All the more reason to enjoy this current life.
Have you read about Secular Humanism at all? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_humanism
Yeah… seems like there’s been a sudden and unexpected death of this thread.
That article was very interesting, Fett101, and from what I read, secular humanism is a very good idea! Thanks for the link. 
And the Cute Overload broke my mind. 
“How was the earth created?”
Okay post your opinion and i’ll let you guys know if we can discuss it or if it is just to difficult to discuss.
If you have topics please pm me.
My opninion…the world was created by an all knowing ever loving God…in 7 days.
Well, you all know me. I believe in the Creation and that God made everything from the Light to the plants to the planets to us.
All loving… until yopu decide you don’t believe in him, THEN HE SENDS YOU TO [size=167]BURN[/size].
Not nessecarily true. According to what I learned, if you accept him as your lord and savior and ask him to become a part of your life, then you a pretty much covered.
walle-i don’t think that is your paygrade to answer that question…
Why would the Wall of Prayer make you get into heated debates or make you mad 
?
Becuase he doesn’t believe in prayer…
I have never even been into that thread because TO ME, Prayer is a load of rubbish. Surely your god will see you are in need without you having to pray!
he’s pretty ego-centric.
To get this thread back on topic and to stop the bashing, a study was actually conducted on prayer.
It was a double blind test involving patients of a hospital and three churches around the country praying for individuals with some individuals knowing they were being prayed for, others not knowing they were prayed for and some not being prayed for.
The result was surprisingly positive, the people being prayed for showed better health and recovery (all had undergone the same operation) than those not prayed for.
Here’s another Topic…
How was the universe created…(we might be able to discuss this one)
Correct me if I’m wrong (kindly), but the Big Bang happened with a lot of spinning, didn’t it? Like all the compunds and such were spinning rapidly when the Big Bang happened?
Say there are children on one of those spinning rides at a playground (bear with me here). Pretend that it spins so fast that the children go flying off. They would all go flying off the same direction as the playground toy (if it spin clockwise, the children flew off clockwise).
But there are many planets and moons that spin different directions.
Now, someone might suggest that comets/space rocks hit the moon/planet, causing it to change direction.
looks at planets and moons Those are gigantic in size. I know there have been series of meteors and space rocks and such hitting a moon/planet, marking craters. But are they really big enough to make the moon/planet change rotation?
Once again, if you have an explanation for this, tell me (us) kindly.
This is taken from another post by Beltemall but I believe it explains a lot please take time to read it.
Great thread! I have been working and teaching in this area for a couple of decades (molecular biology, embryology) and its good to see people thinking about such deep issues.
In the spirit of moving the discussion along I want to clear up a couple of recurrent misconceptions about evolution.
The first is about the alleged flaw in the theory of evolution manifested in the lack of intermediates. This isn’t a flaw at all - its a hang over from the days when we didn’t know much about the molecular biology of evolution. The fact is that the anatomy of organisms can change (evolve) dramatically in very short periods of time and without the need for intermediates. Another way of looking at this is the recurrent idea that evolutionhappens through very gradual changes in morphology (anatomy) over time. SquidDNA gave the example of how slightly smaller animals can open up new econiches for themselves and have a sudden edge in survival. While that happens it is also true that drastic changes in body plans do happen very quickly and there is a clear understanding now of how that happens.
first the opposing argument from the sceptics:
medamanx
Quote:
To get started unraveling this mystery we must first look at the supposed evidence that proves evolution. The fossil record is supposedly one of evolution’s strongest defenses. The only problem is that they don’t tell you what the fossil record really shows. Charles Darwin, the founder of the evolutionary theory, was worried because the fossil record did not show what he had predicted about the links between species:
“Why is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory.”
The reason why this is so detrimental to Darwin’s theory is that if all living things evolved form other living things then there would be plenty of transitional or intermediate forms along the way. But as Darwin pointed out, the fossil record does not support this. It only shows the abrupt appearance of fully formed species. Since the evidence is truly against them, evolutionists have since invented entire intermediates out of a few bones. One of these is called Ramapithecus, and it was based entirely on jaw and teeth fragments. For more 20 years Ramapithecus was proudly displayed as man’s first direct ancestor in museums across the country. Then when a complete jaw was found evolutionists where forced to admit that Ramapithecus was actually a relative of the orangutan and not at all a link between ape and man.
and
Quote:
Natural selection by itself is a huge stumbling block for evolution. The problem is that natural selection only kills off unfit species and does not create new ones. Darwin tried to combat this by saying that these new organisms arrived through mutations of the genes. Evolutionists say the formations of a new and distinct species is due to an accumulation of mutations. This process has never been observed at all anywhere in the world. In fact, all the evidence shows just the opposite. Mutations do not increase the viability of the affected organism, they are almost universally harmful and cause the opposite effects; death and disease, not increasing order and complexity. Mutations only change existing information, never adding new information. The odds for mutations occurring with no radioactive intervention are 1 to 10,000 to 1 in 1 million, per gene, per generation. To add to the problem, 99 percent of all mutations are lethal. Furthermore, mutations are very rare, so imagine millions upon millions of beneficial mutations required to formulate the world as we know it. This surely staggers the imagination and requires immense faith to believe.
If these mutations supposedly happened over millions and millions of years, we should have easily found the ape-to-man transition stage. But all supposed ape-men, Lucy, Nebraska-Man, Java-Man etc., have all been discredited. Scientists have the before stage of all animals, i.e. apes, and the after stage of all animals, i.e. man, but none of the intermediates.
and
Quote:
Another thing evolution fail to explain is how animals got vast systems of interrelated parts, which could not have evolved in gradual fashion, unless, by some miracle, its interconnected parts also evolved at the same time. Many organs such as the eye, lungs, defense systems etc. prove this point. These systems are so complex; each one has a part that needs another one at the same time to work. This could not happen through step-by-step accidents.
Ok so the supposed challenge to the theory is that there are radical differences between the anatomy of species. Where in the evolutionary process is there an explanation for this because the fossil record doesn’t support gradual changes? In fact it shows many examples of radical changes in anatomy over short periods of evolutionary time. Or as meda asked: “how animals got vast systems of interrelated parts, which could not have evolved in gradual fashion”
Basic Concepts (I know a lot of peeps know this but some don’t - hope it helps them).
* "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" When you look at the diversity of animal life it is difficult to see much anatomy in common between species. However if you look at how these organisms are built - how they develop from a single cell through embryonic development - then the similarities are obvious and the differences relatively minor. Ontogeny is this process of development of an organism from a single cell. When you look at the anatomy of embryos at different stages of development they look like the progressively more evolved (that’s to say later in evolutionary time) species. So embryos as they develop almost go through the tree of species (Phylogeny) starting with the simple progressing to more complex.
* Evolution appears to have occurred with rapid changes punctuated by long periods of stasis. Meda said "Evolutionists own words convincingly reveal that the fossil record does not support evolution. Consider the following expectations of the fossil record if evolution were true: gradualism, simple to complex, clear-cut lineages, and identifiable common ancestors", and "If [these] mutations supposedly happened over millions and millions of years, we should have easily found the ape-to-man transition stage." Meda assumes a model of long term gradual change, usually referred to as "phyletic gradualism". It is essentially a 19th century Darwinian idea that species evolve at a more or less steady rate - that there is slow progressive change of one species into the next. Over the last few decades, this model has been challenged by paleontologists (heh we evolved a new one ). Fossil evidence indicates that some species remained essentially the same for millions of years and then underwent short periods of very rapid change. This model is called "punctuated equilibrium".
* DNA (makes RNA) makes Proteins Our bodies are made with or by the actions of proteins. Our genes (stretches of DNA) are templates that code for our various protein molecules. The way that proteins are made is that a copy of the DNA code is made into RNA that is a messenger molecule. RNA then travels to the protein synthesizing machinery in a cell and the protein is built according to the code in the RNA.
* The only thing passed on from generation to generation is DNA So evolved characteristics must reflect changes in DNA. It’s the only way to pass a change on.
* A very small component of the genome (our total DNA) is made up of genes. Most of the DNA in our cells does not code for any protein. There are long stretches of DNA that are regulatory sites (switches) that turn genes on and off. Also the genes themselves are interrupted so that you think of a gene as analogous to a paragraph in a novel there would be maybe 50 interruptions of strings of nonsensical letters (called introns) that chop the gene into small coding fragments (called exons).
* Not all genes are structural genes expressed as visible traits. As molecular biologists characterize the genes that make up animal genomes they find different types of genes. Some genes code for proteins that make things we can see directly such skin or eye pigments, muscle proteins, hair, blood groups, and all the various so called structural components of the body - the bricks and mortar. However many genes do not code for structural genes. These genes are mainly regulatory genes they code for proteins that themselves bind to genes (they interact with the DNA molecule) and regulate the expression of genes.
* Some proteins bind to DNA and regulate the expression of genes. Simplistically it is like a cascade. There may be one master gene that codes for a protein molecule that is a DNA-binding protein. This protein stays in the cell nucleus and binds to regulatory sites on the target DNA (specific sequences of DNA bases) and activates "downstream" genes that in turn make proteins that go on to activate whole banks of other genes. Structural genes are usually at the end of the cascade or regulatory ladder. All genes are regulated by DNA-binding proteins and there may be many sites of regulation for a given gene with some regulatory proteins promoting expression and some inhibiting expression. The regulators compete and the end result is a kind of equilibrium where the gene is expressed to a certain degree but could be turned more on or off to a varying degree.
Why all this Molecular Biology matters for understanding Evolution
The basic question is how can mutations in your structural genes (eye color or blood type as an example) make a monkey into a man. The simple answer is they can’t. Such mutations are not the mechanism of new species.
To understand how gene mutations can make new species you need to look to all that molecular biology stuff above. There are master genes that control or activate the expression of whole banks of genes that in turn go on to make whole organs or body parts. Often many regulatory genes combine in effect and specific patters in time and space to make a body - its like an elaborate military plan with a whole sequence of events happening in very specific order. Mess up the order mess up the outcome.
Scientists identified these master genes (called homeobox genes) in the fruit fly drosophila melanogaster. They found them by looking for animals that had gross deformities like two sets of wings or no eyes, and found the genes that mutated to cause those malformations. They turned out to be master genes of the kind I described above.
Molecular Biology of drastic changes in anatomy
Ok so what? There are master genes that switch on whole banks of genes that go on to make whole organs and limbs - what does that have to do with evolution? - everything. Simple mutations in those master genes make subtle changes in the proteins they code for and this means that these proteins have altered affinity for the target DNA site. So a change in a single amino acid means that instead of binding to one regulatory site on gene A the protein now binds to another site on gene B. Since these are master regulatory genes now whole banks of genes activate at a new point in time.
Read that twice if it doesn’t sound profoundly important because it is.
The punchline or one way of putting a foot in your mouth?
The beauty of science is that when we have theories we can actually test them by experiment. So here is an example. We take a regulatory gene in a fly, mutate it and put it back in an egg and let an embryo develop and show that such simple mutations of regulatory genes cause massive changes in anatomy. There are many examples, this one is a mutation called antennapedia. In this mutation a normal fly mutates into an abnormal fly fly that has a pair of legs growing out of its head where antennae should be. A single gene change puts a pair of limbs where there were none.
Molecular Evolution
I hear the sceptics saying “well so what there are no animals that evolved with legs out of their head thats not evolution!” Well it is the mechanism of evolution. There are now many examples of mutations like antennapedia. Let me show you some really useful examples - like to fly or not to fly? Often the master regulatory genes that mutate specify how many times a group of embryonic cells divide. People have used the simple species like flies and tracked every single embryonic cell through development comparing species that have different anatomy. Using such detailed observation people have studied what is different between insects that fly (=have wings) versus insects that don’t fly (=have no wings). Here is a article that shows the original data. They compared the development of the Grasshopper (has wings) against the Silverfish (doesn’t have wings).
Quote:
Neurogenesis (makin’ brain cells) was examined in the central nervous system of embryos of the primitively wingless insect, the silverfish…The silverfish has the same number and positioning of neuroblasts (precursors of brain cells - like grandfather cells) as seen in more advanced insects and the relative order in which the different neuroblasts segregate from the neuroectoderm is highly conserved between the silverfish and the grasshopper, Schistocerca…Of the 31 different neuroblasts (yup thats right they tracked every single cell and gave them all names) found in a thoracic segment, one (NB 6-3) has a much longer proliferative period in silverfish…Both insects have similar periods of abdominal neurogenesis except that in the silverfish terminal ganglion, a prominent set of neuroblasts continues dividing until close to hatching…This comparison between silverfish and grasshopper shows that the shift from wingless to flying insects was not accompanied by the addition of any new neuronal lineages in the thorax. Instead, selected lineages undergo a proliferative expansion to supply the additional neurons presumably needed for flight.
I hope that all makes sense but what it adds up to is that the nervous system apparatus that controls a whole wing can be the result of a few extra cell division cycles in a single cell in an embryo. Now you can see how single regulatory gene changes can do drastic things that will cause rapid evolution. There are many more examples but I’m not going to labor this - if you’re not convinced I can post more examples.
General Principles
Most of the anatomical changes that are the basis of evolution of organisms are simple changes in the sequence of events in early embryonic development. The earlier embryos of different species are, the more alike they are, and along the process of development small differences emerge that add up to a whole lot of difference in the grown animal.
Genes active in early embryonic development organize the whole business of building body parts. When scientists looked at regulatory genes in different species they found that the master genes in species that are hundreds of millions of years apart in evolution are highly similar. The same master genes are present in flies as in humans! However the structural genes (bricks and mortar) have diverged greatly.
How powerful are these genes? Have you ever seen an animal “mutate” into a different species? The answer is yes. If you are not convinced think about the metamorphosis of a tadpole into a frog. This is triggered by the action of a few master genes. It’s a fascinating area of biology by the way if we understood the gene switches better we could make human amputees regenerate whole limbs just as amphibians can do. As we evolved we lost the switching capability but many species can do it.
Now we know that these are the very genes that when damaged cause cancer. Cancer is often activation of a gene (by a virus or a mutation) that was responsible for triggering a period of rapid cell division in an embryo getting switched on again in an adult and all of a sudden cell division gets out of control = tumor. Mutations causing this kind of problem are often in those silent or non-coding stretches of DNA that affect the regulation of gene expression rather than any structural proteins.
There are many more examples and much more science to the story. The point though is that much of evolution has occurred through changes in regulation of gene expression during embryonic development. Most such mutations are lethal but some are highly advantageous and have resulted in rapid evolutionary changes. Remember this isn’t conjecture or speculation - we can reproduce this in the lab and make embryos morph into radically different creatures.
For those who are interested here is a link to a site that reviews a lot of the biology of the fruitfly that relates to embryonic development and genes.
PostScript - the evolution of the Brain
My area of research has been in the study of the evolution and embryonic development of the brain. If you’ve bothered to read this far I’m assuming you’re interested so I’m going to give one final example of how a couple of relatively simple mutations can have enormous and profound effects on the evolution of species - the evolution of higher brain function. How did it happen that we rocketed ahead of the apes in such a short timespan?
We know that most of the complex wiring of the brain that subserves higher brain functions occurs after birth, way after embryonic development, and IS NOT specified in the genetic code. Thats to say nurture > nature as far as personality and intellect goes. The subleties that make a Mozart or an Einstein largely occur after birth and are the result of the interaction of the brain with the environment. Early childhood experiences actually shape the way our brains wire up and determine many of our personality, intellectual, and athletic attributes. In short (and to simplify to make a point) the DNA template codes for a blank sheet of brain cells. Experience after birth forges into that sheet of brain tissue a human mind (assuming you accept that the mind is in the brain).
So how could human intelligence evolve in keeping with what I have said about mechanisms of evolution? At first it might seem hopelessly complex to begin to understand why humans are so different from chimps. There are many similarities. First the DNA sequences (chimp/human) are >98% homologous - thats right there’s hardly any difference in the genetic codes to explain the differences in intellect between us and the monkeys.
The embryos and their developmental anatomy are almost identical. In both the brain starts as a simple structure that is like a sheet of paper rolled into a tube (the neural tube). Then at the top end (the brain part) the wall of the tube thickens and grandfather cells (neuroblasts) furiously divide in the inner part of the tube and migrate to the outer surface to form brain cells of the cerebral cortex. There is a cool animation here. But this just puts the component brain cells in the right place.
Differences? - We do know that the human brain has enlarged rapidly in recent evolutionary time. Early transitional humans had significantly larger brains than the great apes.
Adult cranial capacity (range in cm3)
* chimpanzees 300-500
* early transitional humans 500-750
* modern humans 900-2300
The biggest difference between the brains of chimpanzees and humans is in the area of cerebral cortex which is that outer convoluted sheet of gray matter that is spread over the surface of the cerebral hemispheres. Humans have more than double the amount that chimps do. Pasko Rakic at Yale who is the leading world expert on the anatomy of the cerebral cortex has estimated that all it would take to explain the difference is one or two more cycles of cell division of some of the early grandfather cells in the embryonic brain and voila you have twice or four times as much as much cerebral cortex! Its that simple. The DNA doesnt need to code for Shakespeare or Mozart or Einstein it just mutated to make a bigger sheet of cells. As a result we have areas of cerebral cortex that can serve integrated and complicated functions subserving language, analytical thinking, and memory that outperform the chimp so drastically that we are sitting at our computers and they’re still in the same habitat they were in 4 million years ago. Hardly any DNA mutation but it affected cell division in the embryonic brain millions of years ago and we got an extra helping.
Couple that with a mutation that rotated the thumb the “wrong” way so it opposed the other fingers and another mutation that made the larynx bigger and allowed speech…You get the picture - its not linear - change some things and the effect is catastrophic. Change others and its not noticable.
So part of the reason for rapid evolutionary change is that critical genes are affected. There is no telling what mutations will do - it is not subtle and gradual, it is spectacular and sudden.
To those people who think human evolution is over now that we all live in a comfortable habitat - bah gg
Here’s another great one
People, the existence of God has nothing to do with the validity of the theory of evolution. Those who think it does are just mudslinging, either pro-God anti-science, or pro-science anti-God. Tearing down someone else’s idea doesn’t make yours better. Move along; don’t get the topic locked.
I also will try to avoid Omnislashing (bless his cold, dark heart) and instead construct my intellectual bludgeoning in a more accessible, fluid manner, but honest-to-God, there were so many inaccuracies and false assumptions in medamanx’s “essay” that I don’t know how I could begin to construct a cohesive counterpoint. My apologies to anyone I may restate herein; I’m trying to keep it cohesive.
With the possible exception of the tree fossil story, which I didn’t understand, every last one of your points is wrong. I could start with your definition of what a theory is but it would be petty.
Fossils: As Dukath already mentioned, fossils are rare events. However, they are not all caused by catastrophes; should an animal or plant fall into an anerobic environment like a bog, a swamp, or an oozebed on the ocean floor, it will largely escape decomposition and consumption by scavengers. A second and important point is that considering the rarity of fossilization as an event, you’re not going to make it into the fossil record unless you thrived and multiplied, and this becomes important later. No, the fossil record is not complete. Nobody expects that it should be. Yes, new species are sometimes inferred from a single bone or a small collection of bones. This is because paleontologists (the proper name for people who study fossils) who are intimately familiar with complete skeletons of some species, can tell that a single bone is similar to, but not similar enough to a previously contextualized one, to indicate that it is probably came from a closely related species.
Regarding Ramapithecus, I’m not familiar with the story but I’m not the least bit surprised by it. Let me tell you a story: in the mid to late 60’s a disease was studied among the Fore people of Papua New Guinea that seemed very similar to diseases which seemed to be heritable or communicable in the rest of the world. It was called Kuru, and by epidemiology it was traced to the practice of ritual cannibalism. It was intensely studied and classified as a “slow virus,” so named because it often took decades to manifest symptoms after infection, and an infectious agent could not be cultured. The problem was that neither could an infectious agent be isolated. Lo and behold, 15(ish) years later, Stanley Prusiner gets the nobel prize for presenting the supported theory that the disease is transmitted in the complete absence of nucleic acids, but instead by information encoded by the fold of a protein, and prions were born. Guess what I study for a living. The point is that scientists make mistakes, as they are human. But that doesn’t mean you throw everything out the window, as, in this instance, the entire science of virology wasn’t ruined by the misclassification of a prion as a virus.
Regarding missing links: as fossilization is a rare event, the folks most likely to make it into the record are those that existed in large numbers. Intermediates are thought to have been poorly adapted to their environment, or “unstable,” but only led to stabilized species because by chance their competition had been selected against in a particular environment. (This accounts both for expansion into new environments and sudden changes in old ones.) As to the origin of intermediates, I will address this soon.
Regarding evidence for the development of the vertebrates, there’s really not much of a need to look for fossil evidence because the evidence exists today. The missing link between invertebrates and vertebrates is alive and well. It’s a marine animal (Phylum Chordata) called Amphioxus lanceolatus. Little bastard has a notochord, which is what you had as a fetus before you started growing a spine. You also had gills right around that time somewhere, which opens up an entirely different set of supports for evolution we haven’t touched on. We’ll stick with these others for now. But your assumption that the development of vertebrates should have been this huge spectacular affair is puzzling. Why do you think this? If things had gone differently, they might have died out immediately and vertebrate morphology as we know it would be completely different, or there might not even be vertebrates at all—just gastropods and worms and insects ruling the land. When considering biology, you must discard the assumption that man is special. I think lots of people have a hard time with that.
Regarding Ediacara, I’m really happy for them that they managed to get a spot in the fossil record. Your argument that they appeared magically defeats itself, however. Since they are soft bodied, any event which fossilizes them would be rare. It is not, however, implausible that such an event could happen in multiple locations simultaneously because of a sudden climatic change. Consider, as an example, the hypothesis that solar input drops. Phytoplankton start to die in droves, wreaking havoc on the food chain and causing soft-bodied predators to starve as well. So you’ve got phytoplankton and starving predators falling to the ocean bottom faster than other things can eat them, and the phytoplankton bury the soft-bodied guys in a silt of their tiny silicaceous corpses. I mean, that took five minutes to come up with. Alternately, lets suppose these guys are living in estuaries, and a few decades of intense rain on the continent gets these guys dropping like flies from the change in salinity, as well as a hell of a lot of silt coming down the river to cover their corpses when the storms mount. That took even less time. But look, those particular events didn’t happen fifty thousand years earlier or later, did they, so there’s no evidence for their progenitors or descendants in the fossil record. Life can be hard.
Re: gradualism, that’s not the favored model. Here, I’ll explain how it works while explaining genetics as well. First, your assertion that the odds of mutation are 1:10^4 – 1:10^6 per gene per generation is false. The rate of mutation by proofreading errors is 1:10^4 – 1:10^6 base pairs per cell division. The overwhelming bulk of these mutations are harmless as they are more likely to make a neutral amino acid substitution than a negative one, or worse, a stop codon, they’re more likely to hit a redundant gene (like ribosomes or transfer RNAs) than something absolutely essential and highly conservative (like cytochrome c) and are on top of that also quite likely to occur somewhere totally irrelavent to the function of the cell.
I’m about to present a hypothetical situation, but I see these sorts of things almost every week; closely related proteins that have different but overlapping functions.
Let’s consider a protein in a small furry mammal. It’s a signaling protein that helps your, I don’t know, pituitary gland properly export growth hormone to the bloodstream from the cell. Well, bad luck, your small furry mammal father ate a funny looking fruit that had absorbed some heavy metals from God-knows-where, and as a result you’ve got one copy of this gene mutated. Fortunately, it’s partially functional, and you still have another good copy, but you’re 5% smaller as an adult. Well, this can be rough on a young furry mammal but you end up finding a hot-looking furry-mammal-of-the-opposite-sex and you two end up with a litter of furry mammals, roughly half of which have your mutation. Being 5% smaller isn’t enough to kill you even if you’re less attractive and maybe a little less able to catch and eat slugs. (You eat slugs for a living, I didn’t mention that?) You don’t go hungry, and your gene works its way into the pool. Occasionally, this results in homozygotes for the gene that, as a result of having two “bad” copies, are 20% smaller, which IS a serious problem, and they rarely if ever reproduce. That’s bad news, because your gene is being selected against, and you had dreams of being a famous innovator in pituitary gland export. (Actually, your dreams were probably about chasing slugs.) Ultimately, your gene is going to be lost, or at least, it would have been, except warmer summers have brought the alligators up the river, and they’re going after the small furry mammals. Bad news for everyone… except your descendants, the runts. The runts suddenly find they have an advantage, as they can better hide in rock crevices when the gators come, and they’re a bit more nimble than their full-size kin. Plus, the gators barely consider them worth eating. All of a sudden, your competition within the gene pool is getting eaten, and you’re sitting happy in your rock crevice with a stomach full of slugs and a furry mammal on each paw. The take home message: à Speciation can be caused by the sudden selection for previously unimportant genetic differences. ß
This is the crudest of examples. I had a better one two years ago about bacteria. See if any of the archivists can find it for you.
Regarding intricately coordinated systems, they don’t have to work all at the same time. When you consider that the systems were developed over tens of millions of years by accumulating fine synergistic adjustments within an organism, it makes perfect sense that the result would be capable of doing a lot more than the beginning components. I already described how sexual reproduction came about.
Life is not thought to have originated from the cosmic dust of the big bang, as the big bang produced almost nothing but hydrogen. The elements necessary for life were created in the hearts of aging stars. Yes, “We are all made of stars” is more than just an irritating Moby single.
Pasteur’s experiments were intended to demonstrate that microbes were not some bizarre side-effect of the nature of the world, that they were instead living things that reproduced like everything else. They were also conducted on a time scale vastly smaller than that of the formation of life in the primordium is thought to have been. Also, the conditions in Pasteur’s sterile chicken broth were quite different than those on the surface of the new Earth. As Dukath and I already mentioned, these conditions favored the generation of self-replicating protobiological structures which by chance eventually began to cooperate. The primary reason this no longer happens is that those conditions don’t exist anymore.
With the exception of the tree story, with which I’m unfamiliar, I’ve refuted your arguments as presented. As a rebuttal to the statement that science pollutes our school systems, I would like to point out that the only groups which I have been able to find making a point of rejecting evolution are the Hare Krishna, an obscure Inuit tribe (because the Bering strait migration theory doesn’t match their oral history) and fundamentalist protestant Christian denominations. Without fail, every detractor to the science behind the theory of evolution has a non-scientific agenda of their own which they wish to promote in its place. So take it back to your place of worship, because neither of our religious dogmas has any place in public schools. Evolution stays, because there is no better supported scientific explanation in existence.
For me at least the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, it’s like denying gravity. Of course we can’t be sure how the original primordial no-even-single celled organism came to life… and ended up containing a few slight variations of a few proteins, which define every characteristic of every organism on earth.
Wow, the Great Barrier Reef is the world’s youngest developed reef. Besides, living reefs aren’t really that accurate anyway as they are very vulnerable to climactic and current changes and only form in warm, shallow water you’d expect to form on land that has recently been inundated by rising sea levels. Therefore most reefs developed since the Ice Age ended, despite there being some in the Marshall Islands (on a submerged volcano) that have shown over 160,000 years of coral activity and are still alive.
The oldest reef ever is dated at 1.2 billion years old. The fact that most reefs now are less than 8000 years old is coincidental to your point.
which reef is that??