Things about Evolution which i dont understand?

Question

yes i can understand how wild dogs and wolves evolved to todays hundreds of different dogs we see that have been domesticated through breeding patterns.

same can be said about cats coing out of tigers and leopards in the wild

Its true about every plant, animal , bird , fish , insect and even Humanbeing.

But what i cant understand is according to evolution how a plant could have evolved into a bird or how a Goat could have evolved into a snake or a fish evolving into monkey or humanbeing.

While Creationism has holes in it dont you think that Evolution too has holes in its theory?

what am i supposed to believe?

Answer 1

everything evolved from the same single celled organisms at the start of evolution. everything is extremely minutely different from its parent, and over time the organisms evolved into multi celled organisms which evolved into fish etc. etc. etc.

they also evolved in some parts into plant life, because over time, evolution found that it was better to have a dormant living thing instead of a conscious living thing.

over a long time, everything evolved from these, each time changing something very slightly, and over time changing the very way they are made, bringing about the extreme differences we see today.

Answer 2

Not to sound snide but you should read more about Evolution and the nature of it. The only hole in the theory is the Missing Link. That is why it has the name. Its not like plants go poof! and they are bird. It takes billions of years and even more cell mutations to create the bridge. You need to think about all the middle steps like the drawing of a monkey becoming a man. Creationism doesn't have holes, it has misnomers, juxtaposition, fantasy, and magic. Evolution is proven, tested, and proven again. Believe it or not, I am not an atheist or agnostic.

Here is first hole in Creationism:

Genesis Chapter 1: God creates Adam and Eve at the same time

Genesis Chapter 2: God created Adam, Adam performs tasks like naming the animals, gets lonely, and then Eve is created from his rib.

Answer 3

Well it helps to understand the 'nature' of the holes.

There are no holes in the Principal of Intelligent Design.  Aka Creationism.

Intelligent things can clearly design.

And there are no holes in the Principal of Evolution.   We know random changes occur.  We know nature kills what doesn't work.  We know life exponentially copies what does work.

The 'holes' are in the paleontological speculations.   When you try and chart the precise path of Evolutionary development for thousands of species from relatively sparse fossil data. In fact holes doesn't really describe it.   You are guessing a puzzle in which the vast majority of the pieces are missing.

But Creationism is in EXACATLY the same boat, because they have the exact same fossil data.   It's fine to say Intelligence can design, but proving the precise path is again profoundly speculative.  And the assertion that our species is ~6000 years old is just in flat out contradiction to the fossil record.

So believe what you like.   I think Religion is great morality, but crappy paleontology.

What you say you can't understand regards Evolutionary paleontology, i.e. goat -> snake, is not what the Evolutionary paleontologists speculate.  If you want to know the current theories on the 'tree of life' look them up.  

Debunking assertions that haven't been made is dishonest at best, and foolish at worst.

As a believer you should be shooting for honest & wise.

Answer 4

Baby steps.  THat's how it works.  

The plant evolving into a bird never happened, of course, nor the goat evolving into a snake.  There were many steps between fishes and monkeys. Before you try to poke holes in it, try to at least get the order right.

Answer 5

according to darwin's belief, intelligent design.

Answer 6

Box, believe in what your mind tells you is real. Believe in that which is proven, to your own satisfaction and not to sciences or religions. Believe in yourself, and your own innate ability to discern truth as it applies to you.

All else, my friend, is bunk..........

Answer 7

This has been an ongoing debate for quite some time. Religion vs Evolution. My thoughts on it are that the world was created by God but after Jesus died the world began to evolve on its own. I mean how come there isn't a half goat fish thing? Or the caveman thing between humans and monkeys.

Answer 8

You're supposed to believe in evolution because it's scientific, whereas the alternatives are all superstition.

Goats don't evolve into snakes. They share a common ancestor, which means they both come from something else which was neither goat nor snake and was probably very small.

Start with an easier example. Whales and horses. They're both mammals, and it turns out that they're both descended from a land animal. This is shown by whale skeletons which have residual rear leg bones inside their bodies. The front legs obviously correspond to the whale's fins. So it seems that in the past there was a four-legged land animal which spent some time on land and some time going into water for prey, much like an otter. Imagine that due to some reason the population of otters got divided up maybe because some of them moved inland. As time went on they'd lose their adaptation to water and adapt better to being on land: hooves, longer legs etc. On the other hand the ones that stayed near the water would, over millions of generations, maybe spend all their time in water, in which case their tails would adapt to help them swim better, their front legs would still be useful for propulsion and for direction, but their back legs would be increasingly redundant. Over time they'd become smaller and eventually virtually disappear.

The point being that whales don't turn into horses or vice versa, but they're both descended from something else.

So much for whales and horses. Going back to snakes and goats: they are in two very separate evolutionary paths. Snakes are reptiles, goats are mammals, so to find the common ancestor we have to go right back to the appearance of mammals, probably from reptilian dinosaurs.

If you choose not to believe in evolution just because we don't know the whole story yet (that's how it is with science: we have to find out ourselves, bit by bit - God won't tell us) you have to answer why there are maladaptations, e.g. parts of animals that are at best useless. Evolution answers this by saying they are vestiges of the evolutionary path. Religion ignores them cos they imply bad design by God.

For example, in your eyes there are photoreceptors making up your retina. It would make sense for the nerves that connect these to your brain to come out of the back of the retina. Instead they come out of the front, meaning that your eyes aren't as sensitive as they could be (cos the nerves absorb some of the light) and you also have a blind spot where the nerves go through the retina in order to come out the other side and go to the brain. There's no way this can evolve away cos there's no evolutionary path around this problem. Very bad design though. The whale's hind legs and your appendix are other examples.

Answer 9

what

Answer 10

One thing to remember is that neither can be proven.  They are both religious beliefs.  The thing I hate about the whole debate is how evolution is suppose to be "scientific" and if you don't believe it you're a "religious nut".  The truth of it all is that there are 2 main types of evolution: MICRO and MACRO.  Micro evolution says that there are variety among the species.  Like you said dogs and wolves have the same ancestor.  This can be observed and is true.  Macro evolution says that everything came from one micro-organism.  This is c**p. It's not science, it can't be proven, and it takes faith to believe it.  That my friend is a RELIGION!!!! not science

Answer 11

Evolution -like all biological ideas - is a theory. It is not a law as you would get in physics.

A goat wouldn't evolve into a snake, rather, they would have a common ancestor. It's like stating how can a branch on a tree cause another branch on the same tree? It doesn't. They are ancestors of the seed that is planted.

However, the problem does arise in plants as we do not have a clear guideline as to what makes a new species as plants do apparently cross breed. This is not for survival but rather as a by-product.

Answer 12

It all started with single-celled organisms. These organisms broke off into branches, which have produced all the living organisms present today.

Plants and Animals have a different genetic make-up, therefore how could a plant possibly evolve into a human or any animal in that case?

The logical error can be found in your reasoning, not in the theory of evolution.

Answer 13

Believe wht your gut tells you. You may even believe a combination of the two. You don't have to understand a theory to believe it, when something tells you you should lean one way or another. There are somethings, infact, many many thiings we will never understand during our existence here on Earth.  We don't need to understand the mechanics of how an airplane works to see that it does indeed fly. And so, in seeing that it works and has a history, we use commercial travel. If you feel compelled to choose a theory, you have only to go outdoors and observe the world around you. Einstein himself acknowledged the existence of God, but was one of the most accomplished Scientists and Theorists of our time. But you don't have to be an Einstein to confirm or deny, in your own mind, what you yourself will choose as True , in your own sense, and what works for you. Free Will is a wonderful thing!

Answer 14

You don't really understand evolution do you?

You must remember that evolution is a very slow process. Every adaptation or mutation happens in a very "slow motion" process. A goat can't evolve into a snake. A fish didn't evolve into a monkey.

Let me just explain this evolution tree.

FISH

AMPHIBIAN

REPTILES

Imagine a fish, a fish that lives in very shallow waters. This shallow water, will sometimes dry in some parts leaving only little water for the fish. Fish have gills and because they live in dry ponds, there gills woulnd't be really helpful because it only allowed them to breath underwater. So many of these fish die.

But some of these fish did not die. Some of them ADAPTED. They DEVELOPED, gills that can breath on air. Why did they ADAPT? Because if they didn't they would die.

With their NEW gills (lungs), they also adapted to have fins that can crawl in land (just like the Mudskipper and Coelacanth). Now this happens in a very long time.

Millions of years later, the SPECIES, of this fish are no longer the SPECIES before because all their descendants are different from them.

Different? How? Different because the gills and fins are now PERFECTLY DEVELOPED into lungs and legs.

Thus these group of fish became AMPHIBIANS.

Able to live on water and on land.

I'm tired... I hope you get the basic concept of evolution.

Answer 15

Plants never evolved into birds, and goats never evolved into snakes. There is this horrible misconception spreading right now about evolution that basically says that any one organism evolved from any other randomly chosen organism. It's not true.

Evolution does not really have any holes. Some of the details of the theory are in dispute by evolutionary biologists, but almost all biological phenomena are explained under the umbrella of evolution. It's like gravity: we know that gravity is what holds the planets in sway, but we also know that there's something very subtle wrong with the mathematical details of Einstein's formulation of gravity because it doesn't mix with quantum mechanics. The most technical details are under debate, but there aren't really holes in the theory, and the theory is correct with unbelievable precision in every imaginable case except for a few especially exotic ones (black holes and the big bang) which we simply don't fully understand right now. This is the case with evolution. One technical area that was under debate for a while is the idea of punctuated equilibria, a doctrine proposed by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould. Punctuated equilibria is a conjecture about the rate at which speciation occurs.

In another sense, evolution is not so much a theory as it is merely a description of the way certain animals' offspring survive and others' offspring die off. If we begin with a self-replicating molecule, evolution is nearly inevitable. When the molecule replicates itself, it makes errors, producing variants of itself instead of perfect copies. Some variants survive better than others and fill up the next "generation." Then each variant produces "offspring" of its own, each "child" slightly different from the "parent." Evolution, then, is inevitable: it's nothing more than the dynamics of which replicas survive and which do not. Now, that does not mean that eventually a human will emerge. Evolution does *not* mean evolution towards humans, although the folly of human conceit often tempts us to think so; it means a statistically significant change of the frequencies of certain genes in the gene pool for a population of organisms.

A very important fact about evolution emerges here: it is directionless. There is no goal, no target, no ultimate organism to which all others are evolving. We humans certainly are not such an ultimate organism. We can survive in very few natural environments, and while we are smart, we're weak and would be torn to pieces by many wild animals. It is most likely a profound occurrence of luck that we humans have become so great in number. The first few organisms rightly classified as "humans" would have had literally the fight of their lives to ensure that their offspring would live on. After all, it took thousands of years before human technology really took off besides a few carved knives.

Another misconception is that evolution is purely random. This couldn't be further from the truth. Evolution itself is very deterministic and well-defined. Those genes that lend the organism helpful qualities tend to be propagated into the next generation, and these genes thus spread through the gene pool, becoming prevalent in the whole population. That is evolution. The only thing that's random is the slight shuffling of genes around when new offspring are produced to create biological diversity and the occurrence of mutations due to physical phenomena such as the striking of the chromosomes by gamma rays. Which genes eventually propagate through the gene pool are not chosen randomly; nature, through her selection process, carefully selects those genes that are more beneficial to the organisms. The genetic variation produced by the shuffling of the genes, however, is critical for evolution to work. Without a sufficient level of genetic variation, natural selection won't have enough variants to work with for some to spread and others to die out, and evolution won't occur. With humans right now genetic variation has nearly died out, although it still pops up now and then.

I've been speaking of evolution as occurring at the level of the gene. I've said evolution is what happens when a certain gene confers a helpful quality upon an organism and consequently spreads through the population. Whence comes altruism and group dynamics, then? Even with elementary mathematical models of population genetics, we can see genes emerging that produce altruistic feelings in organisms because of a phenomenon called "reciprocal altruism." I won't explain all the hairy details, but the basic idea is simple: if a gene that causes altruism gets spread somehow, then any one organism will benefit greatly because suddenly all the other organisms are helping it out. There's more to it than this, but fear not, it's demonstrated that this principle literally does work. Computer simulations have been run many times by many people testing whether altruism could actually arise from population genetics and indeed it does due to exactly what I have described above.

I hope this helps clear up some of the matter for you! :D

By the way, you may find the book "The Ancestor's Tale" by Richard Dawkins interesting. Look it up.

Answer 16

A small single celled organism gradually turning onto a sea creature which then decided to live on land which then turned to a mammal is different to dogs becoming wolves or vice-versa, inbreeding and domestication or mixing of genes to create new breeds is not evolution.

Any serious thinker interested in evolution (whether pro or anti) would read Michael J Behe's book, Darwins Black Box.

Seriously, read it.

Hope that clarifies a little.

Answer 17

evolution is one man's idea which people take to sieriously.

creationists go acording to what the only book that nobody has proven wrong in any subject, the bible.

You Choose What to Believe.

Answer 18

Evolution occurs at an extremely slow pace, thousands, perhaps millions of years.  This is in drastic contract to our own lifespan of perhaps 100 years.  So, when you study the concept of evolution, you are inclined to imagine, for example, a pair fish happily swimming along deciding one day, as if by magic, to growing legs, developing lungs and begin walking upright.  The same holds true for monkeys.   Theorists are not saying that a tree dwelling monkey wakes up one day and starts using tools and developing language.

As to what you are supposed to believe is entirely up to you.  You are on the right track.  You are questioning beliefs.  Continue your study and keep asking questions until you have an answers until you are satisfied