(underlining mine, of course)
Or not:
It is interesting that most people who don’t believe in evolution do so purely from a mechanistic standpoint (HOW?) as opposed to looking at relational evidence that we get from genetics. To say it was impossible for h. erectus to be an ancestor of the present-day human ignores the abundant genetic evidence to that effect. I suppose that this is due mainly to an inability to look at the underlying story of molecular biology which shows that not only are all animals basically made out of the same genetic program, but all Eukaryotes are strongly similar. The real differences on the tree of life occur between domains of Archea, Bacteria, and the Eukaryotes. The crown eukaryotes might as well be the same things. That’s difficult for to grasp on a literal level, but we share so much more in common with a sponge than with a strep bacterium that it would be a stretch in deed to claim that there wasn’t a closer relation between us and the sponge. The simple fact that fossil records even remotely follow the genetic map of evolution seals the deal. Evolution is what has allowed for the vast array of life on this planet of ours.
Correct. But then, that is not particularly unusual in nature. Consider volcanoes.
Some volcanoes simply squeeze out a constant flow of magma, slowly building up new land masses around them.
Other volcanoes go for thousands of years without any changes and then POW, there’s a massive explosion and everything within 100 miles changes overnight.
And society is that way too. Armies can fight each other for thousands of years with nothing but swords on horseback. But then one day, someone invents gunpowder and everything changes in an instant.
Evolution is no different. A rat population can remain unchanged for a million years, but then one day, a rat is accidently born with skin flaps and is able to gather more and better food by gliding through the air. Within 10 years, a thriving colony of bats exists. In evolutionary terms, this is a sudden explosion.
Yes, but there is no transition between a sword and a gun.
Just like there’s no transition between a lobster and a monkey. What’s your point?
His point seems to be that he wants to see the half-sword, half-gun weapon before he will believe that soldiers stopped using swords and started using guns.
Hmm. I think this mystery weapon is normally called a “bayonet.”
It’s dogma vs. dogma, people.
Skeptics won’t accept the idea of God/spirit no matter what.
Creationists won’t accept the idea of evolution–no matter what.
The theory of evolution is a story that matches the phenomena and physical evidence very well. It is therefore “true.” It is arrogant, however, to pretend that we know everything that happend, and how. We don’t.
The creationists are forced to believe in a flood or whatever because they have embraced without qualification a set of interpretations of a certain book. They refuse to engage with the phenomena objectively.
Look at the phenomena/evidence. What story do they tell us? Evolution.
Look at the NDE phenomena–what do they tell us? Survival of consciousness beyond death.
Drop the agendas and engage.
Oh, look. A sword-gun.
Actually, they do nothing of the sort. Since you can create NDE with high G forces and with drugs, it pretty much rules out survival of consciousness beyond death as a viable explanation.
Uh, right here. Skeptic (about most unproven things), who believes in G-d.
I think you’re talking about me again. I believe G-d created us with evolution. I’ll get the exact details when I see him.
I agree with that.
Big generalization for a group of people who admit to various interpretations and beliefs.
There is factual evidence for evolution.
It tells me nothing about an afterlife. It tells me that people have some amazing experiences in their mind during these events. It does not tell me why.
So you’re ready to debate in a sensible manner now? This thread is about evolution. NDE’s hadn’t been invented yet.:rolleyes:
msram, flash 57 and aeschines
You didn’t get my point.
A sword-gun is a combination of two pre-existing items. My analogy (and it was only an analogy) tried to say that what I wanted was to see a series of transitional weapons that gradually went from a sword to a gun. There aren’t.
aeschines
I am creationist (mostly) and I believe in evolution. Open up your ideas. Your blatant stereotype of creationists is really sad.
Perhaps because the gun is not a direct “descendent”, logically or historically, of the sword. Try, oh I dunno, bows and crossbows, maybe, if you’re looking for something more analogous. Although siege engines were probably closer to being direct ancestors, since cannon appeared before rifles or handguns.
Yes, bows and crossbows would’ve been better, still, no transitions. (It was only an analogy, I don’t want to make it more than that, please)
Well, I didn’t miss your point. I was just trying to demonstrate that by picking two random objects and saying there’s no link doesn’t have any real relevance to Darwinism. If you want to look at swords and guns from a social darwinist perspective, they share an origin in the concept of a weapon, and are the results of respective solutions to that problem.
Comparing that to biology, organisms develop solutions to the problems that face them through natural selection. Spiders use their webs to catch their prey, bats use sonar, and I’m fairly certain there’s no direct link from spiders to bats (or from webs to sonar). You have to go back on both sides of the tree until you find a common ancestor, at which these two species diversified by beginning their different solutions to the obstacles they faced. This wouldn’t necessarily be initially developing sonar, flight or the web, that would start way further down after they branched off.
There is an obvious difference between social darwinism and natural selection. Social darwinism is artificial selection, so it’s not really that brilliant an analogy. Also, there may be a clear transition between bows and crossbows and unless you’re an expert in the history of bow weapons I fail to see how you can declare that there are no transitions without first seeing the evidence. Still, it wouldn’t really do any damage to social darwinism if you demonstrated there was no long - what would do damage to social darwinism is if someone sat down one day and invented a bow from scratch, a cultural equivalent to creationism. In fact, the power of artificial selection is clearly demonstrable through different breeds of dogs.
One of the most common creationist/ID arguments around is something along these lines: “I don’t see how X could have evolved so therefore evolution is false.” Emma Darwin thought the evolution of the eye was most unlikely and it has since been demonstration how quickly the eye could develop once photoreceptive cells are in existence (using conservative estimates to minimise chances of an underestimation of the figure). Other popular choices for creationists have been biomimicry being impossible and the fig also had an article written about it by a chemistry professor a while back; entitled “The Smyrna Fig Requires God For It’s Creation”. Possible methods of evolution have been demonstrated for these as well.
You’ve mentioned heart chambers a few times and this seems to be the same kind of thing. What would convince you that evolution is true? Someone demonstrating the evolution of heart chambers? Do you need every single biological mechanism to be demonstrated to you to be convinced? You mentioned that you don’t believe that small mutations can add up to large changes - what exactly is the threshold here? You said you recognised the speciation occurs. Is it really that unbelievable that many many speciations over a huge timespan could end up with an end product that bears very little or no resemblance to the initial organism?
They aren’t objects at random (at least no TOTAL random).
If I’d said a vase and a gun, OK totally random. However a sword and a gun (granting that a bow or crossbow would’ve been better) are both objects designed for killing AND that swords were replaced gradually and definitely and that basically the same armies (not exactly the same soldiers) used the former and then the latter. As a have repeatedly said it was an analogy and am aware of its dificulties. Of course “social” evolution works differently and I wasn’t trying to go for that.
Although I have stated it before, even in this very same thread, I’ll say it once again for your benefit. I am a creationist and I believe in evolution (althoug not necesarily DARWINIAN evolution). For more details please read the thread.
As to heart chambers. I keep mentioning them because I can’t picture 3.3 chambers, it is either 3 or 4, and yes, seeing 3 becoming 4 in a long series of small steps would get me very close to Darwinism.
There isn’t a clear threshold, but again I’ve already mentioned it.
So, am I to assume that in all those years of biology, you’ve never studied reptile* hearts? They are about as intermediate between a 3 and 4 chambered heart as it gets. And, of course, crocodiles have a four-chambered heart. It does not require any stretch in logic to see how an early ventrilcular septum can provide some minor advantage – an advantage which increases as the septum expands until it completely separates the ventricular cavity into two chambers. Since crocodiles are highly derived reptiles (and closely related to birds), it also stands to reason that the change from “3.5 chambers” to “4 chambers” took place within the crocodiles’ ancestral lineage.
*By “reptile” here, I mean “non-crocodilian reptile”.
Still lurking and learning. Thanks!
No I didn’t.
Man did my comment make you see red or what!! (Now I wish I’d studied engineering…)
Wasn’t Linnaean taxonomy useless in studying evolution? Weren’t birds evolved from dinosaurs and not crocodiles?
“The change from 3.5 to 4 took place within the crocodiles’ ancestral lineage.” Does it mean that crocodiles (themselves pretty much evolution resistant) gave origin to 4-chambered creatures OR that crocodiles’ great-grand-daddy gave origin to all or either of the 4-chambered groups, i.e. mammals and birds?
Just to look at what I was “missing” I followed your link…then I went to bed. It is always fun to hear Darwinians saying “it stands to reason” or “no stretch of imagination” when they always demand “facts, facts, facts”.
msram
what is your threshold? I mean, what is the magic number of steps between, let’s say, (non-doctoral-thesis phrase warning) the mouse-like creature that 150 million years ago supposedly (non-doctoral-thesis phrase warning) “gave origin” to all mammals AND modern humans that would convince you that Darwinism isn’t true? What if there were 1 000 steps? 100 steps? 10 steps? There must be a minimum that would render the idea of small, basically random, non-Lamarkian mutations invalid ( at least, up to a point) as the only means of evolution.
Could Homo Erectus have been Homo Sapiens Erectus?
Huh? Linnaean taxonomy is, to me, virtually useless as a taxonomy, but that’s pretty much besides the point.
Birds, dinosaurs and crocodiles are all archosaurs, and they all share a common ancestor (unless you’re into special creation). Birds and crocodiles have four-chambered hearts. It is not unreasonable (and, if you think it is, please explain why) to hypothesize that their common ancestor must have had a four-chambered heart (or something close to it) as well.
See above. Mammals, of course, would have evolved their four-chambered hearts independently from what the archosaurs were doing.
Yes, you’re very clever. It’s just as amusing when a creationist says “show me evidence!”, and then when presented said evidence, he dismisses it without even addressing it. So: reptiles have what is effectively a 3.5 chambered heart, which is not the result of “evolving” a new chamber, but rather the result of evolving a partial septum between chambers. You wanted to see intermediates between a 3-chambered heart and a 4-chambered heart, you’ve now got one. But, let me guess, now you want to see all the other infinitessimal changes between “no septum” and “partial septum”, right? And then all the myriad steps between “partial septum” and “complete septum”. Because, obviously, it does not “stand to reason” for you.
It stands to reason for me because such a change would be primarily developmental in nature, with the evolutionary aspect focusing not so much on the building a new septum between ventricles, but rather slightly adjusting the timing of cardiac development. Even in humans, if something doesn’t go quite right with said timing, the ventricular septum can be incomplete.
See this link for an (sloooww) animation of cardiac development. You can see how the ventricular septum starts at the base of the ventricular cavity and grows upwards towards the atria. Again, I don’t see it as a great stretch at all to theorize that the same, or a similar, process occurred on evolutionary timescales, resulting in a four-chambered heart evolving from a three-chambered one (and no, that is not a version of that old canard “ontogony recapitulates phylogeny”).
Well put! The question that AcidKid asks is flawed 'coz he assumes humans to be ‘created’ and then also accepts the obvious effects of evolution on life.
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The size of the governing dynamics of the universe prevent us from enumerating all data that could help us understand evolution better, but does not hide the basic fact that this data does exist.
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It is easily seen in macro/micro life forms that all systems are largely interconnected. Basic theories in physics like energy cannot be created or destroyed and even the valencies in elements make it clear that given time and energy anything is possible! But this thread is not to discuss the ToE/governing dynamics.
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I blame the power shifts in religious bodies (which are worse than the white house!) for spreading ignorance to keep control! I beleive in religion as rules of society and claim that religion has nothing to do with GOD at all. The entire concept of GOD is a figment of mans imagination. What people should understand is that Jesus (if such man existed!) was nothing more than a very clever(and obviously popular) politician. Given enough word of mouth communication even George W Bush may become ‘GOD’ for someone. (In fact I am quite sure he is ‘GOD’ for some poor little oil rich country with bullish neighbours!)
Regards,
novemberromeo