Posted on 08/13/2014 5:40:47 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
When people joyously discover on Ancestry.com that they're related to, say, a medieval archduke or a notorious Victorian criminal, evolutionary biologists may be permitted to snicker. Because in actuality, we are all related: Humans all share at least one common ancestor if you go far enough back. You are related to every king and criminal who ever lived, to Gandhi and Paris Hilton and Carrot Top. You are even related to me.
But buckle up — that's only the beginning.
Humanity, after all, is but one ugly branch on the big tree of life. Go back far enough, and you'll find an ancestor common to you and to every creature on Earth. You are related to your cat — which may help explain why you get that stare all the time. You are related to a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and to the mosquito you just murdered, and to your houseplants. At any given meal, you may eat all or part of a dozen extremely distant relatives.
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.
Here are the rules, in a nutshell:
• 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at theweek.com ...
That article hit the nail right on the head. Really good read for those that might not be familiar with evolution on a grand scale. There’s something I’d like to say regarding the bringing of faith into the argument. When discussing evolution, someone of religion almost always fires back with something along the lines of “you need just as much faith to believe life spontaneously came from a soup as you do a god”. That is true. However, that is getting into the origin of life, not the origin of species (evolution). Darwin was very clear about this in his writings, so I don’t understand why he gets so much hate from people. To not believe in evolution because you can’t agree on the origin of life is quite foolish, IMO.
I believe in adaptation no evolution. Show me any evidence in a change of kind anywhere.
Please, say it ain't so!
I’m related to Carrot Top?!!
Crap!
... because cloning and man made genetic manipulation.
Evolution should not exclude creation , but the language makes the religious look whaky and reject evolution.
It is the evolutionists who reject creation, not the creationists who reject evolution.
“I believe in adaptation no evolution. Show me any evidence in a change of kind anywhere.”
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evograms_03
Even simplified it is still statistically impossible. When reading textbooks there is a good “chance” that you “may” see these too terms over and over and over.
I believe that there is sufficient evidence for evolution; I also believe that God created it all and set it in motion. I don't reject either. Some folks use each to reject the other; that's their right to be wrong.
IF one believes in the Creator God and His WORD, you cannot accept the whole concept of ‘evolution’.
Those who don’t believe are free to explore it thoroughly.
But if you believe in God and His Word, it says clearly that “death came into the world by sin (Adam’s)...”
Evolution needs many years of life and DEATH to accomplish what it does.
If there was no death before Adam’s sin, how could evolution happen?
-You’d need to remove God from the equation.
Worse yet you are related to Barry Soetero.
Hard to tell which is worse...
“You’d need to remove God from the equation”
The whole point, if they were honest.
To put him into an equation, you'd have to quantify him. I can only imagine the reaction to somebody trying to do that.
that was very well said
Suggests a common designer. They have similar features but would need to see more proof than that.
“Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion–a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint–and Mr. Gish is but one of many to make it–the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.”
– Michael Ruse, How evolution became a religion
You should read the book: I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist.
Exactly, that “just so story” doesn’t prove common descent any more than it proves a common design. I could create a chart with pictures of similar automobiles and how their parts gradually changed over time, but that would not prove the later vehicles evolved from the earlier ones.
Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx's materialistic theory of history and society and Freud's attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin's theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism…
-Douglas Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology (1998, 3rd Ed., Sinauer Associates), p. 5
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