Scientist: Evolution debate will soon be history

San Francisco Chronicle ^ | May 26, 2012 | FRANK ELTMAN

[eekitsagreek]

Richard Leakey predicts skepticism over evolution will soon be history.

Not that the avowed atheist has any doubts himself.

Sometime in the next 15 to 30 years, the Kenyan-born paleoanthropologist expects scientific discoveries will have accelerated to the point that "even the skeptics can accept it."

"If you get to the stage where you can persuade people on the evidence, that it's solid, that we are all African, that color is superficial, that stages of development of culture are all interactive," Leakey says, "then I think we have a chance of a world that will respond better to global challenges."

[Freedom_Is_Not_Free]

I have 2 problems with the theory of evolution. I find the concept plausible and compelling, but I still have 2 problems with it.

1. The Cambrian explosion. If evolution is true, then there should be a fairly uniform rate of evolution over time, maybe changing only with apocalyptic changes in environment such as a meteorite striking earth and causing a severe disruption. Nothing in earth’s Geologic formation can explain the sudden absolute explosion in the number of new species in the Cambrian period. OK, nothing but God creating them.

2. Nobody on the planet can trace the evolutionary history of any animal on earth let alone a mammal. You look up evolution of the horse, and they start with a small horse. OK, what did the small horse evolve from. Nobody can tell you. Ditto the tiger. Small tiger to saber tooth tiger to modern tiger. Small wolf to Dire wolf to modern wolf.

Big flipping deal. If evolution is real, then some genius should be able to show me some model tracing the horse back in it’s evolutionary genealogy back to it’s fish relative in the sea, right? As far as I know, nobody is ever able to connect the dots and go back more than a few million years for the horse or tiger or wolf, and identify its predecessors. Failing that, the theory stands on no legs at all.

If you can’t identify the fossil ancestry of something as a horse, or if you can’t model that ancestry back to the fish from whence it supposedly came, then you haven’t got much of a theory, have you?

[American in Israel]

Evolution was disproved years ago. At this point the only reason it is still pushed is because the alternative is beyond contemplation for the Godless.

[Freedom_Is_Not_Free]

Here is an article that claims that all horses descended from a single, solitary mare 140,000 years ago.

http://phys.org/news/2012-01-mtdna-modern-horses-ancestor-years.html

Fine. If God didn’t create it, and natural selection favored this horse, how come more of it’s predecessors didn’t evolve into horses. If God didn’t create it and one solitary mare began the entire lineage of modern horses, than how did it breed? Virgin Mare?

Now if God did create it, or created a mating pair of horses, even if 140,000 years ago, then I can understand a single mare being mother to all subsequent horses. Evolution, natural selection, just doesn’t explain this. It can’t explain this.

The more seriously, deeply, rationally and logically you think about evolution, the more certainly you are lead back to God as the Eminent Architect. The theory of evolution just does not as logically explain this as does the fact that God, at some point, just created these animals.

[American in Israel]

Do you plant just one seed on the whole planet?

Nah, you teach them to walk. The rest they will figure out just fine.

[publius911]

Bookmark

[txrefugee]

More pie in the sky from an atheist. The godless will get this world straightened out, as the Nazis did.

[Peter ODonnell]

I believe in negative evolution, every time I turn on the sports channel.

[varmintman]

I mentioned a few of the problems of bird evolution, but there's another one as big if not bigger. There is a gigantic difference between down/insulation feathers and flight feathers i.e. flight feathers actually have structure to provide the strength and rigidity to bear weight.

The standard theory of bird evolution calls for hair to morph into insulation/down feathers, but the question of those down feathers evolving into flight feathers is ignored. Ignored also is the question of how the down feathers morphed into flight feathers ONLY ON THE WINGS WHERE THEY ARE NEEDED!!!! I.E why doesn't the bird have flight feathers all over his whole body??? What the hell kind of mutation is going to change down feathers into flight feathers only on arms and then have arms turn into wings???

That may be the single biggest problem with evoloserism which you could easily point out to some body.

Then again if you wanted to think bats evolved, then you have to claim they evolved twice, i.e. the two orders of bats aren't related...

[sodpoodle]

That was ‘awesome’. Will read again after coffee.

Have to wonder if these ‘scientists’ have observed the most recent form of human evolution: smaller brains and larger bodies;)

Acknowledgement of the Creator is compatible with our sense of wonder, humility, love of nature, creativity, poetry, language, charity toward others, familial loyalties and all the other attributes that have elevated the human conscience. Elevation is evolution.....but it began with God.

[theBuckwheat]

Evolutionists demand that I accept a theory that depends on a starting point that contradicts their own theory. So, they steadfastly insist that evolution is not about “origins”, even as evolution depends on a certain type of origin, specifically an origin that does not involve a Creator God.

Evolution is just a way for people to deny God. If there was a God, that has implications that reach to the personal level of behavior and thought.

[mc5cents]

The more we know, the less there is to know.

No, I believe the correct statement would be: The more we know, the more we know how much we don't know.

Our self-satisfaction and hubris is at times breathtaking. Some humans really think they are smart and all-knowing when in fact they are just patting themselves on the back, a circle jerk of self congratulation.

[trubolotta]

Liberal atheists believe the universe and all life happend spontaneously, and evolved on it’s own. But suddenly, NOW, every living thing, up to and including Earth, must be micromanaged for the betterment of all.

There is no inconsistency in this belief of liberal atheists. If there is no Creator then life must be an accident of nature. If life is an accident of nature, who needs a Creator. If there is no Creator, then man must assume the role of a god to make things better and control the evolution of the accident. Finally, some men make better gods then other men. To a liberal atheist, it is perfectly logical because of their initial assumption, there is no God.

[sphinx]

Can someone explain to me why training in breaking rocks and speculating about the origins of man, and then speculating anew when the original hypotheses have been proved wrong, qualifies one as an expert on global climate? Does peering at fossils teach one much about sunspots? Polar alignment? Our path around the sun?

Back off, man. He's a scientist.

[abclily]

We are all Africans? And some of our ancestors moved north and developed white skin? What else did they develop? The ability to make the most of their environment? Since Africa is the richest continent in terms of resources, why aren’t they the most developed?

[abclily]

Sorry...why aren’t they = why isn’t it...

[aruanan]

The ability to make the most of their environment? Since Africa is the richest continent in terms of resources, why aren’t they the most developed?

Because it's also a cesspool of disease? Because the technological development and widespread use in Northern Europe of mechanical devices known to Southern Europe and Greece for over a thousand years mostly as curiosities came as a consequence of the confluence of a number of different factors, among them being the Judeo-Christian belief that if God looked at the work of his hands and saw it was good, getting one's hands dirty in labor was not a bad thing for someone created in the image of God, the relative loss to the north of the older belief prevalent throughout the Roman and Greek world that the truly educated man didn't labor or engage in business but had others do his work for him (still seen in places in Latin America)? Because a less hospitable climate required more effort, planning, and inventiveness to survive and prosper than a more tropical one?

Besides, just having resources available doesn't mean that anything is going to be done with them. A resource only has meaning in the context of a technology that has defined it as a resource. Outside of that, for instance, flint is just another rock and a petroleum seep is just a pool of stinky black crap.

[Ditter]

Exactly!

[StAnDeliver]

Evolution, FWIW, is already at the saturation level you imply. There’s no need to wait, Dick. People have sized you up and found you and your sophistry quite wanting...

[aruanan]

Sometime in the next 15 to 30 years, the Kenyan-born paleoanthropologist expects scientific discoveries will have accelerated to the point that "even the skeptics can accept it."

I seem to recall people saying this for the last one hundred fifty three years or so.

[SoFloFreeper]

Yeah, when you get down to the cellular level, we can clearly see the random chance involved...and how there is NO WAY a designer could have acted.
< /the most extreme sarcasm>