Posted by flcat:
Posted by Jepp5:
Posted by One:
If you cannot quote or articulate your thoughts here in this forum, it is of little value.
If you want to support your claim that micro-evolution has been proven you must "bring the evidence"...not send us out for it.
Again..I'll predict that if I were to read those articles I'd be able to demonstrate very quickly a lot of "assumptions" (supposing I get past the tedious nature of Latin-classification speak)
This is pretty typical of the "debates" I have had with creationists. They generally go something like this:
Creationist--Scientists have never been able to prove that evolution has actually happened.
Me--Of course they have. Diseases evolve resistance to the antibiotics used to treat them. Insects evolve resistance to the insecticides used upon them.
The samples you cite are indications of an organism's "adaptability" and not evolution. Regardless of which antibiotic you use against bacteria, there will be always be bacteria cells genetically predisposed to be more resistant to the antibiotic's attack, and thus able to overcome the attack and survive. When the surviving bacterium reproduces - essentially cloning itself, its "child" will possess identical DNA, and thus will also be resistant. However, in the end, we still have the same bacteria type, which is still readily recognized by microscopic examination.
Same with insects. You give the sci-fi impression that insects "evolve" and become immune to insecticides, and that at a certain point we can bomb them with the stuff and they'll just continue about their merry way unaffected. Nope, everytime you use certain poisons, you are going to kill a certain percentage of bugs. Again, the insects that are genetically inclined to be resistant to certain poisons will survive. And if you overuse such poisons...well, it's the same as when a person ingests small amounts of poison over a period of time and develops a resistance to much larger doses. No one would argue that such a person has "evolved" in a scientific sense.
Creationist--Oh, sure. Micro-evolution has occurred. But science has never demonstrated macro-evolution. They have never shown that one species has ever evolved into another.
Me--Wrong again. There are many, many examples of macro-evolution (speciation) being published in scientific journals and popular scientific magazines every year. Here are some examples right here. (I list a few examples.)
This is where evolution theory really breaks down. The idea that life began as a single celled organism and eventually "diversified" or "evolved" to become the complex mult-celled bio-mechanical constructs that occupy our world is ultimately unprovable. This is the true theological aspect of evolution theory that scientists have to accept on "faith".
No one denies that living organisms are very adaptable. It is true that in the wild, that there are certain individual organisms of a species that are better suited to survive in certain environments than others. As the less fit organisms die, the gene pool becomes more shallow, allowing for less diverse combinations of DNA, and therefore certain dominate genes become more prevalent, especially if the population is isolated (can you say Galapagos Islands?). Of course this is nothing new, especially to those who were practising animal husbandry several centuries before there even was a theory of evolution. But in the end, you essentially wind up with some variant of the SAME species. This has been especially true in the hundreds of thousands of generations that have been produced in Fruit Fly Research. You get insects of every size, wing formation, and eye color (as every random combination of DNA comes into play) -- but in the end, you've still got fruit flies.
Again I add that it is pretty damn silly to believe that scientists have believed a theory for 150 years and yet still have no evidence to support it. That should stretch the belief of any thinking person.
Well, the Greek scientits and philosophers believed the Earth was flat and that the Earth was the center of the universe for a much longer period of time. You can argue that they were an ignorant people, but we still use a lot of what they gave us in mathematics, scientific methods, and philosophy.
