Do you accept the theory of evolution?

Do you accept the theory of evolution?

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It's said that people haven't evolved enough to stop believing in things like this. How easy is it for that man to rub chicken blood or paint on the figure and get publicity from doing something like this?

Virgin Mary Statue 'Bleeding' in Louisiana
 
From Slate

Humans have long enjoyed nonhuman lovers—the proof is in our DNA.

DNA—remains a mystery: No one knows how much of it is essential for life. As one scientist mused, “Is the genome a trash novel, from which you can remove a hundred pages and it doesn’t matter, or is it more like a Hemingway, where if you remove a page, the story line is lost?” However enigmatic, though, noncoding DNA has proved mighty useful for scientists in one way—it’s great for tracking evolution, through so-called DNA clocks. DNA clocks take advantage of the fact that DNA mutates at a constant rate: Every so many years, a new mutation should pop up along a stretch of DNA. So in examining the natural history of two related species—which once had the same DNA sequence—a scientist can count the number of different mutations that have accumulated along a stretch, and estimate from that how many years have passed since the species started drifting apart. Except it’s not quite that simple. Mutations can arise anywhere in the genome, in gene DNA and noncoding DNA alike. But mutations to genes have bigger consequences: They can disable proteins and kill a creature. As a result, mutations within genes often get weeded out and don’t get passed on to future generations. Noncoding DNA faces fewer constraints—it can mutate more freely without causing problems when it’s passed along. Counting mutations in noncoding DNA therefore provides more accurate estimates in many cases because the timer there isn’t getting reset.


Geneticists have used noncoding DNA in other types of historical analyses as well. Until the past few years, most scientists doubted that human beings had ever stooped to interbreed with Neanderthals or other archaic hominids. That view has since been routed: DNA extracted from old Neanderthal bones proves that all people of European and Asian descent have a few percent of Neanderthal DNA inside them today, equivalent to the amount they inherited from each great-great-great-grandparent.


In addition, scientists have discovered that Melanesians, the people who originally settled the islands between New Guinea and Fiji, seduced another archaic human race, the Denisovans, somewhere on the long haul from Africa to the south seas. The Melanesians still carry Denisovan DNA today. In some sense, then, neither Neanderthals nor Denisovans ever quite went extinct: Their DNA lives on in various non-African ethnic groups.


So what about ancient Africans? Did they ever have hominid paramours? Scientists had a harder time answering that question because the hot climate of Africa—unlike the cold Eurasian climate where Neanderthal and Denisovans lived—tends to destroy ancient DNA. A clever study from 2011 got around this limitation, however, and suggests that Africans did indeed indulge in inter-Homo hanky-panky.


The study’s scientists pored over the noncoding DNA of various ethnic groups in Africa, looking for funny patterns. For instance, they looked for random mutations that no other ethnic groups worldwide had. They were especially keen on finding long stretches of such funny DNA, because these stretches were probably inherited en masse from an archaic hominid. Sure enough, regions on chromosome 18, among other places, fit the bill. The study concluded that, about 35,000 years ago, some central Africans had children with an unnamed and now-extinct race of hominids. Like Europeans and Asians before them, these people couldn’t resist the temptations of nonhuman lovers.


As scientists continue to probe the human genome, they’ll likely find even more examples of interbreeding in our past. The DNA memories of those deeds are buried deeper inside us than even our ids, but it seems that all peoples, everywhere, enjoyed cross-species love. The grand saga of how humans spread across the globe will need some amendments and annotations—rendezvous here, elopements there, and the commingling of genes most everywhere. At least we can say that all humans are united in sharing this shame (if shame it is) and in sharing these scarlet As, Cs, Gs, and Ts.
 
What don't you understand?

Shemtov, I'm gonna say this as politely as I can. And even though I'm gonna discuss the R word briefly in this post, hopefully I won't be banned!

Before we can determine if biblical texts are an effect form of evidence against the theory of evolution, we first have to determine if biblical texts are valid at all.

And this is NOT the thread for it.

So, pretty please - stop spamming this thread with biblical discussion. And that goes for everybody. This is not the thread for it, and it is driving me slightly nuts.

As far as I am concerned, it is no more valid than using the text within comic books to show that we ought to surrender our will to Darkseid. (And there is a very funny comic strip someone did online that makes that point).

Thanks!
 
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Keep in mind… A good number of Christians and Jews interpret Genesis as myth and metaphor. So if that’s the view of many believers, it’s odd to take umbrage when scientists (and others) make the very same declaration.
 
Shemtov, I'm gonna say this as politely as I can. And even though I'm gonna discuss the R word briefly in this post, hopefully I won't be banned!

Before we can determine if biblical texts are an effect form of evidence against the theory of evolution, we first have to determine if biblical texts are valid at all.

And this is NOT the thread for it.

So, pretty please - stop spamming this thread with biblical discussion. And that goes for everybody. This is not the thread for it, and it is driving me slightly nuts.

As far as I am concerned, it is no more valid than using the text within comic books to show that we ought to surrender our will to Darkseid. (And there is a very funny comic strip someone did online that makes that point).

Thanks!

Sorry about that.
 
No, I believe in the biblical creation. God the father, created the Earth and mankind.
I also agree with Hmarrs.
 
Everything we've learned tells us that's not the case, but thanks for sharing.
 
No, I believe in the biblical creation. God the father, created the Earth and mankind.
I also agree with Hmarrs.

Check out this link. Scroll to page 449.

http://whitelab.biology.dal.ca/lb/Bejder and Hall.pdf

How can you explain that? Is the evidence just an advanced illusion designed to trick us?

Are we supposed to ignore the best evidence that we have, that screams out to us that evolution is a fact?

Are we seriously supposed to just reject reality?

Come on.
 
No. Never been to America.

Ah, well. About half (48% last I checked) of America doesn't believe in evolution. It's gone down a little. There's a decent sized number who want to teach creationism in school.

However they generally don't call it that. They call it "intelligent design", to make it sound slightly less ridiculous.

A number of politicians are creationists, and it comes up a lot in local state politics.
 
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The calls to stop talking about religion and the Bible have been heard, but I have to respond to these. I'll do so under spoiler tags...

Hold up. Absolutely no offence is intended. But I keep seeing this
"Straw man" term tossed out, once to me and though I admit it was just I have read the same straw man arguments from the evolution side.

Admittedly I have not read much of this thread but from what I have read I saw the bible categorized with such things as unicorns, dragons, fairies, magic, Shakespeare, and the most well thought out one was about similarities to Greek mythology and how immoral it is.

Not one person mentions a cohesive plot among the sub plots.

No one mentions a story about
Deception and it effects (especially involving leadership)
Fear (please ask how if you think its just to control us)
Oppression
Freedom
Human nature (both good and bad)
Forgiveness
a pretty accurate metaphorical "end of times" that we seem to be perpetually a part of looking from today back through history
A book that predicts its own demise.


With just those things I believe a straw man call is deserving. You have at best taken out some things that oversimplify any scripture out there. Some more than other but a spades a spade.

Am I saying this is proof of God? No.

What I'm saying is that some people here have a very high standard of education, especially in the eye of todays education system, for your audience yet in your intellectual supremacy, no joke some of you are smart, you commit the same crime.

Thanks for saying my post on it was the most well thought out... :D

It's not that I don't take all of that into account. Like I said... I've read it... a lot. I simply think the problems with the Bible outweigh all of that. I disagree that it's cohesive. Sections are cohesive, but I don't think it weaves a cohesive tale from beginning to end. On top of that it is internally contradictory.

There's some beautiful writing in the Bible. I'll give it that. But beyond that, it's just not a worthy tome... in my opinion, of course.

I never said religion doesn't affect me directly or indirectly, but since you seem to know me and how I am in the real, please enlighten me on how religion affects me.
As for the making fun of someone for who they worship, I just don't care. I don't care about who worships what. If someone wants to worship Spongebob that's their choice. I still won't make fun of that person, no matter how corny it sounds to me. I will have my opinion on it, but I won't ridicule anyone for what the believe, even if I think it's wrong.

Calling the Bible "a 2000-year-old collection of myths and fairy tales" is not ridicule... it is an accurate statement of what I consider the Bible to be. It is how I view the Bible and is, in a nutshell, what I think of the Bible.

There is no obligation, in my opinion, to show any respect towards the Bible, and when I criticize the Bible, I am saying nothing about the people who believe it. If they are offended when I point out what I see as problems and flaws in the Bible, I don't consider that my problem because I'm neither making fun of or criticizing them.

For the record, I also don't care about beliefs. I really don't care what people believe or not believe. However, I live in the Southeast United States, in Florida. I live in the Bible belt. I'm surrounded by people who's wet dream is basically to turn the USA into a Christian Fascist Theocracy... and it not a minority. In fact, it is the faction that is currently taking over the Republican Party.

I do NOT want Intelligent Design/Creationism (especially Young-earth Creationism) taught in science classrooms. I do NOT want the law of this country built upon what these Dominionists call a "Biblical foundation", because I think women have the right to an abortion, I think homosexuals have the right to get married, I believe that legal prohibition fails every single time, I believe we need to end the War on Drugs, I believe we need to pull out of the Middle east completely, and I believe that every single non-Christian in the US has a right to be a non-Christian.

Over all, I'd rather die then live in a Christian country, and I am literally seeing us inch ever closer to that every single day.

So I speak out. I ridicule religion; I ridicule the idea of Yaweh and Jesus and the Trinity; I ridicule the Bible. And I do it because it's how I contribute to the fight against the fanatic Christians waging war on the rest of us in this country.

If you're oblivious to this, congratulations. I envy you, because I'm living it. Just about every non-Christian living in the Bible Belt is living it.

And yet whenever thousands of people see a UFO, they're nuts.

Show me a miracle on radar, and we'll talk.

Here's a case that is either a miracle, a UFO, strange solar phenomena, or... just a mass hallucination.

The only ones who are nuts are the ones who refuse to change their minds when given evidence that suggests a much more down-to-earth explanation. I'd suggest that the vast majority of people who claim to have seen a UFO are not crazy.

At least it's more likely than a "Faith Healer" curing Breast Cancer just by touching someone and saying "Praise Jesus!"

It would be interesting to see how accepted evolution is on areligious countries.

I believe the level of acceptance in Sweden, one of the least religious countries on the planet, is something like 98% or something like that.

Great reply. Thanks.

I know why I was in the wrong. I called it just, like justice was served. By calling the bible a fairy tale someone would be incorrectly restating the idea's and information in it. A fairy tale can be dismissed far easier than the bible viewed as a whole picture.

Actually, I disagree. I think the Bible can be dismissed pretty easily...

Giving the bible to a lay person for an opinion is like giving a lay person a diagram of dna and ask them what they think. We may not live in a time to call it something so silly as a dragon but you could probably look forward to a couple of "nice art work".
This does not make the Bible any less fictional, however.

Yeah, strict interpretation, I think its better called hypocrisy. But
can you name anything that's not corrupt? Can you name me anything, hope I thought this through, that can't be used for good and bad? It comes with the territory. Only difference between good and bad is perspective.

Your last statement... Pretty true. Gods not comeing down but we aren't exactly evolving our higher brain function fast enough either.
Agreed with both points, here.
 
Well it's going to keep coming up, because the only people who don't believe in evolution don't believe in it because of their religion.

So if your answer to the thread's title is anything but "yes", we go back to religion.
 
The calls to stop talking about religion and the Bible have been heard, but I have to respond to these. I'll do so under spoiler tags...

Thanks for saying my post on it was the most well thought out... :D

It's not that I don't take all of that into account. Like I said... I've read it... a lot. I simply think the problems with the Bible outweigh all of that. I disagree that it's . Sections are cohesive, but I don't think it weaves a cohesive tale from beginning to end. On top of that it is internally contradictory.

There's some beautiful writing in the Bible. I'll give it that. But beyond that, it's just not a worthy tome... in my opinion, of course.



Calling the Bible "a 2000-year-old collection of myths and fairy tales" is not ridicule... it is an accurate statement of what I consider the Bible to be. It is how I view the Bible and is, in a nutshell, what I think of the Bible.

There is no obligation, in my opinion, to show any respect towards the Bible, and when I criticize the Bible, I am saying nothing about the people who believe it. If they are offended

I point out what I see as problems and flaws in the Bible, I don't consider that my problem because I'm neither making fun of or criticizing them.

For the record, I also don't care about beliefs. I really don't care what people believe or not believe. However, I live in the Southeast United States, in Florida. I live in the Bible belt. I'm surrounded by people who's wet dream is basically to turn the USA into a Christian Fascist Theocracy... and it not a minority. In fact, it is the faction that is currently taking over the Republican Party.

I do NOT want Intelligent Design/Creationism (especially Young-earth Creationism) taught in science classrooms. I do NOT want the law of this country built upon what these Dominionists call a "Biblical foundation", because I think women have the right to an abortion, I think homosexuals have the right to get married, I believe that legal prohibition fails every single time, I believe we need to end the War on Drugs, I believe we need to pull out of the Middle east completely, and I believe that every single non-Christian in the US has a right to be a non-Christian.

Over all, I'd rather die then live in a Christian country, and I am literally seeing us inch ever closer to that every single day.

So I speak out. I ridicule religion; I ridicule the idea of Yaweh and Jesus and the Trinity; I ridicule the Bible. And I do it because it's how I contribute to the fight against the fanatic Christians waging war on the rest of us in this country.

If you're oblivious to this, congratulations. I envy you, because I'm living it. Just about every non-Christian living in the Bible Belt is living it.



The only ones who are nuts are the ones who refuse to change their minds when given evidence that suggests a much more down-to-earth explanation. I'd suggest that the vast majority of people who claim to have seen a UFO are not crazy.

At least it's more likely than a "Faith Healer" curing Breast Cancer just by touching someone and saying "Praise Jesus!"



I believe the level of acceptance in Sweden, one of the least religious countries on the planet, is something like 98% or something like that.

Actually, I disagree. I think the Bible can be dismissed pretty easily...

This does not make the Bible any less fictional, however.

Agreed with both points, here.

I agree on almost every word. The contradictions, along with every other bit of deception we can all experience every day, are a given if you take into account the cohesive plot I mentioned. Maybe ill try to make a thread.
Basically I do see the the clear tale of a world and its people being oppressed by rulers using both aggressive and passive measures.

Sorry dbryan I can't find spoiler tags on my phone.
 
As much as a Libritarian as I am half the adult population of the United States not accepting evolution as fact is non negotiable even if it's compatible with religion. It's probably also why I might support removing the right to religious freedom from the First Amendment because all religion does it make someone completely ignorant. At the very least the IRS needs to stop protecting religious institutions as 501(c)(3) nonprofits because they make people ignorant.
 
New Fossils Indicate Early Branching of Human Family Tree




By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Fossil by fossil, scientists over the last 40 years have suspected that their models for the more immediate human family tree — the single trunk, straight as a Ponderosa pine, up from Homo habilis to Homo erectus to Homo sapiens — were oversimplified. The day for that serious revision may be at hand.

The discovery of three new fossil specimens, announced Wednesday, is the most compelling evidence yet for multiple lines of evolution in our own genus, Homo, scientists said. The fossils showed that there were at least two contemporary Homo species, in addition to Homo erectus, living in East Africa as early as two million years ago.

Uncovered from sandstone at Koobi Fora, badlands near Lake Turkana in Kenya, the specimens included a well-preserved skull of a late juvenile with a relatively large braincase and a long, flat face, which has been designated KNM-ER 62000 (62000 for short). It bears a striking resemblance to the enigmatic cranium known as 1470, the center of debate over multiple lineages since its discovery in the same area in 1972.

If the 62000 skull showed that 1470 was not a single odd individual, the other two specimens seemed to provide a vital piece of evidence that had been missing. The specimen 1470 had no mandible, or lower jaw. The new finds included an almost complete lower jaw (60000) — considered to be the most complete mandible of an early Homo yet found — and a part of another lower jaw (62000).

The fossils were collected between 2007 and 2009 by a team led by Meave and Louise Leakey, the mother-and-daughter paleoanthropologists of the Koobi Fora Research Project and members of the famous African fossil-hunting family. Dr. Meave Leakey is the wife of Richard Leakey, a son of Louis and Mary Leakey, who produced the early evidence supporting Africa’s central place in early human origins. Mr. Leakey divides his time between Stony Brook University on Long Island, where he is a professor of anthropology, and the Turkana Basin Institute in Kenya.

After looking “long and hard” for fossils to confirm the intriguing features of 1470’s face and show what its teeth and lower jaw were like, Dr. Meave Leakey said this week, “At last we have some answers.”

The real crux of matter, said Susan C. Antón of New York University, a member of the team, is how the discovery shapes the interpretation of 1470’s place in the early world of Homo. “These fossils are anatomically like 1470, and we now have some teeth,” she said. “We are more certain that 1470 was not a one-off, and not everything 1470 is big.”

In their first formal report, Dr. Leakey and her colleagues wrote in the journal Nature, “These three specimens will greatly aid the reassessment of the systematics and early radiation of the genus Homo.”

They, however, chose not to assign the fossils to any existing or new species until more analysis is conducted on contemporary hominids. The 1470 specimen was two million years old; the new face and fragmentary jaw are 1.9 million to 1.95 million years old; the better-preserved lower jaw is younger still, at 1.83 million years old.

Fred Spoor, a member of the discovery team who directed the laboratory analysis, said in a news teleconference that the research showed clearly that “human evolution is not this straight line it was once thought to be.” Instead, East Africa, he said, “was quite a crowded place, with multiple species” with presumably different diets.

Dr. Spoor is a paleoanthropologist at University College London and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The lab work was supported by the institute. The fieldwork was financed by the National Geographic Society, and the dating of the fossils, mainly by Craig S. Feibel of Rutgers University, was supported by the Leakey Foundation.

Although a few specialists in human origins questioned whether the still sparse evidence was sufficient to back the new conclusions, Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, who was not involved in the new discovery, concluded, “This new material certainly substantiates the idea, long gathering ground, that multiple lineages of early Homo are present in the record at Koobi Fora.”

Dr. Tattersall continued, “And it supports the view that the early history of Homo involved vigorous experimentation with the biological and behavioral potential of the new genus, instead of a slow process of refinement in a central lineage.”
Bernard Wood of George Washington University, who has studied the early Homo fossil record, wrote in a companion article in Nature, “In a nutshell, the anatomy of the specimens supports the hypothesis of multiple early Homo species.”
Dr. Wood then weighed the pros and cons of placing the new fossils with the species H. habilis, first discovered in 1964, or a separate and controversial parallel species known as H. rudolfensis, to which 1470 has often been tentatively assigned. H. erectus emerged around the same time, joining the other two species in Africa.

Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum of London, who had no part in the research, agreed that it looked as if the new discoveries “confirm the distinctiveness of 1470” and “therefore confirm the existence of a distinctive kind of early human around 1.8 to 2.0 million years ago.” But he noted that “there remain many uncertainties” about the 1470 fossil “and whether it might still be just a large specimen of Homo habilis.”

Another problem, Dr. Stringer said, is that in the last three decades, as the number of fossils attributed to habilis has grown, it has become unclear how to define what is and is not a member of that Homo species. Determining if the new fossils belong to rudolfensis or habilis, he said, “would depend on ongoing comparisons with the original fossil assemblage” at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, where the first and many other habilis and contemporary specimens have been excavated.
An assessment of recent finds at Olduvai as well as the 1470 fossil, by Ronald J. Clarke of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, was published recently in a special issue of The Journal of Human Evolution.

“So where do we go from here?” Dr. Wood asked in his commentary. “More work needs to be done using the faces and lower jaws of modern humans and great apes to check how different the shapes and the palate can be among individuals in living species.”

All in all, the state of hominin affairs that paleoanthropologists are left with is neatly summed up in the title of Dr. Wood’s article, “Facing Up to Complexity.” He concluded with the prediction that “by 2064, 100 years after Leakey and colleagues’ description of H. habilis, researchers will view our current hypotheses about this phase of human evolution as remarkably simplistic.”
 
I'm a christian and I believe in Evolution, long day theory.simple as that.
 
I believe in partial evolution. Which is supported. Meaning things adapt to their enviroments over time, even humans. But the whole "we came from monkey's" thing seems a bit silly to me.
 
I believe in partial evolution. Which is supported. Meaning things adapt to their enviroments over time, even humans. But the whole "we came from monkey's" thing seems a bit silly to me.

Apes and humans belong to the same family. Both branches evolved in the same manner you just described. What exactly clashes with your beliefs?
 
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