Topic: Evolution is a hoax - page 208. (Read 108173 times)

I can't agree more and that is my point they wish to find any small hope of reasons why evolution is wrong based on their religious bias. I get that the science in favour of the theory of evolution isn't perfect but its got so much more to back it up than any religious explanation has.

The real problem I have with them is that 99.999% of the people who try to disprove evolution are creationists or religious. They are extremely skeptic about science (that is applied and works on pretty much everything we have today) but they will very easily believe that a man in the sky created everything from scratch because that's definitely a more plausible explanation? If you are going to be so skeptic about scientific theories you should be also skeptic about old books written by some men.

The problem I have with objections to evolution is that people try to make the science fit their theories rather than let the science speak for itself.

Off to a good start. ''This theory, which claims that life emerged by chance from inanimate matter, was invalidated by the scientific evidence of miraculous order in the universe and in living things, as well as by the discovery of more than 300 million fossils revealing that evolution never happened.''

Evolution does not claim that life emerged from anything because evolution is not about how life originated. Evolution's "handbook" - The origin of species lays out the process through which all known species on Earth evolve into their current form. So right off the bat the author of that article clearly does not know what the theory of evolution is. Abiogenesis is the natural process by which life arises from non-living matter, such as simple organic compounds. There are experiments showing how life can come from non-living matter: http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/0623/How-can-life-emerge-from-nonliving-matter-UNC-scientists-find-new-evidence Abiogenesis is however not complete and we still don't know many things.


''Darwin's theory was not based on any concrete scientific finding; as he also accepted, it was just an "assumption." Moreover, as Darwin confessed in the long chapter of his book titled "Difficulties on Theory," the theory failed in the face of many critical questions.''



This is one of the most persistent of LIES spread by Creationists. They will repeat this like a mantra but they will never be able to point to *anything* Darwin wrote that backs up this claim.


The LIE is based on two things:

1. Deliberately *misquoted* passages from Darwin's works. The most common tactic you will find in *MANY* Creationist sources is to quote from Chapter 6, where Darwin anticipates objections or "difficulties" of the theory, Darwin's method is to (A) describe the "difficulty", and then immediately (B) provide a response to it. But the Creationist quotes will give (A) but leave out (B), making it sound like Darwin was "admitting doubts" about his own theory. This is incredibly dishonest, and quite easy to expose (just by checking the original text, since Darwin's works are all searchable online) ... which makes this tactic especially baffling as it does nothing but make the Creationists look like dishonest liars.

This tactic of carefully finding selective partial quotes, and just providing enough to make it sound like the author was saying the *opposite* of what he actually said, is so common among Creationists that the tactic has been given a name ... "quote mining." (Google it for lots of examples.)

2. The infamous "Lady Hope" story. Lady Hope was an evangelist who claims to have visited Darwin on his deathbed and "converted" him. Not one other person (including Darwin's very religious wife, no a single person from Darwin's family) confirms that Lady Hope was anywhere *near* Darwin on his deathbed, much less her story about this deathbed conversion. But the story is inflated by Creationists even beyond what Lady Hope described ... and is now described as Darwin "recanting" his scientific theory on his deathbed. The Creationists will announce this with great authority despite *ZERO* evidence, and despite the fact that it contradicts everything Darwin ever wrote, said, jotted in a letter to closest friends, family, or colleagues, or scribbled on a napkin. All of Darwin's life work means nothing to them compared to a complete exaggeration of an uncorroborated story that is most likely false.

I have read Darwin's book and in 3 chapters Darwin explains the possibility of a higher power creating humanity as if Darwin was following in his wife's religious footsteps. This was never fortified it was just held as an idea based on religious groups, Darwin always believed his theory of evolution, many stories are created nowadays by religious groups trying to deny evolution and fortifying the possibility of a higher power (quote mining), which is false based on Darwin's theory of evolution.

''The Complex Structure of Life''

There is no reason to think that the life around today is comparable in complexity to the earliest life. All of the simplest life would almost certainly be extinct by now, outcompeted by more complex forms.

Self-replicators can be incredibly simple, as simple as a strand of six DNA nucleotides (Sievers and von Kiedrowski 1994). This is simple enough to form via prebiotic chemistry. Self-replication sets the stage for evolution to begin, whether or not you call the molecules "life."

Nobody claims the first life arose by chance. To jump from the fact that the origin is unknown to the conclusion that it could not have happened naturally is the argument from incredulity.


''Imaginary mechanism of Evolution''

The author clearly does not understand or deliberately doesn't explain what natural selection is. I suggest to read what natural selection actually is.

''Lamarck's Impact''

Blatantly just lying here. Mendelian inheritance[help 1] is a type of biological inheritance that follows the laws originally proposed by Gregor Mendel in 1865 and 1866 and re-discovered in 1900. These laws were initially very controversial. When Mendel's theories were integrated with the Boveri–Sutton chromosome theory of inheritance by Thomas Hunt Morgan in 1915, they became the core of classical genetics. Ronald Fisher later combined these ideas with the theory of natural selection in his 1930 book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, putting evolution onto a mathematical footing and forming the basis for population genetics and the modern evolutionary synthesis.[1]
Natural selection is a more powerful process with Mendelian heredity, because Mendelian genes are preserved over time; whereas it is at best a weak process with blending inheritance, because potentially favorable genes are diluted before they can be established.

''Mutations'' ''Mutations do not cause living beings to develop; on the contrary, they are always harmful.''

The author again lies and says this is a fact. Most mutations are neutral. Nachman and Crowell estimate around 3 deleterious mutations out of 175 per generation in humans (2000). Of those that have significant effect, most are harmful, but the fraction which are beneficial is higher than usually though. An experiment with E. coli found that about 1 in 150 newly arising mutations and 1 in 10 functional mutations are beneficial (Perfeito et al. 2007).

The harmful mutations do not survive long, and the beneficial mutations survive much longer, so when you consider only surviving mutations, most are beneficial.

Beneficial mutations are commonly observed. They are common enough to be problems in the cases of antibiotic resistance in disease-causing organisms and pesticide resistance in agricultural pests (e.g., Newcomb et al. 1997; these are not merely selection of pre-existing variation.) They can be repeatedly observed in laboratory populations (Wichman et al. 1999). Other examples include the following:
Mutations have given bacteria the ability to degrade nylon (Prijambada et al. 1995).
Plant breeders have used mutation breeding to induce mutations and select the beneficial ones (FAO/IAEA 1977).
Certain mutations in humans confer resistance to AIDS (Dean et al. 1996; Sullivan et al. 2001) or to heart disease (Long 1994; Weisgraber et al. 1983).
A mutation in humans makes bones strong (Boyden et al. 2002).
Transposons are common, especially in plants, and help to provide beneficial diversity (Moffat 2000).
In vitro mutation and selection can be used to evolve substantially improved function of RNA molecules, such as a ribozyme (Wright and Joyce 1997).

Whether a mutation is beneficial or not depends on environment. A mutation that helps the organism in one circumstance could harm it in another. When the environment changes, variations that once were counteradaptive suddenly become favored. Since environments are constantly changing, variation helps populations survive, even if some of those variations do not do as well as others. When beneficial mutations occur in a changed environment, they generally sweep through the population rapidly (Elena et al. 1996).

High mutation rates are advantageous in some environments. Hypermutable strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa are found more commonly in the lungs of cystic fibrosis patients, where antibiotics and other stresses increase selection pressure and variability, than in patients without cystic fibrosis (Oliver et al. 2000).

''Fossil record''

The idea that gradual change should appear throughout the fossil record is called phyletic gradualism. It is based on the following tenets:
New species arise by the transformation of an ancestral population into its modified descendants.
The transformation is even and slow.
The transformation involves most or all of the ancestral population.
The transformation occurs over most or all of the ancestral species' geographic range.

However, all but the first of these is false far more often that not. Studies of modern populations and incipient species show that new species arise mostly from the splitting of a small part of the original species into a new geographical area. The population genetics of small populations allow this new species to evolve relatively quickly. Its evolution may allow it to spread into new geographical areas. Since the actual transitions occur relatively quickly and in a relatively small area, the transitions do not often show up in the fossil record. Sudden appearance in the fossil record often simply reflects that an existing species moved into a new region.

Once species are well adapted to an environment, selective pressures tend to keep them that way. A change in the environment that alters the selective pressure would then end the "stasis" (or lead to extinction).

It should be noted that even Darwin did not expect the rate of evolutionary change to be constant.
[N]atural selection will generally act very slowly, only at long intervals of time, and only on a few of the inhabitants of the same region. I further believe that these slow, intermittent results accord well with what geology tells us of the rate and manner at which the inhabitants of the world have changed (Darwin 1872, 140-141, chap. 4).
"But I must here remark that I do not suppose that the process ever goes on so regularly as is represented in the diagram, though in itself made somewhat irregular, nor that it goes on continuously; it is far more probable that each form remains for long periods unaltered, and then again undergoes modification (Darwin 1872, 152).
It is a more important consideration . . . that the period during which each species underwent modification, though long as measured by years, was probably short in comparison with that during which it remained without undergoing any change (Darwin 1872, 428, chap. 10).
"it might require a long succession of ages to adapt an organism to some new and peculiar line of life, for instance, to fly through the air; and consequently that the transitional forms would often long remain confined to some one region; but that, when this adaptation had once been effected, and a few species had thus acquired a great advantage over other organisms, a comparatively short time would be necessary to produce many divergent forms, which would spread rapidly and widely throughout the world (Darwin 1872, 433).

The imperfection of the fossil record (due to erosion and periods unfavorable to fossil preservation) also causes gaps, although it probably cannot account for all of them.

Some transitional sequences exist, which, despite an uneven rate of change, still show a gradual continuum of forms.

The fossil record still shows a great deal of change over time. The creationists who make note of the many gaps almost never admit the logical conclusion: If they are due to creation, then there have been hundreds, perhaps even millions, of separate creation events scattered through time.

I will stop here but as I said, the theory of evolution is real, if you don't want to accept it because of your religion, that's your problem but don't spread bullshit.

As I predicted in my previous post, your answer no matter how hard you try it's not satisfactory as it didn't answer what I wanted. However I will post a link for you to raise your horizons in science as I see you like it. I will put a link to the book called "The deceive of the theory of evolution" and although this book is made by a Turk person it is based 99% in science and 1% in religion.

http://www.harunyahya.com/en/books/47624/Darwinist-Propaganda-Techniques/chapter/14326/The-Deception-of-Evolution

Read before talking nonsense, it has even covered your black and white moths myths in the book. Your answer is totally incorrect.

''Why are there still monkeys if men evolved from monkeys'' Is considered the stupidest thing you can say about evolution, please do not say that in front of a scientist because he would smack you. Humans did not evolve from apes, gorillas or chimps. We are all modern species that have followed different evolutionary paths, though humans share a common ancestor with some primates, such as the African ape.
Now, we don't know and probably never will exactly how every organism evolved in details, it's obviously impossible unless we can time travel. However thanks to the different science fields and studies we can determine more or less how it happened.

Perhaps I can give you an easy example of evolution. Peppered Moths are normally white with black speckles across the wings, giving it its name. This patterning makes it well camouflaged against lichen-covered tree trunks when it rests on them during the day. There is also a naturally occurring genetic mutation which causes some moths to have almost black wings. These black forms (called 'melanic') are not as well camouflaged on the lichen as normal 'peppered' forms and so they are more likely to be eaten by birds and other predators. This means that fewer black forms survive to breed and so they are less common in the population than the paler peppered forms. This is the normal situation observed in the countryside of Britain and Ireland.

Normal and Melanic Peppered Moths (Chris Manley)However, in the nineteenth century it was noticed that in towns and cities it was actually the black form of the moth that was more common than the pale peppered form. Industrialisation and domestic coal fires had caused sooty air pollution which had killed off lichens and blackened urban tree trunks and walls. So now it was the pale form of the moth that was more obvious to predators, while the melanic form was better camouflaged and more likely to survive and produce offspring. As a result, over successive generations, the black moths came to outnumber the pale forms in our towns and cities. Since moths are short-lived, this evolution by natural selection happened quite quickly. For example, the first black Peppered Moth was recorded in Manchester in 1848 and by 1895 98% of Peppered Moths in the city were black.

That's what we call evolution, as you can see it's not magic. Some moths simply mutated due to the pollution at the time and survived better than the previous ones because they were harder to detect. There are a lot of mutations and many of them are bad, for example some people might be born with 6 fingers instead of 5, this however doesn't help them in any significant way.

Maybe I should study more but you still haven't told me how did I become a man when I was a reptile before then become a cat ,then become a monkey and in the end I become a man. That leaves me a lot of doubts which biology ,microbiology and every other science you mentioned didn't tell me in details or the details are far from complete. I personally believe that only people with limited mental intelligence believe in evolution. Also why don't monkey turn to men right now ? And don't bother to answer these questions as I am sure your answers will not be satisfactory for my thinking. Prove it otherwise stop it as simple as this.

Biology, Microbiology, Anthropology, Archaeology, Embryology, Geology, Paleontology, Genetics, a lot of math. Statistics, computation, machine learning, applied mathematics, are used heavily in a lot of evolutionary work. In fact evolution has been used in computer science. Evolutionary computation is a family of algorithms for global optimization inspired by biological evolution, and the subfield of artificial intelligence and soft computing studying these algorithms. In technical terms, they are a family of population-based trial and error problem solvers with a metaheuristic or stochastic optimization character.

Also a scientific theory can't be unproved, that would make no sense: A scientific theory is an explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can, in accordance with the scientific method, be repeatedly tested, using a predefined protocol of observations and experiments.[1][2] Established scientific theories have withstood rigorous scrutiny and are a comprehensive form of scientific knowledge.

I think you should study more.

The media I think have brainwashed them too much. How come I have become a man from a reptile who become a cat and then who become a monkey and then become a man, how stupid is this ? I wonder what kind of science backs up evolution as the one I have studied at mathematics school surely do not back up unproved theories.

When are you going to stop embarrassing yourself badecker. You still keep talking about chance and math when I already showed you that those things are false. Evolution is not random and no one claims that but you seem to think scientists claim that evolution is random, it is not. To conceive of evolution as nothing more than blind chance and randomness is the most serious conceptual mistake one can make. Evolution does contain a component of chance, but there is far more to the process than that, and it is precisely the existence of the non-chance components that allows evolution to work. The process of evolution is driven by the engine of natural selection, a filter that extracts order out of chaos according to a fixed and non-random set of rules. It is for this reason that many of the most common creationist caricatures of evolution fail. Evolution is not like an explosion in a print shop producing a dictionary, a tornado in a junkyard producing a 747, or DNA in a blender producing a human being, because all of these lack a component of non-random selection.
Described in its simplest terms, evolution is easy to understand. Due to mutation, organisms undergo random changes, some of which are beneficial, while others are not. The organisms with beneficial changes enjoy a competitive advantage, and these changes are passed on throughout the population and become common; those with deleterious changes are at a disadvantage, are less likely to reproduce, and do not pass these changes on, causing them to disappear out of the population. This is natural selection in a nutshell. Within the scientific community, there are debates about topics such as the level at which selection operates or the relative rate of evolutionary change, but the simple principles outlined above lie at the heart of all versions of evolutionary theory.
It is clear to see that natural selection, which is not chance but the opposite of chance, is what makes evolution work. If there were no selection, change in living things would follow a pattern called a “random walk” – sometimes the changes would be beneficial, sometimes not, and the population as a whole would wander back and forth across the fitness “landscape” but, on average, never get anywhere. That would be an example of random change, and it is absolutely correct to say that such a process could never produce all the intricate diversity and marvelous adaptations that living things possess.
Natural selection changes all that, by preferentially preserving the good variations and eliminating the bad ones. It is like a ratchet, allowing a population to move only in one direction – the direction of greater fitness. And the changes that natural selection favors are not random, but are determined by the characteristics of the environment. This is why, for example, both fish and aquatic mammals such as whales and dolphins have the same streamlined body shape – because this is the shape that is most efficient for moving through the water in which they live. This shape has evolved separately in the fish and cetacean lineages, in an example of an evolutionary phenomenon called convergence, precisely because it is the best shape for that environment regardless of what kind of creature has it. If evolution were random, we would not see this kind of predictable pattern.
Like all natural processes, evolution is guided by laws that do not change. If you throw a rock up in the air, its path is not governed by pure chance, but by the law of gravity. It cannot fly off randomly in any direction, but will travel in a parabolic arc and land at a predictable point. If you put a hot object next to a cold one, the transfer of heat is not governed by pure chance, but by the laws of thermodynamics. Heat cannot flow randomly in either direction; it will move consistently from the hotter object to the colder one. And if you set a population of randomly mutating organisms in an environment, their future is not drifting at the whim of chance, but is directed by the law of natural selection. Their evolution will not proceed in just any direction, but only in those that make them better adapted to their surroundings.
Granted, the mutations that provide the raw material for selection to operate on are random, in the sense that they are not predisposed to increase fitness. Beneficial mutations are not preferentially more likely than deleterious ones, and organisms do not “know” how they “need” to mutate in order to survive. It is merely that the ones that do mutate in helpful ways survive better and reproduce more abundantly than those that do not.
This has led to creationists charging that evolution is random in another sense, that it did not require humans to evolve; that is, there is no inevitability to it. And as far as science can determine, this is an accurate statement. Although we can confidently predict that there will be mutations that increase fitness, we cannot predict exactly what mutations they will be or what form they will take. The evolution of Homo sapiens was the result of a long chain of contingencies, and if any event in our evolutionary past had turned out slightly differently, we might exist in a dramatically altered way, or we might not exist at all. There is no scientific evidence that humans’ existence was inevitable or that evolution in general has any predetermined goals.
But these things are true only as far as science can determine. If one’s personal convictions are such that God intended for humanity to develop all along and guided the course of evolution appropriately, that is not a belief that science can speak to. (That God was working behind the scenes to guide the course of events, despite a lack of any obvious sign of this, is of course a belief common to many religions.) For this reason, the theory of evolution has nothing to say about whether God exists or whether there was a deeper plan to life, though of course, individual scientists are free to take a position on either side of that issue.
But evolution itself is a science, and like all sciences, it tells us only what is, not what should be. It is a description of one particular aspect of reality, and that is all it is. It would be foolish to use it in an attempt to derive a moral code, a purpose for our lives, a meaning to life, or any such thing. Those things do not fall within the realm of science, and science will not give us answers to them; it is up to us as individuals to decide that for ourselves. Some people seek answers to these questions through religion, while others find them through other paths.
When creationists say that one who accepts evolution must believe that life is nothing but the result of random chance, they are abusing the theory. In the scientific sense, this conclusion leaves out the most important part of the entire theory, and in the metaphysical sense, this is a deceptive attempt to derive from the theory an explanation of something it was never meant to explain. Evolution does not tell us that our life is the purposeless result of chance; it does not say anything on the topic at all. Either way, the creationists’ conclusion is flatly inaccurate. Their strategy is to tar evolution with offensive-sounding implications and turn people away from it regardless of the evidence, but this fallacious attack will always wither before the truth.

I can quite get your logic here but if you think about it, there are several species of apes same with other animals and evolution could've taken place with one of these species. Evolution is still the most logical theory of how we came to be.

Nice manifesto, but where's the evidence? I don't need your advice, my cousin is a biochemist and when I speak about evolution with him, he says that he just believes it's true  

'Didn't evolve, we just share..' What?   'Rock is not a stone, it's a stone'... Just the kind of logic to expect from an evolution believer.

Here's a tip for you, don't ever, EVER say this infront of a biologist because you'd be in fora  wild ride and also, before you start bashing something, make sure you've unleast read a little about it. Humans didn't evolve from apes, we just share the ancestors. 

I don't know that there is a law, either, that states that chemicals immediately corrode. However, it is common knowledge that they start to do so whenever they are in the presence of other chemicals that can change them.

This indicates that there was no primordial soup. Why not? Because the chemicals necessary for life will corrode each other, and the resulting chemicals will continue the "corrosion." Rust is an example of simple corrosion. Decay is an example of complex corrosion on many levels. Without life, there is nothing that can control the internal corrosion of a batch of inanimate material in cell form, to make it alive. Rather, the cell form is destroyed by it's own internal corrosion, and the corrosion outside of it.

This is the common everywhere. Dump a bunch of the basic molecules and atoms of a cell together in a vat, toss in a dead or living cell, and the whole thing corrodes because of all kinds of actions of the chemicals on each other. The living cell dies.


Nature also has corrosion. Such corrosion, as has already been stated, destroys any potential cell formation. Check the vat point, directly above.

The longer that a piece of iron has to rust, the rustier it gets. Evolution has it backward. Any billions of years that might have existed, would only serve to corrode any cell formation beyond the point of it ever being able to be alive.

Probability math shows that the chemicals couldn't come together in the first place, because of their variety, and a cells structural complexity.

No chance for evolution. And the greater the length of time, the less the chance.



You are typing because a Super Intelligence that we often call "God" created this whole thing... and set in motion the things that it would take to produce you.

As far as a small chance in probability, scientists have a limit regarding how small of a chance there might be before they call it impossible. The chance against life happening by any logical means we can even guess at, is so great that it literally takes the impossibility factor that scientists have suggested, and increases it exponentially. Evolution is super impossible to have happened.

^^ Here is an article about an experiment which hypothesised exactly what I was talking about - specifically the random organisation of nucleotides into RNA strands with catalytic functions.

http://www.science20.com/stars_planets_life/calculating_odds_life_could_begin_chance

You first speak of rusting. This is a basic oxidation chemical reaction, which occurs whenever certain elements are in contact with oxygen. This is chemistry at its most basic level - electrons being passed from one atom to another.

You then speak of "decay". Now this is a very different process than oxidation, as it involves microbes such as bacteria and mould. Whole living cells which multiply on the surface of the cheese/meat.

Then you say this:


Absolutely false. There is no law in physics or chemistry which states that chemicals will "immediately corrode" before they happen to come together into a certain configuration. Only certain chemicals change state, when they are introduced to other chemicals. Many are inert, and are extremely hard to get to react with others.

It's all to do with the electron shells of the atoms in the chemicals, and whether those electrons are readily absorbed by other atoms.


Again, your reasoning is flawed. Even if you knew how to create a living cell from its constituents (which no scientist does), your argument that "if we can't do it in a lab, then nature couldn't do it" is ridiculous. Nature had 1 billion years, and a metric fuckton of molecules.

Like, loads and loads of chemicals and molecules, spread over the whole Earth, for 10 million lifetimes of a human. That is a seriously long time, with a seriously large amount of chemicals. Is it that crazy to think that it happened, just by chance? Don't forget that as soon as a self replicating cell existed, it might quickly reproduce.

As for your point about "probability math", well, probabilities are just that - chances of things happening. And it doesn't matter how small the chance is, if there is a chance then something CAN happen. And what we're describing certainly COULD happen, it is within the laws of physics.

And it obviously did, because I'm here typing this now.

You know it's really funny how atheist denounce creation and site their support for Science whiles they haven't given us any definite proof about evolution, Do we catch monkeys and study them for a billions years to see if they will evolve into something else, they have watched too much movies.