Why you should think that the Natural-Evolution of species is true

[Beyond_Reason]

Beyond_Reason:

We actually have seen evolution bring about new and different life forms. The biosphere today is very different from what it was 50 million years ago.

Er, no; on the contrary, no one at all has seen evolution bring about new and different life forms. Your Darwinian belief system cannot be verified as a fact.

Besides that, do you know for a fact that the new and different life forms were not the result of separate creations, ie, divine intervention?

Evolution brings about new and different life forms all the time. It has been witnessed under controlled conditions as well as in nature.

And can I prove God isn’t just making them look like they’re evolving? It would be a bizarre and deceitful God but you wanna talk about useless theories, lol

 

[Beyond_Reason]

Prove to me that God didn’t create the universe in 1850 and make it look like it already existed.

 

[rossum]

Prove to me that God didn’t create the universe in 1850 and make it look like it already existed.

Heretic! Her Cosmic Theofelinity created the universe last Thursday, together with the perfect appearance of age. Anyone who says differently will spend eternity in the Litterbox of Doom!

rossum

 

[Metis1]

Really? So what does the fossil record reveal as the evolutionary ancestors of fish? Where are the millions of transitional fossils that should exist between dinosaurs and birds? Why does the Cambrian explosion reveal disparity before diversity - the opposite of what evolution predicts?

First of all, will you provide scientific evidence to show that micro-evolution cannot lead into macro-evolution? All I ever see by some is this deflection into something else.

Do you have any children, by chance? Is so, look into a mirror, and what you see is a “transitional form” since evolution never stops. Also, you might google “speciation” and check out the scientific links that are provided even in their Wiki article.

Also, you are wrong about your “disparity before diversity” comment as environmental factors that are highly restrictive actually tend to lead to greater diversity since gene pools tend to be smaller, thus accelerating the evolutionary rate, and this is due to the greater probability that mutations carried as recessive genes have a greater chance of become the phenotype due to better mathematical odds.

Also, there’s really nothing that mysterious at all about the Cambrian Explosion as the grouping of cells that lead from single-celled organisms to multi-celled organisms created myriads of possible combinations, thus the “Explosion”.

Finally, do you really think that the vastly overwhelming majority of biologists and geneticists are so ignorant and/or dishonest that they don’t know what they’ve studied and concluded? If your position is so scientifically compelling, then why are they overwhelmingly against your position? Are they mostly atheists? American biologists overall, according to a PEW poll, are about 50/50 between them and theists, and yet there’s an overwhelming acceptance of the basic ToE within them as well.

 

[Aloysium]

I’ve argued with enough Young earth creationists and flat-earthers to know exactly where this is headed.

Given the time and effort you put into this post, it warrants a reply. But, off to a bad start I suppose, my first thought was, “What a waste of time.” But it led me to reflect on why I would bother responding to this or any similar posts. The fact is that my thinking has changed 120 degrees (already 60 degrees along the way) since I started on this topic. I’ve gotten there using my God-given reason, looking at the evidence and clarifying definitions. I don’t know where this is heading, but the hope is that some reader will see the science, as it should be viewed - by the Light that is Jesus Christ, the Logos whereby all is brought into existence. It is by the grace of the Holy Spirit that we approach the truth, but it is up to us to share what we know.

Reason and the evidence reveal creation.

But, the idea of evolution is ubiquitous. Let’s take an article which appearred today:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/23/health/climate-change-infant-sex-ratio-intl/index.html

Ray Catalano, a professor in the school of public health at the University of California, Berkeley, explained that the process of natural selection in utero is why deaths occur during gestation. A mother’s biology spontaneously aborts some conceptions in utero but not others. The factors that filter out who “gets through” from conception to birth include chromosomal or genetic abnormalities of the fetus or the mother’s stress response to changes in her environment, Catalano said.

He could have left it at the genetics and epigenetics of intrauterine development, but, you’ve got to throw in “natural selection” to place the process within the modern mythos. This is where we engage in pseudoscience, going beyond the data which can be interpreted philosophically any number of ways. The assumption in secular society is that there is no God, that we are not in a fallen world, subject to the whims of nature acting randomly, but destined in Jesus Christ for salvation in final union with God as we were meant to be eternal.

So for HIV research, I really only need to talk about viral evolution, since even that would negate the majority of anti-evolution arguments made in this thread,

No, no, and no; none of this is demonstrated by the different forms that viruses can take over time. It is what they do, being and always remaining viruses.

In the lab we also observe bacteria being bacteria.

I may be “just some dude on the internet with a weird axe to grind”, but, you’ve essentially admitted to being the same. I actually do understand the subject matter, and that is why I have to say something, and I can’t think of a better place to do it.

I guess the message still hasn’t gotten through, that evolution is not biology, but rather a story. I think the revolution in biology is taking place, but it takes a religious understanding to put it in the rightful perspective.

 

[Aloysium]

First of all, will you provide scientific evidence to show that micro-evolution cannot lead into macro-evolution? All I ever see by some is this deflection into something else.

You are basically admitting that the “theory” is unfalsifiable. The onus on you is to demonstrate that it is, that it is indeed science.

Do you have any children, by chance? Is so, look into a mirror, and what you see is a “transitional form” since evolution never stops.

Are you suggesting you are more or less human?

Finally, do you really think that the vastly overwhelming majority of biologists and geneticists are so ignorant and/or dishonest that they don’t know what they’ve studied and concluded?

They are human beings as are you and I. I’m conversing with you and I don’t think you don’t know what you’ve studied or are being dishonest.

 

[Beyond_Reason]

My response was to a different person and what i said doesnt apply to you because you are different, but I think you have a metaphysical assumption. So I ask again, why is the enormous evolutionary capability of viruses “just viruses being viruses” but it’s impossible for plants to evolve and just say “its plants being plants”? Plant genes mutate just like virus genes do. They’re also subject to selection pressure.

 

[Beyond_Reason]

I feel I need to clarify on viruses. You talk about them like they are undergoing metamorphosis like a caterpillar or tadpole. That is not true, it is mutation across generations, just like evolution at the multicellular level.

 

[Aloysium]

My response was to a different person and what i said doesnt apply to you because you are different, but I think you have a metaphysical assumption. So I ask again, why is the enormous evolutionary capability of viruses “just viruses being viruses” but it’s impossible for plants to evolve and just say “its plants being plants”? Plant genes mutate just like virus genes do. They’re also subject to selection pressure.

I do confess to being some random internet idiot.

Trees are being trees, grasses are grasses, human beings are human beings, all being what they are. Their kind of being was created at their beginnings with the potential for diversity to participate fully in their environment and to demonstrate the creativity and beauty, the glory of God. Recombination and gene transfer were all “pre-programmed” as was the capacity to respond to environmental conditions, both in the individual expression of the particular kind of organism and its offspring. There is no true “natural selection”; everything is merely part of its environment where it flourishes or doesn’t.

Of course there are metaphysical assumptions. That is what evolutionary theory is with its basis in materialism and utilitarianism. We can choose to see creation, as we do with the Old Testament, through the Light that is Jesus Christ.

 

[Beyond_Reason]

There is no true “natural selection”; everything is merely part of its environment where it flourishes or doesn’t.

Where exactly is your objection to natural selection?
Do an organism’s physical characteristics make them more or less likely to flourish?
If so, would those organisms who have characteristics that make them more likely to flourish pass on the genes that give them those characteristics to their offspring?
If so, would organisms with those more fit genes eventually grow in number and spread those genes throughout the population?
Is the inverse true, that organisms with physical characteristics that make them less likely to survive and reproduce would not spread their genes as effectively?

 

[Aloysium]

You talk about them like they are undergoing metamorphosis like a caterpillar or tadpole.

Were they to undergoing those sorts of metamorphoses one would expect more consistency. It would be easy to predict the next form of the virus because it would be programmed to follow a specific pattern. The pattern is chaotic in a sense, predictable in its random unpredictability. The aim for medicine would be getting at what doesn’t change.

Viruses are something more than just atoms and less than prokaryotes. To my way of thinking these three kinds of things describe different levels within the hierarchy of creation, with each individual expression, be it an atom, virus or bacterium, existing as it does as itself and as part of some larger system. The changes found in the structure of viruses in time is simply that. To call these changes, evolution may be accurate in the sense that change occurs within a series of self-replicating objects. but confounds the understanding of the differences we find in nature, how they are scattered in time and what they represent.

Caterpillars and tadpoles are wondrous creatures. Amphibians have been around in different forms, according to the fossil record and modern dating methods for about 300,000,000 years. While this shows great resilience, the modern version, frogs and salamanders are among the most fragile of all species and the most threatened today with extinction, the reality of natural selection. Butterflies from caterpillars are a universal symbol of transcendence, as we emerge, transformed, the soul soaring free from the shackles that bind us to the mundane and suffering, beyond the limits of our ignorance to see reality as it is. In both cases there is one essential being who undergoes a metamorphosis.

What might be termed “evolutionary” are changes in a kind of thing, a genus perhaps, but something that exists through individual expressions of what they are, as we are all one humankind, each of us regardless of whatever genetic abnormalities we possess that remain consistent with life, and all of us collectively fallen in Adam, reunited in Christ.

 

[Aloysium]

Aloysium:

There is no true “natural selection”; everything is merely part of its environment where it flourishes or doesn’t.

Where exactly is your objection to natural selection?
Do an organism’s physical characteristics make them more or less likely to flourish?
If so, would those organisms who have characteristics that make them more likely to flourish pass on the genes that give them those characteristics to their offspring?
If so, would organisms with those more fit genes eventually grow in number and spread those genes throughout the population?
Is the inverse true, that organisms with physical characteristics that make them less likely to survive and reproduce would not spread their genes as effectively?

The issue is has to do with perspective.

Nature might be said to be that aspect of creation that has a physical dimension.

Natural selection is a term that highlights the tension that can exist between an organism and it’s environment. Nature is said to select; for atheists it does so blindly, while pantheists would attribute it to a supreme identity that is everything and imagines itself separate.

Selection by the environment is an abstraction that is the shadow of a reality where everything participates in the formation of an encompassing system - the world. The environment and the individual forms of which it is constituted is perpetually in motion, like the earth, the wind and water that is the weather and the firey sun, whose energy drives the system, the basic elements from which life has been moulded. Something that doesn’t have its niche, which cannot transform external matter into its bodily form, develop, grow and procreate, will not produce offspring.

To reduce the majesty, beauty and general awesomeness of living things as they have diversified from their original state, to natural selection is essentially scraping the bottom of the barrel; that one’s life boiled down to eating and copulating.

There is so much more to the process of creation. Obviously, one can reduce existence to utilitarian terms and that’s what natural selection is about. What has made life flourish on earth is God’s final cause in bringing this all about - the sharing of His glory with His creatures.

 

[buffalo]

See here’s your problem. You can’t get any money by just theorizing. Evolutionary biology is useful and is testable and produces results. Not theorizing, research .

Just peruse through a few of these papers:

https://www.nature.com/subjects/evolutionary-biology

Look at the data, look at the complex models and specific esoteric language. 92 papers in the last year in just one scientific journal. This is what I can’t understand, how people who don’t seem to even have a good grasp of the basic concepts can just dismiss all of this with a sweep of the hand and an a priori certainty that their preconceptions are correct, without any real research on their own. It’s the height of arrogance.

ROTFL …

 

[buffalo]

When out of arguments always attack the poster. Nice.

 

[Beyond_Reason]

I don’t understand, that was highly complimentary.

 

[buffalo]

So many appendixes and tonsils were removed due to evo theory.

 

[edwest]

I have a background in electronics and understand the basic concepts. However, I would be hard pressed to keep up with certain aspects of the field. Biology research journals are interesting but complex models and esoteric language are both esoteric to the layman. Those who are motivated, and who have some background, can get through it.

Biology is useful for research, but trial and error accounts for high drug prices.

 

[Beyond_Reason]

Appendixes and tonsils are not removed because of evolution, lol.

 

[buffalo]

Appendixes and tonsils are not removed because of evolution, lol.

Oh yes they were. Thought to be evolutionary leftovers and they convinced the medical community. Now we know better.

 

[Beyond_Reason]

Actually I think it was more because tonsils have a tendency to house common infections and appendixes have a tendency to ‘explode’, and taking them out didn’t have any obvious negative effect. Doctors weren’t just like “Well evolution is a thing therefore this random organ must be useless.”

I mean come on man. You just heard a talking point about evolution and vestigial organs and completely got the logic backwards.