Evolution is very obvious that is not true at all

[USincognito]

The last time we tried appeasement WWII broke out.

This "argument" is such a load of offal. How does one warp one's mind to think that Sanctions, weapons inspectors and No Fly zones constitutes "appeasement?"

 

[L'Anatra]

Wow... I'm not sure if you're very familiar with internet message boards, dstauff.

If you're not, what you quoted from Aduro Amnis was not his post, but rather his "signature." Most of us have one. You can put whatever you want in it, provided it's non-offensive.

Here on CF, adding a signature to the end of your posts costs 50 blessings. You get a blessing for each post you make. Here is a FAQ on how to gain blessings in other ways: http://www.christianforums.com/faq.php?faq=cf#faq_cf_blessings.

For obvious reasons, signatures often have nothing to do with the discussion at hand.

This topic is not relevant to this forum. Second of all, if we would not have fought the war in Iraq there is no assurance that "every child in the world" would still be living because Saddam and regimes like his would be running loose committing genocide without anyone to keep them in check. You don't get the big picture. Dictators like Saddam will not stop at their own country. They WILL go after the West. The last time we tried appeasement WWII broke out.

Ummm... yeah. No.

 

[dstauff]

L'Anatra, instead of using two or three words, try using reasons in your response if you disagree with a statement.
USincognito, before WWII, Britain and France did watch over Germany to make sure they followed the Versailles Treaty. These restrictions, however, were obviously loosely enforced. Same with Iraq. The war in Iraq was to stop the otherwise inevitable.

 

[USincognito]

L'Anatra, instead of using two or three words, try using reasons in your response if you disagree with a statement.
USincognito, before WWII, Britain and France did watch over Germany to make sure they followed the Versailles Treaty. These restrictions, however, were obviously loosely enforced. Same with Iraq. The war in Iraq was to stop the otherwise inevitable.

Ummmm. I was a History major, so let me draw a more appropriate analogy to your claim of "appeasement." Instead of enforcing sanctions, a No Fly zone and weapons inspectors we would have pull all that out, allow Saddam to rearm and then Annex Kuwait. Otherwise your WWII analogy falls flat.

 

[Tomk80]

L'Anatra, instead of using two or three words, try using reasons in your response if you disagree with a statement.
USincognito, before WWII, Britain and France did watch over Germany to make sure they followed the Versailles Treaty. These restrictions, however, were obviously loosely enforced. Same with Iraq. The war in Iraq was to stop the otherwise inevitable.

Yep, time for you to dive into those books again. And not only evolution, but history also.

 

[Oliver]

WWII is not exactly the "last time we tried appeasement". I would say that the cold war also qualifies, and this time appeasement prevented a nuclear war.

The war in Iraq was to stop the otherwise inevitable.

inevitable? It seems to me like the inspections were doing quite a good job at preventing the "inevitable", and at a much lower human cost.

But all this does not belong in this thread or even in this part of the forum.

 

[L'Anatra]

L'Anatra, instead of using two or three words, try using reasons in your response if you disagree with a statement.

I'd rather not... the situation is not as simple as you'd like to believe.

The reason I responded to your post at all was, ironically, because it doesn't belong in this thread. However, if I'm going to reference someone's post in one of my own, I think the least I can do is reply to the point you intended to make. I could have used one word, but I used three instead.

Besides, I think there are many around here more qualified than I am to discuss world history. USincognito is one of them.

 

[notto]

Would it get this topic back on track if I stated that Darwin was responsible for World War II, Hitler, and Saddam?

 

[challenger]

Would it get this topic back on track if I stated that Darwin was responsible for World War II, Hitler, and Saddam?

LMAO

Anyway, appeasement wouldn't have happened if the Treaty of Versailles wasn't so harsh.

 

[Vinegar]

Ok um can't really spell your name is it ok I call you Sop? You read what I said and I may not be bright enough to clarify so hopefully you can understand me "the simple minded" ok? Why isn't the apes changing into humans? I said that before and I'll ask again and please make it simple and because someone simply has a website on that sort of thing does not make it correct ok? I will check the site out just to be considerate. But please before I go on answer that?

Oddly enough, you don't have to be overly smart to "get" evolution, although it becomes pretty challenging when you get into some of the detail of the science.

Personally, as someone who accepts evolution as the most sensible explanation, I have no problem with the statement that humans evolved from apes. Scientists don't like saying that, because they are pernickety about details, and prefer to say that "humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor", which is technically closer to what they observe in DNA and fossil evidence. The plain fact is, humans and chimpanzees have genomes that are more than 95% the same, humans and orangutans a bit less, humans and gorillas less still, and we even share bits of genome with mice, jellyfish, flies and potatoes (in that order). To suggest that we are not related, means that you have to have reason to believe that humans and apes (and every other life-form on the planet) somehow got to be made out of the same stuff, by some process other than mating and begetting and evolving.

There are all kinds of creation myths around the world, some of them put humans and animals in the same family tree, but none of them come close to mentioning DNA, and none of them comes near to being backed up by scientific findings (find me any reference at AIG that says so and I and others will shoot it down in logical flames).

Evolution requires (to keep it simple) four things: (1) DNA, (2) Reproduction, (3) Useful changes (mutations) in the DNA that is passed down the generations through reproduction, and (4) Change in the interactions between organisms and their environment. All of these four things can be directly observed, existing and happening now, all about us. No-one (even "creation scientists")denies that.

The most significant event in evolution is speciation - this is when one species of organism develops from another species, due to the accumulation of useful mutations in the genome. One useful genetic mutation in a bird could be one that caused a lengthening of beak, enabling the bird to reach further into the earth to catch worms, and so making it easier to get a meal. But why would this take place, if a shorter beak had always been useful? It could happen because of a prolonged period of drought, that meant worms burrowed deeper in the soil. Birds with short-beak genes would more readily die of starvation, leading to a population of birds with a higher proportion of long-beak genes. These genes would be passed through the generations. In this case, short-beaked birds would eventually die out, or "become extinct", like the dinosaurs, because the mix of genes that made them has been "de-selected" by nature.

There is another kind of scenario, though, in which you end up with both short-beaked and long-beaked birds, descended from the same original population. This can happen when some of the original birds fly into an area, perhaps the other side of a mountain, where worms dig themselves a bit deeper into the soil than in the birds' original home. If one or more of those birds happens to have a longer beak, it is more likely to survive separation from the original flock and so more likely to settle in the new, if slightly harsher, environment. From one brooding bird, a flock can grow. For quite a few generations, it is likely that the two separated populations of birds could interbreed. But after many generations of separation, some of the inevitable mutations that arise could lead to the two populations becoming genetically incapable of interbreeding. Two populations that are genetically incompatible equals two separate species.

Over many more generations, many more mutations, many changes in local environment and many migrations to new environments, you end up with many species, all over the place, all traceable through their genes back to a single population of a single species. Logically, it would have taken the accumulation of a lot of tiny changes in DNA from an ape-like ancestor to end up like us. This is consistent with the known rates of mutation of DNA, as well as with the fossil record that includes skeletons that look as you would expect transitional ape-like humans to look, found at levels in the geological strata that match the progression you would also expect. Evolutionary theory does not say that at some point, a knuckle-dragging ape gave birth to a fully-formed human baby. That is just a dumb story told to try to make evolution look ridiculous.

Speciation is not just speculation, either. It has in fact been observed, in some plants, bacteria and insects, which breed fast enough for enough mutations to mount up for speciation to occur, within the professional lifetime of a modern scientist.

Charles Darwin came up with the notion of speciation through the unconscious selection pressures of the natural environment, in part from his observation of the many varieties of finch on the Galapogos Islands. Each variety had a distinctive beak, that enabled it to make use of a specific food source. This is yet another pathway for speciation in birds: not from shallow worms to deep worms this time, but from worms to seeds, for example. Darwin figured that something was at work within organisms that caused variation from one generation to the next, but he didn't know what it was. The later development of statistical genetics, and later still, discovery of DNA, led to much improved means to understand the processes at work.

I have seen a lot of apologists for the particular creation story found in Genesis, trying to claim that a useful mutation is impossible, or that one species of animal cannot develop from another through this means. None of them has ever been able, however, to explain why not, without getting hopelessly mixed up about the actual processes involved. It boils down to them not wanting to accept the possibility of evolution, because someone has told them God doesn't permit people to think any differently from the folk who wrote the Bible. If our ancestors had all followed that rule, medical treatment would be limited to prayer and amputation, and we'd all be driving donkeys.

 

[Vinegar]

In response to L'Anatra: In school, we were taught that mammals had descended from dinosaurs. There are evolutionists who believe that, although you may not be familiar with that. Here's something else which I know everyone may enjoy: Consider the human eye. The human eye is one of the most complex structures in the universe; howerver, it would be useless if it were half-developed or there were no nerves to send its impulses, but evolution requires it to develop over time. So what is the advantage of half an eye? Or just a hole in the head? Surely an animal wouldn't have an advantage over others of its kind just because it has half of a nonfunctioning eye, which would have happened according to evolution.

I sincerely doubt that you were taught any such thing. More likely, some preacher or other told you that to make you believe evolution was silly, before even begiining to understand it.

The "complex eye" argument has been so done to death it's almost a sick joke. Here's a quick response from www.talkorigins.com:

This is the quintessential example of the argument from incredulity. Usually, the source making the claim quotes Darwin saying the evolution of the eye seems "absurd in the highest degree". However, Darwin follows that statement with three and a half pages proposing intermediate stages through which eyes might have evolved via gradual steps [Darwin 1872].


photosensitive cell.
aggregates of pigment cells without a nerve.
an optic nerve surrounded by pigment cells and covered by translucent skin.
pigment cells forming a small depression.
pigment cells forming a deeper depression.
the skin over the depression taking a lens shape.
muscles allowing the lens to adjust.

All of these steps are known to be viable because all exist in animals living today. The increments between these steps are slight and may be broken down into even smaller increments. Natural selection should, under many circumstances, favor the increments. Since eyes don't fossilize well, we don't know that the development of the eye followed exactly that path, but we certainly can't claim that no path exists.

Nilsson and Pelger [1994] calculated that, if each step were a 1% change, the evolution of the eye would take 1829 steps, which could happen in 350,000 generations.

For your information, the creationist "irreduceable complexity" theme has lately been reduced to quibbling about tiny organelles within cells, where it is still failing quite nicely to make any dent whatever on the scientific understanding of reality.

 

[lucaspa]

As to the eye, things are far more complex than you give them credit for. Each step that seems so simple is, in fact, immensely complex, involving numerous biochemical factors. First of all, the light-sensitive spot you take as the first step is already incredibly complex.

Actually, no. It only involves a rhodopsin-like protein.

Next, that simple cup shape requires a host of other molecules to be formed and maintained. The systems that operate within the eye are far more complex than you have been led to believe.

Changing shapes often only involve one gene. That is, if you change a Hox gene, then that itself causes a lot of other changes.

For instance, putting the gene Pax-6 into the cells in the legs of flies will cause eyes to form in the legs! That's just one gene, but the changes are very complex. So you see, small changes can have huge effects during development.

The cup shape does not mean changes in other molecules. The cells are the same, they are just arranged differently in space. And that can be done with a single gene, as we have seen above for the eyes in the legs.

 

[lucaspa]

Saddam and regimes like his would be running loose committing genocide without anyone to keep them in check. You don't get the big picture. Dictators like Saddam will not stop at their own country. They WILL go after the West. The last time we tried appeasement WWII broke out.

You need to look at more recent history. Remember, Saddam did invade another country in 1982 and then again in 1991. The first was Iran and the second was Kuwait. Both times Saddam lost big. Since 1991 Husssein had been very quiet and has been under careful watch -- remember the no-fly zones? It appears that he had learned his lesson about aggression.



I'm afraid that you are swallowing Bush propaganda and not looking at the information on your own. We never used appeasement with Hussein. The question is whether Hussein represented an immediate danger to his neighbors. You can't beat people up because you think they might be a danger later! If that were the case, I'd beat you up because I think you will be a huge danger to science when you are old enough to run for office.

 

[lucaspa]

USincognito, before WWII, Britain and France did watch over Germany to make sure they followed the Versailles Treaty. These restrictions, however, were obviously loosely enforced. Same with Iraq. The war in Iraq was to stop the otherwise inevitable.

That watch ended when Germany finished paying her war reparations. After that Germany engaged in a series of agressions: militarization of the Rhineland, annexation of Austria, invasion of Czechoslovakia, rearmament, etc. There were no responses to that.

NONE of that sequence had happened with Hussein and Iraq. We were still in the watching stage and you have no idea it was inevitable that Hussein would have tried agression again. Unlike Hitler who had successful agressions, Hussein had 2 UNsuccessful aggressions.

Now, don't Christians believe anyone can change? But I guess you abandon that ideal when it is convenient to you. Your justification for the war in Iraq fails by historical data and Christianity.

 

[lucaspa]

Evolution requires (to keep it simple) four things: (1) DNA, (2) Reproduction, (3) Useful changes (mutations) in the DNA that is passed down the generations through reproduction, and (4) Change in the interactions between organisms and their environment. All of these four things can be directly observed, existing and happening now, all about us. No-one (even "creation scientists")denies that.

This is what is required for natural selection. Evolution could happen if organisms inherited acquired characteristics. Evolution is descent with modification. Natural selection is mechanism of modification that gives the designs in plants and animals.

You could have modification, and do, by pure chance. Genetic drift is that. Genetic drift only really works in very small populations -- less than 6 breeding pairs.

The most significant event in evolution is speciation - this is when one species of organism develops from another species, due to the accumulation of useful mutations in the genome.

Vinegar, I hate to mar an excellent attempt to explain evolution with what may seem to be nit-picking, but it isn't.

There are several significant events in evolution. Speciation comes in two forms:
1. Anagenesis. This is when one population transforms over time into a population that is different enough from the original as to be designated a new species. This is your first example of short and long beaked birds over time.

2. Cladogenesis. This is when a small, isolated population faces a different environment and transforms to a population having different traits from the original. But the original still exists. So now you have two species where there was one. This is your example of birds on the other side of the mountain.

Both of these happen due to natural selection. So, the signficant event is the acquisition of new designs that are new traits. You used long beaks instead of short ones.

Evolutionary theory does not say that at some point, a knuckle-dragging ape gave birth to a fully-formed human baby. That is just a dumb story told to try to make evolution look ridiculous.

Well said. Actually, it is creationism. Which shows you how ridiculous creationism is.

Speciation is not just speculation, either. It has in fact been observed, in some plants, bacteria and insects, which breed fast enough for enough mutations to mount up for speciation to occur, within the professional lifetime of a modern scientist.

And in some vertebrates:
1. N Barton Ecology: the rapid origin of reproductive isolation Science 290:462-463, Oct. 20, 2000. www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/290/5491/462 Natural selection of reproductive isolation observed in two cases. Full papers are: AP Hendry, JK Wenburg, P Bentzen, EC Volk, TP Quinn, Rapid evolution of reproductive isolation in the wild: evidence from introduced salmon. Science 290: 516-519, Oct. 20, 2000. and M Higgie, S Chenoweth, MWBlows, Natural selection and the reinforcement of mate recognition. Science290: 519-521, Oct. 20, 2000
2. G Vogel, African elephant species splits in two. Science 293: 1414, Aug. 24, 2001. www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/293/5534/1414
3. C Vila` , P Savolainen, JE. Maldonado, IR. Amorim, JE. Rice, RL. Honeycutt, KA. Crandall, JLundeberg, RK. Wayne, Multiple and Ancient Origins of the Domestic Dog Science 276: 1687-1689, 13 JUNE 1997. Dogs no longer one species but 4 according to the genetics. http://www.idir.net/~wolf2dog/wayne1.htm
4. Barrowclough, George F.. Speciation and Geographic Variation in Black-tailed Gnatcatchers. (book reviews) The Condor. V94. P555(2) May, 1992
5. Kluger, Jeffrey. Go fish. Rapid fish speciation in African lakes. Discover. V13. P18(1) March, 1992.
Formation of five new species of cichlid fishes which formed since they were isolated from the parent stock, Lake Nagubago. (These fish have complex mating rituals and different coloration.) See also Mayr, E., 1970. _Populations, Species, and Evolution_, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press. p. 348
6. Genus _Rattus_ currently consists of 137 species [1,2] and is known to have
originally developed in Indonesia and Malaysia during and prior to the Middle
Ages[3].
[1] T. Yosida. Cytogenetics of the Black Rat. University Park Press, Baltimore, 1980.
[2] D. Morris. The Mammals. Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1965.
[3] G. H. H. Tate. "Some Muridae of the Indo-Australian region," Bull. Amer. Museum Nat. Hist. 72: 501-728, 1963.
7. Stanley, S., 1979. _Macroevolution: Pattern and Process_, San Francisco,
W.H. Freeman and Company. p. 41
Rapid speciation of the Faeroe Island house mouse, which occurred in less than 250 years after man brought the creature to the island.

 

[lucaspa]

Vinegar, what Darwin discovered was an algorithm to get design. An algorithm is a process that, if followed by a servile dunce, is guaranteed to produce a result. Notice the "dunce". No intelligence required. Natural selection is that algorithm. When you discuss NS the next time, perhaps you will find it useful to have Darwin's description of it:

"If, during the long course of ages and under varying conditions of life, organic beings vary at all in the several parts of their organization, and I think this cannot be disputed; if there be, owing to the high geometric powers of increase of each species, at some age, season, or year, a severe struggle for life, and this certainly cannot be disputed; then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their conditions of existence, causing an infinite diversity in structure, constitution, and habits, to be advantageous to them, I think it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variation ever had occurred useful to each beings welfare, in the same way as so many variations have occured useful to man. But if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterized will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will will tend to produce offspring similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection." [Origin, p 127 6th ed.]

Notice how Darwin emphasizes preservation. What NS does is preserve the good designs from each generation to the next.

 

[Vinegar]

Do psychopaths generally change for the better? In intent at least, I think not.

I sympathise with your motives, Iucaspa, but do not agree with your conclusions.

The "containment" of Saddam entailed an oil-for-food program that was corrupt to its core, and manipulated by Saddam to impoverish his own people and thereby curry favor with gullible Western liberal opinion (I consider myself liberal, but try to avoid gullibility), buddy-deals with France and Russia and private German interests to supply luxuries and weaponry, continued vicious suppression of dissent within Iraq's borders, and the bankrolling of Palestinian terrorist missions within Israel. "Containment" was a failure, a sick farce, and a drain on the resources, credibility and strength of the United Nations, and most particularly, the USA and Britain, who with a little help from their friends (viva Australia) carried the can for the rest of the world.

It is a pity that it was the US that took the primary adversarial role, and that the US, Britain and allies felt they had to deport themselves dishonestly in order to achieve a defensible legal pretext (WMD's) to invade and overthrow the regime, that it didn't happen before the Twin Towers event (since it would have enabled a quick route into Afghanistan and the Al Qaeda camps and possible prevention of a whole lot of bad stuff), and that they it proceeded with so much loss of life and various elements of poor planning.

The benefits?
A net saving of thousands of innocent lives.
The destruction of an illegitimate tyrannical regime.
The removal of a support base for Palestinian terrorism.
A re-examination of the role and functions of the United Nations
The spoiling of French and Russian dirty deals.
A focal point for Muslim extremists and anti-democrats to make even bigger idiots of themselves and assist embarrass and bring down lke-minded regimes in the region.
A huge expense to the wealth-bloated United States, combined with a realisation of greater international interdependence.
Improved chances for the election of a Democrat President.

 

[dstauff]

Would it get this topic back on track if I stated that Darwin was responsible for World War II, Hitler, and Saddam?

Notto makes a good point here. Evolution states that everything is random, which means that human lives are worthless. This helped give Hitler the ideaology that Jews were worthless, besides his just plain hatred for them. Do you not see that the theory of evolution devalues the worth of human lives, and, therefore, contributes to genocide and the horrors of our world. I'm not sure if this was what notto was referring to, but this is a valid point.

 

[dstauff]

You need to look at more recent history. Remember, Saddam did invade another country in 1982 and then again in 1991. The first was Iran and the second was Kuwait. Both times Saddam lost big. Since 1991 Husssein had been very quiet and has been under careful watch -- remember the no-fly zones? It appears that he had learned his lesson about aggression.

You can hardly say that Saddam has learned his lesson when he still killed and tortured his own people all the way up to his removal.

 

[Data]

Notto makes a good point here. Evolution states that everything is random, which means that human lives are worthless. This helped give Hitler the ideaology that Jews were worthless, besides his just plain hatred for them. Do you not see that the theory of evolution devalues the worth of human lives, and, therefore, contributes to genocide and the horrors of our world. I'm not sure if this was what notto was referring to, but this is a valid point.

Uh, not again.

I think we need a sticky - but I'll sum it up. Hitler was a proud christian, he beleived in the fixity of species - not evolution, and evolution does not mean that human lives are worthless, furthermore, evolution does not mean there is no god,

And beyond all, please, I stress!

How does what hitler did somehow mean that evolution never occured?