It’s not that enough micro type changes can’t produce drastic change. It’s a matter of whether or not they did, particularly when it comes to man. It just seems wiser to put my faith in G-d and what I believe, than put my faith in man and what he has discovered so far. It probably is something of a “hedge”, but I would rather believe in G-d and what I percieve his truth is and possibly end up wrong about evolution, than form some sort of faith(absent of all the facts) in evolution and be wrong about G-d. Being wrong about G-d somehow seems worse than being wrong about evolution. It’s just a choice of where to put my faith.
Well, at least you’re honest. Am I summarizing your response properly in saying you will not believe anything that contradicts your belief in God’s plan as it is represented in the Bible without some level of contradictory facts?
And exactly what sort of facts would be convincing enough for you to abandon this faith in a literal Bible? The fossil record is substantial, for example. Do you hold that the world is a few thousand years old, in spite of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary? If you don’t believe that evidence for macroevolution currently exists, then just hypothetically can you describe the sort of discovery that would be satisfactory (where the fossil record is not)?
Thanks for responding.
Correct. The story was plagarized from other religions of the time, and it wasn’t right then, either.
The only drawback to that arguement is that you’re putting not putting your faith in a god of any kind, but rather into a fairy story that has been passed down for years from the times when the people who originated it walked around in the desert with their heads uncovered.
Since I’m being honest, I’m not sure I would necessarily believe the contradictory facts if it was in direct conflict with my faith.
I don’t exactly believe in a literal Bible. I know in debate this becomes a point of contention because it seems like we pick and choose what we believe. I think it’s more a matter of interpretation. I think the world’s age is close to what science says and not 6000 years or whatever the current idea is. I don’t know if the fossil record is or ever will be enough evidence to prove macroevolution as far as man’s creation is concerned, but will admit that I am only about two months into any non-biased evolutionary information. Before then, I got my information about evolution from religion. If I were forced to commit, with the information I have; I would probably say that macroevolution as it pertains to man is correct and G-d’s separate creation of Adam & Eve is also correct. The theories that I’ve heard on common descent, coupled with the Bible version of Cain’s exile and interaction with people in another land would have me deciding that evolution was the source of lineage for one group of mankind that became extinct and Adam & Eve were the source of the other lineage and that is where we came from. Since I still don’t know if “common descent” is a true theory or one of the religiously slanted pieces of information I received, I don’t know if this is even possible. With what little I know about evolution, I guess what I would need would be more genetic evidence of our link with chimps, as in what came in between, but really I don’t know enough about it to even decide what information it would take. I’ve struggled really hard trying to make this all fit and finally decided I don’t need to as badly as I thought I did.
Thank you for sharing. While I appreciate the input, I think I’m going to have to go with my gut feeling on this one. You do give weight to the idea that perhaps all of the inferior lineage produced from macroevolution has not become extinct.
Well, the question remains: if such small changes could, in principle, produce so-called large-scale changes, and we have evidence to support the conclusion that they did, in fact, produce such “drastic” change*, why does faith intervene to disallow you to accept such changes? If you allow that God may have used evolution to “create”, why do you disallow that God used evolution to create Man? That’s a very Wallace-esque view, and a weak view at that; “special pleading” and all. As the saying goes, “we are all God’s creatures” – are we, then, less so just because God did not personally mold us from clay? To accept that God used evolution to create man does not suddenly disprove God, nor does it necessitate abandonment of one’s faith.
*Again, I would like to point out that the changes are not drastic! Change is step-wise, and the ensuing version is little different from the previous one. It is only by picking end points, such as we see today – like “bird” vs “lizard”, or even “chimp” vs “man” for a smaller degree of, yet still profound, difference – that we see drastic differences between groups. There remains no good reason not to accept that those differences were, nevertheless, achieved in a stepwise manner.
I can’t even disagree with you on your point. Rationale for my view is weak. I’m not refusing to accept that G-d used evolution to make man. I just don’t see it as an incontrovertable fact at this point. I do realize that it looks like an extemely likely scenario and there is evidence that points that way. I am not concerned that finding out all man came from macroevolution would in any way disprove G-d. Although it does come with it’s own need to explain how and when the soul came into being and how the history stated in the Bible fits with the whole process. I would be the first to admit, and I have, that our whole argument for G-d’s existence is weak anyway. That doesn’t cause me any doubt, but it does make debate on any of the other points rather difficult. I’m sure it doesn’t seem true, but my mind is not closed on any of these matters. I just can’t get to where you are, from where I am, without more information.
This concept as far as “changes” does not seem difficult to me. I realize that if I were to look at man from say 5,000 years ago(I picked that number out of my hat) and the man I looked at were to look back another 5,000 years to the next man, and each one keeps looking back, the changes would be relatively imperceptable. I understand that the change is always very small. What I am having trouble with,and I’m sure it’s for the most part because I just don’t know enough, but since we have genetic testing, DNA markers, etc., shouldn’t we be able to come up with a man that is a lot closer to us than what we have found now, but still has more in common with the chimp than we do, genetic wise? Is the reason we haven’t because there isn’t one or just because there would not necessarily have needed to be many of them, making discovery unlikely?
And that is perfectly valid position. As you learn more about the process, such misgivings may, indeed, fall away (or, they may not!). I can only state that from where I am, given what I have learned, the whole thing seems eminently reasonable.
Are you referring to an extant “proto-man”, or an extinct one? It is actually a prediction of evoution by natural selection that such individuals would not co-exist with us, since we, by definition, would be “better” at, well, being Man. Thus, we would have driven any of our predecessors into extinction. As for why we might not have found fossils for these proto-men, well, we do have many such fossils. We may not have one representing each and every generation, of course (and I have attempted to explain the reasons for that in the “creation and dinosaurs” thread), but we do have several which are in a state which we would predict if common descent is true. This site gives a good overview of what we do have, and this one shows the timelines involved.
Thanks for the cites.
I can understand why all of this would seem reasonable to you. If you take G-d out of the picture, it is really the only explaination for our origin, so I am limited by my bias.
I was refering to an extint “proto-man”. I would assume if they were living, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. Why would we have driven our predecessors into extinction? I would think to have any “smooth transitional forms” would not even be possible. I wonder how many generations that would take to reach a common ancestor. That would be a lot of fossils. I did find out my whole concept of Mitrochondrial Eve was wrong. They should have called her “Janet”.
Going to talkorigins in the section where they’re “de-bunking” creationists theories, has been the only place I’ve found any of the “facts” I thought I knew. It appears one shouldn’t get evolution info on PAX or any other religious based tv station. I think because I have the hardest time when it comes to evolution and man, that I need to go waaay back when the earth hit the right temperature and the “sludge?” started changing. Did it all come from one common “sludge?” or were there many who evolved into different things depending on it’s location? Maybe if I can learn more about the life before man, then I can work my way up or over or ? Is there a really basic book?
> There are limits as to which mutations can arise … Again,
> natural selection is powerful, but it is not all-powerful.
I think I disagree. Natural selection IS all powerful. The problem is that even minor changes take thousands of years to alter a population significantly, while major changes may need millions of years.
Recorded history only accounts for a small fraction of the time that evolvution has been at work. We could compare a man from the begining of recorded history (maybe 4000 years) and he’d look pretty much like a man of today.
While if you got a man from 2 million years ago (or whatever humanoid evolved into man), he’d be very different, even though he’d have many similarities.
Five million years from now, who knows what humans will look like. Granted, we may not be able to fly or shoot fire lasers out of our eyes, that might take 50 million years.
Or it might not. I can easily see genetic engineering and cloning joining forces in the next 1000 years to create humans with all kinds of strange abilities.
Are you sure this is what you are trying to say? Sure, there are no primitive Homo species extant, but if we went back in time 100k years ago, we’d have H. sapiens, neanderthalensis and H. erectus all alive at the same time. Evolutionary theory does not predict that H. sapiens would outcompete the others. It might have come out differently. As I’m sure you know, the normal state of affairs for the last 5 million years or so was that there was more than one Hominid species running around at any given time.
I think these two points are very much related. And, they seem to be your core problem with evolution. First off, fossils are very rare. It’s not as if the cosmic record keeper took a couple of copies of every species and flash froze them and put them on display (in order).
It’s like having a huge jigsaw puzzle, with thousands of pieces, and then having someone take all the pieces and throw them all over a football stadium. Then, after a few months, telling you to go to the stadium and put the puzzle together. You’d be lucky to find 2 or 3 pieces.
As for the small and big changes, I’d challenge you to look around at things in your life. An accumulation of small things DOES add up to a big change.
Look at music. In the 40s, everything was big bands. Now, 60 years later, it’s mostly hip-hop and rap. That was a HUGE overall change in music that happened as a continuing series of small steps. Elvis, folk, rock, disco, new wave, punk, boy bands, and rap were all small little steps that didn’t seem noticeable at the time.
When you fix up an old house, everything doesn’t just change overnight, you change a little bit here and a little bit there. After a while, the house looks completely different.
That’s absolutely true. There are lots and lots of dots missing. That’s simply going to be a problem when you try to collect evidence from events that happened 100 million years ago.
I view all the missing dots like a spline. If you can only nail down a few points, the lines between the points should be nice and smooth. They may not cross exactly where the missing points would be, but they are usually not very far off.
I said (more or less) what I meant to say: descendent species will replace ancestral ones, thus ancestors do not (typically) co-exist with descendents. Consider the gradual transformation, via natural selection, of a population. In order to even be selected for, the trait in question must provide a competitive edge to the individual in question over its conspecifics. As that trait becomes more commonplace in a population, it stands to reason that those who do not possess that trait will fall to the wayside, as it were; the ancestral population will have been replaced by the descendent one, and the ancestral population will thereby be extinct.
If any of the various Homo species (aside from H. sapiens, of course) were our ancestors, it is virtually a given that we would outcompete them. If they were simply contemporaries, even if we shared a common ancestor, then it was essentially anyone’s game and we happened to win.
DF:
OK, I see what you’re getting at. I wasn’t equating “ancestral population” with “proto-man”. The surviving populations of H. erectus could not be called ancestral to H. sapiens. But in the spirit of IWLN’s question about “proto-man”, I would have thought H. eretctus would qualify for that title.
I mostly agree with you, but sometimes evolution is (at least in my eyes) different from your music example. It appears that it’s like:
a) 8-track and then cassettes (wich are basically the same medium) show good small level “evolution”
b) cassettes and then CD show a “jump” that can’t be explained by small steps, even if there are underlying similarites there are no intermediate steps. I’m sure this analogy has holes sompleace but you get my point.
Different rates of change. Species may be stable for long periods of time, then change very suddenly due to dramatic environmental changes. Check out Puntuated Equlilibria.
You could even check out Punctuated Equilibria, as well.
I’ve already checked both ‘:)’, and, although interesting, have the feel of trying to justify “fossil silence” with an almost invisible change. Still it is intersting and not farfetched.
This book, Extinct Humans, by Ian Tattersall would be a good place to start. If you start to do some serious reading, you’ll see that every scientist has a slightly different take on the data. Don’t let that confuse you, though. All science is like that. In the end, you’ll have to come to your own conclusions.