No "Real Science" = No Diploma!

I mean, it must take a lot of "faith" to believe that, right?

 

Okay! I get it.

Evolution hasn't stopped. We see it all the time...In a hospital ward where a superbug has developed a resistance to an anti-biotic, on a cornfield where a pest insect now resists a pesticide.

There was also never a time when dogs (or whatever species we're talking) didn't come out dogs. The change from one species to another doesn't happen in a generation. I've been hearing some neat ideas that speciation may not even be primarily a biological thing. It's intial cause may be cultural. One popultion of robins becomes isolated from another, over time it's signals and communication change so that even if they encounter robins from the inital population they simply don't recognize each others mating signls and such. From there they don't interbreed and over many generations the mutations that naturally occur, since their isolated to the new population and not shared with the old one, differentiate them even more.

Regardless, evolution is simply, "...the process of change in the inherited traits of a population of organisms from one generation to the next." It's not about dogs turning into pigs, it's about a dog giving birth to a dog that has a mutation that gives it a hearing defiency or a curly coat of hair. In fact, it's evolution that allows us to create breeds of dogs.

 

Wait a minute though, we're discussing evolution. How life began is a completely different concern called abiogenesis. Evolution involves the processes of change in organisms and has nothing to do with how life began.

This is a key confusion I see often - and no, not just from creationists.

This isn't evolution, this is origin of life but still, no one argues life appeared out of nothing. Some people who accept evolution think a Creator did it. Others point to world filled wth elements and chemical reactions which isn't nothing.

(BTW, evolution has come up with some preposterous ideas how Mother Nature could have done this.)

Nope. I'm going to be stubborn about this. Evolution has absolutely nothing to say about how life began. Evolution comes in after the fact.

I'm not sure I understand this...Maybe you could elaborate?

Not in a scientific paradigm. Rather, It may be genetic programming.

I don't buy it. To me that misrepresents science and does a disservice to faith.

I'd dispute what I think you're implying about the fossil record. Do you have a source?

Speaking as a Christian who accepts evolution I have to make the point that evolution does NOT exclude God. Evolution excludes a literalist Abrahamic reading of the Bible. Yes. It does not exclude God and many, many believers have no problem accepting evolution.

Yeah but if we were in the same room I would have baked a cheesecake and someone would have brought nachos...Being in a room together is always prefferable if only because of the food!! :lol:

 

It's a good thing science says nothing of the sort then.

 

We read that in an article on evolution in Reader's Digest, which I kept for years. Here's another one, which Reader's Digest also printed, quite different from the whale to wolf story. If reading the entire essay seems intimidating, at least read the portion I highlighted.

first published in The Reader's Digest in August 1925 (Vol. 4, No. 40),
Mr. Bryan on Evolution
by William Jennings Bryan

Are those who reject evolution as an unproved hypothesis unreasonable in refusing to accept, as conclusive, the evidence offered by evolutionists in support of a proposition that links every living thing in blood relationship to every other living thing--the rose to the onion, the eagle to the mosquito, the mockingbird to the rattlesnake, the royal palm to the scrub oak, and man to all? Surely, so astounding a proposition should be supported by facts before it becomes binding upon the judgment of a rational being.

It is not unusual for evolutionists to declare that their hypothesis is as clearly established as the law of gravitation or the roundness of the earth. Yet anyone can prove that anything heavier than air, when thrown up into the air, will fall to the ground; anyone can demonstrate the roundness of the earth by traveling around it.

But how about the doctrine that all of the species (Darwin estimated the number at from two to three million--the lowest estimate is one million, about a half million of which have been tabulated) by the operation of interior, resident forces came by slow and gradual development from one or a few germs of life, which appeared on this planet millions of years ago--the estimates varying according to the vigor of the guesser's imagination and the number of ciphers he has left in his basket? Can that proposition be demonstrated by every one like the law of gravitation or the roundness of the earth? On the contrary, no one has ever been able to trace one single species to another. Darwin admitted that no species had ever been traced to another, but he thought his hypothesis should be accepted even though the "missing links" had not been found. He did not say link, as some seem to think, but links. If there is such a thing as evolution, it is not just one link--the link between man and the lower forms of life--that is missing, but all the millions of links between millions of species. Our case is even stronger; it has been pointed out that evolution, if there is such a force, would act so slowly that there would be an infinite number of links between each two species, or a million times a million links in all, every one of which is missing.
Thomas Huxley also asserted that no species had ever been traced to another; and, while a friend of Darwin, declared that until some species could be traced to another, Darwin's hypothesis did not rise to the dignity of a theory. Prof. William Bateson, a London biologist, prominent enough to be invited to cross the Atlantic and speak to the members of the American Society for the Advancement of Science, at Toronto two years ago last December, in discussing evolution, took up every effort that had been made to discover the origin of species, and declared that every one had failed--every one! Yet he still asserted faith in evolution, showing how much easier it is for some scientists to have faith along their own line of work than along religious lines.

Why should we believe that all species come one from another when no evidence has yet been found to prove that any species came from another? If evolution were true, every square foot of the earth's surface would teem with conclusive proof of change. The entire absence of proof is the strongest possible proof that evolution is a myth.

But those who reject evolution have another proof. Chemistry refutes all the claims of the evolutionists, and proves that there is no pushing power to be found anywhere in nature--no progressive force at work in the earth--no eternal urge lifting matter or life from any plane to a higher one. Chemistry has failed to find any trace of force active enough to raise life, step by step up, along the lines of the family tree imagined by Darwin, from "A group of marine animals, resembling the larvae of existing ascidians" to "Man, the wonder and glory of the universe."
On the contrary, the only active force discovered on the planet as pointed out by Edwin Slosson, is deterioration, decay, death. All the formulae of chemistry are exact and permanent. They leave no room for the guesses upon which evolutionists build other guesses, ad infinitum. Take water, for instance; it must have been on earth before any living thing appeared, because it is the daily need of every living thing. And it has been H2O from the beginning. Every one of the millions of changes of species imagined by the evolutionists have taken place--if they have taken place at all--since water came upon the earth. But water has not changed; neither has anything else ever changed, so far as nature has revealed her processes to man.
When a few bones and a piece of skull are fashioned into a supposed likeness of a prehistoric animal, described as an ape-man, the evolutionists fall down before it and worship it, although it contains a smaller percentage of fact than the one-half percent alcohol permitted in a legal beverage.... Someone searching for fossils in a sand hill in Nebraska came upon a lonely tooth. The body of the animal had disappeared; not even a jaw bone survived. Professor Osborn summoned a few congenial spirits, nearly as credulous as himself, and they held a post mortem examination on this insignificant tooth. After due deliberation, they announced that the tooth was the long-looked-for missing link which the world awaited.

Give science a fact and it is invincible. But no one can guess more wildly than a scientist, when he has no compass but his imagination, and no purpose but to get away from God. Darwin uses the phrase "we may well suppose" 800 times and wins for himself a high place among the unconscious humorists by his efforts to explain things that are not true. For instance, he assumed that man has a brain superior to woman's brain, and tried to explain it on the theory that our ancestors were brutes and that the males, fighting for female mates, increased their brain power. He also assumed that our ancestors were hairy animals, and tried to explain the disappearance of the hair on the theory that the females selected their companions and, because of a universal preference, selected the least hairy and thus, in the course of ages, bred the hair off. The two explanations would be funny enough, even if each did not make the other impossible--the two sexes could not do the selecting at the same time.
Evolutionists also explain to us that light, beating on the skin, brought out the eye, although the explanation does not tell us why the light waves did not continue to beat until they brought out eyes all over the body. They also tell us that the leg is a development from a wart that accidentally appeared on the belly of a legless animal; and that we dream of falling because our ancestors fell out of trees 50,000 years ago.
It is a calamity that highly educated men should while away their time in idle speculation instead of devoting themselves to the serious problems that demand solution.
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Editor's Addendum: The foregoing article was first published in The Reader's Digest in August 1925 (Vol. 4, No. 40), less than three years after the Digest first began publication. At that time, the magazine was not as strongly committed to evolutionism as it is today (the editors have adamantly refused to publish creationist articles in recent years).
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This article is copied from icr.org
Although all of Mr. Bryan's and my views don't match, I thought this essay was well reasoned.

I love cheesecake! I'll bring a platter of fruit to go with it. Jennifer has the popcorn. 'Anybody up to bringing nachos and cheese?

 

Dawninns, I really appreciate your taking so much time to help me understand your reasoning and, therefore, the reasoning of many other people I respect, including relatives and friends. This forum gives me the chance to ask questions (which might sound ignorant to some) which otherwise, I might not have the chance to ask--time wise as well as location, etc. Also, I'm trusting y'all are forgiving of my bias, and you know very well I'm not angry at any of you, just because I think your view is narrow, right?

Defending my position is actually only a secondary motivation for me on this thread. I'm trying very hard to understand where the other side is coming from, and you and others have been helpful. (Though not convincing. *smiling*) Once again, thanks!

 

Dawninns,

I like how you communicate. There are too many examples to quote them all here, but how you explained evolutionary changes using the birds as an example, very cool.

And when you pointed out that Evolution does not have to do with the beginning of life, but simply how it has developed.. very cool as well.

That is why I like debates with you because you make your points clearly.

Oh, and if there is food involved, I'm bringing the Tostitoes and Pico De Gallo!

 

It depends on what you mean by EVOLUTION. Yes, things do evolve as in adapt and change. Even creationists believe that. But there's no evidence of animals evolving from one species into another. That type of evolution DOES have to do with the origin of life.

 

Insect immunity to pesticides is not Evolution. Humans becoming resistant to antibiotics is not Evolution. If this is a fact, please explain why and how this evolution occures and where is the evidence that "proves" this to be accurate. I will say, that I do agree that humans and insects are developing immunities and resistance to pesticides and antibiotics. But never once, during my Pest Management courses were we ever taught that insect immunity was a result of evolution. If this is true, then it contradicts the point that macroevolution happens over thousands of years. People and insects would have to evolve much faster because it was less than 15 to 20 years ago that these pesticides and antibiotics were still working. In this case, we WOULD be able to physically notice the transitions in humans as well as insects. Or are we merely speaking of microevolution. In this case, I can understand and agree.

How long does it take? Is it over hundreds of years, thousands, millions? If science is based around it's observations, then where is the evidence to back these observations? If animals are constantly evolving, then we are in a functioning transitional stage ourselves??? Forever?
...and if it doesn't happen in a generation, then we are back to the question of how can animals reproduce, reproduce being a very, very, important word? If animals are reproducing, some many times in a lifetime, how do they have a chance to evolve and be functioning at the same time?

So it IS still a dog. This contradicts the very idea of where or how humans evolved.

How is this evolution? "Create" being the key word. Man doesn't create, man makes with what already exists. This is not evolution. Dogs breed and reproduce. Where does it say that it is evolution?

 

I second this!!!! I am very thankful for dawninns considerate way of communicating her point. I have said it before, she gives us a lot to think about. It is a pleasure to discuss this topic with all of you. Thanks for the time and information, my friends!!!

 

No, it doesn't. The origin of life is more likely something to do with chemistry. Evolution is genetic change. You can't have that when there's no life. There has to be a different initial cause simply because the elements for evolution don't exist.

And...When we talk about speciation we're only talking degrees. Evolution is always, fundamentally, about small mutations that occur from one generation to the next. It's just that, over long periods of time, those small changes accumulate and so though two populations may have been identical to begin with, once they've been isolated for a few hundred millennia, they're quite different. It's a snowball rolling down a hill. At the beginning it's a little handful of snow. At the end it's a huge boulder of snow packed densly and probably filled with debris. Species? Well that's just some point along the downhill journey where we decided it was different enough. And we use interbreeding as the measure for that marker because well, we're just obsessed with sex.

 

Evolution is genetic change from one generation to the next. That's the process by which insects become resistant to pesticides. It's also natural selection. The evolution is the mutation in a member of the population that offers them resistance to the pesticide. Natural selection then takes over. The pesticide environment determines who dies and who lives on to pass on their genes.

I don't agree with you about time spans. Insects reproduce rapidly. They can go through hundreds of thousands (millions?) of generations before one human reaches sexual maturity. Since the core of evolution is the genetic change that happens from one generation to the next it's only to be expected that rates of change in a fly population would be drasticly different from the rate of change in a human population. How many years would it take us to get through just a hundred thousand generations? Heck...Have we yet?

Yup! We're one point on that path of the rolling snowball. I just think that's the neatest though myself.

It's not natural selection which is the prevailing theory of how evolution works to create species but it is evolution if evolution is, "the process of change in the inherited traits of a population of organisms from one generation to the next." From one generation of dog to the next, there's been a change in an inherited trait.

You know, I think our culture uses those terms (evolution and natural selection) sloppily and interchangably.

 

Thanks you guys. I think this is the first time I've really enjoyed this kind of exchange and I think the key is that I'm not doing this to change minds (first time maybe?! ). I'm just doing it so I can share what I think, explain what I can about what I understand of evolution and have fun. I really appreciate the tone you guys have made possible here!

 

I agree with most of this. An insect indeed matures, reproduces and dies much faster than a human. Still, I can't see this as evolution.





How would you explain your view regarding humans becoming resistant to antibiotics as part of evolution?

This is an interesting point and most definitely food for thought.

 

I have a thought.....

Survival of the fittest...
When farmers want the best cattle, they breed the strongest with the strongest... Could this be a form of human initiated evolution? I mean people breed some pretty weird dogs, you know?

 

That's selection. The evolution would happen anyway. How evolution shapes a species though...Human selection, Natural selection or God. Those are the three basic choices.

 

Several questions have been asked of me, which I'm afraid might not get responded to in a timely manner: Hubby and dd are not yet back from a trip to Oregon, which leaves more responsibility for me on the home front, and coming up this week are a support group field trip, a family gathering, graduations, and more.

I'd also like to spend additional time on some of the sites mentioned on this thread before I say too much more; so please carry on this week, and I hope to be back--if not with conversation, at least for some of that mean cheesecake!

 

Meanwhile, just a fact about the sun, to ponder:
http://www.did-u-know.org/pages/article8.html

 

did you know that the theory of evolution is not actually science? It is not repeatable, or test-able. It is philosophy, taught as science, taught as fact. My kids are aware of the philosophy of evolution, and the philosophy of creation. And they are equally aware that neither are science.