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Author Topic:   How do you define the word Evolution?
vimesey
Member (Idle past 102 days)
Posts: 1398
From: Birmingham, England
Joined: 09-21-2011


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Message 110 of 936 (804561)
04-11-2017 7:33 AM
Reply to: Message 109 by Davidjay
04-11-2017 2:26 AM


Re: Luck & Chance
These supposed magical mutations
Let's be honest here - mutations are not magical are they - they happen, they're demonstrable - they're observed. My father was a veterinary surgeon and once delivered a kitten with two heads fused into one. I saw it. That was a mutation - mutations are real, not magical. Honesty, please.
These...mutations...they supposedly only arrive by sheer luck and chance.
Well, it appears that it is in the nature of DNA to mutate. That tendency to mutate, I guess (I defer to the genetic scientists on here for this), would itself be a survival trait in a changing environment, enabling a population to adapt and survive.
So whilst the particular mutation itself can be seen as random, the fact that there will be mutations within a population is a statistical certainty. So evolution will follow a path, the precise shape of which will be unpredictable, but the general direction of which will be influenced significantly by the selection pressures imposed by the environment and changes to it. Where creationists go wrong is thinking that evolution at any one time dictates the precise shape of the path which happens to have led today to hearts, eyes, lungs etc.
Nature ran a lottery - it was virtually certain that some form of life would win it - and the form of life which has won it to date, is the form we see today.

Could there be any greater conceit, than for someone to believe that the universe has to be simple enough for them to be able to understand it ?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 109 by Davidjay, posted 04-11-2017 2:26 AM Davidjay has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 112 by Davidjay, posted 04-11-2017 11:28 AM vimesey has not replied

  
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