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

No, in fact I still don't see it. Yes, if life can only come from life, then it should always have existed, this is abviously not the case, so it must've come from something that wasn't "alive". Whether it was poofed into existence or through chemical processes, it wasn't always there. No it doesn't. What part of "evolution is NOT about the origin of life" don't you understand? That's why I said that life can't just come from other life. Not necesarily, but this could be the case, yes.

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I hunt for the truth

What makes you think a conclusion cannot be a fact? Please consider the following:Premise 1: All mammals are warm blooded.
Premise 2: My horse is a mammal...
Conclusion: ...therefore my horse is warm blooded.Is it, or is it not the conclusion of this syllogism that my horse is warm blooded? And is it, or is it not a fact that my horse is warm blooded?

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

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.

1) Why should the other apes be called inferior?
2) There are other factors besides natural selection which cause evolutionary changes. The fact that changes in the environment can cause extinctions. Why is it that the non-bird dinoaurs, pleisosaurs & icthiosaurs all became extinct but the birds persisted? Why did lizards, snakes, crocodilians, turtles remain?
3) The point that humans & chimps are not in the direct line but come from a common ancestor. The intermediate hominids are between the common ancestor and modern humans, not between chimps & humans.

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There is no better love between 2 people than mutual respect for each other WT Young, 2002Who gave anyone the authority to call me an authority on anything. WT Young, 1969

Benign has more than one meaning, and in the context of mutations it means harmless, not good. Same meaning in medicine. A benign tumor is not a good or beneficial tumor, but a harmless one.--Percy

Hi Peg,I don't want to swamp you, so I'll keep this "short and sweet".

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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?

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Mod and Bluescat have already touched on this, but I just wanted to spell it out.So far as evolution is concerned there is no "inferior" or "superior", at least not in the way you seem to mean. There is only one test; can the organism survive and reproduce? Those organisms that manage to do this very successfully will prosper and become more populous, those that do badly will become rarer and eventually they may die out entirely and become extinct.It is tempting for us to see our ape-man ancestors as inferior because they were less intelligent, but this is an illusion. Nature doesn't care how smart you are or how you make a living. The only things that matter for evolution are survival and reproductive success.Looked at this way, blue-green algae is much more successful than humanity. It has survived for billions of years compared to our few hundred thousand.Mutate and Survive.Edited by Granny Magda, : Fixed really ugly typo.

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"The Bible is like a person, and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to say almost anything you'd like it to say." -- Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade

Ah, well yeah, not my native language and all. Ok, his use of the word was correct. I retract my statement.

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I hunt for the truth

A creation scientist who is serious about science, as opposed to what you describe as "their work," would do research in a way that was recognizably scientific and so could be published in legitimate peer-reviewed scientific journals. In other words, though creation scientists might be serious about their work, their work is religious apologetics, not science. This is inevitable because their views are founded upon an interpretation of a religious book, not real-world evidence. Mutation is not the primary mechanism of change. Rather, it is mutation, allele remixing and natural selection working together that is the driving force behind evolutionary change.This process is extremely reliable. For example, you can perform a simple genetic experiment with bacteria where a small environmental change is introduced (perhaps a different type of nutrient), and you'll get the same result every time. The necessary random mutation inevitably pops up somewhere and then propagates throughout the population. But they don't have trouble demonstrating it. College students, who are in essence science novices in the extreme, demonstrate it in the lab over and over again when they take Genetics 101. Mutations form spontaneously, which is what most fruit fly genetics research depends upon, not radiation. Some other ways of conducting genetics research with fruit flies involve transplanting specific genes and controlled breeding. You're referring here to mutation alone, but as I pointed out, it's random mutation, allele remixing and natural selection working together that drive evolution, and it works just fine. If it didn't work then laboratory experiments would have results showing that it doesn't work, but they show the opposite, that it does work. And adaptation happens outside the lab, too, including adaptational change to an extent great enough to produce new species. First, while vestigial organs do come up in creation/evolution discussions, no evolutionist would ever cite them as evidence for beneficial mutations.Second, given the time that has passed since the earliest life, very likely the vast majority of human genes arose through mutation. How much in common do human genes have with blue-green algae, the modern representative of what might have been one of the earliest lifeforms? Maybe 10%? Let's take 10% as the figure just for the sake of discussion. So if we share 10% of our DNA with blue-green algae, and if we're descended from blue-green algae or something fairly similar, then 90% of our DNA arose through mutation.In other words, the mutations, harmful, benign and beneficial, are everywhere throughout our genes. You're not specific about which fruit fly experiments you're referring to, but the experiments do not support the creationist model. Beneficial mutations are preserved and propagate through the population according to the degree of benefit they confer, neutral mutations may or may not be preserved, and harmful mutations are removed from the population according to the degree of harm they cause.No deterioration is ever observed. In a stable environment, natural selection will prevent harmful mutations from propagating, will encourage beneficial mutations to propagate, and will allow drift for neutral mutations. The net effect, at a minimum, is a continuation of being adapted to the stable environment forever. No deterioration.--Percy

Hi Peg,I think I can make this issue about the "origin of life" versus the "origin of species" clear for you.First of all, Darwin's Origin of Species is not about the origin of the first species. It's about the origin of the species that existed when he wrote his book. Where did pigeons come from? Barnacles? Giraffes?The answer he proposed was that species evolve gradually in tiny steps from prior species by a process of descent with modification (today we know it is actually due to mutation and allele remixing) and natural selection. Pigeons evolved from a species that existed before pigeons, and the same for barnacles and giraffes.So you see, the origin of species is not about how life began, its about how the species we see around us today began. It's about the process that causes one species to gradually become another, what we today call evolution (Darwin didn't call it evolution).But you're correct that there's an obvious implication, for as you follow the process back in time you quickly realize that there must have been a first species, a first life. And that first life must have arisen from non-life.Of course, it's not as simple as that. Just as harbors only gradually become ocean, and just as foothills only gradually become mountains, non-life only gradually becomes life. Where during that process you draw the line and say before this point was non-life and after it was life is probably fairly arbitrary, and we know far too little about this to say much about the dividing point between life and non-life, except that there was must have been one.The consensus opinion today is probably that life began on this planet, but panspermia, life arriving in the form of spores of some kind from outer space, is another valid theory. But that only pushes questions about the origin of the first life off to other planets or places in the universe.So if you reject evolution, what you're rejecting is that species can change into other species.If you reject a natural origin for life, then what you're rejecting is more formally known as abiogenesis.Abiogenesis and evolution are closely related to one another. Clearly one led to the other. But they are not one and same thing.--Percy

Let me answer your question with a question: If it's only a conclusion from huge numbers of tiny observations that the planets orbit the sun and not the earth, why is it taught as a fact?--Percy

Perhaps it would be helpful to explain that the reliability is statistical in nature. Due to the fact that in a single petri dish the number of bacteria is huge, the chances of a mutation popping up that helps the bacterium utilize the new nutrient become near certainty.With species that replicate slower than bacteria you just have to wait longer for a beneficial mutation to pop up. For nature to try out billions of individual bacteria takes hours, whereas trying out billions of guinea pigs takes thousands, maybe millions of years. Fortunately, evolution has been going on for three to four billion years, so statistics comes to the rescue once again.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Probably because no such experiments exist. There are lots of mutational experiments on flies in the literature but I have never come across any where the purpose was to produce beneficial mutations or create a new species of fly.Mutational screens are designed with the intention of detecting mutations with effects on the phenotype and almost all of these will be deleterious, because it is far easier to cause significant damage to a genetic system by random mutagenesis than to improve it and easier still to detect many such damaging mutations. It is doubtful that any beneficial mutation would present itself in a highly visible way from simple morphology, unlike a large number of deleterious mutations which can produce highly dramatic morphological changes.So it is unsurprising that mutational screens fail to find what they aren't designed to look for.I don't know what creationist site it is that sells people on this rubbish argument, but it is so prevalnet that it has to be coming from some common source, I can't imagine so many people thing up such a stupid argument reliant on complete ignorance of the subject on their own.The classical mutational screen would be the Nusslein-Volhard and Wieschaus screen for embryonic lethal mutations in drosophila, which the astute will realise was designed to detect mutations which were lethal to the organism while it was still embryonic. I'm not sure how creationists expect such screens to detect beneficial mutations.TTFN,WK

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?

Your mentioning Nusslein-Volhard reminds me of an excellent book on the history of biology, as told with reference to different species that have been used as study material. The book in question is titled "The Guinea Pig's History of Biology", by Jim Endersby. It's a thoroughly enjoyable book that reads like a novel, and it's also very accessible for the layman. From Darwin and Mendel to Watson and Crick, to Nusslein-Volhard and others, they all play their part, as do Darwin's passion flowers, Mendel's peas, the fruit fly, the guinea pig, the zebra fish, and mouse eared cress. Highly recommended.Edited by Parasomnium, : No reason given.Edited by Parasomnium, : Added 'also' in "also very accessible", so as not to give the impression that I think Wounded King is a layman. He is probably one of the few real scientists frequenting this site, informing us with his in-depth knowledge. Thanks, WK.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Hi, Peg.You've already had comments from a lot of people more qualified than I, but there's one little tidbit I'd like to clarify. This is actually not a bad point that you've raised.Too often, as evolutionists, I think we treat people who make this statement as idiots, when I personally think it's actually rather astute: it shows the ability to extrapolate an argument to its logical conclusion (which astounds me sometimes, because a lot of creationists can't do the same thing with their own arguments, making them come off as dishonest).But, the basic point is that origin of life science is treated separately from evolution precisely because evolutionists (and their critics) noticed the same thing that you noticed: evolution couldn't act on something that isn't there, so it could only come into effect after "life" was already present.However, evolution by natural selection (or a process very similar to it) is currently the forerunning hypothesis for most of the origin of life. The only thing that evolution by natural selection obviously can't explain is what could be considered the very first "mutation": the emergence of the very first thing upon which natural selection could begin to act. It might have been a single molecule (or several different single molecules), or a system of interacting molecules, but, whatever it was, it was the first thing that was capable of evolution, so it clearly did not evolve from something else itself (at least not in the Darwinian sense).So, some sort of chemical reaction must be proposed to have predated the first instance of evolution. Because of this, it makes perfect sense for "origin of life" to be treated separately from "evolution."I hope this helped. Let me know if I need to clarify anything. Sorry it wasn't "sort and sweet."Edited by Mantis, : No reason given.

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I'm Bluejay.Darwin loves you.