Evolution: The Scientific Evidence

[jinydu]

Originally Posted by mfgoode

Can you back up your statement? I certainly want to know which brute do I originate from and where exactly do I meet a monkey in the past and shake hands with him as a spiritual off shoot from a half developed man.
The Golden rule is "each after its own kind" (species).

Have you read the link I gave earlier in this thread about the chimpanzee genome? If humans and chimpanzees really had a separate origin, how do you explain the great genetic similarity between them?

Originally Posted by mfgoode

If you say that the theory of adaptation to environment and circumstances and natural selection is true it certainly suggests some gruesome possibilities for our race.
I can imagine by your theory to see some humpbacked farmers, with enormous muscular bodies, large headed students with short sighted eyes, office workers with useless shrunken legs, many fingered piano players, mail carriers with legs way out of proportion to their bodies and night watchman with bulging eyes as big as saucers .

I think what you have in mind is a chimera between a human and a large ape. Evolution does not predict the widespread existence of such organisms; sometimes, one gene by itself is not beneficial to survival and reproduction; it takes several genes working together as a package. The organisms you have in mind would have difficulty reproducing with either humans or other primates, and hence would be unlikely to survive until the present day.

Originally Posted by mfgoode

Man is made up of at least two parts- one), physical and two), spiritual. He is a finished being from the start. God does not leave an unfinished creation in man. No amount of evolution can make a man better than what he was 6000 ears ago when he was created.

If that is the case, what about all the known flaws and unecessary parts in the design of a human body? For instance, why would God give humans a tailbone, when humans do not have tails?

Originally Posted by mfgoode

I have had the good fortune, nay Blessing, to have set my eyes on Egyptian mummies 4000 years old and older. Believe me they'd look the same as you and me if you put on some colour and flesh on them. No they dont not look like Pro Mag-non man.

The reason for the similarity with present-day humans is that 4000 years is a very short time in the evolution of humans. Not enough generations elapsed for there to be major genetic changes (other than perhaps resistances to some diseases). If you could find a mummy 100 times older than that, it would look quite different from you and me.

Originally Posted by mfgoode

Man was perfect when created but he 'FELL' physically. He has a whole spiritual evolution ahead of him. This is an aspect you have not taken into consideration.

Spirit (by which I think you mean conscious thought and feeling) is much more vague than physical body; and far more difficult to study scientifically. Personally, I find it uninteresting to study because it is so vague.

Originally Posted by mfgoode

.
To sum up the findings of Science in four words- mutations but no transmutations.

Could you define what you mean by "transmutation"?

Originally Posted by mfgoode

Please read Genesis and study it. It is worth the time you take on studying atheistic evoution.
Mally

Either in this thread, or in the "Does God exist thread", I looked at the first page of Genesis, and already managed to find some flaws in it. For instance, Genesis claims that trees were created before the Sun; one does not have to accept evolution to realize that this is implausible.

I would also like to reiterate a point I have already made several times in this forum. The hypothesis that an omnipotent God created the Universe is unfalsifiable, since God could manipulate the evidence so that it to supports any theory that God wants humans to believe.

[brunoparga]

Originally Posted by Jwb52z

I understand. You really believe that ethical and moral ideas can exist in and of themselves without an origin and just "occur to people" who then decide that they are a good idea and use them. At least, that's what it sounds like you are saying.

Well, not exactly. The way you put it makes it seem like ideas are physical things, floating around there in little bright bubbles, waiting to be catched by this or that brain (perhaps through the ear). It's not like that.

We, humans, have developed language. We can share our thoughts. Suppose one day, a long, long time ago (but not in Star Wars), an ancient man pointed to the poor wild animal he and his tribe were hunting, he pointed to the spilled blood and said "red". If he'd point to a tree, or to the sky, and say "red", his fellas would see it and say, "no, that's not red". This is just a very basic, hypothetic, example, but it shows how language can be used to improve our ideas, our knowledge of the world.

It just happens that we, and most likely only we among all animals, have developed the capacity to think about the process of thinking itself. We think abstractly, if you want it. And, on this story of criticizing ways of thinking, there was this English 14th-century monk, called William of Ockham, who questioned: if all we need to explain something are A and B, why postulate the existence of B, C, D ... Z to explain that very thing?

In other words: ethical and moral ideas *do* exist, that's a fact. I say human reason alone is sufficient to explain them; you say it's insuficient, and you postulate the existence of a God (note it could be the existence of an Invisible Pink Unicorn, or a Flying Spaghetti Monster) to explain it. Who's right, or, at least, who's more likely to be right? Occam's Razor says the simpler explanation is the best. Without it, we all should believe in a plethora of gods, Invisible Pink Unicorns, fairies, dwarves and so on.

Once again, I don't know if I've made myself clear .

[Wacky]

Originally Posted by brunoparga

Without it, we all should believe in a plethora of gods, Invisible Pink Unicorns, fairies, dwarves and so on.

How dare you disparage my associates, the "Invisible Pink Unicorns", et. al.!!!

Should you not worship them?

[brunoparga]

I apologize for the long post.

Originally Posted by jinydu

I think what you have in mind is a chimera between a human and a large ape. Evolution does not predict the widespread existence of such organisms; sometimes, one gene by itself is not beneficial to survival and reproduction; it takes several genes working together as a package. The organisms you have in mind would have difficulty reproducing with either humans or other primates, and hence would be unlikely to survive until the present day.

jinydu, I think perhaps Mally was thinking of something closer to Lamarckism.

Mally seems to believe the current evolution theory states that the environmental conditions of an individual somehow affect its body structure. That's not true, Mally. The way - or, at least, one way, the way I understand best - evolution occurs is not like that.

As you know, every living being has a certain amount of the so-called "nucleic" acids. I've phrased this the way I did to make a definition as broad as I could; viruses, for example, even if their status as "living" is arguable, have DNA or RNA inside them. So do bacteria, even if the DNA in their cells isn't contained in a nucleus, which makes the term "nucleic" acid improper for them. And so do we; we have 23 pairs of mollecules of DNA called chromosomes.

What these acids do is code information, which is transmitted from the DNA via the RNA to any available ribosomes (those of a parasited cell in the case of viruses, one's own in all the other cells). With this information, ribosomes use the sequence of the four types of nitrogenated bases in the nucleic acid to produce proteins; those basically define whether the being in question is a disease-causing bacterium or the love of your life. For instance, the color of your skin is determined by the amount of a protein called melanine present in your skin cells.

Now, genes (I had forgotten to say the portions of nucleic acids specifically responsible for coding proteins are called genes) code proteins by means of a given sequence of nitrogenated bases, right? Then, if something (e.g. radiation) changes that sequence, the protein thus coded *might* be different.

We can have a number of scenarios from here. The process I just described is called mutation. Sometimes, in very rare cases, a mutation can be positive. On most cases, however, the mutant cell will either be destroyed by the body's immune system, or it'll become a tumor. That's not good, trust me.

Sometimes, however, a mutation can happen in a very special place: what is generally called gonads. Those are the sites where a special kind of cell division takes place. This kind of cell division separates each of the pairs of chromosomes I'd mentioned (23 in humans, usually different according to the species); the resulting cells are called the gametes. I'll slip past the part where the gametes find each other and generate a new being.

Now, suppose a gonad cell was a mutant: the individual bearing that cell will have nothing to do with that mutation, but its offspring will carry it in each of their cells, and therefore have mutant characteristics. As Paul has pointed out above, many of those are harmful and kill the unfortunate offspring; some are harmless and coexist with the normal kind of the gene (those are called alleles, and are responsible, for instance, for your blood type). Some are positive and, if accumulated, might lead to speciation.

Now, if you consider that life, by definition, tends to reproduce itself; that it has existed on this planet for at least 3.8 x 10^9 years; that on a lot of cases (e.g single-celled bacteria) there's nothing to prevent mutations from being passed on to offspring; that all multicellular organisms have a *lot* of gonad cells; that mutation-generating factors such as radiation are numerous; that a reasonable amount of mutations provide some kind of advantage to at least some mutants; if you consider all that, then it's not at all surprising that both humans and all the vast diversity in life-forms exists and was generated by evolution.

And, answering directly to your argument: how do you explain that most, if not all, Nigerians are black, while most, if not all, Finns are white?

Bruno

[Wacky]

Originally Posted by brunoparga

And, answering directly to your argument: how do you explain that most, if not all, Nigerians are black, while most, if not all, Finns are white?

More specifically, how does one refute that this is not an environmental adapation?

[jinydu]

Originally Posted by brunoparga

And, answering directly to your argument: how do you explain that most, if not all, Nigerians are black, while most, if not all, Finns are white?

Whose argument are you referring to, brunoparga (it's not clear to me)?

[Jwb52z]

If evolution is the way it is explained here, why doesn't it lead to the occurrance of one mother animal in a species literally giving birth to another species? Is it just because evolution says that speciation is slow or is it that speciation doesn't allow for species to vary enough that that would happen at one time?

[brunoparga]

Originally Posted by jinydu

Whose argument are you referring to, brunoparga (it's not clear to me)?

Mally's. I don't know his position about whether human traits vary across the population and, if they do, the cause for this.

Jwb52z: I think the probability of a couple to have had enough mutations in their reproductive cells so that their offspring will belong to a different species, and that *none* of those mutations will kill their bearer instead of benefitting it, and that that will happen with at least two different couples, one of them generating a male and the other a female that could then mate and reproduce the new species, is ludicrously small. Evolution doesn't simply "say" speciation is a slow process, in the sense it doesn't postulate it. It being slow, in terms of individual generations, is a consequence of the theory and the observed evidence.

Bruno

[Zeta-Flux]

Originally Posted by Jwb52z

If evolution is the way it is explained here, why doesn't it lead to the occurrance of one mother animal in a species literally giving birth to another species? Is it just because evolution says that speciation is slow or is it that speciation doesn't allow for species to vary enough that that would happen at one time?

It is because the word "species" is human-made, and should not be taken to imply some sort of finely demarcated line between one type of animal and another. For example, lions and tigers are different species, even though they can reproduce (and sometimes their offspring are fertile).

[ewmayer]

I used analogies (and differences) between the scientific theories of gravitation and evolution of species in my opening posts of this thread in order to illustrate some key aspects of the nature of scientific inquiry and "truth."

Appropriately enough, a guest editorial in today's New York Times mentions the evolution/creationism controversy, and a thusly-inspired satirical article in The Onion, Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory. Excerpt:

"Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.

Burdett added: "Gravity—which is taught to our children as a law—is founded on great gaps in understanding. The laws predict the mutual force between all bodies of mass, but they cannot explain that force. Isaac Newton himself said, 'I suspect that my theories may all depend upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in vain.' Of course, he is alluding to a higher power."

Founded in 1987, the ECFR is the world's leading institution of evangelical physics, a branch of physics based on literal interpretation of the Bible.

According to the ECFR paper published simultaneously this week in the International Journal Of Science and the adolescent magazine God's Word For Teens!, there are many phenomena that cannot be explained by secular gravity alone, including such mysteries as how angels fly, how Jesus ascended into Heaven, and how Satan fell when cast out of Paradise.

The ECFR, in conjunction with the Christian Coalition and other Christian conservative action groups, is calling for public-school curriculums to give equal time to the Intelligent Falling theory. They insist they are not asking that the theory of gravity be banned from schools, but only that students be offered both sides of the issue "so they can make an informed decision."

...

"Closed-minded gravitists cannot find a way to make Einstein's general relativity match up with the subatomic quantum world," said Dr. Ellen Carson, a leading Intelligent Falling expert known for her work with the Kansan Youth Ministry. "They've been trying to do it for the better part of a century now, and despite all their empirical observation and carefully compiled data, they still don't know how."

"Traditional scientists admit that they cannot explain how gravitation is supposed to work," Carson said. "What the gravity-agenda scientists need to realize is that 'gravity waves' and 'gravitons' are just secular words for 'God can do whatever He wants.'"

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by mfgoode

Atheistic evolution substitutes the image of a monkey for the ‘image of God’.

No, that is not true.

If you want to convince adherents of the other side of a debate that you're right (and they're wrong), then you have to at least demonstrate that you correctly state their position. Otherwise, they can just dismiss everything you say as either ignorance or "straw man" rhetoric.

Evolution teaches a development upward,

As jinydu pointed out, that is incorrect. Again, your arguments that follow an incorrect statement such as that one will seem to the other side to be only ignorant or misleading, not knowledgable and convincing.

To the problem of ‘sin’ and where it comes from, evolution says “All the evil and bad tendencies in man are the remnants and carry over, or survival of his ancestral traits.

You seem to be taking your description of evolution from the opponents of evolution, not its adherents. But opponents may be presenting a false or misleading description, or may give an incorrect, incomplete or outdated description out of ignorance!

In order to demonstrate to evolutionists that your arguments against evolution are valid, you have to use a sincere and knowledgable description of evolution set forth by its supporters, who have motivation to present an accurate, complete, and sincere description.

But if this be true, that we are evolving upward, how do you account for the fact that man at the top of the evolutionary ladder is guilty of crimes and cruelties no respectable animal would stoop to do or consider?

(a) If you start from false statements set forth by opponents of evolution instead of sincere statements set forth by supporters, then of course it's easy to arrive at conclusions that seem slanted against evolution! But such deductions are worthless.

(b)I have read that the murder rate among lions (i.e., lions killing other lions, not lions killing their prey for food) far exceeds the murder rate among humans. Animals are not so noble as your question implies.

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BTW, I attended many years (all my lfe until past age 18) of worship services and Sunday School in a Christian denomination (Methodist) and I have read the entire Bible.