Questions for Evolutionists

Hello Jeff V,

In the last 150 years hundreds of thousands of new (unknown at the time of Darwin) discoveries, have consistently confirmed the theory. And there still are gaps in the evidence, and there are still dicoveries that will continue to be made (my prognostic) conforming it, and there probably will be gaps in the footseps that will be there forever. After all, it is just a trail. There has not been any evidence contradicting it that has not been subsequently explained.

I must commend you on your skepticism. It suits a scientific and rational approach to life understanding.

By the way, the theory of god has been around a lot more than 150 years, yet in that time, there has been not been a single shred of evidence found supporting it. I am sure that you must be at the very least an agnostic with your intellectually rigourous approach to facts and theories.

I think there should be more people like you on this forum, it may make the debates a bit different from the farce that it usually is when people come in here, tooting statements, about loving god, id and mystery and how true that is.

I can see that you will be a great addition to this forum and to the levels of debates encountered here. Welcome as one of the few. Keep on being vocal, because after a little while you will noticed that all your statements will be ignored by religionists who would rather sweep rationality under the carpet and leave it out of sight.


Again, welcome bro [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[wadea]

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3. If you answered yes to #3 then where's the tangible, testible evidence?

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The evidence is in your DNA, bro, and it's very testable. Luckily, we no longer need to resort to dark-age science (i.e. looking at bones next to each other). By comparing similarities and differences between DNA sequences of many organisms, one can determine fairly accurately the order in which they drifted away from a common ancestor. B/c the physical form of an organism is determined primarily by its genes, true evolution happens at a DNA level.

It is also worth reminding everyone that the historical ancestors often no longer exist after the split. It is very difficult to survive without evolving and very few species are able to do it. Both sides of the split usually evolve divergently.

[Borodog]

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1. How many fossils have been found that show transition from one species to the next?

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Here's one of my absolute favorites:



"Creationists . . . assert that apes and humans are separated by a wide gap. If this is true, deciding on which side of that gap individual fossils lie should be trivially easy. Clearly, that is not the case."

And:

"As this table shows, although creationists are adamant that none of these are transitional and all are either apes or humans, they are not able to tell which are which. In fact, there are a number of creationists who have changed their opinion on some fossils. They do not even appear to be converging towards a consistent opinion. Gish and Taylor both used to consider Peking Man an ape and 1470 a human, but now Gish says they are both apes, and Taylor says they were both humans. Interestingly, widely differing views are held by two of the most prominent creationist researchers on human origins, Gish and Lubenow. Bowden, who has also written a book on human evolution, agrees with neither of them, and Mehlert, who has written a number of articles on human evolution in creationist journals, has yet another opinion, as does Cuozzo in his 1998 book on Neandertals. Cuozzo has taken the most extreme stance yet for a young-earth creationist, saying that even H. erectus fossils (in which he includes the Turkana Boy) should not be considered human. (Old-earth creationist Hugh Ross takes an even more extreme stance, claiming that not even Neandertals should be classified as human.)"

[joel2006]

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1. How many fossils have been found that show transition from one species to the next?

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Although the above question appears to be a legitimate one it is in fact a trick question with either none, or many answers. It is one of many tricks employed by religionists (mostly Christians), for example like the questions about the fossil proof that man evolved from apes. There is none, because man didn't evolve from apes (nor did Darwin ever state that they did) Man and apes evolved from a common ancestor, but that doesn't mean that the common ancestor was an ape. In fact it most likely was a lemur. The idea that man evolved from apes was created, propagated, and is continued by opponents of evolution. The reason why the above question is a trick one becomes clear when we examine it closely. Let us say we are looking for a fossil that shows a transition from Species A and Species B, by definition said fossil cannot belong to either species. This means that it would have to be a different species that shows characteristics of both. Many such intermediate species have previously and currently exist. There are also many places in the fossil record where new species that are similar to existing species pop up (like [censored] Sapiens 200k years ago) But how does one prove that any one specific species led to another? Especially when there are several candidate species? Outside of DNA there is no way of doing this, and since fossils are made of stone they contain no DNA.

[Borodog]

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1. How many fossils have been found that show transition from one species to the next?

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Although the above question appears to be a legitimate one it is in fact a trick question with either none, or many answers. It is one of many tricks employed by religionists (mostly Christians), for example like the questions about the fossil proof that man evolved from apes. There is none, because man didn't evolve from apes (nor did Darwin ever state that they did) Man and apes evolved from a common ancestor, but that doesn't mean that the common ancestor was an ape. In fact it most likely was a lemur. The idea that man evolved from apes was created, propagated, and is continued by opponents of evolution.

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You're not helping. This is totally incorrect. Man in fact did evolve from an ape, as did the modern apes. The dirty little secret is that . . . we're all apes. You can't call chimpanzees "apes" and gorillas "apes" without calling humans "apes," because we are more closely related to chimps than chimps are to gorillas. The most recent common ancestor with lemurs is long, long, long. long, long before the most recent common ancestor between apes like us and the rest of the apes.

[BluffTHIS!]

Actually joel is helping. This was his key statement:

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The reason why the above question is a trick one becomes clear when we examine it closely. Let us say we are looking for a fossil that shows a transition from Species A and Species B, by definition said fossil cannot belong to either species. This means that it would have to be a different species that shows characteristics of both. Many such intermediate species have previously and currently exist. There are also many places in the fossil record where new species that are similar to existing species pop up (like [censored] Sapiens 200k years ago) But how does one prove that any one specific species led to another? Especially when there are several candidate species? Outside of DNA there is no way of doing this, and since fossils are made of stone they contain no DNA.

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This is indeed the trick of creationists in trying to frame the question with a scientifically wrong premise, namely that for evolution of species to be true then there must shown an unbroken line of fossil evidence, which of course is not necessarily all extant. And the real trick is their trying to poke holes in evolution by saying it is not continuous when they are the ones making it a chain of discrete instances of antecedant and descendant species when in fact their is no precise point of differentiation, although one can point to a time when a new one existed and a time when it did not.

The solution is that each individual biological specimen in the chain from one species to another is the "missing link". And one only has to look at evidence of early hom.o sapiens to see that Cro Magnon man was different in many ways than we who are the same species, though with a smaller brain capacity than Cro Magnon.

There are also two other points wrong with the OP's arguments in this thread. Firstly, he falsely has tried to limit the discussion to macro evolution, with the implication that micro evolution is not a sufficient proof of a common biological process, which if continued for a long enough time would eventually produce a macro result if there were not occasional cross-breeding within variations of a species to prevent the divergence of the gene pool into first subspecies and then differing species.

And secondly, he rejected David Steele's entire quotation of instances of speciation as only due to hybrydization and not natural selection. This is not true if one will look closely at all the studies on house flies.

[joel2006]

Borodog, you're right, but what i meant was that we didn't evolve from chimps, orangs, bonobos, or gorillas, which is what creationists have led most people to think that evolution says hapened.

[maurile]

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1. How many fossils have been found that show transition from one species to the next?

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Thousands. You can start just with horses (and their ancestors) here.

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2. Is macro-evolution science?

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Are waterfalls science? The question doesn't make sense.

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3. If you answered yes to #3 then where's the tangible, testible evidence?

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You can start here: 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution.

[Jeff V]

I was just asking questions. It's funny that the fact I asked means I have a "religionist" agenda to some people- It works both ways I s'pose.

Why is evolution still theory, and not fact? If the case for evolution is so strong, as some claim here why is ID given a second thought by anyone in any school system anywhere??

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Why is evolution still theory, and not fact? If the case for evolution is so strong, as some claim here why is ID given a second thought by anyone in any school system anywhere??

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Because claasical physic is still theory and wiil be so until every one of its formulae, including the one for acceleration, until every value has been tested for every possible variable [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] LOL

As far as ID is concerned, it probably is because very few people understand what science is, and they keep on confusing it with the realm of belief or religion. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]