Are there any flaws in the Theory of Evolution?

There is no such thing as a flaw in the theory of evolution. It's because it's based on physical science, and any misstatements can be corrected when further research proves past theories were wrong.

You need to show how the article you read proves the so-called "flaws." As you have surmised, they are probably "plain misconceptions."

"A scientific theory is a set of principles that explain and predict phenomena. Scientists create scientific theories with the scientific method, when they are originally proposed as hypotheses and tested for accuracy through observations and experiments. Once a hypothesis is verified, it becomes a theory." - Wickipedia

What is that?

there a a huge number of gaps and missing evidence in specific aspects of Darwins theory,

1.there is really no unique solution to how life began (although Darwin only gave us one sentence about this entire area its become an area of intense research)


2. what ere the physiological/environmental means of extinction and adaptation that accounted for whole groups of organisms making it through or perishing at a "mass extinction"

3MAny entire groups of animals and plants have left no real evidence (or we havent found it yet) for their evolution from a common ancestor

4We have no way of recapturing the genomes of long extinct groups of animals. We have to create artificial genic assemblages of genes based upon living organisms.

5 we dont fully understand the development of major body organs and major tissue systems that define a mammal from a reptile or a fish from an amphibian. We have some really good iseas but noone is sure.

6How did the human brain develop and evolve.

There are many more. HAving said that, none of these areas really negate the entire theory, they are areas that need to be filled in and probably will. The neat thing as edgar and CI said, its a theory that is entirely evidence based . NO OTHER idea of the origin of life can say that.
Things like Creationism and Intelligent Design actually have NO data and evidence and whenever a spokesperson of these stories comes on board for a while, it has yet to provide anything in the way of concrete evidence of its beliefs.

The short answer is that there are no flaws. All evidence supports and no evidence contradicts. There are however, unknown details in the minutia of the process.

No one has ever been able to account for Darwin's penchant for dressing like a retired grocer.

What is evolution?

Definition: any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations.

This definition cannot be refuted, being that it has already been observed, furthermore even if it were to no longer occur, it continues to exist in the subjunctive spectrum of nomological possibilities, being this universe/world.

The refutation may be temporal, if ever possible.

The only refutation is to deny empiricalism.

As for the theories, there are many theories, such as the 'gradualistic' variations of an organism.

You could have just said, "No". Language isn't all data, some of it is Art. You need to balance the two things for effective communication.

I don't think he is capable of simple answers.

You may be right. I just thought I would throw that out there in case he hadn't considered it.

I think he is enamored with the meaning and sound of words without regard for the coherence of the message as a whole.

It's like he can't describe a forrest for fear of neglecting the description of a tree.

He fears neglecting to describe all the trees . . .

Thank you for your responses everyone.
I agree with all of you that the Theory of Evolution is the best theory we have that explains the formation of life as we know it.
So...thank you all.

The big lie which is being promulgated by evolutionists is that there is some sort of a dialectic between evolution and religion. There isn't. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion which operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two possible candidates would be voodoo and Rastifari.

The dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.

Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some expect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, or some other member of that crowd.

To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:

God Hates IDIOTS Too...

The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.

Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.

For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such feature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.

Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.

And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:



You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.

But it gets even stupider.

Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.

Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).

Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:

• It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). In other words, the clowns promoting this BS are claiming that the very lack of intermediate fossils supports the theory. Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could SEE them, they wouldn't BE witches...) This kind of logic is less inhibiting than the logic they used to teach in American schools. For instance, I could as easily claim that the fact that I'd never been seen with Tina Turner was all the proof anybody should need that I was sleeping with her. In other words, it might not work terribly well for science, but it's great for fantasies...
  
  
  
  
• PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
  
  
• PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
  
  
• PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
  
  
• For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.
  

The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.

And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:



They don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"


They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:



Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.

I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?

Basically, as you can see, evolution is nothing BUT flaws; remove the flaws, and there's nothing left.

Yet youve been unable to analyze and report back on your own about what evidence supports your worldview. You have no idea that the flaws you "believe" exist in evolutionary theory are figments of some doofii heads

What orificedid you pull this from? Your "analysis" presumes that only one offspring is responsible for evolutionary change. You dont seem to understand what Haldane and WRight have said, yet you seem to pose his findings as something that detsroys nat selection.


This is all crap. Its wishful thinking from a bunch of Creationist slugheads. Talk -Origins is made up mostly of people who are in the field and do research. What do you do that give you any credentials??

GODDAM you are stupid and bullheaded cause punctuated equi;librium says nothing of the sort. It doesnt account for even MOST of evolutionary change. It only occurs where isolated populations are exposed to rapid environmental changes and these species evolve more quickly that there isnt enough sedimentary data to catch up. EVEN this has been disputed based on Goulds own data and samples. Gould and Eldredge sampled a specific genera of brachiopods and these were seemingly quickly evolved into another genera of brachs called "Spirifers". Well, the scientists who relooked at Goulds own data have found that there were intermediates of the species that accounted for almost 10 million years of the "rapid evolution". These new findings have been published in the 1990's and since you only read **** from no later than 40 years ago, you probably missed the stories around the campfire.
Repeating lie after lie about science makes you look like an idiot gunga, you are aware of that? or is your church of "we dont give a **** what science says" not too familiar with the truth?

I brought this to your attention about 4 years ago. its called "GAmblers Ruin" and was most frequently brought up by Dave RAQup who was critical of Punctuated Equilibrium as a major force in evolutionary change. However, he was writing in the 1980's, before the findings refuted Gould's papers on punctuated equilibrium and now gradualism is the primary record shown in the fossil record.

Believe what you wish but first understand what you are attempting to critique. You have no fuckin idea about what your speaking.

Also, wheres the boatload of evidence to support your "beliefs"

They're not in to evidence; they love to promote creationism in whatever way they can, because that's the only avenue left to them. One thing you have to give them credit for; creativity. After all, that's how they created god(s).

This is why I stated that science may value occhams razor.

The ad hoc supernatural hypothesis is infallible.

Example:
God is immaterial.

How is this empirically investigated?

This requires logic, scientific arguementation has no philosophical basis.

It is suggested that many cosmologists attempted to negate a 'first cause', or 'end' of the universe, infinite regress negates meaning.

Nobody knows what the first cause is. That doesn't mean humans will always be ignorant on this subject. Science is a relatively new form of knowledge, including the instruments of science.

If there are other life forms on other planets, will that support or negate god(s)?