- Aug 12, 2003
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No parents ever gave birth to a child they did not recognize. That's important. It means that there are no sudden examples of gorillas giving birth to human beings. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. As has been stated ad infinitum, change happens gradually over vast periods of time.
The birds of today are related to the dinosaurs of yesterday. It has taken millions of years and hundreds of millions of generations but today's chicken has, as his great, great... great grandfather, a T-rex. This does not mean that one day a T-rex gave birth to a chicken. It means that over time, there were many, many interstitial species. Many of you ask, "then why don't we see all the fossils?" T-rex was around as a species for over 50 million years. We have seven complete fossils. 7. In 50 million years there must have been billions of individuals. Yet only seven fossilized. Why don't we have the fossils? Because they didn't fossilize. Fossils are rare. But we can be assured that since T-rex is no longer around and birds are that what once was T-rex is now a chicken. (Or something like it. I'm taking license here.)
When you are born you are born with a specific set of DNA that outlines who you will be. It's the instruction set that controls what your cells create. How many arms, legs, eyes, teeth... What color hair, eyes... This does NOT change while you are alive. You will die with the genes you were born with. Evolution happens between generations. Your children will be born with different genes than you have. Similar, but different. And their children will be born with different genes. Similar, but different. (If they have children that is.) And there you have it. The key.
If your parents didn't have children the odds are that you won't have any either. When a person fails to have offspring his or her genes are not passed on. That particular branch of evolution ends. All the changes, all the mutations, all the successful mating that led to that person being born comes to a crashing halt. If you breed, you're successful. If you don't, you're not.
I see questions being discussed such as, "well, what about morality?" Morality is irrelevant. Evolution is a process not a religion. It would be like saying Football isn't a good game because they don't use hockey sticks. So? The process of being born and breeding doesn't have anything to do with morality. Stop trying to fit a biological process into a religious bottle.
Lastly, I see much to-do about evolution not addressing how life came to be. Again, so? When we observe the world around us we seek to explain it. When we observe that things fall we seek to explain this and we do so by postulating a thing called, "gravity." When we see that there are many, many different types of life on the earth we first postulated that a deity created them all, and us, at the same time. Then we began to study the world around us and found that this idea didn't fit the evidence. From the evidence we found that a process we called, "evolution" fit the evidence much better than the idea of a single creation by a deity. However, the religious idea combined both the creation and the many species of life into one happening. The evidence shows us that there was one event that was the change from non-life to life (which we call abiogenesis) and then the evolution of many different types of life from a single type of life which we simply refer to as, "evolution." Simply because the religious explanation combines the two does not mean the real explanation has to. Stop trying to force it. Also, evolution is a word that means "change." Biological evolution is not the same thing as cosmic evolution or whatever other kinds of evolution you may have conflated simply because the word "evolution" was used. In the way biologists use it, which is the way it is relevant to this discussion, evolution just means species.
The birds of today are related to the dinosaurs of yesterday. It has taken millions of years and hundreds of millions of generations but today's chicken has, as his great, great... great grandfather, a T-rex. This does not mean that one day a T-rex gave birth to a chicken. It means that over time, there were many, many interstitial species. Many of you ask, "then why don't we see all the fossils?" T-rex was around as a species for over 50 million years. We have seven complete fossils. 7. In 50 million years there must have been billions of individuals. Yet only seven fossilized. Why don't we have the fossils? Because they didn't fossilize. Fossils are rare. But we can be assured that since T-rex is no longer around and birds are that what once was T-rex is now a chicken. (Or something like it. I'm taking license here.)
When you are born you are born with a specific set of DNA that outlines who you will be. It's the instruction set that controls what your cells create. How many arms, legs, eyes, teeth... What color hair, eyes... This does NOT change while you are alive. You will die with the genes you were born with. Evolution happens between generations. Your children will be born with different genes than you have. Similar, but different. And their children will be born with different genes. Similar, but different. (If they have children that is.) And there you have it. The key.
If your parents didn't have children the odds are that you won't have any either. When a person fails to have offspring his or her genes are not passed on. That particular branch of evolution ends. All the changes, all the mutations, all the successful mating that led to that person being born comes to a crashing halt. If you breed, you're successful. If you don't, you're not.
I see questions being discussed such as, "well, what about morality?" Morality is irrelevant. Evolution is a process not a religion. It would be like saying Football isn't a good game because they don't use hockey sticks. So? The process of being born and breeding doesn't have anything to do with morality. Stop trying to fit a biological process into a religious bottle.
Lastly, I see much to-do about evolution not addressing how life came to be. Again, so? When we observe the world around us we seek to explain it. When we observe that things fall we seek to explain this and we do so by postulating a thing called, "gravity." When we see that there are many, many different types of life on the earth we first postulated that a deity created them all, and us, at the same time. Then we began to study the world around us and found that this idea didn't fit the evidence. From the evidence we found that a process we called, "evolution" fit the evidence much better than the idea of a single creation by a deity. However, the religious idea combined both the creation and the many species of life into one happening. The evidence shows us that there was one event that was the change from non-life to life (which we call abiogenesis) and then the evolution of many different types of life from a single type of life which we simply refer to as, "evolution." Simply because the religious explanation combines the two does not mean the real explanation has to. Stop trying to force it. Also, evolution is a word that means "change." Biological evolution is not the same thing as cosmic evolution or whatever other kinds of evolution you may have conflated simply because the word "evolution" was used. In the way biologists use it, which is the way it is relevant to this discussion, evolution just means species.
