Why do so many Catholics accept evolution as fact?

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Techno2000 said:
Can you show any animal today that is in the process of changing into something new ?
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What would we have to show you that would count?

Despite the way it’s often talked about in pop culture, evolution doesn’t have a direction or goals. It’s just a change in allele frequency in populations, which happens because of the principles I outlined earlier. Sometimes those changes accumulate over time into a difference big enough that we would call the result an entirely new species. But I can’t point in advance to a case in which that will eventually happen. There might be a population of fish that would be slightly better than their neighbors at adapting to living on land part of the time, but if environmental pressures never force them to try that, they’re not spontaneously going to become land animals. And if I showed such a group to you now, I can almost guarantee you’d say “They’re still fish.”
 
mVitus said:
Define “changing into something new.”
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Species changes over time to the point where that population is distinct and can no longer interbreed with the “parent” population. In order for one population to diverge enough from another to become a new species.
 
All populations are under selection pressures. How a current population of an animal looks today will compare to a descendant population 100,000 years from now or 1,000,000 years from now is in the realm of speculation. The current pop might barely look different from a descendant pop 100,000 years from now, which might look a little different from the pop 100,000 years after that, which might look a little different than a descendant pop 100,000 years after. Compare anything close together and you might not see much, if any change. Compare populations separated by millions of years and you’ll see something more significant, or perhaps not at all. Depends upon the selection pressures they face. Nor does it mean all descendant populations will see the same trait selection.

The ancestors of bees were probably some type of predatory wasp that also fed on pollen, but bugs don’t fossilize well.

What animal is currently changing? All of them and none. As I said before, it’s a bad question that only seems like it would make sense if someone had a poor grasp of evolution. As bad as an atheist thinking the “burrito” question posted above serves as an adequate “gotcha” to disprove God. It just shows a fundamental lack of understanding. To explain that God can’t eat or what have you, and simply have the atheist repeat the question back at you, is just a pointless discussion.
 
Techno2000 said:
I’m talking about one animal slowly changing into some new animal, and leaving a trail of bones to show every stage of its progression, not an artist’s rendering of what that might look like. For every animal that has bones today there should be a trail of bones to show how it got that way.
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How about {i}Cerion? Not bones, but shells, and a good series of shells gradually changing from one species to another to another. See Evolution and speciation in the Bahamian land snail Cerion.

Other examples include ring species.

There is plenty of evidence available.

rossum
 
Techno2000 said:
Species changes over time to the point where that population is distinct and can no longer interbreed with the “parent” population. In order for one population to diverge enough from another to become a new species.
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Didn’t we already have that with the Galapagos finches that put Darwin on the scent in the first place?
 
Techno2000 said:
That’s called procreation,not evolution… can you answer the Question or not ?
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My God help us.

Look at any organism. See how the traits of parents are blended and mixed and passed along, continually.
Hair color skin color, genetic traits of all kinds. Do you see that human beings come with a variety of changing genetic traits?

Open you eyes, then start thinking.
 
To be clear it’s not as if it’s just standard that snakeflies become wasps and wasps become bees. Isolated populations underwent different pressures and established different niches and favored certain traits. If a group has a niche and no pressures that favor different traits and the population is significantly large, the traits it has will probably remain relatively constant.
 
Usagi said:
Didn’t we already have that with the Galapagos finches that put Darwin on the scent in the first place?
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They are still finches and they will produce more finches, and nothing will change.
 
Wesrock said:
To be clear it’s not as if it’s just standard that snakeflies become wasps and wasps become bees. Isolated populations underwent different pressures and established different niches and favored certain traits. If a group has a niche and no pressures that favor different traits and the population is significantly large, the traits it has will probably remain relatively constant.
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And you show snakeflies becoming wasp, and wasp becoming bees…How ?
 
Techno2000 said:
Species changes over time to the point where that population is distinct and can no longer interbreed with the “parent” population. In order for one population to diverge enough from another to become a new species.
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The smallest genetic change I am aware of is a change of three genes which resulted in speciation of two species of Chrysopa: *C. carnea/]i and C. downesi. See Tauber and Tauber (1977) Sympatric Speciation Based on Allelic Changes at Three Loci: Evidence from Natural Populations in Two Habitats.

Allelic changes at three loci largely explain Chrysopa downesi’s sympatric speciation from a Chrysopa carnea-like ancestor. Disruptive selection first produced a stable polymorphism based on a single pair of alleles that adapted individuals to two habitats, and second, it established seasonal asynchrony in reproduction through allelic substitutions at two loci.

To translate that into English, the “adapted individuals to two habitats” means that some individuals (downesi) are green all year round, and so adapted to camouflage in evergreen trees, while other individuals (carnea)switch from green to brown in winter, and so are camouflaged in deciduous trees. One genetic change caused this difference. Two more changes, “two loci”, altered the breeding season of the new variant ((downesi) so the two do not interbreed in the wild. They live in different habitats and do not interbreed, they are two different species with only three genetic differences.

As with lions and tigers, or horses and donkeys, they can be made to interbreed in the lab and produce fertile offspring, though the offspring are not well camouflaged and so are selected against in the wild. These two are in the process of separating, like lions and tigers (ligers, tigons) and horses and donkeys (mules).

rossum*
 
Techno2000 said:
But they are still snails.
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We are talking about speciation. They are different species of snail, so that is speciation.

Chimps and humans are still mammals so presumably you have no problem with chimps and humans sharing a common ancestor?

Sunflowers and humans are still eukaryotes, so presumably you have no problem with sunflowers and humans sharing a common ancestor?

All you are doing here is showing us the equivalent of “I don’t believe the Bible, so I’ve never read it.” You are not rejecting evolution, you are rejecting your own personal misunderstanding of evolution.

Now go and research how many different species of snails there are. All those snails are the result of different speciation events, which is what you have been asking us about.

rossum
 
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