Evolution and the origine of the species debate

I will address these since I do not believe PreDominance is trolling with his statements. If this thread is indeed a non-serious debate or a troll thread, then I must have missed a different thread that relates to this. If so, I am excused because I have a voucher from flasche that is redeemable on any Empires forum thread.

Ah, the argument from irreducible complexity... one of the weakest arguments against evolution, especially since it's nonscientific, illogical, and does not employ reason.

Surely you can throw us a stronger argument against evolution than that.

More or less, what you've given us is a strategic surrender: "Well everything's just so complex that it couldn't possibly have come about on its own, therefore God (or some other intelligence) did it."

One might at least be able to argue that complex life is designed, but the evidence supports a bottom-up tinkerer (the strongest of which is evolution), rather than a top-down designer (which is what intelligent design and creationism both posit).

Also, evolution is an accepted and documented fact in the scientific community. The only area that's theoretical about evolution is the exact mechanism by which it takes place (the most common explanation of which is natural selection). This is a very good read that you might enjoy: Evolution is a Fact and a Theory.

I am afraid you have a gross misunderstanding of science. Carl Sagan said it better than I possibly could: "Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge."

Science isn't supposed to have all the answers. Rather, it's a tool (or approach) for trying to find answers (ultimately by examining what all of the available evidence converges on). We have to account for the hits as well as the misses.

When we refer to science as a body of knowledge, it's a dynamic body of knowledge that is constantly being updated and refined for accuracy based on the latest findings of leading research. Brutos is correct that we know far more now about the human body than you may think, and quite a bit more now than we did at the beginning of the millennium.

Science actually takes work. It requires that people actually go out and seek answers and create solutions to problems. If your plan is to wait around until it has some grand all-encompassing answer and denounce it until it does, then how can you be sure that you won't just denounce it in the future and say that it's wrong when it does supply you with an accurate explanation for every minuscule detail of the development and operation of the human body? Science doesn't pretend to have all the answers, so it's extraordinarily ignorant to expect that it should, and pathetic to create unfounded answers to fill the gaps.

Your cup can't be filled if it's already full (of whatever garbage you substitute in place of evolution).

 

well, they basically used a yiest cell and like pulled everything out and put new stuff in

 

All of a sudden I feel like doing a Varbles style post.

 

Why isn't major evolution still occurring today? Adaptation excluded.

 

*giggles*

i watted for like a solid minute, then i laughed so hard out loud i woke up mark and now hes mad at me

predom for troll 2010 *giggles*

well, predom if you stack all those "adaptations" on top of each other, for a solid few million years you would get evolution
in fact, it IS still occurring this day because why wouldn't it be? species still go extinct and new species still arrive

i read an article about how a well documented butterfly in the 1750s separated into 2 breeds over the track of 250 years due to pollution effects
one breed had dark and smaller wings, to be camouflaged against darker coloured skies and the other had changed his behaviour to flying closer to the ground and his wings got bigger because of needing that for some reason carefully explained but i forgot

the thing how they knew this was that a guy in the 1750s collected a lot of these butterflies, and all of them were generally the same, being in the middle of the currently living 2 breeds and pretty conform as a group, and well documented

when the scientists compared them to the species that lived today, they saw that the butterflies that where most average in the old collection where almost unfindable in the current biotopes, and that actually the species had split right there and then over the course of 250 years average

will search for the article, since ofc this was read on the internet, and i don't even know if they provided source but this does explain how "adaptation" ends up being stacked on top of each other so 1 group becomes 2 or more, and they grow further apart over periods of time

but to us its like looking at a cartoon frame per frame, and none of us lives long enough to see anything different

the fact that aids is so hard to beat is because it keeps evolving parts of itself branching off

the changes are not that super big, but they are big enough to render normal anti-virals ineffective, and mostly aids specific anti-virals not as effective as they where at the start

 

I'll just leave this here
http://skepticwiki.org/index.php/Creationist_Arguments

 

You have officially passed the stupidity event horizon.
Son. I am disappoint.

 

Or anywhere else.

It's a human problem, not an American one.

 

Thread is now about whether predom is a giant retard or a giant troll.

 

The mountains of german legislature designed to oppress nazis might also have something to do with it.

We have silly shouty people over here in england too, most of them seem to write the newspapers, America has a strong culture of free speech, so people feel compelled to yell their ideas at the top of their heads, and I think that's a good thing, because you can't really ban one type of expression without damaging them all.

With the right to think and speak freely comes the right to think and speak stupidly.

 

reroll or trollard?

 

we as a species should be ashamed we made it possible people can be deluded to the scale as predominance displayed here

science is the rock our society has been building on ever since it was worth to be called a society

religion is sciences older brother that never really got anywhere because he prefers to trow rocks at people

sure, he kept us safe from the bullies and dragged us trough the hard times, but its time to mature out of all that crap, because staying dependant on your older brother to fight your battles is not really cool

and if anyone asks what religion has to do with it

ive not ever ever seen any theory for the origin of the species that is both not evolution and not religion based (religion based as in 'lets make something up to make our creation story fit with all the stuff we come across in science'

if anyone knows some, id more then happily look at them (from the perspective of a reader ofc, im not claiming to have any scientific worth as reviewer)

also; ON TOPIC PLZ

IM NOT GONNA SPLIT THIS THREAD ASWELL, ITS FAR TOO NEAR TO ITS REPLICATIVE LIFESPAN

 

Well you can either have legislation which allows all speech, which is hard to alter, and then let people yell about how other people need to be censored as much as they like but not do anything.

Or, you can have legislation which limits speech, and then use it to start arresting people who suggest.. limiting... speech...

Wait...

 

For starters, evolution isn't a quick process by any measure. At least I've never seen scientists posit it as such.

Modern humans (Homo Sapien) are a product of approximately 200,000 years worth of evolution. Evolution is a constant process, and it is still occurring.

I think that you're asking why it isn't occurring because you perhaps think that it should be something readily observable within our perceptions. There are many things that we as humans are not naturally equipped to perceive - for instance, the movement of celestial objects, we can't just look up at the sky and recognize their movement with our eyes, instead they look still, like when you look up at the moon (but if we record their positions with data or even just with a camera, we can calculate or speed up the process and witness their movement along a timescale that we are equipped to perceive). We're also not equipped to perceive extremely small or extremely large objects and their physical interactions - for instance, we need to employ tools to examine bacteria and anything smaller because we're not equipped to see or recognize them. We're not necessarily equipped to perceive the Earth as an oblate spheroid - if we look at it with our eyes, we see the horizon that surrounds us as being flat. However, by employing the scientific method, data, and technology, we have concluded that the Earth is not flat, but rather is spherical (then we took things further and concluded that it's not a perfect sphere, but actually an oblate spheroid).

I should note here that flat-Earthers often put forth as one of their key arguments: "Well, it looks flat." as can be seen on the Flat Earth Society forums' FAQ as an answer to "Why do you believe the Earth is flat?" This parallels with one of the typical arguments for Intelligent Design: "Well, life forms look designed."

I suggest you read some of Michael Shermer's books on evolution and other evolutionary concepts. He provides the clearest explanations for what, why, and how our perceptions are not necessarily equipped to recognize certain aspects of reality (events or objects) that we know to be occurring or existing, which we can verify ex post.

It's perfectly natural that we don't perceive the evolution taking place around us until after the fact, and frankly, nobody should expect us to.

 

It can actually happen quite quickly if the environment changes quickly enough.

There's a species of moth which occasionally produces a black variant as opposed to a normal tree coloured variant, when industries started producing soot which blackened the trunks of the trees nearby, the brown moths almost died out, while the normally very infrequent black ones became very common.

Normlly the black ones got eaten because they couldn't blend in, but when they became the better suited colour, they quickly became prevalent.

It's a very good example of how changing environments can change a species as a whole.