What is evolution? Is it real? I want a Creationist's point-of-view please.?

Question

I want a REAL and SERIOUS answer, by the way.

Answer 1

This is a serious answer! It doesn't work. Darwin himself in the origin of species, never discussed the theory of evolution on the human species, other than to remark that," light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history".What is working is the brainwashing of our children who essentially are becoming worshipers of time. What Darwin inferred was that over time a species will adapt and improve it's particular breed to fit the conditions it lives in.Thomas Huxley was the first to construct on the basis of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection a clear and logical image of biological man. And as such is clearly the founder of evolutionary anthropology. This takes it a step further and claims that a species will adapt and improve it's particular breed to fit the conditions it lives in to the point of actually changing species. THERE IS NO PROOF OF THIS. If Darwin's theory is correct Eskimos should have grown fur, and the people living in very hot climates would be reflective silver.The opposite is true.  Darwin was angry with God over all the misery in the world, and wrote this," The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved THEORY! Is it then a science, or faith? ".  The faith he speaks of is the worshiping of time!*******P.S. Wolver Li (aptly named) gives a perfect explanation, and an excellent argument against macro-evolution. And make no mistake macro-evolution is the issue. The idea that one species has ever evolved into a different species has NO PROOF!!  The time frame evolutionists require to pull this off is too long to be provable. Because of this it is not a science at all, but a wild haired guess. The idea of God has helped many people, and caused many problems too! The idea of no God has been recorded also, and it's ramafications are not so rosey! Our country was founded by people who believed in God. Teaching our children that their is no god is having negative effects on society. It is an extraordinary claim. It should have extraordinary proof. People go to school and if they don't get on board with this unprovable theory, then their grades suffer! Or the y fail the class. They could just pretend to believe to get good grades, but what kind of principles are we teaching our children if we want them to learn that! People who teach evolution use creation to prove their theory. This makes no sense. If you don't beleive in Genisis(which is not in the christian books of the Bible by the way, but in the old testament!) that doesn't mean a fish turned into a reptile, turned into a mammal, turned from a cat to a dog or a horse to a pig. Their is no proof of any of this in the fossil records. All his examples are of changes within a species! His homind references are even more dubious. many fanciful fossils and skulls have emerged by scientists claiming to be the missing link! they have turned out to be mistakes or pranks. I can't help but believe that an anti-God motivation lies beneath this hoax! and reading the posts on this site only strengthens my belief. Their greatest argument is,"It can't be God". If you want to bring this country down. You'd want to attack it at it's strongest point. It's belief in God's influence. Then Communism would have a greater foothold than before!

Answer 2

Ever heard of an oxymoron?  That's what a creationist's view of evolution would be.

Answer 3

evolution is change over time

and natural sewlection plays a big role into evolution

i took like 20 pages in notes on this yesterday in school

Answer 4

Nobody knows if its really real or not because nobody was their to witness the changing of the genes over time.  Its just a theory, meaning that it has its own proofs and stuff but not actually proven.

Answer 5

from a creationist pov, evolution does not exist..  they believe that everything in the world was created at the same time and created perfect, so there was no need for anything to "change" to suit its environment...

Answer 6

Evolution is real.  Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution to get a description of how evolution operates.  (I know it is Wikipedia, but it is a good overview).  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.

Here is a look at the evidence:

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

Also 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 clairified 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, the 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 a 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. Generally, creation is based on the belief in a God or Gods who acted to bring the material world into existence. More specifically, we tend to equate "creation" with a more or less literal interpretation of the book of Genesis in the Jewish and Christian scriptures.

There really is nothing here to intersect or debate on. Either you believe in that interpretation or not. There is nothing that science can test for.

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. Creation is a religious belief, incapable of scientific testing. The "controversy" is to try to promote religion in society under the guise of science.

To the extent the controversy should be taught, it should be taught in social science classes.

1. http://www.arn.org/docs/wells/jw_pepmoth...

2.http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/11/...

3.http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_7615...

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liger

5. http://www.geocities.com/pride_lands/Lig...

6. http://blog.case.edu/singham/2007/08/01/...

7. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/librar...

8. http://www.amazon.com/Life-Young-Planet-...

9. http://www.amazon.com/At-Waters-Edge-Fin...

10. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/edu...

11. http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/...

12. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/lle...

13. http://www.leakeyfoundation.org/foundati...

14. http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/article...

15. http://www2.ncseweb.org/wp/?page_id=5

16. http://www2.ncseweb.org/kvd/all_legal/20...

17. http://www2.ncseweb.org/kvd/exhibits/ori...

18. http://www2.ncseweb.org/kvd/exhibits/ori...

19. http://www2.ncseweb.org/kvd/exhibits/ori...

20. http://www2.ncseweb.org/kvd/exhibits/ori...

21. http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2005...

22. http://www.antievolution.org/features/we...

23. http://www.pandasthumb.org/

Source(s):

Finally, I hold two degrees in paleoanthropology (human evolution). Also, I am a Christian, active in my congregation and former member of the church council.

wl

Answer 7

If you want a creationist's view, I suggest you post to the religious & spirituality board, or folk lore.  Scientists do not think the Earth is 6000 yrs old & that everything suddenly appeared within 6 days... Chuckle, as if the concept of a day existed before there was an Earth to turn.

Lemurs & monkeys evolved from prosimians & the great Apes did indeed evolve from monkeys.  Homo sapiens evolved from bipedal apes (apes that walked on 2 legs).  I know many will tell you that Apes & humans have a common ancestor, & while true, they were indeed one of the many lines of bipedal apes alive some 8-10 million years ago. Most of these ancient apes died out (both quadrapedal, knuckle walkers & bipedal) but those that survived eventually produced modern apes & modern humans.  

By about 2.8 million years ago the 1st bipedal ape to be designated human (Homo hablis) appeared. From fossile evidence we've determined this human could not talk as modern humans do because it had no hyoid bone to control the air through the larynx.

About 2. 2 million years ago Homo erectus had developed & this human had a hyoid bone, making speach possible. They spread throughout Africa, Europe & Asia & appear to have produced Homo sapien in Africa & Homo neandertal in Europe.

This is just a quick overview or evolution. Evolution is far more than just a "theory" & is supported by all fields of science, while, other than the fundamentalist's interpretation of the Bible, absolutely no evidence supports creationism.  I would remind you that the "Theory of Gravity" is also supported by all fields of science.  In spite of what some creationists would tell you, "Laws" of science are equations, but everything else in science is given the term "theory" after it undergoes rigorous testing as a "hypothesis" & meets the tests of all fields of science.

We have a theory that suggests the World is like a ball & revolves around the Sun too, but religious leaders disputed that until the 20th century.

OK, I give up, the theory of gravity is wrong & science doesn't work. You creationist can all fly accross the Grand Canyon, if you hold a bible in your hand & have faith, please try it! Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.

Answer 8

First there was nothing- no-thing. God, an entity encompassed nothing, no-thing.The entity that we call God created something from nothing. We imperfects can only fathom this Perfect entity as having no beginning and no end, infinite. This Creator planted the seeds of evolution, that is like a seeds, grew, mixed and created. Creation has been and is sustained by this Creator.

Answer 9

No : D

Think of a cup of hot coffee that you just made. You leave it there for a while, it cools down. After a some time, it becomes totally cold. Things weaken over time, so how can they "evolve" ?

The theories of evolution often contradicts itself..

(btw by txtbks, I mean like Science books. You know, written by scientists and stuff)

1. THE ORIGIN OF LIFE

Textbooks claim that the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment shows how life's building blocks may have formed on the early Earth--when conditions on the early Earth were probably nothing like those used in the experiment, and the origin of life remains a mystery.

2. DARWIN'S TREE OF LIFE

Textbooks don't discuss the "Cambrian explosion", in which all major animal groups appear together in the fossil record fully formed instead of branching from a common ancestor--this contradicting the evolutionary tree of life.

3. HOMOLOGY

Textbooks define homology as similarity due to common ancestry, then claim that it is evidence for common ancestry-- a circular argument masquerading (disguising) as scientific evidence.

4. VERTEBRATE EMBRYOS

Txtbks use drawings of similarities in vertebrate embryos as evidence for their common ancestry, even though biologists have known for over a century that vertebrate embryos are not most similar in their early stages and the drawings are faked .____.

5. ARCHAEOPTERYX (it's a fossil name)

txtbooks portray this fossil as the missing link between dinosaurs and modern birds, even though modren birds are probably not descended from it, and its 'supposed' ancestors do not appear until millions of years after it.

6. PEPPERED MOTHS (hm, I've heard about them a lot..)

txtbks use pics of peppered moths camouflaged on tree trunks as evidence for natural selection when biologists have known since the 1980s that the moths don't normally rest on tree trunks, and all the pics have been staged.

7. DARWIN'S FINCHES

txtbks claim that beak changes in Galapagos finches during a severe drought can explain the origin of species by natural selection, even though the changes were reversed after the drought ended, and no net evolution occurred.

8. MUTANT FRUIT FLIES

txtbks use fruit flies with an extra pair of wings as evidence that DNA mutations can supply raw materials for evolution even though the extra wings have no muscles and these disabled mutants can not survive outside the lab.

9. HUMAN ORIGINS

Artists' drawings of ape-like humans are used to justify materialistic claims that we are just animals and our existence is a mere accident, when fossil experts can not even agree on who our supposed ancestors or what they looked like.

10. EVOLUTION A FACT?

We are told that Darwin's theory of evolution is a scientific fact even though many of its claims are based on misinterpretations of the facts.

Oh, and studies have found that we all orginate from a single woman called Eve. Out of all the names, why did it have to be Eve? - 1001 things everyone should know about Science, By James Trefil. Forgot what page, but it was fact #239

Answer 10

Evolution is supposedly the theory that we (humans) evolved from monkeys (main theory) or maybe another species of animal.  I do not believe in this because you don't see a monkey picking up a stick and trying to make fire do you?

You also don't see another animal growing legs and walking on to legs, speaking a major human language, or doing another human-like activity.  The other theory is that we came from aliens.

Answer 11

Here are the Creationist/ Intelligent Design theories of how things came to be:

"Young Earth" Created by supernatural means 6-10,000 years ago. Everything appears at once from nothing

"Old Earth" Earth is millions, not thousands of years old. This theory has several versions:

    "Gap" Earth is old but had fallen into decay. Life was begun on the old planet. This does address fossil evidence.

    "Progressive" God allows certain things natural selection and mutations to occur but will directly intervene as required.

    "Framework Interpretation" holds the Genesis account isn't literal but more represents the outline of how life came to be.

    "Day Age" Here it's held that "Day" can be thousands of millions of years. The world was crated in 6 "days" but it was over a very long time.

"Theistic" AKA  "evolutionary creationism", creation is compatible with  scientific theory (evolution) as it is a tool used by God,

" Literal" God created everything in 6 days right before 23 October  4004 BC. Everything in Genesis is correct and true.

As a creationist would say, about evolution, these are only "theories" (AKA "wild guess") However, note how many of these creation theories include some form of evolution and natural selection