Evloution and science

[Arapuff]

defenestrated

If I accept cell theory, do I have to stop liking pancakes?

Yes. Yes you do. And if you submit to the siren call of the Theory of Gravity, you have to give up your soul,* mwhahahahha! razz




*But only on Thursdays and every other 13th of the month. razz

[Ashley the Bee]

Le Freshmaker

Oh, the silliness of the arguments! heart

Let me just say, from my stance which will bear whatever scrutiny you toss my way, We are here.
We were here for some time, and we will likely be here for a while.
Why is it so important that we know how we got here?

Are we so desperate for validation for our existance that we must deny anything that contradicts a god that justifies us?
Are we so stuck in the past that we need to know that we aren't just puppets in some master plan?

Really, in the end, that's what the opposing sides sound like. At least to me.

If you choose not to wonder, I am fine with that. When it comes down to it, what difference will it make what happened "in the beginning"? That's not my issue.

My issue isn't even with individuals who choose to believe in creationism themselves. More power to them. Again, it doesn't effect me if they think they were born 5 minutes ago, along with everyone else, and we only -think- we've been around for longer than that. I have no problem with this.

My issue comes when individuals who think creationism is science and think it should be taught as a "competing theory" in school. It's not. There is no evidence to support creationism. None. Zero. Zip. Zilch. There is no way to test this idea. There is no criteria to show how it might have happened. It is all, "I think it makes sense" or, "But, look at how complex things are!"

Evolution can and has been tested. Many individuals have ideas for how it happened, and they are tested. There are criteria to prove the ideas correct or false. In other words, it is science.

For ID, please replace the paragraph on creationism with the word ID and reread it.

[Redem]

Le Freshmaker

Oh, the silliness of the arguments! heart

Let me just say, from my stance which will bear whatever scrutiny you toss my way, We are here.
We were here for some time, and we will likely be here for a while.
Why is it so important that we know how we got here?

Are we so desperate for validation for our existance that we must deny anything that contradicts a god that justifies us?
Are we so stuck in the past that we need to know that we aren't just puppets in some master plan?

Really, in the end, that's what the opposing sides sound like. At least to me.

It's important because our understanding of the universe is what drives the technologies that make your life more than a short hunter-gatherer life of pain and hunger.
Besides, simple curiosity. I wanna know.

[ValicVacosties]

Tlara

For those of you who believe in evolution, how does it explain gravity? The theory of relativity? The planets? The solar system? Oh and this time guys...try putting references in your replies...no references, no replies.

Ok, let's start with the OP here... Hi there Tlara. Ok. Let's look at this very very carefully.

Evolution... DEFINED by Merrimam Webster:

4 a: the historical development of a biological group (as a race or species) : phylogeny b: a theory that the various types of animals and plants have their origin in other preexisting types and that the distinguishable differences are due to modifications in successive generations; also : the process described by this theory (Site is Evolution)

OK! Well, that was clarifying, wasn't it? Amazing what a good dictionary can do!

Now, let us turn our eyes to relativity....

3 a: a theory which is based on the two postulates (1) that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant and independent of the source or observer and (2) that the mathematical forms of the laws of physics are invariant in all inertial systems and which leads to the assertion of the equivalence of mass and energy and of change in mass, dimension, and time with increased velocity —called also special relativity, special theory of relativity b: an extension of the theory to include gravitation and related acceleration phenomena —called also general relativity, general theory of relativity (Site is: Relativity

My my... that has nothing to do with Evolution? My goodness.... what are the odds?!

Now that we have compared the two theories... Gravity? Planets? Solar System?! Ok... did you just randomly go to Astronomy.com and pick a few words? You can't compare a theory with something that... isn't.... a theory. It doesn't work. It's like compareing an apple, to a Platypus. One is good to eat, the other is a drunken mistake (but that's for another discussion).

Ok.... Now then.. the next post will deal with a more recent part of this thread!

[Tlara]

ValicVacosties

Evolution... DEFINED by Merrimam Webster:

4 a: the historical development of a biological group (as a race or species) : phylogeny b: a theory that the various types of animals and plants have their origin in other preexisting types and that the distinguishable differences are due to modifications in successive generations; also : the process described by this theory (Site is Evolution)

OK! Well, that was clarifying, wasn't it? Amazing what a good dictionary can do.

So where does the "theory" that everything came from 1 single cell organism come into that? I have no problem with "mutations" within a group. But all living things coming from 1 single cell? Scientists work in a "controlled environment", they dont need "millions" of years for this "process" to take place. They can attempt to do it in a lab. On this point, if you put a car engine (completely torn down, all bolts included) put it in a cement mixer started it rotating, how long till you have a working car engine? How about a computer? A watch?........all these things took someone to build them, they didnt just appear. Did the house your in just appear? How about the roads? Think about the microprocessers, how intricate they are...did someone design it, or did it happen over millions of years?

[Nocturnal Emissions]

Tlara

I have no problem with "mutations" within a group.

Define a group.
Are mammals a group? Bears are very closely related to dogs.
Are canines a group? There are many types of domestic dog, as well as things like wolves and dingoes.
Are humans in a group? We seem to be very genetically close to primates, so are humans in the same group as gorillas are? Are gorillas in the same group as spider monkeys?
What about a platypus? It has qualities of both a mammal and a bird. Which do you think it's a part of?

You can't just say 'evolution within a group'. It doesn't work, because you can't define what a 'group' or 'kind' is. You have to accept that evolution can cause many branches.
The rest of your argument seems silly, because we make car parts and such ourselves. Nobody has seen car parts make a car by mixing them around because that's not how car parts work, they're entirely man made. Animals reproduce and animals mutate, and so animals can evolve randomly.

[EsgarBlackpoxs]

Tlara

ValicVacosties

Evolution... DEFINED by Merrimam Webster:

4 a: the historical development of a biological group (as a race or species) : phylogeny b: a theory that the various types of animals and plants have their origin in other preexisting types and that the distinguishable differences are due to modifications in successive generations; also : the process described by this theory (Site is Evolution)

OK! Well, that was clarifying, wasn't it? Amazing what a good dictionary can do.

So where does the "theory" that everything came from 1 single cell organism come into that? I have no problem with "mutations" within a group. But all living things coming from 1 single cell? Scientists work in a "controlled environment", they dont need "millions" of years for this "process" to take place. They can attempt to do it in a lab. On this point, if you put a car engine (completely torn down, all bolts included) put it in a cement mixer started it rotating, how long till you have a working car engine? How about a computer? A watch?........all these things took someone to build them, they didnt just appear. Did the house your in just appear? How about the roads? Think about the microprocessers, how intricate they are...did someone design it, or did it happen over millions of years?

Ah, the good ol' "watchmaker" analogy. Or in this case, engine-maker. Reasons why this analogy doesn't work:
1) There's more than one of each creature. Bacteria, for example. With uncountable trillions of them dividing, you;d need more than one engine.
2) The analogy doesn't weed out unsuccessful attempts, as happens in real life. Survival of the fittest and whatnot.
3) Yes, microprocessors are man-made. Unfortuantely, you're really just falling into an "irreducible complexity" argument.
4) What about the mountains? They're pretty complex, if you look at laser-scan maps. Did someone create them? Nope. That's the magic of nature.

[Arapuff]

Tlara

So where does the "theory" that everything came from 1 single cell organism come into that? I have no problem with "mutations" within a group. But all living things coming from 1 single cell?

This is true, but... remember. smile The single celled organisms in the beginning were one group. The mutations in the genes that slowly developed (or in other words caused the cells to evolve) brought around the different types of "groups" you see today. So... the mutations are there, and have always been there. They're working, slowly, within the group, and eventually will cause different sub-groups in the major group to become significantly different enough to be called different species, or groups, or whatever you want to call them. smile

Quote:

Scientists work in a "controlled environment", they dont need "millions" of years for this "process" to take place. They can attempt to do it in a lab.

This is true. smile However, they don't use big creatures that require months or even years to grow, develop, create offspring and die, which is what the millions of years are able to show. Instead, they take little things (the first thing that comes to mind is bacteria, so I'll use that as an example), and do different things to it. Every time a strain of a bacteria becomes immune to antibiotics, that bacteria sucessfully mutated/evolved so it could survive. They study that, and other things about how the bacteria and single-celled organisms with an extremely short life-span evolve, and apply that to what they see in other creatures (especially the ones we have fossils and other such records) for.

Quote:

On this point, if you put a car engine (completely torn down, all bolts included) put it in a cement mixer started it rotating, how long till you have a working car engine? How about a computer? A watch?........all these things took someone to build them, they didnt just appear. Did the house your in just appear? How about the roads? Think about the microprocessers, how intricate they are...did someone design it, or did it happen over millions of years?

The thing with these comparisons, dear, is that you're comparing things that are alive and things that aren't (and never will be) alive. That really doesn't work well.... confused

But, let's work with your analysis. smile Say you have a self-contained tornado (not a cement mixer, because that would wear the parts down quickly), and you throw in the necessay (and a few unnecessary) parts for the car engine. Set that whirling for... oh, a few million years, and you'll probably find a part or two that went together correctly. That would be the equivalent of the single-celled organisms on Earth in the beginning. Then after that.... after millions more years... sure, things would start to come together, as long as you remembered to introduce varying conditions from time to time (wind shifts, speed it up or down, reverse the direction it spins in a few times, etc, just like the earth went from the dinosaur's climate to the ice ages and back and forth, with all the different environmental problems to cause mutations, etc). Eventually you will most likely have a machine (and a bunch of little machines, and left over parts, and broken bits, etc) - whether or not it's the engine you wanted when you started out with is a different story, but remember: evolution (and the engine-in-a-tornado experiment) is based on random mutations, so nothing can be predicted entirely. smile

[Ashley the Bee]

Tlara

So where does the "theory" that everything came from 1 single cell organism come into that? I have no problem with "mutations" within a group. But all living things coming from 1 single cell? Scientists work in a "controlled environment", they dont need "millions" of years for this "process" to take place. They can attempt to do it in a lab. On this point, if you put a car engine (completely torn down, all bolts included) put it in a cement mixer started it rotating, how long till you have a working car engine? How about a computer? A watch?........all these things took someone to build them, they didnt just appear. Did the house your in just appear? How about the roads? Think about the microprocessers, how intricate they are...did someone design it, or did it happen over millions of years?

Ignoring the non-biological part of your argument, how does a designer help this?

After all, that designer would be very complex, highly intelligent, etc, compared to the things that she designed, correct? That is, humans are more complex than computers, correct?

So, how did that designer come to be?

[Oblivious Sage]

Tlara

So where does the "theory" that everything came from 1 single cell organism come into that? I have no problem with "mutations" within a group. But all living things coming from 1 single cell? Scientists work in a "controlled environment", they dont need "millions" of years for this "process" to take place. They can attempt to do it in a lab. On this point, if you put a car engine (completely torn down, all bolts included) put it in a cement mixer started it rotating, how long till you have a working car engine? How about a computer? A watch?........all these things took someone to build them, they didnt just appear. Did the house your in just appear? How about the roads? Think about the microprocessers, how intricate they are...did someone design it, or did it happen over millions of years?

Your cement mixer analogy is poor, because it assumes evolution cannot recognize progress. If you had a cement mixer that never separated parts that had been correctly combined, then it would eventually re-assemble the car engine.

[Vryko Lakas]

Tlara

So where does the "theory" that everything came from 1 single cell organism come into that?

If you're asking how to derive Common Ancestry from the basic premise of Evolutionary theory, just apply the idea that all populations of living things change over time and either beget new species or die out. In other words, each branch splits into more branches and twigs and shoots and leaves so long as that branch doesn't just stop.
If we run this backwards, we compare modern species to each other to see what extinct species they sprang from. Imagine looking at the entire collection of leaves, buds, and brandes of a bush, then following them backwards. They eventually meet up at the trunk.
That's the prediction (common ancestry) we can make based on the basic idea of evolution. When we look at all the evidence we have (fossils, anatomy, genes, etc.), we can check out the prediction to see if it matches up with reality. No matter where we look, be it at basic anatomy, the history of life in fossils, or the genes of any living thing, we see clear a very clear pattern: all living things share certain features in common. Those common features indicate the trunk of the bush, from which everything that ever lived is a branch.
We do not know of any living thing that is so radically different from any other living thing that it could have come from an entirely different bush of life. Therefore we are pretty safe to conclude that all life on Earth as we know it is descended from the same stock billions of years ago. IF we ever find such a different living thing, we can say that it came from a different bush, but that does not mean that all people/horses/lizards/germs we currently know about did NOT come from one bush.

Quote:

I have no problem with "mutations" within a group. But all living things coming from 1 single cell?

Maybe not necessarily one single cell, but almost certainly the same source. And how big is your group? Are you considering all tiger moths to be in one group, or all moths? How about all moths and butterflies? All moths, butterflies, and ants? Everything without a backbone?

Quote:

Scientists work in a "controlled environment", they dont need "millions" of years for this "process" to take place. They can attempt to do it in a lab. On this point, if you put a car engine (completely torn down, all bolts included) put it in a cement mixer started it rotating, how long till you have a working car engine? How about a computer? A watch?

None of those things are very good examples of biological evolution, because evolution is NOT just tearing things up and throwing them into a mixer and coming out with all the same parts you started with. In biology, genes can be copied and duplicated several times. This means you can have many copies of the gene, all doing what the gene is supposed to do. Suppose one of those many copies mutates and either does nothing or does something else. The other copies of that gene can still do what the original did while that new gene does whatever it does. There are also genes which apparently don't do much of anything, and if one of those genes suddenly mutated to do something, that would be an additional function that wasn't present before without losing any function there used to be. You can also modify a gene to do something very similar to what it used to do, but slightly different, and have a radically different effect on the organism. There are countless genes and countless actions those genes can do, and we have very little way of saying "once things get mucked up beyond THIS POINT, nothing works."
You're also ignoring the role of selection. Evolution isn't just random mutations: there is also some kind of selective process. If a mutation winds up doing something that makes life harder for the organism, it's likely to be selected against. However, if it does something that makes life easier for the organism, it might be selected for and spread throughout the population over time. THAT'S what evolution is: the change in the "genes" of a population over time. Tearing things up and throwing them into a cement mixer is not a good analogy for evolution.

Quote:

........all these things took someone to build them, they didnt just appear.

Well, you were the one that only chose things we KNOW are designed. So don't blame evolution for that, it was YOUR analogy.

[Tlara]

Nocturnal Emissions

Tlara

I have no problem with "mutations" within a group.

Define a group.
Are mammals a group? Bears are very closely related to dogs.
Are canines a group? There are many types of domestic dog, as well as things like wolves and dingoes.
Are humans in a group? We seem to be very genetically close to primates, so are humans in the same group as gorillas are? Are gorillas in the same group as spider monkeys?
What about a platypus? It has qualities of both a mammal and a bird. Which do you think it's a part of?

You can't just say 'evolution within a group'. It doesn't work, because you can't define what a 'group' or 'kind' is. You have to accept that evolution can cause many branches.
The rest of your argument seems silly, because we make car parts and such ourselves. Nobody has seen car parts make a car by mixing them around because that's not how car parts work, they're entirely man made. Animals reproduce and animals mutate, and so animals can evolve randomly.

From the earliest human record until now, the evidence is that dogs are still dogs, cats continue to be cats, and elephants have been and will always be elephants. Sterility continues to be the delimiting factor as to what constitutes a “kind.” This phenomenon makes possible, through the test of sterility, the determining of the boundaries of all the “kinds” in existence today. Through this natural test of fertilization it is possible to uncover the primary relationships within animal life and plant life. For example, sterility presents an impassable gulf between man and the animals. Breeding experiments have demonstrated that appearance is no criterion. Man and the chimpanzee may look somewhat similar, have comparable types of muscles and bones; yet the complete inability of man to hybridize with the ape family proves that they are two separate creations and not of the same created “kind.”

Although hybridization was once hoped to be the best means of bringing about a new “kind,” in every investigated case of hybridization the mates were always easily identified as being of the same “kind,” such as in the crossing of the horse and the donkey, both of which are members of the horse family. Except in rare instances, the mule thus produced is sterile and unable to continue the variation in a natural way. Even Charles Darwin was forced by the facts to admit: “The distinctness of specific forms and their not being blended together by innumerable transitional links, is a very obvious difficulty.” (Origin of Species, 1902, Part 2, p. 54) This still remains true.

Whereas specific created “kinds” may number only in the hundreds, there are many more varieties of animals and plants on the earth. Modern research has indicated that hundreds of thousands of different plants are members of the same family. Similarly, in the animal kingdom, there may be many varieties of cats, all belonging to one cat family or feline “kind.” The same is true of men, of cattle, and of dogs, allowing for great diversity within each “kind.” But the fact remains that no matter how many varieties occur in each family, none of these “kinds” can commingle genetically.

[Le Freshmaker]

Tlara

Nocturnal Emissions

Tlara

I have no problem with "mutations" within a group.

Define a group.
Are mammals a group? Bears are very closely related to dogs.
Are canines a group? There are many types of domestic dog, as well as things like wolves and dingoes.
Are humans in a group? We seem to be very genetically close to primates, so are humans in the same group as gorillas are? Are gorillas in the same group as spider monkeys?
What about a platypus? It has qualities of both a mammal and a bird. Which do you think it's a part of?

You can't just say 'evolution within a group'. It doesn't work, because you can't define what a 'group' or 'kind' is. You have to accept that evolution can cause many branches.
The rest of your argument seems silly, because we make car parts and such ourselves. Nobody has seen car parts make a car by mixing them around because that's not how car parts work, they're entirely man made. Animals reproduce and animals mutate, and so animals can evolve randomly.

From the earliest human record until now, the evidence is that dogs are still dogs, cats continue to be cats, and elephants have been and will always be elephants. Sterility continues to be the delimiting factor as to what constitutes a “kind.” This phenomenon makes possible, through the test of sterility, the determining of the boundaries of all the “kinds” in existence today. Through this natural test of fertilization it is possible to uncover the primary relationships within animal life and plant life. For example, sterility presents an impassable gulf between man and the animals. Breeding experiments have demonstrated that appearance is no criterion. Man and the chimpanzee may look somewhat similar, have comparable types of muscles and bones; yet the complete inability of man to hybridize with the ape family proves that they are two separate creations and not of the same created “kind.”

Although hybridization was once hoped to be the best means of bringing about a new “kind,” in every investigated case of hybridization the mates were always easily identified as being of the same “kind,” such as in the crossing of the horse and the donkey, both of which are members of the horse family. Except in rare instances, the mule thus produced is sterile and unable to continue the variation in a natural way. Even Charles Darwin was forced by the facts to admit: “The distinctness of specific forms and their not being blended together by innumerable transitional links, is a very obvious difficulty.” (Origin of Species, 1902, Part 2, p. 54) This still remains true.

Whereas specific created “kinds” may number only in the hundreds, there are many more varieties of animals and plants on the earth. Modern research has indicated that hundreds of thousands of different plants are members of the same family. Similarly, in the animal kingdom, there may be many varieties of cats, all belonging to one cat family or feline “kind.” The same is true of men, of cattle, and of dogs, allowing for great diversity within each “kind.” But the fact remains that no matter how many varieties occur in each family, none of these “kinds” can commingle genetically.

The funny thing is, you're getting off topic.

You asked what the connection was between evolution and the other basics. The connection was given.

Strictly speaking, you never asked for proof.

[/thread]

[Tlara]

We have touched on many topics here. If you check like page 3 you will see my appology for this thread. It s still over evolution, and science though.....

[Katherine1]

Tlara

Even Charles Darwin was forced by the facts to admit: “The distinctness of specific forms and their not being blended together by innumerable transitional links, is a very obvious difficulty.” (Origin of Species, 1902, Part 2, p. 54) This still remains true.

Funny, you cited your quote, yet I can't find the quote in Origin of Species. Could you give the surrounding paragraphs as well so that I can see that this isn't a quote mine or fabrication?