InformedIgnorance
Do you 'know' or believe?
The propogation of a change to an individual can occur in a single generation, however the increase in prevalence of a characteristic in a species requires multiple generations for any particular change or series of changes.
Okay, this is a paraphrasing of what I have just written to allow you to better comprehend the concept of evolution which you are misstating.See, right there!! Stop right there!!! It happens every single time...and I've said this exact same thing to about 5 different people on here. Did you just see what happened?
You went from
"...the mouse and the whale are both mammals, there are similarities to their skeletal structure"
to
"some very distant ancestor of a mouse was also the very distance ancestor of a whale".
Did you see how just left science and stepped right in the the religous realm? It happened so fast, you didn't even see itFrom the time you fixed your fingers to start typing the sentence about ancestry, you started to walk away from science and right into the religious realm.
There are some fundamental realities that simply need to be accepted, please indicate if you do not accept one of the following:
- An organism has vastly similar characteristics (such as hair colour) to both their parent(s) and child(ren)
- An organism might inherit some characteristics (like hair colour) from their parent(s) and propagate some characteristics to their child(ren)
- An organism which produces more children is more likely to propagate characteristics (such as hair color)
- This makes those characteristics (for example hair colour in a region) more prevalent within the group of organisms which it breeds with (ie the same type and in proximity with)
Do you agree with each of the points thus far? If so you accept evolution at least at some level. The question then becomes what level of evolution do you find objectionable, the problem being that there is absolutely no scientific basis upon which we can suggest that evolution can occur and influence things such as hereditary hair colour while maintaining it cannot occur for other characteristics.
Up until fairly recently all we had were mountains of fossils and a great deal of extrapolations based on those and so I can understand that you might find this difficult to accept given both you and I are not scientists let alone botanists/biologists/etc. But the capability we have so recently acquired in terms of genetic sequencing really does blow this out of the water - we are capable now of identifying at a molecular level, the heirachies of similarities in genes.
It is really quite difficult to adequately convey just how important this is - before we were limited to comparing the form of fossils and animals and making educated 'guesses' based on what we knew at the time, however, with genetic sequencing what we can actually do is compare the genetic code of any organism about which we have preserved material (if the genetic material (the molecular structure) has degraded sufficiently it would become difficult) to identify the similarities and differences at a level that is truly extraordinarily difficult to comprehend, the equivalent of being able to look at air and determine if what you were looking at was a molecule of water as opposed to nitrogen... we are talking small.
It isnt merely the similarities and differences they use though, what they are able to do by comparing them is to look at continuous sections of similarity and differences in order to establish a heirarchy of genetic similarities, this is how we identify the propogation of characteristics which have occurred in the past - basically the DNA of an organism actually allows us to determine the lineage.
For you and I, neither one a biologist, this is pretty difficult stuff to wrap your head around. But basically speaking, our ability to determine evolutionary history that FAR predates us is the result of having developed a mechanism by which we can look at what we have now and identify the vestiges of propogation throughout history.
Remembering that species is merely a label that humans developed, we would then need to apply one category or another to a particular organism - given that we exist now it would be very difficult to identify the specific generation at which that label would or would not apply and indeed were humans to have been present at the time, it would have been extremely difficult for us to use those labels to seperate the organisms given that each individual is SOOO similar to their parent(s) and child(ren) the changes in one generation are far too insignificant to warrant a seperate species label, it is the accumulation of changes that eventually warrants it over many generations.
A parallel would be kind of like asking at what height does a person become 'tall', now you might decide 6' is tall for a man and say 5'8" for a woman and that anyone shorter than this is 'short'. Yet is there a significant difference between a male who is 5'11" and one that is 6'? No, yet using that manmade height labels of 'tall' and 'short', suddenly there appears a difference. Yet there would be no difference in label for a man who is 5'11 as compared to one who is 3'.
Labels are simply things humans have created for the ease of categorization and comparison. Nothing more.
Actually we can see it happen for example with microbiology. Given the very fast life cycles (the generations in microbiology can be measured in parts of a second for some organisms) this means the ability to observe cumulative changes is greatly enhanced with microorganisms.
However ideologically based resistance to such things is difficult to overcome; and unfortunately they come up with labels like 'kind' that they refuse to define so that it is impossible to contradict. Microbiology is the field in which the scientific community has most soundly demonstrated the shortcomings of ideologically based fallacies held up as refutations of evolution. I am not a scientist, let alone a microbiologist, but even still I have seen those who oppose evolution claim one barrier or another (such as producing populations that are sufficiently diverged as to lack the capacity to interbreed) as being the demarcation of 'kind' which they asserted was not possible for evolution to overcome, yet is subsequently shown to have been overcome - every time this happens, the goal posts of what consistutes 'kind' is moved, because it is demonstrated to be without basis in the natural world.
Okay, so you accept that it is possible to be theistic and recognise the validity of evolution with an assumption of supernatural supervision - do you consider a theistic (supervised) evolutionary position to be one that is reasonable? Your post seems to imply as much but I want to be explicit on this. Because if you do - then you concede that it is entirely reasonable to believe a natural process can achieve these outcomes - it is simply that you believe there is a need for a supervisory force - an assertion that science has no basis to determine as valid and that then becomes the difference, an assumption that there is a need for a supervisor. If not, well if you believe it is not reasonable to assume that god could have created the diversity of life through a natural process such as evolution (even with occasional interference), then I am not sure there is much more to discuss as your very significant perception of a need for direct creation is such that it unlikely supports an old earth model and if you cannot accept an old earth you are almost certainly not able to accept evolution as the reality it has been conclusively demonstrated to be.
edit: 3333 posts amusing.
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