Poll: Do you support evolution?

[Ponyboy]

Greetings- first I'd like to thank all who have given input to this, it is great to be able to "chew to fat", here.
I'm not a geneticist, but I suspect that there are factors in our DNA that may not be completely understood yet, so yes certain changes can be made, but others can not. The ones that can not be changed only result in commonly known birth defects/death. As for millions or billions of years- I think it is impossible to prove that length of time is involved. It becomes a rabbits hat that be used to pull anything out of it. Maybe just use the last 10-15,000 years, which would limit the validity of evolution.
As far as my illustration of making steel and entropy and the comment about it requiring a closed system. It might be relate to the size of the system involved; kind of like economics, it can be measured as macroeconomics, micro, personal.

Thanks-

 

[Eddie the head]

I'm not a geneticist, but I suspect that there are factors in our DNA that may not be completely understood yet, so yes certain changes can be made, but others can not. The ones that can not be changed only result in commonly known birth defects/death.

Umm if I am reading this right, witch I might not be, but if I am you have appear to have little to no understanding of the Theory of Evolution works. Change happens gradually it doesn't happen with a mutation.


Edit. A little more on topic. Science doesn't care about my beliefs.

 

[Frission]

What kind of question is this? Do I support "evolution"? Well personally I would rather the slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum, not harbor beneficial bacteria as a food source. No, I would rather that antibiotic resistant organisms don't survive to pass on their resistance to their offspring, only to disappear when there is no antibiotics because the resistant is rather taxing to keep without reason.

No I don't want the recombination of gametes during meiosis, because that is just inconvenient.

If anyone one understands the amazing complexity of even the smallest organisms, how they function at the cellular level and even at the element(s) level, evolution is impossible.

Are you serious?

Evolution is the change of allele frequency in a population over time. Just studying Mendel in basic biology is enough. This discussion is over.

 

[BrassButtons]

I'm not a geneticist, but I suspect

Let me stop you right there. You're talking about something immensely complicated, and you admit that it is not your area of expertise. So why do your suspicions matter? Do you even know enough to have a handle on the most basic concepts involved? People spend decades studying this stuff. Are you really going to dismiss their work with "I'm not a geneticist, but I suspect"? If you don't know the field then you don't know the field.

that there are factors in our DNA that may not be completely understood yet

I guarantee you that there are factors which are not completely understood yet. I also guarantee you that people who are geneticists know all about them, and that if any of them conflicted with evolutionary theory it would be a Big Deal.

so yes certain changes can be made, but others can not.

And again, if you talk to an actual geneticist they'll happily discuss, in minute detail, which changes can and cannot occur, and why, and what the implications are, and hey there's this cool experiment that was done...seriously, scientists are all over this shit. They dedicate their lives to this stuff. If any of it contradicted evolution they would know.

As for millions or billions of years- I think it is impossible to prove that length of time is involved.

Then you're a few hundred years behind on your research. Geologists in the 1700s determined that certain rock formations (notably angular nonconformities) required that the earth be at least several million years old. Add in modern dating techniques (of which there are several, not just carbon dating) and the fact that we have fossils going back millions of years, and yeah, we have a pretty good idea of the length of time involved. We can't pinpoint exactly when it started (early organisms had no hard parts that could fossilize) but we are able to figure out the minimum length of time involved. And that minimum is a very long time by human standards.

It becomes a rabbits hat that be used to pull anything out of it. Maybe just use the last 10-15,000 years, which would limit the validity of evolution.

Sure, provided you ignore a few hundred years' worth of data. Say, the 1600s called--they want their understanding of geology back.

As far as my illustration of making steel and entropy and the comment about it requiring a closed system. It might be relate to the size of the system involved

Or it might be that you were simply wrong, and entropy does not work the way you think it works. Which might explain why scientists who study this stuff for a living aren't all going "but wait, it doesn't make sense!"

 

[gamernerdtg2]

I believe that the things we create can evolve. Art, technology and so on can evolve. But it's a shame how scientists who believe in intelligent design are being taken out of the picture. I couldn't believe that Bill the science guy and Lavar Burton (who I grew up watching reading rainbow with) passed off creationism as meaningless, antiquated fallacy.

I find that modern science is boring. The museum of Natural History is without wonder now because we can somehow explain everything. I don't want to know everything, and I certainly don't want to be able to explain everything. I want to socialize with people who have studied things that I haven't studied, and see where our knowledge connects.

I blame the extreme conservative people. They have no idea who they are representing - they represent themselves and call that God. It's ridiculous. So many people have been turned off by this extreme stance that we now have the opposite extreme - angry atheists who are just as bad.

This jaded desire to explain everything has crept into art and also video game design. Everyone wants things to be explained down to the minute detail, otherwise it's drivel. I'm not into it.

So I vote for Creationism b/c I really don't want to know everything that there is to know. I want to be kept informed, I want to continue learning, but I also want to be blown away when I learn something new. I don't want to be like Darwin who said quote: "A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections - a mere heart of stone".

I can not get down with that. It's called lying to yourself. What are we doing when we take our affections out of the equation entirely?

the problem with intelligent design isn't that nobody agrees with it, its that there's no way to prove it one way or another, so even bringing it up in a scientific debate is meaningless. If you believe in God, ID is a good way to let Him coexist with the growth of science. If not, then nothing anyone says will change your mind on it. It has its place, but not in serious scientific discussion, religious on the other hand is a different thing all together.

Either you're someone who believes in the existence of God or you're not, and all the arguments that you make are coming from one of those two positions. To me, this is about power more than God or serious scientific debate. It's a power struggle between fundamentalist Christians and atheists. It's an interesting thing to learn about though.

 

[discrider]

I'm with team Science, but Evolution can just jump off the bus. In other words, this poll is completely biased and the OP should be ashamed.

Okay, so obviously I agree with "micro-evolution". I can see the small scale changes happening and species diverging and resistances appearing and the like. This is all adequately shown in numerous experiments and in human farming activities since forever. These processes exist and enable creatures to adapt to their environment or at least stop dying to it.

What I don't agree with is that any of these processes can lead to "macro-evolution". This is the part I'd call Evolution, and then I would rename "micro-evolution" something far less synonymous. This is due to two reasons, first that from what I see today in large scale experiments (farming, pet breeding, etc) is that captive populations are most likely to devolve rather than evolve. They move to a smaller genetic base in response to outside stress and become weaker for it. Second, in mathematical models, given an arbitrary gene injection rate into any given population of individuals regulated by some outside environmental function, one of two things happen. Either the population perfects itself to the local maxima (through micro-evolution) and never changes enough to benefit from other local maxima the environment presents (no macro) or the injection rate is too high and the population never stabilises, so instead of becoming fit for the environment the constant changing of their genome makes them unfit for everything.

Also "macro-evolution" is inherently untestable. Every prediction it makes into the future within a reasonable timescale will not differ from what we see in "micro-evolution". We will see species adapt to the environment as per usual, but we are not going to see the largescale physiological changes within our lifetime. We have the fossil record, but unless we're going to properly map out ancestry by pulling DNA from the bones (and thus voiding their supposed age), all we have are speculations based on similarities in bone structure backed up by guessed dates which are verified by the bones which are verified by the guessed dates. In any case, it would be nice for "macro-evolution" to make some predictions which we could go ahead and verify instead of hiding behind long time frames that we cannot ever test over.

It would also be nice if "macro-evolution" had a concrete starting point for life. But again, "macro-evolution" is untestable. So if we do find some way of kick-starting life naturally, even if in the most contrived and unlikely manner, "macro-evolution" will latch onto it as "proof", whereas there is no fail condition and never finding an appropriate starting point for life will just be down to lazy scientists.

So, yes Science is great. But Evolution is not science, as it does not inform us and thus cannot be disproven. Maybe when we have a collective data base of a million generations then we can look at this argument again and see whether the data shows trends of macro-evolution, but at the moment this just isn't possible.

 

[gamernerdtg2]

Ok, so an example of things that fascinate me would be the way that electrons somehow "disappear" and reappear. Has anyone ever looked into this? I'm not sure that science has found an answer to it yet, but I think science has explained that it actually does happen. I'm not into quantum mechanics, so I would need a layman's explanation if it's possible, or some resources.

How can you look at something like electrons disappearing and reappearing with "a heart of stone"? Certainly we want to observe this and come up with a way to explain what's going on without a bias, but this is pretty crazy. I'm saying that the mysterious element of it...the fact that it has not been explained yet is what would drive me to use science for an explanation.

 

[Terramax]

I believe in neither. 'Believe' implies some level of faith, implies that I do not know which is correct and which isn't but I have chosen anyway. This is not true.

I'm under the similar way of thinking.

But my conclusion is - who cares how the world was created? Has it not occurred to people that, seeing as we don't naturally, instinctively know the reason, we're not supposed to know or care about the how or why?

 

[dreadedcandiru99]

Kind of an odd phrase ("Support" evolution? Like it needs me to?), but yeah. Come on--it makes at least as much sense as the hypothesis that an invisible man who lives in the sky made people out of mud.

 

[bigfatcarp93]

Once you understand how it works, Evolution's existence is obvious.

 

[gamernerdtg2]

Ok, regarding the electron thing, these quotes are blowing my mind:

Virtual particles are indeed real particles. Quantum theory predicts that every particle spends some time as a combination of other particles in all possible ways. These predictions are very well understood and tested.

Quantum mechanics allows, and indeed requires, temporary violations of conservation of energy, so one particle can become a pair of heavier particles (the so-called virtual particles), which quickly rejoin into the original particle as if they had never been there. If that were all that occurred we would still be confident that it was a real effect because it is an intrinsic part of quantum mechanics, which is extremely well tested, and is a complete and tightly woven theory--if any part of it were wrong the whole structure would collapse.
www.scientificamerican.com...
This apparently was discovered in 1948 -
These fascinating variations in the appearance of energy, which sometimes manifests itself as light, sometimes as matter, have stimulated the distinguished French physicist Auger to exclaim enthusiastically, in a monograph on cosmic radiation: "Who has said that there is no poetry in modern, exact and complicated science? Consider only the twin-birth of two quick and lively electrons of both kinds when an overenergetic light quantum brushes too closely against an atom of matter! And think of their death together when, tired out and slow, they meet once again and fuse, sending out into space as their last breath two identical grains of light, which fly off carrying their souls of energy!"
nobelprize.org...

This last bit uses the word "created"
"Another way of thinking about these things is to imagine that all of space, even empty space, is awash with particles, that nature in her infinite wisdom can provide. This is not a metaphor. One of the implications of quantum theory is that these particles do in fact pop in and out of existence in the void. The particles,. . . are all temporary. They are created and then quickly disappear --- a bazaar of seething activity."
web.rollins.edu...

Again, I am not into quantum theory. They use the word "created" but then they also use "implications" which I take to mean that it's not scientific fact. There is sort of a mystic quality to the last observation that I appreciate. Perhaps science will prove this to be completely false. I simply can't look at this information without being "affected" or with a "heart of stone" or "like a machine spitting out answers to questions" as though the topic of the universe is vapid (again, I'm referring Charles Darwin).

 

[Snotnarok]

Believe it or not, it's basically proven with the exception of being able to show something evolve in real time. Hence why it's a theory ...like gravity, and the earth orbiting the sun, yes, they are theories. For some reason many seem to think a theory means a hypothesis, it's not.

Interesting thing I'd like to add here. A research team at my university is currently observing parapatric speciation (or possibly sympatric speciation based on how you define it) in a species of fish in a pond. The population lives in the same pond, but they lay their eggs in different streams so they are separated while reproducing, thus it's most likely parapatric speciation, but nevertheless they are observing the divergence of one species becoming two.

I know you've been informed of the virus evolution, but I thought you'd be interested in knowing it's being observed in animals too.

Indeed I already replied to another poster about fish but in a different way, 2 of the same species with a difference, one lives in polluted water and survives because they adapted to the waters toxins, and this is a result of our presence so it's not like it could have taken excessively long.

The most easy to observe evolution is the flu, need to constantly make modifications to treatments, no wait that's a conspiracy by the government I'm sure some people suggest. They're out to get our hotdogs ladies and gentleman!

The biggest case against evolution is ignorance in recent discoveries or just information in general "if we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys!?" or they try and use skewed numbers to justify this planets population to be a miracle. While that may be true there's no confirmed life out there ...yet, even if the odds were .01% for a planet to have life, in our galaxy alone the number of populated planets would be very much in the many...never the less the universe. Hm, I think I got off topic there in the end but, it really shocks me what people force into fields of facts and discovery with bias and prejudgement.

Honestly, ignorance is something I can accept because even after learning about some fragments of evolution I have shifted from believing I understood it (I have never believed it to be false regardless of how I have heard the story) and well it's hard to believe in something you don't understand.

The people you talk about with their monkey example is something that saddens me. It can either be said by someone who doesn't understand evolution or from someone who argues against it and is simply refusing to acknowledge the facts and use a fallacy to ridicule evolution. Ignorance can be fixed with education, but a charismatic speaker who advocates creationism can make statements that confuse the ignorant and make the theory of evolution seem silly.

Now I am quite opposed to saying we evolved from monkeys because it's a little inaccurate, we evolved from a common ancestor which currently is unknown to us. Or simply saying that we share the same ancestor with the modern great apes to cut down on the amount of words used. It's both more accurate and it leaves less room for the silly fallacy, but that's just a personal preference.

Another problem connected to ignorance is that evolution is too often used to explain why animals have this or that adaptation, why they live here, who they evolved from, who shares common ancestry. These things are constantly being shifted around as new information is discovered and we don't really know as much as we'd like to. Now when you mention virus evolution I'd say that's really what makes evolution such an important subject. Viruses and bacteria are evolving quickly due to their short generation length. If we get a bacterial infection and treat it with antibiotics we will most likely kill most of the population. Vaccines will present the antigen to our immune system and be able to act if these are found in our system again. Evolution here could be to make a harmless or useful bacteria virulent or make a harmful bacteria immune to a certain kind of penicillin. A virus can change enough to dodge the immune system and we'll have to initiate a new primary response.

Pesticides are also being rendered useless with time. As pesticides are being used those rare mutations with resistance to pesticides (which are commonly disadvantageous due to trade-offs) become more advantageous and numerous in the population.

Now to boil down my rambling to a more concise point. I like that you bring up viruses because it emphasizes that evolution isn't just an opposition to creationism that tries to explain nature. It's also an important part of our health and agriculture. It gives hypotheses to what might come and why it happens.

Now to go off topic I will say that I have really enjoyed our discussion here.

Ignorance is forgivable when you're not parroting incorrect information, or like some celeberties making people fall to BS because of their status. The only one I could list off the top of my head is a woman fighting against immunizations because she believes it causes autism (it doesn't) but that's another ramble.

Yeah it's pretty scary how things evolve and adapt to us when you think about it, we've created technology and they (viruses) adapt to our methods against them, astounding really...

Yeah it's nice that it's a discussion and not what you see on youtube comments, then again those can be amusing in their own way hah.

 

[gamernerdtg2]

I'm with team Science, but Evolution can just jump off the bus. In other words, this poll is completely biased and the OP should be ashamed.

Okay, so obviously I agree with "micro-evolution". I can see the small scale changes happening and species diverging and resistances appearing and the like. This is all adequately shown in numerous experiments and in human farming activities since forever. These processes exist and enable creatures to adapt to their environment or at least stop dying to it.

What I don't agree with is that any of these processes can lead to "macro-evolution". This is the part I'd call Evolution, and then I would rename "micro-evolution" something far less synonymous. This is due to two reasons, first that from what I see today in large scale experiments (farming, pet breeding, etc) is that captive populations are most likely to devolve rather than evolve. They move to a smaller genetic base in response to outside stress and become weaker for it. Second, in mathematical models, given an arbitrary gene injection rate into any given population of individuals regulated by some outside environmental function, one of two things happen. Either the population perfects itself to the local maxima (through micro-evolution) and never changes enough to benefit from other local maxima the environment presents (no macro) or the injection rate is too high and the population never stabilises, so instead of becoming fit for the environment the constant changing of their genome makes them unfit for everything.

Also "macro-evolution" is inherently untestable. Every prediction it makes into the future within a reasonable timescale will not differ from what we see in "micro-evolution". We will see species adapt to the environment as per usual, but we are not going to see the largescale physiological changes within our lifetime. We have the fossil record, but unless we're going to properly map out ancestry by pulling DNA from the bones (and thus voiding their supposed age), all we have are speculations based on similarities in bone structure backed up by guessed dates which are verified by the bones which are verified by the guessed dates. In any case, it would be nice for "macro-evolution" to make some predictions which we could go ahead and verify instead of hiding behind long time frames that we cannot ever test over.

It would also be nice if "macro-evolution" had a concrete starting point for life. But again, "macro-evolution" is untestable. So if we do find some way of kick-starting life naturally, even if in the most contrived and unlikely manner, "macro-evolution" will latch onto it as "proof", whereas there is no fail condition and never finding an appropriate starting point for life will just be down to lazy scientists.

So, yes Science is great. But Evolution is not science, as it does not inform us and thus cannot be disproven. Maybe when we have a collective data base of a million generations then we can look at this argument again and see whether the data shows trends of macro-evolution, but at the moment this just isn't possible.

I agree that the OP is blatantly biased, but wow this is great information! You know, the carbon dating thing has always been "accepted" as not 100% accurate. I wasn't thinking about that...

 

[-Dragmire-]

I believe the universe has a creator that made matter and the laws that the universe like the way atoms interact and the way radiation works. My belief stops there, I don't attribute an agenda or moral stance to it. My belief is that existence is an experiment of what happens with matter under the rules defined. Eventually, waaaay after the big bang started things off, life happened, and evolution happened naturally as life struggled to exist. I hold no proof of this obviously, it's just my perspective I live in.


As for what's after life, no idea, I'll see it or not see it when I pass.

My answer was the 'in between' option because my belief in a creator of some kind does not conflict with my trust in science and evolution.

 

[SinisterDeath]

I agree that the OP is blatantly biased, but wow this is great information! You know, the carbon dating thing has always been "accepted" as not 100% accurate. I wasn't thinking about that...

It's accurate, and it isn't accurate. As we gather more information, it becomes more accurate. And when it comes to fossil records, we have other ways of testing age, that is actually more accurate, than carbon dating... Because.. well to do any kind of carbon dating, requires destroying the sample. And you don't just do that with very-rare fossils.

Course, once you start going back beyond the 1 million years-range, you start to go +/- 50 millennia. Not that is inaccurate and makes the time scale wrong. Its mostly used to help pinpoint where something lands on the fossil record. Hell, we had one recent find, that turned out to be something like 500,000 years older than expected, meaning it evolved further back than expected. (which shifted where it was on the evolutionary tree)

It be akin to finding a skeleton of a archaic Homo sapiens 250,000 years prior to its last record.

 

[Deathmageddon]

Theistic Evolutionism: because there are practical issues with atheism (you can either delude yourself into thinking life has meaning and thus there's a point to scientific inquiry, or be a nihilist and spend the rest of your life contemplating suicide), time is relative, and why would God have removed any doubt of His existence by spoiling hundreds of years of research anyway? Giving Moses a simplified version of events makes a great test of faith, too.

Before I get replies from butthurt, "hail science" militant atheist types, think about why Nietzsche and Sartre were opposed to German anti-semitism, or why Richard Dawkins wrote his own Ten Commandments, all while preaching that morality, good and evil, don't exist and that people shouldn't act like they do.

Short version: it's impossible to live happily and consistently as an atheist, but evolution is fact. Therefore, theistic evolutionism is the best way to reconcile fact with truth.

 

[Gizen]

EDIT: All right, maybe believe was the wrong word. How does 'support' sound?

Support sounds dumb. It's like saying you support breathing, or weather. You can't really 'support' a natural process like you would support a sports team.

And in the end, whether you believe in evolution is irrelevant, because nature flat out does not give a shit and will continue to roll along doing what it does, with or without anyone's 'support'.

 

[BrassButtons]

I agree that the OP is blatantly biased, but wow this is great information! You know, the carbon dating thing has always been "accepted" as not 100% accurate. I wasn't thinking about that...

Please tell me that you are being sarcastic, and you don't actually think that post had good information. It was, at best the result of someone falling victim to misinformation and lies. At worst it was a deliberate attempt to spread those same lies.

Carbon dating has issues, and they are well known to the people who actually use those methods. There are various ways of adjusting for the issues, and typically several different dating methods are used (despite what the anti-science crowd would have you believe, the methods do not consist solely of carbon dating, rock layers, and index fossils) so that they can be checked against one another to rule out any errors. Fossil dating simply does not work the way discrider claims. Scientists sure as fuck are not guessing how old things are. These people aren't morons--if anyone tried to date fossils using the circular reasoning discrider described, they'd be fired for either incompetency or fraud and never work in the field again.