nothing else it's probably not a scam.
basically, but #2 can also be blamed on the fact that fossilization is rare. It seems like it happens a lot because we have lots of fossils, but that's from the trillions and trillions of creatures that have died over millions and millions of years.Use_Imagination_here said:
And even if every single thing that ever lived was fossilized, there would still be "missing links" because evolution isn't a 3 step process. It's not like it's a straight line from one thing to another through an intermediary. Life just fills whatever niches are in an environment. If there's food that can be eaten by something, something will be there to eat it. And something to eat that, getting bigger and bigger in either size or social complexity until there are apex predators, which in the end are eaten by bacteria.
You can track their evolutionary past backwards, but you'd only ever get single frames in the moving picture of evolution. To paraphrase AronRa, try to find the one picture that shows me going from a baby into a man - if you can't find it that somehow is evidence that I poofed into existence as a grown man? No. Even if you had a picture from every second of my life, there'd never be a noticable change from one picture to the next. You'd never find the picture where I changed from a baby to a man. That's how evolution works.
number 4 is just a simple matter that the different "stages" of evolving wings had either benign effects, or positive effects, and whatever amount of "flight" the wings could do, that's what they did, and the creature benefited from it. It's not like an animal that didn't have wings one day had a kid that had wings. That's again, not how evolution works. Fins evolved, then they evolved into arms, and then they evolved into wings.
You got #3 basically spot on - We live in our universe, and they're the only set of constants we get. If the constants were any other way, we wouldn't be here to observe them. This speaks to a fundamental difference between the mindsets. Creationists tend to believe in a single universe, scientists tend to be more open to the idea of multiple universes. You may have a billion universes, completely seperate from eachother, each with randomly variable constants. The ones that form into suns and planets, with animals on them have constants like ours. Other universes are completely different. These ideas are a little up there, but they're interesting, and they do help to work out other major problems scientists are curious about, like the ridiculous weakness of gravity compared to the other forces. One thought is that each universe might have their own EM/Weak/Strong force, but gravity is shared between them, so it's ridiculously weak. It's mostly just a thought right now, but at least it shows them trying to work out the problem.
As for number 1 (may as well do all 4), Life was a different thing before the first cellular bodies formed. It was mostly a mishmash of particles and molecules that could replicate themselves (by being next to other particles, pieces of the whole that they were made of, in the right chemical medium, they could replicate themselves in the same way that our own DNA replicated itself for mitosis. Attrition dictated that some of these molecules would have strong bonds and good designs, and those specimens survived to replicate, and the broken ones died, returned to the primordial factory that the successful molecules, the ones that survived to copy themselves used to fuel that duplication. That basically explains how the first life cycle worked. At least that's my interpretation of the information I've gotten, and it logically and fairly soundly describes a universe that could exist, and in all probability did exist.
I don't think interference or intervention is the right word.azukar said:
I was thinking of an original design of certain properties that went wildfire an evolved (there! evolution!) on their own.
Also, I don't share your point of view. The point that "looks like god did it" where you just stop cannot exist for a (true?) scientist.
If something exists (even if "created by god"), it has a mechanism. A mechanism we can use.
This might be due to my training as an engineer, but my scientific goal is finding mechanisms (probably not by myself) and using these found mechanisms to create and mimic. So I don't care "if god invented" the mechanism. I need to know how it works, so I ca use it.
Look at artificial hearts and organs (I differentiated them, because the heart is a solely mechanical organ(generalized)).
We need to find out how they work, we need to reproduce them, and afterwards, we even might be able to IMPROVE them.
It might be a theory, but it's the most sound theory we've got. Whenever someone pulls the misinformed shortcut of assuming we "came from monkeys", I want to facepalm.
Yes, we're primates. We're from a DIVERGENT primate branch that got lucky. We learned to walk upright, we learned to build and use tools, our tools grew more and more sophisticated and, well, fast-forward to the present day, where people are STILL getting taller on the average and our cranial capacity is suspected to be still expanding.
Evolutionary stress might change shape, but it'll never completely disappear. The only thing that keeps micro-organisms in check is the immune systems of bigger organisms, and even then these microbes can adapt to our defenses. SARS and AIDS aren't blights sent by God, they're smaller beings trying their hardest to live off us - seeing as this is how Life goes.
Hence, yes. The great apes are our cousins, not our ancestors. Our ancestors, much like in any standard genealogy, are long gone.
To be honest, I never got while the evolutionary theory gets so many jimmies rustled. The Bible was written thousands of years before we'd have anything resembling modern scientific processes or research methodologies, much less the technology to interpret things like fossils or cave paintings appropriately. It stands to reason that the whole Genesis thing is an approximation of evolution - folks taking a stab at the birds-and-bees debate with no real means to approach it in any other way than by inventing their own fables.
So now we have the tools and means to maybe understand how we really came to be. Why couldn't that just be integrated into a revised version of the Bible? I'd rather be told I need to believe that God designed us in iterations through biological processes that make sense than go with the "Derp, mud shaped into a man, and then we take the mud pile's rib and shape it into a woman, herp!" route.
Yes, we're primates. We're from a DIVERGENT primate branch that got lucky. We learned to walk upright, we learned to build and use tools, our tools grew more and more sophisticated and, well, fast-forward to the present day, where people are STILL getting taller on the average and our cranial capacity is suspected to be still expanding.
Evolutionary stress might change shape, but it'll never completely disappear. The only thing that keeps micro-organisms in check is the immune systems of bigger organisms, and even then these microbes can adapt to our defenses. SARS and AIDS aren't blights sent by God, they're smaller beings trying their hardest to live off us - seeing as this is how Life goes.
Hence, yes. The great apes are our cousins, not our ancestors. Our ancestors, much like in any standard genealogy, are long gone.
To be honest, I never got while the evolutionary theory gets so many jimmies rustled. The Bible was written thousands of years before we'd have anything resembling modern scientific processes or research methodologies, much less the technology to interpret things like fossils or cave paintings appropriately. It stands to reason that the whole Genesis thing is an approximation of evolution - folks taking a stab at the birds-and-bees debate with no real means to approach it in any other way than by inventing their own fables.
So now we have the tools and means to maybe understand how we really came to be. Why couldn't that just be integrated into a revised version of the Bible? I'd rather be told I need to believe that God designed us in iterations through biological processes that make sense than go with the "Derp, mud shaped into a man, and then we take the mud pile's rib and shape it into a woman, herp!" route.
It's only 'smarter' in the sense that it helps them con more people into being suspect of religion. In the same way that it was smart of them to rename 'creationism' to 'intelligent design'.darthzew said:
They've just latched on to two terms that I believe most biologists rarely even use, because there's not much point; there's little important distinction to be made between the two.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14094-bacteria-make-major-evolutionary-shift-in-the-lab.htmlJegsimmons said:
I think we think it's OK because one has had 100 years of Scientific, evidence-based research, fact-checking, and, yes, observations in labs, whilst the other is simply a 4000-year-old myth that has suffered many, many translations from a time where people knew virtually nothing about the world, universe, their own bodies, etc. etc.
They're not equal in any way whatsoever.
Theories are the process. The scientific definition of the word 'theory' is not the same as the everyday usage of the word.Jegsimmons said:
Facts are the what - the thing that happens. Evolution is a scientific fact inundated with overwhelming amounts of evidence. There is no serious debate whatsoever, for the time being, within the scientific community over whether or not evolution occurs.
Theories are a collection of observed facts which are then used to explain a phenomenon. Evolution is a fact itself, natural selection is the theory part. Creationism is a 'just a guess' everyday 'theory'; no true scientific observation has taken place, they've instead come up with an idea first and moved to have everything fit within it.
Definition for scientific fact:
Web definitions:
an observation that has been confirmed repeatedly and is accepted as true (although its truth is never final).
Definition for scientific theory:
Web definitions:
a theory that explains scientific observations
You are correct in that this obviously doesn't mean that it can't later be disproven, but there is no reason to not treat it as true at this time. Conversely, there is absolutely every reason at this time to totally ignore creationism.
Actually, I think there is no simpler explanation than "it's t3h magix!!!1"azukar said:
Look at all the hyperreligious fucknuggets.
They are the simplest simpletons you could think of.
Looking beyond this is work. Hard work.
In the mean time, I looked into some articles on ehtics and stuff.
It seems to be a common "scientific" trait, that the different kinds of scientists, believe in different kinds of origin stories.
As I mentioned, I am an engineer. So it's only "natural" I keep the possibility, that the basic mechanics were engineered by some"one".
A very interesting article was written by a biotechnologist (?). He is one of the people, that look for certain antybodies that might be produced by certain bacterias.
If you are not familiar with it:
(In a nutshell). You harvest and cultivate hundreds of different kinds of bacterias, and infect them with a disease you want to cure. You look what type of bacteria has your antigen.
It's try and error at it's finest. Sometimes you have 300 different stems of bacterias, and no positive results. And this biotech-dude stated his opinion, that nature has tried and errored his way to these starting mechanisms, that I think might be engineered.
Against my "hypothesis" stand more things than for it. Just one: Why is our planet the only (we know of) that was engineered?
So yeah. Most likely it was all just coincidence, that by magical means, the water molecules have this exact angle.
But thinking, someone might have created it that way is more convenient (that is, unscientific, as I stated before. Science is work.)
captcha: forbidden fruit.
Kinda fitting.