More fuel to the Psychoreligionology fire

[meow_meow]

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How about a theory about the origin of life on earth?

Clearly evolution is a flawed theory along these lines.

Refining a species OK. Mutating new species, maybe, but on thin ice.

Origin of life? Sorry, it doesn't have any evidence.

Citing evolutionary evidence within a species, or the spawning of new species via mutation to support that same theory for explaining the origin of life is faulty logic on bad premises.

This makes more sense to me, as it is logical.

Cosmic Ancestry as a LOGICAL theory of life-origin on Earth

Come on people. Evolution is a kind of religion. Sheesh.

Can't we all just get along?

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I have a question for you.
If like on Earth was seeded from space (I don't either like or dislike this theory btw.), where did that life originate?

You still have the same basic problem, with two alternative solutions:
1) life originated via random events acting on pre-biotic chemistry.
2) life was created by some pre-existing "god" (where did he/she come from?)

We at least have evidece for the former. Belief in the latter is purely down to faith.

Your argument reminds me of an anecdote (apocryphal) that Stephen Hawking tells, and goes something like this:
At the end of a lecture on cosmology, and old lady stands up and tells and tells him that he's wrong, and that in fact, the universe rests on the back of a turtle.
"And what supports the turtle?" he asks.
"You can't fool me, young man" she replies, "It's nothing but turtles, all the way down."

[meow_meow]

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So in any or all of these citations was an event such as a monkey becoming a man observed?

I think we can definitely say "natural selection" occurs and results in shifting characteristics of a population of a species that already exists. But has say, a monkey giving birth to a [censored]-sapien been shown somewhere? In a natural context. (With cloning techniques I'm sure that could happen artificially. :-) )

I'm not a creationist, but I do wonder how an evolutionist explains hoping over the specied divide.

I'm defining "species" here as meaning two of them can mate and have children. Granted that leaves out hermaphrodites and of homosexual acts etc. :-)

But consider hypothetically... we have a population of a so many monkeys that can breed.... one of them has mutation.... the first [censored]-sapien.... was it a male or female? Or more importantly, was a member of the other sex of that species also spawned somewhere? And how were they lucky enough to find each other and have spawn the third [censored]-sapien etc?

Or if there were "missing links" that I'n defining as, "could mate with monkey or [censored]-sapien and have viable offspring"... where are these in the fossil record?

Anyway, just curious if this "species jump" has been proven somewhere?

If so, I definitely would like to see where.

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You are thinking about this in the wrong way. Gould aside, evolution happens gradually.
Instead of this "species hop" idea, think of a species of monkies where two populations become geographically isolated (for example, by a newly formed river, that the monkeys can't cross). Over many generations, and even in the absense of different selective pressure, the two populations will accumulate genetic differences, and eventually become reproductively isolated (the definition of different species).

[chezlaw]

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lol! It is known that Einstein wasn't that good at math during his highschool period, and presumably not at all. To come to his E = MC2 he used simple math, the pythagorean theorem! Or so I've been told.

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Einstein was a high class mathematician. Anything else is myth.

[meow_meow]

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I bet all these quotes are from Yankee fans.

I'm sure these books are dumbed down, but for a layman like myself they are interesting.

If you know of anything else on evolution written for a mass audience, I'd like a recommendation.

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Try Richard Dawkins. He seems to have made it his life work to explain evolution to the interested layman. 'The Blind Watchmaker' was his first and a bit of a classic.

chez

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I'd like to second that. Richard Dawkins is the man you want to read. Things were pretty acrimonious between him and SJG, but the former is much more rigorous, and doesn't have the paleontologist skew.
I defy anyone to read "the blind watchmaker" with an open mind and still not buy evolution.

[Jedi Flopper]

I am still waiting for an evolutionary explaination for the transition from asexual reproduction to sexual reproduction...

[MaxPower]

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I bet all these quotes are from Yankee fans.

I'm sure these books are dumbed down, but for a layman like myself they are interesting.

If you know of anything else on evolution written for a mass audience, I'd like a recommendation.

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Try Richard Dawkins. He seems to have made it his life work to explain evolution to the interested layman. 'The Blind Watchmaker' was his first and a bit of a classic.

chez

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Thanks. I think I did read The Selfish Gene many years ago.

I still think those guys are Jealous of SJG becuase he got to be on The Simpsons [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[maurile]

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"But in this day and age, if a legitimate "real challenge" to an aspect of evolutionary theory is discovered, someone will write it up for publication in a journal. Bet on it, even if you have to lay odds."

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/vie...ew&id=2177

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Thanks for posting that. I won't have time to write much until later in the week, but I'll try to address it then. In the meantime, it appears to effectively refute my claim that Creationists haven't gotten any doubts about evolution published in a peer-reviewed science journal.

[maurile]

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Something else I wonder about is that generally in laboratory environments (or at least within the life span of one or several generations) you can only monitor change. However, you are not able to monitor the direction of that change. That is, you are not able to monitor whether that change will benefit the organism in the long run because of the short time span.

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Evolution is incapable of thinking in the long term. Only the short term matters. If a mutation is advantageous in the short term, it will be selected for. If it is disadvantageous in the short term, it will be selected against. If it is neutral in the short term, it will not be selected for or against.

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Therefore I wonder in what way you are able to deduce that what is observed is indeed reinforcement for the evolution theory, and how it implies that there has been growth in the evolution of the organism and not merely alteration.

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"Alteration" is what evolution is about. When biologists speak of evolution, they are referring to a change in allele frequencies over time in a given population. There is no preferred direction for such changes -- changes are changes.

Most mutations are disadvantageous, and thus do not spread through the population, and don't have much of an effect on gene frequencies in that population. Some mutations are disadvantageous in some environments but advantageous in others. So if you take the same species and put it in two separate environments (say you take a population of monkeys, half of which stay in the jungle and the other half wander into the grasslands), different traits will be selected for in each of the separate populations. After enough time, the two populations will have diverged enough genetically to constitute separate species.

[maurile]

As others have mentioned, Richard Dawkins is a great choice. Dawkins is nearly Gould's equal in writing ability, but a better biologist.

The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker are his best books, IMO. River Out of Eden and Climbing Mount Improbable are also good, but generally repetative of the first two. The Extended Phenotype is harder to get through, but worthwhile if you do.

[Cerril]

Personally my favorite response to this sort of thing comes, as one might expect, from Penny-Arcade. Specifically:

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If someone can say [that], they are either idiots or liars. Which is it...? Assholes or retards? You pick.

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It's amazing how many times a week I have cause to think that.