Thoughts on Religion/Evolution

Discussion in 'Off Topic Area' started by CKava, Dec 7, 2009.

  1. CKava

    CKava Just one more thing... Supporter

    I moved this from the other thread as I suspect the comments will attract responses and I do not want the other thread to be interrupted by an off topic discussion on evolution.

     
  2. Smitfire

    Smitfire Cactus Schlong

    I find it hard to believe that first, we evolved from primitive beings and no matter no many years it took, became what we are today.

    Everyone finds that hard. That's why it took so long for a genius like Charles Darwin (and Wallace) to work it out. Our brains just aren't set up to fully understand such things. However once you understand evolution you'll see just how inevitable and powerful the whole process is.

    We still haven't found the first common ancestor that links us to everything else.

    As I understand it we haven't "found" the common ancestor of anything (let alone humans). They are all lost in the midst of time. But we can infer that they existed because of all the other evidence.
     
  3. CKava

    CKava Just one more thing... Supporter

    And to kick things off...

    Unfortunately finding it hard to believe in something makes absolutely no difference to the mountains of evidence that support evolution.

    I don't think you have been reading very good books if you think that we need to find a 'first common ancestor' that links us to everything. There is so much evidence linking us with the other life on this planet that the only reason anyone ever seems to provide for us not being related is that there religion teaches something different. All the genetic evidence and all the fossil evidence points to us being a natural species with various degrees of relatedness to the other forms of life on the planet. What evidence are you asking for? A fossil of some organism that was more primitive than unicellular life? If so I think you are going to be disappointed.

    That makes no sense. Instead of thinking about a connected but branching family tree of relatedness we should instead imagine hypothetical 'created' religious figures for every species of homo? Replacing the word 'common ancestor' with 'Adam' is unnecessary and confusing. If you like you can see God's hand behind evolution but I don't think it's helpful to imagine him blowing dust to life and extracting a rib for the creation of every distinct species.
     
    Last edited: Dec 7, 2009
  4. Fish Of Doom

    Fish Of Doom Will : Mind : Motion Supporter

    ...

    ok

    1- you find it hard to believe that man descended from another being, so you choose to believe in GOD, of all things??? boggles the mind, it does. i think you're just looking for a solution that comforts you, in which case you don't believe, you just want to believe.

    2- so? that's the point with science. except for the poor schmucks that get caught unprepared with trick questions in science vs. religious debates, scientists and atheists (at least the sensible ones) don't claim to have all the answers. science is based on finding out more, because it admits it doesn't know. that's why it keeps going on, because the world can't be defined in terms of X happened so Y and Z, except mr. A says that Ñ. what we do have is a huge and complex network of things that we have observed, and that we can assume are true as far as humanly possible (facts), and that we can connect together to make new conclusions, which by experimentation can then be observed and tested to discern new facts.

    3- no it doesn't. you are contradicting the bible and thus the god you believe in by saying that, since god created only adam and eve, who then ate the funky fruit and were expelled and stuff. there is no story about other adams being created (which there would be if other adams had been created, since the bible also details things that happened when humans were still not there, such as the very creation of the world). if we also take the fruit as being the tool through which adam and eve acquired knowledge, and thus were able to create civilization through their offspring (who would eventually be inbred beyond all recognition, most likely), it also contradicts your "middle ground" because other pre-sapiens species used tools, which by that logic only homo sapiens would be able to use. another fun fact courtesy of science: non-humans also use tools, which by itself implies that they'r not so primitive, eh?.
     
  5. warriorofanart

    warriorofanart Valued Member

    Thank you Ckava.

    I've taken your previous suggestion, but I have still far off.

    So to add on to this.

    Dose anyone think it's possible that all the other Genus Homo are what we would call other Adams?

    Here is alos a rather short article about how we could not be that closely related to chimpanzees which have been used to link us to the on Genus Homo.

    http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/09/0924_020924_dnachimp.html

    From 98.5% to 95% is a big difference.
     
  6. Aegis

    Aegis River Guardian Admin Supporter

    A bad reason to believe if you want my view. It's effectively an argument from ignorance, i.e. "we don't know how A happened, therefore B did it". Very poor logic for any kind of belief, religious or otherwise.

    It would be a semi-valid reason for not accepting evolution, but there's no reason to then go on and assume a god because of it.

    Have your faith for better reasons than "we don't know how else it could have happened". This is what's known as a "God of the Gaps" argument, and it means that your reasons to believe will pretty much always shrink as we learn more and more about the world. Have faith for the right reasons.

    There is no "first ancestor" linking us to everything else. There's a line of fossils that we believe is a pretty good representative sample of the development of humans, but since populations evolve rather than individuals, we wouldn't expect to ever be able to find a single ancestor that we can look at and say "that's definitely the one linking humans to the rest of the great apes".

    There are, however, plenty of fossils that show various stages in development. There's also genetic evidence in the form of DNA similarities, chromosome fusions, morphology, ERVs, etc, all of which support the development of human life from the same origin as the other great apes.

    It makes no sense at all when you examine all the evidence. The evidence simply doesn't point to separate lines of development, but instead to a single origin species for all great apes.
     
  7. warriorofanart

    warriorofanart Valued Member

    You all responding while I was still posting my first message.

    I'll get back to you soon. My, ironically, biology class starts in 5 minutes. I'll get back you all soon.
     
  8. CKava

    CKava Just one more thing... Supporter

    You are drawing completely false conclusions from that study. None of the authors of that study were suggesting that chimpanzees are not our closest living ancestor.

    For a more in depth response courtesy of talk origins:

    "Response:

    1. The difference between chimpanzees and humans due to single-nucleotide substitutions averages 1.23 percent, of which 1.06 percent or less is due to fixed divergence, and the rest being a result of polymorphism within chimp populations and within human populations. Insertion and deletion (indel) events account for another approximately 3 percent difference between chimp and human sequences, but each indel typically involves multiple nucleotides. The number of genetic changes from indels is a fraction of the number of single-nucleotide substitutions (roughly 5 million compared with roughly 35 million). So describing humans and chimpanzees as 98 to 99 percent identical is entirely appropriate (Chimpanzee Sequencing 2005).

    2. The difference measurement depends on what you are measuring. If you measure the number of proteins for which the entire protein is identical in the two species, humans and chimpanzees are 29 percent identical (Chimpanzee Sequencing 2005). If you measure nonsynonymous base pair differences within protein coding regions, humans and chimps are 99.75 percent identical (Chimpanzee Sequencing 2005, fig. 9). The original 98.4 percent estimate came from DNA hybridization experiments, which measured (indirectly, via DNA melting temperature) sequence difference among short segments of the genomes that are similar enough to hybridize but with repetitive elements removed (Sibley and Ahlquist 1987). Whatever measure is used, however, as long as the same measurement is used consistently, will show that humans are more closely related to chimpanzees (including the bonobo, sister species to the common chimpanzee) than to any other species.

    Note also, though, that evolution has not been uniform throughout the genomes, so estimates of human-chimp divergence which consider only part of the genome can give different results (Britten 2002, Chen et al. 2001)."
     
  9. Spinmaster

    Spinmaster Valued Member

    One of the things that I wonder about evolution is, why the scarcity of "missing links"? I mean, given the time that evolution supposedly takes, and the tons of intermediate creatures it would take to get from ape to man, why do we basically have no concrete examples of the transitional forms?
     
  10. Smitfire

    Smitfire Cactus Schlong

    Oh dear....there are literally hundreds (probably thousands) of examples of transitional forms.
    Look into whales, Horses, Humans.
    Archaeopteryx even? I've known about Archaeopteryx since I was a kid.
     
  11. Smitfire

    Smitfire Cactus Schlong

  12. Blade96

    Blade96 shotokan karateka

    if we all descended from adam and eve aren't we all therefore committing incest everytime we mate with someone, incest and inbreeding since we're all related in that case? ok so my mother and father are like 56th cousins in that case and when they had me and my older bro it was a result of inbreeding =]

    I dont believe religion and science/evolution has to be opposites and opposed to one another. Maybe god, if one exists (im agnostic) created evolution. Maybe a god made the big bang. Evolution exists, we know things evolved but we don't know where the 'big bang' came from.
     
  13. Southpaw535

    Southpaw535 Well-Known Member Moderator Supporter

    It would explain Freud's theory that every kid is attracted to the parent of the opposite sex though :D
     
  14. Blade96

    Blade96 shotokan karateka

    freud's theory is wrong, at least in my case. I wouldn't want a bf who comes even close to resembling my father, let alone my father himself.
     
  15. Southpaw535

    Southpaw535 Well-Known Member Moderator Supporter

    bf? I always thought you were a bloke :p

    I think its wrong but it 'twas a joke
     
  16. warriorofanart

    warriorofanart Valued Member

    Since this is a martial arts forum, it would be appropriate to say: Don't pull any punches :)

    Let's get the ball rolling:

    [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_gst-Ryh3g"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_gst-Ryh3g[/ame]

    Okay first off in evolution it is claimed that all living creatures have come down from a common ancestor. This isn't supported by actual observations, because the way I see it, their are numerous of different catergroies of organisms.

    "Although an almost incomprehensible number of species inhabit Earth today, they do not form a continuous spectrum of barely distinguishable intermediates. Instead, nearly all species can be recognized as belonging to a relatively limited number of clearly distinct major groups" (Carroll).

    This is from Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution by Robert Carroll.

    Most evidance of evolution is derived from fossils. In other words, because we are from a common ancestor, it took millions of years for us, and all organisms, to evolve into who we are today. That being the case, we should have had countless forms-in-progress, and logically since we are continuously evolving to adapt and become more able to survive in our enviroments those "primitive" forms would have existed.

    So! As Darwin himself said:

    That would make since if fossils of these countless creatures were found as he continues on later in his book:

    Since we're on the topic of fossils lets discuss it. There are billions of fossils found, so it would make complete sense that some of those "intermediate links" to have had appeared. The problem is experts have found over 250,000 species which closely resemble today's species(Day). So where are the "intermediate links?"

    Here is a quote from the site I am getting this information from:

    I can't find the author's name right now but this is taken from Stephen J. Gould book Evolution's Erratic Pace

    I'll add more later as the discussion progresses.
     
    Last edited: Dec 7, 2009
  17. Blade96

    Blade96 shotokan karateka

    didn't read my profile then :p

    I'm a lady =]
     
  18. Southpaw535

    Southpaw535 Well-Known Member Moderator Supporter

  19. Blade96

    Blade96 shotokan karateka

    most people think i'm a man on forums.....i find it hilarious, I get a kick out of it :p
     
  20. Southpaw535

    Southpaw535 Well-Known Member Moderator Supporter

    As in a "lift the dress on the wedding night" kick out of it?
     

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