What i can't understand about evolution....

I don't know what this means. The theory of evolution is an explanatory framework that explains the fact of evolution. In a sense then, the 'foundation' can be called a fact. Populations do change over time - and the evidence indicates that the changes have been highly significant over time. No, according to the the theory of evolution it happened through various means, horizontal transfer, neutral drift, chance mutations of the genome, various epigenetic effects, natural selection (and its subsets such sexual selection, 'arms races', artificial selection etc etc). There is no magic in the the Theory of Evolution and the Theory of Evolution contains very specific explanations. 'Somehow' isn't in there. Your version isn't scientific. The scientist's version involves heritable changes in phenotypes and genotypes amongst populations of organisms which undergo differential reproductive success, due to reproducing more than can survive and therefore having to struggle to the death for limited resources. Actually we've observed it quite a lot. Naturally observations that can be seen on human time scales mean that it is for small and quickly reproducing organisms like bacteria and particularly things like fruit flies - but we've definitely observed speciation events caused by the gradual accumulation of mutation events. Such things are easily found online. No, you were just using non scientific terminology. You said 'new life forms' or some such thing which is meaningless, as was pointed out, since it can mean just about anything. You have since clarified you meant 'new species' and this is something we have observed. This is not the case - in the last fifty years leaps and bounds have been made and complex organic chemicals have been formed beyond just amino acids. You may take the argument to the origin of life forum where the case can be tackled in more depth.There is some interesting stuff in organic biochemistry now - look around or start a new topic and learn all about it - you might be surprised. What do you mean? Last I checked biologists were fairly comfortable with the actual workings of DNA and RNA. No historical event is provable. Murders, battles, landslides, earthquakes, the existence of dinosaurs, nothing. However, there is evidence that life existed billions of years ago in a much simpler form. Whether it started in what has colloquially been referred to as a soup or not is not entirely established beyond reasonable doubt at this stage. Events that happened 500 years ago, with dozens of witnesses are difficult to piece together beyond reasonable doubt today - we are talking about an event that happened 10 million times longer ago than America was being populated by Europeans with obviously no witnesses. Evidence is bound to be sparse but some educated ideas on the kinds of things that might have happened can be, and are, discussed and tested in labarotories. Yes, because they have not been exposed to this kind of information and have frequently been told an alternative explanation by people they love and trust such as their parents and religious/spriritual leaders and are put in an obvious dilemma of realizing their parents/trusted spiritual leaders mislead them (intentionally or otherwise), their cherished beliefs are erroneous etc etc or denying strangers whose own epistemology requires many years of specialist training to understand even close to fully and a mountain of very specific and difficult to learn knowledge with regards biology and chemistry. They have managed to convince themselves that their knowledge of the subject is good enough to dismiss it, primarily because their life has been grounded at least partially on the idea that it is false.It is much easier to believe in magic and woo or whatever personal viewpoint you happen to hold than to challenge it and change your mind. I have experienced this many times from gun control, UFOs, ghosts, the evidence for God, Santa Claus, Tibet/China and Palestine/Israel, fox hunting and countless others including evolutionary biology. The psychology is interesting and familiar to me - it is incredibly rare to find a person that denies evolution that also understands it and doesn't make any money out of said denial. It is rarer still to find someone who might admit that it is a teensy bit arrogant for someone who has spent zero years at university studying the subject to believe they have a grasp of the subject superior to that of people who have been in the field for twenty years actually doing the experiments, reading the primary literature and even writing some of it.So yes, we can see why so many people do not accept evolution. It is quite natural for people to reject such hypothesis. It is no coincidence that people that reject the Theory of Evolution also reject other hypotheses that step on certain religious or cultural beliefs. Things such as abiogenesis, geology, anthropology, cosmology and so on and so forth - in the areas where such things contradict certain beliefs that have been embedded in our culture for centuries or even millennia...it is not difficult to see why evolutionary ideas which have been around for a millennia but have only really had satisfactory explanations for 150 years or so might be rejected by those who have not spent the long hours required to study and rethink and admit that they and those they love and trust have been wrong for their entire lives.You can see it in action. Long and thoughtful posts that try and give as complete an answer as possible given the constraints of the medium are ignored or only partially responded to. Certain sentences are picked out and "Aha! Gotcha" replies are made. This is the hallmark of someone that doesn't want to challenge their own beliefs, someone who is committed to their ideas but won't take the time to explain them and expose them to criticism and they won't go into any details about why the extensive posts of others are wrong they'll just say silly things about how the theory of evolution postulates magic events and 'poofs' and avoid substantive scientific discussions all the while criticising the science of the subject. It's quite sad, rather inevitable and yet I still retain some optimism that I might come across someone who is really willing to get their hands dirty facing what is a very scary subject. The implications of evolution and the natural history uncovered so far are metaphorically world-shaking - is anyone at all surprised at the nature and character of the opposition? That's all evolution is. Natural history describes the history of such changes going back throughout the entire history of 'nature' where nature generally refers to biology. If you use the terms interchangeably you are going to cause yourself great confusion when you try and understand the science behind it all. The science is older than you are - it is best to stick with the terms it uses or you'll get a headache.Evolution: Populations change over time.
Natural History: The history of how life has come to be and has subsequently changed over the past 4 billion years on earth.
The theory of evolution: A theory that describes how populations can change, split into distinct populations and so on. This theory is used to explain everything from how two species of fruitfly diverge in a lab over the course of a few months all the way up to how the divergence of life from single celled organisms has arrived at the startling complexity we are privileged to be a part of today. 'Cats' are not a species. Unless you think the cute black and white thing purring on my lap right now is the same species as a lion? There is variety within each species (not all lions are the same, obviously), but there is also greater variety within the Felidae family which includes the Pantherinae (the sub family of lions, leopards and so on) and Felinae (the subfamily of cheetahs, lynxes and the black and white critter on my lap).We can take a step up and say there is greater variation still in the Carnivora Order which includes all cats (all Felidae) and all dogs (the Canidae which includes domestic dogs, wolves, foxes, jackals etc) as well as about fourteen other families covering about 250 species of placental mammals.And we can step up to placental mammals (wherein we can now include ourselves and horses), and to mammals in general (throwing in kagaroos and the platypus), and animals in general, and then to life in general. Indeed this ability to 'step up' is one of the best evidences for evolution, but it is also rather difficult to understand so I won't go into it here.Let's just say that every time you draw a line as to which boundaries of evolution you find acceptable - you need a damned good reason not to take the next little step up and for example deny that all carnivora are related.For example: if you are prepared to accept that lions are related to my pussing tat, you would have a hard time denying the smilodon is also related to her. From there you would have difficulty denying Machairodus is related to her. Why not the leopard cat? And if the leapard cat why not the civet cat and why not the mongoose? Once you've accepted that my little Niobe is related to the mongoose you'll find yourself being drawn to accept the relationship with the hyena and the you would have to concede hyenas and dogs. Eventually the whole carnivora has opened up.Naturally presenting you with a complete answer that satisfies all possible questions and issues you might have with the subject is difficult but I hope you will take the time to read my post fully and I'd certainly enjoy a response that has had a similar amount of time and effort that this one has had. If not - I'll wish you the best and maybe we'll have the opportunity for a good and thorough debate in some other thread.

Apologies, I was not suggesting that arrogance makes one disbelieve. The arrogance is often a bedfellow of the disbelief (not universal of course), which arises when the disbeliever encounters expert opinion and believes that the model of evolution they have come to disbelieve is a more accurate understanding of the science than that which the expert is trying to explain. For example:Disbeliever: Evolution says that the eye formed by accident through pure randomness. What are the chances of that happening in reality?Expert: That is not what the science says at all. The science says...Disbeliever: OK, but the chances of the eye randomly forming is really low. I've not seen such sayings. I have seen facts such as "over 99% of all living biologists accept both the fact and the theory of evolution.'. And Dawkins' famous "It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)." He later said about that statement:

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Of course it sounds arrogant, but undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance. Examine the statement carefully and it turns out to be moderate, almost self-evidently true.

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By far the largest of the four categories is 'ignorant', and ignorance is no crime (nor is it bliss ? I forget who it was said, "If ignorance is bliss, how come there's so much misery about?"). Anybody who thinks Joe DiMaggio was a cricketer has to be ignorant, stupid or insane (probably ignorant), and you wouldn't think me arrogant for saying so. Nor is it intolerant to remark that flat-earthers are ignorant, stupid or (probably) insane. It's just true. The difference is that not many people think Joe DiMaggio was a cricketer, or that the earth is flat, so it isn't worth calling attention to them. But, if polls are to be believed, 100 million US citizens believe that humans and dinosaurs were created within the same week as each other, less than ten thousand years ago. This is more serious. People like this have the vote, and we have George W Bush (with a little help from his friends in the Supreme Court) to prove it. They dominate school boards in some States. Their views flatly contradict the great corpus of the sciences, not just biology but physics, geology, astronomy and many others. It is, of course, entirely legitimate to question conventional wisdom in fields which you have bothered to mug up first. That is what Einstein did, and Galileo, and Darwin. But our hundred million are another matter. They are contradicting ? influentially and powerfully ? vast fields of learning in which their own knowledge and reading is indistinguishable from zero. My 'arrogant and intolerant' statement turns out to be nothing but simple truth.

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Not only is ignorance no crime. It is also, fortunately, remediable.

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The full article can be read hereUnderstand it fully. The more I learn about evolutionary biology, the more I realize I have yet to learn about biology before I am in a position to judge the validity of any given science paper. It is not reasonable to expect every person to study evolutionary science, nor is it reasonable to expect every person to study Urology. However, if you are going to decide that you are going to proclaim that prostate cancer doesn't exist - you'd better have studied the subject of urology or oncology or you are going to be charged with not being educated or being ignorant.If you proclaim the earth is flat and you have no experience in geology you are going to get a similar response. If you proclaim that AIDS doesn't exist or that HIV does not cause it and you have not studied aetiology, virology, or similar you had better expect people to regard you as not educated enough or simply too ignorant of the facts to make such statements with any authority.If, on the other hand, you do have the requisite qualifications, and you still deny the phenomenon then you might be a maverick scientist. You might be a deluded or simply mistaken one. Or, if you are making money off the denial (selling books to those who are uneducated, being an expert witness, doing public speeches/debates, having a column, appearing on television shows etc etc.) - one might consider you as being wicked. That is - you are making money off the fact that some people are ignorant of the subject (and we all are ignorant of many subjects) and also have some psychological desire for the phenomenon not to exist. Yes - it is simply necessary. You can retain some scepticism of course but you trust your electrician to wire your house even if you haven't studied the subject - it is a pragmatic necessity. Likewise you trust the mechanic that fixes your car's brakes and the person that tests their work.However, if you are going to criticise the electrician's work - you can understand him calling you ignorant,uneducated or deluded when he discovers that you have only read one book on electrical engineering and that was written by some person who believes that grounding is a tool of evil djinn.If you are sceptical of the person's work, your only recourse is to get a second opinion from another qualified electrician. You can do this as often as you like until you are satisfied. When hundreds of thousands of electrician's have confirmed the work is safe and sound, what would you think of the person with zero training that still denies that the work is good based off the ravings of one guy who is making money by selling books that doubt the veracity of fundamental principles of the safe electrical wiring of a domestic property? How can someone be as committed to something they admit they know little about compared with a person who has Faith? For the sake of discussion about evolution I am perfectly happy to assume that YHWH, aliens, humans from the future with time travel technology, ghosts, djinn, domovoi, Marduk created early life.I rarely see such acceptance of opposing assumptions from creationists. I am merely committed to following the evidence wherever it leads. The most likely origin of life, given the current track record of supernatural explanations, is a natural one. There are some astonishing and promising ideas on how this might have happened being worked on and I do have confidence that some of these ideas will bare fruit and some will be dead ends and maybe new ones will be born. The people coming up with and testing these ideas and their peers are in a much better position than I to deduce their chances of them discovering ways that life can originate without intervention from a divine/alien/futuristic hand in the same way a certified electrical engineer is much more qualified to know if my house is wired safely than a non-electrician. Not at all. One is based on years of study of how biochemistry works. The other is based on the conflicting and evolving ideas of several bronze aged tribes that merged into one (whilst simultaneously and arbitrarily denying the ideas of other contemporary civilizations and tribes).Would you trust the religious ideas of the ancient Egyptians or the Babylonians to deduce if your house has been wired safely over the opinion of a qualified electrician? Would you say that they are both equally a matter of faith?Granted - we could get absurdly philosophical about the issue, and lose sight of reality in the process. But in pragmatic reality? Not a chance. Evolution, as explained exhaustively, is the observed process that populations of living things phenotypically and genetically change over time. It is an observation - it doesn't give answers. That is like saying gravity has not given an answer for the precession of the perihelion of Mercury. Facts don't give answers, they just are.As I stated earlier, historical events cannot be replicated. And yet we believe that the battle of Hastings happened a little under one thousand years ago. Why? Because the evidence strongly implies that it did. You might not know what the evidence is - but you know that qualified experts (historians of the Britons for example), proclaim that it did and that they wouldn't do so unless there was evidence for that proclamation.Likewise, you might not know what the evidence is, but biochemists and biologists and historians of nature (paleontologists, natural historians etc), are all confident that life has changed over time growing more simple as time goes backwards. They have uncovered no evidence of miraculous events springing life fully formed into existence (as in humans and oxen simply appearing with no predecessors) and that our experience exploring this world has demonstrated that if no evidence of supernatural intervention is discovered (disease, storms, floods, harvest etc etc) it is usually because the process behind it is just a complex, difficult to understand natural one that simply requires study, experimentation and the like to really get to grips with.Unless life has existed for an infinite amount of time, it must have had an origin. Some people are trying to figure that out, and they do so by testing, experimenting, hypothesising, learning, studying and so on. Others do it by looking for evidence left over from the time (much like a police officer or archaeologist or fire investigator might), and trying to extract what information they can there so they can pass it on to the people back at the labs who try to use that information to deduce possible ways things might have happened.Faith, is a different ball game entirely. It does not demand evidence, testing, experimentation, hypothesising etc etc. It simply demands you believe. Not being a biochemist, or an astrophysicist, or a xenobiologist I am at a loss as to how you calculated the relative probabilities of a divine creator versus the as yet unknown biochemical processes required for life to form.I know you haven't done the calculation. Doesn't this bother you at all that you believe your gut feelings about such an insanely difficult topic might be accurate? If your gut feeling is that that odds are that your house will burn down because of the work of the electrician that has been verified by ten thousand other electricians...would you not consider the possibility that your gut calculations of probability might be a load of crap? I certainly would, it would be arrogant to do otherwise wouldn't you agree? So how do you know that then? You know that life does come from life but what process did you use to conclude that life cannot come from non life? Allow me to stress this again. It is vitally important for you to discuss the subject with any understanding. The origin of life is not evolution. Evolution is about how life evolves, not originates.Evolution is akin to how the still images on film can produce moving pictures and the origin of life is the manufacturing process of the physical film itself. They are related topics, but they are critically different.You can believe that the origin of life was divine and still accept that evolution happened, and also accept that the theory of evolution explains at least partially, how it happened. Indeed this is so important it needs repeating. In bold. You can believe that the origin of life was divine and still accept that evolution happened, and also accept that the theory of evolution explains at least partially, how it happened. If you deny evolution has happened then yes, you are probably ignorant. It is likely you are not only ignorant but that there is arrogance here because you are admitting your ignorance (I may not know the science but...kind of language you are using) and suggesting that you know better than those that do know the science. You are suggesting that your personal calculations of the way things work must trump the centuries of calculations and work by countless dedicated and qualified experts. You are little different than the electrician-denying ignoramus in the example I have been using - in this regard anyway.You don't have to accept evolution. You don't have to accept the naturalistic origin of life. But when you suggest that your conclusions are superior to those of the relevant experts in the field whilst also admitting your lack of knowledge and expertise...that is arrogant. Be it biology, electrical engineering, history, auto mechanics, urology, computer science, brain surgery, nuclear physics, rocket engineering or whatever. Genetics and bone structure, and paleontological. You skipped a great deal though, so let's take it one step at a time.You have accepted that members of what biolgists call a 'family' can be literally related. Lions and domestic cats, lynxes, cheetahs etc. Not explicitly but you seem to be accepting it so I'll assume you have.Great. First of all: Rather than just relying on gut instinct - what is the scientific evidence that these are related - why do we call them the felidae? Why is a lion a member of this family but a hyena is not?Please answer this question - its vital to proceeding with the discussion.Once you have done that go back to my Message 234 and consider the Smilodon and the Machairodus. After that would you please answer this one:Is the Genet related to the Cat? And most importantly, why, or why not? Darwin was born 200 years ago, before evolution was an accepted fact. Before it was a profession to go looking for these things the way people do now. Your 'even' is massively misplaced. You'd have been better served mentioning Gould or someone of that nature. Yes - that is because a non-fully formed species cannot exist since an organism that is not fully formed is almost universally dead. Transitional fossils, which do exist, in abudance, are fully formed species in their own rights. No - unless you want fossil evidence of embryos which have partly formed bones - in which case I probably can. However, I can show you a transition of bone structures from one state of affairs to another. here
here
hereAnd well, there are others. However - don't be fooled into thinking that fossils represent the best or even the only evidence of evolution. The fossils are useful as factual observations - but there is much better evidence (that can be lined up with the fossils and found to be almost exactly confirmed by them - multiple lines of evidence converging on one conclusion is exceptionally powerful, yes?)

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Incidentally, my thanks for taking the time to read and respond to my post. I hope we can have a constructive and interesting dialogue. I am not trying to belittle you or anyone with my comments of arrogance and ignorance. I am ignorant of many things and I almost certainly arrogantly believe I know more about certain things than I really do - to the point of criticising experts in the field. It is natural but a still a bad habit - thankfully it is an easy one to break as long as one can realize it is happening and is willing to swallow pride from time to time.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

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saying that evidence that a feline and a hyena can be linked via 'DNA & Fossils' doesnt cut it either

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evidence, proof...links...pictures...research notes etc

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Before you will have a hope of understanding "evidence,proof...links...pictures...research notes etc" you are going to need to learn some difficult science. A good primer can be found in the talk origins archives courtesy of Douglas Theobald, Ph.D. and can be read here. If you click 'Next' from that page, there is some good explanations of the evidence of the universal common ancestry of all life and other general evidences of natural history.To answer your query directly you can use google to find these things, but I was hoping we might go through it using slow steps. If you really want to give it a go you can try PHYLOGENY AND CHARACTER CHANGE IN THE FELOID CARNIVORA By JILL A. HOLLIDAY

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Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the phylogenetic relationships between the feloid Carnivorans, represented by the families Felidae (cats), Hyaenidae (hyaenas), Viverridae (civets and genets), Eupleridae (Malagasy carnivores), Herpestidae (mongooses) and the monotypic family Nandiinidae, the African palm civet. Feloids exhibit a variety of ecological and dietary habits, including frugivorous, omnivorous, durophagous, and hypercarnivorous taxa, and fossil material, particularly for the Felidae and Hyaenidae, is relatively common. Because three of the six constituent families have independently evolved hypercarnivory, phylogenetic analysis of this clade, in a framework that includes both recent and fossil material, offers the best potential information gain relative to relative to the data that must be collected to obtain a comprehensive phylogeny.

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In Chapter 3, molecular data for 39 species of feloid representing all of the constituent families was obtained for the nuclear genes RAG1, GHR, and c-myc. Cytochrome b data was available on Genbank, and this was added to the dataset. Phylogenies were analyzed in both maximum likelihood and Bayesian frameworks, and the signal from each of the genes was evaluated. This phylogeny helps to establish the pattern of diversification between the four feloid families, and consequently helps to clarify character polarities as well. It is also the most thoroughly sampled, well-supported phylogeny available for the recent feloid Carnivorans, and will be useful for many workers studying ecological and evolutionary patterns.

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Although molecular analysis of the recent feloids provides valuable information on its own, the question of the taxonomic position of early feloids and the more basal members of each of the four families must still be addressed. Inclusion of these taxa is key in reconstructing ancestral character states and, consequently, in establishing the primitive morphological condition(s) from which hypercarnivory may have evolved. In Chapter 4, 103 morphological characters, representing data from over 1000 fossil and recent specimens and over 183 operational taxonomic units, were added to the molecular data matrix for a combined evidence analysis of both recent and fossil taxa. Data was analyzed using a constraint tree (the previously obtained molecular phylogeny) as well as a combined Bayesian analysis of both molecular and morphological data. The effects of missing data and of homoplasious signal were taken into account and data was analyzed in subsets that included family level analyses and also subsets that removed taxa with specific amounts of missing data (e.g. taxa less than 20% complete, taxa less than 50% complete).

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The results of the combined evidence analyses confirmed placement for some stem taxa, but also helped to establish the phylogenetic position of an equal number of questionable species. These analyses show that Viverridae is paraphyletic, that Herpestides is a member of the Hyaenid(Euplerid/Herpestid clade) and Plioviverrops is a herpestid. As anticipated, these results help to establish character polarities, and improve ancestral state estimations. The information obtained from these phylogenies will vastly improve future study of character evolution, while the trees themselves represent a significant advance in available data for this clade.

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If you move down to about page 80 of the dissertation or about page 87 of the pdf file you'll see her constructed phylogenetic trees. You can also try something like The interrelationships of chromosome banding patterns in canids, mustelids, hyena, and felids
D.H. Wurster-Hill, W.R. Centerwall

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The G-banding patterns of six canids, four mustelids, one hyena, and 12 felids have been studied, and data from the study of 30 felids are summarized. The canids are karyotypically very similar to one another, but minor differences have tentatively been identified. The mustelids show the greatest karyotypic diversity of all the carnivore families so far studied. They do display, however, considerable G-band conservatism, as is common throughout the Order, and appear karyotypically more closely related to the Feloidea than to the Canoidea. The hyena shares many autosomes with the felids, showing a close relationship to that family. The felids are for the first time divisible into small groups or individually identifiable on the basis of 16 different karyotypic patterns.

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But to be honest, without the (years of) studying these things are going to be difficult or impossible to understand. I certainly don't completely follow what they are saying.Edited by Admin, : Remove extraneous line feeds.

The universal common ancestor of all life, assuming there is one (and the evidence is not entirely conclusive but it is fairly convincing), was a living organism that probably existed a long time (thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of years) after the primordial soup.So, seriously, the two things should be kept distinct for a reason. Many scientists (of the relevant fields) believe that proto-life became early life through a process analogous to evolution, but non-life to proto-life is still something of an unknown process other than the near certainty that it was dictated by the laws of chemistry. If you propose that the laws of chemistry were suspended for some reason (ie a divine hand) you are the one with the uphill struggle to demonstrate this - but that can wait for another time (it has waited long enough to date a few more centuries won't make any difference). Do you have any evidence for this assertion? On what grounds are the following people *not* smart scientists?Jack W. Szostak
Katarzyna Adamala
Tony Bell
Raphael Bruckner
Xin Cai
Jingyang (Jesse) Chen
Quentin Dufton
Mark Elenko
Ben Heuberger
Mathangi Krishnamurthy
Chi-Wang Lin
Alexander (Sasha) Litovchick
Alonso Ricardo
Yollete V. Guillen Schlippe
Jason P. Schrum
Pam Svec
Sylvia Tobé
Simon Trevino
Na Zhang
Shenglong Zhang
Ting F. Zhu
Keyong Zou(scientists from a single lab investigating the origin of life at Harvard)To help you come up with an answer to that question, here is a very simply 10 minute summary of their work:Please let us know exactly why these people are not 'smart scientists'. There are more summaries at this siteThen you can tackle:Stuart A. Kauffman His wiki page advises us:

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Kauffman presently holds a joint appointment at the University of Calgary in Biological Sciences and in Physics and Astronomy, and is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Philosophy. He is also an iCORE (Informatics Research Circle of Excellence) [1] chair and the director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics.

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He graduated from Dartmouth in 1960, was awarded the BA (Hons) by Oxford University in 1963, and completed a medical degree (M.D.) at the University of California, San Francisco in 1968. After completing his residency in Emergency Medicine, he moved into developmental genetics of the fruitfly, holding appointments first at the University of Chicago, then at the University of Pennsylvania from 1975 to 1995, where he rose to Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics. Kauffman held a MacArthur Fellowship, 1987-1992.

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Kauffman rose to prominence through his association with the Santa Fe Institute (a non-profit research institute dedicated to the study of complex systems), where he was faculty in residence from 1986 to 1997, and through his work on models in various areas of biology. These included autocatalytic sets in origin of life research, gene regulatory networks in developmental biology, and fitness landscapes in evolutionary biology.

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In 1996, Kauffman started BiosGroup, a Santa Fe, New Mexico-based for-profit company that employs complex systems methodology to attempt to solve business problems. BiosGroup was acquired by NuTech Solutions[2] in early 2003. As of 2003, Kauffman was a director of NuTech which is no longer doing business.

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So by what definition is he not 'smart'?Professor Jeffrey L. Bada, Professor of Marine Chemistry. Is this scientist not 'smart'? Why?Robert Shapiro, Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Chemistry at New York University B.S., City College of New York; Ph.D., Harvard University; Postdoctoral training, Cambridge University, over 125 publications, care to tell us why he is not smart?

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Professor Shapiro was born on November 28, 1935 in New York City and obtained a BS in chemistry, summa cum laude (1956) from the City College of New York He received a PhD degree in organic chemistry from Harvard, under the supervision of Nobel Laureate R.B. Woodward (1959), postdoctoral training in DNA chemistry at Cambridge with Nobel Laureate Lord Todd (1959-1960). After an additional year of postdoctoral study at the NYU Medical School, he joined the NYU Chemistry Department in 1961. He has held a Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health and has been awarded (with physicist Paul Davies) the Trotter Prize in Complexity, Information and Inference for 2004.

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Leslie Orgel (recently deceased), according to the wiki article:

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Born in London, England, Orgel received his B.A. in chemistry with first class honors from Oxford University in 1949. In 1950 he was elected a Fellow of Magdalen College and in 1951 was awarded his Ph.D in chemistry at Oxford...

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...In 1964 Orgel was appointed Senior Fellow and Research Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where he directed the Chemical Evolution Laboratory. He was also an adjunct professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego, and he was one of five principal investigators in the NASA-sponsored NSCORT program in exobiology. Orgel also participated in NASA's Viking Mars Lander Program as a member of the Molecular Analysis Team that designed the gas chromatography mass spectrometer instrument that robots took to the planet Mars.

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Orgel’s lab came across an economical way to make cytarabine, a compound that is one of today’s most commonly used anti-cancer agents...

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...His name is popularly known because of Orgel's rules, credited to him, particularly Orgel's Second Rule: "Evolution is cleverer than you are".

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Are you telling me that Orgel was not a smart scientist?Louis Allamandola

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Internationally acclaimed scientist Dr. Louis Allamandola recently won three great honors. He was elected a fellow by two prestigious science organizations, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Physical Society (APS). He was also recognized with The Presidential Rank Award, one of the highest honors a civilian can receive.

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Over the past 25 years, Dr. Allamandola's research has revolutionized our understanding of interstellar molecules and carbon rich dust and has firmly established the profound astrophysical importance of these materials. 'Dr. Allamandola's seminal contributions in astrochemistry have forever revolutionized our understanding of interstellar molecules, interstellar ices, and the chemical physics of the interstellar medium', said Dr. Yvonne Pendleton, Chief of the Space Science Division at NASA Ames Research Center, in California's Silicon Valley.

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Here is a list of relevant publications he and his team have contributed to origin of life studies. Are you suggesting this scientist, and the scientists listed as authors of those papers are not smart?Prof Michael J Russell, University of Glasgow.They were the ones I found with 30 seconds of googling. Are you trying to say, with a straight face, that it is not the most enormous act of hubris and arrogance for someone like yourself, with a self-admitted absense of any knowledge of this subject - a person who after being told several times still gets confused between the Theory of Evolution and Evolution itself and the concept of the abiogenetic origin of life and Natural History - who has the gall to suggest that the above highly acclaimed, highly honoured, widely published research scientists are not smart? And I didn't even scratch the surface. Thousands of other scientists could be referenced given time that I don't care to spend.Do you really, seriously, deny that you are being massively arrogant when you suggest that you are in an appropriate position to judge the 'smartness' of the above luminaries and hard working lab guys?I am frankly, astonished. You need to get off your high horse for a moment their bud, otherwise its going to be very difficult to communicate with you. You really are the electrician-denying lunatic from my previous example if you are sincere in your belief that these scientists are not smart.You might think they are wrong - but not smart? I am flabbergasted by the effrontery, the overweeningness, the excessive pride, the presumption, the uppishness, damnit, the thesaurus doesn't have enough polite words to use to express my feelings about the extent of your arrogance...if you are being sincere in your words. To be honest, I don't think you were. I think you were just trying to stress your point, but you did so in a fashion that went beyond breaking point. If you care to sit down and think about it for at least one solid minute, you will see that it was a silly and rash thing for you to say. Despite what others might think or express on these boards - I don't think you are stupid - I just think you have a psychological block which is causing you problems.I remember I failed a physics exam once because of such a block. It was an exam on fluid dynamics and I refused to accept anything the literature said about the way fluids travel through varying sized channels. It was all counterintuitive and my intuition was precious to me. As such, I got 0/50 on the exam. These 'blocks' are common enough, but they can result in the most ludicrous opinions and ideas. Like as a seventeen year old college student I somehow knew better than the fifty five year old published physicist? I honestly thought he was being stupid when he said some of the things he said, and any smart person would agree with my view of fluid dynamics.Stupid intuition more like. Stupid stupid intuition. That wouldn't have made sense. The 'Evolution of species', maybe, but in Darwin's time evolution meant an unfurling of a pre-written scroll or likewise and Darwin was apparently disinclined to use the world evolution due to its implications of fate and pre-destiny. He preferred, 'Descent with modification'. Besides, Darwin's seminal book was meant to describe the origin of the variety of species that existed during the Victorian period (ie., the variety of finches, tortoises, pigeons etc etc) - so the title makes sense. He did not call it 'the origin of life'. Then you accept evolution entirely. Still you aren't being completely accurate here. You do deny the natural history as understood by the consensus of scientists since you deny the relatedness of cats and hyenas. Their common ancestry was much more recent than the origin of life.Still if the origin of life is genuinely your only beef you should be debating in Origin of Life, not here. Though this thread has devolved into a catchall evolution misconceptions thread it seems. Yes, that is what the theory evolution proposes as the explanation for the changes that have occurred in the populations of life on earth over time. Species slowly diverging over time always after their own 'kind' (it is called the nested hierarchy of life - I provided a link earlier). They sort of have - but that is mostly not relevant to evolution. There is the process of horizontal gene transfer - retroviruses can insert DNA into other animals (it is one of the ways we can test paternity by looking for these insertions) and some species have been cross bred (lions and tigers for example...but that is not the principle driving force of evolution since most of the time they are sterile (like mules, which are crosses of horses and donkeys). All mammals started with a single species (or at least a very small number) that diverged into many branches of mammals, cats, dogs, humans, horses etc etc. Likewise, all animals started with a single species (similar disclaimer to above), that diverged into the many different animals today. Likewise all life started as a single species (disclaimer disclaimer), that diverged into plants, animals and fungi etc. Very likely, it would seem. But amino acids can form on the ground, in the air, in the sea and in space: they are absurdly easy to make it seems. And yet complex organic chemistry exists on rocks at near zero temperatures with no atmosphere and thus no protection from UV radiation. A lot of bio-chemistry is hypothesized to occur underwater (hence the term 'soup') - which acts as a complete shield against UV radiation. Indeed - but various things such as clays can act as catalysts and sort left and right handed amino acids apart from each other. The fact that they are all of the same type is actually evidence of universal common ancestry if you stop and think about it. There is no reason that God or aliens had to make every animal of the same type of amino acid is there? If there was a 50% chance of picking either one for each 'kind' - what are the chances they picked the same one for all of them? You can prove no historical hypothesis. How many times does it need repeating before you will absorb this fundamental fact about history? Now, are you going to deny Henry VIII had six wives, the existence of the Egyptians, the battle of Hastings because they cannot be proved?The evidence that life has changed via the mechanisms described by the theory of evolution is overwhelming...more overwhelming than the evidence that King Harold was hit in the eye by an arrow. Once again, a basic misconception of evolution. I have not investigated the particular claim of waste management you are proposing here - it would be nice for some links or some references if you don't mind. But let's assume you are right on this - evolution has no direction. There is no 'backwards' and 'forwards'. After all, when the dinosaurs went extinct - animals generally stopped being supersized monsters and went to...mammal sized which is on average only a few kilograms. Though there were many small dinosaurs, there are very few large land animals these days - and none are comparable to the big guns of the dinos. This is not a problem for evolution which has no predetermined target or goals. It is just about life surviving or not surviving. That's it.

What makes you think that 'ape-men' are better at surviving in this world than chimpanzees and orangutans and gorillas (which are having a tough time of it right now as it is)? Surely the evidence would indicate that 'ape-men' aren't so good at surviving given that only one species of them did (us).Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

There is a whole science dedicated to this kind of maths, it is called Population genetics (or for a more advanced discussion of pros and cons of trying to use this kind of maths as evidence for (or against) evolution try Stanford Encyclopedia) if you want to discuss how population genetics or similar disciplines can falsify evolution, perhaps you can start a new topic off. If you don't want to propose a new topic but you do want to discuss it - let us know and maybe someone else will start one for you.10% is very high (though in some populations it has been observed to be higher) - and we would expect rapid allele frequency changes to be going on with that kind of figure. For example, pulling numbers out of thin air is going to cause problems. There are 3 billion base pairs in humans. 9 million different base pairs would make the things 99.7% genetically identical by a simple comparison. That is assuming that each mutation definitely occurs at a completely different locus each time (which almost certainly isn't the case) A much wiser course of action, as I said, is to get to grips with the actual science behind population genetics before proclaiming that it demonstrates that evolution cannot work, don't you agree?

Apes. Again I ask you the question - how are you measuring 'lower', 'higher' or 'more advanced'? Can you name one of these 'lower' apes and one of these 'advanced' apes. How would we measure which ones are better at surviving than others?I'd suggest that the species that survive are on average, those that are best at surviving. Some exceptions probably exist, lucky species and unlucky ones and so on. Can we agree that the measure of survival is in the surviving?And so, the 'advanced apes' that went extinct, weren't - on average - so great at surviving. Indeed - maybe the ones that have so far just got lucky. They are mostly doing poorly at surviving right now.Why? Well - because 'advanced' is a word that doesn't mean anything - I suspect it exists predominantly in your head and is a result of the hubris of 19th and early 20th Century Biologists who kept falling into the trap of believing that humans were the pinnacle of evolution which is just self-centredness.Alternatively - if we are sticking with the word 'advanced', then all present life forms are equally advanced. Gazelle are as advanced as lions. Lions are advanced as whales. Whales are advanced as Gorillas. Gorillas are as advanced as Lemurs. Lemurs are advanced as humans and humans are advanced as bacteria.

Can you replicate the Industrial Revolution, the Battle of Hastings or The Great Leap Forward? Do courts replicate murders or road traffic accidents or rapes?I assume not but I also assume that you believe that the statement 'these things have happened' is true.So how do we know they have if the only criteria for truth is that we can should see it or be able to replicate it? I can not see the Industrial Revolution or the Battle of Hastings, nor can I replicate it so there must be other reasons to accept things that have happened in the past as being at least provisionally true.We look for supporting evidence. To do that, we ask the questions 'If the event really happened, what evidence might there be to support it? What evidence is there very likely to be if it did happen? What evidence might exist that would show that it did not happen?'For example, we would expect that somebody would have mentioned the Battle of Hastings in writings since humans like to record battles and it is meant to have happened during a time of somewhat decent record keeping (though not necessarily reliable...). Any financial accounts would support the existence of at least one army on both sides. We might expect to find arrow heads and other battle detritus on the proposed battlefield roughly corresponding to the location the battle as described. We probably would never find every single arrowhead, nor every bit of jewellery or all belt buckles, swords, stirrups and so on but if we found a decent amount that would imply that a battle occurred.So what would be true if all species are related via a common ancestor?I'd say that we would probably be able to compose, at least in broad strokes, a fairly consistent family tree of current life based on shared/inherited characteristics. We should find that genetic testing would give almost identical results. We may find remains of previous species and they should fit into the family tree. We may find that if we work out average mutation rates that we can use this to approximate at least some dates for when two lineages split apart based on their genetic differences and we should find that any fossils for the proposed close relatives of the common ancestors for these two lineages that we manage to find that they date to a similar age to that uncovered by the genetic dating methods. If we find species that are significantly out of sync with this, then universal common descent may be falsified (rabbit fossils in the Cambrian might be a good start for example)Maybe you can think of more things that might expect, that we should almost certainly find, and things that would falsify common ancestry and the relatedness of all life forms.I certainly can't replicate my grandfather, but with genetic testing and looking at records I might be able to determine who my distant cousins are. The further back I go, the harder it gets of course since written records eventually get patchy, inaccurate and then stop altogether - but I'm sure you can see that the relatedness of two people can be estimated based on various pieces of evidence and that if evolution is true we should be able to extend this to the relatedness of other organisms.It is all about consistency of the evidence and its quantity. If we worked out that the probability that all the genetic evidence and the fossil evidence was consistent under the assumption that the fossil record (and currently living organisms) was just a random jumble was 1 in a trillion, would you accept that the fossil record (and currently living organisms) isn't just a random jumble of unrelated life. Ask five world war II historians why the second world war began and you will get five different answers with some significant overlap. Ask five biochemists how life originated and you will get likewise (though with probably less overlap).If you can come to accept the relatedness of all living things, then and only then, is it a good idea to tackle the origin of life. It is a simple matter of walking before running - the origin of life is much easier to discuss when there aren't objections about the relatedness of all life hanging over us.I am perfectly happy to discuss with you the details of the kinds of evidence that we should expect to see if all living things are related, and how that lines up with what we find when we go looking - though the thread is coming to a close and the last time I tried to go into it you decided to concentrate on the points that other posters were raising. I had hoped we could have a good conversation, but I appreciate the problems associated with 'piling on'. One is tempted to tackle the easiest to tackle posts - those with incomplete arguments that you can find wiggle room for argument in, those that are shorter and require less attention and the like. It is a fair problem of economy and I don't envy you the task. Once more, and for the last time on this thread, I extend my offer to explore the evidence one step at a time in a constructive and friendly fashion.

Strange, I always thought he was mild mannered and rather genial sex maniac. 'Many' is something of a poor choice of word here. Creationists who also happen to be practicing biologists are very very rare breeds indeed. I don't think I could name even a few. There are a couple of more that are Intelligent Design proponents.So lets say you have five thousand electricians giving you one piece of advice and three that are giving you the opposite advise based on philosophical objections to the materialist electricity hypothesis. What do you do? You of course realize that for centuries Creationists dominated the field. Might there be a reason they are becoming less common other than some conspiracy to silence them? Maybe they are just not as good at convincing experts in the field that their arguments have merit. We could say the same thing here for any now largely forgotten idea. Those who have done any studying accept that world is at least somewhat spheroid and that in simple terms the common centre of orbit for the planets of the solar system is the sun, not the earth and that diseases are caused by bacteria and viruses rather than demons and spirits. Is this problematic in some way? Well, lets get specific. Francis Collins believes in God. Let's see where that puts his research with a quick look at wikipedia:

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Francis S. Collins (born April 14, 1950), M.D., Ph.D., is an American physician-geneticist, noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes, and his leadership of the Human Genome Project (HGP). He was director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), one of the 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland until August 1, 2008.

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On pretty good grounds, I'd say, no? Nope. In fact, Francis Collins is/was both a practicing evolutionist and Christian, he says, "I am unaware of any irreconcilable conflict between scientific knowledge about evolution and the idea of a creator God; why couldn't God have used the mechanism of evolution to create?And to visit a different discipline John Polkinghorne, who played a role in discovering the quark in the field of physics is also an ordained priest.

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astronomer Robert Jastrow said: “To their chagrin [scientists] have no clear-cut answer, because chemists have never succeeded in reproducing nature’s experiments on the creation of life out of nonliving matter. Scientists do not know how that happened.” He added: “Scientists have no proof that life was not the result of an act of creation

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I agree with him.

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Astronomers Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe “The problem for biology is to reach a simple beginning,” “Fossil residues of ancient life-forms discovered in the rocks do not reveal a simple beginning. . . . so the evolutionary theory lacks a proper foundation.”

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I have nothing much to say on Hoyle and Wickramasinghe. They aren't biologists as noted, but they are exploring panspermia, good luck to them. (well to Wickramasinghe, Hoyle passed away some years ago)

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Chemist Richard Dickerson comments on the chance that molecules could have formed in a primoridal soup: “It is therefore hard to see how polymerization [linking together smaller molecules to form bigger ones] could have proceeded in the aqueous environment of the primitive ocean, since the presence of water favors depolymerization [breaking up big molecules into simpler ones] rather than polymerization.”

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And indeed it is difficult. What do you think he spent the rest of the article (titled "Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life") doing but trying to show how that might have happened? This is called a quote mine. It is somewhat standard to start a scientific article by explaining to the reader what the problem is that you propose to discuss and maybe even solve before going on to do that very thing. You'll excuse me if I don't go into the rest, why don't you try investigating a few of them yourself? What's pointless, exactly? Again, not true. Evolution has no opinions since it has no brain.Evolution is just the observed phenomenon that life changes over time. It might be the case that this is as the result of purely naturalistic causes or it might be the case that a supernatural agent is directing things. The modern evolutionary theory as yet has no supernatural agents included in its explanatory framework, to paraphrase Laplace: Peg, I have no need for that hypothesis. Some evolutionary biologists believe there is a supernatural guiding force, and that belief doesn't usually get in the way of them doing their job.At this time, nobody has proposed a scientific method for discovering the actions of these intelligent agents that might be at work, nobody has proposed how they are changing life over time exactly and therefore there is no scientific theory. Explain why.According to you, common descent (not evolution), is the proposal that all species on earth have evolved from other organisms and that all current life shares a common ancestry. Evidence from Natural History and the Theory of Evolution itself would suggest that this common ancestor was likely a single celled organism. From this, how does it follow that that common descent, the theory of evolution or evolution itself must by necessity be able to explain the origin of life. Can you show how they explain the origin of life - a Nobel prize await.If God created the first life, then it stands to reason that the theory of evolution will never be able to explain the origin of life even if we assume it could otherwise. If Aliens created the first life, then we aren't going to get any closer by looking at how chemicals on prebiotic earth interact. The study of biological evolution and the study of biological origins are not unrelated studies. Indeed - I have already given you a simple ten minute video that explains how thermodynamics and other simple forces coupled eventually with ideas from the theory of evolution can generate a sort of proto-life form. I have not denied that the fields are related - it just doesn't serve well to say inaccurate things about what evolution is (the fact that populations change), the theory that explains those changes (inheritable changes acted upon by selective pressures etc) and the study of the history of nature (natural history) and the still somewhat disputed fact that all current living organisms are related by a single common ancestor.As long as you don't get them confused we're doing fine.Do we want to know how life might originate? Yes, that's why we spend millions researching it.
Do we need to know how life originated to know that Chimpanzees and Humans share a common ancestor? No.Happy with that?

What some people can't understand about evolution can fill 500 posts up quite easily.When presented with a difficult concept that one hasn't studied there are several different ways to proceed. The first is to accept whatever the experts in the field say knowing that maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong but if anybody is going to at least get close it is them. In cases where there is some disagreement one might simply choose the side with the most support. A second method is to be sceptical of the experts.Sometimes one might be driven to be sceptical of the experts because their conclusions are in tension with some notion that one holds dear in which case there are certain If you wish to act on this scepticism (speaking out loud, writing to a school board), it might be best to study the topic to at least a fairly decent level first. You would look foolish if you told the world that electricians were wrong in their wiring concepts if you didn't know what the purpose of grounding was. If it is biology, first learn basic science then study basic biology, then spend time studying the particular part of biology that is causing the tension (such as evolution versus creationism). If you have the time to argue with people on the internet about it - you have the time to read online resources occasionally asking questions. And hey - maybe if you find you want to learn more, a visit to the library or bookstore and a few dollars/pounds/rupees can give you access to a wealth of new information should you desire to learn.All too often people proclaim their scepticism, declare people that have done a lot of studying of the subject are wrong and yet have an attention span that means they cannot spend the time necessary to even read and understand the basics of the position they are trying to explain they have declared erroneous. While they are perfectly willing to imply or even in some cases outright say that practitioners of the subject - and let's not be coy, evolution and natural history is the subject at hand in this specific case - are morons and idiots and yet they consistently to the point of inevitability will not read and absorb a few thousand words from someone who has read or studied the subject in more depth than they.The evidence of this is clear: An evolution denier will state that evolution implies something that it doesn't. Other people will explain that evolution doesn't imply that and why. The evolution denier will sometimes concede the point and then three posts later repeat the misconception.It shows an unwillingness to learn. I suspect the reason is twofold. Firstly, if they learned what evolution actually is, their belief in their own favourite killer argument against it might evaporate and they might be forced to think that they aren't as smart as they thought they were. Secondly (and most importantly) there is a real fear their faith might be destroyed like so many that go to pinko-liberal universities tend to.I haven't found a cure for this seemingly willful ignorance. I think it is something that the opposition to evolution should seriously consider working on because there are many people out there that are willing to discuss evolution with them, and answer any questions they might have - but it quickly becomes an exercise in futility if the person asking the questions thinks they know better than the person whose answering them. Humility not arrogance, should guide creationists, IDists and other evolution deniers, if they have a real desire to learn what the other side thinks.Alternatively, and this is what I suspect evolution deniers will continue to do, they can just be completely arrogant think-they-know-everything 'smart-arses' they'll learn nothing, get bored of the subject and eventually forget about the whole thing. Their loss, ultimately.