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

Peg, I know that these comments already attracted a lot of responses and you might be feeling overwhelmed by them. Still, I decided to add my own comment. I hope you take the time to read it.We scientist like to break down our theories into small parts that can be tested and improved separately. We may have different levels of confidence in each part, depending on the amount of evidence pro and against each one of them. You've been lumping three different things that we like to keep separate. The main reason to keep them separate is because we have different levels of confidence in them.1.) The theory of evolution (ToE):
That's the idea that life forms evolve over time into other different life forms through the process of speciation fueled by mutations and guided by natural selection.Our level of confidence in this theory is extremely high because the evidence for it is strong enough to be considered incontrovertible.2.) Common decent:
That's the idea that all life on earth evolved from a single common ancestorOur level of confidence in this theory is high (but not as high as our confidence level in the ToE) because the evidence for it is strong (but not strong enough to be considered incontrovertible)3.) Abiogenesis:
That's the idea that life came from non-life at some point early in the history of earthOur level of confidence in this theory is definitely lower then in the other two because the evidence for it is quite spotty. (I happen to believe in it, but I know some scientists that don't). One symptom of that is the large number of alternate processes for abiogenesis that have been proposed so far.I hope you read this post and try to take that into consideration in your future posts, otherwise we will never be able to mode the debate forward. (We've been stuck for a couple days now)Edited by fallacycop, : typo

Out of curiosity, what do they believe?

I'm curious as well. We know that the Universe in the past has been completely inhospitable to life. Even those who posit panspermia or other such alternatives to Earthly abiogenesis must still admit that at a certain point there was no life in the Universe, and at a later point life exists. This means that life arose through abiogenesis somewhere, life was created by a magical deity (who somehow itself existed while the Universe was impossibly inhospitable to all life, and which somehow itself does not require its own "creator"), or life arrived here from "outside the Universe," which is basically a contradiction in terms anyway. In other words, abiogenesis is the most rational position by far, to a sufficient degree that I'd call the other options utter fantasy.

I met one guy that tells me he believes in panspermia (Aparently our universe is being seeded through whiteholes). More seriously though, I know quite a few that hold that God must have given the initial push.

Hey Rahvin, My personal take, is not panspermia, but a universe created to provide as many diverse places as possible, and primed with the precursors for life - the organic compounds forming throughout space, ready to seed any place that can support life.Thus abiogenesis and subsequently evolution are 'expected' to occur.What I don't understand about evolution is (a) why do creationists not only have such a poor understanding of it, but why they keep that understanding in the face of contrary evidence, and (b) why there is not as big problem with the concept of common ancestry - when that is the real issue.Enjoy.Edited by RAZD, : added topical comment

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we are limited in our ability to understand
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Rebel American Zen Deist
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For some of the answers here I think you need to study the creationists' websites and literature.But first you must understand that creationists, as a group, distrust science and tend not to learn much about it. In extreme cases some creationists even feel that science is evil, and that to study it would be to join in that evil. And finally, many creationists feel that in any conflict between the Bible and science, the Bible must prevail.The natural consequence of these factors is that opposing science, particularly those parts of science that are perceived (based on the teachings of creationist's websites and literature) as contrary to scripture and revelation, is seen as praiseworthy!This opposition is frequently based on strawmen gleaned from those websites and the literature. And here is where a compound problem enters the picture: the target audience is largely fellow creationists, not scientists; and the method of argument is apologetics, not arguments based on the scientific method.The result of this is that scientific arguments make little to no impression on confirmed creationists; they have their beliefs and science is simply wrong. This is why you can explain something using the best logic and scientific evidence and have a creationist post the same thing again the following day. Many simply do not credit scientific evidence as superseding religious belief.They may not know how science is wrong (for example, on radiometric dating or what they call macro-evolution) but they believe that it is wrong somehow and hence no evidence presented by scientists means anything. That is where the serial "what if" stories come in. These "what ifs" are presented as evidence for something they know is true--and if one "what if" doesn't explain things, surely the next one will. That is where we get the wildly fluctuating decay rates, variable speed of light, and greatly lower gravity during the dinosaur's era. Creationists know there is some reason scientists are wrong, but it is not very important to them which one it is. If its not one reason, its another. Scientists are wrong and that's that!On your second question: why there is not such a problem with common ancestry? I would look to the creationist websites and literature. If they don't make a big deal of it, you probably won't see much opposition to that concept. Some ideas are easier to sell than others: descent from apes is one of the easiest to oppose, while any idea that is expressed clearly in the Bible is easy to promote to their target audience.I hope this makes sense. This is a distillation of a number of years of experience dealing with creationists on other websites. YYMV

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Thanks, coyote The question was rather rhetorical just to keep on topic. I understand that when they say "evolution" they really mean "all science" ...The remark is more based on the fact that every time you say that evolution is the change in hereditary traits in populations from generation to generation, they'll say "oh I believe in that, in fact it is part of creationism" then they'll go on about origin of life or change to (never defined) "new forms" ... It's just curious that they accept evolution as occurring (hyper) after the flood, and then skip over common ancestry as the real issue -- was it one or was it many?Enjoy.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
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Rebel American Zen Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
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• • • Join the effort to solve medical problems, AIDS/HIV, Cancer and more with Team EvC! (click) • • •

Sorry to disappoint. I'm only pointing out what I see. How many times have I seen people in this thread mention things like "blind faith without reason". That would be the viewpoint someone would get from watching "The Simpsons", not from speaking with a creation scientist who is serious about their work. If mutation is the primary mechanism of change for evolutionists, it had better be reliable.Lack of reliability is the reason scientists have trouble demonstrating it. If you subject fruit flies to radiation to get them to evolve, it is far easier to kill off the entire strain than to get them to change.There lies the problem with the Theory of Evolution's primary mechanism. It doesn't work.Scientists have been watching fruit flies for 100 or-so years. Yes, they have documented thousands of mutations. Of those, the vast majority are either detrimental or benign. A few are claimed to be beneficial. Not many can you even make an argument that they would give the fruit flies any survival benefit.Here is the problem with those results when you try and compare them to the evolutionary model: As an example, assume that 10% of the mutations that are passed on are "beneficial" mutations (EXTREMELY generous from the numbers I've seen). That would mean 90% are benign (they give no advantage or disadvantage). The detrimental mutations cause the organism to die off (according to evolutionists), so they aren't passed on.How many beneficial mutations would it take for something the size of a virus to become a human? 1 million? 1 billion? (Remember these are MINUSCULE changes, we are talking about. The men who were studying the flies said 1000 of these mutations would not even make a new species of fly). I will use 1 million just for a round number, though I'm sure it's more. So if evolution from virus to human produced 90% benign mutations and 10% beneficial, that means a human should have some 9 million "benign" mutations.So where are they all? Not only does the human body seem almost perfectly designed, it's even organized and symmetrical. Why would mutation care about those things?Now I realize that evolutionists point out vestigial organs and say those are the evidence. But they find a meager few per organism when you shouldn't even have to look hard. If your evolutionary mechanism matched up with fruit fly mutation that has been observed, the human body should be a TREASURE TROVE of vestigial structures.Yet all evolutionists can scrape up is a handful, and even those are "disappearing" as the years go by, because we discover that they actually have a use. (i.e. someone brought up the "vestigial" pelvic bones in whales earlier in this thread, but those are used in mating, so they are not vestigial)Oddly enough , the results of the fruit fly mutation experiment are exactly what you would expect if the creation model is true. The EXTREME majority of mutations were negative or benign, supporting the creationist viewpoint that all organisms STARTED essentially perfect and are slowly deteriorating. Not the other way around as evolutionists suggest.

The issue of hyper (or super) evolution is fascinating.For the most part creationists deny that evolution on that scale occurs at all. Then to get from the "kinds" on the ark to the species of today they have to propose evolution acting a hundred or more times faster than scientists have ever claimed. (Whoops!)One of the silliest versions of this is from Woodmorappe and Lubenow, who feel that "Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, and Homo neanderthalensis can best be understood as racial variants of modern man--all descended from Adam and Eve, and most likely arising after the separation of people groups after Babel."The problem with this is it requires evolution to occur several hundred times faster than scientists predict--and in reverse! (Whoops!)This is why I mentioned in a previous post that creationists are offering us apologetics, not science. This type of claim certainly confirms that.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Hi, Wardog. Welcome back!Are you sure you want to argue flies with an entomologist?Okay, so I don't work with Drosophila genetics: but I know a lot of people who do. And, I raise them in the laboratory to feed my spiders. But, scientists don't have trouble demonstrating it. At all.----- And you know this because you've done it before?Or, are you saying this because it sounds right to you?Be careful, Wardog: not everything is intuitive.----- You're right, of course: evolution should be intelligent enough to use only reliable mechanisms, shouldn't it?But, let's look at the fossil record for a moment. What do we see? Brilliant engineering that reliably conquers all the obstacles that come up?Well, yes: sometimes we see that.But, more often, what we see is a whole bunch of dead ends. Draw up a tree of life that contains every group of organisms that ever lived, and it will become very clear that most of nature's experiments have ended in failure (i.e. extinction).Does this sound like the workings of a reliable mechanism to you?So, on what grounds do you claim that evolution must be working on a reliable mechanism?----- But, evolutionists do not argue the opposite position. The earliest visions of evolution were based on a "ladder" concept wherein everything was constantly improving upon itself. But, the modern concept of evolution does not stipulate that there is any directionality to change. Complexity can increase, decrease or diversify: it makes no difference.Evolution is simply change. Not directional change: any change.

Birds lose their wings. Complexity decreases. Evolution.

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Lizards develop a cecal valve. Complexity increases. Evolution.

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Primates develop independently-mobile fingers. Complexity increases. Evolution.

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Primitive insects develop wings. Complexity increases. Evolution.

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Ancestors of fleas lose their wings. Complexity decreases. Evolution.

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Several groups of mammals decrease their quantities of teeth. Complexity decreases. Evolution.

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There is no dichotomy here between what creationists say and what evolutionists say. Evolutionists presented a theory, and creationists whited out the parts they didn't like.

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Edited by Mantis, : Rewording

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I'm Bluejay.

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Darwin loves you.

Hello Wardog, and welcome back. Just a few quick points. Ask if you want me to elaborate, Instead of benign, I'd use the word neutral. Benign means good, yet something with no effect can't be said to be good, right? {ABE}As Percy pointed out in Message 290 your use of the wrod IS correct. I retract this statement. It's far from perfectly designed, nor is it symmetrical. It doesn't, that's why it isn't. But far from mutation making our body shape, you forget the other mechanism involved, natural selection.As a final note, I would like you to provide the sources for your statements. As they are now,, they are nothing but assumptions, and all I have to do is say they aren't true, and we're on equal footing again.Edited by Huntard, : Added the rad stuff

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I hunt for the truth

How could you tell a neutral mutation carried by the human genome. It seems to me you would have to compare it with something else. may be by comparing it with some other species and look for differences?It's not clear to me what is it you are looking for here...Edited by fallacycop, : typo

Hi Huntard,sorry to be pedantic but did you notice the contradiction here?I said, 'life only comes from pre-existing life' you replied surely this statement implies that something 'non-living' came to life.then you say which implies what i said initially, that evolution is about the origin of life. Lets face it, if everything came from something else, then it must go right back to nothingness, just like the universe...at some point the universe came into existence from 'non-existence'

if its only a conclusion, why is it taught as being a fact? And why is it wrong of me not to believe the conclusion? If it is in fact only a conclusion...or is it fact??? im confused. Yes i am, short and sweet is much better for me.

if as you say, animals progressed up the evolutionary scale, and became more capable of surviving, yes?If thats the case, why is the “inferior” ape family still in existence, but not a single one of the presumed intermediate forms, which were supposed to be more advanced in evolution?Today we see chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, but no “ape-men.” How is it that the more recent and supposedly more advanced “links” between apelike creatures and modern man should have become extinct, but not the lower apes?