Thanks, I feel the same way.Fate Elixir wrote...
Gill Kaiser - This is the classic age old argument of Evolution vs Creation. You and I both know that there is no right or wrong answer. That is a matter of personal belief and worldview. The debate can and would rage on until the sun came down if we decided to take it there. I commend you for putting together a thoughtful and respectful response. I am always happy to have a civil exchange of ideas.
See, the neat thing about the process of evolution (that people who cite irreducible complexity don't always get) is that because evolution occurs blindly, it uses what it has 'on hand', as it were. Complex organs that can only perform their function if they exist wholly as they are in the present-day (such as the eye) may incorporate many vestigial structures into their design which were previously used for other purposes during the organism's evolutionary development. For example, the use of pharyngeal slits throughout the development of early chordates into more complex species such as vertebrates: fish gills as they currently exist are a high surface-area structure for gaseous exchange, but they developed from the filter-feeding apparatus of invertebrates such as tunicates (there are clear homologies between the structures, as well as intermediate forms in species such as amphioxus which use their pharyngeal slits for filter feeding but in many other ways resemble primitive fish). Another example might be the bones in the human inner ear, which are homologous to some of the bones that are used in the jaw apparatus of bony fish and reptiles. During our development we no longer needed the same kind of jaw as those species, so the bones were appropriated for another purpose.To address your overall theme I will try and be simple and to the point. Richard Dawkins (One of the four horseman of evolutionary leaders) says that it is not left to only chance or design. He states that natural selection explains everything. This theory has as many holes as swiss cheese. First off not every organism competes with each other. Secondly, and more importantly, there are many things in this world that are irreducibly complex (look up bio-chemist Michael Behe for more on this). For instance if you look at the cilium of a sperm cell (the tail), what evolved first, the tail (cylium) or the head? They both depend on each other, and both serve no purpose seperately. There are other such examples as the eye, or bacterial flagellum among others.
Every random mutation is not beneficial, not even close. In fact, most are losses of useful information, garbling of genes, etc. The point is that there is a natural selection process that on average retains those mutations that do provide positive effects. If a gene is affected by a mutation, yes the original gene information is in some way 'lost', but it has been replaced by a new iteration that might or might not be superior. The original gene will still exist in another individual, most likely (maybe in a sibling or other relative), and this allows the newly mutated allele to compete against the original. It doesn't work too well on the individual level, but on a species-level and over millions of years, surely you can see how beneficial information could be built up?This of course is just one question that needs to be examined to be a proponent of evolution. The other is simply that all beings had to have evolved from one single celled amoeba. Science has never been able to explain how every random mutation is beneficial in the form of specific informational increase, and observable physical change.
Horses and dogs developed seperately at the same time, so you'll never see a horse turning into a dog. Fish (in a way) have been seen to turn into whales, since bony fish gave rise to terrestrial amphibians, which gave rise to dinosaurs and reptiles, which then gave rise to land mammals, some of which then moved back into the sea to form aquatic mammals like the whale.One important note is that microevolution has been observed and is real (canines teeth formational changes over centuries for instance), however the theory of macroevolution has never been observed by the human eye. This of course is the change of species and not just suttle physical changes. Nobody has ever observed a horse turn into a dog, or a fish into a whale. At this rate of reasoning why won't a bicycle turn into a motorcycle if left in the garage long enough? Dawkins actually believes that if you were to walk in a forest and randomly find a stopwatch having never seen one before, that if given enough time the components could self assemble into that functional watch. I hope my Xbox evolves into a Xbox 360 soon cause I want some new video games.
Stopwatches, bicycles, motorcycles and games consoles are all inanimate objects which have no heritable form of information retention, nor any form of natural selection process acting upon them. It is (1) The existence of DNA as a data molecule, (2) The heritability of DNA, and (3) The process of natural selection that results in evolution from one thing to another. The objects you mention are not comparable to living organisms.
That old chestnut. To me the answer seems clear. At some point, an organism similar to a chicken but not classifiable as a chicken by modern standards (for simplification, let's say it was an organism that would not have been able to procreate with a modern chicken) laid an egg, from which hatched an offspring that was just diffferent enough from its parent to be classified as a modern chicken. Therefore, the egg came first.It is true that it takes faith to believe in a higher power, but it takes just as much faith (in my opinion, more) to believe in the theory of evolution. Simply ask the following question to test what you believe, what came first the chicken or the egg? If you can't answer this definitively (and none of us can) than maybe you should stop to consider that we may not know as much as we think. The debate goes on...
Modifié par Gill Kaiser, 02 avril 2010 - 11:27 .
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