Evolution? How?

Thanks for the animation Mesquite. What amazes me is the speed India zipped across the Indian Ocean. Does anyone know why it moved so much quicker than anywhere else?

It'll last forever because it's modifyable to fit the evidence. The basic theory has been intact since Darwin described it, but we've been fine tuning it ever since with more and more detail. It describes an amazing world where the elegance of life is contained within the system. We use this knowledge every day in medicine and in agriculture.

Why do you choose to believe what you're told by the people who gave you your first bible? Do you trust them? Who do you believe in such matters?

Bili,
Lets address some of your statements about why evolution doesn't work.

1. The Cambrian explosion took place over 30 million years. A short time in geological terms but a long time in evolutionary terms. Because we haven't witnesssed a species change in 50 years can hardly compare to 30 million years. (When we discover new species today how can we be sure that they were not recently evolved?)

2. Ever hear of XYY syndrome? a person actually has an extra chromosome which is made up of over a thousand genes. So, we have provable instances of people having added genes. http://mchneighborhood.ichp.edu/pacnorgg/media/Sex_Chrom/xyy_eng.pdf

3. The only requirement for evolution is life. It does not require a certain temperature other than one that can sustain life. You must mean high temperatures are needed for the creation of life. Scientists have created amino acids in the laboratory. In fact recent experiments have shown amino acids can be created in the cold of space.
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20020330/fob1.asp

4. explained earlier in this thread.

7. " the principle of carbon-14 dating applies to other isotopes as well. Potassium-40 is another radioactive element naturally found in your body and has a half-life of 1.3 billion years. Other useful radioisotopes for radioactive dating include Uranium -235 (half-life = 704 million years), Uranium -238 (half-life = 4.5 billion years), Thorium-232 (half-life = 14 billion years) and Rubidium-87 (half-life = 49 billion years).
" http://science.howstuffworks.com/carbon-142.htm

8. ALL are bad? What evidence do you have to support this absolute statement? Majority might be bad but I don't accept all. (Cancer is not an evolutionary mutation by the way.)

You have no evidence of a worldwide flood. Thats just dumb Pick any spot on the planet that is now dry and lets look at evidence for a simultaneous flood deposit. Most of the Creationists have even given that up.

As far as the Cambrian explosion. Only 2 orders of animals appeared in that period.All major classes and phyla appeared since the
CE"For example, fish, amphibians, reptiles, dinos, birds, mammals all appeared in subsequent time periods many 100s of millions of years apart. The "CE" was just a convenient point wherein animals with chitenous bodies and calcite/aragonite tests appeared.
The first notochord appeared in Pikaia , an animal that didnt appear till the middle Cambrian (Hardly an explosion-more of a series of pulses)

You may not be right but at least youre not in doubt.

In Britain with an election coming up the Labour Govt. is worried about muslims not voting or voting against them because they have so pissed them off over the Iraq war and anti terror legislation which they see as anti muslim. So they about to introduce a bit of legislation as a sop to the muslim vote. They are about to introduce a law making "incitement to religious hatred" a criminal offence. This would make insulting remarks against Islam illegal. I reject this absolutely. How can you make it illegal to hate an idea? Some ideas really are hateful. And what I find most hateful of all is the irrational rejection of evidence based truth in favour of myth superstition and magic. Of course the new law wouldnt just protect the sensitivities of Allah, fundamentalist Christians would also seek shelter. The way things are going, creationist lunatics will use the law to insist it is taught in schools, and and will try and gag legitimate attacks on them by insisting they have right not to be offended.

I used to be tolerant of other people's deeply held religious beliefs, however wacky, because I had no wish to cause unnecessary offense. No longer. Its time to fight FIRE with FIRE.

Fight

Fundamentalist
Irrational
Religious
Extremism

with

Factual
Intelligible
Rational
Explanation.

thats my little homily for the day.

I hate doing this kind of post by post crap but pilsner has made a few error filled observations that seem to be draughted by the CRI. viz
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]2. Genes. Give 1 example of one gene ADDING itself to ANOTHER gene. Result: zero.

Read about "Cap.turing genomes by Lynne Margulis. Entire genomic
portions of organisms have been picked up by other organisms.Lichens, for exampkle, carry the gene for chitenous body parts
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3. Earth was COLDER 2000000000000 (insert zeros) MYO

This doesnt even, make sense Pilsner.Youve made the earth 2 trillion years old .
Evolution requires Earth to be HOTTER.

WHAAAAA? We had dinosaurs living in extreme cold and extremophilic

c organisms living in the Greenland Ice cap, whats yer point?
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4. 2nd Law of Thermodynamics

(William Thompson, when he cooked up the laws of Thermo, erroneously felt that the earth wouldnt have enough time for evolution to occur.We know him to be wrong and that nuclear decay, internal friction, and mantle convection have held the core/mantle temperature fairly constant).Lord Kelvin lived about the time of Darwin and was a sevre critic.

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5. Irreducible Complexities

Theres only one person on the planet who even believes in this, and thats Michael Behe, and even he accepts evolution,an old earth, and Uniformitarianism. So once again, whats the point? Behe has no arguments for the process of evolution, hes actually stipulated to most of it. Hes an INTELLIGENT DESIGNER, and is mostly arguing how life began
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6. Geological strata.

What about it. Im a geologist , Id love to discuss this so you can understand better. The strata that exist are wonderfully laid out fdor us to see. I hope youre not gonna give me some crap about"polystrate fossils" ,

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7. No carbon (or any other element) can date rocks past 1MYO let alone
six BYO or whatever it is.

WAAAYWRONG-We dont even use C14 much beyond 30000 years (in a stretch to 50K)Lead/lead, Zirc/ Lead, Thorium. K/Argon are the nuclides of choice even when all is exhausted , there is a parent/daughter lead ratio 210v 206/208 which is used as post facto isotopic analyses
. The interesting thing is, we only date stuff by isotopes directly back to about 3.8 BYA and we have strata from that age , lots of stable isotope strata from the Isua Formation and the cratons of Canada and Australia and Africa. wherein C12/C13 ratios show that life probably already existed.Life forms selectively mtabolize the C12 at a greater rate than C13. However, Metamorphism and anatectic melting has smooshed much of the record from earlier time. You need to learn more about this entire topic before you start trying to critique it

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8. Mutations are all bad, as observed through current emperical sciences (you guys would operate on cancer cells would you not?)
Mutations occupy only one mechanism of genic diversity. Many benign Mutations accumulate in a genome at a fairly fixed rate from which we can date the organism in its present form.(The technique of Polymerase Chain reactions allows us to detect and repeat the occurences of the short tandem repeat alleles in the previously called "junk" DNA-we now know that its not junk at all). Mayr has stated that. Much other genetic diversity comes from recombination. duplication, retention of RNA factors, etc much of a populations diversity comes from good ole sexual transmission of traits
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9. All too convenient ad hocs (see MLPT above) esp. so for astronomy

I have to beg big ignorance here , Im a geo /chem guy with paleo experience. But your argument is for a young sun , I can easily show plenty ofevidence that the earth is old, and during that time photosynthetic reactions were going on in stromatolite reefs. Cant have one without the other

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10. Scopes Trial (makes me laugh).

Scopes was found guilty because the case was set up to test the law itself. It wasnt overturned till 1969 .BTW . William Jennings Bryant died less than a week after the trial because he was truly a believer in his cause but was ridiculed by the press and , perhaps the stress of the press gave him a massive cardiac
The real death knell to Creationism as a political force came in June 1987 when the US Supreme Court found Against Gov Edwards of Louisiana in the famous Edwards v Aguillard decision. The court ruled 7-2 that teaching Creationism was not a scientific pursuit and was not to be taught in Science curricula of schools. SO ,the Creationists may scream that their alive and well but youve been found to be proposing a "religious based dogma" posing as science

Justices Scalia and Rhenquist voted in the minority
]

bm, Farmer, your an info machine.

hey, Im always impressed by my truck mechanic he can at least get my goddam turbo unstuck.Y'ever hear a cat deisel with a stuck open turbo? sounds like a Stuka bombing Warsaw

:-) If it weren't for your posts and a few others, I would know next to nothing about evolution.

Sometimes I have to read the same post 2 or 3 times just to get an inkling, but I try.

Nods to your mechanic :-)

Ya know, Steve has a point here. It's good to respect other people's religious beliefs, and a spiritual view of the world which doesn't conflict with reality doesn't worry me. But let's face it, anyone who thinks the Earth is only 4000 years old needs a good healthy dope slap to wake them up because they're just not living in the real world. Where do we draw the line between respecting people's beliefs and letting the inmates run the asylum?

rosborne, Good point; to intentionally agree with the religious folks that keeps insisting about the truth of the bible does them no favors. It seems many religious folks can't accept scientific facts no matter how it shows the bible to be in error. They go from "misinterpretation" to "must understand the bible as a whole" to make their argument. Somebody even insisted that one must have the blessing of god to understand the bible. It continues to amaze me how they can continue to deny what is so obvious from science.

Evolution is the development of a species, organism, etc. from its original to its present state. How then can you say that people evolved from apes. This would have to mean that apes could no longer be in existince because of the fact that they would all have to be humans. Also, why don't apes still turn into people over many generations? I am a believer in creationism but i still think species change. However, I would like to point out that adaptation is not the same thing. It's defined as changing to be suitable. The next time that you go to defend evolution, keep this thought in your head.

Adaptation IS evolution.

A lot of us are so used to bending over backwards to find some way to respect other opinions, that sometimes I think we don't recognize when our attempts at tolerance have become desperate attempts, or merely academic exercises.

For example, anyone can defend almost any position by taking the philosophical position that human awareness is subjective, and that we can't *know* reality. And we can milk that argument until A2K runs out of disk space, but in the real world we still have to take a piss, still have to eat, keep warm and breath.

I like tolerance, and I like a diversity of ideas, but I also like sanity and reason. Fundamentalists and Extremists who don't have a good grip on reality are often dangerous to themselves and to those around them, and I don't see much reason to tolerate that.

How?


Well CI, i thought I just proved to you that they weren't the same thinig but apparently you need a further explanation. Evolution suggests that one species completely changes to another. Adaptation suggests that the species doesn't change into something else, just that it gains or loses certain attributes to make it more suitable. Ponder on that for a while and see what else you come up with.

cash, You need to study the dodo bird.

Nobody said that people evolved from Apes. Apes and Humans evolved from a common ancestor which now happens to be extinct (along with a bunch of other ancestors).



Even if humans *did* evolve from apes (which we didn't) it still wouldn't imply that apes had to be extinct due to the process. Common ancestors *tend* to be out-competed by more well adapted species, and therefor *tend* to become extinct leaving only the newer species, but this isn't a requirement of the process, only a likely outcome due to competetive challenges.



Because evolution doesn't lead toward the development of humanity. We weren't *meant* to evolve, we just *happened* to be the first thing which evolved to ask that question about ourselves.

If you have misconceptions about what evolution is and about how it works (which you clearly do), then it's easy to see why you would disagree with it; because you're disagreeing with falacies you have collected over the years.

First of all, get rid of the idea that humans evolved from apes. Humans and Apes evolved from a common ancestor. And get rid of the idea that humans are a *goal* of evolution because no species is a goal of evolution. And next, try to adjust your vision of evolution into one which matches the actual theory, because you're wasting your own time by objecting to ideas about the theory which aren't even accurate.

You did not "PROVE" anything. You just made a blanket statement with no evidence or authority. As ci said, youve just defined evolution, adaptation leads to change and suddenly theres a new species. Sounds like youre trying to have it both ways.

rosborne, you are probably right. In an effort to be as polite to the Creationists , we almost stumble over ourselves not to appear impatient with their inability to read and understand evidence. I guess, with the newest hearings centering on ID, Ive taken a newer tack to remind the Creationists that they are passe in the eyes of the Supreme Court and most mainstream religions. There seems to be a small but vocal group of strict Creationists who remain locked to their boneheaded interpretations andpurposeful mistatements of scientific data, and, I might add, throw in a mix of well documented fraud.

OY, case in point

Re: How?


I wish I could find a way to say this without sounding rude, cash, but "proved" seems to have a meaning to you that is different anyone else's understanding of the word. Private defininitions don't help move a discussion forward.