Tricia

One doesn’t believe evolution.

Uhh….. Oh never mind.

but it would be insane to think that some things just pop out of nothing. Well wait, isn’t that what you believe about the creation of the universe?
Well wait, isn’t that what you believe about the creation of the universe and living things?

One tiny difference: I believe there was a Creator, whereas you trust in electrons and positrons magically appearing out of thin air with no Intelligent Designer.


Sure sure, the Big Bang, but where did all the matter come from to gather in that one dot of incredibly bright light? How did it get there? Something can’t come from nothing. (Unless you are God. )
That’s not the way of it. Sorry Tricia, you’re slipping back into your old ways, disagreeing with something you don’t understand. Have a look at the encyclopedia entry here: But this has nothing to do with biological evolution.

Don’t kid yourself. I know what I’m “slipping back into”. Me bringing God into the picture is something you’ll just have to get used to because I am a Christian.

Why am I not surprised? Why, by now, should you be surprised?

Look, I’ve grown up fundy, and my future looks fundy. Creationists are like the home team; I’m more likely to believe them over an evolutionist.

I guess a vital part that I didn’t include in my post was that if the chuckwalla lizard doesn’t sneeze out that salt, he will explode.
Oddly enough, if we didn’t pee, we’d explode too. Why aren’t we dead? Sneezing is a reflex. How is this supposed to be a problem?

I’m beginning to think the lizard was a bad example.

Ah come on, are you serious? Nothing needs to be known by anything. Copying errors in DNA (the genotype) can bring about changes in the body (the phenotype).

OK, I get it. Mutations are just screw ups of the DNA copies. That was a big question I had. While on the subject of mutations, I was talking to my mother, an RN, and she said that ALL mutations are bad. As in, they are bad by definition. Yet, you say that a lot of mutations are for good. What do you have to say for that?

why would a creator create eggs that would stick together in the first place, and so have to create an additional anti-sticking mechanism?The creator started with a blank slate, and being supposedly a bit clever, could do whatever designs he liked. In this case, what he in fact saw fit to do was to give spiders sticky eggs and a method of stopping them sticking. Erm, if he’s so clever, why not make the eggs less sticky? If god is a designer, he’s not a very clever one.

Why not? And besides, He’s God. It’s not like He was up all night thinking about the animals He created. Ya gotta give Him more credit than that if you are going to recognize Him at all.

There are countless other examples of this sort of unintelligent design, just ask!

IYO, of course. I don’t think God would quite agree with you. And I think it’s cool how God made things complex. If everything were so simple, we’d be bored to tears after like 100 years because there’d be nothing to explore or discover.

You’re doing fine

Grazie.

Some ancestor was able to move into an area - adapt - to the environment a little bit at a time.

Another question: humans are supposed to adapt to our surroundings, correct? If that’s true, then why are people so obese in the US? Because food is so readily available at walmart, we can just veg. But if our bodies are supposed to adapt, why don’t we have very high metabolisms to keep off that weight?

Hope this helps.

Thanks. J

Well wait, isn?t that what you believe about the creation of the universe? Sure sure, the Big Bang, but where did all the matter come from to gather in that one dot of incredibly bright light? How did it get there? Something can?t come from nothing.
Happens all the time. You have a piece of empty space. Suddenly, out of nowhere, with nothing causing it, an electron and a positron will appear.

Wow. I’ve never heard this before. So if you believe that absolutely nothing produced something, why would it be so hard to believe Something created everything?

If you choose to become a Roman Catholic priest (but could you pass the physical?) or otherwise decide not to have children, you will remove your entire genetic inheritance from the gene pool and will have helped human beings evolve.

I don’t understandt his part. So if I don’t have children, I will help evolution? I thought it was the other way around.

Why do you believe it? Do you have a good reason, or is it just because you want to? And if it is the latter, is that a sensible thing to do?

I’m a Christian, it goes along with the package. I know my God. He’s creative, and He can do anything He wants to. That’s why I believe it.

~Tricia

KeithHarwood

We try not to kid ourselves. We know that people are very good at believing things just because they are nice things to believe and kidding themselves that what they see is what they believe in. So scientists work very hard not to believe, to accept whatever the evidence leads to and then question that, to look for alternatives and question those and find evidence to support or deny them.

It's not easy. It's a filthy job, but someone has to do it. It's much easier to invent some pleasant myth, say, `that is what I believe' and leave it at that. But scientists aren't allowed to do that. Their job is to find out what the world is, not what they want it to be.

Nope. Most do nothing. Large parts of our DNA are junk and don't code for any genes. So a mutation there does nothing and has no effect on evolution. By looking at mutations in this junk DNA we can calculate the raw mutation rate, because we know that it hasn't been subject to selection.

As for the rest, some are good, some are bad. If they are very bad the organism doesn't develop and thus doesn't pass on the mutation. If it's merely bad the organism doesn't live long enough to reproduce and, again, doesn't pass on the mutation. So mutations which are uniformly bad don't get passed on.

Some mutations are uniformly good, though I can't think of any examples at the moment.

But many mutations are neither good nor bad, they are merely different. Whether they are good or bad depends on the environment that the organism is in. For example, the mutation that causes sickle cell anaemia in humans is a bad thing in most places but a good thing in places where malaria is endemic. Similarly, a mutation which increases the size of the salt glands of your chuckwallas would be a good thing for a chuckwalla in a dry, salty environment and of no use at all anywhere else.

(BTW. What, precisely, is a chuckwalla. If it was spelt `chuckwallah' I would say that the word was an American/Hindi composite meaning `a servant who is in charge of the food on a cattle drive with cowboys'; but I'm pretty sure that's not it.)

Human beings have evolved in an environment without walmart. In general our bodies are designed to store lots of stuff during the fat times that we can use during the lean times. If the lean times don't come we never get rid of the stored stuff.

In any case, adaptation and evolution don't apply to individuals. They apply to populations. There are people with high metabolisms, who can't get fat no matter how much food is available. If the walmarts continue over the next few thousand years there is a good chance that those people will have more progeny than those whose obesity causes health problems so the human race will contain more such people.

Neither had I when I was your age. Of course it was pretty new then. I didn't get the full story until my fourth year at university. These days I think they get it in second year physics. They probably get it in the engineering department as well.

Because then I have the problem of what created the Something. I can see the effect of these things popping in and out of existence so I have to accept them whether I like it or not. Adding a Something that makes them happen just makes it more complicated and harder to understand. If convincing evidence comes along for the existence of the Something I'll have to accept that as well.

The definition of evolution, relating to a population of organisms, is `the change over time of the gene frequency of those organisms'. In as far as your decision not to have children is influenced by your genetic inheritance, those genes will be removed from the human gene pool and their frequency will have changed.


But it doesn't go along with the package. You are very much in the minority. The vast majority of Christians believe that God created the universe as it is, not as they would wish it to be. For them, when God said, `Let there be light', it was the intense brightness of the big bang. Their god created a universe that has lasted 15,000,000,000 years already and looks like going on forever. Their god created a universe in which stars were born and died, in which worlds formed out of star dust and in which creatures evolved over billions of years in awesome complexity.

The vast majority of Christians do not believe in a narrow, pathetic little god who made a universe only 6,000 years old, who fakes it to look older (but if you read your bible you will know that God deceives and sometimes punishes people for being deceived), and who (if my theology is correct) is going to destroy it any minute now; who builds creatures with amazingly wonderful capabilities but equally amazing stuff-ups. Remember, when you are older and suffer from back-ache, that this god can't design a decent spine for creatures that walk upright.

By all means be a Christian, but if you believe God created the universe, don't turn your back on His creation.

The Other Michael

Chuckwalla photo here:



KeithHarwood, I liked your "wallah of chuck" definition! It's just a Western version of the tiffin wallahs.

cheers,
Michael

[Edited by Oolon: long url made the format screwy, and we may as well see the pic here!]

[ May 10, 2002: Message edited by: Oolon Colluphid ]</p>

Skeptictank

Again, I'm going to jump in with my very limited knowledge to help out on one point.

Keith gave a good explaination, but it goes even further. Back when man's ancestors were living on the east african plains fats and sugars were hard to come by. Hunting was difficult and dangerous and nobody had invented the Snickers bar. To compensate, humans developed a craving for fats and sugars, to make sure the body got its minimum amount because back then fruits and veggies were relativly easy to get, but again fats and sugars weren't. Note: This took thousands of years to develop.

Now look at industrial society. Meat and sugar is easy to come by and its cheap. But humans still have that craving for fats and sugars so people eat steaks and candy every day as the staple of their diet, instead of as a rare suppliment.
As a side note, remember that our ancestors had to constantly fight to survive and that ate up a lot of calories! Most Americans tend to avoid physical exercise like the plague. Hence they get fatter.

Quetzal

Hi Tricia:

Skeptic and Keith gave great answers to this question. However, things are both simpler and more complex, IMO. The reality is humans are adapting - or rather would be adapting - to the current environment if we were operating under a strictly natural selection scenario. Why do you think a rise in obesity equates (often) with a rise in circulatory and other weight-related health problems? Under NS, obesity would be subject to negative selection pressures - and these tendancies would be eliminated.

However, humans are not solely (or in most developed countries anyway) subject to NS today. The reality is that humans can significantly modify their environments (adapt the environment rather than adapting to the environment). We can, using modern medical science, keep "unfit" (at least in strict Darwinian terms) individuals alive "artificially" long enough to reproduce. It's cultural evolution - not biological evolution - and technology that has allowed us to do this. Therefore, since obesity is NOT necessarily a negative phenotype upon which the culling action of NS can act, because we have successfully removed or mitigated the normal environmental pressures, and we DO have lots of goodies to eat - obesity can become more prevalent in the population.

As Skeptic pointed out, our biological evolution has not caught up with our cultural ability to produce an excess of cheesburgers and chocolate cake... Give humans another 100,000 - 1 million years, and you'll see a major phenotypical change that allows mass consumption of chocolate while eliminating the negative effects - hope for all dieters!

Godless Dave

How is magic less plausible than a creator god? They're both supernatural explanations. One does not make any more sense than the other.

And neither one is what cosmologists think. First, matter didn't appear out of thin air, because there was no air. Air is made up of molecules, which are made up of atoms, etc. The universe didn't explode into empty space. Space is part of the universe.

You're right, we don't know how the universe came into being. But unlike you we don't make up a supernatural explanation to fill in the gaps and say it's the truth. We say "We don't know. Here's the data we have so far."

[ May 10, 2002: Message edited by: Godless Dave ]</p>

Godless Dave

Read a physics textbook, Tricia. This is a well known and well documented phenomenon. Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" would be a good start.

Oolon Colluphid

Tricia, just to let you know, I will get back to you if others haven't already covered things, but I'm off on hols for a week from tomorrow, and 'puterless .

Cheers, Oolon

Tricia

We try not to kid ourselves. We know that people are very good at believing things just because they are nice things to believe and kidding themselves that what they see is what they believe in.

Yeah, I know.

So scientists work very hard not to believe, to accept whatever the evidence leads to and then question that, to look for alternatives and question those and find evidence to support or deny them.

So what about scientists who are creationists? You would think that if they were Christians and studied the earth and how it “really came to be,” they’d turn evolutionists in a heartbeat.


Some mutations are uniformly good, though I can't think of any examples at the moment.

Can anyone help him? I’d really like to know.

If convincing evidence comes along for the existence of the Something I'll have to accept that as well.

Would it make a difference in your life?

The definition of evolution, relating to a population of organisms, is `the change over time of the gene frequency of those organisms'. In as far as your decision not to have children is influenced by your genetic inheritance, those genes will be removed from the human gene pool and their frequency will have changed.

But if I did have children, I wouldn’t have that genetic inheritance, so why would it matter?

But it doesn't go along with the package. You are very much in the minority.

Minority?!?! I think not.

The vast majority of Christians believe that God created the universe as it is, not as they would wish it to be. For them, when God said, `Let there be light', it was the intense brightness of the big bang.

What Christians have you been talking to? No Christian I know believes that.

Their god created a universe that has lasted 15,000,000,000 years already and looks like going on forever. Their god created a universe in which stars were born and died, in which worlds formed out of star dust and in which creatures evolved over billions of years in awesome complexity.

I don’t understand what you are getting at.

The vast majority of Christians do not believe in a narrow, pathetic little god who made a universe only 6,000 years old, who fakes it to look older (but if you read your bible you will know that God deceives and sometimes punishes people for being deceived), and who (if my theology is correct) is going to destroy it any minute now; who builds creatures with amazingly wonderful capabilities but equally amazing stuff-ups.

What are you getting at?

Remember, when you are older and suffer from back-ache, that

when Adam and Eve sinned in the garden they brought pain into the world.

By all means be a Christian, but if you believe God created the universe, don't turn your back on His creation.

Don’t plan to.

Now for some more questions.

What exactly is the Red Shift?

The sun is shrinking at such a pace (loses 5 million tons every second) that if it lasted supposedly billions of years, it would have been gone many years ago. What about that?

Carbon dating: isn’t this only a practical way of dating things if you know for sure how old the earth is? (Which nobody does)

~Tricia

[ May 11, 2002: Message edited by: Tricia ]</p>

RufusAtticus

Tricia, I'm writing a longer answer to your questions, but I thought I'd go ahead and give this to you.

<a href="http://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/Wiens.html" target="_blank">Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective</a>

Enjoy.

~~RvFvS~~