Questions for those who believe in Evolution theory?

Question

Some people believe based on half-baked evidence that there was no life and then magically non living matter turned into some cells and then from one cell plus lots of time we have civilization and billions of living things. So the question is

How did non living matter turned into living cells (by itself) ?

How did everything turned into something else as a result of natural selection...because Natural selection has no consciousness. How can a spider build such a sophisticated web right when it comes out of its egg and without learning it from other spiders? How does it know how to build it?

Answer 1

How did non living matter turned into living cells (by itself) ?

The million dollar question, and no answer yet.  The key thing to keep in mind is exactly what scince is supposed to do and be.

Science is meant to describe and explain what we see in the world without invoking any magical being (like God) behind it all.  As soon as you mention a designer, or creator, or whatever, you have left science and are into somethng else.  This does not mean that scientists are Godless, it's just that we can't use God to explain anything, because God is a matter of faith, not science.

There are many questions in science (not just evolution) that remain unanswered.

My question is why do people single out evolution for such scrutiny?  Do you also doubt atomic theory, or the theory of gravity?  If not, why not?  Is there some special insight that I missed?

Answer 2

I put it there.

Answer 3

Let's start with your middle question first - though I know this is an exercise in futility based on your first sentence.

1) You're correct.  Natural selection has no consciousness.  So, let's just assume that in this particular case we're discussing cold.  No consciousness.  Just cold.  And let's say that it's getting colder over time.  Maybe it's the beginnings of an ice age or just maybe it's a small cycle of the earth cooling for a few thousand years.  Again, no consciousness.  Still any animal (or plant) that exists in the area of cooling has to continue to live and breed in the area as it's cooling.  Winters are now longer, summers are cooler.  The organisms continue to have young, those that aren't already dead.  Every organism has more young during its life than can survive.  Remember to keep a population stable, no matter how large, it is only necessary for two young to survive if the animal is a sexually reproducing one.  Why? Because two will replace the parents.  So what happens to all the others?  Some get eaten, some die before breeding, etc.  

2) Of those that do breed, the ones that for whatever reason are just slightly better able to tolerate the cold, either because they've got slightly longer fur, or have a slightly higher concentration of natural antifreeze in their leaf cells or for whatever reason, it's irrelevant, because of their genetic makeup will tend to survive and have more youngsters of their own that survive.  There is no consciousness in it.  It's simply a matter of survive and breed enough youngsters that survive or die.  The cold simply IS.  The organisms evolve.  Their genome changes over time.  That means that their descendants may look, act, and even be different than what we call the original ancestors in the past.  They may be so different that we recognize them as so different that we call them a new species.  No consciousness, just cold.  

3) The same thing happens as oxygen levels rise and fall on earth; as heat and warming replace cold; as land uplifts and deserts develop in the rain shadow.  No consciousness, just survival of organisms based on what survives best in those areas.

4) Human driven selection is no different except that we have a possible end point in mind.  We stop most of the young from breeding by spaying, or eating, or whatever.  We pick whatever young we like to breed the next generation and then the next.  Let's say we want to push in the snout of a wolf so it looks more "baby-like" to us and we wind up with Pugs or we want them larger so we wind up with St. Bernards.  You can consider Chihuahuas and Great Danes as the ends of a man-made cline.  A natural one is the Larus complex of gulls - look it up - or the Ensatina salamanders of California - look them up too.

5) Orb web spiders are the end result of more than a few million years of evolution.  If you actually ARE interested, then you can check on how some of the more primitive spiders use earlier types of web, which are basically stood on end by the orb weavers to create theirs. http://www.earthlife.net/chelicerata/web...

I don't have time to give you even a sixth grade bio class to answer the rest of your questions.  I suggest, again likely uselessly, that you go read http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-...

I also suggest that you might like to check out The Big Bang Cosmology Primer

http://cosmology.berkeley.edu/Education/...

You might also find out by looking around that the iron and calcium in your blood and bones was born (and I use the term in its non-biological sense)  in a star long before our sun began to shine.

BTW - I don't "believe" in evolutionary theory.  I accept the evidence that has been found repeatedly and in multidisciplines around the world.  Belief has nothing to do with it.

Answer 4

Most of your questions (except for the one about natural selection) have absolutely nothing to do with Evolution theory.

It is not "half-baked evidence" that there was no life and then non-living matter turned into some "cells.  (You threw in that word "magically", and I dropped it, because obviously the word "magically" isn't exactly a scientific concept.)   We have evidence of life going back to 3.5 billion years ago.  And we also have evidence that the earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago ... so *OBVIOUSLY* life appeared sometime in that one billion years.   That is not "half-baked evidence."  

>"How did non living matter turned into living cells (by itself) ?"

The beginnings of life from non-life is a *completely* separate question from evolution. Evolution is about how life *changes*, not how it *began*.

But the answer is that this is still being researched (we've only had the tools to start looking at this question for the last 50 years).  But there are already *MANY* very promising ideas.   Scientists aren't exactly stumped ... they just need more research to find evidence that favors one hypothesis over the others.

In science, there is nothing wrong with the answer "we don't know", as long as there are ideas about how to go about finding the answers.  The reason that Creationists make such lousy scientists is that they are *SO* willing to throw in the towel and say "we don't know, therefore we might as well stop looking for an answer and just say 'God did it'."

>"How did everything turned into something else as a result of natural selection...because Natural selection has no consciousness."

Why does something need consciousness to change?  Sea cliffs change into sandy beaches without conciousness.    Water vapor turns into snowflakes without consciousness.

Natural selection just means that that beneficial traits will get passed onto more offspring.   So evolution is the result of millions of generations of beneficial traits accumulating, and bad traits disappearing, due to the simple act of surviving and making babies in an environment.   It is a slow process, but an absolutely *relentless* process.   It does not require "consciousness" to explain it.  (Which is not to say that conciousness cannot affect it ... as obviously humans can *direct* evolution by controlling the selection pressures ... that's what we do when we breed cows, racehorses, or cocker spaniels.)

>"How can a spider build such a sophisticated web right when it comes out of its egg and without learning it from other spiders?"

Again, that question is irrelevant to evolution.  Clearly a spider does build a web without learning it from other spiders, so the answer to your question is that the web-building skill *must* be encodable in DNA and inheritable. Period. (Unless you are saying that God teaches every newborn spider this skill).

>"Where did non living matter come from in the begining?"

Again, NOTHING to do with evolution, but with the Big Bang theory of cosmology.   I suggest asking this in the Astronomy and Space section.

It is this inability to separate these issues that makes your question so frustrating to answer.   Evolution is a very narrow concept in biology ... considered the cornerstone of modern biology.   You don't get to wrap them all up into one overreaching package you call "evolution" so that you can claim that uncertainties about the origins of the universe, of matter, or even the origins of life, translate somehow into uncertainties about evolution!

Answer 5

First of all, it's obvious you don''t understand what you're talking about.  You need to do more learning on this subject.  How can you make in informed decision about what to believe if you don't even know what you're talking about?

Evolution has NOTHING to do with 'where the first life came from.'  That is a completely different subject called abiogenesis.  You can learn about abiogenesis here - http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob...

Just so you know, it's an observed fact that life can be created from nonliving things.  Here is an example of that happening - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/200...

"How did everything turned into something else as a result of natural selection...because Natural selection has no consciousness."

Do you actually know what natural selection is?  Because if you do, it's quite clear that random mutation + natural selection can lead to new organisms.  *Even creationists don't deny this can happen.*  Creationists only claim that it is confined to variation within a species.

Here is an example of an observed, proven example of this happening - http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/...

"How can a spider build such a sophisticated web right when it comes out of its egg and without learning it from other spiders? How does it know how to build it?"

Instinct.  How do you know how to breathe, or eat, when you're born without learning it from another human?  It's the same thing, instinct.

"Where did non living matter come from in the begining?"

I could just as easily ask you where god came from.  If you say god has always been there, then I can say the 'non living matter' has always been there.

"half-baked evidence"

This is the part that most clearly shows you have no idea what you're talking about.  The evidence for evolution is IMMENSE.  The evolutionary _process_ is an observed fact, we KNOW that things evolve, there is no denying this.  The only questions is HOW exactly they evolve.

You MIGHT be able to argue that, even though ALL THE EVIDENCE CLEARLY POINTS TOWARD evolution, it's still not true.  But what you CAN'T say is that the evidence is weak or nonexistent, unless you are just completely ignorant about the evidence.

I encourage you to learn more about the evidence for evolution - http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

Answer 6

This isn't evolution...it's abiogenesis.

Biomolecules spontaneously form in a reducing environment like that of the early Earth.

The rest is complicated.  Read a little next time.