I'm not sure if i'm getting the picture about how evolution is the same as adaption. I am under the impression that adaption is just suppressing bad traits and bringing out the good ones already present and works hand in hand with natural selection. (see my article at the bottom) Example, there are a bunch of fish in a river most of them are brightly colored and a few are dark and dull. The brightly colored ones die until only the dark and dull ones remain and they mate making more dark and dull ones making that the only color that will ever be produced by those particular fish. Which is not evolution just adaption, in my mind. Since they didn't get a new trait just an existing one.
While evolution is when that species gets an entirely new trait that wasn't there before. Example, a bunch of fish have no teeth and they only eat plants, but all of a sudden there are very little plants but there are an abundant amount of other fish. Though they don't have a gene/trait to have teeth they get teeth anyways out of nowhere.
So the difference between the two are pretty big.
I have a problem with fossils. Fossils only show characteristics (which are open to anyone's interpretation) not transition. My other problem is this, has there ever been evidence of a change of kinds or just a change in species? Like the dinosaur that had feathers, does having feathers make it a bird (changing of kind) or just a different species of dinosaur?
How do they do that? If they are truly adapting they are actually getting rid of most of their already existing bad traits and keeping a few of the already existing good ones not making any new ones. Now if they were evolving they would be getting whole new traits so they could make themselves into something else. But by your statement they weren't evolving merely adapting, so it's not possible.
I think you need to brush up on your evolution and definitions my friend.
If living things such as plants have been observed to adapt to their environment—isn’t that evolution?
To see why it is not, imagine a population of plants in a reasonably well-watered environment. Now the climate slowly changes, so as to become progressively more dry. After several generations, it is noticed that these particular plants tend to develop deeper roots. This helps them reach water at deeper levels. Also, they have a more waxy cuticle (outer coating) than before which prevents them from losing as much moisture.
Both of these are adaptations. The plants are now better adapted to survive in their new environment. But—this could only have happened because the (genetic) information allowing waxier cuticles and deeper root systems was already in the population. Evolution, as an explanation of the whole world of living things, would require that information appears which was not there before. An amoeba does not have the information required to construct a man, so ‘amoeba-to-man’ evolution requires that new, more complex information be added. Therefore examples of adaptation such as these plants most definitely do not demonstrate how alleged amoeba-to- man evolution could have occurred.
If we had observed closely while the plants were growing in the moist environment, now and again there would have been plants with a waxier cuticle than others, and some with deeper roots (every population has built-in variation—just look around at the people in the street).
These were not the average, and they had no advantage over the others. However, once the area began to dry out, they were better able to survive and pass on their genetic information to offspring. Those with more shallow roots and less waxy cuticles were the first to die out. In time, the whole population will be, on average, deeper-rooted with thicker cuticles.
This is natural selection preferring one lot of information over another, leading to adaptation. However, selection by itself can choose only from what is there—it can’t create new, more complex, functional information needed to transform one type of creature into another. (That’s another question altogether—whether mutation [copying mistakes] can achieve this.)
In fact, such a change as we have discussed is really a ‘downhill’ change—some of the information in the plants which have now died out was not represented in the ‘newer’ (surviving) strain and is thus lost from the population forever.
Also, to cover another base, this is a good article about Natural Selection and Evolution. http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/cm/v6/n4/natural-selection
To everyone else, maybe I was being ignorant to the facts before i'll be more open from now on.
Gahd. I'm no scientist, but I'll try to explain it to you in layman's terms. Some biology or genetics expert correct me if I'm wrong.
Every time something reproduces, it's making a copy of it's genetic code. Now, because nature is imperfect, these codes often have errors. These errors are called 'mutations'. There's nothing that says the positive traits are the ones that survive: clearly, they're not, unless, you know, you're trying to evolve hamsters over your lifetime and kill all the hamsters with undesirable traits. I think there are some Christians that view evolution in that way.
Anyway, back to how us non-believers see it. So we've got these errors occurring in a species. We'll use your fish. Some are light, some are dark. Now, there's a predator in the area which happens to see bright colors more clearly, so it's easier for it to hunt the brighter fish. Accordingly, many of the light scaled fish are killed off by this predator, and the survivors are mostly dark scaled. So they mate and have little fishies and they're dark scaled.
Now, one day, there's a (relatively) big error in the genetic code and one of these fishes has bumps inside his mouth. This allows him to catch and eat more food, so he's more successful than his peers. Naturally, because he survives, he reproduces. Some of his kids are born with the same mutation. They also have an advantage, so more of them survive than their peers. So on and so forth.
Most of the modern day evidence of the dramatic changes you hint that you're looking for, Jarold, lie in microorganisms and viruses. That's because smaller, in general, is usually faster in nature, so they reproduce at a faster rate, therefore there's more chance for them to evolve within a shorter time frame. This kind of dramatic change in larger animals obviously takes a long ass time, because here's the thing about evolution:
it's random. No one is choosing who lives or who dies, it's just a response to the environment.
We've changed the environment, so we can only imagine where humanity might go in the extremely distant future, biologically speaking. Anyway, I'm getting off track. Hope that helped.
And for the record, it's not like we all weren't presented with the same arguments you're giving us. I was raised in a fundamentalist christian family. I had to pass out pamphlets that were from Answers in Genesis as a child. My entire community went to the same church, and I wasn't really allowed to hang out as much with nonbelievers. I was ostracized for expressing my doubts from an early age.
It just doesn't make sense. I mean, look at all the religions out there. What makes any one of them more right than the other? How do any of those stories make any sense given what we know? Do we believe in fairies? Elves? No? So why do we still have people who believe in demons and prophecy?
In the beginning though, was the message itself. Love your neighbor, but judge him if he's not following a set of arbitrary rules that were designed for people in the past who lived in a different world. Love your neighbor, but not if he's gay. You can be a good man, but not if you don't accept that there's some guy who rules over it all and he gets angry at people for being the people he made them to be. Wait, that's not his fault. That's our fault, and Satan's fault. But if he's all powerful, is it?
You've got to understand, that to us, believing you is akin to you believing some hindu about his extra-limbed god with an elephant head that occasionally drinks milk fed to his idols. Or you know, Tolkien's middle-earth for that matter, since middle-earth is more coherent than most mythological narratives. Yes, there was a time when we needed to explain things we didn't understand, but those people didn't have access to the cumulative knowledge we do know. We do. We don't have an excuse to simply dismiss real things in favor for imagined explanations.
We don't need religion because religion, ultimately, is outdated pop culture and science all rolled into one. We've got better versions of both those things.
IMO, it's a dick move to criticize people of their spiritual beliefs - coming from someone who beliefs that no one view is correct or wrong.
It is. I never attempt it with older people, but I feel like those who grew up in these times, with the kind of access to information that we have, don't really have an excuse.
