Posted on 05/26/2012 9:47:00 PM PDT by 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."
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
People eventually will (and mostly have) accepted evolution, the way they accepted the heliocentric view of the solar system, or the Galilean version of gravity. Science marches on, because people are fundamentally curious about the nature of the universe in which they live. A narrow, unscientific world view based on a moralistic story from the Bible does not satisfy that deep curiosity, nor does it provide any answers to the burning questions many of us have about the nature of the world and the universe.
The only reason that anti-scientific objections to evolution persist is that a bunch of charlatans are taking advantage of the poor state of science education in our schools to essentially sell nonsense. And yes, I do mean sell: Gish, Behe, especially Hovind, all get money from going around peddling anti-science.
The guy is talking about changes and genetic differences due to selective breeding -races. That is not the theory of evolution.
He needs to show the world evidence that man evolved from slime to prove the theory of evolution.
The theory of evolution is atheism’s religion and they hope their religion will be the only religion of the new world order.
“Because a less hospitable climate required more effort, planning, and inventiveness to survive and prosper than a more tropical one?”
So, you’re saying that those who moved north needed to develop more inventiveness than those who stayed in Africa? Of course, what follows from your assumption is the notion that those who moved north are more evolved than than those who stayed in Africa.
Isn’t Hovind still in the slammer??
Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a system for pivoting flight feathers so that they open on up strokes and close on down strokes, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through lungs and a high efficiency heart, a specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters, a beak (since you won't have hands any more...) etc. etc. etc.
One of the biggest fallacies that anti-scientists try to use to "discredit" evolution is that organisms sprang up in their modern form from basically nothing. In fact, that description of evolution sounds more like the biblical story of Genesis--where God commanded all the plants, and then all the animals, to pop up from the mud, and they did. The idea that any scientist would believe that a dog would give birth to a non-dog, and that is how evolution happens is nonsense.
Evolution takes place one small change at a time. You can look at the process of evolution without ever looking at the fossil record: living examples of organisms at every evolutionary step along the way exist right now, from bacteria to colony-forming Euglena, to slime molds, to simple hydras, to mollusks, etc. Many people have noticed that children often do not look exactly like their parents, although they can be quite similar: that is an illustration of evolution in action.
I remember reading THE BONE PEDDLERS by William R Fix years ago. It told how scientific discoveries had better fall into alignment with current evolutionary thinking or you don’t get grants, recognition or publishing.
Some discoveries have been suppressed because they don’t meet the template of modern evolution.
I don’t agree with his idea of how things “evolved” but the rest of the book is really interesting.
-——Many people have noticed that children often do not look exactly like their parents, although they can be quite similar: that is an illustration of evolution in action.——
LOL.....you can’t be serious....
That’s micro evolution not Darwinian evolution....
When your children eventually evolve into a short haired terrier .....get back with me
Is it Leakey’s old age that results in something like this: “then I think we have a chance of a world that will respond better to global challenges.”
That’s a decent explanation but I like the old standby, necessity is the mother of invention.
I’ll give Zappa credit for Moon Unit - that was inventive!
In other words, he has no pretense of following established scientific process - and thereby PROVING evolution, he only intends to browbeat fellow “scientists” until the opposing views are banished.
The Cambrian "explosion" really wasn't all that sudden--it took place over a period of ~70 to 80 million years. It appears to follow a growth curve similar to that seen in bacterial cultures: a "lag phase", where the number of multicellular organisms changes very little over time, while the conditions conducive to growth are being formed, a "log phase", where the number of multicellular organisms is increasing in a more-or-less linear manner, and a "stationary phase", where the number of species has approached the theoretical maximum possible in that system.
The rate of mutation *is* fairly constant over time; it is a function of the chemical nature of DNA. Various effects occur to reduce the effects of random mutation: a mutation that has an effect on survivability will be selected for or against, depending on the effect ("survival of the fittest"), and the ability of a neutral mutation to survive and propagate through a population over the course of generations is based purely on chance. This process of slow change over time is called "genetic drift" and occurs in every species--it can be observed to have acted on humans even within the span of recorded history. A change in environment, which can happen for any number of reasons, can cause previously neutral mutations to become advantageous or deleterious, and such mutations would then be propagated or eliminated within a few generations, changing the overall genetic characteristics of the population. There are many factors that affect the rate of evolutionary change.
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.
Most of the illustrations of horse evolution only start at the point that the horse ancestor was already differentiated from the common ancestor of horses and bats. In theory, phylogenetic trees can be constructed to include every organism from single cells up to modern multicellular organisms, but in practice, such a tree would contain so much information and have so many branches that it would be unreadable. So, for the sake of simplicity and comprehensibility, horse evolution is only illustrated from the point where it is specific to horses. Most horse evolution illustrations also omit other equine species, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
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.
You can find that information by googling "vertebrate evolution". There is so much knowledge about evolution that it is really impossible for any one person to know all the details, much less to present a comprehensive description to non-scientists within the context of a forum thread.
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?
As I said above, the fossil ancestry of horses has been traced all the way back to the ancestor of all vertebrates. How would you know that a fish was the ancestor of all land vertebrates, if the ancestry had NOT been traced back that far?
As for the "legs" of evolutionary theory--it's based on many scientific disciplines. Paleontology, comparative anatomy, geology, physics, mathematics and statistics--molecular biology is the most recent addition to the tools used to study evolution, and, so far, everything we've learned using molecular biology dovetails quite nicely with the other approaches.
Beliefs belong in church.
As far as I know, he is. I have no doubt that he'll return to his dishonest ways the moment he is released, which should be in 2017, if he serves his full sentence.
But remember, you are NEVER to say that Darwin's theory is used to promote social agendas.
But remember, you are NEVER to say that Darwin's theory is used to promote social agendas.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.