-
Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:- Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
- Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
- Access to private conversations with other members.
We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
some thoughts on creationism
- Thread starter Eddi
- Start date
osgart
Nothing my eye, Something for sure
How is that determined?
It's pretty clear once you understand and have observed the actual mechanism. Natural selection works, so why posit extra and untestable steps?
How is popping into existence fully-formed determined?
osgart
Nothing my eye, Something for sure
Popping into existence fully formed is not something that I claim.
Extra steps are needed to explain the planning of the forms.
What planning? Do you understand how the forms evolved to be as they are? Do you understand the mechanism?
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
Evidence
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
There is no planning.
There is only the gradual adaption to external conditions / selection pressures.
osgart
Nothing my eye, Something for sure
I know you're claiming that environmental pressures are solely responsible for the forms. I've never observed the mechanism.
exchemist
Veteran Member
You haven’t observed a glacier carve a U shaped valley either. There are processes that take longer than a single human lifetime. Durrh.
osgart
Nothing my eye, Something for sure
So the appearance of life forms, and the appearance of planning is beyond observation.
McBell
Unbound
osgart
Nothing my eye, Something for sure
Then how is the determination made on the matter?
Yet millions have; everyone who's actually looked, in fact.
exchemist
Veteran Member
Obviously, processes occurring in the past cannot be directly observed. But their effects can be observed, e.g. the presence of U-shaped valleys in landscapes for which there is evidence of past glaciation. But you know this. What is your point?
Last edited:
osgart
Nothing my eye, Something for sure
What effects lead to a human hand, or a set of eyes? Moreover what effects lead to conscious intellect? It's an uncanny miracle that all human functions and capabilities align to serve the creature as they do.
Not a miracle, just natural selection.
exchemist
Veteran Member
Join the dots. Look at the progression of the fossils through rocks of different ages and you see the pattern emerge. So the changes certainly happened.
As for why, Darwin's insight was that we breed animals and plants to enhance or develop certain traits, so why should nature not do the same, by rewarding better adapted traits with better breeding success?
And then we see this playing out before our eyes, in organisms that go through successive reproductive cycles fast enough, for instance in the development of resistance to drugs and so forth. (As I have had occasion to remark before, evolution was what finally killed my wife: the cancer, which reproduces and mutates very rapidly of course, eventually evolved resistance to all the available chemo options.) We also see the effect in changes to coloration, as with the peppered moth, or other traits as with Darwin's own Galapagos finches. Obviously we can't expect to see within a human lifetime major changes in form, any more than we can watch a glacier carve out its valley. But that is not a reason to doubt that it can happen.
We can't say for sure exactly what combination of circumstances gave rise to the hand of primates, but clearly it would have been advantageous for life in the trees. And having such a versatile hand would have had the side effect of making the use of tools possible ( a stick, a rock, etc) and the option of tools would have created an advantage for a larger brain, as the creature could think of more things to do with them and even manufacture them, which would have given an advantage.
It's all hypothetical, but it can neatly account for why creatures often seem so uncannily equipped for the environment they occupy.
Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
So the recurrent laryngeal never was done on purpose? How can one say that and claim "design" with a straight face?
Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
Not really. From the start an organism had to work. And even abiogenesis may have followed an "evolutionary path'. But that is another discussion. Once life existed it only takes a small improvement for something to become part of the genome. Billions if not trillions of small improvements over time along with diversification arising from different opportunities for life add in the time that we know exists and evolution is not that big of a mystery.
And one thing about evolution. Unlike design it is very hard to go back and start again from zero. That is why there are defects that evolution has to work around. The recurrent laryngeal nerve was not always a huge detour. For the first land animal it was a distance measured in inches for even larger early tetrapods. But being bigger is often an advantage for life and so some life evolved to fill those open niches. For some sauropod dinosaurs the length of the nerve would have been up to 28 meters. And a good 90% of that distance at least would have been a wasted loop. But once life left the ocean there was no going back and trying again with a different wiring. The first land animals had already filled those niches making it all but impossible for Johnny Come Lately species to try something new and different.
Eye evolution is very well understood. You mentioned the human eye, but it did not evolve separately for humans. It already existed in over 99% of its current state in our ancestors. The difference between a human eye and chimp eye would just be some very small tweaks.