Poll: Evolution Yay or Nah?
- Thread starter lawrie001
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The question is too board. Yes, I believe evolution is real because there is evidence to support and confirm it's real. Do I believe that evolution is guided by an powerful diety? No, I don't because there is no evidence to support the diety's existance.
Belief in religion is not the same as belief in life on other planets.juraigamer said:
a : to have a firm religious faith b : to accept something as true, genuine, or real
2
: to have a firm conviction as to the goodness, efficacy, or ability of something
3
: to hold an opinion : think
transitive verb
1
a : to consider to be true or honest <you wouldn't believe how long it took> b : to accept the word or evidence of <couldn't believe my ears>
2
: to hold as an opinion : suppose
? be·liev·er noun
? not believe
: to be astounded at <I couldn't believe my luck>
2
: to have a firm conviction as to the goodness, efficacy, or ability of something
3
: to hold an opinion : think
transitive verb
1
a : to consider to be true or honest <you wouldn't believe how long it took> b : to accept the word or evidence of <couldn't believe my ears>
2
: to hold as an opinion : suppose
? be·liev·er noun
? not believe
: to be astounded at <I couldn't believe my luck>
So yes believe was the correct word for him to use.
Now back to the life on other planets part, it is more likely that there is life on other planets than the alternative.
yeah i know what you mean. I am an athiest but it annoys me when my religious friends tell me that they are not sure what to think about evolution because it contradicts their religion. Surely if god existed evolution would be the coolest thing he ever made, i really fail to see how the two are contradictory. Unless of course you read the entire bible literally, in which case i think i would have too start questioning your judgement.Saelune said:
SOME OF Haeckel's embryo PICTURES were faked. Subsequent evidence, including direct photography of embryos, has supported the idea that evolution acts on embryos just like it acts on anything else. So your claims about embryology are a lie.Cerrida said:
There are no "missing links". It's a flawed concept, stemming from a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution--namely, expecting to see one organism give rise to a contemporaraneous organism. What we DO see, frequently, in the fossil record is a clear line of descendants from a common ancestor. Take birds--we've pretty firmly established that birds arose from therapod dinosaurs (the details are a bit hazy, but we're working on that). Or, check out gastropod evolution.
If you're going to call Lucy a fake, please cite the evidence for it--and it had better stand up to peer review. As far as I know, no knowledgeable anthropologist or paleontologist has determined Lucy to be a fake. In fact, there have only been a handful of faked homnonid fossils, all of which were discovered to be fake by scientists (usually well before Creationists say they were discovered to be fake). So this is a lie.
As far as carbon dating goes, it's funny that you utterly fail to discuss...well, anything about it. I mean, if you want to talk about the Mount St. Helens data, you have to also mention that 1) the lab the Creationists sent the samples to told them that it wouldn't work and why, in their official report (which, if I recall correctly, is publicly available, and 2) the Creationists in question used methods that they knew would yield false answers, because the minerals they used and the isotopes they used had closing temperatures far different from the temperatures the eruption reached--meaning that they were never testing the Mount St. Helens eruption, but rather when those minerals cooled deep within the Earth. Also, there has been a LOT of research on radiometric dating techniques--IN MEDICINE. Where we can actually watch how the isotopes act over many half-lives. More or less everything we predicted based on nuclear chemistry holds true, and being as there is no reason to assume that long-lived isotopes behave differently from short-lived ones, we can assume that, properly applied, radiometric dating is valid. In short, this is nothing but a nest of lies and lies, intentionally misleading and often openly fraudulent.
As for your definition of theory, nice equivocation. Unfortunately, the scientific definition is not the common one. There are actually a few definitions of "theory" in science, but there are two common themes: tremendous, consistent support, and an explanation for a wide range of observations. Evolution has both. It's as firmly established as the theory of gravity (well, more so truth be told--we at least all agree on what causes evolution!), or cell theory, or the germ theory of diseases.
Of course I'm not suggesting that, I'm suggesting that evolution has no set goal in mind and that even humans are an intermediary stage of further evolution and that we may well physically change further after hundreds/thousands of generations.lacktheknack said:
I'm suggesting that species adapt to their environment, so unless a divine being happened to plan for... say, the industrial revolution changing the colours of trees and therefore causing many types of moths to change colour then the hypothesis that evolution is guided by a divine being doesn't hold up.
Also, if God started with "a pack of cells and had humans in mind" then he's reached his end game. therefore he has no further plan (since he's reached what he aimed for) and therefore evolution is now unguided. That would imply that evolution would no longer occur but it does. Also, if the entire point of evolution was to create humans why are there so many species around that aren't human? Were those just failed experiments?
You missed the point. Modern programs, in just about every field, wouldn't exist with out genetic algorithms [http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=genetic+algorithms&btnG=Search&as_sdt=0%2C48&as_ylo=&as_vis=1], which are based off of the principles of evolution [http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/genalg/genalg.html].lacktheknack said:
Google uses it to optimize their searching algorithms, operating systems use it to build optimal resource schedulers, internet hosting providers use it to build routing algorithms, and electrical engineers (The kind that build circuit boards) use it to find optimal solutions. Oh, and games use it to create AIs, besides the fact that most programming languages and libraries use algorithms heavily influenced by algorithms generated by genetic algorithms.
Sorry I didn't make that more clear. (I use this argument because I am a computer science graduate student)
I put no just to spite all those fucking atheists who are determined to shove science and facts down my throat, even though I don't give a fuck about theism or atheism.
No, they're part of the planet. Removing them would affect humanity badly, just as we'd be adversely affected if there had never been iron. Also, who knows where his endgame is. That's one reason we have religion, you know. And future evolution doesn't really matter if God kicks the end times into gear.webby said:
Now, this is clearly wild speculation based on the assumption that there is a God and it fits the Judeo-Christian prototype, so I'm not demanding that you accept it as a theory. Just a possibility that I've embraced.
evolution is an indisputable fact
the discussions and ragewars are all wrong! it's not "does god decide who or what lives or dies, and what new creatures come to exist"
it's "is there a god, and did he make an automated program to (evolution) to save himself the hassle of having to create and eradicate creatures every few thousand years (not a long time? you try doing that for BILLIONS OF YEARS) or is it just a natural phenomena"
the discussions and ragewars are all wrong! it's not "does god decide who or what lives or dies, and what new creatures come to exist"
it's "is there a god, and did he make an automated program to (evolution) to save himself the hassle of having to create and eradicate creatures every few thousand years (not a long time? you try doing that for BILLIONS OF YEARS) or is it just a natural phenomena"
Fun Fact!
Evolution and the world as presented by the Bible are wholly incompatible!
Christianity rests upon the noble sacrifice of Jesus to God, in order to atone for the ancestral original sin in the Garden of Eden. Jesus being God, and Adam and Eve having been made by the4 aforementioned all-knowing creator, so he sacrificed himself to himself for something that was his fault in the first place.
But I digress. If humanity did not originate with Adam and Eve, then this original sin was not comitted, and the whole business of knocking up a married woman so he could be nailed to a tree to make up for that original sin would be utterly pointless.
So if you beleive the Bible, you cannot accept evolution. Unless you only believe part of it. Which opens up a whole other can of martyrs.
Evolution and the world as presented by the Bible are wholly incompatible!
Christianity rests upon the noble sacrifice of Jesus to God, in order to atone for the ancestral original sin in the Garden of Eden. Jesus being God, and Adam and Eve having been made by the4 aforementioned all-knowing creator, so he sacrificed himself to himself for something that was his fault in the first place.
But I digress. If humanity did not originate with Adam and Eve, then this original sin was not comitted, and the whole business of knocking up a married woman so he could be nailed to a tree to make up for that original sin would be utterly pointless.
So if you beleive the Bible, you cannot accept evolution. Unless you only believe part of it. Which opens up a whole other can of martyrs.
I'm not here to questions peoples beliefs, I was simply curious how a few things in "guided evolution" are explained, most importantly how even when humans control the environment and create changes looking for specific evolutionary reactions they occur exactly how they were anticipated. If evolution were truly guided by a God does that mean this God is simply showing us what we expect to see via the stringent experimental methodology we as humans have incorporated? If this is the case surely our expectations are guiding evolution then as this God is simply mirroring our expectations back at us, and if that were the case the theory of evolution as we "know" it would be 100% true. Therefore even the idea of guided evolution is simply the idea of "regular" evolution.lacktheknack said:
Of course there is the possibility that God has aligned everything to happen in a very strict sense so we caused the industrial revolution which recoloured moths just as this God had programmed the moths to change colour, and God used his eternal knowledge to know that we would experiment on certain elements of a certain species of a certain virus and programmed the very select few that were chosen to evolve in the ways the people observing would expect based on the stimuli added. But the issue there is that if this were the case there is no "evolution" it is simply a God dicking around with a variety of things as he sees fit and also eliminates any ideas of self determination that could be harboured.
I don't believe that we can ever know anything for sure and "fact" implies that you can. So no. I do think it makes the most sense based on empirical evidence, however.
If you cannot give me evidence proving an explanation for how life sprung out of nowhere to begin the evolution process, you cannot call evolution "fact". Telling everyone that a theory is fact is asking for FAITH. Thus, science that calls itself "fact" is no better than any faith-based religion, perhaps worse for it's claims to be above it.juraigamer said:
They way i've heard of Evolution, it's basically saying everything has had to come from something else, creating an infinite chain of "So this came from this which came from this which came from this...", I just can't really see the concept of this having no start point. We came from bacteria? Where did that come from? Meteor? Where did that come from? Planet? Came from.... Etc. until we just can't go back any further.