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But Evolution, by its definition, does not concern itself with how life started, but rather how organisms progress to become more complex and adapt to their surrounding environments.

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The meaning of life is 'bucket.'

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I agree with you, BTG, I really can't find an argument to dispute evolution. It isn't fact, but that's because no theory can be; gravity is obviously present, but it's still just a theory - a scientific theory, like evolution. A theory is based on fact, it's no just an hypothesis, and unless you were to debate the reliability of the facts backing it up, you can't really debate evolution. This doesn't disprove creationism, it just might not have the same ideas as it once did.

It's fantastic how the definition of a single word can do so much.

Yeah... really bad and obscure joke. Sorry.

I wouldn't even call it a joke...

I would say the strongest argument in favor of both natural selection and evolution is statistics. If you start with the premise that species mutate over time -- which is known to be true and has even been empirically observed -- then the ideas of natural selection and evolution naturally follow.

It's hard to really explain unless you're already familiar with statistics and randomness. But consider a weighted coin, one that comes up heads 51% of the time in the long run. That 1% difference seems insignificant, and indeed it truly does not matter if you just want to flip a coin to decide what you're going to have for lunch. But if you add up these coin flips over millenia, that 1% is going to make a huge difference. If you flip that coin one billion times, you will get 10,000,000 more heads on average than if the coin were fair.

Survival of the fittest is like a weighted coin in that respect: small differences aren't so small in the long run. This is a very imperfect example, but the idea is to get the idea across that small differences are not small.

Now consider that these not-really-small differences also accumulate, combining with each other... how could a species not evolve over time? If you believe the Earth is 6000 years old, maybe that argument doesn't seem so important, but then you have to figure out how to refute all the evidence that points to the planet being 4.6 billion years old -- or, at least, older than 6000 years.



By whom, exactly? This is certainly not scientific consensus.

- Kef

And it's not possible. You can't prove A wrong if a is a fact supporting the proof. If you do, you've created quite the paradox.

Here's how it started:
In the beginning, there was nothing.
Then Chuck Norris round-house kicked that nothing in the face and said "Get a job."
And here we are.

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Please, only post if you have something intelligent to say.

Not to take anything from the conversation, but where are the Creationists on here. I know there are a few on here. We need them in this conversation. This one-sided conversation is getting boring pretty quickly.

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I think gravity is less of a theory than evolution. The only theories dealing with gravity are mathematical ones. The fact that there IS gravity isn't a theory (aka the law of gravity). It's not like that with evolution.

I still think evolution is right, though. Just stating the facts.

JELLO B. - CRUSADER OF TRUTH

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I believe that the brain is too complex to have evolved over time, unlike the eye or the stomach or the heart. We can grow kidneys & livers and other organs in Petri dishes, but we're nowhere close to a brain.

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I don't really see the connection between "being too difficult to grow in a petri dish" and "being too difficult to evolve over a period of a few billion years".

- Kef

How can something like a brain evolve, though?

The brain is little more than a network of neurons. In that respect, a brain is actually pretty simple. (That doesn't make it well-understood, of course.) It's just that there have to be enough of them and they have to interact in just the right ways (which is obviously not simple). So how does that happen? One neuron at a time, I guess.

- Kef

Furthermore, there's no real connection between "I don't understand how complicated stuff could evolve" and "evolution is impossible." Frankly, a lot of from-the-heart creationist arguments boil down to this. That's essentially saying that a given individual's ignorance can refute an entire scientific discipline.

To be fair, I hear the same reckoning applied to God. "I don't think there could be a god, ergo there isn't one." Either way the argument does not hold water.

Mike

The reason the evolution vs creation "debate" is pretty much one-sided is that there is an incredible amount of facts from biology, ecology, geology, cell biology, computer simulations, ect supporting the evolution theory, while the creation theory basicly only is "supported" by the bible and/or other religious writings.

In order for the creation theory to "win" over the evolution theory, it would not only have to come up with a lot of facts supporting itself, but also explain how come there are so many facts supporting evolution.

And in case you're wondering, in science, the difference between a fact and a theory is that facts are information you can aquire through experiments and research. A theory is looking for patterns, similarities and explanations in those facts. A theory does not mean "we're not quite sure about it", it means "this is the conclusion we can draw from these facts". Gravity is also a theory, and it has facts to back it up just like evolution. We can't see evolution with our own eyes, nor can we see gravity with our own eyes (we can only see their effects).

And saying "well, evolution is true, but there could be a god controlling it through natural means/watching over it/set it in motion" is not very scientific since it cannot be proven or disproven, and there is no way to do any research or experiments on it. It's like saying "what if the universe was created 10 seconds ago and all your memories were just artificially created at that time?".

Yep indeed - "fact" and "theory" aren't opposites at all. And those "Evolution isn't fact cos it's just a theory" arguments aren't, themselves, backed up in the facts.

In scientific jargon (like Duke said), a fact is an observation, and a theory is an explanation of an observative. So by that token, evolution is both a fact and a theory.

Hitler was smart. Win.

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I don't know exact names, but think about it:

Natural Selection: The process that something happened to something. If that something helped out, it stayed around. So, in order for something to be built, such as this, all of the little parts would have to had to appeared all at the exact moment of time, because if they appeared one by one, the creature would be gotten rid of it because the little parts are no help to the creature without all the pieces.

(And evolution isn't all Natural Selection. It's just that this is what started the whole idea.)

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In other words, what Behe called an "irreducible complexity." I'm not sure that an organism would necessarily purge itself of the useless parts, but you do have to wonder how certain complex functions came about when, if you remove even one part of it, the rest wouldn't function at all. It'd be like finding a watch in the middle of the forest, only to be told that all the parts just happened to fall together into that pattern.

Keep in mind, though, Behe's explanation doesn't exclude the possibility of evolution, but his theory does exclude natural selection as the process that brings it about.

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Or that a building was created by a wind blowing really hard.

(And I learned this through a lesson taught by my Youth Leader through a series of DVDs called Where Does the Evidence Lead? made by evolutionists.)

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This concept of irreducible complexity has also been debunked.

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The meaning of life is 'bucket.'

FOR PONY!!!

From the same website that PianoManGidley linked to, refutations of the following points:

• What use is half an eye?
• The eye is too complex to have evolved

In fact, regardless of what you believe, you'd do well to just read the whole darn site.



I don't think you're going to find very many people who believe in evolution but not natural selection. It certainly hasn't been "proved wrong" by the evolutionists themselves (or, really, anybody).

I also still think it's statistically impossible for natural selection not to take place, simply because it logically follows from the fact that creatures mutate and from the laws of statistics.

- Kef

First off, Illustra Media is linked to the Discovery Institute, the leading proponent of the decidedly non-scientific concept of intelligent design. They are certainly not "evolutionists." As for Michael Behe, he stated under oath that that ID cannot be proven by experiment in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District 4 case. Since ID is not falsifiable it is not science, however slick the video.

"Where Does the Evidence Lead?" is an edited version of an earlier video called "Unlocking the Mystery of Life." UML was reviewed and critiqued in 2003 by Dr. Andrea Bottaro, a microbiologist at the University of Rochester. Dr. Bottaro then sent his review to the New York Department of Education. You can read his letter here. One thing for sure: that video was not made by evolutionists.

As others have stated, let's remember that science does not invalidate the concept of God. Evolution does not invalidate God...it only invalidates a certain bit of dogma. Just as the church relented on concepts like heliocentricism, it will eventually capitulate on this issue. The process is already underway.

Mike

something that makes me wonder.
why are there still monkeys?

Here, try this. Remember, the talk.origins page that Kef links to above is searchable.

Mike

Evolution states that all species have a common ancestor.

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Because the evolutionary process, whether divinely guided or acting according to natural selection, is not a uniform process, given that a particular species might inhabit different environments. The adaptations or surviving mutations within those differing environs would be different, and over time, the single species might produce multiple species.

An example can be understood from a not-so-natural process of breeding livestock and/or pets. Look at all the different breeds of dog we have now - and keep in mind, they all seem to have originated from the same species. Yet, by carefully selecting breeding partners bearing desired traits, multiple breeds have resulted, each with somewhat different characteristics. Of course, I'm pretty sure that different breeds are considered still the same species, but you see what I mean.

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In fact, Didy, domestic dogs are still considered a subspecies of the gray wolf, canis lupus.

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Of course, livestock/pet breeding is not "natural selection," since deliberate choices are made as to which characteristics are desirable.

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The same reason that there are stil bacteria, amoebae, plants, fungus, and all other forms of life.

Consider this... things eventually got to a point where bacteria were found all over the planet -- or at least, all over the ocean. Either way, that's a large amount of space. Are all those bacteria all over the planet going to magically evolve into the same species? Or is one patch here going to become new species A, this patch here going to become new species B, this patch here become new species C, etc.? There's no particular reason for bacteria that are thousands of miles apart to evolve into the same thing.

The same goes for apes. If we have one big population of apes that splits up and becomes two separate populations of apes, they're not going to evolve into the same thing, because they no longer share genes.

- Kef

Evolution never creates more than one new species from a single species st the same time. Of course, it takes many, many years for this "one time" to occur, but in an evolutionary tree, you can see that a new species will arise from another species, while the original species continues in the same line. The two new species could then, separately, produce new species, but the original species will stay until it becomes extinct. The original species may change and not be like it was when the 2nd species was cr4eated from it, but it will still be the same species.

For example, if you have a single species of bird located around a large area, and eventually a group of mountains sprouts up and separates the group into two. If the mountains block winds cool from entering one of the sides, that side will get warmer and adapt to the new environment. The original species will be relatively the same, while the new, warmer-environment based species will have changed, perhaps becoming a whole new species. (Two species are not separate until they can no longer naturally reproduce with one another)

Or they produce an infertile male hybrid when they mate. Like mules or a liger.

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