Fuel, I understand you are getting piled on here, which we can’t really do much about. I hope you understand that there ARE people here who have put a lot of time and study into the subject of evolution, and all the evidence available. They really are qualified to be discussing evolution (which is not always the case, but this board happens to have some remarkable people posting on it) This doesn’t mean you have to believe them, and indeed, being skeptical is really a laudable thing.
In fact, let me make both a defense, and a warning about your skepticism. The defense is this: whether you personally believe evolution accounts for the diversity of life on this planet or not… is simply not a very pressing issue. Unless you are interested in a career as a professional scientist, doing research, not believing in evolution is not going to materially set you back in your professional or intellectual pursuits. You can still live a happy life, be well-educated, become a proffesor, lawyer, or the President. While some might argue that your disbelief could have harmful effects on other people who ARE going to be involved in science, I think that’s at best a probability, and is besides premised on thinking that you are wrong: a premise which you don’t accept anyway, making it a moot point.
So you, personally, can easily afford to be skeptical, and especially for people on this board, skepticism is always an invigorating thing. From the perspective of the people on this board, the appearance of a skeptic like you is hopefully a chance to have yet another look at evolution to reconsider again and again their own arguments: how to best formulate them, how to make them current, and whether there are parts that are really as sound as we make them out to be.
The warning is this: we should, and you should, be skeptical of skeptics. Skeptics make arguments too: arguments against various things, and these arguments are just as capable of being misinformed or dishonest as the ideas they are criticizing. So while I agree that Creationists can be skeptics, that doesn’t mean that their attacks on evolution are always well thought out or even principled. You need to be just as wary of evolution skeptics as you are of evolution itself. I may be wrong, but your posts sound very much like you’ve either recently read creationist/ID books by Johnson or Dembski, or webpages based off their ideas, because your arguments are very similar to theirs (particularly Johnson). While I’m not going to go into my problems with those writers here, I would counsel that it pays to be just as skeptical of their claims about evolution as you might be about evolutionary theory itself.
—I’ll do some reading, but while i am could someone give me a good solid easy to understand beneficial mutuation for the physical, visual change of humans?—
I’ll try to give you my best answer on this. First of all, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, you need to understand that your focus on beneficial mutations is misguided: it’s giving you a misleading picture of how evolution works.
The way you seem to be thinking of things is this: there’s a population of creatures. We’ll say that the creatures of this population are not altogether fit for its environment in several different ways, though we need consider only one. In your story, you seem to think that for this population to change, it needs to basically wait around until one of the creatures is born with a beneficial mutation: a longer beak, a better eye, etc. Then, natural selection favors this creature and its offspring, and they come to dominate.
If that is how you see things, then I can appreciate how you find it implausible that evolution could explain the diversity of life on the planet. Indeed, though that story is possible it is indeed wildly implausible as a mechanism for the sort of evolution we’d need to see to explain the species diversity of life on this planet. “Beneficial” mutations of that sort are indeed very very rare.
That story, however, is actually not what evolution is all about. Indeed, if that story were commonly true, we’d actually have a problem with what’s known as the “modern synthesis” (Darwin + Mendelian genetics). Because it would mean something called saltation: huge jumps of remarkably lucky development happening much faster than would be expected by a common knowledge of mutation. If that happened: if we saw dogs turning into cats within only a few generations, it would actually pretty prove most of what we call evolution to be WRONG. Indeed, if singular mutations that came when needed and then somehow dominated a population were what drove evolution forward, I would be a skeptic myself. For one thing, there’s no reason to think that even a very beneficial mutation would spread to an entire population: it would much more likely be quickly diluted by interbreeding with non-mutated variants. Luckily for evolution, however, the above story is NOT the general case that evolution rests upon.
The real story is this: that same population of creatures is made up of diverse individuals. Why diverse? Most simply because of the genetic mixing of traits due to sexual reproduction (even with a strictly limited pool of traits, there are still billions of possible combinations. But more fundamentally because of… mutation. But here’s the kicker: not “beneficial” mutation. Most mutations aren’t “beneficial” or even “detrimental”: they are just slight changes that really don’t have much appreciable effect. What they do do, however, is steadily increase variation in a given population over time: every animal is less and less like its fellow cousins along a wide number of different traits. Slightly longer legs, slightly shorter, slightly lighter bones, slightly heavier, etc. Usually each individual change is even more miniscule than that: just a slightly different volume of protein expression during embryonic development or something like that.
Now, why did I put “beneficial” and “detrimental” in quotes there? Because in this model, it’s very rare that you can know that a given mutation is beneficial (or detrimental) when it happens. It just happens, and is henceforth just one of many many other changes floating around in the gene pool: just another contribution to the variation in a population. It’s effect may not even be “selected” for until hundreds of years after it enters the gene pool! That even means that a mutation might well be detrimental in one context, but beneficial in another. A mutation that calls for slightly thicker fur could be detrimental when your population is in the desert… but as it migrates north, chasing its food source over a few hundred years, it becomes beneficial.
What that also means is that populations DON’T just wait around for the right beneficial mutation to occur before they proceed. All they need to have is enough variation stored up in the gene pool: not contemporary “lucky” mutations that come just when needed! With this variation in place, selection of the environment puts pressures on the entire population, not just any one individual. A percentage of this population survives to breed into the next generation: and, here’s the key point: that surviving percentage is biased towards whatever slice of the already existing variation is most beneficial. Not just along one single trait, but all relevant traits at once. This surviving population then increases its numbers again, and then ITS children are selected: and so on. At the same time, mutations may well have happened to occur in some of that surviving generation: but these mutations may have nothing to do with any of the “beneficial” traits currently being selected for: all they really do is continue to increase the variation in the surviving population. Indeed, by most estimates, variation actually increases four times faster than would be necessary to make evolutionary change plausible in the neccesary amount of time. That means that natural selection actually slows down the propagation of new variations!
Now, I don’t know if you find the second story any more plausible than you find the first. But when you criticize evolution, especially from the “beneficial mutation” perspective, you should definately be thinking about the second story, not the first. Because the second story makes the “beneficial mutations are unlikely” complaint pretty much irrelevant. This isn’t about just waiting around, hoping for beneficial mutations to come along.