drthmik said:
Beliyal said:
I'm not sure I understand your second point. People didn't start off by saying "Evolution is true, let's find the evidence!".
Yes they did and they do.
I'm sorry, but this is nonsense.
drthmik said:
Beliyal said:
If it wasn't true, science would've dismissed it, like it dismissed the stuff like "Earth is flat" or "Everything revolves around Earth". If Darwin was saying nonsense, if there was no evidence, it wasn't applicable to anything in the past or the present and it didn't so easily and perfectly explain the diversity of the life on Earth, it wouldn't be a widely accepted theory.
you assume that it has undergone the rigors of scientific examination that other theories have to undergo. this is not the case. When Darwin was doing his work on the adaptation of species to their environments (called natural selection) he had the idea to apply this theory too all things everywhere and an atheistic explanation to the existence of life. due to a total lack of knowledge of the complexity of cellular life and the existence of DNA the idea looked plausible enough to get people to think that it might be true and the process took so long that it couldn't be tested or observed in anything less than a thousand lifetimes. Atheistic Scientists latched on to evolution and, despite strong evidence to the contrary, quickly began the search for proof.
Not only atheists are scientists; there are many scientists who are Christian or members of other religions and are scientists that agree that evolution is a fact.
And yes, evolution underwent the rigours of scientific examination. It's how science works. To completely prove a theory, it needs to be fully tested and documented, proved and accepted among thousands of scientists. You forgot how much it took for people to take Darwin seriously? Even scientists thought he was completely insane. His theory wasn't accepted for long after he postulated it. It was only in the recent decades that we finally managed to gather an insurmountable heaps of evidence.
drthmik said:
they are still at it to this day
normally, when a theory is proposed many scientists will take that theory and try to prove it while others try their best to disprove it (there are even scientists currently trying to disprove Einstein's theory of relativity) this is the process known as SCIENCE
However if you declared that you intend put evolution under your scientific microscope with the intent to disprove it you will quickly find yourself ostracized from your colleagues, blacklisted from scientific journals, and without funding or often even a job.
the only way a scientist is aloud yo work in the field of evolutionary science is if you intend to prove it true or you assume it already proven.
First, no one is trying to prove or disprove a theory when it is proposed. The theory is being
tested and scientists are looking at it objectively from all angles. It takes decades to say "The theory has been proven/disproven". Scientists do not grab a theory and test it with bias; that's fallible and cannot be taken as real proof. A real scientist will approach a new theory and test it; if it works, especially if tested multidisciplinary, it will be accepted after long and hard work, publishing and more testing. A poor scientist will take a dogma as truth and go on a personal crusade to prove it, no matter what it takes and no matter how many evidence there is that it does not work.
In your original post, I answered by giving you a lot of links. You said that there is no fossil evidence for evolution; I proved there is. What about it? You also said that evolution cannot be tested in lab; I provided you with links where it clearly shows that it can be tested in a lab. You also said that it has never been observed in nature; despite the complicated and long-lasting process it is, fortunately, it was possible to observe it in nature thanks to animals with short life spans. How else would you explain things that have occurred under our own very eyes? And besides, in the favour of what theory
exactly are you willing to dismiss everything that scientists have done in the last 150 years since evolution was proposed? I would also like to know how exactly are you so certain you know better than people who studied the subject extensively whole their lives.
Science would gladly allow you to work on the theory if you had really great evidence to present. As a matter of fact, they would encourage you to challenge the current views on such matters. However, "God did it" is not a sufficient evidence for science; it cannot be tested, observed and documented (contrary to evolution, which can). Unless someone gives science a real, tangible proof of such an event, any other theory except evolution will not be taught and funded on a whim. The problem is that every evidence ever put against evolution has been proven to be false or was the victim of poor understanding of science (and sometimes, lack of knowledge and scientific progress). Of course, scientists don't take kindly the notion that someone will "Disprove evolution". It is a very complex, yet in the same time, remarkably simple and efficient system that single-handedly proves a vast number of things in science, and all that while providing huge amounts of evidence, examples to look at, fossils, and other things.
I know we'll not come to the conclusion about this, in this thread, but you need to stop looking at science as a scary monster and a conspiracy theory. It doesn't work like that. If you want to challenge a theory that is strongly rooted into the ground and has very little, if none, problems and/or holes (none of which are major problems), while being perfectly observable and possible to experiment with, you'll need to work ten times as hard to manage to convince the scientific community to take you seriously. Challenging the current knowledge is great, but you need to have something to challenge it with. Every serious scientist will easily explain and answer all your questions about the matter. When presented with the evidence, you deny it, and when there's no evidence, you assume you're victorious; how to please you people? No matter how many books, scientific papers and debates have been written and said, no matter how many fossils are stacked in our museums and institutes, no matter how much time, effort and work has been put into perfecting the theory and explaining it to others, there are always some people who dismiss EVERYTHING. What type of evidence would convince you that evolution was not invented by someone who was bored 150 years ago? Really, I'd like to know.
drthmik said:
Beliyal said:
Adaptations to new environments are a part of evolution. Some species evolved to adapt to a certain environment the best they can, some changed over millions of years and gradually completely lost what they had before to be better equipped for the new environment. We, for example, lost a lot of body hair, adapted our hands for better dexterity, grew taller, got bigger brains.
no they are not
adaptation is within a species
evolution is a change from one species to a completely separate species
saying that evolution is lots of adaptations over a long time shows a complete ignorance of how DNA and mutations work
a mutation and/or adaptation is always a loss of DNA information
evolution is a gain in DNA information
the former has been seen
the latter has not.
Evolution (or more specifically biological or organic evolution) is the change over time in one or more inherited traits found in populations of individuals.[1] Inherited traits are distinguishing characteristics, for example anatomical, biochemical or behavioural, that are passed on from one generation to the next. Evolution requires variation of inherited traits within a population. New variants of inherited traits can enter a population from outside populations, and this is referred to as gene flow.[2][3][4][5] Alternatively, new variants can come into being from within a population in at least three ways: mutation of DNA, epimutation (a change inherited in some way other than through the sequence of nucleotides in DNA), and genetic recombination. Natural selection, where different inherited traits cause different rates of survival and reproduction, can cause new variants to become common in a population.[1] Other evolutionary mechanisms can cause a variant to become common even if the variant does not directly cause improved survival or reproduction. These mechanisms include genetic hitchhiking, genetic drift,[6][7] and recurrent biased mutation or migration.
Do I have to copy the entire article? You are misinterpreting the very definition of evolution. Do you honestly believe that in the last few decades, no scientist ever bumped into the problems about DNA and mutations that you mentioned? They have, much before we were even born. Those issues have been addressed and solved. If something like that really interfered with the concept of evolution, evolution would've been heavily challenged, to the point of being dismissed long before we were even born.
The problem with involvement of religion in this matter is; which religion? You do know that there have been hundreds of thousands of creation myths during the course of our history and that today, there are many major religions, with hundreds of millions of followers that cannot agree with what and/or who God/gods is/are. Should we abandon all science and argue over who's God is the real one, who's non-existent evidence is better and debate about metaphysical and philosophical things that will never, ever be proven (or disproven), or should we focus on things that work perfectly well in front of our very eyes, things that we can touch, hear and see, document, test, challenge and, ultimately, present it as evidence that will work no matter what your set of beliefs is, no matter where on the Earth (or the universe) you live and no matter what your life has been like? There is a reason why all scientists almost unanimously agree with evolution; it works, and we can see how.
Notes:
1. I am not an atheist.
2. I understand we'll never come to an agreement about this, so we might as well stop spamming the thread and continue through private messaging, if you have ridiculous amounts of time to spare (and want to spare it for arguing over the internet).
