1 piece of evidence to disprove evolution..

Hi, my original post was infact as I wanted to know if evolution could be proved false, well in the sense that all life originated 3.5 billions yeard ago form a single celled amoeba forinstance I realise most Creationists accept micro evolution, however not macro evolution.From my experience about discussing theories they can only be considered viable if not proved false. Hence I wanted to know why avian evolution wasn't more of a problem amoungst the 'evolutionists' than it currently is. Not planning to. One of my discussions is about natural selection (which I fully believe in), which I'm trying to find out if it is responsible for visible changes in species.I dont know about the fruitflies ? I mean I fully understand natural selection, however apparently (from what I read here), there have been no 'evolution' (as in 'beneficial mutation') in the labs. I mean cancer is a mutation of cells, but it doesn't imply evolution. Well, essentially my question would thus if 'Evolutionists' could 100 % believe evolution being responsible for all the diverse life forms we have, when taking into account some pretty drastic transitions, such as avian evolution ? Could Creation views not be valid ? I have no idea about that, however it would be pretty neccesary for me to use a dictionary to actually understand the explanations provided (well most of the time). I suppose the Religious equivalent would be asking a priest a question, to which the reply would be a sentance about the 'diathecise' or some other word one would not understand. cheers[This message has been edited by Zealot, 08-15-2003]

There is in fact evolution in cancer cells, in much the same way as there is evolution in cultures of E. coli. Certain mutations will lead to a particular subpopulation of the cancer/pre-cancer being more successful and outcompeting with the other sub populations.There are many examples of beneficial mutations in cell cultures in laboratory conditions, and several examples of drosophila with beneficial mutations generated experimentally, there is a thread on fruit fly mutation on this forum in which I have given references of a couple.The easiest thing if you don't understand a word is to ask someone to explain the word rather than to complain about it, that way instead of antagonising people you will be expanding your own vocabulary.Your argument seems to be reducing itself down to nothing but incredulity that those believing in evolution arent mor incredulous themselves.

Just some points to think about1) Evolution does not put a firm date on the beginning of life. The oldest signs of life are about 3.5 billion years old, and appear to be fossilised cyanobacteria ("blue-green algae"). Some scientists still argue that these structures have been misinterpreted. But this is not in any way a key part of evolution.2) The first life was not an amoeba. More likely it was a predecessor to something like the cyanobacteria mentioned above. Exactly what it was will depend on the definition of "life" - and that in itself is something of a problem.3) The reason why 'evolutionists' beleive that evolution was responsible for the diversity of life is that the data points towards common descent and not separate creation. So in that sense it would certainly not make "creation" a valid view.

What drastic transitions? As has been explained, evolutionary scenarios for the emergence of avian flight all involve very gradual change over long periods of time. The changes were always small and incremental, providing an advantage that was also small and incremental.Let's say that you conclusively demonstrate that all current ideas of avian evolution are wrong and send things back to square zero. What Creationist views are you thinking might then be possibly be valid? Try out a few:

• Because we have no idea how avian flight evolved, evolution between kinds is not possible.
• Because we have no idea how avian flight evolved, the dinosaurs must have been created at the same time as the rest of the world around 6000 years ago.
• Because we have no idea how avian flight evolved, most existing geological formations are the result of a global flood about 5000 years ago.

Do any of these conclusions seem to follow from the initial premise to you? They don't to me.--Percy

Well, from what I've heard and general consensus from Evolutionists is that Avian evolution is pretty much still a big question mark. So much so that the up-down and down-up theories have been constantly challenged and new theories proposed. I would rather prefer someone to say 'We just dont know yet' that... most likely that must have been the case.Same goes for the eye. A tremendously complex organ that I honestly cant see how it could have evolved by random mutation. Yes I'm sure 100% that there will be a theory to it , but how plausable ? I mean I can even probably tell you that its some kind of light receptor cell that enabled an organism (sorry I forget the correct word) to detect light. Pff and I dont even know the first thing about evolution! That is entirely my point and why I mentioned Avian Evolution. If there seems as if there can be no evolutionary 'leap' from 1 species to the next, what would it imply to evolutionists ?Would it just be one missing piece of the jigsaw or would it actually question all current theories ? I mean usually for a theory to be proved false, you only need to prove one part of the equasion as false. While I realise it to be extremely difficult for evolutionists to prove all questions, in light of difficulty of finding proof, basically I want to find out what would have to be proved to debunk the ToE.My appologies for offending anyone. I'm actually finding these talks pretty interesting and mean no offense to anyone's belief, however I'm sure when you throw creationists and evolutionists in the same room, you're bound to stir a few feathers, so I'm sure you guys should be use to these questions.Have a good weekend all!
Phew.. sunny in London... time to hit the ... park PS.. is there any way to change your password ?

Well, you obviously don't, because if you did, you'd know that there's a perfectly logical path for the evolution of the eye. Maybe you'd like to guess, or search google? Or we could just try and explain it to you.It didn't evolve by random mutation, of course. It evolved by random mutation + natural selection. (It's that selection process that weeds out the failures so all you're left with is the successes.) But the lack of fossil evidence for avian transition isn't evidence that it never happened. It simply means we don't know which of our ample theories on the evolution of birds is the most accurate. Just because we don't know which theory is right doesn't mean that they're all wrong.[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 08-15-2003]

Hi Zealot, Basically there's a piece here that hasn't been adequately expressed that seems to be misleading you. NO evolutionary biologist or paleontologist claims to know the exact evolutionary pathway for avian evolution. What we DO have is, as you stated, a speculation. However, the piece you're missing is that the speculations are based on quite a number of accumulated facts. A scientific "speculation", put forward in terms of a hypothesis, must be based on some collection of observations that tie a bunch of facts together. In the case of flight, for instance, we have a number of fossil dino species that were quite incapable of flight, but that have feathers. We have specimens like Archeopteryx which were apparently capable of flight, have feathers, but also retain quite a few reptilian features. And we have them all in some kind of temporal order in the record - maybe not exact parent-child, but "older" to "younger". So whereas the specific path may be disputed and changed with the discovery of new facts, it's pretty solidly established that dinos --> birds. With the eye, we're on even more solid ground than with flight. Evolutionists actually ask the same kind of question (although phrased a little less colloquially) as creationists: "Just what good IS half an eye?". In this case the answer turns out to be, "Quite good, depending on environmental context and the needs of the particular organism." With the eye, we have living examples of every conceivable stage in eye evolution - from a light-sensitive drop of the photochemical rhodopsin in Euglenia to multiple compound eyes, various degrees of cupping, various levels of muscular control, etc. We can even have examples of the results of different evolutionary pressures (the eyes of cephalopods vs mammalian, for instance). Given that we have examples of every possible permutation from nothing to something that we can actually hold in our hands (more or less), the evolution of the eye seems pretty obvious.To a lesser extent, we can do the same with the flight thingy (you know, "What good is half a wing?"). The problem with flight is that we've got examples that could go either way: running/jumping --> flight or arboreal --> gliding --> powered flight. So the argument continues. However, the arguers aren't denying that flight evolved...

But what kind of question mark:

• Is it that we have no idea how avian flight could have evolved within an evolutionary framework?
  ​
• Or it is that we are unable to determine which of many evolutionary possibilities is correct?

It's the latter, right?Look at it another way. Someone tells you the score of a football game was 41-36, and that's all the information they provide. You're then asked how many touchdowns, extra points, fieldgoals and touchbacks each team got, and their order during the game. You can't answer the question, can you? There's simply not enough information. Can this absence of information in any way be construed as evidence that the football game didn't happen? Or that there's no such thing as football? Of course not.I see you're in the UK, and my example was American football, so let me translate this to another sport. Someone tells you that Tiger Woods scored 68 in his last round, and that's all the information they provide. You're then asked how many holes in one, eagles, birdies, pars, bogies, double bogies, etc, he got, and on which holes. You can't answer the question, can you? There's simply not enough information. Can this absence of information in any way be construed as evidence that the round of golf didn't happen? Or that there's no such thing as golf? Of course not.In the exact same way, the insufficiency of available information to conclusively answer the questions about avian evolution in no way reflect on the viability of the theory of evolution. Added by edit:By the way, the situation you're looking for within evolution would correspond to a score in American football of 1-0 (impossible since the smallest scoring play is 2 points for a touchback), and in golf of 17 or less (impossible since it would require at least one hole-in-none). There is no possible way such scores could occur. In contrast, the evolution of avian flight has countless ways by which it could have happened.--Percy[This message has been edited by Percipient, 08-16-2003]

Hi Quetzal, thanks for your reply.The thing to me is that the theory of avian evolution really is a case of speculation (which apparently you guys agree with). I by no means insinuate that there is no 'findings' that suggest it could be true, merely that the findings seem to be pretty incomplete, which is fair and I agree not sufficient to 'disprove' evolution as such (or the theory of avian evolution forinstance). However when many questions arise, which cant be answered, would the ToE hold less ground ?I think Darwin stated something along the lines that the ToE could be proved false 'IF' it could be proved impossible for evolution from one species to another (well something to that effect) however this is impossible. It could be highly unlikely (as IMO Avian Evolution), however impossible to disprove in precisely the same way God cannot be proved not to exist. So in essense the ToE would be , in Darwin's opinion, virtually impossible to disprove ?I mean, removing all forms of geological ageing etc, would it not be possible to assume a God created all animals with natural selection (and possibly mutation) in mind ?I mean, my (utterly simplistic) view is as follows. I have 4000 lego pieces and I can use any amount of them to create 10 000 objects. When I build a spaceship, I use the 'wings', and when I build cars, I use 'wheels' together with other 'common' building pieces. Houses and Offices have windows. Yes, sometimes I can add a room to a house or add another engine to a plane. In the end I have 1 000 objects and I can pretty much organise them into 'most complex' and 'least complex' and buildings and vehicles ect.I've built each of these objects seperately, however I have used similar building blocks for similar objects. None of these however have actually evolved from one another, but when arranged chronologically , they might have seemed to 'grown' from the smallest ?Anything you want to prove you can do exactly the same with. You have something like what 100 000 (way more I'm sure) species that you can arrange (say the eye) from most simple to most complex and draw up a conclusion from that. Not saying that doesn't make sense, just that for any 'Darwin' evolutionary gap question that can be used, thus its pretty much impossible to prove incorrect surely or at that unfeasible.The way that Darwin didn't didn't seemed concerned with explaining where the 'primordial pool' came from, also confuses me.Same goes for the formation and complexity of DNA , which apparently Darwin didn't know about in his time, also things such as instinct and simbiotic relationships.I know all these questions have been answered already, because of this constant debate between Evolutionists and Creationists, but are there any theories (other than avian evol) that any of you guys have difficultly with ? I know Christian's have difficulty answering questions sometimes, but just because you dont know the answer, doesn't mean it doesn't exists. Same ofcourse can be said about evolution.thanks for your time.EDIT.. fixed my putrid spelling..[This message has been edited by Zealot, 08-16-2003]

Hehe, I watched NFL, but lost interest after Barry Saunders retired. I see what you are saying and dont disagree, but in evolution there really is no way to do this is there ? For instance ever if there only existed 1 Bird today , there wouldn't even have to be any trace of any bird fossils as they just "haven't been found.", which in itself would be a fair comment I'm sure.My football analogy would be if you told me the Bills beat the Cowboys 400 - 3 in the superbowl. While by no means impossible (especially when you consider how old the Earth is and that they have been playing football for a 1000 years), my gut reaction would be to one of scepticism.Usually facts are essentially suppose to be just things of 'extremely high probability', and the only way to disprove a fact would be to look at its weakest point. This however would get particularly more difficult if the 'fact' was able to "evolve" with new findings.Lets just put it this way. If the Bible could 'evolve' in its content, there wouldn't even be arguments with Evolutionists. Dont know if that made any sense ?cheers.

I think speculations about things like avian evolution might be called theories when speaking casually, but speaking for myself it doesn't seem feel correct to speak of the Theory of Avian Evolution or the Theory of Equine Evolution and so forth. To me they are speculations, reconstructions, or at best hypotheses. That being said, I guess I have no strong objection if other people prefer to call them theories.In order for a fossil or set of fossils to represent a problem to evolutionary theory, they would have to be unconnected in significant ways to other life. The fossil structure would have to resemble no other life, fossil or otherwise, ever discovered. Such fossils could not be placed in any evolutionary context, and would represent a significant puzzle. In other words, you don't want to be examining things like avian evolution, for which proposals abound, but things for which no one's been able to develop any evolutionary possibilities. You need an evolutionary anomaly.That being said, keep in mind that the modern synthesis is actually the merging of Darwinian evolution and the science of genetics. Because of genetics we know all the "hows" of evolution, and we've observed speciation in the wild and created speciation in the lab. Evolution has been observed to occur. And the fossil record is one of evolution. Falsifying all this is hard to imagine and would be very difficult in the extreme.--Percy

Zealot,Maybe we should ask you whether there is any amount of evidence that would convince you that the theory of evolution by natural selection is the best explanation for the history of life on Earth. All scientific certainty is tentative, of course. However, several people have pointed out that Darwin's theory is supported by an abundance of evidence from various fields. All you seem to be saying is that if one area (for instance, the evolution of flight) is speculative, then the mountain of evidence in several other areas means nothing.It's impossible to show you flight evolving in birds. We can only safely say that it happened over numerous generations, eons ago. The only eyewitness account we have is a fossil record. Older reptilian forms had scales, then came certain reptiles with scales and feathers, and later came recognizable bird species with wings. From what we know about natural selection, we suspect certain species had an advantage because of the ability to glide and over time this became full-fledged flight. What's a better explanation?

quote:

---

I think Darwin stated something along the lines that the ToE could be proved false 'IF' it could be proved impossible for evolution from one species to another (well something to that effect) however this is impossible.

---

It would certainly be difficult for us to assert that one species evolved from a previous one if every species had its own genetic code, but this is not the case. All organisms share the DNA code. The mountain of molecular data that we currently have is well explained by the idea of common descent: that modern forms all share common ancestors.

quote:

---

You have something like what 100 000 (way more I'm sure) species that you can arrange (say the eye) from most simple to most complex and draw up a conclusion from that.

---

The conclusion we draw is that an eye, for example, didn't necessarily have to be formed exactly like a human eye to be of use to an organism's survival. If you're impressed with the complexity of the human eye, you're not alone. There's good reason to suspect that our ancestors could have survived with eyes that were not quite as complex, since we understand from looking at other species alive today that eyes don't have to be exactly like ours to aid in survival.

quote:

---

I know Christian's have difficulty answering questions sometimes, but just because you dont know the answer, doesn't mean it doesn't exists. Same ofcourse can be said about evolution.

---

I fully agree. But there will always be questions about Nature, and we have to find the theory that best explains our observations. Tell me what you need to see before you accept that the ToE is a good explanation for Nature and its history.------------------
En la tierra de ciegos, el tuerto es el Rey.

Hi Percy. Hope you had a good weekend. CNN.com - Page not found' WASHINGTON (AP) -- Some may like it hot, but nothing likes it hotter than a weird microbe known as Strain 121. The one-celled organism, captured from a magma vent at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, can survive 266 degrees Fahrenheit (130 degrees Celsius), a temperature no other known life form can tolerate. 'Came across this just now while doing my weekend CNN browse. This would pretty much be an anomoly surely, but again I dont see it even making a dent in the ToE. It would just be another example of 'something resisting more and more heat etc... ' Well this is kinda what I've been thinking about RE fossils. If you take the fossil record and compare the skeletons of even a human from birth to adulthood, essentially you could say that 'tall men' evolved from 'short- round headed' creatures.Same can be said for Dogs. Labradors and Jack Russels are all the same species, but should only the labrador continue to survive, then 10 000 years from now their fossils are found and assumptions would be made that Labradors evolved from Jack Russels ?

quote:

---

This would pretty much be an anomoly surely, but again I dont see it even making a dent in the ToE.

---

If you read the article you cited, you'll notice that it isn't an anomaly. It is an archaea-bacteria-- the same domain as the previous high-temp record holder. In other words, it is connected in significant ways to other life.

quote:

---

If you take the fossil record and compare the skeletons of even a human from birth to adulthood, essentially you could say that 'tall men' evolved from 'short- round headed' creatures.

---

No you couldn't. The skeletons themselves would give it away. It is a matter of developmental biology. If you have enough bone and know enough about them, it is possible to determine the age at which a creature died via clues in the skeleton. Aging a human skeleton isn't that hard. A lot of people have tackled the problem. So when all of the short, round-headed' people turn out to be infants and all of the 'tall men' turn out to be adults, you'd have to start to wonder.

quote:

---

Labradors and Jack Russels are all the same species, but should only the labrador continue to survive, then 10 000 years from now their fossils are found and assumptions would be made that Labradors evolved from Jack Russels ?

---

Doubtful. Here is why. Someone seeing fossils of all of our domestic dogs may be tempted to classify them as different species. That would be wrong but it isn't critical. But they would all appear in the record at the same time, more or less, so the assumption is not going to be that one evolved from another, but that they all evolved from a common ancestral species. Further investigation will reveal that there were canines prior to the explosion of domestics, and that/those populations will be assumed to be ancestral to the domestics and to surviving labradors. This is correct. It may not be possible to pinpoint exactly which path the labs took through the AKA, but the general stream is correct-- ancestral canines, explosion of what the future scientists may think are cousin species, surviving labradors. Then again, some feature in the bones may reveal a more precise pathway.------------------
No webpage found at provided URL: www.hells-handmaiden.com

Good question. And by the way, I dont particularly disbelieve in evolution. I was pretty much a believer to a certain degree until about 3 years ago. I dont deny that a God that created all life on Earth would have catered for it to be able to sustain itself without interference, so from that respect I understand evolution, however my problem in believing that we all resulted from some primordial pool is where I get unstuck. Yes Darwins theory is supported by certain scientific fields, well dependant on them more like it. (IE: They have all been based on the ToE to a certain extent.)There are however alot of mathematicians and scientists from various areas (Einstein forinstance) that could not believe in the 'chaos thoery' (well essentailly that there wasn't a 'creator' to start off with.) Nope, not at all. Like I said, not everything can be proved. Lets put it this way. I'm a developer by profession and essentially when I test code, we do 'unit testing'. Simply put it just means every function we write is tested in isolation from the entire program. If one of these functions fails, odds are the entire system will fail, however if you ask any programmer when the system goes live, there definitely are no bugs Through the development life cycle however we chop and change functions, adapt some code to work with new functions ect, until eventually after alot of time, we have what we like to consider a working system.The confusing metaphor I'm trying to draw up here is one where a theory IMO should be tested on its own, devoid and not based on another theory. The system on a whole might seem to work, but sooner of later if there is one flaw in the systsm, the entire thing could come crashing down. Not saying Evolution IS like that, merely that the premised of a 'primordial pool' could be complete wrong, which would change a lot of other theories. Hehe, I actually had someone explain avian evolution to me in 2 sentances before. He said 'Something has feathers, then flaps their wings' and slowly learns to fly Off topic I know, but funny none the less.Well the thing is there just seems too much of a lack of fossils to convince me, but again I know it doesn't prove it didn't happen. Which is pretty much my point. In my prior reply, there is an microbe capable of surviving in 250 degrees fahrenheid, but again this will be easy to explain and just because there aren't any intermediate microbes, doesn't mean they dont exist.. This I dont get, yes all organisms share the same DNA code, but all houses are made of bricks. As far as I knew only 90% of all genes in the human body have been mapped, however how much is known about other species ? Again I point to my stupid lego example. A flat and a house will be completely different objects in no way dependant on one another however they will share 97% of the same common components. Surely it makes sense that creatures that share the most similar collection of genes would end up looking like one another ? Well this is where I find it interesting. Virtually every creature (well, most significant ones) has 2 eyes. This would give me the impression that 2 eyes are the optimum number of eyes for survival correct ? I mean we have dinosaurs to lizards to snakes to grasshoppers, octipi ect all have 2 eyes, however a spider has 10 eyes (or something like that). For spiders it just happens to be the 'optimum amount of eyes to have'. Ants however (even if they were to mutate eyes) it just seems it would not be beneficial for them to have eyes, which is unusual considering they actually do spend alot of time above ground. Well I pretty much 100% accept Natural Selection as true and I know mutations occur. I suppose for evolution (ignoring the Big Bang theory) to be fact, I would have to see either life on another planet, or evolution from 'essentialy nothing'. Eg: the Moon, mars etc. And that would have to be able to be reproduced. PS.. anyone have any idea why the moon revolves around the earth ?It's basically this. We live on a planet, which seems to be in perfect harmony mathematically with the Sun, Moon and other planets in the solar system. We can choose to believe it all just happened from a Big Bang, or that there is some sort of order to it all. I think this is what Einstein also had a problem with.Another one of my examples AI is in essence a program/code that is able to teach itself and thus become smarter. An example would be a recursive function for a Chess program. This just means that everytime a piece of code is called, it actually creates another instance of itself , which contains all the information from the previous function. In theory, one day we could be able to produce a smart 'program' which is capable of teaching itself and learning more. I read a couple of Asimov books as a youth, so I fully believe this will be accomplished in not too long a period of time. If one day this program becomes self aware, it will be able to trace its 'evolution' back , however someone had to be there to start it all off, which is where I have a problem with the whole evolution theory from 'Primordial Soup'.For me to look at the world around me and see how alone we actually are in this universe, I find it very difficult to believe its all just a matter of chance. Even the fact that the Earth is supposedly 17.5 Billion years old and we are the first ones (17.5 Billion divided by 150 (years since ToE) ) that have come to understand the 'truth', is so miniscule, I cant help but think 'either Im just insanely lucky be be here... now, or there is more to life.gnight.. I really need to sleep!PS. Sorry this post is longer than I intended, so feel free to reply to just the relevant sections.