Questions for Evolutionists

[KeysrSoze]

Grunching

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

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All of them. Every creature is in fact a transition between its parents species and its childrens species. You guys look at everything in black and white; a dog doesn't suddenly birth a half-dog/half-cat, who then births a cat.

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2. Is macro-evolution science?

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Macro-evolution is a misnomer, I believe. It's just the product of a whole bunch of changes brought about by what you call micro-evolution. How many micro-evolutions does a macro-evolution require? Its like if you shovel sand into a pile, when is it a hill? on the 100th scoop? the 101st?

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

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Evolution is heavily documented, tangible, observed and tested even (for instance you can show that bacteria will select, mutate and adapt to their environment to resist penicillin). Just plug in your arbitrary number of changes needed to count as macro-evolution. X number of these adaptations, and there you go.

[Jeff V]

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I grunced once...it's not all it's cracked up to be.

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All of them. Every creature is in fact a transition between its parents species and its childrens species.

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Yawn. Then we should have a fossil of a scale through air resistance becoming a feather right? How bout a scale with some serious frayed edges?

They just don't exist.

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.

[tolbiny]

While not an expert i do have some background in this.

"If man evolved from apes, then why aren't there any half man-apes around in the process of becoming fully man?"

The simple answer to your first questionis that the half man half apes were out competed by humans. Around 200,000k yrs ago we find evidence of what are considered the first anatomically modern [censored] sapiens. At this time there exists a different species, [censored] neanderthalensis. There are also the last survivors of a species know as [censored] erectus. erectus is probably the "apeman" you are thinking off- he walked upright, had an average brain size of around 1000ccs (humas average around 1400, chimps around 450 iirc), made and used stone tools and controlled fire. His skeleton diffeered from H. sapiens in a couple of ways- 1 obviously he had a smally skull (smaller brain)- but it was shaped differently as well. It is longer than it is high (in humans its higher than it is long) and it is wider at the base of the cranium than it is at the top (in humans it is widest just above the ears) and erectus exhibits strongly prounounced double arched brow ridges (humans are unnoticible by comparison). There are also dental differences is the size of teeth, and no erectus specimin has been found exhibiting a chin. They are clearly a different species from sapiens. Otherwise they were very similar to anatomically modern [censored] sapiens (AMHS), shared the same diet and habitat. Once they eveolved AMHS outcompeted erectus. Where would you find such apemen? Anywhere they might have lived humans have moved into and driven them to extinction.

"Did the genus of ape we evolved from suddenly stop evolving into man?"

Apes and humans split from a common ancestor around 6 million years ago. Apes have evolved since then, our common ancestor probably looked as different from chimps as we look different from chimps. There were many steps between this common ancestor and us. Adaptations that allowed us to walk upright, carry things more efficiently, communicate, larger brains ect. A million years ago the hominids that walked around weren't human, they were a different species, different from what came before them, and different from what was to follow. We don't show up until around 200k years ago.

"Why do we find that one species is often so clearly defined from other species?"
I can never describe this one well- the easy answer is time. Stuff has been around long enough to specialize into a specific habitat.

"I have some problem with the so-called Cambrian explosion too"
Ask away, while i am not very strong in PE thoery, i can probably answer a question or two.

[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.

[Lestat]

Wow thanks tobiny! That was interesting.

I guess my mistake was looking at the evolution off species like some kind of weed. Even if [censored] sapiens killed of the neanderthals, I expected they would keep trying to evolve from our common ancestor. I mean, why wouldn't they? I understand we drove them to extinction, but is was our common ancestor also extinct at the time?

The other thing I often overlook is the random mutation part. It seemed to me that it's not that important, but in fact it must be. As species randomly develop features and keep those of benefit, I guess I can see how a species like [censored] sapien may never evolve again.

But do we see current species in current states of development? The fact that the process takes so long and our technology is so young makes it so hard to tell. But is it possible there will be some apes in Africa that will learn how to use fire? Will dogs one day evolve the brain power to watch TV and understand our language? Will certain humans one day become intolerant of any type of weather outside that of room temperature? Etc. etc.

I want to see (or at least understand the process in action). It's a fascinating subject. btw- How do you come to have a background in this? Thanks again.