Do you believe in the theory of evolution?

Answer

Do you believe in gravity? Or do you feel that God is controlling your fall? They are both REAL. The fact is, that if you jump out of a plane, you will fall and hit the ground - unless God steps in and prevents it. In evolution terms, the fact is that organisms change and diverge over long periods of time that people can't hardly comprehend - unless God intervenes. It is just something that happens.

Various pressures contribute to this via natural selection, random mutation, random events, sexual selection, and several other contributors. The longer the period between generations, the harder it is to see the changes. However, simple organisms with very short lifespans and generation periods show clearly that the processes are true. For example, take the flu virus. The genes mutate in such a way that every YEAR it is different enough from the previous year that you need a whole new set of antibodies to deal with it.

Of course, more complex lifeforms tale even longer to show mutations. With us being one of the most complex, it only stands to reason that we would have one of the largest periods of change.

A surprisingly recent instance of human evolution has been detected among the peoples of East Africa. It is the ability to digest milk in adulthood, conferred by genetic changes that occurred as recently as 3,000 years ago, a team of geneticists has found.

The survival advantage was so powerful perhaps because those with the mutations not only gained extra energy from lactose but also, in drought conditions, would have benefited from the water in milk. People who were lactose-intolerant could have risked losing water from diarrhea.

Refer to Weblink NyTimes.com

Yet we can see that change. We can document it. People are getting taller in general. Dogs can be bred into various shapes and forms. Naysayers say that "yes, and dogs look very different but they aren't different species" - well that's true. But the genetic differences between a poodle and a great dane are MINOR and FEW. The reality is that we have only been selectively breeding them for a few thousand years at most. If you kept a group of great danes and a group of poodles separate from the rest of the dogs of the world and isolated their groups for 20,000-50,000 years, or better yet, 250,000 years, I guarantee you they would be VERY different and they would NOT be able to interbreed - hence, they would be different species.

It's not really that complicated and I don't understand why so many overzealous Christians have so much trouble with evolution. Evolution does not contradict the bible. It only contradicts some people's interpretations of the bible. And it is these interpretations that stand to lose to evolution, not Christianity itself. There is not 1 place in the bible that says the world is 6000 years old yet some will say it is so. Well here's something to think about:

Imagine God created a 30 year old tree right now in your front yard next to a truly 30 year old tree. A friend comes by and says "how old are these trees?". You say "One is 30 years old and the other is 2 minutes old". The friend realizes they are both the same size and appear the same age so cuts the trees down, he sees 30 rings in both and concludes that both trees are 30 years old because the tree grows a new ring every year. SO who is right? Does one say that the tree counting method of determining tree ages is incorrect? NO. Does one say that both trees are 30 years old? YES - because God made a 30 year old tree. Can you convince the person that the tree is only 2 minutes old? Maybe. He has to have FAITH that the tree is only 2 minutes old yet at the same time he can know it is 30 yrs old and it is not a conflict because the tree is BOTH.

We are human beings and we see time in a linear way. We were given by God a certain set of physical rules of the universe in which we live. All of those rules have to apply to us both FORWARD and BACKWARDS in order for our world to make sense. If we were to cut down a tree that looks like a 30 yr old tree but find no rings, that would not make sense. We could no longer use that method to determine tree age and t hat would not allow us to do simple things like grow trees for houses since we would have no idea how long it takes certain trees to grow unless we sat and watched one year after year.

So it's no surprise that He gave us a backwards path that makes sense all the way back to some infinitely small point. That point being the big bang and that's where it all breaks down. At that point all things cease to make sense but it is far enough back to allow us to discover the laws of the universe as he decides we should discover them and apply them to our lives.

Evolution is just one of those things. It allows us to make sense of everything within the physical laws of the universe that He created. Without some kind of clear path backwards that can be applied going forward and tested and proven, we would not be able to discover diseases and correct them. We could not figure out why DDT no longer works on bedbugs. And perhaps worse of all, it would be glaringly obvious to everyone that there was a God and faith would no longer matter.

So to sum this up, Evolution is just another mechanism in the world like all the others that allow us to make sense of the world and make predictions which help us solve problems. Without this process, nothing would make sense and everything would become clearly obvious that there was a God at which point faith would no longer matter and thus the reason for being here in the first place would disappear.

And one more thing. Don;t be fooled by those who say "If it is a fact, why do they call it a theory?". Look up the definition of theory. A scientific theory is a "body of fact". The word "theory" is often confused by the less educated with the word "hypothesis" which is an educated guess. Don't be one of these people.

Answer

No. Evolution has been proven to be impossible many times over. Not unlikely or even really, really hard. Impossible. Which of course leaves us with the inescapable conclusion that there is a God. And with God comes rules. People don't like rules so a while back they dreamed up the whole evolution thing. Which of course is rubbish.

-footnote: whoever wrote this is an idiot and has no idea what science is. There is plenty of proof that evolution exists. I bet that he hasn't ever read one of Darwin's works.
-footnote of footnote: Darwin is an idiot.

Additional: Both people above seem to be confused, evolution is not impossible whether you believe it happened or not. Also, proofs are mathematic, their is no "proof" (as science understands the term) for empirical sciences such as biology. There is however facts.

Answer

Many times terminology is used loosely which tends to muddy the waters in discussions of scientific questions. Strictly speaking natural selection, which Darwin observed in the Galapagos Island finches is regarded as the main mechanism together with mutations for evolution to take place. While natural selection acting on pre-existing genetic variety within a population can be observed thousands of times (examples above) and is going on continuously in humans, dogs etc this is not the same as evolution. People are still people and dogs are still dogs.

The modern science of Genetics demonstrates definite limits to changes within a type of plant or animal, beyond which the DNA of that organism will not go. A good example of this is the selective breeding of sugar beets to make them produce maximum sugar. Once the limit was reached, the sugar concentration could not be increased further. No-one denies the fact of natural selection, not even young-earth creationists, who however are certainly against evolution which is not the same and has not at all been proven.

Similarly, to say that believing in evolution is the same as believing in gravity is not correct because gravity is a scientific law with no known exceptions whereas evolution is not. This is even admitted by some evolutionists themselves.

Real Answer

Evolution has been proven false after it was discovered that DNA cannot evolve. Apparently, not many people know this yet…

Additional: DNA doesn't evolve, but that has nothing to do with evolution. Instead DNA accumulates mutations and therefore causes the organism to evolve. Evolution is defined as "a change in allelic frequency in a population over time". As a matter of fact not only does DNA not evolve, but individuals do not evolve either since it is the change in populations over time.

DNA cannot mutate either.

-- Yes, it can. Time and time again people have demonstrated genetic mutations---substitutions (an adenine changes to a thynine, etc) and insertions/deletions (indels)---which have the potential to provide the raw material for large changes.
---Ahh, so, people has mutated DNA, but it has not mutated naturally?

----Please read up on mutation from reputable sources. The only interesting kind of mutation in terms of evolution are changes in the DNA that can happen through many different processes including simple substitution errors, slippage, etc. These happen for all sorts of reasons (including mutagens, but also just naturally) and are usually, but not always, fixed. Think about it: if there were no mutations (or no natural mutations) why wouldn't we all have the same DNA? Especially if we all came from just 2 people, Adam and Eve. But no one has the same DNA. Do a little DNA research and you find lots of differences in all sorts of ways that evolutionary theory has predicted.

Cells can mutate

-- No, not under the scientific definition of mutation as it pertains to evolution.
---Maybe not as it pertains to evolution, but still, they mutate. Then the mutation spreads to other cells. Look it up.

----What do you mean by mutating cells? It just doesn't make sense. Cells change, but it's not called mutation. When someone gets fatter or taller we don't call that mutation... The DNA inside cells mutates but not the cells themselves. At least not by any normal scientific definition that pertains to evolution.

, which is why some frogs sometimes have 5 legs, but DNA cannot mutate.

-- Yes you can have teenage "mutant" ninja turtles, but unless the changes are genetic, they are unimportant for evolution...those frogs were caused by parasites and sewage.
---So the parasites and sewage caused the cell mutation. Duh

----Not exactly. Just changed how they were regulated.

And if evolution was real, how come there are still monkeys around?

-- Because only a small population of apes started the process of evolving into humans. Not every ape everywhere. This is what you're saying: If the USA exists then why does Britain/UK still exist? Well, not every part of the United Kingdom broke off and became America, just a part of America. Does the fact that the UK still exists prove that the American Revolution never took place? No, it doesn't. And neither does the existence of monkeys prove that SOME apes didn't evolve into humans.
---Why did only the small amount of monkey's evolve? And how come they are still everywhere they were, and we got all over the earth, if only one small clan of monkeys evolved in one small spot?

----Because you can only have that evolution in interbreeding populations. There are many species of monkeys which can't interbreed, so if it happened in one, it couldn't have affected the others. Most monkey species (and ape species) are in numerous fairly separate populations, so it only would have been one population. And the monkeys (and apes) continued evolving after we broke off, they just went in a different direction. Chimps and bonobos (whose ancestors we last shared 6-7 million years ago) evolved with their environment---they're great at living in tropical rain forests. We evolved into savanna beings because the area we inhabited became deforested with a changing climate. Apes actually were found all over the place, including Europe and many parts of Asia and Africa they are no longer in at that time. They died off as their habitat went away. As we became better adapted to the savanna, we could spread further. So eventually we spread out and continued evolving. Then our actual species, Homo sapiens, appeared and some of them left Africa about 60-80 thousand years ago and rapidly spread throughout the world because at that point we had evolved to the point that we could, through cultural and genetic changes, inhabit many habitats, unlike most other primates. For example we could wear clothes to combat the cold (we also became less lanky as a defense against cold and lighter skinned for vitamin D absorption and made other changes)...we could travel long distances (lots of evolution went into that one) and could build canoes and such to travel to islands. So, we spread everywhere.

And how come we are still the same.

-- The same as what? There's starting to emerge tons of good evidence we've been evolving even in the last few thousand years. If you're looking at the last million years especially, we've got fossils from thousands of individuals representing basically every intermediate stage between early members of the genus Homo and us. There they are gradually changing, gradually increasing brain size, reducing molar tooth size, reducing bone density, etc. Oh and you know what's really funny, Neandertals had bigger brains than us. So if you want to make the argument that God put down transitioning fossils to make it look exactly like we had evolved, he must be an even bigger prankster than most imagine!
---All of the fossils that look different then we do now are just a different race. Like Jewish or Chinese or American or African. We all look different, so different looking fossils don't mean anything except humanity.

----So chimps are just another race of humans? We have fossils of basically everything intermediate between chimps and humans. Also, looking at the bones of modern humans, there is not a ton of difference between races. The differences we see in even fairly recent human fossils is much beyond the range of human variation. Have you met any people who have an abducted big toe for climbing trees to escape predators? No, they don't exist EXCEPT in the fossil record. Oh, and we've gotten DNA from Neandertals, who are the closest to modern humans in terms of last common ancestor and physical traits---and now we have very strong evidence they did not breed with any of the modern humans that lived at the same time in the same place as them...unlike races today. Look, believe what you want, but base it on actual facts. And if you want to respond again, answer this question in your response:

- How did Noah save all of the species of plants (many of which could not have survived the deluge), the millions of species of microscopic bacteria, nematodes, insects, etc many of which can only be identified as separate species by molecular methods, AND human and animal pathogens? Many of those diseases can only live inside of humans (and cannot live for long inside one human)...so how could 7 people maintain measles, mumps, scarlet fever, syphilis, etc in addition to things like SIV in the chimps, etc. Everyone and every animal on the arc would have had to die with all those pathogens... And what of the animals that didn't live anywhere near Noah? And why were some animals not saved, like the dinosaurs. I don't recall the Bible saying that Noah only saved some animals.

Evolution, again, is only a theory. There is no proof.

-- There can be no proof of the kind creationists want in science generally. How does a physicist prove that a specific particle he and his instruments can't see or directly measure exists? He can only say that it *appears* as if a particle with certain properties exists there, but cannot rule out that there is a God that just makes it appear as if that's the case. Allowing the invocation of God in scientific matters means no science can advance since it is impossible to disprove God as a likely cause of *any* phenomenon since, by most people's definitions, God can do anything. It's much more productive to attempt to explain natural phenomena WITHOUT invoking God to understand nature better.

Theory is defined as "a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something." There is no actual proof, it is only a supposition, or an assumption.

-- Indeed, it is exactly like my assumption that you (and everyone else) is a thinking, feeling human that experiences sensations and thinks more or less similarly to how I do. It works extremely well in practice (assuming that others don't like it when I hit them and do like it when I do something nice for them seems to work pretty well), but which I can never truly *prove* in the way you want evolution to be proved. It is implausible, but possible, that God is just letting me "watch a movie" and no one else really exists. Or that He created the Earth just for me and everyone else is an unfeeling robot just acting like they have feelings.

First answer by Brads. Last edit by Rboyko. Contributor trust: 10 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 38 [recommend question]