posted January 31, 2001 09:54 PM            

I myself find evolution infinitely more believable than the idea of God (or gods, if you prefer) but that's just me.

posted January 31, 2001 10:23 PM            

I've always found the theory of evolution increadibly mind boggling. I know the earth has been around for billions of years, but is that still enough time to evolve from one celled organism to blue whale?

As someone who belives in creation I find the theory of evolution to be the most plausible of scientific theories to explain life.

Then again, does anyone know any other scientific theories? Seems that evolution has the monopoly on that question.

I'd really like to know other scientific bodies that that have their own theories. Does anyone know any?

posted January 31, 2001 10:30 PM            

Evolution is, and has always been, presented as a theory. That means it's an idea that seems to fit all the available facts. When there are facts missing (and you can bet your opposable thumbs that there are always facts missing), a theory needs to have a certain amount of speculation to fill in the gaps. When the speculation does not directly contradict known facts -- that's facts, not "common sense," which has nothing to do with science -- the theory must be considered valid.

As to the idea of scientists putting mud and water under a heat lamp ... scientists have created amino acids, the basic building blocks of organic material, under laboratory conditions. What's missing from the original setup is an unbelievably vast amount of time, and until they figure out how to synthesize that under laboratory conditions, we're stuck with theories.
Right now, some variation or other on the theory of evolution seems to be the best one we've got. Unless anyone here has got a better one?

Oh, and Brad? Please don't confuse bad science with science fiction.

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-=> Toon

posted January 31, 2001 11:48 PM         

[This message has been edited by Nix (edited January 31, 2001).]

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posted February 01, 2001 07:23 AM            

(edited because it's too early in the morning to make sense)

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"He went over to the stove and turned on the gas.
He would have lit a cigarette, but he didn't have any.
He had never smoked in his life and this was no time to start."

posted February 01, 2001 08:25 AM            

Since somebody has brought in religion, I would offer a bit of cautionary advice: A religious person should never place the same kind of faith in a scientific theory that one does in a religious precept. Don't marry your religion to your science. The Catholic Church made that mistake (and I can say that now, because the Pope has admitted it was a mistake) in the Renaissance, when they declared Galileo's theories to be heresy; they'd embraced the prior scientific theory (Aristotle's concept of geocentrism and the celestial spheres) and decided that the Bible supported it, and thus were left without a leg to stand on when science moved on ahead of them.

The theory of evolution might be true. It might be partially true. It might be all wrong. The scientists don't claim to know for certain; if they do, they're being bad scientists. A religion shouldn't invest too much in either supporting or denying any given theory; it can turn out very embarrassing in the long run.

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-=> Toon

posted February 01, 2001 08:44 AM            

There's "micro" evolution, which you can actualy see happening. Like those birds (damn my memory... it's way too selective sometimes) that changed from white to black because of smog... black is much better camafluge(killed that word... oh well) than white when you're dealing with smog.

And there's "macro" evolution, which is pretty damn hard to prove. That's the one that says that you go through enough micro evolution that you get a completely different species in the end.

I think... isn't that how it goes?

The stuff that confuses me (but I never bothered to actually look in to) are things that just couldn't have happened in steps. Like that toad (damn my memory) that has two different chemicals? (damn my memory) stored in two different places? and when they meet they explode.... or something... it's supposed to be it's defense against predators.

Are there theories out there that try and explain that? (i know... it's a hard question to answer... "Are there theories out there to explain that thing where in that one animal that if the two things meet they explode?" where's my memory when I need it?) Or is this animal just something that some fundamentalist made up to win a few more people to Christ? 'Cause how could that work? How could survial of the fitest work? If they discover that two chemicals explode... wouldn't that kill them?

Anyway... that's just something I heard from attending a Christian college... Most things you hear from attending a Christian college are easily proved wrong usually.

[This message has been edited by ThePet (edited February 01, 2001).]

posted February 01, 2001 09:10 AM            

When discussing evolution, you need to differentiate between evolution the fact and evolution the theory. The fact of evolution is remarkably simple. Species used to exist that don't today. Species that exist today didn't always exist. The Theory of evolution is an attempt to explain those facts.

Evolution is both a fact and a theory
Introduction to Evolutionary Biology
Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution

Evolution itself, by the way, is defined as "the change in allele frequencies over time".

Definition of Evolution
Onto a few specific questions:

1) Micro and Macroevolution: Microevolution is a term generally used to discuss variation inside a species, and Macroevolution it discuss speciation level events or above (the appearance of a new species).

Microevolution is rather easy to demonstrate. Selective breeding of dogs, Darwin's finches, those moths in London..all examples of variation within a species. Some variations, of course, being better suited for long life and procreation than others.

Macrevolution, however, is rather harder. One needs the fossil record for the truly obvious examples. Whale fossils, for instance, lay out a series of transitionals that are a biologists dream. The horse sequence is also pretty well documented. Further, examples of speciation have been documented in both the lab and the wild.

Transitional Vertebrate Fossils
Hominid Fossils
Punctuated Equilibrium
List of Observed Speciation Events
More Observed Speciation Events

The toad you're referring to is most likely, by the way, not a toad but a beetle. The Bombadier Beetle. By bringing up biochemistry, I'm guessing you're also referring to "irreducibly complex" systems.

Bombadier Beetle
Michael Behe and Irreducible Complexity

The links I added all point to talk.origins. It's an excellent site. Their FAQs are well referenced, and submitted to an informal peer review known as "getting jumped on by the T.O. regulars (which number many biologists, geologists and other professionals in relevant fields, as well as the assorted amateurs who just like to argue and look things up)".

Talk.Origins Archive

Anyone wishing to "start at the beginning" should start here:

Talk.Origins Must-Read FAQs

And of course, for the post that started this:

Interim Abiogenesis FAQ

posted February 01, 2001 09:16 AM            

*waves hi to my memory*

posted February 01, 2001 09:31 AM            

Many of our food crops are examples of this. I think wheat is a relatively recent hexaploid, while corn (maize) is an ancient tetraploid.

Here is a link to a book chapter about the subject. It's a PDF, so if you don't like PDFs, don't click.

(edited to add that Morat has really good points.)

posted February 01, 2001 10:26 AM         

...basic building blocks of organic material, under laboratory conditions. What's missing from the original setup is an unbelievably vast amount of time, and until they figure out how to synthesize that under laboratory conditions, we're stuck with theories.

To which I respond:
Evolutionists are in love with time. The answer to all questions is time. If you leave something alone for a long enough period of time, the magical time fairy will come along and breath life into it. That's real scientific isn't it?

Suppose we throw a bunch of cloth, metal, glass, oil, and gas into an empty room (we have supplied all the necessary building blocks for an automobile). Lock the room up for a million years. How many people actually believe that a car will have magically appeared in that time period?

Throwing huge amounts of time at a problem solves nothing. Think about it, there has to be a single instant in time (less than a second) when non-living matter became living matter. Not only that; the previously non-living matter would need food to feed on and a means to breed new organisms.

Life springing from non-living matter is the principal foundation upon which evolution is constructed. Since the foundation is laughable and unprovable, the entire theory is a house of cards.

posted February 01, 2001 10:51 AM            

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posted February 01, 2001 11:04 AM            

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Ladies and gentlemen, the dream we all dream of--boy versus girl in the World Series of Love.

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posted February 01, 2001 11:07 AM            

Kent Hovind's Challenge to Evolution
The Wild, Wild World of Kent Hovind

Brad: I suggest you read the "Interim Abiogenesis" FAQ I previously linked to. However, to answer part of your objections: Regardless of where the first proto-cell came from, whether God *poofed* it into existance, it fell from the sky, or was loving placed by aliens, it does not affect evolution. It does not falsify evolution.

As for the vast majority of your argument. Have you ever heard of:

Argument from Ignorance
Dawkin's Argument from Personal Incredulity
(It's a quote page, so here's the relevant quote)

quote:

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Never say, and never take seriously anyone who says, 'I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved
by gradual selection.' I have dubbed this kind of fallacy 'the Argument from Personal Incredulity.' Time
and again, it has proven the prelude to an intellectual banana-skin experience.

- Richard Dawkins, "River out of Eden"

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posted February 01, 2001 11:16 AM            

[This message has been edited by GuardianLion (edited February 01, 2001).]

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posted February 01, 2001 12:17 PM            

Let me sidetrack for a second. The definition of species is "a species consists of those animals that can (and do) breed and produce fertile offspring)". It's fuzzy, but that's exactly what you'ld expect. Taxonomy is the art of trying to divide a continuum into neat little boxes. Thus, Archy becomes a bird for feathers, while all it's reptile qualities are ignored..Because "feathers" exist only in the box marked "Bird". There is no "Feathered reptile" box. Species are much the same way.

Further, a surprising number of things won't prevent breeding. Differing number of chromosomes, for instance, don't prevent a great deal of cross-breeding amongst horse-like animals, despite them all having different numbers of chromosomes. But however you breed Horses, Zebras and Donkeys, you very, very rarely get anything fertile.

But then you find two species whose only substantive difference is one enters it's breeding period one month after the other...or mates only at night. Hence they are different species.

My favorite, for demonstration purposes, are those species called "ring species". There is a certain type of bird, for instance, that can breed with the birds due south of it. And those can breed with the birds just north and due south of them...and this extends around in a vast circle. What do you find? Each bird can reproduce with those next to. Except that the birds on each end cannot breed with each other. Are they two different species? If so, where do they become another species?

Evolution predicts this exact kind of fuzziness. I find it amusing when it's used as "proof" (and it often is) against it..

As to your example: It's exactly this sort of thing that forms the keystone of Gould's Punctuated Equilbria (one of the myriad little paths evolution happens on). What you get is a subset of a species that becomes reproductively isolated. Perhaps an earthquake forms a fissure that keeps them isolated. What you get is a tiny, isolated gene pool in which mutations spread rapidly.

posted February 01, 2001 12:42 PM            

After I came out to my parents they set forth all sorts of requirements in order for me to continue going to school as opposed to moving back home (long story, I eventually was disowned and didn't speak to them for a really long time, but that's not the point I am trying to make here.) One of these "conditions" was that I see a Christain therapist every week. It was generally unsuccessful as far as therapy goes, with me being gay and an atheist, she being a southern baptist and thinking that I was a sinner. One of the things she asked me to do was to prove to her that God doesn't exist. I said, "I can't disprove the existance of a god who is by definition unknowable. It's impossible." She countered that by saying, "If you believe in evolution then tell me where the first living cells came from." I think that the basis for her argument was that because there is no other obvious explanation, the first life must have been created by God. I disagree with that because I think that people tend to use God as a way to explain things that they cannot explain through other means. I think that God is a way to fill in the pieces of our lives that seem inexplicable. I think that there are some things that we will simply never be able to explain (why someone dies, where life come from, etc.) That doesn't mean, however, that these things must have something to do with God. God is our excuse for explaining the inexplicable. That's not enough for me to believe in a higher power. I'm one of those people who wants proof. Sorry.

And sorry that this is off the subject and possibly not stated all that well. I'll think about this a bit and see if I can better explain my position.

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And before you get all happy, be informed that your punishment does not include pain or sex

posted February 01, 2001 01:03 PM            

Quoth Brad:

quote:

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Evolutionists are in love with time. The answer to all questions is time.

---

Well, yeah ... that's because it's a good answer. Put things in an environment where they can move about and interact with each other, and the laws of chance dictate that given enough time they will achieve all possible interactions. Given less than enough time, they will not.

quote:

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Suppose we throw a bunch of cloth, metal, glass, oil, and gas into an empty room (we have supplied all the necessary building blocks for an automobile). Lock the room up for a million years. How many people actually believe that a car will have magically appeared in that time period?

---

What you have here is a failure to draw a distinction between the impossible and the highly improbable.
Let's try this a little differently. Allow the materials an environment in which they can move around and interact -- let's say free-fall, as water would be useless -- or, better, allow for something to manipulate and combine the materials at random. Allow for random elements to be introduced to the mix, such as the odd high voltage of electricity (as in a lightning bolt) and heavy solar radiation. Actually, never mind this; let's just lock six monkeys in a room with six typewriters, an infinite amount of paper, and an infinite amount of time, and see how long it takes them to reproduce your first post here....

Laws of chance, man. Allow enough time and it doesn't matter how improbable the coincidence is; if it's physically possible, eventually it's gonna happen.

Quoth Morat, among other points which were good ones:

quote:

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The fact of evolution is remarkably simple. Species used to exist that don't today. Species that exist today didn't always exist.

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-=> Toon

posted February 01, 2001 01:09 PM            

You should of said something like, "The first cells were always there." Then she probably would have gotten upset and said something like, "Someone had to create them." Then you could have said, "Where did God come from?" And of course, her answer would be, "God was always there."

Personally... I used to be Chrisitan... but then I lost my faith after I discovered that I didn't care. And how could I let myself think that I still believed if I didn't care? How can I believe something like that. and just truely not care? I wouldn't want to know me if I believed stuff like that and didn't care about it. So I faced it... and finally told myself that I didn't believe (not a very easy thing to do).

So... I'm not a Christian. But I'm not really an Athiest either. I don't know what's out there... But I have to go with words from Hamlet, "There's more things in heaven and earth that are dreampt of in your philosphy." I know... Shakespeare was Christian and was probably making a reference to God... but I still believe that. I just don't know quite sure what is out there. And I don't think I ever will.

How this relates to Evolution... Well... I don't think everything was an accident. I think there was something there that guided it and something there that still guides life. Who knows though...

I'm just in love with faith. Without faith the world would be so boring to me. And without faith life would be 100 times more depressing to me. I like to think that there's more to life than just "it happened... now live for a while and then die."

I once asked an athiest what her hope in life was... I expected something like, "loving my children"... ya know... but she responded with something that, to me if I believed it, might just make me want to stop living. She said something like, "My hope in life is to some day die and turn to ashes and become a part the world again."

My Grandma just passed away last weekend... The eulogy (is that the right word?) was horrible... but I remember one thing that she said, "life and death are the same thing, much like a river leads to the ocean". Are eulogys really supposed to be that depressing?

posted February 01, 2001 01:11 PM            

Additionally, I loveMorat's posts, and love a quote from the Bombadier Beetle link:

quote:

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Most important, nature is not constrained by any person's lack of imagination.

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posted February 01, 2001 01:56 PM            

"For I perceive that behind this seemingly unrelated sequence of events, there lurks a singular, sinister attitude of mind."
"Whose?"
"MINE! HA-HA!"

IP: Logged

posted February 01, 2001 02:28 PM            

Those who claim evolution precedes by blind chance are wrong. (Well, genetic drift, but that's not the whole story). For instance, if I scatter hydrogen molecules in a void, and they coelesce into a star, was it chance that moved them into a sphere? No, gravity. Evolution is drunkward's walk. I suggest Dawkin's Climbing Mount Improbable for a decent take on the subject.

This is nicely covered on talk.origins in the Interim Abiogenesis FAQ and also in the Evolution and Chance FAQ. This isn't the blind chance of thrown coins, but the bounded chance of chemistry. The importance of natural selection can't be discounted here either. I suggest a little experimentation with Genetic Algorithms. My 26 Monkeys, with 30 possible letters, manage to get out "methinks it is like a weasel" in only a few hundred generations. Far less than the amount of time blind change predicts.

"Evolution as Blind Chance" is a strawman. It's a very good sign that the person who claims it is unfamiliar with the concepts.

quote:

---

That's not evolution. Species used to exist that don't today? That's because they all died out, not
because they turned into other animals. Species exist today that didn't always exist? Yeah, but
who's to say where they came from?

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quote:

---

Facts exist that support the concept of evolution, but evolution is not a fact. Calling it such does
the science a great disservice.

---

Life is diverse, and everchanging. That is the fact. Why it is such is the theory. Evolution is both a fact and a theory. Care should be taken to ensure which one you are discussing.

I find this topic fascinating, especially given the sheer depth and breadth of the topic. Evolution is the paradigm of biology. Without it (I forget who said this) nothing in biology makes sense. It is as well supported as atomic theory, and as broad. The evidence for it streches back 200 years and there are multiple, independent lines of evidence ranging from the fossil record to protein analysis to the twin nested heirchies.

I suppose my only real complaint is that you start to hear the same objections over and over. Biologists would love to replace evolution. Careers get made by kicking over an established theory. There would be resistance (people being people) like with plate techtonics (although that had more to do with a lack of a mechanism for a few decades), but ultimately you'd have a stronger and better biology out of it. And a nice Nobel prize. Science gives it's highest awards to people who prove them wrong, or show them something better. It's the whole point.

But you do get tired of hearing "The Second Law of Thermodynamics proves evolution wrong because..." by someone whose sole knowledge of the second law is a laymen level paraphrase given by a website he visited. Cut -and-paste drive-bys tend to be obnoxious too. That's why talk.origins put up an archive of FAQs in the first place. The whole "no transitional fossil" objection can be met with a single, well reference link..as opposed to someone spending hours digging through textbooks and papers.

Even the more "high profile" objections (Behe and Irreducible Complexity and Dembski's ID) work tends to suffer from major methodological flaws. Behe, for instance, turns out to be a pretty poor researcher. Quite a few of his claims (the lack of research into the evolutionary origins of the blood clotting cascade) can be debunked by a quick search of PubMed. Even his claim that IC systems can't evolve is incorrect. IC systems can (and do) evolve. Dembski, on the other hand, never manages to really make his explanatory filter work (despite heavily borrowing from Shannon in terms of information theory).

In short, the objections to evolution tend to really fall short of the standards science holds it's own works too. Despite some claims to the contrary, science doesn't ignore criticism of evolution...the sad truth is there is currently no valid criticism. Now, debates over mechanisms and the relative importance of things like drift, punc-e and cladistics does occur, and all the time. Evolutionary theory is by no means static. Like everything else it is constantly being refined and changed as new facts and observations come to light.

The bulk of "evolution is wrong/suspect because of.." information is based solidly on incorrect, outdated, wrong, or poorly researched objections. The lower profile objectiones tend to be strawman and incredulity.

Brad's post fits squarly into the lower levels of evolution objections. His objection consists of a strawman (that of blind chance), an analogy, and a basic statement of disbelief. It is, in summation, no more than basically saying "I don't understand/have an incorrect understanding. I cannot believe this is true. Therefore it is not".

Not that this is a bad thing, all told. Ignorance is the starting condition of every person in every field. Using it as an argument is a bad thing.

posted February 01, 2001 03:23 PM            

and i cant make any of the arguments better than morat and clickie.

posted February 01, 2001 07:20 PM            

quote:

---

Life is diverse, and everchanging. That is the fact. Why it is such is the theory. Evolution is both a fact and a theory. Care should be taken to ensure which one you are discussing.

---

Ah, I see. Semantic misinterpretation on my part. Sorry about that.

I'm not sure I understood your comment about experimentation with Genetic Algorithms. What exactly was the nature of this experiment? -- as I can only assume that you're not talking about actual monkeys?
Thanks for giving me a new sig, though.

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-=> Toon

posted February 01, 2001 09:55 PM            

Cheatara- Thanks, but I'm not really all that brave. I did eventually go back into the closet to get my parents to reown me. I think that if I had the cojones I would just say, "Screw you," to my parents and get on with my life, but I really need their support. It does hurt me that their love and support is conditional, though.

I couldn't tell from your post if you think that I am a militant atheist. I don't believe in God, that's true, but I don't think I'm preachy, and I don't think that religious people are stupid. I do think that people who are closed-minded and blindly religious are pretty silly. I wonder how strong someone's faith can be if they are unable to back up their beliefs or unwilling to listen to other opinions. I do think that religion is a beautiful thing, and I still enjoy going to church once in a while, and I consider myself to be a spiritual person. I just don't believe in God.

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And before you get all happy, be informed that your punishment does not include pain or sex