Thoughts on Evolution?

Question

I just want to know what are your thoughts of the Theory of Evolution.

Answer 1

After all this time, without a better explanation for the origin of species, I believe it should be considered fact, not theory.

Answer 2

I'ts really quite simple, there both right,

if you were a God, and wanted to create a world, would you not create life that can evolve over time with out your help.

learning and evolving over time from it environment and it's mistakes.

Answer 3

"Cloudcity CC"...what he/she said! I'm going with that.

Answer 4

DNA is too complex to instruct how each cell should divide and grow in each specie. It takes too much faith to believe it happened all by itself with out  a intelligent source involved.

Why is it too hard to believe that God Created every living thing?

Answer 5

Curious, but I've never seen pictures of a transgendered species. In other words, we see monkeys and we see men, but we've never seen any documented evidence that there are creatures running around that are still animalistic, but are also developing the traits of humans.......now that I think about it, maybe we have.......liberals.......

Answer 6

I dont think its a matter of belief.  its a fact that has happened and is happening

something that needs to be believed is the fact that there is a higher being, may it be god or simply nature that we can never fully understand.

so for now, as we live our lives, we should live it by the fundamental tenets of most religions- love and help one another other and lead a good, moral life.

:D

Answer 7

I don't believe it to be a theory.

Answer 8

i think god(could just be an ET that has the technology to create galaxies-or it/he/she could have done something like blown up an experimental power source or the likes) but i dont think one dull day absolutely nothing decided to make something of itself so somewhere along the line something happened that made THE BIG BANG and have you never asked yourself what was BEFORE the big bang??????  it cannot have been nothing because how did nothing suddenly appear and go BANG?

so we have established that something must have been there and set the ball moving but i think the most explicable answer it that something-a universe generation-before us happned say like a massive war and a big big big big bomb or device of somekind or an experiment that went wrong killed all of that life and hey presto amino acids came along

Answer 9

It seems to be working.

Answer 10

I think that hermit needs to read the definition of theory, in terms of science... It is not the same as the layman use of the word. In science, theory is an accepted logical hypothesis, based on facts.

Edit: Greg, you're suggesting that it is difficult to believe that species might have learned to adapt to their environment and evolve over Billions of years, in spite of incredible amounts of documented research to support such a notion, but that it is reasonable to assume some omniscient entity that predates the known universe creating us and the universe for reasons unknown, despite no evidence to suggest such a thing (excluding some stories written down about 700 years later, by men about some person who claimed to be the avatar son of that divine being, over 2,000 years ago), is reasonable ? I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on that one...

Edit: F W... as I said to hermit, a theory is more or less accepted by the scientific community as fact (ie. The theory of relativity), a theory in science can only become a law once there is enough evidence that it cannot be argued. ie. Gravity. We know Gravity exists, without a doubt. Evolution while logical and supported by the evidence, is not proven infallible without a doubt.

Answer 11

We must remember that evolution makes no claim as to creation. It merely recalls the events of earths history.

It wasn't Darwin that brought evolution to the fore. It was a man named William "Strata" Smith. It was through him evolution began to unfold. He is also responsible for creating the term(s) stratify and stratosphere.

http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oG...

Answer 12

Well everyone in my church doesn't beleive in it. I kinda do though because I don't think that man just was created because didn't they find fossils of our previous ancestors?

Answer 13

Evolution is a Circular Religion because it takes faith to believe that life was created from non-living matter WITHOUT AN INTELLIGENT CAUSE.  (THIS HAS NEVER BEEN OBSERVED)  The law of biogenesis states life only comes from life.

Answer 14

It is close to 150 years since Darwin wrote "The Origin of Species", and during that entire time it has been tested by naturalists, biologist, geologists, paleontologists, physicists, etc. and not only have they been unable to falsify natural selection (which was Darwin's great insight), but their research has lead to the strengthening of evolution to the point that it is one of the main underpinnings of science.

Darwinian evolution has amassed an enormous amount of evidence in support. To give only a few examples:

There is a great deal of evidence for pathogens evolving resistance under selective pressure of antibiotics--the so-called superbugs.

Also, there is a lot of evidence that insects have evolved resistance to pesticides such as DDT.

Peppered moths are a great example of natural selection as well as how science works. The original research was widely excepted, but other evolutionary scientists found problems with the way that research was done. The research was redone, addressing the problems in methods, and reconfirmed the conclusions. (see first two links below).

Additional evidence for evolution can be found in looking at populations that are in the process of speciation. Since evolution does not proceed quickly enough to show that entire process in a human lifetime or even in several human lifetimes, you have to look at several examples:

1. Ligers and tigons: these are offspring of lions and tigers. Ligers are offspring of lionesses and male tigers, tigons the offspring of tigresses and male lions. Lions are known to have overlapped in range with tigers in the near past--the last 10,000 years or so (see third link below). Even now there are reports of rare crosses in the wild but normally crosses are in captivity and often by means of artificial insemination (the 3rd-5th links below). Only the female crosses are fertile.

2. Mules: Offspring of horses and asses (donkeys) are mules, well know for being sterile.

3. Herring Gulls: In England, The Herring Gull and the Lesser Black-backed Gull coexist but do not interbreed--the sign of different species. However, if one follows the Herring Gull populations westward, around the Arctic Circle, one finds that the populations change in appearance, becoming more like Lesser Black-backed Gulls. By the time you reach England again, there are two species, even though up to that point, each population of gull can and does interbreed with it's neighbors. There are other examples, such as the salamander Ensatina in the US pacific coast (see the 6th and 7th links below).

Another major source of evidence is of course the fossil record. There are so many examples, that it is hard to single out just a few examples, but I'll try.

1. The evolution of life before 600 million years ago: It is well known that there was an (apparently ) enormous and sudden flowering of life in the Cambrian period, with little or no evidence of life in earlier rock. This for years has been used by creationists to attack evolution, but a great deal of research has been done in the last fifty years, and there is a good record now of life on earth going back to about 3.6 billion years ago. An excellent book on this topic is Andrew H. Knoll's "Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth" (see the 8th link below).

2. Evolution of Tetrapods and Cetaceans: A great deal of research, spanning paleontology, molecular genetics, ontology and other fields in Biology has been done on the evolution of land vertebrates (tetrapods), and a clear picture has emerged.

This has included many testable predictions (one of the elements of science--theories [that is, well-tested explanations] will generate testable hypotheses), such as predicting that one should find fossils of vertebrates in the process of adapting to life on land in rocks around 375 million years old-- a prediction that did happen.

No more interesting than the process by which vertebrates evolved to live on land, is the process by which the cetaceans evolved to live a fully aquatic life. Again, research in the last thirty years has clarified how this happened.

A good account for both of these is Carl Zimmer's "At the Water's Edge : Fish with Fingers, Whales with Legs, and How Life Came Ashore but Then Went Back to Sea" (see the 9th link below).

3. Human Evolution: This is of course the elephant in the corner. If evolution did not imply that humans evolved, there would be no fight at all. Without going into a HUGE amount of detail, I'll note that two of the most famous paleoanthropological finds were made by workers who predicted where fossil hominid remains were and then went out and found them: Eugen (or Eugene) DuBois and Pithecanthropus (now known as Homo erectus) in Java, and Louis Leakey and his hominid finds in East Africa (see the 10th-13th links below).

Before moving on to Creation, I want to emphasize several points.

First, the word "theory" has a different meaning in science then it does popularly. In science, a theory is an explanation or set of explanations for which there is a considerable body of supporting work, usually over a considerable period of time. Darwinian evolution, or, more exactly, the NeoDarwinian synthesis, now has 150 years of testing behind it. The popular meaning of "theory" is a yet untested or unsupported idea. This is closer to what science call a hypothesis, if it isn't a wild guess or assertion of opinion. A lot of confusion can be avoided if this difference is kept in mind.

Second, the NeoDarwinian synthesis is not something to just toss aside. It is the basic organizing theory in biology. There is very little in biology now that does not depend on or bear on evolution. Further, much evidence supporting evolution is basis in other scientific disciplines, such as physics, astronomy, geology, chemistry and so forth. Further, there are other field, such as medicine which depend on the insights gained from evolution.

Third, if you examine the links below, you'll find lots of disagreements among evolutionary scientists. This is not a weakness, but strength. This is how science works. Ideas are presented, supported, tested, pulled apart, argued over until the idea is rejected, or tentatively accepted.

Classical physics was a set of explanations that had developed over a thousand-plus years. However at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th centuries, it was found that it could not explain certain phenomena and was disproved. Yet we are still taught physics as new theories were proposed, tested and refined which incorporate what classic physics explained and also those phenomena that it could not.

Regarding Creation, I cannot build any case for its acceptance. We tend to equate "creation" with a more or less literal interpretation of the book of Genesis in the Jewish and Christian scriptures.

Science can only work with material causes and material phenomena. Why is this? Because science takes an explanation and tests it, trying to disprove it (you can't prove something is true, you can only disprove it).

How can you test creation? Every piece of evidence mentioned above can be met by the statement: "God in His wisdom has ordained it to be so".

There is really nothing to be said further, there is no point where they come to grips.

Why then the "controversy"? It is because some people of belief feel that the concept of evolution is so contrary to belief that it should not be taught, or if it does that creation should be taught too.

In the US, there is now almost forty years of case law that concludes that Creation is a specific form of religious belief and cannot be taught in public schools as science (see the 14th and 15th links below).

Creation supporters want creation in some form taught to oppose evolution. They have tried to repackage creationism as "Creation Science" or "Scientific Creationism", they have tied to get equal time for it in the classroom, and the courts have in each case declared it to be religion, not science.

Most recently, creationism has been repackaged as "Intelligent Design", with the more modest goal of "teaching the controversy", by which they mean the "scientific" controversy.

Intelligent design got its day in court in the case Kitzmiller vs. Dover, where all parties wanted the judge to rule on whether ID was or was not science. Judge Jones clearly ruled that ID was not science, only creationism--i.e. religion renamed. (see link 15 below for links to all the case documents, and link 16 for Judge Jones' decision).

One of the most damning exhibits presented was proof that the ID textbook "Of Pandas and People" was really a Creation Science textbook, with ID language replacing Creationist language. In fact a poor job was done, so that the term "creationists" was replaced with "cdesign proponentsists" instead of the intended "intelligent design proponents" (see links 17-21 below).

So if creationism is religion, not science, where do they draw a scientific case. The blunt fact is that they don't. Their "case" is based on misrepresenting the work of evolutionists, selective quoting to make individuals say things other then they actually said. They want to get some form of creation into the schools (currently this form is Intelligent Design) to effect a societal change, not to teach science. (this is not really denied by the creationists, they quite openly have their strategy, called the "Wedge Strategy" on the web, see link 22. For more on creationist tactics and their refutation, see "Panda's Thumb", link 23 below).

To conclude, evolution is a well-supported scientific theory with almost 150 years of scientific study backing it up.