Mark yourself as a creationist or evolution supporter, then attempt to describe as much as you can about evolution and how it works, as the theory itself states. The rules:
No responding to anyone; this is a bit of an experiment, just to see what people honestly think independently. Do not attempt to correct people, or encourage them to say more.
Try to be serious, no snarky answers.
Answer independently of the fact that you support or deny evolution. Your response should be as neutral as possible, with no criticizing or promotional language.
my honest answer is, i don't know what to think about evolution.
i can say it makes sense.
but when you start diving into it, you find all kinds of shadiness associated with it.
judging from my experience debating this topic, and from what i know to be the facts, i question the validity of almost everything about evolution.
i once thought that the increasing complexity of the fossil record was evidence for evolution.
then john maynard smith comes along and states there is no empirical evidence for increasing complexity.
and that's the very tip of the iceberg.
i think it's safe to say, evolution as you know it is nothing more than dogma.
BTW, this post was made before reading any of the others except the OP.
edit:
sarah said:
Now, will people please edit their posts accordingly?
i'm editing.
Whois didn't follow the rules though; he used language that implied evolution was invalid.
okay, questioning the validity of what is written about it is not questioning evolution.
evolution is not the gradualistic, adaptive paradigm you are led to believe it is.
the notion of progress in regards to evolution is not correct.
You're just supposed to say all that you understand about it, . . .
i know that the 2 basic tenets of evolution, abiogenesis, and common descent, have no empirical evidence to support it.
the ability to trace gene history through deep time flies in the face of gene acquisition by mutation.
. . . not what you feel about it.
how i feel about evolution is a direct consequence of what i know about it.
i guess i can leave this here:
Some of us first met to discuss these advances six years ago. In the time since, as members of an interdisciplinary team, we have worked intensively to develop a broader framework, termed the extended evolutionary synthesis
1 (EES), and to flesh out its structure, assumptions and predictions.
. . .
The number of biologists calling for change in how evolution is conceptualized is growing rapidly. Strong support comes from allied disciplines, particularly developmental biology, but also genomics, epigenetics, ecology and social science.
. . .
Yet the mere mention of the EES often evokes an emotional, even hostile, reaction among evolutionary biologists. Too often, vital discussions descend into acrimony, with accusations of muddle or misrepresentation.
www.nature.com/news/does-evolutionary-theory-need-a-rethink-1.16080
i certainly know what it's like to be accused of misrepresentation.
edit 2:
on natural selection:
The concept of natural selection as the foundation of evolutionary change has been largely superseded, mostly through the work of Motoo Kimura, Tomoko Ohta, and others, who have shown both theoretically and empirically that natural selection has little or no effect on the vast majority of the genomes of most living organisms.
. . .
Kimura, Ohta, Jukes, and Crow dropped a monkey wrench into the "engine" at the heart of the modern synthesis — natural selection — and then Gould and Lewontin finished the job with their famous paper on “the spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm”. The rise of evo-devo over the past two decades has laid the groundwork for a completely new and empirically testable theory of macroevolution, a theory that is currently facilitating exponential progress in our understanding of how major evolutionary transitions happen. And iconoclasts like Lynn Margulis, Eva Jablonka, Marian Lamb, Mary Jane West-Eberhard, and David Sloan Wilson are rapidly overturning our understanding of how evolutionary change happens at all levels, and how it is inherited.
evolutionlist.blogspot.com/2009/11/modern-synthesis-is-dead-long-live.html
However, some of the assumptions at the foundation of The Modern Synthesis started to crumble in the 1970s with the discovery of super-abundant genetic variation that arguably often didn't evolve under the strict aegis of natural selection. Then cells were found to incorporate genes, mobile genetic elements, and organelles of diverse historical origins. Furthermore, it became apparent in the last decades of the 20th Century that DNA sequences often evolved in ways that
reduced the fitness of the organisms that bore them. It is now abundantly clear that living things often attain a degree of genomic complexity far beyond simple models like the "gene library" genome of the Modern Synthesis.
. . .
Furthermore, we do not suppose that a single review article could conceivably do justice to all the relevant complexities of research on these topics. Instead, we discuss aspects of research on these questions that serve to illustrate our general view that a new biology has developed and, in conjunction, many important assumptions of 20th Century biology have been abandoned.
. . .
We should be equally clear that, in arguing for the necessity of this intellectual transformation, we do
not think that those who based their research on the Modern Synthesis were "bad scientists" and those who now abandon it are "good scientists." We are simply offering an overview of how a large number of us have changed our thinking, our biological Weltanschauung.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2222615/
