Are we all descendants of Adam and Eve?

faithiest writes:I guess I'll just leave it at that and consider myself and my questions unwelcome.

faithiest writes:I'm not sure why I wasted any time on this!

jaywill writes:Most of us regard humans being on the top the scale. And every evolutionary sequence I ever saw from imaginative artists always have in the front of the line, or the top of the tree, to at the end of the supposed ascending scheme - you guessed it, a human being.

jaywill writes:First let me ask you. If I believed that - "poof" when some lightening struck on a pool of primordial soup and, presto, the first living micro organism came into being, would that be less miraculous ?

jaywill writes:Nonsense. These were standard books breaking down current science thought for the general public.

Now, in hindsight, it looks "ridiculous."

jaywill writes:You prefer comforting lies like "there is no God."

And you prefer other comforting lies like "In saying that there is no God, I make no claim so the burden of proof rests solely on theists."

That is why many new atheists have sought to redefine "Atheism" to mean simply a lack of belief in God or gods.

You know? Like the shrub outside my door also lacks a belief in God or gods. It too must be an atheist.

jaywill writes:If you guys are all in consensus perhaps one by one you each could mention the definitive identifying example of the one conclusive proof that we humans transitionally came about from.

Chimpanzees are apes and one of our closest animal relatives - their scientific name is Pan troglodytes.Now, imagine that you are standing face to face with a female chimpanzee - let’s call her Pan. With your left hand you are holding the hand of your mother and your mother is holding the right hand of her mother and so on for thousands of generations back into the past. By doing this, you know as an absolute certainty that you are descended directly on your mother’s side to everyone in the chain.Imagine that Pan is doing the same but with her right hand.You now have two imaginary lines of women and female chimps holding hands going backwards in time - like a railway track with women and chimps lining each side.You can now walk down the centre of the rails and look carefully at your mother's family line and the chimp's family line going back millions of years.So what would do you see?Walking back about 200,000 years on the human side you see a mother who’s husband was a chap science named Heidelberg Man (Homo heidelbergensis ) she’s distinctly human, using tools and standing upright, probably hairless and very tall — the males are up to 7 feet tall. This is the first different species that we’ve come across in our chain. But you wouldn’t be able to tell exactly when Homo sapiens (people) merged into Heidelberg because each mother would look almost identical to the next — you can’t see the join. The changes from mother to mother are so gradual that you only see a change by comparing mothers thousands or millions of years apart. We only now know that Heidelberg is different from us because we’ve found his fossilised remains and we can compare it to ourselves today.This is why there’s no such thing as a transitional fossil or a missing link; every fossil is a transitional fossil and every living species is in transition to the next — if we had a fossil for every mother in the lines, even the experts wouldn’t be able to say where a separate species had been formed. We can only guess with hindsight.If you find this hard to grasp or you think it’s impossible for one species to change slowly into another we can see it happening today. For example, we call species that change slowly over geographic areas rather than over time, ring species.Here in the UK the Herring Gull and the Lesser Black-backed Gull are distinct and non-interbreeding species. But if you physically follow the Herring Gull west towards North America it gradually blurs into something more like a Lesser Black-backed Gull. It carries on changing towards Siberia and when it finally returns to Western Europe the Herring Gull has become a Lesser Black-backed Gull and the two species don’t interbreed. At no point in the ring can you say exactly where it changed species — it’s a gradual merging of characteristics over distance.As you walk back further, at about 500,000 years ago, you’d see a branch form and go off sideways from our human line, these are the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis). They lived along side us but developed separately. There may even be Neanderthal mothers in our line, because we think that for some time there was interbreeding.And so on down the line of mothers through increasingly apelike creatures until at about 2.5 million years ago we reach an animal called the Southern African ape (Australopithecus africanis). This creature is small — around 4 feet, with a brain a third the size of ours and although she stands upright like us, she’s covered in hair and is distinctly apelike. We used to think that this is roughly where chimps split from the human line but modern molecular genetics tells us that it was earlier.We have to walk much farther down the lines to get to where most evolution scientists think chimps branch off - somewhere about 7m years ago. This mother would have looked something like a chap called ‘Taumai’ (Sahelanthropus tchadensis). He has the same brain size as a modern chimp but his face is a little more like a human than a chimp.No one knows for sure whether Taumai is the point where chimps start off on their own line but we do know one thing for certain:Wherever the split actually happened, at this point in the two lines of human and chimp descendants you would see that the right hand of a mother from the chimp line is now holding the left hand of a mother from the human line.
The lines have met — the ancient chimp and the ancient human have the same mother.This mother starts the lines to both Pan and you, so Pan is your distant cousin. And both you, the human, and Pan, the ape are still here.

jaywill writes:The matter of the Gulls I will look into. But different breeds of dogs differing in size, appearance, hair length, volume of bark, etc. have been observed through human breeding methods.They have not though bred a dog into a pony or a monkey, which is more of what you are proposing, I think.What you say we observed seems to remain in the realm of gulls.
Is that the macro evolution you propose equaling apes fading into humans?

"Despite the excited and optimistic claims that have been made by some paleontologists, no fossil hominid species can be established as our direct ancestor."
Do you think this comment has been proved false since 1982 ?

This problem could be the reason why it is proposed by some that we can only guess now where a separate species of pre-humans begins -

My comments now are going to be related to the Bible and how I view the Chimpanzee / Human closeness - appearance or genome or otherwise.

Jaywill writes:Actually, the theory of evolution perdicts that gulls will remain gulls.
Then I think that is not the example you should have used to prove that we have observed macro evolution. You chose that example.

I mean it is not fair to point to changes in dogs, for example, and argue that we observe evolution therefore apes gradually gave birth to humans.

Jaywill writes:If you want to present convincing evidence of "observed" macro evolution to me the gulls were not good enough.

Jaywill writes:It seems that "You don't understand evolution" is something I will hear people tell me for the rest of my life.

One never "understands" evolution until one agrees that macro evolution is a historical fact.

Now I will repeat what I wrote before. If I was a professional trained Biologist researching the development of living things I would spend time exploring something like punctuated equilibrium or another theory to compete with an all encompassing gradualism.

There may be something to evolution but not as much as evolutionists like.

jaywil writes:Its a theory about history (pre-history actually) or what occured in the past.

You want to believe that a un-intelligent, goal-less, cascading of mutations tumbled randomnly down the eons to "selecting" its way arrived at the complete biosphere we see around us ? You go ahead and believe that.