Yep. People who know science and Christianity are well aware that there is no conflict between the two.
"The natural man does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God. For they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned." 1 Corinthians 2:14
"Natural Selection" is supposedly the mechanism for evolution. There is no reason to believe this, but science has never needed a reason to reject God, His word and His ways. I've mocked evolution in the past by talking about the Evolution Fairy sprinkling evo dust around to produce new life forms. It's about as sensible as any other godless theory.
The linked article is a breathtaking expose of how evolutionists bald faced contradict themselves with the principle of natural selection. I won't go into details. The article speaks for itself.
It's an agency of evolution. Not the only one, of course. Natural selection is what makes evolution move in a specific direction. And it's been repeatedly observed to do so.
I don't think you understand what it means. Let's say there's a population of insects, which are being killed by an insecticide. A mutation that provides some immunity to the insecticide occurs. Succeeding generations will see the immune individuals selected to survive and reproduce. And the population will change over time as a result. That's what natural selection is.
Exactly, so the origin of the change, the immunity, was a mutation, not natural selection, right?
More precisely, the mutation is the change.
The mutation appeared randomly. The change in the population, however, is not random. Random mutations plus natural selection is a non-random process. I don't see how that's hard to understand but if you like, we can look at some other examples to see why that is so.
Nope. You just learned (or possibly you still don't get it) is that natural selection is the antithesis of randomness. Let's look at something without the emotional content. Roll a six-sided die 1000 times and record results. You'll almost certainly get something that looks completely random. Now, let's add natural selection and do it again. This time, each time the result is less than 4, roll again, and use that number instead. When you're done, you will find that the result is not random. How can that be? Think about it.
no argument there.
Hence the need for mutations to provide new information. This is why random mutation and natural selection are necessary for the diversity of life we see. God knew best, after all.
Mutations. Every new mutation in a population adds to the information in that population. Would you like to see the number for a relatively simple case?
Which is what mutation and natural selection will do. Would you like to try a simple simulation that would do this?
As you now see, Darwinian evolution is the opposite of randomness.
Bingo.
Now you're getting it. Novelty is provided by mutation. This is why (for example) that while it would be useful for humans to have a second pair of hands, it's not going to happen because the lack of useful intermediate steps prevents it. It would be great if we could have mechanically efficient lower back. But it's not going to happen for the same reason. In fact, immunity to cancer would be great, but the mutation(s) necessary haven't yet happened.
Right. It only takes novel information and sorts it out. The stuff that's useful tends to be preserved and the stuff that's harmful tends to be removed. Not surprisingly, this is exactly what we see happening in nature.
No,that's wrong. Evolution doesn't happen to individuals. It happens to populations. So the mutation is evolution only when in becomes part of the population.
No. Some forms of ID would recognize the way Darwinian evolution works, but neither Lamarckism nor creationism do.
Well I think we have established something we can agree on; the origin of new genetic information (mutation) required for evolution to take place is random according to Darwinism.
That's been known since genes were discovered. Luria and Delbruck got their Nobels for documenting this.
Several errors there. First, some mutations do protect against cancer, we just haven't seen one that offers complete immunity:
I see a hidden false assumption here. Evolution is not always an increase in information. It is merely a change in allele frequencies in a population. It could reduce information, such as we see in the simplification of mammalian skeletons from reptilian ones or the removal of vitamin C genes as we see in primates.
Understood; observed 'macro-evolution' or 'variation' is either a mix and match of already existing genes... or the destruction of existing genes.That's been known since genes were discovered. Luria and Delbruck got their Nobels for documenting this.
Several errors there. First, some mutations do protect against cancer, we just haven't seen one that offers complete immunity:
Millions of humans carry a genetic mutation that could cause cells to explode
Millions of cells in our bodies undergo programmed death, a crucial process that protects us from diseases by eliminating unwanted, damaged, or dangerous cells and preventing the spread of viruses, bacteria, and even cancer.
Millions of humans carry a genetic mutation that could cause cells to explode
Millions of cells in our bodies undergo programmed death, a crucial process that protects us from diseases by eliminating unwanted, damaged, or dangerous cells and preventing the spread of viruses, bacteria, and even cancer.www.indiatoday.in
Second, every mutation in a population increases information. Again, if you'd like to see the numbers for a simple case, I can show you.
I see a hidden false assumption here. Evolution is not always an increase in information. It is merely a change in allele frequencies in a population. It could reduce information, such as we see in the simplification of mammalian skeletons from reptilian ones or the removal of vitamin C genes as we see in primates.
So a population evolves by filtering out. It may be a matter of replacing existing alleles with new mutations or it could be merely simplifying.
The latter is an important part of new species. Most speciation is allopatric, from small, isolated groups that are ("founder effect") different than the larger populations. This is seen in the evolution of Darwin's finches, dipterans in Hawaii, and many other cases.
Of course, mutation continues in such separated populations, and the new genetic information is often a factor in the speciation of these groups. Would you like some examples?
It's not a contradiction in terms. Mutation represents the origin of heritable variation in the population, while Darwin was talking about the origin of species, not the origin of variation. His hypothesis was that species change and become new species because of selection acting on heritable variation. We now understand that that is indeed one mechanism for the origin of species, but that mutations (which Darwin of course didn't know anything about) can generate new species even in the absence of selection, through the accumulation of multiple neutral mutations or even through a single mutational event (as in polyploidization in plants).
No, that's almost backwards. By definition, actual 'evolution' is the change in the frequency of genetic variants in a population. One contribution to that comes from new mutation, but even in the absence of any new mutations lots of evolution -- lots of change to the population -- can occur through changes in variant frequencies.
Mutations destroy functional information and create new functional information. Any mutation in one direction can equally occur in the opposite direction. The combination of random variation and natural selection is a powerful way of incorporating information about the organism's environment and about what combinations of genes work best into the organism's DNA.
Only the latter is exponentially less probable than the former- the mutations we can actually observe overwhelmingly destroy functional information rather than create it.
Or freguently by the addition of new genes which come about by mutation. Interestingly, it's now been shown that new genes often come from mutation of non-coding DNA:
www.ucdavis.edu
No. Individuals don't evolve. Populations do. But most new organisms will very slightly change the allele frequencies in a population. Since you child would almost certainly have dozens of mutations (all humans do) it would have some effect.
That would be pretty tough to imagine. Humans evolved from other primates. Turns out the evolution of eukaryotes from prokaryotes was pretty difficult. For most of life's history on Earth there were no eukaryotes. Would you like to see how that finally happened? It's pretty interesting.
Hence the need for new genes, which appear by various mutations such as from non-coding DNA, or gene duplication and mutation. God thought of everything.
First most mutations don't destroy "functional information". They add information to a population genome, but most of them are effectively neutral, keeping the function of the mutated gene. A few are harmful, and tend to be removed by natural selection and a very fuew are useful and tend to increase in the population by natural selection.
No, that's wrong one mutation in a gene can change it to a new useful function. See the link above. However, such evolution by sequential steps has been observed to happen. Would you like to see about that?
Actually speciation has been directly observed, so there's really no point in denying the fact. Micro-evolution (evolution not producing new species) is more common, but macro-evolution is a fact.
It certainly is.
No, that's wrong, too. The evolution of eukaryotes involves endosybiosis, the inclusion of cells into other cells as functional endosymbionts mutually dependent on each other. All of our cells are like that. Creationists insist that this could not have happened but such an endosymbiosis has been directly observed to happen. Would you like to see about that?
In fact, creationists insist that every time we find a new transitional form, two new gaps are created. No one takes that seriously, not even the creationists. As your fellow YE creationist, Dr. Kurt Wise admits, the large number of transitional series is "very good evidence for macroevolutionary theory." But let's test your beliefs here; name me any two major groups, said to be evolutionarily connected, and I'll see if there's a transitional form. You're on.
In fact, Darwin didn't make that claim. He thought that perhaps a number of individual organisms were separately connected. But with the advent of genetics, we learned that all living things on Earth are from a common ancestor. You're doubly wrong here.
Technically,it's genetics that demonstrates common descent of all living things. Darwinism merely shows the mechanism for that evolution. Would you like to see how that works?
No, that's wrong, too. Even many creationist organizations now admit that fact of speciation. Most now admit that new genera and often new families arise from older taxa.Speciation has been claimed from merely observing that other individuals didn't seem to want to mate with an individual with certain traits.
It's one of the most devastating problems for creationism. Darwin pointed out that if evolution was a fact, then we would see many cases of transitional forms making it hard to precisely define species. If creationism were true, this would not be so. Creationists have no explanation for this, other than to concede a certain amount of evolution. But that's a bigger problem for them, since they can't show any sort of barrier to increasing changes over time.
That's been directly observed. As Darwin pointed out, they arise from modification of existing proteins. One of the more interesting ones is the nylon bug:
