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Let's debate evolution.

cantab

Well-Known Member
I don't personally believe in "evolution" of species as say monkeys turned into humans. I do believe in adaptation though, which is the animals slightly adapting to their environment, but not completely changing species.
Enough slight adaptations, added up, result in a new species. If the population is split, typically because its habitat is split, or simply by great distance, then the two halves experience different environments, and of course adapt in different ways. After a sufficient period of time, the two populations can diverge enough to be unable to interbreed. What was one species has become two.

Oh, and in scientific contexts, "law" and "theory" are synonyms. "Law" tends to be used to refer to pre 20th century theories in physics.
 

Vermehlo_Steele

Grand Arbiter II
The facts are plain as day and it saddens me so much that 151 years after On the Origin of Species was first published we still have people arguing against it - and being listened to.

There is no scientifically credible counter to the mountain of evidence we have (transitory fossils, the fossil record, shared DNA).

That's why people who're opposed to it on ideological grounds focus on: supposed irregularities, the fact that there are gaps in the fossil record (yeah like everything that dies is going to do so in a prefect place to be fossilised...), pretend things simply pop into existence and things science doesn't have a solid answer for yet (ie "how did life start").

And it's sad that because of how religion does get into people's minds and teaches them not to question but just to accept what they're told we'll still be having this conversation for a long time...



Are you referring to the thread or posters?
 
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Sabonea_Masukippa

Well-Known Member
Humans didn't come from monkeys, we share a common ancestor with the great apes.

We are descended from monkeys, because the great apes are a branch on the 'monkey' tree. And we don't just share a common ancestor with one: We are one. You don't out grow your own ancestry and neither do species.

It's not even an issue to do with evolution; we were classified as a type of ape by a natural theologian (who, incidentally, happened to believe in the Judeo-Christian 'spontaneous creation' myth) well before Darwin even proposed his hypothesis.
 

Chris-kun

i still believe
Well, it's more accurately called 'natural selection' rather than 'survival of the fittest' which is more of a misnomer. 'Natural selection' is more about the suitability of an organism to survive (and breed) in a given environment. (Pressures humans are still under in some regards).

"Fitness" in biological terms refers to the ability for an organism to reproduce successfully. So, "survival of the fittest" means that those who have offspring are considered the fittest.

also, the natural selection theory has been observed and documented in bacteria, and on a grander scale, the beaks of finches in the galapagos islands. We can see this process somewhat in motion, so that aspect of the theory is provable. Whether it can result in something like an ape to become a human being we can't directly prove, since we can't observe it happening.

that's all Darwin proposed. Evolution had been a theory for thousands of years. The Greeks wrote of species changing through time. Darwin's own grandfather published a book on evolution.
 
Which one? Show us.
Simple enough. Darwin, much like everyone else of his era, knew nothing about heredity and his original theory stipulated that parental characteristics were transmitted through the blood. Quite a bit of Darwin's original theory has been abandoned for the new paradigm, neo-Darwinism.
Oh please, like others have already said Darwin wasn't infallible. Yes he didn't get everything right, he was going on what he could see - we can now access things he couldn't have dreamt about, but nothing we've come across in the following 151 years has dealt a death blow to his theory.
As I have said, "his theory" has been debunked. Thoroughly. That's why it isn't around anymore. Now we prefer neo-Darwinian punctuated equilibrium and in it we have a theory that Darwin wouldn't recognize.
 

GhostAnime

Searching for her...
Why is it called Darwinism and not Evolution..?
 

cantab

Well-Known Member
The term "Darwinism" is sometimes used to refer to Darwin's theories specifically, as opposed to more recent extensions and modifications of them. However, it has also fallen into use by creationists, who use the term "Darwinism" to imply the theory of evolution by natural selection is a religion-like belief.
 
...weird. what are those?
Lamarck's is a theory of biological evolution whose mechanism is soft inheritance--the notion that an organism can pass on characteristics acquired during its lifetime to its offspring. Saltationism is a theory of biological evolution whose mechanism is macromutation as opposed those of Darwinian evolution: micromutation and natural selection. Modern proponents of certain Lamarckian views include Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini, and modern proponents of saltationism include Sören Lövtrup.
 

Poketmonsta0310

Well-Known Member
I'm not totaly sure of the theory of evolution as it is. I would be a complete idiot to deny that there is change over time in organisms, since we can plainly see that. Mutations do occur in organisms that lead to perminant changes in that species.

What I dont believe is that human beings could ahve possibly come from a puddle of ooze trillions of years ago and since then, become fish and birds and monkeys and such. My reason is that every time a mutation occurs in an organisms genetic structure, information is lost, not gained. Ther is no way that genetic information can be added to the DNA of an organism. The idea that microscopic organisms that lived at the beggining of the planets existance could have contained all the DNA to create every single living thing on this planet is ridiculous, as scientists today can at least partialy see what DNA micro-organisms that are around today contain, and there is nowhere near enough.
 

meteor64

Show Me Ya Noobs
I'm not totaly sure of the theory of evolution as it is. I would be a complete idiot to deny that there is change over time in organisms, since we can plainly see that. Mutations do occur in organisms that lead to perminant changes in that species.

What I dont believe is that human beings could ahve possibly come from a puddle of ooze trillions of years ago and since then, become fish and birds and monkeys and such. My reason is that every time a mutation occurs in an organisms genetic structure, information is lost, not gained. Ther is no way that genetic information can be added to the DNA of an organism. The idea that microscopic organisms that lived at the beggining of the planets existance could have contained all the DNA to create every single living thing on this planet is ridiculous, as scientists today can at least partialy see what DNA micro-organisms that are around today contain, and there is nowhere near enough.

Woah there. Information is altered when mutation occurs, not lost or gained. Where the heck did you get that idea from?
 

Poketmonsta0310

Well-Known Member
I haven't explained what I was trying to put across as I had wanted but, since genetic information can't increase in an organism it isn't possible for a single called organism to become something as complicated as a human being. That's it in a nutshell. I'm tired so I didn't really use the right words when explaining my point.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/508.asp this link explains what I'm trying to say
 
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cantab

Well-Known Member
You are overlooking an important process: An organism can, for whatever reason, obtain an extra copy of a gene. Once that happens, one copy can mutate entirely freely, since the other can continue producing the needed protein. The freely mutating copy may come to encode a new useful protein, and in that way the complexity of the organism can increase.

Incidentally, that creationist article claims "Of the many cases of antibiotic resistance studied, none have involved the production of new functionally complex information, such as a new enzyme. This would be real evolution, but such has not been found.". Maybe not for antibiotic resistance, but how about the case of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria , that evidently have evolved an entirely new enyzme to digest a man-made nutrient source.
 
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meteor64

Show Me Ya Noobs
Oh dear. Your source does not seem to understand what its talking about.

For example this bit -
A group of creatures might become more adapted to the cold, for example, by the elimination of those which don’t carry the genetic information to make thick fur. But that doesn’t explain the origin of the information to make thick fur.
What if I said that all the information to make everything is already there in the DNA? And that all of the required bits of information to create animal X are turned on within the code? So, for example, to create animal X, we need gene A to turn on, alongside C, F, H, I, L, O, etc. Because thats how it really works.

Naturally, such scrambling of information will often be harmful—thousands of hereditary diseases in people, for instance, are caused by just such inherited mutational defects. At best they may be neutral—having no effect on the outcome, or the expressed meaning of the code. Using English as an (admittedly limited) analogy, assume a message were transmitted saying ‘the enemy is now attacking’, which accidentally suffers a one-letter substitution changing it to ‘the enemy is not attacking’. The result is potentially disastrous, like a harmful mutation. Whereas a change to ‘tha enemy is now attacking’ would be neutral; a change, but not affecting the end result.
But using that analogy, the chances of a "disastrous" translation are ridiculously slim.
Besides, 1 in 20 (ballpark figure) people are estimated to suffer from genetic diseases. Thats hardly a negligible amount.

However, evolutionists believe that occasionally, a ‘good’ mutation will occur which will be favoured by selection and will allow that creature to progress along its evolutionary pathway to something completely different.
And this is where the language analogy draws short- DNA is a bunch of ons and offs. Language is not. So by occasionally, what it should mean is that half the time when a change occurs, it's a good one.

‘There!’ says the evolutionist. ‘A favourable mutation—evolution in action!’ However, it fails to make his case, because though beneficial to survival, it is still a defect—a loss or corruption of information. This is the very opposite of what evolutionists need to demonstrate real evolution.
Yet again, the source knows little. Information is not destroyed- it is turned off. If you are familiar with computer programming, think of it as being "commented out". It could always change back.

Also, a loss of information can cause bacterial antibiotic resistance, e.g. penicillin resistance in Staphylococcus can be due to a mutation causing a regulatory gene’s loss of control of production of penicillinase (an enzyme which destroys penicillin). The resulting overproduction of penicillinase increases resistance to penicillin. But in the wild (away from artificial environments swamped with penicillin), the Staphylococcus would be less ‘fit’ because it wastes resources producing heaps of unnecessary protein.
At which point the species as a whole would mutate to turn those genes off. The it would become a new strain of Staphylococcus.

I'm not going to investigate the source any further, it's quite evident where its heading, and where it's made its vital flaw- namely, not knowing how DNA actually works.
 

Poketmonsta0310

Well-Known Member
The fact remains that it is not possible for there to be a mutaion that would allow an organism to become more complex, which is the point I am trying to put across.

The fact is that even though species change over time due to mutations, this cannot lead to the evolution of a more complex organism. You spent more time disproving the source than you did trying to disprove the idea behind it.

My understanding of DNA is that it is like a book. When a mutation occurs one of the letters is erased and replaced with another, altough there is still the chance that it could later be erased and replaced with the original letter. Now, you could spend forever going through and changing bits of this book and most of the changes will either have no effect, or effect it negatively but there can also be positive changes. This is clear. But, it is not possible to go and add more on to the end of the book. You cant add more pages, only edit what has already been put there. Unless you can add more, I dont see how any single cell organism can evolve into something any more complex than a single celled organism.
 

meteor64

Show Me Ya Noobs
The fact remains that it is not possible for there to be a mutaion that would allow an organism to become more complex, which is the point I am trying to put across.
You seem to be assuming every cell within an organism has all its DNA exactly the same. Either that, or you're thinking in unicellular terms.
The fact is that even though species change over time due to mutations, this cannot lead to the evolution of a more complex organism. You spent more time disproving the source than you did trying to disprove the idea behind it.
Well I'm hardly going to listen to something that doesn't know what its talking about, am I? If Stephen Hawking used the Second law of thermodynamics to explain something, but got a major part of the theory wrong, would you ignore it and take his word for it?

My understanding of DNA is that it is like a book. When a mutation occurs one of the letters is erased and replaced with another, altough there is still the chance that it could later be erased and replaced with the original letter. Now, you could spend forever going through and changing bits of this book and most of the changes will either have no effect, or effect it negatively but there can also be positive changes. This is clear. But, it is not possible to go and add more on to the end of the book. You cant add more pages, only edit what has already been put there. Unless you can add more, I dont see how any single cell organism can evolve into something any more complex than a single celled organism.
You're right there. But thats not how multicellular organisms work.

Say you had 2 separate cells. They both absorb nutrients, process them, and dispose of waste individually.
Then say a cell mutated in such a way so that when it split, each cell altered themselves to take a specific role- this is cell specializiation, and it's occuring in your bone marrow right now, as well as during the very early stages of pregnancy.
Once these two cells have specialised, they will support each other- for example, one cell could intake all the nutrients required, process them, pass them to the next cell, who then takes what it needs and disposes of the waste.
That is increasing complexity. And it isn't required for life to continue. But evolution isn't picky with path it takes- it just takes any, and in some cases, that increases the complexity life would have reached thus far.
 

GhostAnime

Searching for her...
Let's see you use a source reviewed and researched by scientists rather than a creationist site, shall we?
 
Let's see you use a source reviewed and researched by scientists rather than a creationist site, shall we?
This is akin to only permitting citations of Planned Parenthood newsletters in an abortion debate (that's my second abortion reference in recent memory).

Let Poketmonsta use any source he pleases, and deal with whatever is said in said sources without any attempts at deck-stacking.

And this is where the language analogy draws short- DNA is a bunch of ons and offs. Language is not. So by occasionally, what it should mean is that half the time when a change occurs, it's a good one.
I can't let you get away with a claim so blatantly silly.

"...New mutations that have an immediate beneficial effect on the organism seem generally to be quite rare." (Strickenberger 2000, p. 227)
 
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Chris-kun

i still believe
However, we all have the relative same genetic information at the core. It's only little, tiny tweaks in the code that can create new species. But the genes are all the same.

For example, there was an experiment where the gene for eye development from a mouse was taken and put in a fruit fly in place of it's own eye development gene. When the larva developed, it developed a normal fruit fly eye despite having a mouse eye gene. So the genes aren't transforming or gaining or losing anything.
 
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