[_ Old Earth _] How well do you actually know The Theory of Evolution?

[Gary]

Where did I say I was unable to explain it. It has been explained by another poster, I agree with his response and you had nothing of substance to offer as a rebuttal.

You can play the game of claiming victory, where there is none to claim, but I am not going to discuss that matter further.

I have a question: Is evolution an ongoing process or is it finished?

 

[Doulos Iesou]

I have a question: Is evolution an ongoing process or is it finished?

It's ongoing, it does not require additional outside guidance because God set it up to occur through Natural Selection.

 

[Gary]

It's ongoing, it does not require additional outside guidance because God set it up to occur through Natural Selection.

Ok.

So if it's ongoing, shouldn't there be countless species roaming the earth that are in some form of transition? The bat for instance. It still appears as it did millions of years ago. Shouldn't we be witnessing some sort of transition? The Horseshoe Crab, the Dragon Fly, the Alligator, etc., etc. Why haven't these things evolved into something else? Their physical form has remained virtually unchanged for millions of years.

Why?

 

[Doulos Iesou]

Ok.

So if it's ongoing, shouldn't there be countless species roaming the earth that are in some form of transition? The bat for instance. It still appears as it did millions of years ago. Shouldn't we be witnessing some sort of transition? The Horseshoe Crab, the Dragon Fly, the Alligator, etc., etc. Why haven't these things evolved into something else? Their physical form has remained virtually unchanged for millions of years.

Why?

There are about 1,240 different species of bats, this is evidence of the ongoing process of speciation. There isn't just one species of bats that are all the same, some consume blood, while others fruit, while still others consume bugs, etc. They don't appear the same as they did millions of years ago as there are far more species and some of the abilities such as echolocation weren't there. Every single different species is evidence of transition as each population is more suited to it's particular environment.

What.. would you expect bats to start losing their wings and become rats? This order of mammals, known as Chiroptera has changed quite a bit, but they maintain a common form because they share a common ancestry. If you go back far enough you'll find that their ancestors don't look too much like them, because they are placental mammals. However, about 52 million years ago we first find evidence for this speciation. Do you think God just poofed them into existence at that time, or did they evolve from lower life forms? I think the totality of the evidence suggests the latter.

 

[Gary]

Every single different species is evidence of transition as each population is more suited to it's particular environment.

Where are the living transitional forms? There should be countless thousands of them. Becoming suited for a particular environment is not evolution.

 

[Doulos Iesou]

Where are the living transitional forms? There should be countless thousands of them. Becoming suited for a particular environment is not evolution.

Wow.... becoming more suited to particular environment IS evolution. There are 1,240 different transitional forms of bats, in that they are different species and have genetically drifted from other bats so that they are distinct.

 

[Gary]

Wow.... becoming more suited to particular environment IS evolution. There are 1,240 different transitional forms of bats, in that they are different species and have genetically drifted from other bats so that they are distinct.

Ok, show me some the animals these bats evolved into. I'm assuming they're no longer bats. Show me the transitional fossils that record their slow gradual transformation into something totally new.

 

[Edward]

Could you please explain that?

I'd be glad to Gary. Ok so we came from a cosmic mud puddle, right? Some chemical all mixed together and made a soup and something or other happened and then it sprang to live and voila'!~ Here we are...Sooo...where did moral principles come from? How do chemicals decide that they need to evolve to where they care about one another?

Evolution which is totally organic, has no need for morals or a sense of caring, love or anything like that that's even remotely related.

I was cooking dinner the other night and my spaghetti sauce began crying because it felt bad for the garlic that I was cutting up...View attachment 5431 View attachment 5432

Along those lines brother.

 

[Edward]

Hey I just thought of something...

"Universe"

Uni = Single.
Verse = Spoken sentance.

Single spoken sentence...

Well well well, hehe.

 

[Doulos Iesou]

Ok, show me some the animals these bats evolved into. I'm assuming they're no longer bats. Show me the transitional fossils that record their slow gradual transformation into something totally new.

Where did I say that bats evolved into something else? Are you just making stuff up now?

 

[Doulos Iesou]

I'd be glad to Gary. Ok so we came from a cosmic mud puddle, right? Some chemical all mixed together and made a soup and something or other happened and then it sprang to live and voila'!~

This is an outdated theory on abiogenesis, which is totally separate from the Theory of Evolution. Most that hold to abiogenesis believe that life arose from thermal vents deep in the ocean from the different chemicals released.

That's besides the point though.

Here we are...Sooo...where did moral principles come from?

Certainly we don't accept social darwinism, and as a Christian I accept a theistic approach to moral theory. This incorporates just about every variety of ethical theory, as I don't really hold to Divine Command Theory.

The point is that ethics is a question and issue separate from the discussion of biology.

How do chemicals decide that they need to evolve to where they care about one another?

Chemicals think nothing, sentient beings think about how we should regard each other.

Evolution which is totally organic, has no need for morals or a sense of caring, love or anything like that that's even remotely related.

How does a child survive without the nurturing care of a mother?

I was cooking dinner the other night and my spaghetti sauce began crying because it felt bad for the garlic that I was cutting up...

Along those lines brother.

Well you seem to have assumed that all evolutionists are atheists or something, because this is only a relevant question or concern for them.

 

[Doulos Iesou]

Hey I just thought of something...

"Universe"

Uni = Single.
Verse = Spoken sentance.

Single spoken sentence...

Well well well, hehe.

The word Universe derives from the Old French word Univers, which in turn derives from the Latin word universum.[28] The Latin word was used by Cicero and later Latin authors in many of the same senses as the modern English word is used.[29] The Latin word derives from the poetic contraction Unvorsum — first used by Lucretius in Book IV (line 262) of his De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) — which connects un, uni (the combining form of unus, or "one") with vorsum, versum (a noun made from the perfect passive participle of vertere, meaning "something rotated, rolled, changed").[29]

An alternative interpretation of unvorsum is "everything rotated as one" or "everything rotated by one". In this sense, it may be considered a translation of an earlier Greek word for the Universe, περιφορά, (periforá, "circumambulation"), originally used to describe a course of a meal, the food being carried around the circle of dinner guests.[30] This Greek word refers to celestial spheres, an early Greek model of the Universe. Regarding Plato's Metaphor of the sun, Aristotle suggests that the rotation of the sphere of fixed stars inspired by the prime mover, motivates, in turn, terrestrial change via the Sun. Careful astronomical and physical measurements (such as the Foucault pendulum) are required to prove the Earth rotates on its axis.

A term for "Universe" in ancient Greece was τὸ πᾶν (tò pán, The All, Pan (mythology)). Related terms were matter, (τὸ ὅλον, tò ólon, see also Hyle, lit. wood) and place (τὸ κενόν, tò kenón).[31][32] Other synonyms for the Universe among the ancient Greek philosophers included κόσμος (cosmos) and φύσις (meaning Nature, from which we derive the word physics).[33] The same synonyms are found in Latin authors (totum, mundus, natura)[34] and survive in modern languages, e.g., the German words Das All, Weltall, and Natur for Universe. The same synonyms are found in English, such as everything (as in thetheory of everything), the cosmos (as in cosmology), the world (as in the many-worlds interpretation), and Nature (as in natural laws or natural philosophy).[35]
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe#Etymology.2C_synonyms_and_definitions

 

[Barbarian]

Yes, humans and everything else are still evolving. But at different rates depending on environment. Look up "stabilizing selection" and learn why.

 

[Doulos Iesou]

"Stabilizing selection (not the same thing as negative selection[1][2]) is a type of natural selection in which genetic diversity decreases and the population mean stabilizes on a particular trait value. This is thought to be the most common mechanism of action for natural selection because most traits do not appear to change drastically over time. [3] Stabilizing selection commonly uses negative selection (a.k.a. purifying selection) to select against extreme values of the character.

Stabilizing selection is the opposite of disruptive selection. Instead of favoring individuals with extreme phenotypes, it favors the intermediate variants. It reduces phenotypic variation and maintains the status quo. Natural selection tends to remove the more severe phenotypes, resulting in the reproductive success of the norm or average phenotypes.[4] For example, the Bicyclus anynana exhibits stabilizing selection with its eyespots.[5]

A classic example of this is human birth weight. Babies of low weight lose heat more quickly and get ill from infectious diseases more easily, whereas babies of large body weight are more difficult to deliver through the pelvis. Infants of a more medium weight survive much more often. For the larger or smaller babies, the baby mortality rate is much higher.[citation needed]

Because most traits change little over time, stabilizing selection is thought to be the most common type of selection in most populations. [6] However, a meta-analysis of studies that measured selection in the wild failed to find an overall trend for stabilizing selection. [7] The reason can be that methods for detecting stabilizing selection are complex. They can involve studying the changes that causes natural selection in the mean and variance of the trait, or measuring fitness for a range of differentphenotypes under natural conditions and examining the relationship between these fitness measurements and the trait value, but analysis and interpretation of the results is not straightforward."
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilizing_selection

 

[Barbarian]

Where are the living transitional forms? There should be countless thousands of them. Becoming suited for a particular environment is not evolution.

Platypuses, transitional between advanced therapsids and placental eutherian mammals.
Wood roaches, transitional between roaches and termites. (there are transitional termites, also)
Racoon dogs, transitional between primitive carnivores and canids.
Okapis, transitional between primitive artiodactyls and giraffes
Pygopodidae, transitional between lizards and snakes

Those come to mind off the top of my head. There are certainly more. In the sense that all living populations continue to evolve (examples of continuing human evolution on request) all species are transitional.

 

[Barbarian]

Yep. Ongoing process. In humans, most notably the evolution of high-altitude adaptations by Tibetans.

 

[Doulos Iesou]

Yep. Ongoing process. In humans, most notably the evolution of high-altitude adaptations by Tibetans.

I'm into mountaineering and hearing about the adaptations of Sherpas and other high-altitude peoples is very fascinating.

 

[lordkalvan]

Evolution ... It's not "an instrument of God's creative genius". The bible says God created man, not God created man with the help of...

It says:

John 1
3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

But it does not say how this was accomplished, any more than saying Michaelangelo made 'David' tells you anything about how he went about it. Indeed, the Bible also says -

'Gen 1:11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.'

- which suggests a naturalistic process.

And

Hebrews 13
3 Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.

And those words also continue to suggest a naturalistic process (evolution) here -

'Gen 1:20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.'

As well as here -

'Gen 1:24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.'

There's nothing in the fossil record that would suggest all life evolved from a single cell.

Two brief points:

1. There is plenty of evidence in the fossil evidence that indicates that simple life forms preceded more complex ones. For example, we see stromatolites in the fossil record long before we see dinosaurs or mammals.

2. The evidence supporting the hypothesis that life on Earth evolved from a single-celled common ancestor does not depend on the fossil record, but on biochemistry, e.g. DNA sequencing.

 

[Gary]

2. The evidence supporting the hypothesis that life on Earth evolved from a single-celled common ancestor does not depend on the fossil record, but on biochemistry, e.g. DNA sequencing.

DNA is the carrier of genetic information.

How is that possible, considering you have only one cell to work with? Where did the DNA come from?

 

[lordkalvan]

DNA is the carrier of genetic information.

How is that possible, considering you have only one cell to work with? Where did the DNA come from?

How is what possible? DNA sequencing is a methodology that determines relatedness, so that courts will accept it as evidence of paternity for example.

DNA originates from chemical precursors, just like - analogously - water molecules originate from two precursor elements, hydrogen and oxygen.