I don’t have a problem with the teaching of evolution in schools, and I don’t have a problem with not giving creation equal time. What I hate is how schools routinely teach it as fact. It is I think the weakest theory that modern science supports.
How does a species with no eyes develop eyes? An animal that mutates part of an eye has no advantage in survival since the eye doesn’t work! The mutation can’t get a foothold.
Why is the most difficult step (non-life to life) one of the quickest? We find bacteria appearing almost immediately after the earth formed.
Microevolution is good science–it’s easy to understand giraffe’s necks getting longer or moths changing color. In those cases, incremental change improves survival. But macroevolution is a pile of illogical crap.
So I call for schools and textbooks to baldly explain the problems as well as the theory, then admit that we don’t have a clue. Because quite frankly, we don’t. But nooooo, we can’t admit that science doesn’t have all the answers, or allow the students to actually find a place for God in their lives.
OK, I guess I was ranting at high school and introductory undergraduate biology, which in all my experience presents it as absolute fact. People who don’t major in biology finish their education without the slightest doubt of any bit of it.
Heh i dont even believe in new genetic information at the micro level.
Though actually you should be ranting against the teacher, My teacher was a coach and his whole teaching of evolution was “Im not talking about evolution, god made everyone”
You are forming a judgement from very poor information.
The eye example has been around and comprehensively debunked for years. Starting with no sensitivity to light, why wouldn’t a mutation which allows some light sensitivity provide an advantage? Eyes would not start looking like eyes but with some bits missing, rather they would begin with light-sensitive patches of skin.
There is no difference betwen microevolution and macroevolution. And curiously, the length of giraffes’ necks is still a puzzle.
I call on you to do some reading. Try http://www.talkorigins.org/ You may find that the people filling your head with the “problems of evolution” don’t know what they are talking about, or worse still have been lying to you.
Are you saying that because there are some unanswered questions, the whole field should go down the drain?
Your question (moved to my field) would be like saying, “Why is it that some people get Parkinson’s and others don’t? We don’t know! Medicine is a pile of illogical crap. Disease is clearly caused by evil spirit demons that manipulate our energy fields.”
I’ll just warn you now–if you intend to get into this discussion, you probably need to spend several hours at the talk.origins archive first. There’s not much tolerance for ignorance of the basics around here. You can start with this essay on The Evolution of Color Vision, which might answer some of your questions about the eye.
Asmodean:
You don’t believe that genetic mutations can lead to new traits? That’s fine, except that it’s demonstrably true.
Then he had no business teaching science, and should have been thrown out on his ass.
It has been said that “A question which has no right to be asked, does not deserve a true answer”.
Compared to a million years from now, the current state of human perception can be summarized in one word “Ignorance”.
Being a mere snail in year 2001, we human beings have not yet reached the mental capacity to even perceive the true answer to such questions as “How did it all start?”, thus we really have no business to raise such questions as to who or what created the Big Bang, if any. And if “a force” that created the Big Bang is called God, then who created God?
At this point in our brain evolution, everything points to “human ignorance” as the creator of the concept of God, which is the easy way out. Have you noticed whenever we reach the limits of our mental capacity to explain the unknown, we simply say “God knows”. And since the concept of God is created by human beings, we are basically saying that we are ignorant, which in year 2001 is the absolute truth.
So, go ahead and say with certainty that “Evolution sucks”. Just remember – Certainty, is that state of ignorance which has yet to recognize itself.
Well, there’s your problem right there: scientifically, it’s one of the strongest - as Stephen Jay Gould says, it’s right up there with the Earth circling the sun. Until you’ve got some big gun scientists backing you up on your doubts, you should wonder if maybe you’re dismissing evolution unfairly.
What makes you think that I want your religious beliefs crammed down my throat?
For the record, even if the way that evolution works is not fully understood it is still governed by the scientific method. Creation, is not and can never be scientifically studied.
Why not? Genetic information is basically: A, T, G, C.
That doesn’t change. But the way they are combined does, and that has all the difference made. The way they are sequenced is the new information and that happens all the time.
betenoir, sure genetic information like that can mess up in one generation, but how does it get passed down? If its random chance that 1 generation had it then its random chance that the next generation has it.
Demonstrate it, give me an example where a species has a mutation that would help it survive where it didn’t have that genetic information before.
And my biology teacher was one of the better teachers at my school. Another teacher would have been better suited as a bus driver. (a kid lit her portable on fire and she didn’t know)
Since I work on the evolution of eyes (kind of), I posted a somewhat reasonable exploration of how eyes could have evolved in this thread.
I work on the development of the eye of the fruit fly D. melanogaster. While this seems very esoteric at first glance, the genetic pathways involved in fly eye development are conserved throughout evolution. Many of the same mechanisms are involved in forming a fruit fly eye and a human eye. Trust me. If you accept science, and you believe peer reviewed research, it is not difficult to fit eye development into evolution.
This is the principle of doing a genetic screen. This is a tool that biologists use to describe gene function. Granted, it is artificial, but it is easy to explain, and easy to see how parallel things happen in nature.
Take an organism (bacterium, yeast, worm, fly, mouse) and feed it mutagens or expose it to X-rays. Some of its germ line cells (sperm or eggs) become mutagenized.
Its progeny carry various mutations. We, as geneticists, select for a specific phenotype that we like (for instance, an albino mouse versus its colored siblings). For that specific organism (the albino mouse), it now has a much better fitness than its sibling organisms who did not carry the mutation. We allow it to mate, and since it is not mosaic or chimaeric (the whole mouse comes from that one mutagenized albino sperm from its father), it passes the mutation on to 50% of its children.
A simple example :
Mutagenize yeast and put them on plates containing 5% ethanol. This is usually toxic to the yeast. Most yeast die. A small population grows, descended from a cell carrying a mutation which imparts the ability to grow on ethanol. That cell, and all of its daughter cells, live because of genetic change.
The exact same thing happens during wine making and beer brewing – the population of yeasts that you have at the end of the brewing process are genetically different than those at the beginning, and thus are able to make ethanol up to about 12% concentration.
Although I don’t feel like looking for an exact cite right now,a variety of bacteria has, outside of the laboratory, developed the ability to digest nylon. This has come about from a single point mutation of an existing protein, giving the strain an enzyme that breaks down nylon.
Does this count as an increase in genetic information, or as a new trait from a mutation that is passed down to later generations?
Do you think it’s random chance if two black-haired parents have black-haired children?
Lactose tolerance. Normally, adults are not supposed to drink milk; they cannot digest milk sugar (lactose intolerance). However, in the distant past, some mutation granted someone the ability to digest milk sugar and this mutation was passed on to his or her descendents. This meant that adults now had an additional source of calcium and protein that others could not take advantage of. These people had many more descendents than those who could not drink milk. They were more successful.
Fact: Lactose tolerance is very rare in Asians and Native Americans, less rare among Africans and even less rare among Europeans.
Another helpful discovery: Four out of five Europeans have a common ancestor, a man who lived about 40,000 years ago. He was most likely a hunter.