If evolution is true...

[Vosur]

The entire premise "If evolution is true ..." is utterly flawed. Biological evolution, the gradual change of organisms over time, is not a matter of "true" or "false" - it's an observational fact. To deny that it happens puts you into the same category as those who deny that the earth is spherical or that gravity exists. If anything, the premise would have to be "If the theory of evolution is true/sound/valid ...".

[Aseptic Skeptic]

First of all, evolution could be true AND there could be a god. Evolution might just be god's tool for creation. It's like he's playing a really complex game of Spore. Just because one of those things might be true (at least presuppositionally) doesn't mean the other thing must be false.

And, as others have pointed out, evolution is real, it happens all the time, it has happened since life began. There is no doubt of this. The only questions remain about the exact details of what evolved into what, and at what time - we have many of those details, but not all.

As to answering those questions, others have already done so, but to add more to the second answer, it seems as if many people who have never truly understood evolution seem to think it happens on the spot. Instantly. Maybe even partially. Like one day a cow might give birth to a chicken. Or a half-chicken-half-cow. Or craziest of all, a cow might just be grazing in a field and suddenly in morphs into a half-chicken-half-cow. It's all totally nonsense, of course. Evolution is a long, slow, gradual process. Every child resembles its parents, biologically. There really is no such thing as a "transitional species" because everything that has ever lived is a transitional species, including the every human alive right now. So, really, "transitional species" = "species" in the same way that "wet water" = "water" - just eliminate the redundant adjective.

So maybe what the questioner(s) meant to ask was "where is the species that has vestigial features of it's ancestors while also have precursor features of its descendants?" Well, that's more like it. We have found some such creatures. My favorite to show off is Tiktaalik. Google it. It's a good read. A team of paleontologists figured out where to find a transitional fish, one with fishy gills and also legs. One that could be the (a) missing link between fish and land animals. Technically, they could be anywhere, but only certain types of soils, ground, etc., were likely to preserve it, or most likely, and those soils are buried pretty deep, except in a few areas where just the right layers of soils are exposed to make the search easier, so they scoured the world and found the best spot and then spent years searching for it, and finally they found it, right where science predicted it would be. Since then, lots of other groups have found more of them (which rules out hoaxes). If there is one perfect example of what most people mean by "transitional fossil" then Tiktaalik has got to be it.

[TheBeardedDude]

(01-01-2013 10:26 PM)Phaedrus Wrote:  The first question shows a complete ignorance of even the basic fundamentals of geology. It's like asking, "Well how come parents are always older than their kids?" It's so naive and backwards, from the perspective of someone who actually studied geology in college, that I have trouble thinking on a low enough level to answer him.



Fossils are buried in sediment, which is clay, gravel, sand, and such: the eroded remains of older rocks. Rocks are continually uplifted by geological processes, which form hills, mountains, etc. Rocks are eroded from those formations and are carried downhill and downstream. In some areas the sediment settles out of the water and forms layers of sand, mud, or dirt. This is where fossils form. New sediment comes and settles on top. It doesn't magically tunnel underneath the older sediment which is already deposited. It settles on top. Hence why older rocks are on bottom and newer rocks are on top. This is one of the basic principles of geology.

Now, geological activity can disturb rocks, and things like uplift or orogeny or subduction can disturb the ordering of rocks so that you can find newer rocks below older rocks. But this is usually very obvious to geologists when this has happened, because it involves the expenditure of huge amounts of energy over very long periods of times, and the effects on the rocks are obvious.

Precisely. This what we call Superposition. We also have Original horizontality (sediments are originally horizontal) and lateral continuity (sediments extend for significant geographic stretches). They need a basic intro geology textbook before they start spouting off such ignorant statements.

[kingschosen]

Never mind. Not needed here.

[Misanthropik]

(01-01-2013 11:29 PM)kim Wrote:  ...pull out the wrong tinker toy and they're fucked.

Genius. I loled.

[Adenosis]

(03-01-2013 05:08 PM)Misanthropik Wrote:  

(01-01-2013 11:29 PM)kim Wrote:  ...pull out the wrong tinker toy and they're fucked.

Genius. I loled.

Haha, me too. It's so true...

[cjs]

I just read the book Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne. I never doubted it but wanted to know more about it since science is interesting. That book explains it very well and is a good read. As you said, they have found transitional fossils, and the theory has held up for over 100 years. That means no other hypothesis has supplanted it. There is still much unknown since there are millions of species, but science doesn't have to be able to explain every bit of it for the theory to prevail. Ppl are ignorant about what scientific theories actually mean and how the scientific process works.

One argument I will start using is that just because we don't know some things, does that mean science should just quit looking for natural explanations and attribute it to god? If they'd done that, illness might still be blamed on demonic possession or witchcraft. Astronomy would have kept with everything revolving around the earth theory. Just because science can't explain something yet doesn't mean the whole thing is invalid. Apologists seize on this, but it's still just the old and tired god of the gaps argument.

The book explains it all better than I ever could, but good luck getting hard core anti-evolution ppl to read it.

[Human Being]

Awesome book. Does a great job of rounding up the evidence and presenting it in an easy to undertand way. I particularly liked the parts about bio-geography, as that was something I was relatively unfamiliar with. It's definitely a book I would read again, and I almost never read a book twice.

[kim]

Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne... hmm... sounds interesting. May need to do a little shopping in my favorite smelly bookstore this weekend... bio-geography has a familiarly exciting ring to it.

[ClydeLee]

(04-01-2013 02:01 PM)kim Wrote:  Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne... hmm... sounds interesting. May need to do a little shopping in my favorite smelly bookstore this weekend... bio-geography has a familiarly exciting ring to it.

There is a great YouTube video from a conference he did on some details of the book. It's got the same title.