Evolutionists Moving the Goalposts Again

[LightHorseman]

Note further, JohnR7 is incapable of offering an alternate mechanism of genotype or phenotype differentiation.

 

[OdwinOddball]

Let's start with the just this very incomplete list of evidence here in these links:

Six lines of evidence, one conclusion...evolution ain't going away

Or how about reviewing some of the evidence for human evolution and taking Scigirl's Chromosome Challenge?(Post #96)

Let's see you give a reasoned argument to the contrary against any part of the the above.

Still awaiting JohnR7's reply.

 

[jamie4418]

Question for the evolutionists. Even if evolution is true (which I don't believe), God still created all life, didn't He?

 

[Lucretius]

Question for the evolutionists. Even if evolution is true (which I don't believe), God still created all life, didn't He?

Science and religion are two separate issues. One is testable and verifiable, and the other is not. As an atheist I do not think God played any part in anything, because I don't believe he exists. This doesn't change the fact that evolution occurs.

 

[TheInstant]

Question for the evolutionists. Even if evolution is true (which I don't believe), God still created all life, didn't He?

Depends on who you ask. The title "evolutionists" includes both theists and atheists.

 

[jamie4418]

As evolutionists, do you believe life just came from nowhere?

 

[JedPerkins]

As evolutionists, do you believe life just came from nowhere?

Evolutionists can believe in a god, or gods, you know. I personally don't, and think that life arose from the right processes coming together at random in this incredibly vast universe (understanding the vastness of the universe I think is key in understanding my position).

 

[TheInstant]

As evolutionists, do you believe life just came from nowhere?

What do you mean by "from nowhere"? Do you mean without a God? If so, I would answer yes, but as an atheist, not an evolutionist (as evolutionists have different views on these things).

 

[jamie4418]

Evolutionists can believe in a god, or gods, you know. I personally don't, and think that life arose from the right processes coming together at random in this incredibly vast universe (understanding the vastness of the universe I think is key in understanding my position).

So, what you're saying is that you believe the entire universe, in its vast magnificence, not to mention all life on earth, is one big accident?

 

[JedPerkins]

So, what you're saying is that you believe the entire universe, in its vast magnificence, not to mention all life on earth, is one big accident?

What does this have to do with evolution? Are you just looking for someone who happens to accept evolution AND who doesn't believe a conscious entity needed to create the universe? Well, you've found one. I have no idea how the universe came about. I believe that it is quite possible it happened entirely by chance.

 

[eri]

If by 'accident', you mean came together under the influence of physical laws, than yes. Since we know how (most) of that could have happened, I find it a lot more plausible to accept that theory than the unnecessary 'sky daddy' theory.

 

[Lucretius]

We can discuss origins of the universe if you want.

 

[Nathan Poe]

So, what you're saying is that you believe the entire universe, in its vast magnificence, not to mention all life on earth, is one big accident?

Or a series of little accidents.

(P.S. This has nothing to do with evolution.)

 

[Chalnoth]

Or a series of little accidents.

(P.S. This has nothing to do with evolution.)

I find the possibilities surrounding the birth of the universe to be rather fascinating. The theory of cosmic inflation allows one comparatively small accident to initiate the birth of a new universe. Unfortunately we probably won't ever be able to probe physics to that scale to ever test the causes of our own universe: the furthest we can possibly probe is the end of inflation, there is no known way to probe for the beginning.

 

[LightHorseman]

It would not be beyond a truly omnipotent God to create a universe where the fundamental laws would TEND towards life under the right conditions. As I have stated before, I think his ability to do this is more awe inspiring than the image of some guy in a robe and beard with a petri dish designing the first cell

 

[jamie4418]

Questions for evolutionists:

1) Did humans come from apes?

2) Are humans more evolved than apes?

3) Did all life come from amoeba?

4) Where did amoeba come from?

 

[Magnus Vile]

Questions for evolutionists:

1) Did humans come from apes?

Depends on your definition of ape. Certainly they didn't come from any modern ape.

2) Are humans more evolved than apes?

No.

3) Did all life come from amoeba?

Nope.

4) Where did amoeba come from?

Which one? Or all of them?

Whichever, they all came from something earlier.

 

[Nathan Poe]

Questions for evolutionists:

1) Did humans come from apes?

Humans are apes, if you want to get technical about it.

2) Are humans more evolved than apes?

No.

3) Did all life come from amoeba?

One particular Amoeba, or the Ameoba family, or what?

4) Where did amoeba come from?

Does it matter? The point is, life started somewhere and diversified.

 

[Chalnoth]

Questions for evolutionists:

1) Did humans come from apes?

Yes. We speciated from the ancestors of the chimpanzees about 5-6 million years ago. This doesn't say that we came from the apes of today. It states that the apes of today and ourselves share common ancestors.

2) Are humans more evolved than apes?

How do you define more evolved? We're certainly more intelligent, but is that necessarily more evolved? I suppose one might possibly say that we are the most evolved of the apes (since we share ancestors from them, we really are still apes, just as we are mammals), considering that we are the only among the apes to begin accelerated social evolution (the social structures of other apes have remained largely unchanged for millions of years, while our societies are changing on the order of decades).

At the same time, we, along with the other apes, have been evolving for the same amount of time, so by some measure we are equally-evolved. Our evolutions just took different paths.

3) Did all life come from amoeba?

Well, not amoeba. Amoeba are just one form of single-celled organism. But I assume you mean that all multicellular life came from single-celled life.

But anyway, yes. We have even see single-celled organisms evolve into simple multi-celled organisms in the laboratory:

Starting from single celled animals, each of which has the capability to reproduce there is no sex in the sense that we think of the term. Selective pressure has been observed to convert single-cellular forms into multicellular forms. A case was observed in which a single celled form changed to multicellularity.
Boxhorn, a student of Boraas,writes: Coloniality in Chlorella vulgaris
Boraas (1983) reported the induction of multicellularity in a strain of Chlorella pyrenoidosa (since reclassified as C. vulgaris) by predation. He was growing the unicellular green alga in the first stage of a two stage continuous culture system as for food for a flagellate predator, Ochromonas sp., that was growing in the second stage. Due to the failure of a pump, flagellates washed back into the first stage. Within five days a colonial form of the Chlorella appeared. It rapidly came to dominate the culture. The colony size ranged from 4 cells to 32 cells. Eventually it stabilized at 8 cells. This colonial form has persisted in culture for about a decade. The new form has been keyed out using a number of algal taxonomic keys. They key out now as being in the genus Coelosphaerium, which is in a different family from Chlorella. "
Boraas, M. E. 1983. Predator induced evolution in chemostat culture. EOS. Transactions of the American Geophysical Union. 64:1102.
from Observed Instances of Speciation

http://www.gate.net/~rwms/EvoMutations.html

I thought the really cool thing about this particular experiment was that they observed the mutation which led to the production of simple multicelled organisms after five days of the right conditions in a tiny laboratory experiment. The early Earth had and entire planet and hundreds of millions of years to find the right conditions.

Of course, we haven't observed in the laboratory the entire series of evolutionary steps from single-celled organisms to complex organisms, but since this change took a couple billion years with an entire planet of life forms to work with, this is no surprise at all.

But please understand that even today's single-celled organisms have been evolving for billions of years since the original single-celled organisms. The original single-celled organisms were much, much simpler than today's.

4) Where did amoeba come from?

Now that is a very interesting subject, and isn't really evolution, but rather the discipline of abiogenesis. Here's a basic, basic idea of abiogenesis:

1. Start with conditions on the early Earth that are amenable to the production of amino acids. These conditions turn out to be a very natural expectation from our models of the properties of the early Earth.
2. Once you have an early Earth that has copious amounts of amino acids, you get them to concentrate. This concentration will happen naturally in many places along coastal areas.
3. Add in a mechanism to produce proteins or other complex organic molecules from these amino acids. It turns out that asteroid and comet impacts are one such method to produce proteins in large amounts. We expect the early Earth to have a much higher collision rate of asteroids and comets than today's Earth (basically because there's only so much matter out there in the solar system that can hit us). There are probably many other mechanisms.
4. Now, randomly produce a specific complex molecule that self-replicates. A number of these molecules have been produced in the laboratory.
5. Once you have a self-replicating molecule, it will quickly combine all amino acids in its immediate environment into copies of itself. Weather patterns will spread these molecules slowly but surely, and eventually the Earth will be covered in self-replicating objects.
6. These self-replicating molecules will then start on a path to the inevitable first proto-cells: basically, cellular life is so dramatically preferred evolutionarily (instead of waiting for specific molecules to come to you, you can develop machinery to make your own) that it basically has to happen sooner or later.
7. Once you have the first cells, abiogenesis has occurred, and evolution takes over.

Anyway, we don't really have all the answers as to exactly how the above happened, but there are strong geological reasons to believe that given the right conditions, it becomes extremely likely. After all, life appeared very early in the Earth's history: it was only a few hundred million years after the Earth cooled enough to support life that it first appeared.

Since life first appeared, it has slowly favored organisms that evolve faster and faster. Thus early-on, changes happened very slowly. For a picture of how miniscule our current time scale is, take a look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_time_scale
Notice the nested nature of the graph: the third graph, the Cenozoic, fits into that tiny yellow box on the top graph. And all of human civilization? That's that slightly thick line on the far right of the graph of the Cenozoic era. That should give you some understaing of why we shouldn't expect to see dramatic changes in the life around us: our experience is a minscule snapshot of a snapshot of the timescales of life on Earth.

 

[USincognito]

Questions for evolutionists:

1) Did humans come from apes?

No and yes. We fall within the classification for apes. We share a common ancestor with our fellow apes. We did not come from any of the species that are alive today.

2) Are humans more evolved than apes?

No. Every plant, animal and other is equally evolved.

3) Did all life come from amoeba?

No, but all animal life likely came from a common ancestor of amoebas about 1.3 billion years ago.

4) Where did amoeba come from?

It likely shares a common ancestor with plants about 1.5 billion years ago.