Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Evolution is a myth? Please explain:

I agree...I think they deny themselves by choice, but it doesn't have to be this way.

The problem with religious dogma is when it is faced with incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. The dogmatic holds to their dogma regardless...That's tragic. Oh, and dogmatic thought isn't exclusive to religion by a LONG shot. But when I was a Christian, I actively denied myself any deep study of evolution. It was when I saw massive hypocrisy in the church that I started educating myself beyond what religious dogma allows...and my mind was blown. Evolution is straight up bad ass...Such a cool field of study.

Wheat. Banana, holstein, corn......We've already been at it for a long time.

the math is simply what happens to things that are better than their predecessor.

You have to wrap your mind around the one and only thing need for selection to happen, better things are those that produce more.

That's always been how I've seen it, too.

But I wasn’t talking about humans. I was talking about the mutations that caused a fifty cell organism to develop an eye when nothing like that structure existed.

I am literally NOT arguing for the existence of God in this thread. I’m not even denying micro evolution. And maybe, I’m not even arguing a bit more than micro evolution in higher order animals. But to get from those simple animals to the higher ones, you need new information and the math makes the insertion of that information by random mutation unlikely. The earth simply isn’t old enough even if it is 4.5 billion years old. There haven’t been enough organisms.

yeah we have. but the tempo is beginning to pick up a bit.

7 plus billion humans, all god's children that have to be fed,

educated, cared for, given jobs, etc. etc.

no tellin' where the next einstein might come?

Earlier I gave the example of how Tiktaalik was found. That is so bad ass... Evolution helped them find where geographically, how deep to dig, and what specifically they should find. After a decade of search; they eventually found almost exactly what they were looking for.

Another predictive sign of evolution. Try to find evidence of a dinosaur 300 million years ago...its not there.

If it was all "created in an instant", why are there layers and layers of differing life forms? Why is it that they get more simple the deeper you dig (exactly what evolution predicts), and more complex in the more shallow layers. And all of this was predicted LONG before we began finding fossils en masse.

Evolution also predicts that you should find dinosaur features in birds...and we do; especially in fetal development.

Hey Joe...

Take a look at fetal development. If there is no such thing as evolution, why do humans grow gills and tails as fetuses? Why do chickens do the same thing?

Yes, the problem is time scale. A man lives for maybe 100 yrs and can witness microevolution during his lifetime, so has no problem with the concept.

Mankind has "species memory" through oral traditions and written words which goes back maybe 10,000 years. Which is simply not enough time to record speciation, unless of course one is witnessing an extinction level event. In which case no one would survive to tell what went before.

But the micro evolution we witness over 100 years, easily yields new species if continued over one million or ten million years. And many branches of new species, genus, or even families over multiple millions of years.

As to mutations being lethal, I can name three new genes which appeared in the lineage of homo sapiens which lead to enhanced abilities and eventually spread throughout the species.

At one point in time a new gene appears in recovered bones of Home sapiens. That gene has been identified with development of the language center in the brain. Archeologists and paleontologists have discovered evidence that shows by the impression the brain leaves on the inside of the skull that the language center of the brain increased in size during the same time the gene appeared. They have also discovered evidence that suggests spoken language appeared at the same time.

The second mutation I will mention in the human genome is a gene which enhance artistic expression. Once again it has been shown that the lobe of the brain which gives artistic talent became enlarged at the same, and cave paintings appeared at that point in history.

The third mutation I will mention occured much more recently and is for a gene which allows production of the enzyme "lactase" in the human adult. Human populations which acquired this gene over came their competitors in the environment by adopting dairy animals and having consumable proteins and vitamin rich milk available year round.

The interesting thing about the lactase gene. It has appeared not once, but multiple times in disparate populations. Each time a totally different gene, but causing the body to produce lactase in each case.

Each case an example of a beneficial mutation furthering the evolution of the human species.

And, no, a harmful mutation does not wipe out a species. It is only harmful to the individual carrying the harmful mutation. That individual may reproduce at a slower rate, fail to reproduce, or even die. But in the grand scheme, the species does not notice the loss of an individual.

But when a beneficial mutation occurs and offspring carrying that new gene begin to overwhelm their conspecifics, that does impact the species as a whole. Therefor mutations can not harm a species, but they can help it.

But nobody claims they just grew an eye with the next generation. Mutations are not limited to the change of one amino acid. Whole hunks of DNA can mutate when transferred. There's a whole body of science about this stuff.

[quote=GunGeek]

If you’re correct, I expect that we’ll eventually be able to take a dog fetus and turn it into a baby. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.

But once again, my primary objection is with the creation of the vast amount of information required to make the jump from the simple life forms to the higher forms. So, the fact that the higher animals share these features is not particularly surprising.

But we aren’t just talking about mutations. We are talking about viable mutations. Then beneficial mutations. Then viable, beneficial, and heritable mutations.

Sounds like science fiction...but would you believe me if I told you something very similar to that is going on right now? Paleontologist Jack Horner is methodically working his way through the steps necessary to turn a chicken back into a dinosaur. His team has identified the genes that turn on and turn off DNA instructions to create teeth, arms, and a tail. Took them 7 years to grow teeth in a chicken.

Yes...some are not viable for the individual with the mutation. No one denies that. However, you seem to be denying that unless the change is large enough to be lethal or clearly observable in our lifetimes; it's not legit. That's just not a logical way of looking at things.

What does the math say about magic... an invisible entity conjuring up a universe through the power of Word and Will?

Yeah, but that’s kind of like turning a calf embryo into a Auroch as that a bird pretty much IS a dinosaur. Turn a bird into an elephant and I’ll be impressed.

No, I’m just telling you that you can’t get there completely with small mutations. And that particularly applies in the period I am mainly discussing when lower order simple organisms developed new information to form all the body parts of higher form life.

How do you not see that statement as an admission of evolution?

Now you're on to irreducible complexity.

The eye has evolved many times independently, by different mechanisms. It's not irreducibly complex. An example is where it starts with a light sensitive patch of cells merely for distinguishing light from darkness. A curvature of these cells gives the animal the ability to sense the direction of light. Increase the curvature, and eventually you've reached the pinhole (lensless) eye, like that on a nautilus.

No less believable than saying, “Trust me. It just takes a lot of time.”