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

“survival of the fittest””that humans and animals compete within their kinds for survival. The fittest live; the weakest die. when we see a mother cat leave one of her cubs to die, that is survival of the fittest, she'll feed the healthy ones and allow the weak one to die as an example.2. I think all life is complex, no matter how small it is, its complex so 'more advanced' does not mean 'more complex' but rather higher forms of life. Eg, humans are a higher form of life compared to an ape or gorilla.thats how i understand it to be anyway.

so they have 'proved' evolution by experiments?what sort of experiments are you talking about??? have they produced life from non living matter?because if they do that, then i'll believe that life arose by chancePs, in case you havnt noticed, i acknowledge that 'evolution' occurs...i am well aware that species do diversify thru genetics and can adapt to environmental change...this isnt the issue i have with evolution.

Hi Mantis your reasoning is good and i totally see your pointI suppose its the implications that the theory of evolution are proposing that makes me want to see the foundation first.I know people keep saying that evolution and 'origin of life' are completely separate issues, and evolution does not attempt to explain the origin of life, but the logical deduction is that if all life arose by chance and evolved gradually from one form to another, then logically it takes it all back to an original sourceso if that original source was not God, then I want evidence for what it was... i dont want theories and speculation

i see what you are saying and i apologise, my definitions are not very clear... and now im not really sure how to define iti view all animals equal in complexity, but in terms of intelligence, not all are equalI guess when i spoke about it before, it was in the context of the ape-men... the homo erectus/hominoids/neanderthals/humans etcin that context, its the intelligence that made them 'higher' or 'lower'but in saying that, i wouldnt apply this in the same way to all animals

if evolution is to be proved, in my eyes, they need to show how it originally developedto show how it originally developed, they need to create it... they need to create molecules and chemicals that produced life and then watch how it evolvesbut if they cannot reproduce it, then how can they say we've proved it via experiments???what sort of experiments prove 'evolution'
(please keep in mind that i do believe in evolution in terms of genetic variations and speciation)Edited by Peg, : No reason given.

it was said earlier that the crocodiles of today have been the same for a million years... thats not much change at allits not logical that evolution would have been active with all other species but not on this one....would it do that?????

i do see thatbut, if each species arose from a previous species by gradual change, then this implies that if we were to trace the steps right back, we would be right back at abiogenesis and life would have to have arose from non living matter

i will try and find it...its in this thread i think...probably early pages, i jsut remember it because it was a reply to one of my comments about why evolution happens sometimes but not all the time and you said that its not purposeful or directional...of course i could be wrong... but i'll try and find itbut first i have to go to bed and sleep... its almost 1am here and i cant think straight anymore.

i accept diversification thru genetics...thats a little different to the evolution of one species into a new kind of species...i dont believe that at all because if that were true, then we should be able to replicate it or we should see itand, it would also lead us back to an original source of production where the evolution first took place

Hi Modulous,
i apologize, i missed this post earlier.About Dawkins, i have to say that i completely and utterly dislike that man. He is the most arrogant and angry individual ever! i agree with you, but there is one small problem with this. Many of the scientists who do present a different view also happen to be creationists. and because they are creationists, they are not considered 'real' scientists. this is a very sad state of affairs for science. Im sure what will happen is less and less creationists will be in the field of science and this could lead to unbridled and unchallenged ideas.interestingly The science journal 'Nature' reported in 1997 that almost 40percent of biologists, physicists, and mathematicians surveyed believe in a God. So where does that put the research of these individuals? Does the fact that they believe in God make their research any less accurate then an athiest/evolutionary scientist??I'd be interested to know what you think of these statements...these scientists hold doubts over evolution and some could be creationists...

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Francis Hitching, an evolutionist and author of the book The Neck of the Giraffe, stated: “For all its acceptance in the scientific world as the great unifying principle of biology, Darwinism, after a century and a quarter, is in a surprising amount of trouble.

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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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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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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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Biochemist George Wald states: “Spontaneous dissolution is much more probable, and hence proceeds much more rapidly, than spontaneous synthesis.” This means there would be no accumulation of organic soup! Wald believes this to be “the most stubborn problem that confronts us [evolutionists]

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About DNA and proteins and DNA Hitching says: “Proteins depend on DNA for their formation. But DNA cannot form without pre-existing protein. They must have developed in parallel”

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Leslie Orgel of Salk Institute in California has indicated nucleotides to be “one of the major problems in prebiotic synthesis.”9 They are needed to make the nucleic acids (DNA, RNA), also called an overwhelming difficulty. Incidentally, proteins cannot be assembled without the nucleic acids, nor can nucleic acids form without proteins.

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Robert Shapiro, professor of chemistry at New York University and a specialist in DNA research, dispose of the chance formation of nucleotides and nucleic acids in early earth’s environment:

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“Whenever two amino acids unite, a water molecule is released. Two molecules of water must be set free in assembling a nucleotide from its components, and additional water is released in combining nucleotides to form nucleic acids. Unfortunately, the formation of water in an environment that is full of it is the chemical equivalent of bringing sand to the Sahara. It is unfavorable, and requires the expenditure of energy. Such processes do not readily take place on their own. In fact, the reverse reactions are the ones that occur spontaneously. Water happily attacks large biological molecules. It pries nucleotides apart from each other, breaks sugar-to-phosphate bonds, and severs bases from sugars.”

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Expressing doubts over a 'simple begining' Michael Denton, specialist in molecular biology said
“Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10’12gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world...the basic design of the cell system is essentially the same in all living systems on earth from bacteria to mammals. In all organisms the roles of DNA, mRNA and protein are identical. The meaning of the genetic code is also virtually identical in all cells. The size, structure and component design of the protein synthetic machinery is practically the same in all cells. In terms of their basic biochemical design, therefore no living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth.”

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Harold Morowitz, a Yale University physicist, has calculated that the chances of getting the simplest living bacterium by random changes is 1 in 1 followed by 100,000,000,000 zeros.

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“This number is so large, that to write it in conventional form we would require several hundred thousand blank books. Scientists committed to the chemical evolution of lifehave chosen to hold it as a truth beyond question, thereby enshrining it as mythology.”

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What can be logically deducted from all this evidence, and the scientists invaluable research into the mechanisms of 'life'?
1. without the right atmosphere there would be no organic soup.2.Without the organic soup there would have been no amino acids.
3. Without amino acids we would not have proteins.
4. Without proteins there would be no nucleotides.
5. Without nucleotides there would be no DNA and without DNA there are no cells that can reproduce themselves.
6. Without a covering membrane, no living cell. Meaning NO LIFE7. without life on earth, no evolution of the species.it all must come back to where it all began, otherwise its pointless isnt it? we must be honest here. Evolution alone tracks the changes in species. I accept that. But evolution also discounts an intelligent designer by its very nature. According to evolution, a designer/creator had no hand in the species on earthaccording to evolution, the species on earth evolved from each other and this evolution began with simple celled organisms and progressed to all the species we see on earth today. With this in mind, evolution must by necessity be able to explain the origin of the first living cell and how that cell became a living organism, and how that organism developed and what it developed into ectObviously some evolutionary scientists see the need to offer such an explanation because many theories over the origin of life have been formulated by them.

a kind as in a species that can reproduce together.eg, various breeds of chickens can reproduce together, but a chicken and a duck cannot, therefore they are different 'kinds' or 'species'im sure i have explained this previously.

what proof do evolutionists provide to support the claim that natural selection chooses beneficial mutations to produce new species?in 1999 a brochure by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in America says: “A particularly compelling example of speciation [the evolution of new species] involves the 13 species of finches studied by Darwin on the Galápagos Islands, now known as Darwin’s finches.”these finche's were studied in the 70's by Peter and Rosemary Grant who discovered that after a year of drought, finches that had slightly bigger beaks survived better than those with smaller beaks. these findings were assumed to be significant apparently because the size and shape of the beaks is a primary way of determining the 13 species of finches.
they estimated that if droughts occur about once every 10 years on the islands, a new species of finch might arise in only about 200 years.ok so it seems that evolution might have a point with this exampleExcept that in the years following the drought, finches with smaller beaks again began to dominate the population. In the science Journal Nature 1987 a Peter Grant and graduate student Lisle Gibbs wrote that they had seen “a reversal in the direction of selection.”So it seems the finch's were not becoming a new species at all but rather the population was being affected by the climate changes.

believe it or not, its only been in the last day or two that i've come to realize what you all mean when you use the term 'creationist'. I thought i was a creationist, but now i realise that term is reserved for those who adhere to the young earth theories.i've inadvertently been arguing for something i dont agree with LOLbut darwinian evolution and the spontaneous generation of life on this planet is not logical to me either, not in the slightest. Leslie Orgel quote "Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide" p. 188
Robert Shipiro quote "Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide" pp. 173-4.
Michael Dentons quote "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," p. 250.Harold Morowitz quote "Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide" pp. 32, 49,128Edited by Peg, : No reason given.Edited by Peg, : No reason given.

could you provide some examples of this with perhaps links to the actual laboratories and the research you are referring to ?Edited by Peg, : No reason given.

i has been said by others that it is a separate issue.abiogenesis and evolution have nothing to do with each other, evolution does not attempt to explain the origin of life etc etcbut its one thing to say that evolution is how species evolved from other species then not back up where the species began in the first placethats why they are very much linked together