Oolon Colluphid

Oh deary dear... Arguing with a creationist with the temerity to call himself Charles Darwin makes my old Darwin�s Terrier moniker rather embarrassing... or perhaps, rather apposite. Watch your ankles, Charles.

Now then...
Start by thoroughly reading the link Michael (TLR) gave you above.

It�s really quite simple, old chap. We have dozens of separate lines of evidence from a range of fields. Not one of them disagrees with evolution, which they could have if evolution were wrong; instead, they all confirm it. We have biogeography, genetics, anatomy and physiology, for instance, plus those annoying fossils. Where would you like to start?

Okay, I�ll get specific. If evolution -- descent with modification -- is not a fact, perhaps you could explain these two pictures:



Would you mind telling us please which are the ape fossils, and which are human, and why?

Then there�s this:



See www.gate.net/~rwms/EvoEvidence.html for an explanation.

Care to explain why there are telomeres in the middle of our chromosome 2?

These are two, entirely unrelated fields, both saying the same thing: humans and apes share a common ancestor.

These are just two examples, readily to hand. But all of biology and palaeontology is like this, stuffed with observations that only make sense if evolution is correct. I chose humans because, when the chase is cut to, whatever else creationists can be forced to accept, it is human evolution that they cannot countenance.

Ah, to hell with it, I�ll jump the gun anyway, since bats have been mentioned...

The designer was clever enough to make echolocation. Okay... but maybe, Charles, you could explain why this same creator gave bats a respiratory / lung ventilation system that is ten times less efficient than that of birds?

What is it about the lifestyles of bats that meant their designer was right to give them a breathing system so inefficient, compared to one he used elsewhere in other flying creatures?

And why did He use the avian through-flow system in kiwis, and the mammalian tidal system in cheetahs (sprinters), wolves (long-distance runners) and the pinnacle of His purpose, us humans?

TTFN, Oolon

Jack the Bodiless

That was me.

Others have already dealt with this, but:

We know for a fact that the process of evolution occurrs. This is NOT a controversial statement: even YEC's accept it (even if they insist on calling it "microevolution").

You were attempting to place the "God hypothesis" on the same level as the "evolution hypothesis". But we KNOW that evolution is an actual process, happening right now in the real world. And, even though we cannot be certain that evolution alone is the full and complete explanation for our own descent from primitive organisms, we know of no reason why this should NOT be the case.

...Whereas I am not aware of ANY actual, successful, scientifically-verified examples of intelligences willing Universes into being, or even very small objects into being. There is no known process that the supporter of the God hypothesis can point to and say "look, there, THAT's what I'm suggesting as the process which led to the emergence of humanity".

Oolon Colluphid

So the time needed doesn�t bother you. And even the thickest creationist doesn�t contest �microevolution� -- that is, descent with modification, but only a little of it. Fine.

In which case, perhaps Charles Darwin -- who ought to know, I guess -- could tell us what exactly a �kind� is? Is it roughly a species, a genus, a family, an order... what? IOW, what�s to stop cumulative microevolution making something considerably different? We really need to know, if we�re to tell whether �kinds� are genuinely immutable.

Now take a good hard look at these two pics.





On what grounds could descent with modification not have produced these two organisms from a common ancestor?

TTFN, Oolon

lpetrich

"Charles Darwin" has maintained that the following are unevolvable:

* Echolocation

* Altruism (behavior that benefits another rather than oneself)

He points to examples of fancy echolocation, and he seems to think that they had emerged in one big jump. Yet such fancy echolocation does not require one big jump to come into existence; a simpler echolocation system can still be functional, even if its performance is less.

He ought to consider human-technology echolocation: radar and sonar. Present-day radar and sonar systems were not developed instantaneously in one big jump, but over the last century.

There is a close parallel with discussions of the evolution of eyes.

Turning to his second problem, there are two favorite solutions:

* Reciprocal altruism (I'll scratch your back, and you'll scratch mine)

That happens in social animals; some even take care to detect cheaters. Vampire bats will share meals with other bats which have not been able to eat -- but only if those others had helped them out in this fashion in the past.

* Kin selection (they share many of one's genes; part of oneself continues to live in them)

There are numerous examples of that, starting with the cells of a multicellular organism. All but a few will die with the organism, and many of them die before that:

The outermost layer of human skin is dead cells, produced by the multiplication of cells just below. There are several other kinds of sacrificial cells in our bodies, including digestive-system-surface cells and various blood cells.

Tree trunks have only a thin "live" layer, the cambium. Cells on the cambium's inside die and become wood; cells on the cambium's outside die and become bark.

Many trees drop their leaves before wintertime or a dry season. Such "deciduous trees" produce leaves that last only a growing season, and die at the end of it.

Development often involves cells dying at strategic places, such as cells between the digits (fingers, toes).

Going back to the organism level, parental care and provisioning is an obvious form of kin selection; it sometimes takes extremes like plants dying as they go to seed or a female octopus starving to death as she protects her eggs.

Kin selection may be involved in sociality, since social groups are often somewhat inbred. This goes to extremes in "eusocial" insects, where a few reproducers produce the rest of the group's members -- members who does not reproduce. Such worker insects are like the non-germ cells in a body; they assist the reproduction of close relatives.

So "Charles Darwin" ought to study some evolutionary biology some time -- he will be amazed at how far it has gone.

Roland98

Do you understand why the retroviral insertions are such convincing evidence in support of evolution? The insertions are in the same position on the same chromosome in two different species (say, chimps and humans). In some cases, these insertion elements are in the same position in more distant common ancestors as well, but are missing in relatives further down the evolutionary line (say in this case, crocodiles). The most parsimonious reason for there identical position is that they were inheirited from a common ancestor; in the example I outlined, it would have integrated into an ancestor prior to the time the chimp/human lineages diverged, but after those lineages shared a common ancestor with crocodiles. Pretty straightforward stuff, and very unlikely to happen by chance. However, the lack of a viral insertion is not evidence against evolution; and I presume you read the explanations the authors provided?

Wounded King

Whats up Roland? No balm in Gilead?

Roland98

heh heh...kept hitting quote instead of edit...sorry, it's a Monday. :banghead: Mods, please feel free to delete extraneous posts to keep the thread on track, and my apologies.

RBH

I suggest that Charles Darwin's definition of "evolution" needs to be addressed. It's very peculiar:No mention of allele frequency changes, natural selection, population variability and its generators; just "natural forces and laws." That definition is of "science," not "evolution." Substitute any phenomenon for "the origin of the species" in that sentence and it reads just the same. In other words, Charles Darwin equates "evolution" and naturalism, methodological or (this is my bet) philosophical, with no other distinguishing content. Any naturalistic theory of the origin of species is "evolution" to Charles.

RBH

Jack the Bodiless

I've used echolocation myself: I've dropped a stone down a well, and I've even made a clicking sound to get a "feel" for the size of a dark cave. The results weren't particulary precise, but it wasn't exactly difficult to do either.

But maybe I'm just a transitional form between the two species depicted above by Oolon.

HRG

Which (if true) simply means that the gorilla-chimp split occurred after the human-(chimp+gorilla) split.

I wonder why this is apparently so difficult to understand.

Regards,
HRG.