does evolution exsist

[matthew809]

The discovery of the mechanism for heredity, DNA. This, perhaps more than any other thing solidified evolution as the most powerful explanatory mechanism yet discovered to explain the similarities and differences between life forms.

DNA shows the fundamental similarities between species, but DNA does not show evolution. Nor does it suggest evolution. At best, the discovery of DNA simply doesn't rule out evolution as a possibility. Isn't it just as likely that the life on our planet was created by a less than perfect alien race over the course of many experimental years? The similarity of DNA could likely be indicative of a sort of object-oriented, reusable programming language for life.

Are you really suggesting that the Bible, the Qur'an, all the other major religious texts as well as scientific theories such as evolution and the big bang have all been fabricated by people "at the top"?

That's a possibility. But the important thing is not who created the theory, but who is currently pushing the theory.

For me it is simply the observed examples of natural selection and speciation. Extend that over millions of years and it seems impossible for evolution not to occur.

Again, isn't it possible that the effects of natural selection were intentionally built into our DNA code in order for life to survive in a changing environment?

The similarities of different species is not evidence of evolution.

 

[spidergoat]

DNA shows the fundamental similarities between species, but DNA does not show evolution. Nor does it suggest evolution. At best, the discovery of DNA simply doesn't rule out evolution as a possibility. Isn't it just as likely that the life on our planet was created by a less than perfect alien race over the course of many experimental years? The similarity of DNA could likely be indicative of a sort of object-oriented, reusable programming language for life.

Actually, it reveals the nested hierarchy that could be called the tree of life. This does suggest evolution.

If that alien race exists, it must have evolved too. And DNA does not look designed, since it is full of errors and junk data that isn't even used. Chicken DNA, for instance, still contains instructions for making teeth.

 

[Rav]

I'm going to leave the conspiracy theory nonsense alone since it got quite off-topic. This thread is about evolution and now that we're back on track we should try to keep it that way.

Again, isn't it possible that the effects of natural selection were intentionally built into our DNA code in order for life to survive in a changing environment?

I see the game you are playing. You're just throwing around a bunch of possibilities that while outrageous, are technically unfalsifiable. I'm sure you have a huge list of such ideas up your sleeve. So now you've revealed your strategy, I'm going to adjust mine.

Where's your evidence? If you want someone to consider alternatives, cut the shit and give us something resembling a compelling reason to.

The similarities of different species is not evidence of evolution.

I don't remember saying that. I was talking about speciation.

 

[wellwisher]

There is a difference between pure and applied science. Pure science is about the truth of nature, whereas applied science is about applying science to solve practical problems, with the results not having to be natural. They can be synthetic if that solves the problem.

For example, we can use some of the principles of pure science to distill alcoholic beverages to make scotch. Just because we can do that in the lab, and it is all based on natural science, does not mean distilled beverages are natural.

This is easy to see in the above example, but when the results of applied science gets very close to natural science, it is not as easy to separate natural from synthetic theory. It is theoretically possible to create a synthetic theory that one can show in the lab, that is not natural, but it can be so close, that most will be fooled.

I can see the biological process of life changing over time since this is supported by fossil data, carbon dating and more recently by DNA evidence. But it is not 100% clear whether the rest of the theory is applied science. It does solve a long standing practical problem of how life changes over time. The natural may have extra variables.

Let me give an example, within physics, of theories getting very close between natural and synthetic. We have quantum theory and string theory. Both are mutually exclusive, meaning they can't both be right at the same time. Yet mathematically, both give excellent practical results. They are so close, the experts can't label one or the other as synthetic, yet mutually exclusive implies one might well be.

 

[gmilam]

In the case of evolution, I can imagine such a scenario where hiding the truth from the masses would be advantageous for those few in power. In fact it's what I believe is currently the situation. I'd rather not get into the details though because I know it would sound crazy. But I will say that controlling the evolution/creation debate may be only part of a much bigger deception.

Uh-huh, well... (Play Twilight Zone music here)

 

[matthew809]

Actually, it reveals the nested hierarchy that could be called the tree of life. This does suggest evolution.

There is a nested hierarchy in the organization of computer code as well. It doesn't suggest evolution, it suggests logical organization.

And DNA does not look designed, since it is full of errors and junk data that isn't even used. Chicken DNA, for instance, still contains instructions for making teeth.

From an engineering standpoint, the inactive teeth DNA seems like a stroke of genius, considering the ever-changing conditions a species may need to adapt to.

 

[matthew809]

Where's your evidence? If you want someone to consider alternatives, cut the shit and give us something resembling a compelling reason to.

My evidence is just a simple idea:

DNA is too complex and interdependent to have formed without intention, no matter how many small steps, and how much time was given. It's a simple truth that get's overlooked and replaced with convoluted rationalizations based on preconceived notions.

I used to think exactly the same way about evolution that you do now. I used to visualize the "natural" process in my head and it made perfect sense. With enough time, the chemicals of our universe with it's few basic laws of motion, perform an intricate dance with ever-increasing complexity and stability. This is life. Life is a natural, inevitable product of our virtually infinite universe. I get it. Really. You guys are not telling me anything that I haven't already believed and understood to be true in the past.

The thing is, I've thought about it further, and I see the errors of my past reasoning. I've moved beyond it. It's not something I can show you or prove to you. I have no evidence for it.

But then again, there is no evidence for evolution either. There's evidence for direction and organization but that's it.

 

[NMSquirrel]

From an engineering standpoint, the inactive teeth DNA seems like a stroke of genius, considering the ever-changing conditions a species may need to adapt to.

the day chickens need teeth is the day i invest in a shotgun..

 

[Rav]

My evidence is just a simple idea:

As in, not evidence at all.

I used to think exactly the same way about evolution that you do now. I used to visualize the "natural" process in my head and it made perfect sense. With enough time, the chemicals of our universe with it's few basic laws of motion, perform an intricate dance with ever-increasing complexity and stability. This is life. Life is a natural, inevitable product of our virtually infinite universe. I get it. Really. You guys are not telling me anything that I haven't already believed and understood to be true in the past.

The thing is, I've thought about it further, and I see the errors of my past reasoning. I've moved beyond it.

Ah, a statement of conversion fallacy. Good one.

DNA is too complex and interdependent to have formed without intention, no matter how many small steps, and how much time was given.

Interesting. That's what I used to think. But then I went and learned more about evolution and after I spent a bit of time processing the information and wrestling some of the trickier considerations into focus, I realized the problem wasn't that it didn't make sense, it was simply that I couldn't initially comprehend it. You could say that I saw the errors of my past reasoning and that I've now moved beyond it.

I'm not just trying to be a smart arse here. What I said is actually true. But do you see the ridiculousness of statement of conversion fallacies? They have zero value, unless you can demonstrate that you are indeed an authority on the subject.

But then again, there is no evidence for evolution either. There's evidence for direction and organization but that's it.

I seriously doubt that you've ever properly examined the evidence. You only ever seem to discuss ideas in their simplest form, but evolution is a hell of a lot more than just a bunch of simple ideas these days.

Anyway, being that alternative theories would likely be considered on-topic in a thread entitled "does evolution exist", I'd like the hear the specifics of your theory. Care to outline it for us?

 

[Rav]

From an engineering standpoint, the inactive teeth DNA seems like a stroke of genius, considering the ever-changing conditions a species may need to adapt to.

A real "stroke of genius" would be the inclusion of genes for all potentially useful characteristics in the DNA of all organisms. But that's not what we find in nature. Instead we find different sets of genes in the DNA of different organisms. In the case of the Chicken, unexpressed genes that are responsible for the formation of teeth, a feature that birds lost some 70 millions years ago (we know this from the fossil record).

This is not just consistent with evolution, it supports it.

 

[Hercules Rockefeller]

My evidence is just a simple idea:

Yep, it sure is. Simple and wrong.

DNA is too complex and interdependent to have formed without intention, no matter how many small steps, and how much time was given.

That’s not evidence at all. That’s an assertion, and a wrong one at that, not evidence. It’s nothing but your own misunderstanding of a subject you clearly know nothing about.

 

[Sarkus]

My evidence is just a simple idea:
...
I have no evidence for it.

Your idea is overwhelming.

DNA is too complex and interdependent to have formed without intention, no matter how many small steps, and how much time was given.

Argument from ignorance fallacy.

The thing is, I've thought about it further, and I see the errors of my past reasoning. I've moved beyond it. It's not something I can show you or prove to you. I have no evidence for it.

Sounds to me like you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater - rejecting an entire concept due to a failure on your part to understand certain aspects - rather than trying to actually understand. "I don't understand it... must be wrong!"

But then again, there is no evidence for evolution either. There's evidence for direction and organization but that's it.

There is evidence for evolution. There is no evidence for a guiding hand other than nature itself, if that was the implication of your last sentence.

 

[1I'd Oyler]

There is a nested hierarchy in the organization of computer code as well. It doesn't suggest evolution, it suggests logical organization.

You would have a point if we didn't keep track of revision histories.

Since your analogy is basically comparing computer code to DNA, I think it's reasonable to extend the analogy and further define players in it. If the Code is DNA, then the program itself must be the organism. It would then follow that the world in which the program "lives" and functions would be its ecological niche, a role that can be mapped to the OS.

The initial code is often buggy. It may work only in a very limited environment, ie the programmer's particular OS version and hardware set up. After the initial code, the program must be updated and revised if it is to "survive" in other systems and over come bugs.

In this case we have the "evolution" of the program being guided by the programmer's hand, but this is because there is no organic, natural process --no auto-correction in the code. When you talk of living organisms, there is such a process.

We can reproduce many key components of evolution in the lab. Why is it so hard to accept. If your problem is the initial "leap" from a collection of molecules into a "living" thing then, as pointed out, I believe, in the denial of evolution III thread, what you should be discussing is abiogenesis....

Unless you actually are claiming that every species man has actually witnessed on this Earth instantly into being, fully formed no less, millions and millions of years ago..... Unless you're also suggesting that all current dating technologies and methodologies are fundamentally flawed and wrong and the planet isn't that old at all, which calls into question what we understand about chemistry and physics.... you get the idea.

 

[leopold]

Fair enough. Here's a challenge, then, if you're up to it. Explain, in your own words, what the mechanisms of evolution are. You don't have to agree with them of course, but if you can do it accurately it will demonstrate that you at least know something about what you are attacking. If you can't, however, then your criticisms are all straw man fallacies.

why? what have i posted that makes you make such a request?

That's what they all appear to have been thus far, as evidenced by your continued misrepresentations.

show me where i misrepresented anything and i will correct it.

In any case I would suggest trying a different browser. There's a lot of great stuff on http://www.scribd.com so it might be worth it.

it isn't up to me to present your evidence.

The Grants are just being cautious because although the new species . . .

talk about misrepresentations . . .
what was that scientific name again?

Well now you've gone and got yourself in the unfortunate position of having to cite us some specific examples of scientists who have been caught "lying" about evolution.

you can't be serious. lies of omission are still lies.

To suggest that the theory of evolution itself is a lie would require a global conspiracy of epic proportions so you'll have to do better than that.

i never said the theory of evolution was a lie.

 

[Rav]

show me where i misrepresented anything and i will correct it.

See directly below:

some organism had an instinct to fly and in a couple of thousnd years did exactly that.

I hope you're going to make good on your promise now and explain what evolution actually teaches about how such changes took place.

it isn't up to me to present your evidence.

I'm not asking you to. I simply suggested trying to view it in a web browser that is actually capable of rendering a website correctly.

talk about misrepresentations . . .
what was that scientific name again?

You know who gets to name the new species right? The Grants do. And it's not like they have to submit a f#!king application and hope that it gets approved either. They are both evolutionary biologists who are well respected in the scientific community and have spent 6 months out of every year, for the last 28 years, studying these birds. No-one knows more about Galápagos finches than they do. They are the authority. They'd submit an application (if there was such a thing) to name the new species to themselves. They already call them "Big Birds" and have stated that they'd simply translate that into Latin.

Again, the reason they haven't done this yet is because they feel that it's possible that the new species might start interbreeding with other finches again. If this turns out to be the case the new species will be short lived. They simply want to see the new finches remain reproductively isolated for a few more generations before they officially name them. But regardless of whether or not that actually happens, what they've observed is still speciation. If you can't see that then you don't understand what speciation is.

Aside from all that, this is not the only example of observed speciation anyway so let's stop pretending that it is. Here are a whole lot more:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html

lies of omission are still lies.

Only if you can demonstrate that the omission was part of a deliberate attempt to deceive. Can you?

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

Isn't it just as likely that the life on our planet was created by a less than perfect alien race over the course of many experimental years? The similarity of DNA could likely be indicative of a sort of object-oriented, reusable programming language for life.

It's time to invoke Occam's Razor: Test the simplest solution first, in case it's the right one. Otherwise you can waste your whole life trying to test the more complicated solution.

We have so much evidence for evolution that it has become part of the canon of science, and even religious leaders like the Pope accept it and support its teaching in Catholic universities, even though it means that they have to regard much of their own holy book as metaphor instead of literal truth.

On the other hand, there is no evidence for the seeded-by-aliens hypothesis, which in any case begs the question by not explaining how the alien lifeform reached a level of development that allowed them to invent both faster-than-light space travel (there are no inhabited planets within sublight commuting distance of earth) and organic programming.

Evolution will clearly be easier to test. Once we've dismissed it, then maybe we can look at your idea.

But if evolution is not correct, if simple lifeforms don't evolve into more complex lifeforms, then where did the original complex lifeform come from, the one that planted life on other planets? It's not too much of a stretch to hypothesize abiogenesis as the mechanism for the origin of pathetically simple prokaryotes, but how did creatures complex enough to build a civilization first appear? Your hypothesis merely shifts the question to their planet, just as Divine Creation merely shifts the question to, "OK, wiseguy, so where did the gods come from?"

To hypothesize a solution to a problem that results in the need to solve an even more complex problem than one started with is to thumb one's nose at Occam, and, therefore, at the scientific method of which it is a key component.

 

[Billy T]

... (1) there is no evidence for evolution either. (2)There's evidence for direction and organization but that's it.

Your (1) is false, based only on your ignorance. Not even including the fossil records, there are dozens of cases of well documented evolution within complex species that exist (Both accidental and planned experimental demonstrations), tens of thousands of cases of demonstrated evolution in singled celled organisms (Why you need to keep taking an anti-biotic many days after you are "cured.") and even one case of a new species of mammals evolving, here:
http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2672082&postcount=845

Or see my original post reporting (probably the first in English) about the new species at:
http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2205207&postcount=83 which is my summary and translation of a Portuguese newspaper article, now available here:
http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/ciencia/ult306u536537.shtml, with photo of the new species.

Your (2) is also false, unless you mean "direction" by environmental selection. For there to be evidence of "direction", as you are using the term, there needs to be evidence also of the existence of the "Director." Can you supply any? If not your (2) IS FALSE ALSO.

It is not an error to say that the changing environment is directing the evolution so long as you understand there is no goal being directed towards.
There is no goal of natural evolution and no intelligence directing it, other than man, giving it some direction. For example, man has directed the evolution of wolves to make a great variety of dogs, but all are of the same species. Perhaps soon man may be able to create new complex species also.

 

[leopold]

See directly below:



I hope you're going to make good on your promise now and explain what evolution actually teaches about how such changes took place.

ah yes, my bad, i should have said "the environment naturally selected an organism to fly and in a couple thousand years did exactly that.".
that almost sounds like i could invoke the rule of laplace.

You know who gets to name the new species right? The Grants do. And it's not like they have to submit a f#!king application and hope that it gets approved either. They are both evolutionary biologists who are well respected in the scientific community and have spent 6 months out of every year, for the last 28 years, studying these birds. No-one knows more about Galápagos finches than they do. They are the authority. They'd submit an application (if there was such a thing) to name the new species to themselves. They already call them "Big Birds" and have stated that they'd simply translate that into Latin.

Again, the reason they haven't done this yet is because they feel that it's possible that the new species might start interbreeding with other finches again. If this turns out to be the case the new species will be short lived. They simply want to see the new finches remain reproductively isolated for a few more generations before they officially name them. But regardless of whether or not that actually happens, what they've observed is still speciation. If you can't see that then you don't understand what speciation is.

Aside from all that, this is not the only example of observed speciation anyway so let's stop pretending that it is. Here are a whole lot more:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html

you can call it what you will but i still stand by my statements.

Only if you can demonstrate that the omission was part of a deliberate attempt to deceive. Can you?

the attempt to deceive lies in the fact that our students are led to believe that science has solve the riddle of our origins and earths diverse lifeforms.
science has not solved how we got here nor have they demonstrated that macro evolution happens.

 

[Rav]

ah yes, my bad, i should have said "the environment naturally selected an organism to fly and in a couple thousand years did exactly that.".
that almost sounds like i could invoke the rule of laplace.

That is still a misrepresentation.

the attempt to deceive lies in the fact that our students are led to believe that science has solve the riddle of our origins and earths diverse lifeforms.

Unless you can scientifically falsify the theory of evolution and then demonstrate that it is being taught by people who know that's it's bullshit, there is no deception. You are unable to do that so your claim that we are being lied to is complete bullshit.

science has not solved how we got here nor have they demonstrated that macro evolution happens.

In order to observe macroevolution a person would have to live for thousands if not tens of thousands of years. Is that really your argument? That evolution is bullshit because people can't live long enough to directly observe it over such an extended period of time? That's a pretty weak argument. Macroevolution is simply microevolution over a much longer period of time, and we have observed the latter.

But whatever. I've grown tired of you taking the easy road by sitting back and making attacks. It's time for you to define your own position on the origins of life so we can examine the scientific merits of that.

 

[leopold]

That is still a misrepresentation.

only because it sounds insane.
that is exactly what evolution says happens.
you need to step back and ask yourself if you aren't backing the wrong horse.

In order to observe macroevolution a person would have to live for thousands if not tens of thousands of years. Is that really your argument?

no. my arguement is that science has not demonstrated it possible.
i gave a link earlier for the consensus of a panel of scientist on the matter.
[EDIT] post 46 [/EDIT]

It's time for you to define your own position on the origins of life so we can examine the scientific merits of that.

life apparently comes from life.
i haven't seen anything that refutes that observation.