Sonnikke:
According to the Creation model God created male and female (humans & animals) and told them to be fruitful and multiply. Is that what we observe? yes.
No, that is an extrapolation from an observation. The same could be said for any other creation story. Let's consider the Old Norse creation story in the Eddas. According to it, the familiar Universe was created from the dismembered body of the slain giant Ymir. Let's see how it adds up.
Ymir's skull becomes the sky. Both have a round-vault sort of appearance. Check.
Ymir's brain becomes the clouds. Both have a puffy appearance. Check.
Ymir's blood becomes the sea. Both are salty. Check.
Ymir's flesh becomes the soil. Both are relatively soft. Check.
Ymir's bones become the hills and mountains. Both are mineral. Check.
Ymir's hair becomes the vegetation. Both grow out of some substrate. Check.
So let us worship Odin and Thor and Freyja and so forth.
According to Creation there were two sexes created, is that what we observe? yes.
Except that there are many organisms that are hermaphroditic and many that reproduce asexually at least part of the time. And body cells reproduce asexually nearly all the time.
According to Creation male and female were made to compliment each other and be attracted to each other, is that what we observe? yes.
That's a necessary part of sexual reproduction, so all one can say is so what?
According to ToE there was one common ancestor and no specification as to how many sexes, why are there only two?
Except that some protists and fungi have more than two sexes or "mating types" -- which are often identical except for certain recognition molecules ("isogamy"). According to
this review, basidiomycete fungi can have thousands of mating types -- thousands of sexes!
According to ToE even *if* two sexes had evolved simultaneously, which is impossible,
Actually, there is an easy way for that to happen. The first sexually-reproducing organisms could have been only one sex -- they would have been protists (one-celled eukaryotes) that do a haploid/diploid alternation, with any haploid individual being able to fuse with any other haploid individual to make a diploid one.
After that process is up and running, the next thing to appear would be some mechanism for preventing inbreeding -- mating types. If a protist discovers that another protist has its flavor of the recognition molecules, it will not fuse with that other protist.
but for the sake of argument, assuming they "fit" and that their reproductive systems complimented each other (the details of which are so complex that that alone would blow the theory out of the water),
Except that "mating types" are some sort of molecular recognition mechanism, something like how the immune system works.
And the complexities that Sonnikke obsesses about can easily be produced after the original sexual reproduction gets started; I had earlier explained some straightforward pathways for producing them.
they would have to *acquire* a desire for each other which is not a heritable trait and thus doesn't explain why men and women are attracted to each other.
Except that such a "desire" is genetically programmed -- one sex or both seeks out the other. A common mechanism is for one or both sexes to produce pheromones and the other sex to track them down. Usually, it is the female that produces the pheromones and the male that does the seeking, generally because males have lighter gametes than females. A more passive form of seeking is employed by pollen grains, which get blown or carried to pistils; pollen grains are much lighter than ovules.
Furthermore, our species has a LOT of evolution behind it; our species should not be mistaken for some early Proterozoic protist.
[This message has been edited by lpetrich, 03-20-2003]
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