America Doesn't Believe Evolution

[arkain101]

There should be a building.

 

A building called; The where did we come from building.

 

So when children wonder where it is they came from, they can visit this building called; The where did we come from building.

 

And in this building there will be multiple doors, that lead into many different rooms.

 

In these rooms are theories and ideologies of life and its origin.

 

A door and room for christianity and the bible.

 

A door and room that contains evolution and scientific reasoning.

 

A door and room for buddhism

 

And the list goes on.

 

Then each person can decide which idea of all the very different ideas makes the best sense.

 

And maybe they will miracuously walk out of the building and find that they really no longer care, or even more amazing come up with an idea of their own. Or become satisfied with one of the ideas in the building.

 

Why should one be forced opinions not of their making.

[learnin to learn]

There should be a building.

 

A building called; The where did we come from building.

 

So when children wonder where it is they came from, they can visit this building called; The where did we come from building.

 

And in this building there will be multiple doors, that lead into many different rooms.

we do! it is called a hospital.:D just playing! We do need such a building! But, I do not think that it would work in this land of political opinion! Someone would fuss to the news then the local government would get involved! It would be a big mess! But great idea!

[arkain101]

I was not being completely serious in the imagery...

 

My point was that there is so many ideas and versions. Some believe this and some believe that. Its difficult to answer, or prove for that matter. Yet in education, and polictical matters there are versions which are taught as THE version, and there are parents that pass down THE version. The true versions.

 

Yet, no one was there, no one has proof. So why not uphold The Ideas and respect the belief of these versions of ideas and offer them what the world really has to offer.

 

Instead of creating conflict and enemies because they hold a different book than you, and things of this manner.

 

but thanks for the kind response (s) everyone.

[cwes99_03]

I don't think you are correct.:confused: The facts and evidence from a religious book cannot be verified. No proof can be given about their truth except that they are from a holy/religious book.

But the facts and evidence from science books and research can be verified .

 

Whoa boy.

 

Care to turn that horse around?

 

Are you saying that facts found in the Bible can't be verified? This very general statement, if left completley general is completely false. Thousands of statements made in the Bible have been verified by science, history, archaeology, etc. THOUSANDS. To say that facts and evidence from a religious book cannot be verified is either simply a mistake in words or a bold-faced lie.

 

Turtle brought this to my attention earlier, I failed to consider reproducibility, but thanks for noticing my error.

 

For a second there I thought you said it couldn't predict anything, which of course is wrong, because the whole basis for religion is that it predicts something.

Reproducibility? Hmm, have to explore some thought on that. What do you mean reproducibility?

 

Despite it’s inability to actually predict the outcome of a real world, chaotic system, it’s inappropriate to say that classical mechanics “cannot predict”.

I completely agree with the very last part of that statement. Classical mechanics can predict, and does so with regularity every day in every elementary, middle, and high school around the world. Classical mechanics however does not pretend to describe non-linear physics, which you refer to as chaotic.

However, there are branches of non-linear physics which do quite well at predicting future events of a non-linear system. Don't confuse the issue by bringing these things in. So called "chaotic" systems still have odds, percentages, and statistics. All of these are required for predictability.

 

Now evolution, does not have predictability. No evolutionary scientist to my knowledge has made a prediction of the next evolutionary step of man. Why not? Because he knows he would be laughed at, when asked the simple question of why do you believe so. There simply is not enough data supporting the theory, which means there isn't enough data to make a prediction.

 

Of the most basic predictions that can be made are:

 

1) the next evolutionary step of man will be a sudden leap ahead (thus skipping any microevolutionary steps in between) which is suggested already to have happened by CraigD in the following quote. How so? Well so far all Darwinian evolution has been able to do is find some fossils believed to be of early man and put them in some semblance of an order.

Many people find the explanation of the state of the current biological world to be well-explained by Darwinian evolution.

 

2) due to microevolution, changes are constantly happening and thus sudden leaps in evolution do not occur, but slow changes over time do. This statement comes from noting the variety of life on earth (many different finches, but all still finches) and noting mutations found within nearly every living thing on earth. These are thought to explain/predict that all major evolutionary steps from Darwin's theory are in fact just another step in the microevolutionary process.

 

With the second point here we return to the statement I made earlier and will attempt to site sometime today if I get the time. Someone has said that looking at the supposed evolution of man like a slide show, we have a few slides. You can find pictures like the one found here which give you a good idea of what that slide show might look like. That person said this if one were to look at the supposed evolutionary history of man as a slide show, one would realize that the slide show was missing 999 out of every 1000 slides.

 

Okay looking at that picture and extrapolating back a few more "major" evolutionary steps to an ape such as a chimp, we would have about 10 slides. Thus 9990 slides are missing for a grand total of 10,000.

Now, going on the 3,000,000 year supposed evolution of man from chimp to it's present form, we come up with (based on that quote) a microevolutionary step every what? That's right every 300 years.

 

If we look back at the last 3000 years of recorded history, we should be able to see some major changes in human physiology. I call them major, because while they may be micro-evolutionary steps, they would still be very noticeable. In those 3000 years we would have had on average 10 micro-evolutionary steps. Has evolutionary theory tried to show these?

No, because they know they have not seen any consistent physiological changes in 3000 years. They also know that if they were to explore this thought, that not only would there have to be lasting changes to the physiology, but that there would also have to be other steps that were not lasting and these would be well recorded (any historians want to site some?).

 

InfiniteNow suggests that these non-lasting changes may result in a near extinction of the species because this type of change would be detrimental to the life of the bearer of change, which leaves only a portion of the population able to survive. Of this type of catistrophic event I can think of two. Spanish flue, and Boubonic plague. Both killed millions, but it wasn't an evolutoinary change in some that allowed survival, but very old medical practices of isolation.

 

Perhaps this means that only our brains (intelligence or useage) are evolving now and we have reached some limit to the evolutionary process of our physical bodies.

Okay, good thought. Easy answer. There are millions of "species" on the earth. Some of them have been around and well known and watched for the last 3000 years. The only noted changes in them have been brought about by genetic manipulation by humans (think domesticated animals, cats, dogs, cows, birds, horses, etc.) All of these changes by the way are due simply to combining the right genetic attributes through breeding. It isn't like they have caused these through any type of microevolutionary process.

 

Does human interference break the chain? How could it, it is a natural law that governs these things according to Darwin's theory.

 

Anyway, you all can see from my perspective anyway that there is way too much that is inaccurate, if not just unexplored/missing for this to be called more than a theory. Other thoughts have been explored, and I'll answer the whole idea of EC and the sand pile in a moment, but I have to run.

[Boerseun]

Whoa boy.

 

Care to turn that horse around?

 

Are you saying that facts found in the Bible can't be verified? This very general statement, if left completley general is completely false. Thousands of statements made in the Bible have been verified by science, history, archaeology, etc. THOUSANDS. To say that facts and evidence from a religious book cannot be verified is either simply a mistake in words or a bold-faced lie.

As a point of order, I'll just mention here that yes, indeed, plenty of statements in the Bible have indeed been verified as fact. However, an equal if not bigger amount of statements in the Bible cannot be verified, and seems to be nothing more that exaggerations and/or flights of fancy.

 

Stuff like Lot's wife turning into a pillar of salt. If the area where this is said to happen is inspected, it is found that there are plenty of salt pillars all over the show - they look like calcium stalacmites on the borders of the Dead Sea. This was a handy reference. But not fact, and not to be taken literally. Another guy was swallowed by the only whale in the history of whaledom not to develop stomach acids. He probably photosynthesized, or something. And the dude stayed there for three days. A regular Captain Nemo. This is clearly an exaggeration, or a flight of fancy.

 

There are plenty cases of this happening, and it is exactly these inconsistencies that makes the Bible a very bad reference work where science is concerned. The fact that one statement in the Bible can be verified, says nothing of any other statement in the Bible. It doesn't imply truth to anything else than that one specific verified statement, which can now be viewed as fact.

 

This is the same as in saying that since Heisenberg's uncertainty principle holds, then all other scientific statements must be true. They all form part of the scientific body, no?

 

By the same token, this makes biology a useless reference when we discuss astronomy. The one has very little to do with the other, although both are separate fields of what we call 'science'.

 

So, neither science nor the Bible can be viewed as homogenous entities. They are both compartmentalised, and any bit of truth in one compartment says nothing of the truth in others.

[ughaibu]

If you make a fist, you'll probably see two tendons on your inner wrist, one of these is disappearing. People with fewer teeth are also on the increase, evolutionary changes can be observed in humans, the teeth could have been predicted, I dont know if they were.

[cwes99_03]

UG please back this up. 1) I have a lot of friend who have extra sets of wisdom teeth. In fact, had a friend the other day who said she is going to have two full sets removed, bad for her and for your theory of microevolution causing this.

Never heard of a disappearing tendon either. How does one measure how fast it is disappearing? Has it been disappearing for 3000 years? Does it take that long for a microevolutionary change to occur? When we talk about microevolution btw, we are talking about the actual disappearance of the tendon, not the slow decrease in it's size.

 

When you say disappearing, are you referring to the idea that it would begin to grow again if we started using our hands for new inventions like the keyboard or the guitar? Is it large in these people? If so, maybe someday there will be a race of humans who can play guitar and type on keyboards while others can't because the rest of humankind only developed one tendon and can't do that anymore.

 

Don't forget the varieties of short legged dogs like the docshound. It must be an evolutionary change to. Guess it is a totally new species. Oh wait, that one was created by humans simply by breeding the characteristic in from existing genes within the dog that has been around for thousands of years, and then breeding that characteristic to forms thousands of such dogs. Nothing natural about that.

[ughaibu]

I expect that the muscles are merging to a tendon higher up the arm, ie the seperate tendon, not the muscle, is disappearing. I was given these examples by a paleoanthropologist in discussion after an evening of lectures, I dont recall the speaker's name but I'll look for an alternative source. Interestingly, one of the friends I was with has only one wrist tendon, and my brother is among those with less teeth.

There is no requirement for evolution to be "natural" or to result in new species.

[cwes99_03]

Actually this is an important definition for evolution.

The first point about it being "natural" is important because it isn't evolution if it isn't natural. Scientists may learn how to splice the genes of a plant into a human so that instead of growing hair the human grows leaves. This would not be evolution, it would be genetic manipulation.

The second point about a new species is a finer point.

Looking back we have homo habilis, erectus, georgicus, erectus, antecessor, heidelbergensis, neanderthalensis, and rhodesiensis, before sapien. Each of these are defined as an evolutionary stage according to the theory. Each is a different species of the same genus.

 

Now here's the big problem with evolution and speciation. It is not considered evolution if there is not some change in the genes. Why? Well, two people carry around the genes for a blue-eyed child even though they each have brown eyes. Thus when a blue-eyed child is born, it is not an evolutoinary step because blue-eyed children could have been born at any time given that two people with that gene reproduced.

Thus an evolutionary step must be something more than that. A new gene must be manifest for it to be considered an evolutionary step. It cannot be a gene that has existed since the beginning of man, but that is so recessive that it is rare (such as albinism.)

[ughaibu]

Evolution means changes in a population that persist over several generations, it might be natural or it might be imposed, it might result in a distinct species or it might not, it doesn't matter which.

[Dov Henis]

Purely semantically evolution is a change in a direction.

 

In biological context I prefer its following description, which I once used for explaining that genotype does not generated phenotype, that we evolved from our genotype via a group of feedback loops. ( From Science, Vol 308, Issue 5728, 1563-1565 , 10 June 2005, Immunology: Opposites Attract in Differentiating T Cells, Mark Bix, Sunhwa Kim,Anjana Rao ):

 

"During differentiation, precursor cells with progressively narrowed potential give rise to progeny cells that adopt one of two (or more) divergent cell fates. This choice is influenced by intricate regulatory networks acting at multiple levels. Early in differentiation, precursor cells show low-level activation of all progeny genetic programs. Bias toward a given lineage comes from environmental inputs that activate powerful positive- and negative- feedback loops, which work in concert to impose selective gene expression patterns".

 

Dov

[cwes99_03]

Thanks, Dov. To put it in layman's terms, your argument ug is a cheap chip shot. Don't take them. You know for a fact that there are many contexts to words. Check out the definitions of thread posts 22 and 23 here.

 

pgrmdave said a similar thing in that there are many definitions to the meaning run when taken in different contexts. In the context of biology and the theory of evolution, evolution means one thing. Don't try to prove your point by weakening it. We are talking about the Theory of Evolution here, not the different meanings of the word evolution, which in it's simplest form means to change, not even changes in a population.

Read up on the theory.

[CraigD]

We are talking about the Theory of Evolution here, not the different meanings of the word evolution, which in it's simplest form means to change, not even changes in a population.

While the subject of the etymology of the word “evolve”, we should note that it comes from the Latin “e” = out + “volvere” = roll, so it means, litteraly, “roll out” or “unroll”.

 

To be unambiguous, I think the term “Darwinian evolution” needs to be used to mean “what most biologists meant by ‘evolution’ between roughly 1860 and 1900”, “neo-Darwinian” for “what most biologist believed from 1900-1960”, and “gene-centric evolution” to mean “what most biologist believe since 1960”. Each can be viewed as resulting from the incorporation of new theory into the previous version of evolution theory.

 

As techniques of molecular biology become able to obtain and manipulate greater amount of biological data, reference to a single “theory of evolution” becomes more ambiguous. Many current theories disagree strongly over such details as the roll of exogenous DNA, viruses, and exogenous protein in evolution, in ways that result in explanations and predictions made by the competing theories differing dramatically.

 

More remarkable than the addition (eg: DNA) and deletion (eg: Lamarchian inheritance of acquired traits) of theoretical data to and from theories of evolution, and the resulting splitting of it into many competing versions, are the data that survive essentially unchanged from version to version: from 19th century Darwinian evolution, that only heritable traits of individuals that reproduce survive; from early 20th century neo-Darwinian evolution, that these traits are due to genes; from the late 20th century, that genes are coded in DNA or RNA by exactly 4 proteins (A C G T/U).

 

While credible theories of evolution may disagree on the details, they share these and additional areas of agreement, and thus share a large body of supporting experimental data. Any theory that proposes to refute one or more of these areas of agreement is extraordinary, and must be supported by both the existing large body of data, and new supporting experimental data as detailed and reproducible as the existing.

 

Well-know theories refuting areas of agreement among modern theories of evolution include Sheldrake’s theory or morphogenic fields, which holds that biological phenomena are not solely the result of physical/chemical processes, but also of “organizing fields” of an unknown nature, and ”intelligent design”, which hold that as yet undetected supernatural agencies play an important role in biological phenomena.

 

To date, proponents of these theories have been unable to produce supporting data of a quantity and quality allowing them to seriously challenge accepted theories.

[ughaibu]

Cwes99_03:

This is what you wrote, it's untrue, simple as that:

 

"Actually this is an important definition for evolution.

The first point about it being "natural" is important because it isn't evolution if it isn't natural."

 

Contrary to the view that several members appear to hold, the theory of evolution is a wide ranging body of thought, by attacking, in isolation, a proposed mechanism of evolution, these members are not attacking evolution or the overall theory of evolution.

[learnin to learn]

Cwes99_03:

This is what you wrote, it's untrue, simple as that:

 

"Actually this is an important definition for evolution.

The first point about it being "natural" is important because it isn't evolution if it isn't natural."

 

Contrary to the view that several members appear to hold, the theory of evolution is a wide ranging body of thought, by attacking, in isolation, a proposed mechanism of evolution, these members are not attacking evolution or the overall theory of evolution.

 

But isnt their many different forms of evolution?

[cwes99_03]

Learnin, you might edit that to "aren't there" :naughty: .

 

I don't care how many different microviews of evolution you can come up with. I'm discussing the basic underlying theory. This is simply stated:

All life has evolved, according to the theory of evolution, from a single-celled organism that may have been created by a lightning strike igniting a soup of primordial ooze of chemicals ripe for producing amino acids.

 

You could even take it back further, by saying that all the universe originated in a Big Bang and has evolved from that point as these two theories are in many ways connected since scientists use them to deny the Genesis and other religious accounts of the creation of the world. I particularly use the Genesis account because it is the most scientifically accurate one that I know of.

 

Now stating that all life "evolved" from a single celled organism defines that evolution must show a major change from one organism to the next. On top of that, "evolutionists" have defined the stages of human evolution as different species.

 

Take that along with the very natural way of passing different genes on to your kids through (and I love this term because it says that a man and woman create life) procreation. The fact that my mother and father can both be brown haired and brown eyed and they have a son with blonde hair and blue eyes, means that these genetic traits are not an evolution of the human genome. Any other type of genetic variation that can be proven to have existed within a species is not an evolutionary step, it is simply that a genetic variation within a species.

 

If you want to understand this further, I seriously recommend taking a long deep look at the studies of Darwin's finches.

 

For background you may wish to read these two.

http://www.rit.edu/~rhrsbi/GalapagosPages/DarwinFinch.html

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/6/l_016_02.html

 

For the heart of the matter, please read the entirety of the following. While not getting overly specific, it provides enough background to understand how evolutionist thinking is most likely wrong.

http://www.alternativescience.com/darwin's_finches.htm Fixed URL.

 

Oh and definitely don't forget to click on this one.

http://www.alternativescience.com/speciation.htm

 

I'll keep looking for more specific data on the studies of these birds.

 

EDIT: fixed link

[InfiniteNow]

The fact that my mother and father can both be brown haired and brown eyed and they have a son with blonde hair and blue eyes, means that these genetic traits are not an evolution of the human genome.

You've just betrayed your ignorance on this topic.

 

 

Perhaps a more appropriate thread title would be:

 

"Many Americans do not accurately understand evolution." but that could devolve into a converstaion about our education system.