So the "evolution is not proven!" meme came up in another thread. Since we've already had many threads debating this point, i doubt everyone wants to cover the old ground again - but i do have a question - hopefully a new one.

Is there anyone who seriously questions evolutionary theory from a non-religious perspective? I mean, I understand that If I say that rabbits do not chew their cud, and you have a holy book that says that they do chew their cud, then you are going to disagree with me, and I am not likely to say anything that will dissuade you.

Lately, It seems to me that all the objections I hear to the principles of evolutionary theory (that is: that the form of living things is based on the non-random survival of their randomly varying anscestors) are really religious ones - even when couched in scientific language. So I guess I'm just checking my own assumptions here. Does anyone here seriously question evolutionary theory who is not a Deist or a supernaturalist?

Well my answer is short: Not really. For me evolution is a fact.

Also: What's a Deist?

Sorry - I should have said "Theist" - a person who believes in god or gods.

A "deist" believes in a supreme being who created the universe but does not interfere in that Universe - a sort of way to have God, but no miracles. It is a view not so popular now (but was critical to founding of the USA). I should have said "theist" which is much more inclusive. Just a foolish mistake on my part.

OMG ! why do people still believe in fairy tales like 'GOD"

but on the other hand , sometimes i look at nature and i'm like "daaaaaam , how the hell did that just Happen?" you know what i mean ? like ,,,, what's a good example .. i don't know , a lot of different bugs ar pretty crazy if you think about it .

Or , one question i was wondering about is - if some certain animal has an evolutionary advantage like poison spikes and flying ability , like if that animal was waaay stronger than others , wouldn't the whole Earth eventually be filled with that creature ? i mean , what maintains the balance , why are there so many different species and not just a handfull of super badass acid spiting electric pokemon filling the globe ?

lothar
i mean , what maintains the balance , why are there so many different species and not just a handfull of super badass acid spiting electric pokemon filling the globe ?

The fact that they only grow to take advantage of their own environments, and that every other creature is doing the same thing.

What you have to keep in mind is that nature isn't a single consciousness or entity (which a lot of people seem to believe, because they're morons), but rather that all species fight for their own survival. So all animals in an environment develop their strengths and weaknesses based on the strengths and weaknesses of others.

lothar
Or , one question i was wondering about is - if some certain animal has an evolutionary advantage like poison spikes and flying ability , like if that animal was waaay stronger than others , wouldn't the whole Earth eventually be filled with that creature ? i mean , what maintains the balance , why are there so many different species and not just a handfull of super badass acid spiting electric pokemon filling the globe ?

Well I know of one creature that qualifies in that category, minus the acid spiting electrical part. We call that critter... human.

When I saw the name of this thread I thought, "Oh no...." But what sets this one apart is Stacey's big question: Are there non-religious reasons to refute evolution? And it's a good question. I'd like to see some people answer that before we fall back into the stuff we already talked about.

I can only think of one non-religious reason evolution wouldn't be true and unfortunately it's not very scientific. The world is very complex. When you consider the ecosystem, our immune system, photosynthesis, our hands, or other highly-complex works of life, sometimes it seems like no amount of evolutionary sorting could cause it to be.

This goes especially for traits and features we've developed that seemingly have no evolutionary advantage. For instance, why do our tear ducts activate when we are sad? Having hurt feelings is no indication that our eyeballs need cleaned off. Yet humans unanimously evolved this trait of crying, which does not give us any advantage for survival. Do monkeys cry tears? There are other traits we have that seemingly give us no survival edge, yet they somehow evolved into our nature.

I suppose enough millions of years could evolve us something complex like an immune system or our hands, but it still seems baffling to me.

Hawk
For instance, why do our tear ducts activate when we are sad? Having hurt feelings is no indication that our eyeballs need cleaned off. Yet humans unanimously evolved this trait of crying, which does not give us any advantage for survival. Do monkeys cry tears? There are other traits we have that seemingly give us no survival edge, yet they somehow evolved into our nature.

Interestingly, emotional Tears have a different composition than "stuff in my eye" tears - they contain more prolactin, adrenocorticotropic hormone,and leucine enkephalin. Leucine enkephalin is a natural painkiller.

It may be that we are the only animal that cries emotional tears because of the complexity of our big brains - crying may be an important part of flushing chemicals out of the brain and getting on to the next thing. Humans who can cry may indeed have a very big edge over humans who cannot cry.

I'm not saying we totally know the answer to Hawk's question. I'm just saying that like hawk said "The world is very complex." So yes, it seems baffling to us.

At first.

lothar
Or , one question i was wondering about is - if some certain animal has an evolutionary advantage like poison spikes and flying ability , like if that animal was waaay stronger than others , wouldn't the whole Earth eventually be filled with that creature ? i mean , what maintains the balance , why are there so many different species and not just a handfull of super badass acid spiting electric pokemon filling the globe ?

Have you ever played Magic The Gathering?

In MTG you build decks out of cards and then compete with them. There are worldwide tournaments. So the better deck designs tend to spread around. But one "perfect" deck doesn't just supplant all the others. Because nothing is perfect. Any good strategy has it's downsides that can be exploited.

Still -and I am speaking outside of my field here, i do not play MTG - but as i understand it, a winning deck at this years tournament is likely to be more sophisticated than the winner of the first tournament, many years ago.

So in part, it does happen - the life forms that are alive on Earth today are, in many cases, really bad-ass compared to life from millions of years ago.

Someone
So in part, it does happen - the life forms that are alive on Earth today are, in many cases, really bad-ass compared to life from millions of years ago.

Not really, just better adapted to their enviornment or new designs to replace some that were suddenly gotten rid of.

Aligators, crocodiles are decidedly less bad-ass than they used to be. They no longer needed to be quite so bad-ass and were better able to survive being less bad-ass.

Look at a normal tiger and the so-called Saber tooth tiger. Which one is more bad ass? The saber toothed variant of predator was no longer as good a hunter as the one without the saber teeth and like rumble seats in cars, evolution got rid of the saber teeth.

Bad ass is only better if it allows a species to survive better (meteor impacts and large-scale extinctions aside)

To quote a Junior High school dinosaur lover: "Really sucks if you're into really cool animals because it always seems like all the really awesome bad-ass ones are extinct."

Well, seems like this is for a specific clique only. I was going to throw in my thoughts, but I'm obviously excluded from this discussion

On this message board I go to, there's apparently people who aren't very religious but still have some doubts regarding evoultion.

I think it's mainly due to the fact that they're buying into the myths such as "Humans came from the apes as we know them today!" etc... and that some of the layman terms sometimes can be a little bit misleading.

To help them though, I listed those helpful real facts clearing up the myths of evolution:

==Evolution==

In biology the word evolution describes the changes that occur in populations of living organisms over time. Describing these changes does not address the origin of life: for that, see abiogenesis. The two are commonly and mistakenly conflated. Biological evolution likewise says nothing about cosmology, the Big Bang, or where the universe, galaxy, solar system, or Earth came from.

The word "theory" in "the theory of evolution" does not imply doubt in mainstream science about the validity of this theory; the words "theory" and "hypothesis" are not the same in a scientific context (see Evolution as theory and fact). A scientific theory is a set of principles which, via logical deduction, explain the observations in nature. The same logical deductions can be made to predict observations before they are made. The theory describing how evolution occurs is a "theory" in the same sense as the theory of gravity, the theory of relativity, or indeed number theory.

Evolution by natural selection is not an entirely random process; the random results of mutation are filtered by the non-random process of natural selection and other non-random mechanisms. On the other hand, some evolutionary changes result from genetic drift, and are entirely random.

Evolution does not need to be directed (although some people believe it is). It is a process, like the fractal growth of a snowflake, where complex structures come from simple rules.

Humans did not evolve from chimpanzees or any other modern ape; instead they share a common ancestor (possibly Sahelanthropus tchadensis) that existed around 7 million years ago in the late Miocene epoch.However, the genuses Ardipithecus and Orrorin are alternative candidates for this common ancestor.

The process of evolution is not necessarily slow. Millions of years are not required to see evolution, or even to see speciation in action. Indeed, it has been observed multiple times under both controlled laboratory conditions and in nature.

Evolution does not happen within a single organism: a chimpanzee cannot be born a chimpanzee and turn into a different species within its lifetime. Evolution deals with changes to the gene pool of a population, which accumulate only over generations. Similarly, organisms cannot pass on acquired traits to their offspring; a bodybuilder's children are not born with more muscles (but see epigenetics).

Evolution is not a progression from "lower" to "higher", and evolution does not require an increase in complexity (see Evolution of complexity). A population can evolve to become simpler, and have a smaller genome — often called "devolution", but that is a misnomer.

The theory of evolution does posit "transitional forms"... but not "endpoint forms". That is, every animal, plant, fossil that exists, is an example of a transitional form. Evolution is an eternal and continuous process.

The claim that "almost all mutations are harmful" is false. In fact, most mutations have no noticeable effect. One study gives the average number of mutations that arise in a human conception to be around 128, with an average number of harmful mutations per conception of 1.3.

The claim that individuals with a different number of chromosomes can never produce viable offspring is false - Przewalski's Horse, for example, can produce viable offspring with the common horse, despite a different number of chromosomes.

The claim that evolution is not scientific since it cannot be falsified is not true. Any number of discoveries could potentially falsify evolution - for example the discovery of a contemporary mammal fossil in ancient rock strata.

The claim that evolution makes no meaningful predictions is not true - for example the discovery of the relationship between chromosome 2 and chimpanzee chromosomes at the end of the completion of the human and chimp genome projects was predicted, and makes no sense except as evidence of a common ancestor.

Hawk
When I saw the name of this thread I thought, "Oh no...." But what sets this one apart is Stacey's big question: Are there non-religious reasons to refute evolution? And it's a good question. I'd like to see some people answer that before we fall back into the stuff we already talked about.

An important consideration.

We can say evolutionary theory is very obviously evident in all life. And we can apply it to many other things like human or animal based structures, technology, speech patterns... and so on.

But we can't say that it's a "fact" when applied to the beginning of "life" on this planet. Without those time machines we'd all love, we have a natural limit to our knowledge there at the moment. Not to speculation and investigation, but to the actual knowledge. :(
------------------

For all we know, Kyupol's advanced aliens landed here and created the first life themselves. Or maybe life started and evolved mysteriously in so distant part of the galaxy and was transported here frozen on a wondering comet? Maybe it came about way, way, way back and has been transferring itself and around the universe via various means almost since the place started, like some kind of virus? lol! With no one knowing where it started...
Without anything concrete that sort of speculation is entirely valid.

-I don't think those scenarios are likely, but there are scientists following those lines of enquiry... :)

Evolution deals with what happened after life started. Sure those molecular biologists have pushed it back pretty far, but as yet no one has had a pile of proteins become RNA in the lab. As ozone has said they probably never will as the experiment to be fair would have to run several thousand years.

The Theory of evolution is the best thing we have going right now and the proof on the genetic and cellular level is conclusive but as for the original creation of life? aye there's the rub

No one who looks at the genetics or cell development questions how they developed over time through evolution. There is no irreducible complexity and the "half an eye" argument is without validity as there are plenty of creatures with the equivelent of half an eye.

The mechanism of natural selection on the other hand is still open to reinterpretation... it's the best thing we have right now, and is probably one aspect of of how life evolves, but it may not be as clean and easy going as it seemed to Darwin.

lothar
Or , one question i was wondering about is - if some certain animal has an evolutionary advantage like poison spikes and flying ability , like if that animal was waaay stronger than others , wouldn't the whole Earth eventually be filled with that creature ?

Natural selection cannot produce something like the ultimate being mostly because adaptations are often compromises. Humans owe much of their versatility and athleticism to their prehensile hands and flexible limbs, but those also make them prone to sprains, torn ligaments, and dislocations-structural reinforcement is compromised for agility. It is the opposite for many insects. A seal spends part of its time on land, especially on rocks and stuff. It would probably walk better if it had legs instead of flippers, but it would not swim nearly as well. Hollow bones of birds, though they make flight easier, are broken easily.

Evolution is also limited by historical constraints. Each species has a legacy of descent with modification from a long line of ancestral forms. Evolution does not scrap ancestral anatomy and build each new complex structure from scratch, but instead co-opts existing structures and adapts them to new situations. Selection can only edit existing attributes. It favors only the fittest variations from the phenotypes that are available, which may not be the ideal traits. New traits do not arise on demand.
_____________

One argument against evolution that I've seen is shown in some experiment, where some scientists took fruit flies and bred them for many generations. They even used X-rays to increase the gene mutation rate. The files reproduce very quickly, making it easy to produce in a short time the same number of generations that mammals would in thousands of years. In the end, all the scientists got were fruit flies, mutated flies, but fruit flies nonetheless.

Has anyone else heard about this?

Evolution =/= Proof against higher being

veritan
In the end, all the scientists got were fruit flies, mutated flies, but fruit flies nonetheless.

That sounds extremely reasonable to me considering the form of many insects and certain other creatures has remained stable for millions of years. Mutation is only one factor in evolutionary change I'm afraid, you also have environmental factors and all the other aspects of pure chance:
A freak storm, disease, loss of a certain mineral from the environment, changing food sources, Geographical changes and constraints, higher temperature or lower temperatures for the weather, new predator or prey species introduced, and a an almost infinite number of other things. If all your lab experiment has is mutation and simulated accelerated time, it doesn't have much.

Atom Apple
Evolution =/= Proof against higher being

That's nonsense. All evolution concerns is the change and adaption of species over time. Nothing to to with a "higher being", whether in proof of denial or confirmation.

ozoneocean

Atom Apple
Evolution =/= Proof against higher being

That's nonsense. All evolution concerns is the change and adaption of species over time. Nothing to to with a "higher being", whether in proof of denial or confirmation.

That's why I put a slashy thing. "Does not equal".

Well I proved your point in that case. lol!

And we both agree, which is nice. :)

ozoneocean
Well I proved your point in that case. lol!

And we both agree, which is nice. :)

High five!

In on topic related news, I mean if I were God I wouldn't want to sit around thinking through every species to get them to function properly. I'd throw some carbon around and say "Figure it out yourself."

veritan
One argument against evolution that I've seen is shown in some experiment, where some scientists took fruit flies and bred them for many generations. They even used X-rays to increase the gene mutation rate. The files reproduce very quickly, making it easy to produce in a short time the same number of generations that mammals would in thousands of years. In the end, all the scientists got were fruit flies, mutated flies, but fruit flies nonetheless.

Has anyone else heard about this?

Drosophila melanogaster! I have heard about this. There have been many of these experiments, some of them quite famous, and they have spawned many imitators.

The short answer is - it is actually pretty easy to breed Fruit Flies into populations that cannot interbreed with each other. That is, You start with 1 population of Fruit Flies and end up with two completely serarate populations with different traits that cannot intermingle. Tis is called "Speciation" - the creation of new species.

Critics of evolution theory at this point will try to shout me down - but they are all still fruit flies, they will exclaim!

Says them. The trick here is make the word "Species" sound very serious without ever giving a clear definition of what you mean by the word- and it can mean many different things. So long as you dont define "species" clearly, you can always say that speciation has not ocurred.

But Speciation happens all the time. Forget about Fruit Flies - try something more familiar, like Dogs.




One species or two? You can claim they are one species because they are "both just dogs." But they cannot interbreed. If Vulcans landed on Earth tomorrow and started to classify our life forms, they would obviously list these as two different species, two obviously different and divergent species of dog.

And we've been breeding dogs for how long? Not long, in evolutionary terms.

How different do you think these dog's offspring will be in 100 million years?

The form of living things is based on the non-random survival of their randomly varying anscestors.

(edited for clarity and typos)

Beautiful point and well said. But there's that probelm with the term "variety" as members of the same species that should be able to interbreed.

I think you can interbreed a tiny rat-dogs with a massive sheep herder. I've seen the resulting mutts of breeds you wouldn't think could mix. My favorite was a Chihulha-pit bull mix.

To continue your Star Trek metaphor: You are aware that in one variant of the Star Trek universe (Guide to Alien Life Forms and original Star Trek tech manual) Vulcans and Klingons are varieties of Homo Sapiens? Vulcans, Klingons and humans can interbreed. Speciation didn't occur there.

Unless speciation means mean that they're only different species if you can't get a viable offspring that can reproduce the resulting mix? (mules?)

I guess it does kind of depend on how one defines a species.

The most common definition, the biological species, is whether or not members of a population can produce living, fertile, offspring. Horses and donkeys remain separate species because their hybrid offspring, mules, are sterile. However, this definition has some limitations. For example, there is no way to check interbreeding in the extinct forms represented by fossils, and the concept also has no utility at all for lifeforms that are entirely asexual, such as bacteria.

If one were to use a definition like the recognition species concept , then one might classify horses, donkeys, and zebras as the same species.

The Vulcans would have to get through me first if they want to start classifying our creatures.

The thing that strikes me odd about the fruit fly experiment is that it misses alot of important parts of evoloution. Manily they won't evolve unless they need to, like if an anti-biotic is used to treat a bacterial infection and you don't use the drugs for the length of time the doctor recomends you'll be sick again and the bacteria will be harder to treat because the stronger cells survived and reproduced. If you aren't preventing the unmutated fruit flys from reproduceing the mutated genes won't survive in the gene pool for more then a few generations because they'll be replaced by more common genes.

BffSatan
The Vulcans would have to get through me first if they want to start classifying our creatures.

The thing that strikes me odd about the fruit fly experiment is that it misses alot of important parts of evoloution. Manily they won't evolve unless they need to, like if an anti-biotic is used to treat a bacterial infection and you don't use the drugs for the length of time the doctor recomends you'll be sick again and the bacteria will be harder to treat because the stronger cells survived and reproduced. If you aren't preventing the unmutated fruit flys from reproduceing the mutated genes won't survive in the gene pool for more then a few generations because they'll be replaced by more common genes.

The fruit fly thing also bothers me because it seems to ignore natural selection. If there's no change in the environment that requires the insect/animal to change all the radiation in the world wouldn't necessarily change the creature.
Maybe it just proves that you can't force evolution and that a creature won't change noticablely unless it needs to.

bravo1102
The fruit fly thing also bothers me because it seems to ignore natural selection. If there's no change in the environment that requires the insect/animal to change all the radiation in the world wouldn't necessarily change the creature.
Maybe it just proves that you can't force evolution and that a creature won't change noticablely unless it needs to.

Many of these experiments did involve some kind of imposed selection, as i recall, and i dont think any of them were actually intended to prove speciation, as a geneticist would consider that already proven. These experiments got mentioned once(many years ago) under the idea that "but they were all still fruit flies, so that disproves speciation!" so now it is a recurring meme. It comes up eventually in any discussion of evolutionary theory these days, as if by rote.

But speciation does occur all the time, os it is an empty point.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=574

Sorry. I had to.

lothar
Or , one question i was wondering about is - if some certain animal has an evolutionary advantage like poison spikes and flying ability , like if that animal was waaay stronger than others , wouldn't the whole Earth eventually be filled with that creature ?

Not to pound this into the ground too much, but the other reason a creature like this would ultimately not succeed is that they would almost certainly kill off their food source in short order. So, for a while they would be king and they would breed to a certain level, then the food source would dry up and then they would die off - or evolve away from being too badass.

"Survival of the fittest" describes creatures that fit the best into their environment. This includes the entire circle of life, and if any one creature dominates to the point where the circle is broken, then they eventually are the cause of their own demise.

evolution versus religion?

um... Evolution IS a religion. :)

These debates always bother me because they are so black or white.

I personally believe that God used physics and evolution and science in general AS A TOOL. Why the hell do people always act like God is only allowed to use special God magic? Why can't he understand and use evolution or physics to create Earth and the life on it? Why does it all have to be either God, or science?

Christ.