dude, you don't even know how Evolution works!!! you think the Earth's species simply change to adjust with the environment.
he thinks he can bend us to his will by limiting the possibilities - trapping us between his proscribed rock and hard place. I had thought he was smarter than this. Or rather, I had thought he realised we were smarter than that. The difficulty is that they get the most appallingly rudimentary debating material from their pastors/websites etc.
Did I even use the word "environment" in a post? Saying, "You don't understand" does not answer the questions. The UC Berkeley website (already linked) states we're cousins with oak trees. I want to know what evidence there is to back that. Don't you? There is no evidence of a speciation event in which the common ancestor to humans and chimps gave birth to two distinct creatures, one human and one chimp. So why suggest there's evidence to go even further than that by saying we're cousins with trees. If you don't believe animals and plants share a common ancestor, you don't believe in evolution. If your answer to the question - where's the evidence that plants and animals share a common ancestor? is - "You don't understand evolution." I think you're the one who doesn't understand it.
lol!!! only a Fundy would take something like that literally. ....or it just another very pathetic Creationist strawman. Its all you guys have.
Why does it have to be either? Why not just a book that was written after this tribe/clan of hebrews passed down from generation to generation about how they think they came into existence. Nothing prophetic or revelational.
Belief is probably beside the point here. There is enough commonality in these 3 domains to suggest that they did branch very early on. If they arose through a hundred years of protolife steps, yet entirely independently, there would be too many coincidences to be credible. They all chose the same chirality? They all chose the same amino acids? They all happened onto RNA and DNA? This seems unlikely. Moving right along, eukaryotes are a relatively recent invention. Prokaryotes (both bacteria and archaea are prokaryotes) were around for about 3 billion years before nature stumbled onto eukaryotic cells. Most of which are STILL protists, not specialized parts of multicelled organisms. And bacteria and archaea are similar enough so that they weren't recognized as separate domains until DNA sequencing became cost effective. The dichotomy you propose (3 separate starts, or one start that branched) may be too simplified. It could be multiple separate starts which, when encountering one another, blended in some ways. Horizontal gene transfer could suggest that these separate beginnings could have partially combined in different ways, resulting in multiple more robust lines, two of which survived. We should bear in mind that today's situation isn't very suitable to extrapolate that far into the past. Back then, "life" was pretty borderline (today we speak of "protolife"), and replication had not yet evolved for optimal fidelity (which is nowhere near FULL fidelity, which would be fatal!) There was possibly a lot of mixing and matching, what today we'd regard as wild trial and error, mostly error. So the bottom line here is that today's domains bear little resemblance to the range of protolife 4 billion years back. Trying to cram them into current domains after so long, is guaranteed to be misleading. (And we have much more insight into the advent of eukaryotic radiation, which is still lousy insight. And early in the Cambrian we see lots of experimentation with body plans and approaches to metabolism. I have to laugh when I see people looking at these microscopic experiments and trying to stick each one into a "phylum" which hadn't yet really materialized. Today we have plants and animals and fungi and molds. Back then, none of the tiny organisms were ANY of these yet. )
Ok notice please that you in no way addressed any of what I said. I wonder why? its such a habit you have. Please try not to be like that. Rephrasing.. SINCE the fossil record, and every other piece of relevant data does confirm evolution of life over hundreds of millions of years,why is important to you to know if its 3 and 3 or 1 and 3? Do you see something about this that somehow invalidates all other data? As for relationships for which there is insufficient evidence, ok, there are some; does that some way invalidate all for which there is abundant evidence? We do have a lot of fossils of human beings quite unlike us, and more of other two legged beings who dont really qualify as human but are so clearly similar, far more so than any living ape. How can one not think that means something? No modern humans, no tools,nothing of that sort to be found at that or earlier dates, all the way back for hundreds of millions of years. Then you start seeing more and more modern humans,more and more modern tools. What meaning do you assign to those facts? I see your objections as comparable to questioning whether there was a roman empire, because a lot of the story is missing! Surely there is more than enough remaining to show that it really did exist! There is a very good outline for human evolution and far far better and more detailed for some other organisms. This info is out there and easy enough to access. What do you make of it when there is a good continuous record? "Absolute certainty" is not an attribute of science. We hear the religious say the have that. Science is about probability. Do you doubt that the info presented in that website is accurate? Like that those fossils do not exist? What other than some aspect of style is objectionable? As for the oak and man I dont get why this troubles you so. Its just a way of expressing the unity of all life, something that impresses itself on a person more and more as they study biology. If you dont like the idea, or find it pointless,that is fine. Such a somewhat poetic statement from some individual in no way is a factual argument that disproves ToE. All of this talk is just going about poking at minutae and perception of style. If you want to disprove general relativity you dont talk about Eisnsteins hair, you present some math. if you want to disprove ToE, you need some sort of contrary fact. Do you have one?
Oh gosh youlie, dont do this to yourself, You just cant claim to understand anything about ToE and then say something so utterly weird as the part in bold. Seriously? I dont know where you got such an idea, it is just so far from how evolution could ever happen, as any geneticist could tell you! You keep arguing against your own imagination!
Yes, but that evidence is there. UC Berkeley isn't just making stuff up. They are summarizing the evidence. It's there for you to see, if you wish. Nor could there be, since that's not how it could have happened. There's no question both humans and chimps each had MANY ancestors before you get back to a common ancestor. And speciations aren't as you describe. What you have is one part of a breeding population either suddenly or gradually experiencing breeding isolation from the other part. That means mutations are no longer spread through both parts, and given a few dozen speciations and a few million years, the divergence is large enough so that morphological differences become visible. Because of the genetic overlaps. Again, UC Berkeley can GIVE you the genetic evidence if you wish to see it. But our relationship with trees is about as distant as it's possible for eukaryotic relationships to be. The branching occurred early in the Cambrian, if not before. At that time, the common eukaryotic ancestor branched into very different lines - into animals and plants and fungi and molds, into bilateral and radial symmetry. I forget whether we're more closely related to oak trees or slime molds, but I don't worry about it because these branches took place when the modern eukaryotic phyla didn't even exist yet. Well, I'd say there's a failure to communicate. Clearly such an ancestor existed. We can place that ancestor to within 50 million years or so. We can do the DNA sequence comparison (a technique to see how closely two species are related - between humans and chimps it's about 95%, between humans and oak trees maybe 10%) quite quickly and inexpensively today. These DNA comparisons reflect how recently the branching took place -- if we share 10% of DNA sequence (genetic similarity) with oak trees and 15% with jellyfish, we can conclude that we had a common ancestor with jellyfish more recently than a common ancestor with oak trees. That is, the oak-animal branch preceded the jellyfish-human branch.
I think we're looking at time dilation here. For many people, Deep Time is off the radar. The notion that a speciation event is something experienced by an entire population over the course of 10,000 generations just doesn't compute. Why, that means that a speciation event might require many human lifetimes! And for most organisms of interest (interesting meaning "visible to the naked eye"), we might be talking 10-20 thousand years. Much easier to simplify it into a single critter giving birth to a duck and a croc, and POOF we have speciation into "kinds".
If you don't literally believe that humans and oak trees share a common ancestor, you don't believe in evolution. You can take any two members of any of the three domains of life and conclude they share a common ancestor. Evolution doesn't stop at multiple common ancestors for multiple species. It asserts that all of life came from one life, a universal common ancestor. If you don't believe in a universal common ancestor, just say so.
You're saying life as we know it wasn't the same then as is is now, so the question of which came first and which gave rise to the other (observable life today) is unimportant. Why don't we simply conclude that all of life share these commonalities and DNA because it's life, not necessarily because all of the life is related?
I really can't believe, today in the 21st century, people still cling to medieval dogma. Let me guess, you believe the Earth is 6000 years old?
Well, it certainly isn't prophetic. Genesis isn't a part of the Nevi'im. The Bible is revealing what its authors thought was the truth about the origin of the world. - - - Updated - - - Uh huh. So you think what you said was idiotic too?
I remember as a kid, my dad introduced me to the idea of deep time, and me getting kind of dizzy thinking of it. Sometimes a person gets an insight, if that is the word, some sort of epiphany..thats not it either. But maybe you know what I mean. Maybe sitting on a hill, looking out over a river valley in karst topography. The tropical ocean, the precipitation of limestone from the tiny organisms, the deep burial, the uplift,the patient erosion, it all kind of comes together and its so overwhelming. Maybe there is a fossil of some long ago creature. I guess the combo of thinking in terms of only a few thousand years, and the shallow cartoon-like notions of geology such as can be gleaned from what i call "creosites" just makes it impossible for a person-especially if they are determined to resist-to process these concepts.
Humans and chimpanzees are cousins. Humans and cork trees are very very distant third cousins. Someday, you'll understand the difference.
He didnt use that word, dont you supply it! No fair. It is tho, well for us all to remember that facetiosity* does not play well, all aside from Poe's law, and we end up wasting time on it for no good reason,as above. * dont even think of going there!
I don't know what you mean by "important". I don't understand your point. Yes, it's all life. Yes, all life in this planet is related as far as we can tell. We have techniques that indicate this. Why not accept them?
Evolution is a scientific theory that the some religious persons believe to be incorrect because it does not align with religious dogma still held to be true.
When you say all life "is" related, that is a definitive statement. That's not saying all life "may be" related, since there are commonalities and DNA. You're taking a hypothesis and making it fact, without accepting the possibility that it could be wrong. Then you say we have techniques that "indicate" this. How many different species of animals exists today, including insects? Now, Earth is 4 billion years old or so, right? Let's do some basic math? There are 8.7 million eukaryotes on Earth. Science has only identified about 2 million. Now, let's throw in all the microbes. Any guess on the total number of life forms (all three domains) on Earth? I'm sure it's a staggering number, but does it reach the billions? In 4.5 billion years of Earth being formed and developed, at least 8.7 million eukaryotes have evolved - from ONE. That is a rate of 517 per year! We're still not including all of the species that have gone extinct! Either millions of various forms of life came at once, and evolved from there; or one form of life evolved into everything we observe today. Which is it? If you accept that life could've "sprang" up everywhere at close to the same time, that's border line Creationists argument there. But if you believe it all came from a single life from, and that all of life is related, you're talking warp speed evolution. What am I missing, Flintc?
Fundies reject Evolution not on its scientific merits, but because it counters their religious dogma.
