Why do so many Catholics accept evolution as fact?

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rossum said:
Humans are susceptible to scurvy because we cannot make vitamin C. Primates, and other mammals with a functioning version of the gene are not susceptible to scurvy. It sure looks non-functional to me.

Correct. Mutation is not natural selection. Mutation increases the diversity in a population’s genome. Natural selection reduced diversity. They are very different processes.

There is a STOP codon in the same position in all the broken GULO-P pseudogenes, near the beginning. That is what I meant by “broken in the same way”.

It is still subject to mutations and to neutral drift. It is no longer subject to natural selection. If you are going to talk about evolution, then you really should know this already. Mutation, natural selection and neutral drift are three basic and fundamental processes in evolution.

rossum
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👍🍿
 
rossum said:
Humans are susceptible to scurvy because we cannot make vitamin C. Primates, and other mammals with a functioning version of the gene are not susceptible to scurvy. It sure looks non-functional to me.

Correct. Mutation is not natural selection. Mutation increases the diversity in a population’s genome. Natural selection reduced diversity. They are very different processes.

There is a STOP codon in the same position in all the broken GULO-P pseudogenes, near the beginning. That is what I meant by “broken in the same way”.

It is still subject to mutations and to neutral drift. It is no longer subject to natural selection. If you are going to talk about evolution, then you really should know this already. Mutation, natural selection and neutral drift are three basic and fundamental processes in evolution.

rossum
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I didn’t know this. Thank you for supplying me with such information. 🙂
 
goout said:
Ed, you have a responsibility to educate yourself in the science if you are going to refute it. And I’m not talking about google.
Start with a basic geology or earth science course which can give you a sense of time and go from there.
Please.
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This does nothing to further your argument; nor does it offer any proof to counter those that have been proposed other than perhaps appealing to authority. In making that sort of argument, one shouldn’t condescend.

What Ed said is actually correct; it is your “educated” opinion, I suppose.

He is also justified in saying that all we have is what is now, the record (which includes memory) of events that have happened in the past to construct a story of what has been. Clearly, we need to make assumptions about how things work. We have to believe that what is now, like human life expectancy, has always been. The behaviour of genetic material is assumed by most science to be the result of biochemical activity. It therefore implies the assumption that matter does not move in accordance to the will of God, that He could not introduce great genetic diversity over a few generations.

In order to understand, we require a conceptual framework which ultimately rests on a philosophical ground. Theories are needed to know what to look for. So, even raw data can be said to have been heavily processed; moreso the statistical analyses that underlie scientific “facts”.
 
Techno2000 said:
That’s the problem I haven’t got a clear answer, can someone point to animal right now after billions of years have passed and say this animal is becoming something new ?
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You do realize almost all of the animals alive today were not around billions or even hundreds of millions of years right?
 
I encourage everyone reading this thread not to believe anything you read here without question. No matter how logical it appears. Unless someone here actually possesses qualifications and experience in that scientific field, I would take everything they post with a grain of salt.

University of Google is not a recognised tertiary institution.😛
 
Wesrock said:
You do realize almost all of the animals alive today were not around billions or even hundreds of millions of years right?
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So what then was around billions of years ago, and how long did it take a cell to become a cell ?
 
Techno2000 said:
So what then was around billions of years ago, and how long did it take a cell to become a cell ?
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1 billion years ago seems to have seen the beginnings of the first sexually reproducing organisms. But we’ve no need to dive into abiogenesis or the origins of life. Modern horses have only been on the scene for five million years or so. Sometime before then there were no modern horses. There were horse like things or so… but that’s only going back another ten or so million years. Prior to that, we don’t have anything that could be considered a horse at all, though we did have some quadropeds walking around with some bone structure only found today in horses and similar mammals. We find no vertebrates before 500 million years ago. And life’s been on Earth, what, 3.8 billion years?

But again, no need to go back to the beginning, most birds and mammals alive today did not exist as they are until the last few million years. Modern man only a few hundred thousand. They’ve not just existed consistently since mammals first appeared.
 
edwest2 said:
You can pass through many, many, many different generations of bacteria and you still get bacteria. The bacteria who have never been exposed to this or that are still out there.

Ed
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Bacteria are an entire domain of life! You can get a lot of speciation events and macro-evolution and still have bacteria. The question is whether they stay the same species of bacteria forever.
 
Wesrock said:
1 billion years ago seems to have seen the beginnings of the first sexually reproducing organisms. But we’ve no need to dive into abiogenesis or the origins of life. Modern horses have only been on the scene for five million years or so. Sometime before then there were no modern horses. There were horse like things or so… but that’s only going back another ten or so million years. Prior to that, we don’t have anything that could be considered a horse at all, though we did have some quadropeds walking around with some bone structure only found today in horses and similar mammals. We find no vertebrates before 500 million years ago. And life’s been on Earth, what, 3.8 billion years?

But again, no need to go back to the beginning, most birds and mammals alive today did not exist as they are until the last few million years. Modern man only a few hundred thousand. They’ve not just existed consistently since mammals first appeared.
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What was the first life form to appear on the Earth ?
 
goout said:
👍
There are textbooks full of solid evidentiary connections for the development of organisms.
To deny this is nothing short of pagan superstition. It’s no different that refusing to take your child to the doctor because you believe modern medicine is speculation.
No different.
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That is incorrect and a reading of history shows that people without great education, learned which parts of a plant had a beneficial effect. “Willow bark, the bark of several varieties of willow tree, has been used for centuries as a pain reliever.”

Incorrect comparison.

Ed

Pagan superstition. Wow. At the risk of sounding ignorant, I am highly trained and have years of practical experience under my belt. I have been asked to track down a wide variety of information and it had better be accurate. I’ve been given opportunities to learn about things of which I had no previous knowledge.
 
rossum said:
So, Ed. you have no problem with eukaryotes evolving from eukaryotes, or (as in the news) deuterostomes evolving from deuterostomes?

Yes, they are still bacteria, but they are new species of bacteria. New species of bacteria (and of eukaryotes) are evolving all the time.

Chimps and humans are both mammals. Does that mean you have no objection to common ancestry between the two, “You can pass through many, many, many different generations of mammals and you still get mammals.”

rossum
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I completely reject the unproven assumption that chimps and humans had a common ancestor. It doesn’t make sense that an ape just gave birth to a baby that looked more human while other apes just kept producing apes.

Ed
 
edwest2 said:
I completely reject the unproven assumption that chimps and humans had a common ancestor. It doesn’t make sense that an ape just gave birth to a baby that looked more human while other apes just kept producing apes.

Ed
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Right, and what happen to the wasp… where did it go?
 
OK, I am opting out of evolution threads. They end up being dominated by that ever so rare creature - the fundamentalist Catholic. I used to think it was good to participate so that lurkers seeking to learn about Catholicism don’t assume that the rare creationist was typical of Catholics. But the frustration of the disingenuous fake “dialogue” is just too much. If anyone is actually here to learn about Catholic teaching, read the Church’s actual statements on science and evolution and don’t rely on the fringe creationists that try to dominate these threads.
 
edwest2 said:
Uh, they’re all human beings.

Ed
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But slightly different human beings. I don’t have the same genes as my mother or my father. I am different.
Evolution doesn’t happen in one day. To liken it to a human’s growth, we can look at each stage of life as being analogous to evolution. A newly fertilized embryo is significantly different versus an old man physically speaking. And if you took photos of the person from conception to death in one second intervals, you’d see barely any difference between any two consecutive photos. But if you looked at them in 1 year intervals you’d see the differences coming over time.

So it is with the evolution of species. A baby will not be majorly different than its parents generally speaking. And each consecutive baby will not be much different than the other. But when you look at it over the long run, you notice the differences. One of the posters linked an article that had a picture of hominid skulls over a long period of time. Each skull compared to the successive one wasn’t too much different. But you could see clear differences by looking at the first and the last. Evolution is slight differences compounding over time and producing an individual that’s a little different and who’s offspring will be different.

It’s kind of like geological processes. A new island is forming in the Hawaiian chain right now. If you look at it today and then tomorrow you’ll see no difference in it and maybe say “It’s not even above the water. How can it be becoming an island?” But bit by bit it’s growing and will eventually become an island after a long time. That’s kind of how it is with evolution, but due to it’s random nature we don’t know what will come of evolution one million years from now like we know the end result of a geological process. But we can look at the past with the fossil record and see where it’s been.

A big question I’d have to anyone doubting evolution is: What about dinosaurs?
 
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