Quote Originally Posted by Sharla
I look at this website and I see it saying things are invalid but not really proving anything. I haven't read it thoroughly because a lot of it is just a run down of the history of theories saying they are crap rather than actual evidence as to why. You'll have to point me in the right direction if there are particular points in that worth reading.

I don't think the theory of evolution is about how things were created but how they have evolved over time. You can believe what you like about how life was initially created but it doesn't mean it hasn't been subject to micro and macro evolution over time.

I keep reading bits and pieces about how people think that an ancient animal existing at the same time as a more recently evolved creature somehow disproves evolution.

It doesn't.

The way animals are influenced over time depends on their form, their behaviour including migration patterns and how that is or isn't suited to survival in their environment.

If their environment changes but they don't it could be that they were pretty robust in surviving different conditions in the first place. Say something like a cockroach doesn't die easily and flies reproduce so damn quickly that they are not very vulnerable.

Still if you could examine a living specimen of one of these creatures from a few thousand years ago and compare it with one existing now you'd find they probably still differed in some ways for example disease resistance, exact diet would have changed etc etc. They have evolved just in ways which are less visible.

Scientists in my lab often use rice synteny to track down the location of genes on the barley or wheat genome. They do this because the rice genome has been fully sequenced and barley and wheat have not. As rice and barley are both cereals the idea is that you get the sequence of the barley or wheat gene and find a close match in the rice genome. The genes are normally slightly different but the proteins are similar in form and function - not exactly the same but similar.

They were looking for a gene in barley and sequenced the region they expected to find it in according to the rice sequence and found that a whole segment of DNA was in a different position than they would have predicted from rice synteny. Rice is more ancient than barley and somewhere along the way a cross over and inversion event occurred. They share similar genes but in different parts of the genome, some are completely inverted which makes for a very different plant.

That's just one specific example I know of and it's not random shuffling of DNA is a specific stage in meiosis and cellular replication. Cancer is started by mutagenesis of cells. It's lethal because it makes cells function differently and it's often caused by things like UV light, radiation etc. The difference is when a person gets cancer the DNA in a differentiated cell is effected.

If a non lethal mutation occurs in an embryonic cell you have a genetically modified organism. We know cancer is common and a product of loads of environmental influences (carcinogens) so why does it seen so absurd to people to think that an embryo can't be genetically modified.

Dramatic things happen in nature like ice ages etc. If you have a population of say 2 million people and theres an ice age. Some decide to stick it out and some migrate. They eat different food as their environment changes, they have different behavioural patterns, their hormones are effected. Lets say it's a really brutal ice age, it lowers their immune system, they get a few viruses which are different in different places and wa la their populations are now down to 2 remote camps for 200 or so. Few survive and their gene pool is narrowed to particular groups with more or less body hair and tolerance to specific diets and disease - they become DIFFERENT.

It's a big change because the selection pressure is harsh for them - not necessarily all animals as some might have already been better able to tolerate the cold.

Macro evolution can just be microevolution under a harsher selection pressure.

You can still say god is behind it. No one can disprove it.

Also if you were god speaking to people thousands of years ago you'd know these people who don't even get that the earth is round yet would understand that. You'd dumb it down for them. "You'd say I created all these other things and then along you came, now I'm gonna rest for a bit and leave you to it have a nice life." - you wouldn't bother trying to explain evolution as your tool for creation would you!
Hey Sharla, cc for another good response but again you are talking only about adaptation or changes within a species or kind.

Nobody to my knowledge disputes changes to an organism due to natural selection, genetic modification or other enviromental pressures to my knowldege but all these changes are strictly limited and confined to slight alterations of already preexistant lines of code.

Barley and wheat may share a common ancester and maybe adapt to become different over time, but they will always remain plants, they will never become insects or some other form of animal because the necessary information just isn't there.

No matter how much time is allowed, or how much enviromental or laboratory pressure is put on these organsims they will never turn into an animal simply because there are no instructions within the DNA to tell it how to do so.


Changes such as size, colour, body dimension, behaviour etc can all be easily manipulated by slight alterations in the genes but new appendages, wings, eyes when there were no eyes etc simply cannot happen as there isn't any preexistant material to be manipulated.

And if you want to insist that such change could be possible providing there was a big enough timeframe then it only contradicts other things we see in nature, for example a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. How on earth would a caterpiller, gradually over millions of years evolve the ability to turn into a butterfly?

It would have to get it right the very first time else there would be no future caterpillars. But you yourself as a biologist would surely know that the immense amount of instructions required to turn a caterpiller into a butterfly could not appear instantly in one generation!

There is nothing that you describe than cannot be seen simply as being an inbuilt (I'd say by God) survival mechanism in all organisms to be able to adapt to fit their changing enviroment. If they could not then all of life would have died out a long time ago.

The evidence for natural selection, adaptation, genetic variance etc is overwhelming and irrefutable, nobody denies this, but to draw a conclusion from it that these relatively tiny changes within an organism can lead to whole new creatures evolving out of them given enough time is a conclusion that neither molecular biology or the fossils themselves offer no support for whatsoever.

It's a catch 22 for evolutionists. If you argue that changes are so gradual taking millions of years then you are left trying to explain how the fossil record has managed to cover up every stage of evolution for every living organism on this planet. If evolution were true we'd have more transitional fossils than we would fully developed species fossils yet we have none.

If you argue that evolution happens so quickly that it will leave no trace in the fossil record then you are suggesting something that is surely biologically impossible as it cannot be possible for the amount of information needed at the molecular level to induce massive change, dinosaur to bird for example just could not appear in such a short time. Knowing what we now know about the complexity of even the simplest molecule this as idiotic as suggesting like our forefathers did that flies and low level insects sponataneously appeared.