For a Monday morning, this is a pretty good read:
It's remarkable how poorly understood evolution is today — how easily "debated" it is — given that its rules have been in place at least since life on Earth began, and that the truth of it is easily demonstrated. In fact, the basic theory has been in a state of continuous reconfirmation since Darwin proposed it in 1859, with geology, biology, anthropology, carbon dating, Pangaea, and every dinosaur bone ever found providing a nonstop barrage of additional proof points.And Keith Blanchard, of The Week, goes on to give a simplified version of those rules:
- Genes, stored in every cell, are the body's blueprints; they code for traits like eye color, disease susceptibility, and a bazillion other things that make you you.
- Reproduction involves copying and recombining these blueprints, which is complicated, and errors happen.
- Errors are passed along in the code to future generations, the way a smudge on a photocopy will exist on all subsequent copies.
- This modified code can (but doesn't always) produce new traits in successive generations: an extra finger, sickle-celled blood, increased tolerance for Miley Cyrus shenanigans.
- When these new traits are advantageous (longer legs in gazelles), organisms survive and replicate at a higher rate than average, and when disadvantageous (brittle skulls in woodpeckers), they survive and replicate at a lower rate.
It really is quite simple. Not something to "believe" in - like, say, how the Sun stopped in the sky during the battle of Jericho (Joshua 10:13).
Blanchard ends:
Have a good Monday morning.
So if someone asks, "Do you believe in evolution," they are framing it wrong. That's like asking, "Do you believe in blue?"
Evolution is nothing more than a fairly simple way of understanding what is unquestionably happening. You don't believe in it — you either understand it or you don't. But pretending evolution is a matter of faith can be a clever way to hijack the conversation, and pit it in a false duality against religion. And that's how we end up with people decrying evolution, even as they eat their strawberries and pet their dogs, because they've been led to believe faith can only be held in one or the other.
But there's no reason for people of faith to reject the mountains of data and the evidence of their own senses. Reconciling is easy: Believe, if you want to, that God set up the rules of evolution among His wonders, along with the laws of physics, and probability, and everything else we can see and measure for ourselves. But don't deny evolution itself, or gravity, or the roundness of Earth. That's just covering your eyes and ears. And only monkeys would do that.
5 comments:
Neil Degrasse Tyson was wrong during Cosmos when he said we don't know exactly what happened during/at origin of life .
The fact (not theory) of Evolution explains all!
As show by the the last episode of Star Trek The Next Generation All Good Things...
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/All_Good_Things..._%28episode%29
"Q then shows Picard a pool of green sludge, a pool of amino acids. They are about to combine to form the first proteins, however, the disturbance from the anomaly stops the combination as it happens. Life on Earth doesn't start, and the anomaly stopped the
creation of Humanity."
The anti science creationist deniers should avoid being hypocrites by not using the Technologies/Scientific advancements based on Evolution and the Big Bang theory of modern medical science and agriculture.
Great that the article proves how species evolve in completely different species in addition to abiogenesis.
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2014/02/a-nightmare-for-science.html#c2564749209515341680
"Huh? Evolution presupposes stepwise explanations but the first step is somehow beside the point and unimportant to the theory?
The beginnings question is not irrelevant or superficially tangential to evolution. It is the foundational premise the entire house of cards that is evolution is built on. Evolution is completely contingent upon
abiogenesis. No abiogenesis, no evolution.
Appealing to conflation amounts to fatuous hand-waving."
@HTT
"Evolution is completely contingent upon
abiogenesis. No abiogenesis, no evolution."
Total, complete BS. Providing a quote from a clueless commenter on another blog is supposed to substantiate something about the merits of evolutionary theory?
What you have failed to understand, is that people of faith are not rejecting micro or sideways evolution, which IS something we can observe through the various species of birds and dogs, etc. People of faith are rejecting macro or upwards evolution, which the whole 'theory of evolution' is based on, that all life evolved from goo, which is something that not only has never been observed and lacks any evidence or experimentation whatsoever but is disproved at every level of science and more and more as science progresses. The blueprints in DNA, as you so rightly said, make up everything about us. This code can mutate creating different species, but believing macro-evolution is like believing the engineering blueprints for a car can somehow mutate and produce the more superior and much more complicated engineering blueprints for an airplane. Believing macro-evolution is like believing the code for a computer program can somehow mutate to produce a more superior computer program. As any engineer or computer programmer can tell you, as I am both, this is not only completely ridiculous, but quite impossible. Believing macro evolution is like believing a tornado could sweep through a junkyard and somehow a shiny, brand new, perfectly working car could somehow be thrown together during the chaos. Science literally means 'knowledge.' There is nothing 'knowledgeable' about the 'theory' that nobody + nothing = everything.
Ummm...Sean? Perhaps you are unfamiliar with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment
And that's over a span of time that is a mere eyeblink in deep time. You can believe whatever you want, but as the post notes, you lack understanding.
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