True, though there were always a bunch of things that never quite fit, and also this had to do with the quality of the evidence being too low to make clear the distinctions and problems that would crop up when, say, telescopes and such became much more powerful tools. Also true, but then, so could anything. If you want to argue that it is, then you need arguments and evidence for this position. I'm not sure why you'd quote this as a problem with using carbon dating: this is one of the many known elements that carbon dating takes into account. Scientists KNOW about all the issues with carbon dating, and they've found ways to correct for them. That's what science does: it's doesn't just throw up its hands and say "well, I'm done, I've hit a problem, the end." However, this specific example, I think you're telling it wrong. There is 0% chance that you would get a date of "40 million years" on anything involving carbon isotopes. Carbon's half life is too short: it's only good for fairly recent things (even a million years is outside its scope). Exactly. They may have laughed at Einstein, they may have laughed at Wegner, but they also laughed a Groucho Marx. For every genius with a revolutionary idea, there are a million crackpots with ideas that went nowhere. What separates the crackpots from the true revolutionaries is that they have real solid, well argued EVIDENCE on their side. Right now, the evidence is all for evolution, old earth, etc. It's all well and good to muse about how maybe this is wrong, but if you want to claim its' so, then you need evidence, not speculation. What the heck does one have to do with the other? Evolution doesn't disprove the existence of god. It just shows that the earth is not 6000 years old and that genesis can't be read litterally. I've generally also found that the "amazing things God has done in my life" seem a lot less amazing, and a lot less obviously the work of God, when put in context.
Stronger in their delusion, I agree. If you ever seriously questioned your faith, you'd realize what an illogical, improbable, worthless load it is. If that kind of thing actually affirms your beliefs, then the only explanation is some bizarre cognitive dissonance.
OK. Here are my questions The Fossil Record. The theory of evolution states that living things gradually evolve over millions of years yet comparing creatures such bees and dragon flies and star fish show no change over the past 100s of millions of years. Also, the fossil records show no transitional forms of animals life a reptile that is evolving into a bird- there have been no 'reptilian-birds' that have half-bird half-reptilian features. This problem with the fossil record has actually been documented by evolutionist palaeontologists like Derek V. Alger and Mark Czarnecki. Moreover, considering the fact that life started as simple forms and evolved into more complex forms then if we look into the Cambrian period, which is one of the most earliest periods, the trilobyte existed in. The trilobytes have an extremely complex eye structure whic is described as 'an optimal design which would require a well trained and imaginative optical engineer to develop today'. The theory of evolution suggests that a simple form became more complex so how could the trilobyte have such a complex structure when it came from the oldest stratums in the Earth, dating back 500-550 million years? Transition from Water to Land. The evolutionists also state that fish evolved into reptiles, yet there is no half-fish, half-reptile in any fossil record. In addition, the oldest known frog, salamanders etc. are very similar to their living descendants. Assuming the fish could go to land there would be several problems with this: 1. Carrying of weight, sea dwelling creatures do not worry about weight yet creatures on land consume around 40% of energy carrying their weight around-thus the fish would need to develop new skeletal and muscles systems. 2. Heat retention, land temperatures are subject to more fluctuations and sea dwelling creatures would need a new system to protect themselves 3. Water, land-dwelling creatures have a 'thirst' and a system that ensures water is not excessively lost as it is essential to metabolism. Sea dwelling creatures do not have similar problems and their skin would not be suitable for a land-dwelling environment. 4. Kidneys, as water is used restrictively in land dwelling environments water is filtered, the same does not apply to fish as water is not scarce. 5. Respiratory, fish would need a perfect lung system to breathe overground These characteristics would be needed at the same time if a water-dwelling creature was to live on land. There is a similar problem with birds. Their wings, respiratory and other systems are perfectly adapted so they can fly but they need to be fully formed or else they cant. There is also no transitional bird forms and fossils prove that 120 million years ago birds had the same indistinguishable features that birds have today. Another thing id like to ask is if evolutionists were so sure about evolution then why where there hoaxes like the 'Piltdown man' where paleoanthropologist Charles Dawson announced a discovery of a jawbone and a cranial fragment, this was meant to be proof of human evolution. After 40 years fluorine testing proved that the two were different. The cranial fragment had more fluorine than the jawbone which meant they were separate. The teeth were specifically arranged in an array and added to the jaw. Then the pieces were stained with Potassium Dichromate to give a dated appearance. The stains disappeared when dipped in acid. Human evolution is also hampered by recent research which reveals it is impossible for a bent ape skeleton with a quadripedal stride to evolve into an upright human skeleton fit for bipedal stride. Since evolutionists also state that life started with a cell that formed by chance. According to the scenario, four billion years ago various inorganic chemical compounds underwent a reaction in the primordial earth atmosphere in which the correct conditions formed a cell. However, this has not been verified scientifically by any experiment or observation so far (e.g. on planets). Moreover, the cell is such a complex structure any attempt to synthesis or imitate it have been fruitless. The cell is so complex that even a high level of technology cannot create one. Yet evolutionists claim that this cell was created by chance in primordial earth. He also calculated the coincidental formation of the 2000 proteins found in a single bacterium which was found to be 1 over 10 followed by 40000 zeros. Even producing a useful amino acid by chance had a probability of 1 over 10 followed by 950 zeros. Similarly there are problems with evolution of complex parts of the body such as the eye, respiratory system, circulatory system because as evolutionists state, in transitional creatures some of the systems should be ‘developing’ but if this were the case the whole system would not work because of its entire complexity. Mutations caused are unlikely ever to be useful. During tens of thousands of experiments on creatures to see if any positive mutation came out, there was not an affirmative result. Simply because an ‘error’ will not make a complex system better, it is more likely to make it worse. There are many more questions I would like to ask but this post is uncomfortably long such as about DNA, RNA and the formation of an enzyme useful to life, known as Cytochrome-C.
This is a common confusion: the step by step change is gradual. But the PACE of change may not be steady or gradual at all. Right in the Origin of Species, Darwin says that he doesn't expect the pace of change to be steady: in fact he expects it to reach equilibriums all the time during which creatures are well suited in their niches already and so don't change too much. Some scientists did advocate phyletic gradualism later, but their views lost out against the evidence. However, you are also overstating the amount of non-change...: Not so. You are mostly likely making a category error here: assuming that "bee" is a species, when it is really a much higher level grouping. Modern bees and dragon flies are the descendants of ancient bees and dragon flies, but they are clearly not the same species: they are modified forms. They may belong in the same class, but as I hope you'll come to understand, ALL creatures belong in classes that sit below and inside those of their ancestors. There is no guarantee that particular fossils will turn up. However, that's not the same thing as saying that no transitional fossils ever turn up: they do all the time. Archaeopteryx is a great example of a creature that has both obvious dinosaur/reptile traits and also traits found in modern birds (not just feathers either). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeopteryx However, there is a more important point to make here which I hinted at above. In evolution, things don't change into other things taxonomically. That is, things don't change from one taxonomic class into another one that's on the same level. Instead, new species are modifications of what came before. Saying that something is "half-reptile, half-bird" is sort like saying that something is "half-bird, half-duck." But a duck IS a type of bird. Now this is confusing because terms like "reptiles" are common understandings without much real evolutionary use. The term reptile is what's called "paraphyletic" which means that it's an artificial group from the standpoint of evolution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphyly It is akin to saying that you, your father, and your mother are part of a group, but your sister is not. The same is true for "reptiles." Most people think of reptiles as not including mammals, but the fact is, mammals are descended from creatures that we would call reptiles. So are birds. So "reptile" is considered a sort of sloppy, outdated term by many biologists. The reason for this is that "reptile" was a word we developed to describe a modern grouping, in ignorance of ancient reptiles and who their descendants were. The same, really goes for "bird." So in asking for a "half-reptile, half-bird" most people are really asking for one MODERN creature turning into another MODERN creature. Evolution not only does NOT predict or involve that, but if such a thing happened, it would be decided proof against evolution. So as it happens, birds aren't just descended from dinosaurs: they ARE dinosaurs. And dinosaurs ARE "reptiles," just as they are also amniotes, just as they are also vertebrates, and so on. That's how evolution actually works: descent with modification. Nested groups descended from larger groups. Not one thing turning into a completely different thing. Cite? I find that when people quote scientists to make these claims, they most often misunderstand what is being debated, or the scientists are being outright misrepresented. Sometimes, there are real problems and disputes within science: but as a layperson, and especially as someone who probably hears a lot of mispreresentation of things from creationists, you may be confused as to exactly what things are actually in dispute and what's at stake (often, things that don't affect the overall issue of evolution much at all). Again, no. Evolution does not guarantee this at all. Complexity is one common outcome of natural selection, but not the only one, and ancient life was plenty complex in its own way as well. While there are life forms around today that are far more complex than very early life, that's a factor as much of just what you can expect from a random walk as it is something that evolution forces to happen. So? And while it may be a neat design, it certainly isn't as good as even a human eye, let alone a hawk eye. I don't really understand the question. First of all, the trilobyte eye is NOT incredibly complex: certainly there are more complex eyes around today. It is a good lens, but then, a lot of what evolution produces is better than what human designers can produce. Of course, we don't take millions of years to do it. But your suggestion that it is somehow too complex for the time period has, as far as I know, no real meaning. How did you decide that it was too complex for that time period, exactly? Again, "fish" is sort of a sloppy term, mostly having meaning only to describe modern fish: it's usage breaks down when you consider non-modern life. In taxonomy (the REAL language of biological classification) there is no term for just "fish." "Vertebrates" is about the lowest level grouping you can use that still contains all things that we would call a fish, but as it happens, it also contains all mammals, reptiles, birds, dinos, etc. So again, "half-fish, half-reptile" is mixing TWO screwy terms together. Nothing was ever "half-fish, half-reptile" and evolution doesn't say there was. What there was was a vertebrate creature we called a "lobed-fin fish" that gradually made it to land and was the ancestor of all reptiles, mammals, and so on. Here's a good transitional fossil example of that branch, a creature with the distinctive traits of both lobed-fin fishes and tetrapods (the land creatures with four limbs): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiktaalik I have no idea what you think "very similar" means. But even if it were true the way you mean it, so what? Again, evolution does not predict a constant rate of change. However, it's clearly not that true because early amphibians were different in many ways, from number of fingers to bone structure, and so on. The large scale groups of "frogs" and "amphbians" in general fit are still around, but then so are the classes of "mammals," and so are classes of "tetrapods." It is a misunderstanding of evolution to think that these groupings themselves change over time. New species are variants within those large groupings, not the start of new groupings on the same level as the old ones.
To react to the "chance" part: I just hypothetically threw a dice 125 times. The sequence I got is: 12452645244652514353624356163444426565342624661536342664244266452111142562552426342524552414342612223345452641243514552666333 The chance of me rolling that sequence is 1.857x10^97. That's BILLIONS OF TRILLIONS of times more than the amount of elementary particles in the Universe. But I just threw that exact sequence. It shouldn't be possible, right? Lets get this straight: evolution is NOT DEPENDANT ON CHANCE. Comparing evolution to a 747 being built by a tornado shows of massive ignorance to the theory of evolution. First of, evolution happens in the genes, the "building plans" of the body. If you would want to compare evolution to building a 747, you would need to compare it to altering the building plans of the 747, not building the thing itself. The genes contain the instructions how to code the proteins that make up your body. Second. There is NOT A SINGLE evolutionist who claims that all life suddenly 'evolved' by some miraculous chance. Evolution happens over many generations. And I'm a noob at the matingrituals of 747's, but I don't think they have sex or produce offspring. So the analogy would be correct if you said that a 747 descended from another airplane which was modified in the blueprints in multiple iterations which were selected to fit the demands of the people who buy the aircraft. Which happens TO BE TRUE. OH SNAP! While we're on the subject of analogies, if you walk down the street after a rainy day, do you stop to wonder at the amazing complexity of a puddle of water in a hole? That puddle consists of TRILLIONS of atoms, and the puddle PERFECTLY matches the hole in the ground. The chances of that happening by random chance is incredibly small! Good thing then that it didn't happen by chance, the water molecules were directed in that position by the laws of physics. Like the adaption of life to the environment in evolution was forced to that adaption by natural selection. Another analogy: I push a rock of a mountain. It rolls down and lands at certain coordinates. The odds of it landing at those exact coordinates are one in BILLIONS, but the rock did just land there. That's because a) it's not dependant on chance, it's dependant on the laws of physics, it was forced in that position and influenced by many factors and b) it doesn't matter where it lands, because it lands SOMEWHERE. Just like evolution. Evolution doesn't have a purpose nor is guided to eventually form humans.
Ok: so? This is exactly what the fossil record shows them developing. Again, so? Creatures have obviously figured out all sorts of ways to handle this, and the development of new ways is not implausible. Reptiles today, for instance, often manage body temperature simply by moving in and out of the sun and water. You are raising issues with moving from water to land, but I'm not sure why. Sure, land has all sorts of different challenges. But evolution is exactly about how these challenges were met. If your implication is that dealing with them is an "all or nothing" proposition, then you are simply mistaken. It's not. Dealing with them is part of moving onto land, but becoming fully land based and accustomed to that lifestyle took millions of years of different gradual modification, and many creatures still haven't made the transition completely even today (in part because there is nothing special or inevitable about the transition: frogs do just fine being partly aquatic and partly suited for land: they don't necessarily NEED to become more land based). Most lobed fishes ALREADY had a lung system. It wasn't "perfect" but it worked decently enough to allow them to get air out of the atmosphere. Again, like all the rest, it wasn't something that had to happen overnight. There are all sorts of papers on the evidence of how each and every one of these traits evolved. But again, this is just assuming that to make it in life, you must have full and perfect flight just like a modern bird. Why assume that? It's not even clear that feathers arose for flight in the first place: several dinosaurs had them that clearly could never have flown, and they may have used them for warmth instead. There is a cotinuum of usefulness from being a fast runner on ground all the way to flight. Being able to glide, even for short distances, for instance, has advantages. Evolution only needs a tiny amount of advantage for some trait to be selected for. It doesn't forsee flight and design towards it: it simply selects traits that happen to play a role in improving survival in some environment, and then, if its still useful to do so, keeps building on them. Nonsense. I already linked one. Ancient birds didn't have the eact same flight capability and exact specialities and variations of birds today, but they had traits that worked in their ecology and which are distinctive and obvious ancestors of traits that all birds share today. If anything, this goes against your case. Piltdown man was indeed a careful fraud, but it was discovered so late in part because it wasn't paid much attention to in the first place: it was considered unremarkable other than being somewhat of a questionable anomaly in that it didn't really fit in anywhere obvious with all the other fossil finds. When it was exposed as a fraud, it was scientists that exposed it as a fraud! The fact that someone made one or two frauds out of THOUSANDS of legitimate fossil is hardly much help in trying to hadnwave away human evolution. You can't wave away all that evidence by mere reference to the fact that someone passed off a fraud for a while when that fraud was basically not very remarkable. Cite for this research showing that it is "impossible"? I mean, come on. Even some apes around today can walk bipedally, some for short distances, but a few almost all the time. Is it just a coincidence that apes are partially bipedal, and that their hips have only slight balancing differences from ours? First of all, no. This isn't part of evolutionary theory proper: it's generally referred to as abiogenesis. The two theories aren't dependent on each other, because they involve different mechanisms and one can be true without the other being true. Second of all, no one thinks that likfe started with anything that looked even remotely like a modern cell. It would have been far far simpler. It may not have even had a cell membrane, for instance. Again, no, not likely a cell, or at least, not anything like what we call a cell today. This is a bizarre statement. No, we do not have a complete picture of how life began: what it looked like, even which elements of life came first (metabolism? heredity?) But that doesn't mean that there is nothing scientific about the inquiry, that we have learned nothing, and that the field isn't worth pursing. It's steadily delivered all sorts of fascinating results as to how early life could have evolved. We haven't really studied any other planets for life, so we'll just have to wait and see on that. Nope. This is a straw man. No one thinks a complex modern cell is what early life was like. That's, in fact, almost 100% backwards, because modern cells are the MOST evolved structures on the planet: they are the furthest from early life of anything. These calculations are pure nonsense even if it hadn't already made the mistake of using a bacterium (of which even the simplest is still a vastly more evolved and complex strucutre than early life would ahve been). You cannot model chemical reactions or early ecologies as random assemblages. It makes no sense. The probabilities aren't all indepedent, you don't know the conditions, and the idea that a SPECIFIC protein has to be created is as ludicrous as me dealing you a hand of poker and telling you that the odds on getting that hand are a million million to one, and so it must have been a miracle. There's so much wrong with the logic here it's hard to even know where to start. Again, while we don't know everything about the evolution of everything, the arguments that evolving these things was impossible, or that they needed to be "all or nothing" simply doesn't fly. It isn't so. If you actually read actual papers concerning the evolution of these things, or even just look at actual living life today, you'll see all sorts of different ways for different systems to work and evolve. [qote]Mutations caused are unlikely ever to be useful. During tens of thousands of experiments on creatures to see if any positive mutation came out, there was not an affirmative result.[/quote] Simply not true at all. I mean geez: there are hundreds of papers every YEAR in biology journals that would make no sense if this were true. Of course, what a "positive" mutation is is probably more complicated than you are aware of, but that's a discussion for another time. Those things that would make it worse are generally almost immediately discarded, leaving only those things that are neutral and/or beneficial. Ok. Isn't it interesting how Cyt-C is in nearly all life, and yet the variations of it match up almost exactly to the same tree of life we can build from, say, the fossil record? That is, the creatures who have the most in common with us in their verision of Cyt-C are those that are most closely related to us in terms of evolutionary ancestry.
Umm... I believe in evolution dude. What are you going on about? I just don't understand the evolution process. I was wondering how critters gradually evolve to live in something like an ocean enviroment. I wouldn't have thought just living in contact with water would grow them the tools they need to live in it best. I was asking for answers, not instigating conflict.
In a certain way, it IS the contact with the water that does, in the sense that living near the water presents different challenges for survival, and different opportunities for new changes to gain the upper hand by proving themselves useful in dealing with it. Living in the water a lot more than your hairy ancestors might well make it better for those that have shorter and shorter and thinner hair to reduce drag and decrease the amount of time it takes to dry off.
What should really be debating is the origin of all that is, will be, and was. And how the origin is a possibility by itself For, in fact, evolution is indebatable unless you take the choice of the denial.
PLay the "game of life". Watch things "evolve". Its a set of mathamatical rules, that makes things start to take shape, then evolve, destroy other things etc. There only simple rules too. yet complex stuff is made.
Here's a link to an excellent Game of Life applet for those interested in mathmatical evolution: http://www.ibiblio.org/lifepatterns/
The way I see it, evolution is a completely genetic phenomenon. If I spent my life running barefoot in jungles, my son's skin would not automaticaly grow tougher. But over the course of millenia, as chromosomes would couple in countless ways, the combinations that would produce tough skin would have an inherent advantage, and this population would eventually outnumber the others. As for how the first cell started, does no one understand probability? Consider the amount of time for which the earth has existed - it's inevitable that eventually life would begin on a planet with such favourable conditions. Cell-like structures may have been produced many times by chemical interactions, until one or more developed the trait of reproduction. Another popular argument for creationism is why everything turned out so perfectly on earth. Well, probability says there is a real chance of life developing somewhere in the universe - and earth was it.
For all those people out there that dissagree with Darwin and evolutionary-theory... buy it...at least watch it
I know you're all joking, but what you've got, you've got, and evolution won't change it. It only happens to populations over time: the individuals are stuck with the genetic code they are born with. Mostly the only thing you are going to get out of any subsequent genetic mutations in your body is cancer.
TO ALL NON-BELIEVERS..Whos to say that god didnt create us to evolve? Isn't it more comforting to believe and have hope for the afterlife, then to just not bother or search ways of proving god to b fake? If ur sooo sure that there is no god, y bother wasting wats left of ur life w/this sh!t or to prove a theory wrong instead of doing something better w/itOr say...giving religion a chance and yes i know ur comeback will b something about reading the bible being a waste right? Well just think about it and think about wat makes ppl happier to believe. o and does trying to prove ppl wrong make u feel better about urselves. Its wrong to make fun of any1s belief(ex.being a christian i dont make fun of say buhddism) all of u none believers have ur own oppoinion and i accept that, but dont go trying to change any1 elses opinion or make fun of them, just try to get along. Whoever agrees PLZ PM me..If not dont bother telling me how I'm "wrong"(PS F@#K U NOFX FOR BOOING UNDEROATH OF STAGE B.CUZ THEY ARE CHRISTIAN!!!)
This just in: the Bible is a horrible book to learn English from. Learn some ****ing English. Or don't and give the science of cryptography something to do. But I'm not reading that shit.