What are the dumbest attempts to find fault in the theory of evolution you've heard?

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Re: No dumb questions, only dumb answers.

See spurious monkeys reply.
You live for what, 30 years and are now suspicious that evolution hasn't occured because you haven't noticed any drastic changes in your tiny insignificant lifetime? Its similar to if a 20 year old man bought a dog, in that dogs 10 year lifetime the man would hardly change in physical appearance, the dog would assume thats just how his owner always looks
You think like a dog.
You can probably tell the difference between you and your children correct? Now imagine you're great great great great x a million grandchildren, your line of descendents are going to get more and more different as time goes by. Now imagine you had many many children, and they were all slightly different, one child seemed kind of useless but then a tsunami came and it turned out that child was a wicked surfer, the rest of your children died because they couldn't surf. An expert surfing line of humans has just started to evolve. If your descendents keep getting faced with tsanami's where the only escape is surfing your great great great great x a million grandchildren will be perfectly suited for surfing.
Granted, no family tree is required to ride that many waves, but family trees are required to chase gazelle, find berries, sniff out rotting carcasses etc. Living organisms just naturally get tested in these varying fashions, with the only survivors being those that pass these tests.
This system can sculpt numerous species out of one species, because sometimes more than one of an organisms offspring survive, they seperate and branch out and their offspring end up having to deal with different tests.

Actually no, its a retarded and ignorant question.

Is that even a large gap? Not that it would matter if it was, but it isn't anyway, its a tiny little miniscule gap when you consider some other gaps, that don't hurt the theory at all anyway FYI, but you know, you could have tried a better one. Like hyena's, there is a huge gap between them and their closest relative.
But what you don't understand is it isn't necessarry for the gaps to be filled at all, the species that filled those gaps had no moral obligation to survive longer than they could.
Whats amazing is we do get gaps filled (haha that sounds funny), not litterally but an eye with common sense can see how the evolution of mammals went down just by looking at surviving animals, we are very lucky in that regard. The family tree that lead to humans started at rats(actually its started with strands of the elements that make up life, but thats a long story) from rats its not a big step to bushbabies, from bushbabies its not a big step to lemurs, from lemurs its not a big step to apes and monkeys, from apes its not a big step to homonids(which is where humans fit in). Not that complicated when put like that is it? Of course a scientist would say its not entirely accurate because the creatures I'm referring to weren't exactly rats or bushbabies as we know them. What they were was the ancestors of the bush babies and rats, rats and bush babies are the branches that didn't change as much because they didn't need to.
Your problems arise from looking at evolution as it is written in biology textbooks, and misinterpretting. Think of it on the very litteral scale. You'll find words like gaps and such don't really have anything to do with it. All refutations of evolution I've ever heard have been based on misinformation or the misinterpretting of tricky sentences.
Nothing comes close to touching on earth's theory of evolution, you don't need a book to learn about it, you need willing to learn eyes, patience and a clear head.

The quotes weren't from sciforums, and what the hell do you care? Wtf? And who is No!.
Anyway, I'm confident that the people who made these quotes could easily be persuaded to drop any legal action with a simple offering of magic beans.

 

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I think the problem is just that anti-evolutionist believe evolution disproves god, this is totally untrue: Science could never disprove the existence of god(s). Many refuse to believe that one can accept evolution and erroneous nature of the holy books and yet still believe a god(s) happily.

The worst I have ever heard was in highschool in biology class when a very religious girl said: “Evolution is just a theory, you’re believing in a theory made by men, a THEORY! I responded “Well you believe in mythology made by tribal leaders thousands of years ago, MYTHOLGY!” She did not responded well to having her religion reduced to the statues of Romen gods and paganism. I still to this day cannot see the difference between ancient mythologies and modern religion.

Many symbiotic relationships have in fact been proven by evolution; particularly mitochondria and chloroplast which are bacteria that have come to reside in all our cells for the last few billion years, without which we would still be single cellular and anaerobicily fermenting sugar for all our energy. Genetics have proven that mitochondria and chloroplast are bacteria and even more so genetic mutations of these organelles have been used to track the evolution of species. One of the most definitive proofs of evolution I can think of is how mutations can be track from species to species guaranteeing that they are related and came from a common ancestor. But those anti-evolutionists will come up with a counter argument to anything: they claim this is god testing us be making it look like organisms are related to each other by common ancestry, there is no convincing these people!

I like the exploding giraffe head thing that makes a lot of sense!

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Would they not have a problem with low blood pressure not high?

 

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Fine, I'll be the devil advocate for the iguanas.

The iguanas are similar in the most important way....Their DNA is exactly the same from when it was born, till it dies. The iguana couldn't have evolved in it's life time because it's DNA remains not changed.

James, Monkey was more correct in his answer. Evolution only take place at reproduction and when different DNA meet, and not during the life time of the species...That's called aging and not evolution.

My point is, the question is not silly at all, the answers are usually are.

 

Re: Re: No dumb questions, only dumb answers.

So it must be voodooo science. You can't read it from a book, you can't touch it, you can't see it in a lab, you can not observe it in nature...It is officially voodooo.

 

Listen to yourself Dr. Lou...You're making no sense.

My gosh, what the hell are you saying?

If one kid is a fluke and survived because they knew how to do something, then all his/her children will be exactly like him....perfectly suited for surfing?

Well, I'm the one that gave birth to the bastard and I don't know how to surf?, so how come I didn't continue and live?. Does that great tsunami save another great female surfer to mate with our great surfer friend. Could it also be that chance intervened and a nerd survived because he hid in the forest away from the surf????And you said the bastard will give birth to good surfers? How are you sure of that? Perhaps that gift of surfing skip a couple of generations, and the great surfer might be impotent in reproduction and thus humanity will stop at his hands.

As I said, Voodoo science....circumstancial evidance, gaps, no taking account of probability, chance, ect....

I believe in small scale adaptation of species to their environment. I don't believe in grand transformation.

 

An example of the tsunami thing is the peppered moth in England; if you want the full story you can see it <a href="http://www.txtwriter.com/Backgrounders/Evolution/EVpage07.html">here</a>, but you've probably already heard this one so I won't extemporise.

However, it does show a situation where the degree of melanization in the population changes pretty quickly in response to changes in environmental pollution (and hence the colour of tree trunks). Admittedly it's not a giant tidal wave washing away all but one of them, but it happens on the order of decades rather than millions of years, which is pretty fast.

 

Evolution theory is merely a classification system. A very beneficial one indeed, but speaks nothing about prediction of how we came into existance.

Classifications systems are very beneficial. They group similar species together and due to that we can study each group separately and correlate things with some sense. Classifiction systems by no means imply that things actually sorted themselves out that way...it's purely observed human sorting of things....

For example, stream morphology have developed a great classification systems for streams. Mountain streams are called class A, meandering streams are called E, entrenched streams are G, and wide streams are F. After sorting out the different stream types, all sort of theories emerged trying to form a theory of evolution of streams and predicting evolution and migration patterns. While these theories are beneficial, they by no means make a statement on how the streams that we have today have evolved and what they evoloved from. Evolutionist rely on fossil records to make a claim and how more inaccurate can we get with our assessments.

The whole thing is voodoo science.

 

AS opposed to your religion? Hang on, isnt voodoo a religion? So whats so different between your beliefs and anothers?

sorry to jump in like this guys.

 

Atually thats the last problem with evolution, is that you cant relaly experiment upon it, can you?
But it is falsifiable is it not?

 

Um, no. Cladistics is a classification system. Evolutionary theory is an effort to explain how things develop from other things.

Whereas it is true that we are generally unable to recite a thing's past by looking at its present state, this is not a particularly good criticism of a scientific theory, particularly not for a theory that describes a process.

When you are presented, for instance, with a series of stars of similar properties but different ages, you might believe that they represent the aging process of a star - you know, proceeding through various stages of fusion, becoming larger and thereby cooler at the surface, all that kind of thing.

You could be wrong. Each one could have been some kind of gigantic cream pie that became a star of its sort only just before you looked. Would you ever know? Probably not. But we generally like to hope that the world conforms to some understandable rules so that we're not just covering our eyes and wishing desperately that the cream pies won't get us.

Basic evolutionary theory is pretty reasonable - let's say you're an ostrich breeder. Every year you keep the ten biggest ostriches - five male and five female or whatever is optimal for ostrich breeding - and make the rest into ostrich stew. Over time this technique has proven to increase the average size of your ostriches, although 1) there will be exceptions and 2) there is probably an upper limit.

Evolutionary theory infers that in a given environment there will be some form of pressure on the organisms present, and so those which do not survive to reproduce because of some trait, will die. The trait will become under-represented in the population and possibly disappear, although in the case of the melanization of peppered moths, there are generally some light-coloured ones and some dark-coloured ones at any given time.

Since I'm returning to the peppered moths anyway, this situation did represent a phenomenon where the effects of selective pressure was visible over a span of fifty years, which - though a long time - is still surveyable by a single human being.

Evolutionary theory relies on other theories - like cladistics - to determine the relationships between different organisms. To say evolutionary theory cannot predict where an organism came from may be true - but it's kind of like saying that they didn't teach you how to build a house in math class. Why would they?

 

I don't recall writing a book about my beliefs, claiming it a scientific revolution, or recieving any awards because of it. I don't even recall ever visiting a religious congregation or building.

Is that what your evolution education teaches you, to assume and judge people and decoy serious discussions.

 

"Evolution education"?

Evolution isn't a damn religion. It's a description of a process that is not particularly hard to understand. If you don't agree and have a better idea, that's great, but calling it "voodoo science" and offering no support except for personal attacks isn't a very convincing argument.


Flores, what is your better alternative? And by this I mean, your description of the process by which organisms come to take certain forms?

 

WOW, they teach civil engineering in math classes now a days.

Because building a house that works doesn't only depend on addition/multiplication/integration/differenciation. Building a house includes the integration of many complex desciplines and involves everything from mechanical, electrical, fire protection, transportation, land management, forestry, zoning, hydorology and hydraulics, seizmic, grading and survey, design considerations for the human elements that includes the well and the disabeled, ect..... And even considering all the above, we are disrespecting many natural laws including the environment, the water cycle, animal migration routes, land development strategies, ect.

You have come close to show us the real problem with the evolution model. It's too simplistic and doesn't integrate the lessons learned from other disciplines, that being physics, math, ect.... It's nice to say that all life started from a simple cell, but can you explain that using our respectable set of physics law? The answer is no!...But evolution theory is quite a beloved pet to biologists not because it's true and infalliable, but because much has been invested in it and the biologists don't understand anything outside of it'a releam.

 

I'm responding to guthrie's personal attack. Do you always skip the unimportant posters and concentrate your efforts on the more important ones? I'm flattered.

It's voodoo science, and the burden of proof doesn't fall on me, it falls on the founders of such voodoo. Lack of explanation doesn't make the existing voodoo a reality. It only makes it a convineance.

 

It's voodoo science. For any such claim to stand, you need to provide us with very solid and complicated probability theories. Where is the math and the probability that supports evolution. Does that math have more than linear algebra in it. Evolution is too simplistic and relies heavely on cladistics. It's a giant leap based on a simple classification system, and the burden of proof doesn't fall on me, it falls on the founders of such voodoo. Lack of explanation doesn't make the existing voodoo a reality. It only makes it a convineance.

 

Okay; let's start from the beginning.

Do you have any problem with the concept of selective breeding? That is, choosing the bigger ostriches?

 

Flores,

See the Talk.Origins archives or the unofficial Stephen Jay Gould archive, among many, many others...

 

Well I think this calls for a few Creationist quotes:

"If evolution is true, you could not know that it's true because your brain is nothing but chemicals. Think about that." -Hovind, Kent

"Dinosaurs were nothing more than giant lizards in the garden of Eden." -Hovind, Kent Unmasking the False Religion of Evolution Chapter 2

"In ancient literature what were called "dragons" where actually dinosaurs. The way they killed these dragons namely T-Rex was to pull off their small arm, and let them bleed to death." -Hovind, Kent

".....a lizard laid an egg, and a chicken hatched out. That is the general idea behind punctuated equilibrium." -Hovind, Kent Unmasking the False Religion of Evolution Chapter 6

"The practice of homosexuality...is now is now considered not only acceptable but even desirable by most evolutionists." -Morris, Henry Back to Genesis, No. 140, August, 2000.

"But now Frank, if you're trying to tell me and this audience that a chimpanzee and man are 98.4% similar, I will b'lieve that when you will allow your daughter to date a chimpanzee and so forth. And you know you wouldn't do that because there's a whale of a difference between a chimpanzee and a human. " Duane Gish- in a debate with Zindler.

In response, I have my favorite Scifi writer:

Orson Scott Card, Secular Humanist Revival Meeting (quoted from memory):

"But my heart goes out to those well-meaning mamas and papas who send their children to the "God's World" class. Now the stupid children are safe enough; they will just laugh at evolution and be happy fools for the rest of their days. But the parents of the smart children live in dread of the day that they know will come, when their child comes home from school and says: 'Today I learned what evolution really is and YOU LIED TO ME! If you lied to me about that, then what else did you lie to me about? Did you lie about the Resurrection? About Sin and Redemption? About loving my neighbor? Was it all just lies? How could I ever believe you again?' To all those well-meaning mamas and papas, I say that this book [indicating the "God's World" creation science textbook], this book is full of lies. If you can only defend your faith by lying about what others believe, then you stop right there. Your faith is doomed. The best of your children will not follow you. You are the Last Generation."

 

Selective breeding is a modern intervention human thing. I doubt the ancient ostriges selectively breeded to ensure bigger ostriges.