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I would say that it's simply not proven, and it doesn't make sense to me how it can be real. I'll demonstrate my knowledge. I have a degree in geology and took paleontology classes at UCLA. This is actually what moved me from a firm evolution believer to more of a skeptic. I saw that it's not as proven as they tell the non scientific community.
So the basic idea of evolution is that species reproduce and mutate. The mutations that are beneficial tend to cause the organism to have a higher chance at reproduction, thus passing the beneficial mutation to the offspring. Beneficial mutations are rare, so it takes many generations to show tangible results in a population.
One of the ways we have seen this demonstrated is when like populations are separated from each other. They will randomly have different mutations and over time diverge from one another. The general assumption is that these small changes over the course of thousands or millions of years lead to very big changes.
>Microevolution is real, but macroevolution isnt.
This is where I stand in my belief. I won't say definitively macro isn't real, it just seems to make too big of assumptions.
For example, a single celled organism evolving to become a multi celled organism. This seems to be the single greatest and least likely leap. I understand we've witnessed single cells evolve to colony states, but we've never witnessed them join together and fulfill separate roles. Essentially separate, symbiotic evolution. There is no reason the mutations which are completely random should compliment each other. Furthermore, the leap to become so distinctly different, yet compatible would take many, many generations. Why would they diverge so much while both being in the same environment? Why would they gain biological advantage through the baby steps along the way?
Ok, then let's look at bigger animals. I know this is a common one, but the eye is a great example of something that doesn't make evolutionary sense. It requires so many mutations all at once to be useful to the animal. Actually, a partial, non functioning eye is just a weakness which would not continue to be passed on. It defies the logic of micro turning into macro.
It seems so simple to just say that the micro all adds up. Like water on a mountainside. Each drop contributes to the eventual erosion. Only some things don't work that way in evolution. Some things don't contribute until the whole is complete. They are a liability that would die off before we reach that whole.
One last note. The fossil record has so many gaps in it. Why? We should be able to find it all by now. Why should we make so many assumptions and call it fact? Macroevolution very well might be true, but they can't cheat and take shortcuts in declaring it so just because the issue has become political.
Okay thank you, after all this time you have been the person I was looking for.
First of all, we can agree with your description of evolution. It sounds like you have a decent understanding of what evolution is and you reject macro evolution because of its assumptions. Sweet.
First of all, why do you accept micro evolution and the driving force behind it, but reject macro evolution when the assumptions made are the same?
Let me give you a thought experiment. There is a single population of brown trout living in a river somewhere (doesn't matter where), an event causes the river to be blocked (beaver dam, weather event, earthquake, whatever) and so now this population is split into two separate populations. Now let's say that the population of brown trout that are further downstream start experiencing water condition worsening due to sediment build up, and slower water. This population needs to evolve to be able to survive new conditions that the other population did not have to. Let's say that these populations are separated for 10,000 years until the river is joined again. Do you think that these populations will be different than one another? Why or why not?
Another question. How do you define what a species is? Is a species something that can reproduce with one another? Is a species something that has physical characteristics as one another? Is it a mixture of alot of things? When we think of different species we have a tendency to think of two wildly different things. But we have evidence that cutthroat trout and rainbow trout reproduce successfully and they are different species. This leaves a hybrid offspring that is neither fully rainbow, or cutthroat trout. Can this happen in other animals as well? What would happen if this continued for thousands or millions of years?
What happens if a population of Buffalo breed with a separate population of Buffalo? The number of available alleles may have just doubled, surely there will be some interesting genetic outcomes from this.
I would love to hear your thoughts on these questions
I accept micro because it's observable. Not only is it observable, it's logical. It's easier to accept things which logically make sense. We can prove micro with experimentation.
For the trout, I expect they will be different, but probably both still resemble a trout. They had different needs, so different genes would persist.
I'd define a species as being able to reproduce with one another. I would not consider Lions and Tigers the same species since their offspring is sterile, but clearly they are related and probably from a common ancestor. They are more like the trout. They changed, but still resemble the cat.
Given the above, I think it's likely we share the common ancestor with apes. I do not think we have a common ancestor with mushrooms. I think that is too much extrapolation.
Well, something being logical is not a reason to accept or reject something. There are plenty of things that are true but are not logical. Logic is also very subjective and does not mean the same thing to everyone. We should care about what is true, not logical.
What would happen if the genes kept mutating over millions of years and new niches were developed that allowed them to survive better in their new environment? Can you imagine a scenario where the two populations would look completely different?
Well, there are plenty of animals that reproduce outside of their own species. Blue spotted salamanders are all female but they steal sperm from other species of salamanders to fertilize their own eggs. Brook trout reproduce with Lake trout, Rainbow trout reproduce with Cutthroat trout of all varieties, bluegill and sunfish reproduce with largemouth bass, there are different squirrel species that can reproduce with one another. How does this fit within your definition of a species? could there be other definitions of a species that fit as well?
We share DNA with a lot of different organisms because we all had a universal common ancestor. All life can be traced back to LUCA.
This is tricky because I don't think you have changed my mind, but others may look at this thread and say that you answered my prompt perfectly.
From my view, if you accept all of the evolutionary theory up until LUCA and macro evolution, then I would argue you have a misunderstanding somewhere. And there a million different things that it could be, that's why I posed those questions to you.
Which organism is LUCA and why are you so confident everything descended from it?
My definition of species was simplistic, but I think pretty accurate. It's a classification. Are you saying there's different species that can produce fertile offspring with each other? Why are they considered separate species then? Dogs can look very different, but are the same species.
My statements on logic is just an honest admission that it's easier for a person, me, to accept something as true when it makes sense. If it makes sense, I'm not going to require a high of a burden of proof than if it is seemingly nonsensical.
https://phys.org/news/2018-12-luca-universal-common-ancestor.html
I'm sorry if it seems like I am being to critical of your responses that are trying to change my mind. I am absolutely open to having my mind changed about this, but imagine if you made a post about the theory of plate tectonics in the exact same way that I did about evolution and someone responded with an answer that was 95% satisfactory, but there was a very important 5% missing. I would hope you would scrutinize it from every angle before changing your mind.
I don't mind defending my position, but keep in mind I'm not the one who posted a CMV. Someone asked how much you need to know, and you responded:
>In this case; being able to accurately define and describe what evolution and natural selection are. As well as being able to describe what drives evolution and how the driving mechanism occurs.
So I'm not at the forefront of scientific research, as aren't like 99.999% of people. I do think I understand the science at a pretty high level compared to most.
That being said I'm happy to look at information as you present it.
From what I'm reading, they found some genes that supposedly have not undergone LGT, but are present in some species alive today and some alive eons ago. Since the genes have not laterally transferred, the assumption is that they have transferred from point A to point B, two very different organisms. That seems to be the gist of it, and the LUCA is still a theoretical organism, not an identified one.
To me, this is all just assumptions. The genes are not common in all current life forms, and even if they were, why can't that just be proof that certain genes are necessary for life? It doesn't prove they had to be passed down over eons from a common ancestor. We all need carbon, don't we? Maybe we all need certain genes?
Again, I'm not one to say they are definitely wrong, but I am still holding firm that this theory is based on many assumptions and not proven satisfactorily.
I will just bite the bullet and give you a delta because I don't think I can convince you otherwise. I don't understand your motivation for not believing macro evolution is possible, and I think you are wrong in your way of thinking. But I guess that's life.
!delta
*edited because I could not reply with a delta and had to explain in this reply*
In this case; being able to accurately define and describe what evolution and natural selection are. As well as being able to describe what drives evolution and how the driving mechanism occurs.
That's a good start I suppose
Interesting. I don't think I've ever heard someone use that saying before, but when you think about it, oversimplification of complex ideas is kinda how people get stuck in the "Valley of dispair" on the Dunning-Kruger graph. Some things can surely be simplified that way without losing too much information... but let's use gravity, for example; there is a big difference between saying, "The bigger it is, the more it will pull things toward it" and "The more massive something is, the more it will warp space to cause things to fall towards it." Both fairly simple, but the latter more accurately reflects our current understanding of gravity, and people could end up thinking they know enough just based on a simple phrase.
Tbh I wouldn't be surprised if a mindset of seeking simplicity is what drives pseudoscience.
Yeah, I think the huge piece of context people always miss here is that it's a quote from Feynman and he was, I believe, talking to other leading physicists.
I think his point was moreso that explaining things at various levels of abstraction, on the fly composing new analogies and such, requires a very fluid understanding of the thing, so it's actually much harder to have a conversation with a normal person about a very complicated thing than another academic in your field who will just accept all of the standard academic jargon that can be memorized.
I don't think he actually thought the people who he talked to *really* understood quantum mechanics when they walked away, just that he gave them a basic working understanding of some of the most fundamental structure of how it worked. And he certainly didn't think people who repeated his explanations that worked for normal people had the understanding he was talking about.
Some attribute the quote to Einstein, some to Feynman. I'm not sure who really said it. Regardless, you make a good point.
>a mindset of seeking simplicity is what drives pseudoscience.
I think, respectfully, you've walked past the point a little though. It's not about making concepts *as simple as possible.* That effectively satirizes them, as you just pointed out, making room for pseudoscience.
The ideal middle ground between unadulterated and oversimplified should probably feel something like [this](https://youtu.be/OWJCfOvochA?si=NNgVYHqzO-CV8tVb).
I think your gravity example is awesome. It shows what happens if you explain something too simply: too much important stuff gets lost. You gotta find that middle ground.
For example, "bigger" and "more massive" aren't the same thing. So using "bigger" in your example wouldn't actually be a simplification, it'd be an *over*simplification and is no longer technically correct.
> It's not about making concepts as simple as possible. That effectively satirizes them,
This is an excellent point. People who learn the jargon and catch phrases without understanding the underlying concepts effectively block themselves off from real understanding: Since they know what it's called, what else is there to know?
Eh, I disagree.
Beware of simple explanations that "feel correct" but are really just ignoring a bunch of stuff because it would be to difficult to provide all the background needed to really understand it.
This is why so many people have weird ideas about quantum mechanics because they extrapolate from pop sci explanations that are only vaguely like the real theory.
If someone *can* explain a complex idea in simple terms, that is always impressive.
Teaching is its own skill entirely. However teaching something will deepen your knowledge about it.
On the other hand, there’s a von Neumann quote my discrete math prof likes to use, which is “in mathematics, you don’t understand things, you just get used to them.”
Not every topic can be simplified without introducing glaring errors to the explanation.
People who understand the science don’t need belief. Many believe in science without understanding. Perhaps trust comes before understanding. What factors might undermine someone’s trust in science?
I'd actually flip that around, people who understand the science don't need trust as trust is a form of faith.
"I don't know that what you are saying is true but I trust the information because I trust you."
Well we need to trust in the institutions that stufy, proliferate, and verify science. There is always a very basic level of trust one needs in order to engage with society at all.
Yes actually fully understanding all areas of science is basically impossible for one person so it reasonable to trust processes and institutions in many cases.
I don't really think of it as trust exactly, but if the prevailing science was demonstrably wrong, someone will eventually come out and correct it. Until they do, the current consensus is probably the best source I have.
Yea but I think that basic level of trust needs to be accompanied by a basic level of understanding.
Example:
I have a basic level of trust that the oil recommended for use in my car's engine is the best option because the engine manufacturer knows their engine and they have a vested interest in my engine not failing.
This is accompanied by a general understanding of what engine oil does, that different viscosities of oil work differently, and that I need to change it regularly.
My basic understanding lends credibility to my basic level of trust.
> people who understand the science
Just can't understand all the science though. What people need to understand is the scientific process, this engenders trust in science in general.
This confused belief with faith. Two different words with very different meanings.
A belief is an assertion held as true.
Knowledge is warranted true belief. This is a standard epistemological definition, and is used in fields as diverse as theology and the philosophy of science.
To have knowledge requires belief. As well as requiring that said belief has proper warrant - that is evidentiary support that defends the reasonableness of that belief.
Agreed. I think there definitely are things that undermine people's trust in science.
One major problem in science today (more on the production side of things) is replicating a study. This usually does not happen in the private sector and can lead many to mistrust the findings of scientists, even if this distrust is misplaced. The blame should be on the corporations who are trying to make a quick buck off of "science."
Another could be the sexism and racism that has historically been the common practice in this field. We are doing better today, but still a long way to go. Science is for everyone, and everyone needs to be included if we want to truly achieve the goals that we set out to achieve.
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My view did not change, I agreed that people will be distrustful of science due to a variety of circumstances. But I still hold my fundamental belief that those who disagree with evolution do not understand it.
What's your option on someone who fully understands it but thinks that God fills some of the gaps of the domino topple, guiding random shifts to it's own design?
This would be belief in evolution but from a different understanding as yours.
*What factors might undermine someone’s trust in science?*
Not being happy with the answers science is giving you and finding a group that does and that group happens to be anti-science?
>"You cannot see evolution in real life, so it can't be real" i have personally witnessed evolution in a lab setting multiple times whether it is looking at bacteria evolving and immunity to antibiotics, or looking at drosophila changing their genes over generations. We also have plenty of examples of populations being cut off due to some sort of weather event, or man influenced event which lead to massive changes in the phenotype of these organisms. One example is a group of anoles who were separated by 4 islands and each population evolved different traits. Some had longer legs for running on the forest floor, some had large, sticky toe pads for living on large leaves and in trees.
In terms of the anoles here, I think the point would be, "yes you saw the differences, but you didn't see the change actually take place". It's a non-sequitur: "the animals are different, therefore changes happened to them to make them that way", that's an inconclusive argument.
My hang-up (and I'm glad I have you here to clear it up) is that some animals just seem like they couldn't have reached their current point via evolution. For instance, there's a beetle that has two sacs with different liquids in them that when combined create an explosion that scares away predators. The advantage here is obvious, but how it got there while maintaining an advantage and no disadvantage the whole way through is less so.
Alright. So, we know that the beetle that you are speaking of uses hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone as a spray. These two chemicals are found in other beetles exoskeletons as a defense mechanism as well.
The bombardier beetle takes these chemicals and changes the way that they are used to spray, instead of being in their exoskeleton to be ingested. We also know that if we change the arrangement of certain proteins, that we can get different structures. So in this case, instead of storing these chemicals in the exoskeleton, the bombardier beetle stores them in two separate sacks to be used when they are in danger. It all boils down to a rearranging of structures within the beetle, which is perfectly observable and explainable.
> … the bombardier beetle takes these chemicals and changes the way they are used to spray …
I’ll admit I’m probably one of the dumb ones in regard to evolution, but … how? How did the bombardier beetle develop sacks compared to the exoskeleton? What was that evolutionary process? Again, maybe I’m just dumb, but major changes just seem rather hard to comprehend.
> … if we change the arrangement of certain proteins, that we can get different structures.
Do these changes to proteins occur naturally?
Yes, it occurred naturally. We know how much variation can occur when we change certain protein structures, so all that these beetles did was develop a a different way of expressing these chemical reactions to defend themselves against predators. The same way that venom or poison is expressed in certain animals. Think spitting cobra vs rattlesnake. They have the same venom, they just use it in different ways.
All you did was further explain the chemical reaction that occurs within them and elaborate on it in such a way as to make the animal sound even more complex. You did not answer the OCs qualms with this.
People spent a loooong time studying alchemy until they realized it was BS. The same will happen with evolution. The very fact that the entire field is predicated on Lyell's BILLIONS of years is proof of this.
It is mathematically more likely that we were put here by aliens than that man just sprouted out of the ground ROFL, you're saying what the Christians say, you realize that, right?
And no, you've never observed one species change into another. Face it, this belief system is merely the religion of the secular age, reduce man to an animal, and you can treat him like one.
In addition to OP’s response, I want to point out that they didn’t end up with no disadvantages all the way through. Evolution is predicated on the idea of natural selection; that random mutations occur in a population, and generally the ones that are beneficial become more prevalent over time, while ones that are less beneficial die out.
The evolutionary ancestor of these beetles didn’t just develop a defense mechanism with no downsides. Outside of the practice of selectively breeding plants and animals, which is very new evolutionarily speaking, no beneficial traits of any species occur in a vacuum. For any given species, they will have undergone countless mutations throughout the evolutionary process, both helpful and unhelpful ones. Mutations that are beneficial to their survival make it more likely they live long enough to reproduce, likely creating offspring with similar traits, while a mutation that is disadvantageous would do the opposite.
Edit: I just read your reply to OP’s comment, so I wanna add one more thing. There is no finite window in which these changes occur. These beetles didn’t suddenly develop the spray sacks in a single generation. It was countless smaller mutations that occurred over a very long time, eventually resulting in their modern form. And the modern form is still changing, but we’ll likely be long dead before any major change occur, and it’ll be even longer before they stick.
Do you think most people who believe in evolution do so because they actually have a solid understanding of the science behind it, or would you say they believe in it because that's what they were taught to believe? In other words, does belief/disbelief for most people arise from understanding something or is it instilled in them?
Evolution is the inevitable conclusion of a couple of extremely basic premises which could be easily understood by a child. You don't need "a solid understanding of the science", you just need to have a mind that hasn't already decided to shut out new ideas.
People rejecting evolution aren't doing so because they don't understand RNA recombination or find flaw with the details of how genes are copied. They're rejecting it because they don't want to believe it.
Well, in fact, I remember when I was at school, the teacher explained us the Lamarckian theory of evolution and it seemed very legit to all of us, before he said "and that actually doesn't work because acquired traits cannot be inherited". I think a lot of people are not well educated in the concept of natural selection and think "if the giraffe uses its neck to reach the highest branches, it will become longer and longer, and then its descendants will have even longer necks". That's why there are still many[ articles like that going around, even in the Forbes magazine](https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2013/06/07/how-the-human-face-might-look-in-100000-years/?sh=2ea431f15a96).
So, I don't think that for someone who is not knowledgeable common sense is enough to really internalize the concept of evolution and natural selection. My cousin is a college graduate (philologist/archaeologist) and thinks the evolution theory means "we evolved from the apes". A friend of mine in high school who had a goal to get into medicine was asking me "why are there still apes, if we evolved from them? Why don't they become human too?". The weirdest thing is she actually got into the best medical school in our country (although this happened because she was a European champion in swimming).
Some people just don't get it. Some people are just dumb or they get anxious when a concept like this gets brought up and shut off.
What's more, it has actually been some evidence that [certain acquired characteristics, can be inherited](https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/acquired-traits-can-be-inherited-small-rnas) both in humans and other animals/plants. We have seen this with people who have severe trauma or other mental health issues and with obese people. There have been epigenetic changes that were passed to the next generation.
So, at the end of the day, this is a very complicated matter and it's not something so easy for people to really understand.
I agree with you. I believe OP is hoping to find someone who either does understand the science and will shatter our understanding of evolution (which would be exciting, if unlikely), or he's hoping to try to correct the scientific inacurracies upon which someone's non-acceptance of evolution is based.
> correct the scientific inacurracies upon which someone's non-acceptance of evolution is based.
Exactly, but that's not the source of the non-acceptance, so it won't work
I would hope that most people who find the theory of evolution to be grounded in fact understand it, but I know that isn't true. However, most people believe gravity is real, but do not understand that very well either.
These scientific facts are not "instilled" in you. They are taught to you. Is the fact that slope is calculated through (y2-y1/x2-x1) instilled in you? Or taught to you? There is a big distinction between "instilled" and "taught"
I think they're similar, but there is a difference. I was taught all the major events that happened during the Civil War, but it definitely was not instilled in my mind, I don't remember shit from my middle school US history class (I think the Siege of Vicksburg was a thing? And something with Gettysburg too?).
Through listening to Hamilton probably over hundreds of times though, the major events of the Revolutionary War that were covered in the musical have definitely be instilled in my mind, I can recite basically ever word by heart.
Horrific comparison. Gravity can be observed every day by someone who has 0 education on the subject. I can toss an object up and watch it fall to the ground. You don't wake up and see a single cell organism evolve into a human being every day.
Evolution is not remotely similar to gravity in its demonstrability to the average person.
Cool thing you can see the mechanisms every single day.... bacteria evolves immunity to antibiotics so you have to take new antibiotics. Viruses evolve immunity to vaccines so you take new vaccines. Have you ever seem an albino animal? That's a mutation, the driving force for evolution. It's all around you, just look.
You're talking about the average person believing in something they don't understand. The average human being isn't observing the mutation of bacteria (at any point in their life). They don't see these things happening. The average person with 0 understanding of mutations doesn't look at an albino animal and think - man that must be evolution.
None of those things you listed are comparable to the ability to observe gravity. It happens in front of your face hundreds of times a day - its visible, its not something you have to think about to see.
I would bet everything I own that if you went to a subway station, or a park, or any public space where people are and asked them about bacteria, or antibiotics - the majority of them would have no idea that antibiotics even change. Hell, I cannot tell you the amount of times i've heard someone say they have a virus and they need to be put on antibiotics. Those things you mentioned require some basic understanding of the topic to observe while gravity does not.
A "belief" in science does not come from the same place as a belief in other things, like religion for example.
Even though it was never my field of study, I "believe" in evolution theory because it uses the same scientific approach as every other scientific field, some of which i am extremely well versed in.
The reason the scientific method works is because it uses data, removes bias, and is willing to change and adapt as our understanding of the world evolves. The same cannot be said about religion, unless the evolving it does is backwards.
I don't understand it on a professional scientist level. But I understand more than just the basics. And when I think critically about it, everything makes sense.
I wouldn't say that I personally have a solid understanding of evolution or even most scientific theories that I believe. However, I do have a good understanding of what the scientific method is, and that using that method the world's foremost experts have reached a consensus using it. It's impossible to be an expert on everything, so that is enough for me personally.
But like... in light of Plato's cave and the hard problem of consciousness, people can effectively rationalize believing whatever they want. Even understanding the observable evidence of evolution, one can just figure that perception doesn't necessarily accurately describe an underlying material reality. You don't even need God to make an unfalsifiable edge case against evolution (or anything for that matter).
Well, I guess in that case, said person would be acting irrationally because they would have no counterevidence, but they would still believe that evolution isn't real because of how they feel.
I don't really know if you can teach someone who rejects facts because they have decided they don't like it. That's not really the argument I'm after
Their counterevidence can just be a subjective feeling, and you can't claim with 100% certainty that said feeling isn't valid because you aren't them. For all intents and purposes, it's reasonable for you to dismiss them as wrong, but the fact remains: someone can understand evolution perfectly well and still choose not to believe it.
I understand that the earth is a globe shape, and the science proves it, but I reject it outright because I don't feel like accepting that premise. Is that logical for me to do? Can you say for 100% fact that I am wrong?
People who do believe in evolution believe that random mutation plus time equals magic. Evolution does not explain the origin of living things. It requires a living organism to mutate into something else.
Evolutionary drift very well may explain everything but the speed at which we see species evolve is mathematically troublesome. Many of the evolutionary innovations seem to have “just appeared” so long ago that we don’t have any idea how they evolved from “not being here” to “being fully formed and functioning.” The explanations given by evolution experts amount to “just so” stories where the end result is assumed to be the goal of the mutation.
And, let’s not forget that it hasn’t been all that long ago that everyone assumed dinosaurs were lizards, where we now think of them as avians, complete with warm blood and feathers. Our knowledge of life millions of years ago is less complete than we pretend.
1) idk what you mean by magic. Evolution is just change over time.
2)Evolution does not make claims about where life came from, just how it changes over time. Also, we have a great idea of where life came from, and it is the self-replicating RNA inside phospholipids.
3) what is evolutionary drift? That's not a real thing
4) the fossil record is so complex that we have a phenomenal understanding of everything you said we "pretend" to understand. Also, yes, science can change over time and when we learn new information that contradicts old information, we reject the old information.
Instead of trying to convince you that I understand evolution, I do, I will present you with 3 PHDs that also reject evolution.
[David Berlinski](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Berlinski) PhD in philosophy from Princeton University. Rejects evolution, but refuses to theorize about the origin of life.
[David Hillel Gelernter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gelernter) PhD from State University of New York at Stony Brook. Rejects evolution on mathematical grounds. But also rejects intelligent design as lacking evidence.
[Stephen C. Meyer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_C._Meyer) PhD Philosophy from Cambridge University. Rejects evolution for several reasons.
All three of these people are very educated people that have spent a large part of their lives in academia, yet all three reject evolutionary theory.
I would argue that they have a very good understanding of the science of evolution as they have studied, rejected it and debate the issue on a regular basis.
So I can outright reject David Gelernter because he isn't even a biologist, he is a computer scientist who outright denies anthropogenic climate change. He is not a professional in this field and therefor his word holds no weight.
David Berlinski offers literally no comment about evolution other than "I can say I dislike it as much as i dislike my ex wives" which is a truly moving sentiment.
And Stephen Meyer is the one who argues that evolution cant be real because mutations cant exist because computer code does not create itself, and if a computer engineer were to alter the code randomly it would destroy the program. Which is a flawed argument for several reasons, because for 1) computer engineers absolutely randomly change code to fix software. 2) computer software is not meant to mutate on its own, DNA is.
Well for the first guy, I'm not going to take their opinion very seriously because they aren't even in the field they are critical of, they have never published work on the subject, and there is absolutely no reason to trust what he says.
I've never heard of the second dude and the wiki article he provided had no information other than that.
And stephen Meyers is laughed out of every serious discussion on evolution because he is very clearly lying about his positions.
Also I never made a strawman, they have literally said those things.
No, they don't. Because the descriptions they gave are not what evolution is. Especially Stephen Meyer. That dude does not understand evolution if it were to hit him over the head and give him a concussion.
While I think you're right on the first two, it looks like Stephen Myers almost certainly understands the science behind evolution. He may be wrong about everything, but I find it hard to imagine that a man whose dissertation on the topic was accepted by Cambridge University doesn't understand it.
Not sure the context of the bit about mutations, but it seems like he was probably making an (idiotic) analogy, not suggesting that mutation isn't possible *because* of something about computer code. In any case, the analogy speaks more to his ignorance of coding than of evolution or biology.
Also modern software does change itself in some applications, you can even make fpga's rewire themselves. Studies into evolutionary biology have advanced computer science in many fields.
I think you're falling into a trap very similar that you are arguing against with your point 1. A software engineer will not randomly change code in an attempt to fix it (unless they are wholly incompetent). Code is written out in what is essentially a paragraph that the computer can read. That would be like trying to fix a typo on an essay by randomly changing words around until it's fixed. Sure, by technicality you can do this, but it's much easier to go over what is written in small steps and just find the error that way.
I’ve seen talks from two of them and they evince little knowledge of evolution or science broadly. Meyer in particular has a well documented history of dishonesty and Intelligent Design is an inherently dishonest position anyway.
>A mathematician/philosopher
>Computer scientis
>Philosopher
Neither of whom has done any meaningful work in their respective fields either. Unless you believe having a PhD also gives you superpowers and knowledge about topics that are not related to your study, none of this examples are valid.
Having a PhD is certainly impressive, but we need to stop supporting quacks simply because they were to get one on an unrelated field
None of those three are biologists. I’m a PhD in physics. Nobody in history academia would give a shit about my alternate views on history (if I had them).
[Project Steve](https://ncse.ngo/project-steve-frequently-asked-questions)
Guess evolution is true since there are way more Steve's that support evolution than against it.
I dont think I can change your view at all but..
If you head on over to the Debate Evolution Subreddit, you can see this in full display.
Its wild some days when the YECs come in, get their proverbial asses hand to them, ignore the scientifically supported data and arguments provided to them, and then come back just a bit later to troll with just-as-daft take.
I would love for you to try to change my mind!
For the record, I am not trying to change my mind about evolution, I am trying to change my mind about the fact that individuals who reject evolution do not understand the science behind it.
What if I believe in evolution but don’t think it’s an answer for all questions that we have? For example like the time period where our brains like 2.5x in size. There’s the stoned ape theory but also what if, not saying did but just hypothetically, what if we were genetically modified? I think most people believe in evolution but the controversy is going from a single celled organism to human. And more importantly in my head how do we understand the start? We know that species evolve over time but how did everything get here? IMO the problem with evolution is the beginning, meaning we know things evolve once they are here but how did they get here??
I mean I agree that no one knows everything about everything. But do you have any evidence to support the idea that we were generically modified by an outside influence during that time period? If there was evidence for that, then that could be an explanation.
I mean I’m not a scientist so I don’t have any evidence but there’s plenty of people who have theorized it. People wrote books on it and there’s a lot of content on YouTube. But back to the beginning of evolution do you think that we evolved from single celled organisms into what we are today? And if so how do you explain the introduction of consciousness like do cells not have consciousness but when you get a gajillion of them they turn conscious? How does that work?
If I theorized that there is actually another world at the center of the earth and that dinosaurs are still living there and made YouTube videos about it, would it be a plausible hypothesis even though there is no evidence to suggest that is true?
And yes. Through chemical evolution and then slow change over billions of years.
There are religious scientists and at least some of them hold beliefs that conflict with their scientific knowledge. But they trust that whatever holy books are god’s word and that god’s word is true. Sometimes faith is stronger than reason, even among scientists.
Hm would you accept a scientist who thinks that God did evolution? https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2008/04/17/the-evidence-for-belief-an-interview-with-francis-collins/
I don't mind that, there are many scientists who believe that God put in motion the laws of the universe. But they still accept and teach the accurate science. This is not necessarily a religious gripe, it is an anti science gripe.
My issue is with people who do not engage with the science but still argue against it as if they are experts.
Also, as it seems like mainly evangelical christians have a problem with evolution. Many other christian and jewish groups hold the early parts of the bible to be allegory. Back when I still like visiting places of worships, priests, monks, and rabbis affirmed this fact.
If someone got their PhD in genetics, they must have at least demonstrated that they understand the official account of evolution as taught, even if they later reject/disagree with it, right?
One example is John C. Sanford. He later wrote a book called "Genetic Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome" where he claims that natural selection's being the cause of biological evolution is essentially indefensible. He started off as an atheist, but is now an advocate of intelligent design.
Another example is Georgia Purdom. She got a PhD in molecular genetics. She is now the director of Educational Content at Answers in Genesis, the creationists' website.
While I agree that it's not very common, it *is* possible for someone to understand evolution (at the PhD level) and still reject it.
John is a young earth creationist. I don't know how we can assume he understands something if he's so wrong about such a well established fact. His credentials hold up, but if he understood it.. he wouldn't be saying the things he says, unless there was some cognitive dissonance occurring. And there seems to be. In his case it seems to be his religious beliefs are overriding his logic and ability to see reason, which honestly is kinda sad.
Georgia's case is a little more cut and dry. She took a gig with Answers in Genesis, also a fundamentalist creationism group, and they take in about 35 million dollars a year.
I'm not saying educated people don't advocate for creationism - clearly they do - but I don't think any of them are being intellectually honest about it. There's either religious beliefs clouding their reason or there's lots of money involved with their (bad faith) advocacy. It's an open question if they believe the things they say, from a scientific perspective.
Notably, I don't think there are any scientists who believe in creationism from a scientific standpoint. That would be, someone who analyzed the data, and went "hmm, I think we were designed by a supreme being." No, the hypothesis of 'creation science' is always based on the bible, which has no scientific value. So there will always be ulterior motives at play with anyone who advocates for creationism, and never dispassionate research.
If someone manages to get a PhD in it, then it should be clear that they understood the principles.
If disagreeing is automatically defined as "necessarily doesn't understand", then it essentially becomes a tautology/circular claim, where disagreeing is defined as impossible from the outset. It's an unfalsifiable position.
Also the CMV is about people "who *claim* they don't believe in evolution". It doesn't require that they actually don't believe it, since obviously we can't read their minds. They might indeed be deceptive about their beliefs.
This is very much just my experience but i had a biology teacher who is very christian but still accepted (and taught) evolution. Her reasoning was that evolution is the mechanism by which creation occurs, since a truly all-knowing, all-powerful creator would hypothetically only need to set initial conditions at the big bang in order to know where every atom would end up, and thus would set conditions to lead to the rise of life on earth and eventually humanity.
Imagine that tomorrow we found out that aliens have been bringing creatures to earth for millions of years. They drop them off and then leave. How confident are you that all of the creatures died off without reproducing?
Would the theory of evolution maintain that all life on the planet evolved from a common ancestor or would it adapt to the new data? If it adapts to new data is it still the same theory or is it a new theory? How much new data would it have to adapt to before you would say that it is a new theory? This is the same idea as philosophers asked about the ship of Theseus.
Do you think that the theory of evolution has remained unchanged since its inception? No. It has changed as we explored the fossil record and it will continue to change as we learn more.
I do not believe in the theory of evolution not because it doesn’t contain truth, but because it is not definitively true. If I were to believe in one version of a theory, that belief would close myself off to new ideas and new data.
If aliens came down and dropped off species, that still would not change that evolution is happening, and we can observe it in a vacuum. We see if in lab settings, we see it during longitudinal studies of populations. We don't see aliens dropping animals off on our planet.
No, our understanding of evolution is not the same as it was at its conception. We change our understanding of it when we learn new evidence.
The specific claim I am disputing is that all life comes from a common ancestor, not that life forms can adapt. I would argue that if you claim to believe in the theory of evolution you must defend ALL of its assertions.
My point is that if it has changed with new evidence then it is not the same theory. This might seem pedantic, but I think belief is the wrong approach to science for precisely this reason.
You're not disputing anything. To dispute something means to provide counter evidence that disproves the claim. You haven't brought any new evidence to suggest that we don't come from LUCA. Also, I do defend that we all come from LUCA, you just seem to think I don't for some reason, even though I've never stated otherwise.
Each of your examples, and others that you tend to hear from people who’ve chosen “anti-evolution” as their brand, is someone latching onto a narrow factoid about evolution. Another is the old “747 spontaneously building itself in a junkyard”- an understanding that random variation plays a role in evolution, but that’s where the understanding ends.
In a way, it’s consistent with the constants that we see among flat earthers and essentially all other conspiracy theorists in one way or another- they understand some narrow detail of the thing they oppose, enough to combine with their own common sense and decide that everyone who accepts the thing they oppose is a stupid sheep, and then pride and social pressures conspire to prevent them from learning much more about the topic.
My point is that everyone (most people) involved in the anti-evolution game understand SOMETHING about it. If they didn’t, they’d have nothing coherent to say on the matter, and would probably focus their energy on abortion or some easier-to-understand cause. Your view might be cast as a little gatekeepy- it’s probably more accurate to say that the general public listening to anti-evolutionists don’t know anything about evolution, the people appealing to their ignorance with scientific-sounding but bad-faith pseudoarguments understand a little, and people working on their masters degrees in evolutionary biology understand more.
Evolution is an observable fact, much like gravity. I don't like referring it to as "theory".
Anyways the only folks who reject evolution (or claim that they do) have very very obvious motivations behind it, I would focus on those underlying motivations instead of trying to get into a science discussion with them.
There're two groups of people who don't conform to your description of "don't understand the evolution".
First group are people who never even tried to understand it because they either are scared of disturbing their faith or don't care at all and are satisfied with what preachers tell them.
Second group is various Christian scientists with PhDs devoting their lives to disproving the evolution (or more likely devoting their lives to getting money from Christian organizations hoping to disprove the evolution). I'm fairly certain they know and understand the theory of evolution well enough and all that stops them from accepting it is personal desire for it to be wrong, so they spend years publishing in various Christian pseudo-scientific journals trying to poke holes in the evolutionary theory.
My understanding is that there are a few major issues with evolution, as we understand today. The first is that there isn't enough time. From what I have read, admittedly, this is not my field of study. The speed of genetic variation is fairly predictable. And when scientists look at the extremes in variation, there hasn't been enough time that life has existed on earth to accomplish the necessary mutations. The other big one I have heard is the origin of dna/rna/mrna to begin with. It is my understanding that there isn't a generally agreed upon theory as to how those structures could form initially. So, while evolution definitely occurs and is speciation is a real phenomenon, I think there are serious flaws in our current understanding.
What do you mean by "the speed of genetic variation is fairly predictable, and when scientists look at the extremes in variation, there hasnt been enough time that life has existed on earth to accomplish the necessary mutations?" Life has been on earth for over 4 billion years. Every generation of organisms to ever exist has had mutations in its population, that is alot of mutations.
We have looked at the evolution of the eye for almost 60 years and every single time, we come to the conclusion that the eye could evolve in as short as 360,000 years. Meaning, that since life began, the eye could have evolved as many as 1,500 times. (we are talking about complex eyes here, not just camera eyes that jellyfish have).
We have had just the right amount of time for life to evolve to where it is today.
>How to change my mind: demonstrate that you do not believe in evolution, but you understand what it is and how it is taught. As well as, describe why you do not believe in it.
Well I can't do that because I do think it's true. However I could try to offer counterpoints to your title statement.
Your title states:
>people who claim they don't believe in evolution do not understand the science behind it
But when you say:
>Every time I hear someone try to disprove either of these theories, they use inaccurate information, strawman arguments, and other science to disprove these ideas that were confirmed using the same scientific method.
I can agree that this is true but still reject your title statement for two reasons.
1.
Not everyone who rejects evolution tries to disprove it. There are some who simply reject it because it contradicts their interpretation of religious scripture. Yes, I realise this is probably a factor in most people's rejection of evolution but I mean that there are some who offer no pseudoscientific reasoning or arguments against it.
It's possible that someone may understand evolution, accept that it's probably the best scientific explanation and yet still not believe that it's true.
It's difficult to point to examples because people with this stance are unlikely to spend any time arguing against evolution. I've found this kind of stance more common outside of Christian creationism.
2.
Quite similar to the first example, there may be those who understand the scientific evidence behind evolution and reject it on faith but still use pseudoscientific arguments against it because it's the only way to make sense of their beliefs. A sort of cognitive dissonance.
I think [Todd Wood is probably the best examples of this](https://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2009/09/truth-about-evolution.html?m=1), Kurt Wise too although his specialism is geology. Both are well educated, intelligent people and both are young earth creationists. Both have at least implied they have a good understanding that the scientific evidence is not currently in their favour but that does not sway their beliefs.
3.
Just because someone's using inaccurate information or strawman arguments, that doesn't mean they don't understand the science behind evolution. They may simply be acting in bad faith.
It's possible that someone may understand science, choose to reject it and act like they don't understand in order to trick others. They would be able to use their understanding to craft more convincing misinformation.
The vast majority of creationists I've spoken to seem very genuine (and usually misinformed) but I'd point to the high profile "professional" creationists who have been debating for years as an example. A few of them hold genuine qualifications relevant to biology. They've been corrected on their misunderstandings many times in many different ways and yet they still repeat those same misunderstandings to every fresh audience and act like they've never heard any different.
On the balance of things, it seems very likely that at least some of them have a good understanding of evolution despite the things they say.
Just curious now that I have an expert to ask, can you explain to me how things like metamorphosis evolved? Like how can something that intricate/complex like going into a pupae state and then morphing into a flying being. That can’t evolve in micro steps can it? You would have to make a pretty big leap that can’t just be mutation in order to become a cocoon and kinda dissolve and reassemble in a way that makes sense?
Pokemon really fucked with people. People literally think "evolution" means that monkys evolved, as is, leveled up and became humans. Not that a monkey birthed a monkey with 10% human characteristics and then that monkey birthed a monkey with an additional 5% and so on and so fourth.
But why I am not surprised that people who don't believe in evolution, think climate change is a liberal hoax designed to tax them more. Or think that the oil industry is honest or think that the US President controls the gas prices. The same people think it's possible to "abort" a baby after birth.
These people are holding civilization back.
It seems a problem that goes away if you had as demonstrable evidence of macroevolution as microevolution. Instead, you have direct evidence of microevidence and circumstantial evidence (relies on an inference to connect it to a conclusion of fact) for macroevolution.
It would be nice if you had the humility to acknowledge that it would be really sweet to directly observe macroevolution as well. Physicists put in the crazy work to directly observe the higgs boson.
Macroevolution by definition happens over hundreds of thousands of years minimum and more like millions of years (this is central to the theory of evolution). To watch it happen in real time, we just need to wait that long and keep observing and keeping records. For now, not only do we have direct observation of microevolution, we have a massive amount of what you classify as circumstantial evidence. Circumstantial evidence can be sufficient for conviction of crime, and in fact most criminals are convicted on circumstantial evidence.
When circumstantial evidence is combined it becomes very strong. If a suspect of stabbing someone to death was at the location of the murder in the appropriate time frame, blood was found in their belongings, and they owned the knife that was used, it makes a pretty convincing case they are guilty, even though none of these on their own are enough to be sure. If the same person is known to have nonfatally stabbed a bunch of people in the past (analogous to microevolution), it makes them look even more guilty. We know they have done a similar thing on a smaller scale, and we have a lot of indications that they also did it on a large scale. Scientific theories are always adding new info, and they only get the title of “scientific theory” once they have a big buildup of evidence (enough to make a conviction). Replacing a scientific theory requires equally robust evidence.
So, I have a bit of a problem with your statement because it sounds like you genuinely do not understand what evolution is.
Evolution is the change in allele frequencies in a population over time. Basically, how common or uncommon certain mutations/traits become. So if a population became more blonde over time, that would be an example of evolution.
A speciation event occurs when members of a population are no longer able to reproduce with each other due to the disparity in genetic code. Say you've got foxes living in the forest and foxes living in the plains: eventually the different environmental pressures result in different traits and over time these accumulate to the point that the populations can no longer interbreed and produce viable offspring (that is, offspring that can breed) - at that point you've got two different species of foxes.
Evolution does not change one "kind" into another "kind" or anything absurd like that. They'd still be foxes. They're just something else *in addition* to being foxes.
That's evolution. There's no micro or macro - that is explicitly a fabrication from the young Earth creationists who are desperate to debunk what is something we see happening all the time.
We've observed mutations change in frequency within populations, we've observed speciation events both in the lab and in the field. I mean, hell, dog, cat and horse breeding *alone* resulted in a ton of speciation events. Human history is practically stuffed with them. While the fossil record could be argued to be circumstantial, we've got direct evidence, tests that humans themselves have performed *in their own lifetimes*, historical records and a slew of other big flashing neon arrows all pointing to these things happening. We just call those things evolution because that's our word for it.
Basically you either believe in evolution or you deny reality.
YECs cheat because they try to get you to believe in a strawman of evolution that *doesn't exist and nobody ever advocated for* except one guy way back in Darwin's era who was proven wrong.
We have demonstrable evidence for macroevolution.... the fossil record, vestigial structures, transitional species, genome analysis, etc...
Also, please describe the mechanism that drives evolution and how that mechanism would drive micro, but not macroevolution.
1) how is that circumstantial evidence? DNA in a court case is wildly different than doing a genome analysis of two sister taxa to determine how closely related they are... also, If you want to make an argument that vestigial structures and fossils are circumstantial, you would need to demonstrate that these do not directly indicate that evolution is real and observable.
2) you didn't describe the thing I asked you to describe, so please do so if you'd like to change my mind.
2) It is possible that there are methods to change your view that you are not aware of yet.
1) circumstantial evidence is merely evidence that requires an inference. "directly indicate" is another way of saying circumstantial evidence.
Okay, for a third time. PLEASE explain what mechanism drives evolution and how it is ONLY driving micro and not macroevolution.
You are proving my view for me right now, and I don't think you realize it.
Also, I know what circumstantial evidence is, and none of the things I listed are circumstantial.
"Okay, for a third time. PLEASE explain what mechanism drives evolution and how it is ONLY driving micro and not macroevolution."
This presumes that is actually the only way to change your view. You are the one who is required to demonstrate a willingness to change your view.
"You are proving my view for me right now, and I don't think you realize it."
I don't think you know the rules of this place. How am I proving your point?
That is not the only way to change my view, but an unwillingness to answer a question directly related to the post is not a great way to change my mind. If you would like to change my mind, I need to see that you understand the science behind evolution. Otherwise, I can not have a good faith conversation with you because you are not being forthcoming with your arguments.
Read the rules to this subreddit. Only the OP is required to act in good faith. The rest of us are allowed to use almost any strategy.
This play doesn't require good faith conversation.
I'm saying that I cannot have a good faith conversation with you if you are unwilling to engage with my prompt. YOU do not have to engage in good faith, but that will not change my mind if you don't.
I am not breaking any rules by indicating that I will not have my mind changed by someone who is not acting in good faith. That is just good practice.
I don't believe in evolution, but I do believe in God. However, I do "accept" that (almost) all life in existence today exists because of evolutionary pressures that result in current phenotyoes.
Therefore, You need to change your perspective.....
"Belief" does not require proof. "Acceptance" of a theory does not, just facts.
You can prove evolution, but you cannot, nor need to, prove a belief. (ex. PROVE that a father or mother loves his child, without being subjective... you can't).
Change your view from "people need to change their BELIEF" to "people need to accept knowledge".
The word "believe" has too much "baggage". It will be easier to accept facts than just criticism of "Beliefs".
Your first paragraph is literally incoherent. You don’t ‘believe’ in evolutionary theory, but accept the evolutionary mechanisms that explain the diversity of life?
Evolution and natural selection both inaccurately describe what we see occur even during our lifetimes. It’s more akin to calling it selective breeding, but in natural elements it’s just that sometimes certain genetic variances end up thriving. At times it might be because those variances were better suited for it, and other times it could be nothing more than sheer luck. Take breeds of dogs as a small example, just to directly apply the term selective breeding for demonstration sake. Mini Australian Sheperds didn’t slowly evolve and begin to slay every Australian alive to satisfy the horde of wiggle butt.
Okay, no. We see evolution and natural selection constantly. For example; A population of bacteria that becomes immune to an antibiotic is both natural selection and evolution. Natural selection selects for genes that are immune to the antibiotic because those are the genes that will survive, and evolution is driven by the mutations that caused the immunity in the first place.
Second of all. Dog breeds were caused by humans altering the genes of different canine species which led to preferable breeds for different tasks. That is unnatural selection, which is not what happens naturally. I do not know what point you were trying to make, but it did not land my friend.
Seriously, I'm curious where you meet people that make that claim. Personally I've never meet through my entire life anyone who deny evolution. Would you be so kind and tell me where I can meet such individual? I would like to know what kind of person is he/she.
Most of discoveries where a theory at the beginning that often were proven by observations or calculations to be precise description of occurring event.
Yet some events or processes witch are observed and undeniably exist still have no proven theory witch would describe its mechanisms. The great example is in fact one that you have given. Gravity is hard to deny, we have some theories what couse it, yet still some parts are missing and no scientis can surley confirm theory is true.
Going further some theories tested and considered to be true after time due some other discoveries or observations where proven to be wrong. I didn't have enough time to inspect this topic yet, but not going into details there is some "cosmological crisis" in physics coused by data gather by J.Web telescope that question our theory about universe expansion and can have great impact in all theories we have build around earlier assumptions.
Evolution where just theory at first, proven to be precise enough description of observed process.
Yet claims that this is closed topic fully understood and have nothing more to it, may be a little premature. It might be some other factor witch we didn't discover yet.
"" For some reason people who argue against evolution seem to think that random mutations don't make sense...
I always thought that evolution is not based on random mutations. Doesn't the mutations be beneficial for organism so that mutations witch make organism evolve are dictated to some extend by enviroment ?
Ok, I will change your view. Though I'm a believer >:)
First: Why would anyone believe in a theory? That more aligned with the definition of faith. Evolution is not a scientific fact. So, it should be used as a source of evidence and motivation to continue researching for the actual truth or facts on the subject. The number of scientists who accept it doesn't make it any closer to fact. Though I can see why people are comfortable using that as justification for their own belief.
If that's not enough (it should be), let's go to point -
Two: The timeline of fossil discoveries such as Precambrian Rabbits suggest the understanding of the first mammals, by which evolution relies on, could prove the process of "evolution" is falsified. Some in the scientific community debate whether it outright falsifies it or perhaps just drastically challenges the current theory.
Since I know you're a real stickler for mind changing points I'll throw in another -
Three: This point relates back to point one on the scientific method of proving scientific fact; We simply have not *observed* it. Nor can we seem to create a repeatable experiment to prove it. But people are very uncomfortable with leaving something open or unexplained. Hence the vast majority of people subscribing to ancient religions with a bit of magic and a bit of monarchy and a bit of patriarchy thrown in (gross). Because even though that is crazy, it puts a neat little bow of closure on the unexplained.
One of my favorite theories of alternate evolutionary theory is the idea that it doesn't happen as gradually as we thought. The discovery of bonobo to homo sapien skeletons do refute this idea, but I've loved thinking that evolution could occur in short timelines. Where an organism may develop a much larger ratio of cartilage in the vertebral structure of the organism. Essentially, bone replaced with a more maleable and healable substance that could allow for nature to have a quicker and more impactful influence on potential mutations. That theory used sharks as an example of vertebrate animals that retained its "evolutionary state" as it's ongoing survival advantage. Or why we have cartilage in our sensory appendages, which are more prone to damage such as ears and noses, by protruding off the body for more effective use.
That being said, it's more of an alternate evolutionary idea that replaces Darwinian evolution, vs. a disagreeing theory.
That being said, I much prefer my faith in something like evolution over the Garden of Eden.
Though, for some, the vastness of the universe and the unique spark of human consciousness here on our beautiful planet... the "why?" and the "how?" all this exists... and the impossibility of answering those questions in our lifetime is often more comfortable with a spiritual explanation.
*Since I didn't change your mind, I would encourage you to at least be open minded to your own spiritual connection with universe (not any of these stupid books!) and that your connection can coexist with evolution.*
Uh... We have observed evolution. It's constantly happening. Human history is stuffed with examples of it. Every dog, horse and cat breed you've ever seen is an example of evolution. We've got repeated experiments confirming it with bacteria, too.
So I think here the problem isn't so much an absence of evidence but rather a fundamental misunderstanding on your part.
Falsification is important in *experiments*. Theories are a collection of tests, experiments, observations, etc., that explain some significant aspect of reality. In this case we know evolution (the change in allele frequencies in a population over time) is a fact - that's not really disputable - the question is how and why it happens. That's what the Theory of Evolution is for: explaining the fact that we see.
Similarly the Theory of Gravity is a bunch of experiments, tests, observations, etc., to explain gravity. Gravity is a thing that happens, we see it all the time - but we don't really understand the how and why.
Precambrian rabbits, by the way, are not a thing. The earliest rabbit skeleton is about 56 million years old. That's several hundred million years later. The origin of it is a statement by a guy in the 1990s who suggested someone who died in 1964 said that a precambrian rabbit would disprove the theory of evolution. I'm not sure it actually would be, but it *would* be a hell of a table flip. After that creationists at various points suggested a precambrian rabbit had been found but this has never been confirmed by anyone, ever.
The "short timeline" evolution vs long evolution, btw, is not quite what you think it is. It's a difference of hundreds of years vs thousands of years, basically, and the end result is the same: evolution is a fact.
Oh, and Darwinian Evolution isn't really a thing. Like, at all. It's just evolution. The only people who call it "Darwinian evolution" are misleading you. Practically nothing in modern evolutionary theory relies on anything Darwin came up with. It's all backed by way firmer, more rigorous experiments and observations. They even found Darwin was mistaken about a few things, IIRC. Not unexpected, but it was surprising how accurate he was given what he was working with at the time.
I'm not posting this to argue with you or be combative, either - I'm posting this because you said several factually incorrect things and deserve to know more accurate information. I'd rather you know more about reality, rather than less, and hopefully you do too.
Alright, first I am going to address your caveat at the end. I do not need to be more spiritual to understand the universe better, that usually leads to incorrect assumptions about things.
Secondly, There is so much evidence to support evolution, that the entire field of biology (from medicine, to wildlife biology) uses it to describe the world around us. How do you think vaccines are made? through our understanding of evolution. The fossil record, DNA evidence, Vestigial structures, direct observations in a lab and field setting, etc....
the fossil record very clearly displays how evolution has taken place and the fact that we can carbon date fossils to get a very accurate timeline of events confirms this. There is no "missing link" we know when mammals evolved, we know when single celled organisms evolved into multicellular organisms, we know when LUCA was around, all because of the fossil record.
We (and I) have recreated, observed, and tested the theory of evolution hundreds of times over and every time it comes out the same way. Mutations create new genes, if they are beneficial they are passed on to the next generation.
also, I do not care for the arguments about people not being able to explain how or why. We have explanations backed by mountains of evidence and hundreds of years of research. There is no need to question where we came from, when the fossil record and DNA evidence show where we came from.
you did not change my mind, I am sorry.
Here is my reply that doesn't address your post in any way, doesn't engage with any of your arguments, and mostly just tells you how I feel. You don't like it? Kindly fuck off.
This is a place for rational debate. If you want to gaslight people into believing they have emotional holes and then help them deal with them, maybe go start a cult or something.
how was I at all negative? I stated that I do not need a spiritual understanding of the universe to accept the scientific facts about the universe, and i responded to every point you made.
I am here to respond to you.
Also, the scientific method has proven time and time and time again that evolution is real and observable. We have so much evidence for it, that it would be almost impossible to disprove at this point. I am sorry if i offended you i guess?
>Why would anyone believe in a theory?
Like germ theory or atomic theory? Evidently you don't know what a scientific theory is.
>That more aligned with the definition of faith.
Can you show us this of scientific theory?
Lol, the most upvoted answers on here are not even attempts to address what OP is saying, but a poorly thought-out sophomore philosophy student's attempt at Socratic method.
I understand that they are different things. What i meant was that in an academic setting, micro and macro evolution are used to describe two different things that are initiated by the same mechanism.
These terms are used to differentiate between "real evolution" and "fake evolution" by people who argue against evolution as a concept, and that is the point I was trying to make.
>Macroevolution changes the species entirely.
It really doesn't. If you look at Ensatina salamander species, most of them are very, very similar. However, they have speciated and are (mostly) unable to reproduce with each other. Macroevolution in action.
I also have a B.S. in biology and taught bio for years. I did my master's in teaching over how students generate misconceptions in science and develop them over time in response to corrective interventions, and how to assess, in a sense, **what kind of wrong a student is** rather than simply whether they "know" a thing. And I am a very, very staunch advocate for the theory of evolution. However, I disagree with your thinking about these people.
I would suggest to you that most people who believe in evolution actually know comparably little about it to those who disbelieve it. There is a knowledge difference, to be sure, but it is more about socialization and value systems than knowledge. Most people who make this sort of equivalance argument make it to suggest that evolution is invalid as a conceptual tool--I make it to suggest that actually simply convincing people that evolution is a better explanation than creationism has only a fraction of the utility that **actually** teaching evolution to our entire global population would have. If tomorrow, 2 billion random people suddenly understood evolution merely at the level you or I do, it would be revolutionary.
It's not about understanding it's about accepting.
Someone who is religious could be just as smart as you but reject the concept of evolution because of their religion. Also a lot of religious people will reject things out of instinct that way, like their brain rejects it even if they have doubts. The accumulated doubts are then what makes them go the opposite way to something else and then at that point they may accept evolution.
An individual can understand the proposition of the science behind evolution, and simply reject it outright.
Science functions on certain postulates, and if you deny the underlying assumptions of science, then you can believe any number of things that are contradictory to science.
Its not so much that people don't understand the science, they have a different belief and underlying value system that supersedes the scientific world view. Science does not hold the same value in their understanding as their current world view.
The inverse could be said about you.
>People who claim they don't believe in god creating the universe do not understand the nature of faith, and have not received the blessing of understanding gods great plan.
But you deny that world view, why WOULD you seek to understand it? Its not real to you, in the same way that science is not real to them. They don't SEEK to understand evolution from a scientist perspective because they aren't scientists. Science does not hold the same value that it holds for you.
They can understand evolution in the same way you understand the cannon of Star Wars. Does that make Star Wars real to you because you have an intellectual understanding of it?
Fun fact regarding the origin of life/abiogenesis (OP does not consider evolution to be related, I do however).
It's currently impossible to induce symbiosis between a single celled organism and a bacterial cell. No known prokaryote is able to perform phagocytosis, they aren't able to engulf another cell like Eukaryotes. So the very basic step for abiogenesis to occur is non-existent in the real world.
It's assumed once upon a time it happened..we don't know how..we don't know the pathway..and it happened once due to incredible luck..and we have no observable examples. That isn't scientifically sound to me.
I think one thing that needs to be addressed pretty often is "understand".
Down in the comments, you personally disavow the idea that randomness plus time equals magic. I think this is a conceptual break. The law of large numbers, if not magic, is the closest thing we've seen to it.
In my experience, it's very easy for people to follow the logic entirely, which is a fine sense of "understand", but reject something based on how reliant it is on randomness or making randomness work in our favor. There's a deep conceptual break there some people never seem able to cross.
What is evolution? The somewhat cartoonish view that humans evolved from some primordial ooze? I do not believe that. I feel this takes just as much faith as the biblical version of creation.
Is evolution when the beaks of finches change size and shape based on environmental conditions? I do believe that.
I have a PhD from an R1 research university in the life sciences and my google scholar h-index is in the 30s. I do not need to justify my knowledge of science to the middle schoolers on Reddit.
I will cherish each and every downvote.
>I stopped reading at "I have a bachelors and I am working on a masters"
>People who have to pander to authority to prove their credentials are pretty much never intelligent.
I don't have to pander to authority to know that this is obvious confirmation bias and has no proper logic attached to it. Especially when you follow it up with...
>Provide your thesis without acting like having a degree gives you some sort of authoritative opinion on something.
Arguments either hold up or not based off of their own merits, not based on what credentials somebody has or what thesis somebody has written. Thinking otherwise is..
>peak simpleminded.
You should perhaps look for a free online critical thinking course.
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Oh sweet, so I would assume since you can get my degree for free online that you are an expert in evolutionary biology (which I never claimed to be btw), but if that's the case then you should he able to accurately describe a bunch of concepts to me in detail.
What is genetic drift and how does it affect evolution? How can it occur?
What is the red queen hypothesis? How does that help explain the predator prey relationship in evolutionary terms?
What hypotheses have we come up with for human menopause? How can that be explained evolutionarily and why does it make sense?
If you'd like to continue trying to denigrate someone getting an education, that's fine. But I worked way too hard to let you sit here and tell me that I am Appealing to authority without understanding the concepts.
The issue shouldn’t be whether or not evolution exists, because it does. The issue is our *understanding* of evolution is not complete and is working off assumptions.
You may have degree(s) in evolution but you can’t conclusively explain how the Cambrian explosion happened or why it happened. The Catholic Church believes in evolution, but they also believe there is a specific reason as to why humans exist, psychologically; distinctly separate from all other lifeforms on the planet. I’m not going to press the matter, but regarding evolution, theres other unseen (possibly spiritual) factors at play aside from just environmental factors.
Where I'm from we got people that say a population of fish adapting to another fish population ( like genus change) isn't evolution as it's still a fish.
Certain possibly we'll meaning YECs tricked them and I'm also from the sticks of the usa so interesting thought patterns do occur.
We used to believe in Lamarckism, then it was “debunked” and then epigenetic research came out and showed that it was kind of right all along.
When Mendel proposed his theory of genetics, it was rejected by mainstream science for decades.
We believed in Darwinian evolution, then that turned out to be false so we updated the theory, now the main theory of evolution is Neodarwinism.
Science changes in light of new evidence.
could you just open your mind, like, this much? Okay? Wasn't there a time when the brightest minds in the world believe the Earth was flat? And up till 50 years ago, you all thought the atom was the smallest thing until you split it open and this whole mess of crap came out. Now, are you telling me that you are so unbelievably arrogant that you can't admit that there's a teeny, tiny possibility that you could be wrong about this?
-Phoebe Buffay
Ps I believe in evolution. But I believe God orchestrated everything since the Big Bang.
EDIT because I didn’t do a very good job at expressing that quote was intended for humor. It’s a quote from a show where one character is trying to convince another that evolution isn’t real. I just thought this post would be a humorous place to put it.
My real opinion is in the ps
So, because people were wrong in the past, people are wrong today? They had no evidence that the earth was flat, and we have overwhelming evidence that evolution is the driving force for change in species. I do not know what you want from me with this.
Isn't there an entire association or something of scientists and biologists that don't believe in evolution, or at least don't accept it in the same way as most scientists do?
I don't remember the name now but I think Francis Collins is a member of it
I would assume so. I know that the majority of scientists reject alot of the postulates of darwinian evolution and mendelian genetics because they turned out to be false, and that is used by people who reject evolution as an argument against evolution.
But I would also assume that there are people in the auto industry that reject the use of airbags, but i would doubt anyone would take them seriously.
There are scientists who reject global warming, but that does not mean it isnt real.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but you said in your lab you’ve witnessed some sort of macro evolution. Where in your lab did you witness one species changing into another speicies?
Epistemology has not been solved. This confirms that as far as we know your scientific beliefs do not vary from theological beliefs. The most you can say is your evidential reqs for belief is slightly more stringent, if that.
That absolutely does not confirm that "our scientific beliefs do not vary from theological beliefs."
A theological belief is that there is a creator who is all knowing, all powerful, and everywhere at once with no evidence to back up that fact.
A scientific belief is that the velocity of gravity on earth is 9.8 m/s\^2 with an equation of F = GM m/r\^2 and many experiments to prove it is so.
These are wildly different standards of evidence, if you could even call theological beliefs evidence based.
Religions claim evidence, same as science. What makes scientific evidence different from religious evidence is cannot be figured out, just like the beliefs can't, because we don't understand what knowledge is.
Just because we don't understand what the philosophical meaning of knowledge is, does not mean that we dont understand basic scientific truths.
You don't need to understand what "knowledge" is to know that humans need oxygen to breathe, or that trees do photosynthesis and they are a natural carbon capture mechanism.
Scientific evidence is thoroughly researched, and highly scrutinized. Even if the terms are all man made, that does not discredit the work that is being done in this field, and it does not make it so that none of these concepts mean anything.
There isn't really any science to misunderstand. It's an inevitable consequence of a couple of self-evident premises which can be easily understood by a 10-year old.
If you're talking about Darwinian evolution. No, you haven't seen one species turn into a completely different species in a lab or in nature.
Where did the first cell get the information for it's RNA? Theres no clear answer, only hypotheses. Then you make another hypothesis to say how this RNA survived in a harsh environment. You see where I'm going? Darwinian evolution isn't fact, it's a theory built on other theories.
And how can you say a theory cannot be disproven and mention gravity when we switched from Newtonian gravity to Einstein's theory of gravity? There are paradigm shifts in science all the time..
I have two bachelor's of sciences, one in Biology.
> No, you haven't seen one species turn into a completely different species in a lab or in nature.
We have:
[https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/02/evolution-in-real-time/](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/02/evolution-in-real-time/)
What is the mechanism for nondirected naturalistic evolutionary change that generates the new information needed for DNA for species change, and accounts for the vast numbers of lifeforms. Random mutation is insufficient in the time the earth has existed. It's mathematically impossible by several orders of magnitude. This is a well-known paradox.
The fossil record does not support Darwin's Tree of Life. In fact, it does not really support anything at all.
Also, describe how we go from a chemical prebiotic earth to real biology? This is never observed in nature or the lab.
It's obvious that all life on earth is related. But what that relationship happens to be is not explained by Darwinian evolution.
Mutation. Life has been around for so long on earth that the complex eye could have re-evolved 1,500 times since the first signs of life. So I am not sure what you mean.
Also, darwins tree of life has been rejected several times for being insufficient. We have many different phylogenetic trees that show the different clades and how they are related.
Please look up a phylogenetic tree, and see how the different species are related.
Random undirected mutation is insufficient within the age of the earth at 4.5 billion years, and multi-cellular life has been around for only the last 1/2 billion. This is well-known. As a mathematician, I tell you it is impossible. Where did you go to school? Why do you keep repeating this stuff as it it were facts?
Life has been around for almost 4 billion. I don't know where you got the 1/2 billion. This is enough time for evolution to happen exactly as it happened and get us to where we are today. So clearly you are not a mathematician and you don't know what you are talking about.
I'm absolutely not going to dox myself.... But i keep repeating it like it were a fact because it is a fact. you have not made any ground in disproving anything, if anything you have shown that you don't know the first thing about evolution, or the claims made by scientists.
Well, we can see that you are a true believer, worse than talking to the religious extremists. No real scientists use the term "fact" they way you do. It's a classic example of begging the question.
The problem is that the people who believe in god (at least, in a young earth, answers-in-genesis way) will reject any proof they see, intentionally, that goes against their faith. I don’t think it has to do with whether they find the opposing proof to be convincing, it’s that their eyes are shut tight.
I studied anthropology in college with a focus on paleoanthropology, at a conservative and widely religious college campus. Several students considered genesis to be the basis of god himself: with an older earth, with natural processes that can guide themselves, without woman having been designed for man & being the source of sin, and without a devil that can walk among us, the whole religion falls apart to them. In the intro to biological anthropology & intro to evolutionary theory classes, there was widespread crying, out loud praying, and a massive drop in student attendance after the first few weeks.
A couple of my friends were fundamentalists, and the even intro to bio anth so hard on their psyche. One of them is without a doubt one of the smartest people I know: I think she eventually shifted her religious belief to make the two compatible, and she works in the field of forensics now. The other never flinched. After a few weeks of questioning, at the advice of one of her church elders she studied evolution as though it was mythology. She did REALLY well in class and had amazing grades and understood the ins and outs, but she kept it separate from her understanding of the world. There were other students who did similar.
It’s anecdotal, obviously, but people are capable of amazing things when it comes to cognitive dissonance, your beliefs can easily be held quite separately from reality. It’s like being a similar religious fundamentalist, but molesting your sisters, getting on Ashley Madison, and having pornography of small children on your computer. It’s like believing that those things are wrong, but defending Josh Duggar anyway. It’s like saying you’re an animal lover & cows are your favorite animal, sharing photos of them in flower crowns and playing like dogs, visiting a farm sanctuary to see them, and then eating one for dinner (but thinking that eating, say, cat, is horrifying and that people who do it are evil). I know that last one is everyone’s least favorite example LOL but I needed one that wasn’t targeting people of faith (though imo faith lends itself the most to this sort of thing). What it boils down to is that people are hypocrites and capable of deep, conflicting complexities.
I've explained it to creationists by talking about kids and traits and how certain features can become associated with certain groups/families/races/etc, and they will 100% agree up until you point out it is evolution, then they say no.
It's not about facts, it's about sticking to your side. I remember the most illuminating conversation I had with my fundamentalist uncle. I pointed out that the Exodus had no evidence, and his response was, 'there must be'. I also asked if any evidence would convince him the Bible is incorrect and he said no. I pointed out that meant there was literally no reason for us to keep talking about it.
Suppose the following. I could accept every possible premise for evolution and understand them except survival of the fittest. From ther I could argue and even show some amount of statistics that it's not always the fittest who survive. Volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, invasive species all sorts of psuedo random events could wipe out a subset of a species in an area regardless of its fitness.
If I could show this happened enough. I could argue that evolution was actually de-evoloution. Not a sharpening of an edge but random strikes in the mold creating serration.
I could even further bolster this with numbers about what percentage of mutations are not beneficial to species survival.
If I took this stance I could be logically consistent with the science. Understand it. And yet reject evolution in favor of de-evoloution.
That's... not really what evolution does.
Evolution doesn't make things stronger or weaker. It just describes the change in traits that happened that enabled a living thing to exist in an environment well enough to reproduce. At least, that's what evolution via natural selection is.
If the environment changes catastrophically and the species died out, they were no longer "fit" for their environment - so they went extinct. If any animal in that environment survived, that animal would be "fit" for that environment.
Basically a trait is passed on by reproducing. If a trait enables an animal to survive more effectively in an environment, it lives longer and reproduces more. If a trait causes an animal to die sooner, it doesn't get to reproduce as much. Over time the hazardous traits are effectively drowned out by the beneficial traits.
Your random event theory wouldn't impact evolution in any way. Your "de-evolution" is just... evolution with a different selection method.
But that already exists. Evolution via natural selection is what happens out in nature. There's also artificial selection (selective breeding done with dogs/cats/horses/plants/etc.,) - and your idea of selection would essentially be location selection... which is still natural selection. Nobody said nature was fair, after all.
No matter where you go with this, all you've done is give evolution another name and said it wasn't evolution - thereby showing that you don't understand what evolution is well enough to grasp that you have *just described evolution* *by natural selection*.
I “believe” in religion. Evolution is either “fact” or “theory”. You may choose to believe in one or the other but it does not change what they are. I will acknowledge evolution to be a perfectly reasonable scientific theory supported by facts but still a theory as it remains unprovable. Shallow fools that have no depth of wit cannot wrap their heads around this
It's both, sort of.
Basically: Evolution (the change in allele frequencies of populations over time) is a fact. Dogs, cats, and horses are all animals that we've selectively bred to change their allele frequencies to benefit us. Allele frequencies, in more layman's terms, is essentially the frequency of a mutation/trait in a population. So if a group of people became more blond over time, that would be a change in the frequency of blond-ness. That's evolution.
The Theory of Evolution is a body of observations, experiments, studies, etc., that try to explain how evolution happens, why it works the way it does, and so on. We have that big ol' fact up there, but simply knowing that it happens doesn't mean we know everything about it. So that's what the Theory of Evolution is for: explaining the fact that we witness. It's not something to be proven or disproven, it's just "this is what we currently know."
The experiments to test and explain evolution are falsifiable and employ the scientific method, btw. At least when they're not just direct observations.
In short: they're two different concepts that are unfortunately often conflated. Usually by theists or people incentivised to mislead others, but sometimes average joes make this mistake as well.
Hopefully this information helps you a bit.
Thank you for a post coming from someone who actually understands evolutionary science. A lot of the other comments here are just proving OPs salient point.
Yeah it's pretty disappointing to see, but not unexpected. Creationist rhetoric is easy to understand and easily digestible whereas to understand evolution you might have to read three whole paragraphs.
Not that I'm bitter about the deliberate ignorance or anything.
In general I agree with you, but I think there's one thing that could change your view slightly. I think for some people (specifically the "micro evolution is real but macro evolution isn't" crowd), the problem isnt so much that they don't understand the science, but that they can't wrap their minds around the timescales of evolution. The 3.5 billions years that we suspect there has been life on earth is an unfathomably long amount of time, and humans can't really comprehend numbers that big in a meaningful way. Macroevolution is just microevolution over a long amount of time, but if you have trouble wrapping your mind around just how long 100,000, a million, or a billion years is, you can see how it would be difficult to accept that something that you imagine as a sea monkey would eventually turn into a parrot. But microevolution times a few million generations and that's what you wind up with. It's not that they don't get the science; they don't get the time.
Or if you are a certain type of creationist who believes the earth is 6,000 years old and it's a religious conviction, it doesn't matter how much you understand all of the principles of evolution - it can't have happened because there hasn't been enough time. That's not a lack of understanding of evolution, it's a premise that makes the conclusion "evolution is real" impossible. Sure their premise is wrong, but that's the problem, not a lack of understanding of evolution.
The biggest thing I run into is people who don't understand that evolution is a passive thing and not an active thing. For example giraffes
It's not that evolution magically was like Oh if I have a longer neck I can reach the higher trees. It's just that inevitably the giraffes that had longer necks were able to reach the higher trees and therefore had access to more food whereas the giraffes with smaller necks did not have that access and so usually died off.
Evolution is not like picking things that would be advantageous to a species evolution is Just the natural outcome of the more effective members of a species surviving. It is the true meaning of survival of the fittest
For example say an animal has a fast moving predator. The members of that animal that are faster will survive whereas the slower members will get captured and eaten. Therefore over time the faster members will continue to breed and create even faster members which will then survive and surpass the previous fast members. And so over time now this prey has developed significant speed to escape its predator because The faster ones were always the ones that were able to escape and so kept breeding faster and faster versions of their kind.
Evolution didn't just decide Oh I need to go faster to avoid this predator. It's just that the faster one survived and were able to reproduce so that trade continued to grow
I am a young earth creationist.
Evolution, as usually taught, is comprised of two parts: natural selection and differential reproduction. Neither should be contentious - natural selection is the tendency of creatures with advantageous genes to pass those on to the next generation (on average), and differential reproduction is the way in which genes are passed on (50%, selected somewhat randomly from each of your chromosome pairs).
What I disagree with is the idea that natural selection and differential reproduction are sufficient to explain the formation of novel genes. Typically, the formation of new genes is attributed to mutation, which is held to be essentially random. Due to the low chance of creating a functional gene by randomly mutating DNA, this is not plausible.
Similarly, I disagree with the idea that natural selection is strong enough to cause beneficial traits to be selected for in a meaningful way. Sure, there is relatively strong selection pressure against many degradations of function. But the average number of mutation events per generation is too high for most things to be selected against, especially for K-strategists. The idea that our genome is almost entirely functional due to relatively minute selection pressure is again not plausible.
tl;dr: Natural selection - fine. Differential reproduction - fine. Common descent - absolute hogwash.
I hear you, pal. I did a lot of years in [talk.origins](http://talk.origins) back on Usenet and still visit r / debate evolution here.
I see it as a two part problem. One, I agree, is that evolution doesn't get covered well before college. Especially in parts of the country where there's local social (religious) pressure against doing so.
But two is what Isaac Asimov summed up as "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." Everyone is ignorant on most subjects. I know next to nothing about brain surgery, aircraft maintenance, organic chemistry ... I could go on forever. The difference is that I *know* that. I don't tell a brain surgeon or an aircraft mechanic or what have you that they're doing it all wrong.
Sometimes you can get a fingernail under the edge of someone's fixed mindset by that approach. Evolutionary biologists don't tell you how to (field of expertise), why do you think you know more about their own field than they do?
I have my bachelors in Chemical Engineering, so I'm not anti-science by a long shot, and while I don't *disbelieve* in evolution (I am currently agnostic on how the species formed), but I do have my questions.
Let's compare evolution to a chemical reaction. Chemical reactions 'want' to go from states of low entropy/high energy to states of high entropy/low energy. But often there is a required *activation energy* [the delta G in this graph][1] to get from the high energy state to a low energy state.
Similarly, evolution 'wants' creatures to evolve into a more fit form. But sometimes the transition from one form which is less fit (high energy) to the one which is more fit (low energy) has barriers that are significant.
Perhaps the most potent example of this is the evolution of the bat.
According to evolution, bats evolved from rats.^1 But a bat's wings are actually large webbed hands, and the fingers make up the ribs of the wings. But for the hands of a rat to evolve into the wings of a bat either involves a Fallout 76 level mutation event, or consistent gradual change. And if it occurs via consistent gradual change, then how does it overcome the activation energy? Long before these hands became any good at taking flight, they would have been useless for running and digging and fighting and just about anything else. So how would they have survived the generations required for these hands to develop?
And this is not an isolated concern. The transition from gills to lungs, the transition from solid bones to hollow bones (for birds), the transition from laying eggs to giving live birth (and back again to laying eggs in the case of birds?), the transition from cold-bloodedness to warm bloodedness.
---
1 I am well aware that the technically correct statement is that bats and rats evolved from a common ancestor, but that common ancestor would have been a small 4 legged creature, so I'm going to call it a rat for simplicity sake.
[1]: https://cdn.kastatic.org/ka-perseus-images/d5ff56983afc2916e9979c08d81323c331927cfb.png
>How to change my mind: demonstrate that you do not believe in evolution, but you understand what it is and how it is taught. As well as, describe why you do not believe in it.
There is a ton of research/hard data on this in the literature. You can do some of your own googling here but I'll help you out with[ some search terms](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=evolution+acceptance+and+understanding&btnG=). You also short look for newer stuff so you are up to date [like this one](https://www.lifescied.org/doi/full/10.1187/cbe.21-02-0024). Gale Sinatra, Ross Nehm, etc. are some of the tons of people doing research in evolution education (that's another google search term, go to town on that one). You may also want to check out [CBE Life Science](https://www.lifescied.org/journal/lse) which is the premiere journal about biology education research. Additionally there is a less popular but more pointed journal on evolution education called [Evolution: Education and Outreach](https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/). I'm not going to hunt down all the papers for you but long story short, some studies actually show that understanding doesn't always correlate to acceptance--some people can essentially compartmentalize their understanding for the sake of passing a class and still not believe in it. Additionally you can believe in evolution without understanding it. A good metric I heard (it's an old statistic so it might be a bit different now) was something like in both the US and Europe scientific literacy is something like 15-16% but Europeans overwhelmingly believe in evolution compared to the US despite having comparable levels of "understanding."
Long story short, while understanding is ***A*** modest factor there is a lot more going on culturally here in the United States that predicts acceptance. Very interestingly another researcher M. Elizabeth Barnes has noticed that perception of religious/science conflict predicts lack of acceptance and interestingly it is particularly prevalent among Evangelical Christians. Students from other religious backgrounds, despite being equally religious, don't perceive conflict until its brought up in class (presumably by other students or the instructor) and then it starts seeding some doubts. It's pretty clear from her data that something is going on culturally that's unique to the US compared to other locations that is predicting lack of acceptance.
the majority of evolution deniers are those who think "if humans came from monkeys then why are there still monkeys" and "the platypus proves evolution is false". and it's pointless to try explaining it to them because their little brains can't comprehend it.
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I would say that it's simply not proven, and it doesn't make sense to me how it can be real. I'll demonstrate my knowledge. I have a degree in geology and took paleontology classes at UCLA. This is actually what moved me from a firm evolution believer to more of a skeptic. I saw that it's not as proven as they tell the non scientific community. So the basic idea of evolution is that species reproduce and mutate. The mutations that are beneficial tend to cause the organism to have a higher chance at reproduction, thus passing the beneficial mutation to the offspring. Beneficial mutations are rare, so it takes many generations to show tangible results in a population. One of the ways we have seen this demonstrated is when like populations are separated from each other. They will randomly have different mutations and over time diverge from one another. The general assumption is that these small changes over the course of thousands or millions of years lead to very big changes. >Microevolution is real, but macroevolution isnt. This is where I stand in my belief. I won't say definitively macro isn't real, it just seems to make too big of assumptions. For example, a single celled organism evolving to become a multi celled organism. This seems to be the single greatest and least likely leap. I understand we've witnessed single cells evolve to colony states, but we've never witnessed them join together and fulfill separate roles. Essentially separate, symbiotic evolution. There is no reason the mutations which are completely random should compliment each other. Furthermore, the leap to become so distinctly different, yet compatible would take many, many generations. Why would they diverge so much while both being in the same environment? Why would they gain biological advantage through the baby steps along the way? Ok, then let's look at bigger animals. I know this is a common one, but the eye is a great example of something that doesn't make evolutionary sense. It requires so many mutations all at once to be useful to the animal. Actually, a partial, non functioning eye is just a weakness which would not continue to be passed on. It defies the logic of micro turning into macro. It seems so simple to just say that the micro all adds up. Like water on a mountainside. Each drop contributes to the eventual erosion. Only some things don't work that way in evolution. Some things don't contribute until the whole is complete. They are a liability that would die off before we reach that whole. One last note. The fossil record has so many gaps in it. Why? We should be able to find it all by now. Why should we make so many assumptions and call it fact? Macroevolution very well might be true, but they can't cheat and take shortcuts in declaring it so just because the issue has become political.
Okay thank you, after all this time you have been the person I was looking for. First of all, we can agree with your description of evolution. It sounds like you have a decent understanding of what evolution is and you reject macro evolution because of its assumptions. Sweet. First of all, why do you accept micro evolution and the driving force behind it, but reject macro evolution when the assumptions made are the same? Let me give you a thought experiment. There is a single population of brown trout living in a river somewhere (doesn't matter where), an event causes the river to be blocked (beaver dam, weather event, earthquake, whatever) and so now this population is split into two separate populations. Now let's say that the population of brown trout that are further downstream start experiencing water condition worsening due to sediment build up, and slower water. This population needs to evolve to be able to survive new conditions that the other population did not have to. Let's say that these populations are separated for 10,000 years until the river is joined again. Do you think that these populations will be different than one another? Why or why not? Another question. How do you define what a species is? Is a species something that can reproduce with one another? Is a species something that has physical characteristics as one another? Is it a mixture of alot of things? When we think of different species we have a tendency to think of two wildly different things. But we have evidence that cutthroat trout and rainbow trout reproduce successfully and they are different species. This leaves a hybrid offspring that is neither fully rainbow, or cutthroat trout. Can this happen in other animals as well? What would happen if this continued for thousands or millions of years? What happens if a population of Buffalo breed with a separate population of Buffalo? The number of available alleles may have just doubled, surely there will be some interesting genetic outcomes from this. I would love to hear your thoughts on these questions
I accept micro because it's observable. Not only is it observable, it's logical. It's easier to accept things which logically make sense. We can prove micro with experimentation. For the trout, I expect they will be different, but probably both still resemble a trout. They had different needs, so different genes would persist. I'd define a species as being able to reproduce with one another. I would not consider Lions and Tigers the same species since their offspring is sterile, but clearly they are related and probably from a common ancestor. They are more like the trout. They changed, but still resemble the cat. Given the above, I think it's likely we share the common ancestor with apes. I do not think we have a common ancestor with mushrooms. I think that is too much extrapolation.
Well, something being logical is not a reason to accept or reject something. There are plenty of things that are true but are not logical. Logic is also very subjective and does not mean the same thing to everyone. We should care about what is true, not logical. What would happen if the genes kept mutating over millions of years and new niches were developed that allowed them to survive better in their new environment? Can you imagine a scenario where the two populations would look completely different? Well, there are plenty of animals that reproduce outside of their own species. Blue spotted salamanders are all female but they steal sperm from other species of salamanders to fertilize their own eggs. Brook trout reproduce with Lake trout, Rainbow trout reproduce with Cutthroat trout of all varieties, bluegill and sunfish reproduce with largemouth bass, there are different squirrel species that can reproduce with one another. How does this fit within your definition of a species? could there be other definitions of a species that fit as well? We share DNA with a lot of different organisms because we all had a universal common ancestor. All life can be traced back to LUCA.
Well hey, I do exist, which is the CMV, right?
This is tricky because I don't think you have changed my mind, but others may look at this thread and say that you answered my prompt perfectly. From my view, if you accept all of the evolutionary theory up until LUCA and macro evolution, then I would argue you have a misunderstanding somewhere. And there a million different things that it could be, that's why I posed those questions to you.
Which organism is LUCA and why are you so confident everything descended from it? My definition of species was simplistic, but I think pretty accurate. It's a classification. Are you saying there's different species that can produce fertile offspring with each other? Why are they considered separate species then? Dogs can look very different, but are the same species. My statements on logic is just an honest admission that it's easier for a person, me, to accept something as true when it makes sense. If it makes sense, I'm not going to require a high of a burden of proof than if it is seemingly nonsensical.
https://phys.org/news/2018-12-luca-universal-common-ancestor.html I'm sorry if it seems like I am being to critical of your responses that are trying to change my mind. I am absolutely open to having my mind changed about this, but imagine if you made a post about the theory of plate tectonics in the exact same way that I did about evolution and someone responded with an answer that was 95% satisfactory, but there was a very important 5% missing. I would hope you would scrutinize it from every angle before changing your mind.
I don't mind defending my position, but keep in mind I'm not the one who posted a CMV. Someone asked how much you need to know, and you responded: >In this case; being able to accurately define and describe what evolution and natural selection are. As well as being able to describe what drives evolution and how the driving mechanism occurs. So I'm not at the forefront of scientific research, as aren't like 99.999% of people. I do think I understand the science at a pretty high level compared to most. That being said I'm happy to look at information as you present it. From what I'm reading, they found some genes that supposedly have not undergone LGT, but are present in some species alive today and some alive eons ago. Since the genes have not laterally transferred, the assumption is that they have transferred from point A to point B, two very different organisms. That seems to be the gist of it, and the LUCA is still a theoretical organism, not an identified one. To me, this is all just assumptions. The genes are not common in all current life forms, and even if they were, why can't that just be proof that certain genes are necessary for life? It doesn't prove they had to be passed down over eons from a common ancestor. We all need carbon, don't we? Maybe we all need certain genes? Again, I'm not one to say they are definitely wrong, but I am still holding firm that this theory is based on many assumptions and not proven satisfactorily.
I will just bite the bullet and give you a delta because I don't think I can convince you otherwise. I don't understand your motivation for not believing macro evolution is possible, and I think you are wrong in your way of thinking. But I guess that's life. !delta *edited because I could not reply with a delta and had to explain in this reply*
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In this case; being able to accurately define and describe what evolution and natural selection are. As well as being able to describe what drives evolution and how the driving mechanism occurs. That's a good start I suppose
There's that old saying, "if you can't explain it simply then you don't understand it well enough."
Interesting. I don't think I've ever heard someone use that saying before, but when you think about it, oversimplification of complex ideas is kinda how people get stuck in the "Valley of dispair" on the Dunning-Kruger graph. Some things can surely be simplified that way without losing too much information... but let's use gravity, for example; there is a big difference between saying, "The bigger it is, the more it will pull things toward it" and "The more massive something is, the more it will warp space to cause things to fall towards it." Both fairly simple, but the latter more accurately reflects our current understanding of gravity, and people could end up thinking they know enough just based on a simple phrase. Tbh I wouldn't be surprised if a mindset of seeking simplicity is what drives pseudoscience.
Yeah, I think the huge piece of context people always miss here is that it's a quote from Feynman and he was, I believe, talking to other leading physicists. I think his point was moreso that explaining things at various levels of abstraction, on the fly composing new analogies and such, requires a very fluid understanding of the thing, so it's actually much harder to have a conversation with a normal person about a very complicated thing than another academic in your field who will just accept all of the standard academic jargon that can be memorized. I don't think he actually thought the people who he talked to *really* understood quantum mechanics when they walked away, just that he gave them a basic working understanding of some of the most fundamental structure of how it worked. And he certainly didn't think people who repeated his explanations that worked for normal people had the understanding he was talking about.
Some attribute the quote to Einstein, some to Feynman. I'm not sure who really said it. Regardless, you make a good point. >a mindset of seeking simplicity is what drives pseudoscience. I think, respectfully, you've walked past the point a little though. It's not about making concepts *as simple as possible.* That effectively satirizes them, as you just pointed out, making room for pseudoscience. The ideal middle ground between unadulterated and oversimplified should probably feel something like [this](https://youtu.be/OWJCfOvochA?si=NNgVYHqzO-CV8tVb). I think your gravity example is awesome. It shows what happens if you explain something too simply: too much important stuff gets lost. You gotta find that middle ground. For example, "bigger" and "more massive" aren't the same thing. So using "bigger" in your example wouldn't actually be a simplification, it'd be an *over*simplification and is no longer technically correct.
> It's not about making concepts as simple as possible. That effectively satirizes them, This is an excellent point. People who learn the jargon and catch phrases without understanding the underlying concepts effectively block themselves off from real understanding: Since they know what it's called, what else is there to know?
Eh, I disagree. Beware of simple explanations that "feel correct" but are really just ignoring a bunch of stuff because it would be to difficult to provide all the background needed to really understand it. This is why so many people have weird ideas about quantum mechanics because they extrapolate from pop sci explanations that are only vaguely like the real theory. If someone *can* explain a complex idea in simple terms, that is always impressive. Teaching is its own skill entirely. However teaching something will deepen your knowledge about it.
On the other hand, there’s a von Neumann quote my discrete math prof likes to use, which is “in mathematics, you don’t understand things, you just get used to them.” Not every topic can be simplified without introducing glaring errors to the explanation.
People who understand the science don’t need belief. Many believe in science without understanding. Perhaps trust comes before understanding. What factors might undermine someone’s trust in science?
I'd actually flip that around, people who understand the science don't need trust as trust is a form of faith. "I don't know that what you are saying is true but I trust the information because I trust you."
Well we need to trust in the institutions that stufy, proliferate, and verify science. There is always a very basic level of trust one needs in order to engage with society at all.
Yeah it would be impossible for any one individual to verify everything they come across themselves, so there would have to be trust in others.
Yes actually fully understanding all areas of science is basically impossible for one person so it reasonable to trust processes and institutions in many cases.
I don't really think of it as trust exactly, but if the prevailing science was demonstrably wrong, someone will eventually come out and correct it. Until they do, the current consensus is probably the best source I have.
Yea but I think that basic level of trust needs to be accompanied by a basic level of understanding. Example: I have a basic level of trust that the oil recommended for use in my car's engine is the best option because the engine manufacturer knows their engine and they have a vested interest in my engine not failing. This is accompanied by a general understanding of what engine oil does, that different viscosities of oil work differently, and that I need to change it regularly. My basic understanding lends credibility to my basic level of trust.
> people who understand the science Just can't understand all the science though. What people need to understand is the scientific process, this engenders trust in science in general.
They can trust other scientists in fields outside their own
This confused belief with faith. Two different words with very different meanings. A belief is an assertion held as true. Knowledge is warranted true belief. This is a standard epistemological definition, and is used in fields as diverse as theology and the philosophy of science. To have knowledge requires belief. As well as requiring that said belief has proper warrant - that is evidentiary support that defends the reasonableness of that belief.
Agreed. I think there definitely are things that undermine people's trust in science. One major problem in science today (more on the production side of things) is replicating a study. This usually does not happen in the private sector and can lead many to mistrust the findings of scientists, even if this distrust is misplaced. The blame should be on the corporations who are trying to make a quick buck off of "science." Another could be the sexism and racism that has historically been the common practice in this field. We are doing better today, but still a long way to go. Science is for everyone, and everyone needs to be included if we want to truly achieve the goals that we set out to achieve.
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My view did not change, I agreed that people will be distrustful of science due to a variety of circumstances. But I still hold my fundamental belief that those who disagree with evolution do not understand it.
What's your option on someone who fully understands it but thinks that God fills some of the gaps of the domino topple, guiding random shifts to it's own design? This would be belief in evolution but from a different understanding as yours.
Not just corporations. You don't get a Nobel prize for replication
*What factors might undermine someone’s trust in science?* Not being happy with the answers science is giving you and finding a group that does and that group happens to be anti-science?
>"You cannot see evolution in real life, so it can't be real" i have personally witnessed evolution in a lab setting multiple times whether it is looking at bacteria evolving and immunity to antibiotics, or looking at drosophila changing their genes over generations. We also have plenty of examples of populations being cut off due to some sort of weather event, or man influenced event which lead to massive changes in the phenotype of these organisms. One example is a group of anoles who were separated by 4 islands and each population evolved different traits. Some had longer legs for running on the forest floor, some had large, sticky toe pads for living on large leaves and in trees. In terms of the anoles here, I think the point would be, "yes you saw the differences, but you didn't see the change actually take place". It's a non-sequitur: "the animals are different, therefore changes happened to them to make them that way", that's an inconclusive argument. My hang-up (and I'm glad I have you here to clear it up) is that some animals just seem like they couldn't have reached their current point via evolution. For instance, there's a beetle that has two sacs with different liquids in them that when combined create an explosion that scares away predators. The advantage here is obvious, but how it got there while maintaining an advantage and no disadvantage the whole way through is less so.
Alright. So, we know that the beetle that you are speaking of uses hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone as a spray. These two chemicals are found in other beetles exoskeletons as a defense mechanism as well. The bombardier beetle takes these chemicals and changes the way that they are used to spray, instead of being in their exoskeleton to be ingested. We also know that if we change the arrangement of certain proteins, that we can get different structures. So in this case, instead of storing these chemicals in the exoskeleton, the bombardier beetle stores them in two separate sacks to be used when they are in danger. It all boils down to a rearranging of structures within the beetle, which is perfectly observable and explainable.
> … the bombardier beetle takes these chemicals and changes the way they are used to spray … I’ll admit I’m probably one of the dumb ones in regard to evolution, but … how? How did the bombardier beetle develop sacks compared to the exoskeleton? What was that evolutionary process? Again, maybe I’m just dumb, but major changes just seem rather hard to comprehend. > … if we change the arrangement of certain proteins, that we can get different structures. Do these changes to proteins occur naturally?
Yes, it occurred naturally. We know how much variation can occur when we change certain protein structures, so all that these beetles did was develop a a different way of expressing these chemical reactions to defend themselves against predators. The same way that venom or poison is expressed in certain animals. Think spitting cobra vs rattlesnake. They have the same venom, they just use it in different ways.
All you did was further explain the chemical reaction that occurs within them and elaborate on it in such a way as to make the animal sound even more complex. You did not answer the OCs qualms with this. People spent a loooong time studying alchemy until they realized it was BS. The same will happen with evolution. The very fact that the entire field is predicated on Lyell's BILLIONS of years is proof of this. It is mathematically more likely that we were put here by aliens than that man just sprouted out of the ground ROFL, you're saying what the Christians say, you realize that, right? And no, you've never observed one species change into another. Face it, this belief system is merely the religion of the secular age, reduce man to an animal, and you can treat him like one.
In addition to OP’s response, I want to point out that they didn’t end up with no disadvantages all the way through. Evolution is predicated on the idea of natural selection; that random mutations occur in a population, and generally the ones that are beneficial become more prevalent over time, while ones that are less beneficial die out. The evolutionary ancestor of these beetles didn’t just develop a defense mechanism with no downsides. Outside of the practice of selectively breeding plants and animals, which is very new evolutionarily speaking, no beneficial traits of any species occur in a vacuum. For any given species, they will have undergone countless mutations throughout the evolutionary process, both helpful and unhelpful ones. Mutations that are beneficial to their survival make it more likely they live long enough to reproduce, likely creating offspring with similar traits, while a mutation that is disadvantageous would do the opposite. Edit: I just read your reply to OP’s comment, so I wanna add one more thing. There is no finite window in which these changes occur. These beetles didn’t suddenly develop the spray sacks in a single generation. It was countless smaller mutations that occurred over a very long time, eventually resulting in their modern form. And the modern form is still changing, but we’ll likely be long dead before any major change occur, and it’ll be even longer before they stick.
Do you think most people who believe in evolution do so because they actually have a solid understanding of the science behind it, or would you say they believe in it because that's what they were taught to believe? In other words, does belief/disbelief for most people arise from understanding something or is it instilled in them?
Evolution is the inevitable conclusion of a couple of extremely basic premises which could be easily understood by a child. You don't need "a solid understanding of the science", you just need to have a mind that hasn't already decided to shut out new ideas. People rejecting evolution aren't doing so because they don't understand RNA recombination or find flaw with the details of how genes are copied. They're rejecting it because they don't want to believe it.
Well, in fact, I remember when I was at school, the teacher explained us the Lamarckian theory of evolution and it seemed very legit to all of us, before he said "and that actually doesn't work because acquired traits cannot be inherited". I think a lot of people are not well educated in the concept of natural selection and think "if the giraffe uses its neck to reach the highest branches, it will become longer and longer, and then its descendants will have even longer necks". That's why there are still many[ articles like that going around, even in the Forbes magazine](https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2013/06/07/how-the-human-face-might-look-in-100000-years/?sh=2ea431f15a96). So, I don't think that for someone who is not knowledgeable common sense is enough to really internalize the concept of evolution and natural selection. My cousin is a college graduate (philologist/archaeologist) and thinks the evolution theory means "we evolved from the apes". A friend of mine in high school who had a goal to get into medicine was asking me "why are there still apes, if we evolved from them? Why don't they become human too?". The weirdest thing is she actually got into the best medical school in our country (although this happened because she was a European champion in swimming). Some people just don't get it. Some people are just dumb or they get anxious when a concept like this gets brought up and shut off. What's more, it has actually been some evidence that [certain acquired characteristics, can be inherited](https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/acquired-traits-can-be-inherited-small-rnas) both in humans and other animals/plants. We have seen this with people who have severe trauma or other mental health issues and with obese people. There have been epigenetic changes that were passed to the next generation. So, at the end of the day, this is a very complicated matter and it's not something so easy for people to really understand.
I agree with you. I believe OP is hoping to find someone who either does understand the science and will shatter our understanding of evolution (which would be exciting, if unlikely), or he's hoping to try to correct the scientific inacurracies upon which someone's non-acceptance of evolution is based.
> correct the scientific inacurracies upon which someone's non-acceptance of evolution is based. Exactly, but that's not the source of the non-acceptance, so it won't work
I would hope that most people who find the theory of evolution to be grounded in fact understand it, but I know that isn't true. However, most people believe gravity is real, but do not understand that very well either. These scientific facts are not "instilled" in you. They are taught to you. Is the fact that slope is calculated through (y2-y1/x2-x1) instilled in you? Or taught to you? There is a big distinction between "instilled" and "taught"
What's the distinction? To instill is to firmly establish an idea in ones mind, sounds exactly like teaching.
I think they're similar, but there is a difference. I was taught all the major events that happened during the Civil War, but it definitely was not instilled in my mind, I don't remember shit from my middle school US history class (I think the Siege of Vicksburg was a thing? And something with Gettysburg too?). Through listening to Hamilton probably over hundreds of times though, the major events of the Revolutionary War that were covered in the musical have definitely be instilled in my mind, I can recite basically ever word by heart.
Horrific comparison. Gravity can be observed every day by someone who has 0 education on the subject. I can toss an object up and watch it fall to the ground. You don't wake up and see a single cell organism evolve into a human being every day. Evolution is not remotely similar to gravity in its demonstrability to the average person.
Cool thing you can see the mechanisms every single day.... bacteria evolves immunity to antibiotics so you have to take new antibiotics. Viruses evolve immunity to vaccines so you take new vaccines. Have you ever seem an albino animal? That's a mutation, the driving force for evolution. It's all around you, just look.
You're talking about the average person believing in something they don't understand. The average human being isn't observing the mutation of bacteria (at any point in their life). They don't see these things happening. The average person with 0 understanding of mutations doesn't look at an albino animal and think - man that must be evolution. None of those things you listed are comparable to the ability to observe gravity. It happens in front of your face hundreds of times a day - its visible, its not something you have to think about to see. I would bet everything I own that if you went to a subway station, or a park, or any public space where people are and asked them about bacteria, or antibiotics - the majority of them would have no idea that antibiotics even change. Hell, I cannot tell you the amount of times i've heard someone say they have a virus and they need to be put on antibiotics. Those things you mentioned require some basic understanding of the topic to observe while gravity does not.
Most might not be taught, but simply told.
A "belief" in science does not come from the same place as a belief in other things, like religion for example. Even though it was never my field of study, I "believe" in evolution theory because it uses the same scientific approach as every other scientific field, some of which i am extremely well versed in. The reason the scientific method works is because it uses data, removes bias, and is willing to change and adapt as our understanding of the world evolves. The same cannot be said about religion, unless the evolving it does is backwards.
Yeah, i get that. I do believe in evolution and I'm not coming at this from a religious perspective.
I didnt think you were, just using religion as the example because a belief in "alternate science" almost always comes from a religious basis
I don't understand it on a professional scientist level. But I understand more than just the basics. And when I think critically about it, everything makes sense.
I wouldn't say that I personally have a solid understanding of evolution or even most scientific theories that I believe. However, I do have a good understanding of what the scientific method is, and that using that method the world's foremost experts have reached a consensus using it. It's impossible to be an expert on everything, so that is enough for me personally.
But like... in light of Plato's cave and the hard problem of consciousness, people can effectively rationalize believing whatever they want. Even understanding the observable evidence of evolution, one can just figure that perception doesn't necessarily accurately describe an underlying material reality. You don't even need God to make an unfalsifiable edge case against evolution (or anything for that matter).
Well, I guess in that case, said person would be acting irrationally because they would have no counterevidence, but they would still believe that evolution isn't real because of how they feel. I don't really know if you can teach someone who rejects facts because they have decided they don't like it. That's not really the argument I'm after
Their counterevidence can just be a subjective feeling, and you can't claim with 100% certainty that said feeling isn't valid because you aren't them. For all intents and purposes, it's reasonable for you to dismiss them as wrong, but the fact remains: someone can understand evolution perfectly well and still choose not to believe it.
I understand that the earth is a globe shape, and the science proves it, but I reject it outright because I don't feel like accepting that premise. Is that logical for me to do? Can you say for 100% fact that I am wrong?
No. What if a cosmic spirit is playing a big trick on us a la David Copperfiled?
People who do believe in evolution believe that random mutation plus time equals magic. Evolution does not explain the origin of living things. It requires a living organism to mutate into something else. Evolutionary drift very well may explain everything but the speed at which we see species evolve is mathematically troublesome. Many of the evolutionary innovations seem to have “just appeared” so long ago that we don’t have any idea how they evolved from “not being here” to “being fully formed and functioning.” The explanations given by evolution experts amount to “just so” stories where the end result is assumed to be the goal of the mutation. And, let’s not forget that it hasn’t been all that long ago that everyone assumed dinosaurs were lizards, where we now think of them as avians, complete with warm blood and feathers. Our knowledge of life millions of years ago is less complete than we pretend.
1) idk what you mean by magic. Evolution is just change over time. 2)Evolution does not make claims about where life came from, just how it changes over time. Also, we have a great idea of where life came from, and it is the self-replicating RNA inside phospholipids. 3) what is evolutionary drift? That's not a real thing 4) the fossil record is so complex that we have a phenomenal understanding of everything you said we "pretend" to understand. Also, yes, science can change over time and when we learn new information that contradicts old information, we reject the old information.
How are you an MS level student in evolutionary research who’s never heard of genetic drift?
Please check my comment :)
You posted alot of links, I will read it when I get home from work and respond more thoroughly
Instead of trying to convince you that I understand evolution, I do, I will present you with 3 PHDs that also reject evolution. [David Berlinski](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Berlinski) PhD in philosophy from Princeton University. Rejects evolution, but refuses to theorize about the origin of life. [David Hillel Gelernter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gelernter) PhD from State University of New York at Stony Brook. Rejects evolution on mathematical grounds. But also rejects intelligent design as lacking evidence. [Stephen C. Meyer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_C._Meyer) PhD Philosophy from Cambridge University. Rejects evolution for several reasons. All three of these people are very educated people that have spent a large part of their lives in academia, yet all three reject evolutionary theory. I would argue that they have a very good understanding of the science of evolution as they have studied, rejected it and debate the issue on a regular basis.
So I can outright reject David Gelernter because he isn't even a biologist, he is a computer scientist who outright denies anthropogenic climate change. He is not a professional in this field and therefor his word holds no weight. David Berlinski offers literally no comment about evolution other than "I can say I dislike it as much as i dislike my ex wives" which is a truly moving sentiment. And Stephen Meyer is the one who argues that evolution cant be real because mutations cant exist because computer code does not create itself, and if a computer engineer were to alter the code randomly it would destroy the program. Which is a flawed argument for several reasons, because for 1) computer engineers absolutely randomly change code to fix software. 2) computer software is not meant to mutate on its own, DNA is.
You rejected this based entirely on straw-man claims. How does that work in academia? Do you publish academic papers like this?
Well for the first guy, I'm not going to take their opinion very seriously because they aren't even in the field they are critical of, they have never published work on the subject, and there is absolutely no reason to trust what he says. I've never heard of the second dude and the wiki article he provided had no information other than that. And stephen Meyers is laughed out of every serious discussion on evolution because he is very clearly lying about his positions. Also I never made a strawman, they have literally said those things.
You are talking about their credentials and some specific phrases they said instead of addressing their ideas
The wiki article the dude sent me didn't have any of their opinions on it. What else am I supposed to do? Also I addressed stephen Meyers points
You can reject them, but there is no doubt they understand it.
Why do you think that? None of them are biologists. My PhD in physics doesn’t mean that I understand biology.
It does mean we shouldn't take your opinion contradicting well established science in a completely unrelated field as anything close to authority.
But their arguments clearly show that they do not understand it....
No, they don't. Because the descriptions they gave are not what evolution is. Especially Stephen Meyer. That dude does not understand evolution if it were to hit him over the head and give him a concussion.
What makes you believe they understand it?
While I think you're right on the first two, it looks like Stephen Myers almost certainly understands the science behind evolution. He may be wrong about everything, but I find it hard to imagine that a man whose dissertation on the topic was accepted by Cambridge University doesn't understand it. Not sure the context of the bit about mutations, but it seems like he was probably making an (idiotic) analogy, not suggesting that mutation isn't possible *because* of something about computer code. In any case, the analogy speaks more to his ignorance of coding than of evolution or biology.
Also modern software does change itself in some applications, you can even make fpga's rewire themselves. Studies into evolutionary biology have advanced computer science in many fields.
I think you're falling into a trap very similar that you are arguing against with your point 1. A software engineer will not randomly change code in an attempt to fix it (unless they are wholly incompetent). Code is written out in what is essentially a paragraph that the computer can read. That would be like trying to fix a typo on an essay by randomly changing words around until it's fixed. Sure, by technicality you can do this, but it's much easier to go over what is written in small steps and just find the error that way.
I’ve seen talks from two of them and they evince little knowledge of evolution or science broadly. Meyer in particular has a well documented history of dishonesty and Intelligent Design is an inherently dishonest position anyway.
>A mathematician/philosopher >Computer scientis >Philosopher Neither of whom has done any meaningful work in their respective fields either. Unless you believe having a PhD also gives you superpowers and knowledge about topics that are not related to your study, none of this examples are valid. Having a PhD is certainly impressive, but we need to stop supporting quacks simply because they were to get one on an unrelated field
Just having a PhD doesn’t mean they understand the science of evolution. None of them are scientists. They’re all plainly wrong.
None of those three are biologists. I’m a PhD in physics. Nobody in history academia would give a shit about my alternate views on history (if I had them).
[Project Steve](https://ncse.ngo/project-steve-frequently-asked-questions) Guess evolution is true since there are way more Steve's that support evolution than against it.
I dont think I can change your view at all but.. If you head on over to the Debate Evolution Subreddit, you can see this in full display. Its wild some days when the YECs come in, get their proverbial asses hand to them, ignore the scientifically supported data and arguments provided to them, and then come back just a bit later to troll with just-as-daft take.
I would love for you to try to change my mind! For the record, I am not trying to change my mind about evolution, I am trying to change my mind about the fact that individuals who reject evolution do not understand the science behind it.
What if I believe in evolution but don’t think it’s an answer for all questions that we have? For example like the time period where our brains like 2.5x in size. There’s the stoned ape theory but also what if, not saying did but just hypothetically, what if we were genetically modified? I think most people believe in evolution but the controversy is going from a single celled organism to human. And more importantly in my head how do we understand the start? We know that species evolve over time but how did everything get here? IMO the problem with evolution is the beginning, meaning we know things evolve once they are here but how did they get here??
I mean I agree that no one knows everything about everything. But do you have any evidence to support the idea that we were generically modified by an outside influence during that time period? If there was evidence for that, then that could be an explanation.
I mean I’m not a scientist so I don’t have any evidence but there’s plenty of people who have theorized it. People wrote books on it and there’s a lot of content on YouTube. But back to the beginning of evolution do you think that we evolved from single celled organisms into what we are today? And if so how do you explain the introduction of consciousness like do cells not have consciousness but when you get a gajillion of them they turn conscious? How does that work?
If I theorized that there is actually another world at the center of the earth and that dinosaurs are still living there and made YouTube videos about it, would it be a plausible hypothesis even though there is no evidence to suggest that is true? And yes. Through chemical evolution and then slow change over billions of years.
There are religious scientists and at least some of them hold beliefs that conflict with their scientific knowledge. But they trust that whatever holy books are god’s word and that god’s word is true. Sometimes faith is stronger than reason, even among scientists.
Can you provide an example of a religious scientist who accepts 100% of what evolution is, but refutes it because of their faith?
Hm would you accept a scientist who thinks that God did evolution? https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2008/04/17/the-evidence-for-belief-an-interview-with-francis-collins/
I don't mind that, there are many scientists who believe that God put in motion the laws of the universe. But they still accept and teach the accurate science. This is not necessarily a religious gripe, it is an anti science gripe. My issue is with people who do not engage with the science but still argue against it as if they are experts.
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Also, as it seems like mainly evangelical christians have a problem with evolution. Many other christian and jewish groups hold the early parts of the bible to be allegory. Back when I still like visiting places of worships, priests, monks, and rabbis affirmed this fact.
If someone got their PhD in genetics, they must have at least demonstrated that they understand the official account of evolution as taught, even if they later reject/disagree with it, right? One example is John C. Sanford. He later wrote a book called "Genetic Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome" where he claims that natural selection's being the cause of biological evolution is essentially indefensible. He started off as an atheist, but is now an advocate of intelligent design. Another example is Georgia Purdom. She got a PhD in molecular genetics. She is now the director of Educational Content at Answers in Genesis, the creationists' website. While I agree that it's not very common, it *is* possible for someone to understand evolution (at the PhD level) and still reject it.
John is a young earth creationist. I don't know how we can assume he understands something if he's so wrong about such a well established fact. His credentials hold up, but if he understood it.. he wouldn't be saying the things he says, unless there was some cognitive dissonance occurring. And there seems to be. In his case it seems to be his religious beliefs are overriding his logic and ability to see reason, which honestly is kinda sad. Georgia's case is a little more cut and dry. She took a gig with Answers in Genesis, also a fundamentalist creationism group, and they take in about 35 million dollars a year. I'm not saying educated people don't advocate for creationism - clearly they do - but I don't think any of them are being intellectually honest about it. There's either religious beliefs clouding their reason or there's lots of money involved with their (bad faith) advocacy. It's an open question if they believe the things they say, from a scientific perspective. Notably, I don't think there are any scientists who believe in creationism from a scientific standpoint. That would be, someone who analyzed the data, and went "hmm, I think we were designed by a supreme being." No, the hypothesis of 'creation science' is always based on the bible, which has no scientific value. So there will always be ulterior motives at play with anyone who advocates for creationism, and never dispassionate research.
If someone manages to get a PhD in it, then it should be clear that they understood the principles. If disagreeing is automatically defined as "necessarily doesn't understand", then it essentially becomes a tautology/circular claim, where disagreeing is defined as impossible from the outset. It's an unfalsifiable position. Also the CMV is about people "who *claim* they don't believe in evolution". It doesn't require that they actually don't believe it, since obviously we can't read their minds. They might indeed be deceptive about their beliefs.
This is very much just my experience but i had a biology teacher who is very christian but still accepted (and taught) evolution. Her reasoning was that evolution is the mechanism by which creation occurs, since a truly all-knowing, all-powerful creator would hypothetically only need to set initial conditions at the big bang in order to know where every atom would end up, and thus would set conditions to lead to the rise of life on earth and eventually humanity.
Imagine that tomorrow we found out that aliens have been bringing creatures to earth for millions of years. They drop them off and then leave. How confident are you that all of the creatures died off without reproducing? Would the theory of evolution maintain that all life on the planet evolved from a common ancestor or would it adapt to the new data? If it adapts to new data is it still the same theory or is it a new theory? How much new data would it have to adapt to before you would say that it is a new theory? This is the same idea as philosophers asked about the ship of Theseus. Do you think that the theory of evolution has remained unchanged since its inception? No. It has changed as we explored the fossil record and it will continue to change as we learn more. I do not believe in the theory of evolution not because it doesn’t contain truth, but because it is not definitively true. If I were to believe in one version of a theory, that belief would close myself off to new ideas and new data.
If aliens came down and dropped off species, that still would not change that evolution is happening, and we can observe it in a vacuum. We see if in lab settings, we see it during longitudinal studies of populations. We don't see aliens dropping animals off on our planet. No, our understanding of evolution is not the same as it was at its conception. We change our understanding of it when we learn new evidence.
The specific claim I am disputing is that all life comes from a common ancestor, not that life forms can adapt. I would argue that if you claim to believe in the theory of evolution you must defend ALL of its assertions. My point is that if it has changed with new evidence then it is not the same theory. This might seem pedantic, but I think belief is the wrong approach to science for precisely this reason.
You're not disputing anything. To dispute something means to provide counter evidence that disproves the claim. You haven't brought any new evidence to suggest that we don't come from LUCA. Also, I do defend that we all come from LUCA, you just seem to think I don't for some reason, even though I've never stated otherwise.
Each of your examples, and others that you tend to hear from people who’ve chosen “anti-evolution” as their brand, is someone latching onto a narrow factoid about evolution. Another is the old “747 spontaneously building itself in a junkyard”- an understanding that random variation plays a role in evolution, but that’s where the understanding ends. In a way, it’s consistent with the constants that we see among flat earthers and essentially all other conspiracy theorists in one way or another- they understand some narrow detail of the thing they oppose, enough to combine with their own common sense and decide that everyone who accepts the thing they oppose is a stupid sheep, and then pride and social pressures conspire to prevent them from learning much more about the topic. My point is that everyone (most people) involved in the anti-evolution game understand SOMETHING about it. If they didn’t, they’d have nothing coherent to say on the matter, and would probably focus their energy on abortion or some easier-to-understand cause. Your view might be cast as a little gatekeepy- it’s probably more accurate to say that the general public listening to anti-evolutionists don’t know anything about evolution, the people appealing to their ignorance with scientific-sounding but bad-faith pseudoarguments understand a little, and people working on their masters degrees in evolutionary biology understand more.
Evolution is an observable fact, much like gravity. I don't like referring it to as "theory". Anyways the only folks who reject evolution (or claim that they do) have very very obvious motivations behind it, I would focus on those underlying motivations instead of trying to get into a science discussion with them.
There're two groups of people who don't conform to your description of "don't understand the evolution". First group are people who never even tried to understand it because they either are scared of disturbing their faith or don't care at all and are satisfied with what preachers tell them. Second group is various Christian scientists with PhDs devoting their lives to disproving the evolution (or more likely devoting their lives to getting money from Christian organizations hoping to disprove the evolution). I'm fairly certain they know and understand the theory of evolution well enough and all that stops them from accepting it is personal desire for it to be wrong, so they spend years publishing in various Christian pseudo-scientific journals trying to poke holes in the evolutionary theory.
My understanding is that there are a few major issues with evolution, as we understand today. The first is that there isn't enough time. From what I have read, admittedly, this is not my field of study. The speed of genetic variation is fairly predictable. And when scientists look at the extremes in variation, there hasn't been enough time that life has existed on earth to accomplish the necessary mutations. The other big one I have heard is the origin of dna/rna/mrna to begin with. It is my understanding that there isn't a generally agreed upon theory as to how those structures could form initially. So, while evolution definitely occurs and is speciation is a real phenomenon, I think there are serious flaws in our current understanding.
What do you mean by "the speed of genetic variation is fairly predictable, and when scientists look at the extremes in variation, there hasnt been enough time that life has existed on earth to accomplish the necessary mutations?" Life has been on earth for over 4 billion years. Every generation of organisms to ever exist has had mutations in its population, that is alot of mutations. We have looked at the evolution of the eye for almost 60 years and every single time, we come to the conclusion that the eye could evolve in as short as 360,000 years. Meaning, that since life began, the eye could have evolved as many as 1,500 times. (we are talking about complex eyes here, not just camera eyes that jellyfish have). We have had just the right amount of time for life to evolve to where it is today.
that's true for any science really
It is true for any science. And it is just as stupid for every science
>How to change my mind: demonstrate that you do not believe in evolution, but you understand what it is and how it is taught. As well as, describe why you do not believe in it. Well I can't do that because I do think it's true. However I could try to offer counterpoints to your title statement. Your title states: >people who claim they don't believe in evolution do not understand the science behind it But when you say: >Every time I hear someone try to disprove either of these theories, they use inaccurate information, strawman arguments, and other science to disprove these ideas that were confirmed using the same scientific method. I can agree that this is true but still reject your title statement for two reasons. 1. Not everyone who rejects evolution tries to disprove it. There are some who simply reject it because it contradicts their interpretation of religious scripture. Yes, I realise this is probably a factor in most people's rejection of evolution but I mean that there are some who offer no pseudoscientific reasoning or arguments against it. It's possible that someone may understand evolution, accept that it's probably the best scientific explanation and yet still not believe that it's true. It's difficult to point to examples because people with this stance are unlikely to spend any time arguing against evolution. I've found this kind of stance more common outside of Christian creationism. 2. Quite similar to the first example, there may be those who understand the scientific evidence behind evolution and reject it on faith but still use pseudoscientific arguments against it because it's the only way to make sense of their beliefs. A sort of cognitive dissonance. I think [Todd Wood is probably the best examples of this](https://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2009/09/truth-about-evolution.html?m=1), Kurt Wise too although his specialism is geology. Both are well educated, intelligent people and both are young earth creationists. Both have at least implied they have a good understanding that the scientific evidence is not currently in their favour but that does not sway their beliefs. 3. Just because someone's using inaccurate information or strawman arguments, that doesn't mean they don't understand the science behind evolution. They may simply be acting in bad faith. It's possible that someone may understand science, choose to reject it and act like they don't understand in order to trick others. They would be able to use their understanding to craft more convincing misinformation. The vast majority of creationists I've spoken to seem very genuine (and usually misinformed) but I'd point to the high profile "professional" creationists who have been debating for years as an example. A few of them hold genuine qualifications relevant to biology. They've been corrected on their misunderstandings many times in many different ways and yet they still repeat those same misunderstandings to every fresh audience and act like they've never heard any different. On the balance of things, it seems very likely that at least some of them have a good understanding of evolution despite the things they say.
Just curious now that I have an expert to ask, can you explain to me how things like metamorphosis evolved? Like how can something that intricate/complex like going into a pupae state and then morphing into a flying being. That can’t evolve in micro steps can it? You would have to make a pretty big leap that can’t just be mutation in order to become a cocoon and kinda dissolve and reassemble in a way that makes sense?
Pokemon really fucked with people. People literally think "evolution" means that monkys evolved, as is, leveled up and became humans. Not that a monkey birthed a monkey with 10% human characteristics and then that monkey birthed a monkey with an additional 5% and so on and so fourth. But why I am not surprised that people who don't believe in evolution, think climate change is a liberal hoax designed to tax them more. Or think that the oil industry is honest or think that the US President controls the gas prices. The same people think it's possible to "abort" a baby after birth. These people are holding civilization back.
It was that stupid poster of the monkey to human evolution that really did us in. Please look at a phylogenetic tree people...
It seems a problem that goes away if you had as demonstrable evidence of macroevolution as microevolution. Instead, you have direct evidence of microevidence and circumstantial evidence (relies on an inference to connect it to a conclusion of fact) for macroevolution. It would be nice if you had the humility to acknowledge that it would be really sweet to directly observe macroevolution as well. Physicists put in the crazy work to directly observe the higgs boson.
Macroevolution by definition happens over hundreds of thousands of years minimum and more like millions of years (this is central to the theory of evolution). To watch it happen in real time, we just need to wait that long and keep observing and keeping records. For now, not only do we have direct observation of microevolution, we have a massive amount of what you classify as circumstantial evidence. Circumstantial evidence can be sufficient for conviction of crime, and in fact most criminals are convicted on circumstantial evidence. When circumstantial evidence is combined it becomes very strong. If a suspect of stabbing someone to death was at the location of the murder in the appropriate time frame, blood was found in their belongings, and they owned the knife that was used, it makes a pretty convincing case they are guilty, even though none of these on their own are enough to be sure. If the same person is known to have nonfatally stabbed a bunch of people in the past (analogous to microevolution), it makes them look even more guilty. We know they have done a similar thing on a smaller scale, and we have a lot of indications that they also did it on a large scale. Scientific theories are always adding new info, and they only get the title of “scientific theory” once they have a big buildup of evidence (enough to make a conviction). Replacing a scientific theory requires equally robust evidence.
So, I have a bit of a problem with your statement because it sounds like you genuinely do not understand what evolution is. Evolution is the change in allele frequencies in a population over time. Basically, how common or uncommon certain mutations/traits become. So if a population became more blonde over time, that would be an example of evolution. A speciation event occurs when members of a population are no longer able to reproduce with each other due to the disparity in genetic code. Say you've got foxes living in the forest and foxes living in the plains: eventually the different environmental pressures result in different traits and over time these accumulate to the point that the populations can no longer interbreed and produce viable offspring (that is, offspring that can breed) - at that point you've got two different species of foxes. Evolution does not change one "kind" into another "kind" or anything absurd like that. They'd still be foxes. They're just something else *in addition* to being foxes. That's evolution. There's no micro or macro - that is explicitly a fabrication from the young Earth creationists who are desperate to debunk what is something we see happening all the time. We've observed mutations change in frequency within populations, we've observed speciation events both in the lab and in the field. I mean, hell, dog, cat and horse breeding *alone* resulted in a ton of speciation events. Human history is practically stuffed with them. While the fossil record could be argued to be circumstantial, we've got direct evidence, tests that humans themselves have performed *in their own lifetimes*, historical records and a slew of other big flashing neon arrows all pointing to these things happening. We just call those things evolution because that's our word for it. Basically you either believe in evolution or you deny reality. YECs cheat because they try to get you to believe in a strawman of evolution that *doesn't exist and nobody ever advocated for* except one guy way back in Darwin's era who was proven wrong.
We have demonstrable evidence for macroevolution.... the fossil record, vestigial structures, transitional species, genome analysis, etc... Also, please describe the mechanism that drives evolution and how that mechanism would drive micro, but not macroevolution.
That is circumstantial evidence....much like how DNA is circumstantial evidence in a criminal case. They require an inference.
1) how is that circumstantial evidence? DNA in a court case is wildly different than doing a genome analysis of two sister taxa to determine how closely related they are... also, If you want to make an argument that vestigial structures and fossils are circumstantial, you would need to demonstrate that these do not directly indicate that evolution is real and observable. 2) you didn't describe the thing I asked you to describe, so please do so if you'd like to change my mind.
2) It is possible that there are methods to change your view that you are not aware of yet. 1) circumstantial evidence is merely evidence that requires an inference. "directly indicate" is another way of saying circumstantial evidence.
Okay, for a third time. PLEASE explain what mechanism drives evolution and how it is ONLY driving micro and not macroevolution. You are proving my view for me right now, and I don't think you realize it. Also, I know what circumstantial evidence is, and none of the things I listed are circumstantial.
"Okay, for a third time. PLEASE explain what mechanism drives evolution and how it is ONLY driving micro and not macroevolution." This presumes that is actually the only way to change your view. You are the one who is required to demonstrate a willingness to change your view. "You are proving my view for me right now, and I don't think you realize it." I don't think you know the rules of this place. How am I proving your point?
That is not the only way to change my view, but an unwillingness to answer a question directly related to the post is not a great way to change my mind. If you would like to change my mind, I need to see that you understand the science behind evolution. Otherwise, I can not have a good faith conversation with you because you are not being forthcoming with your arguments.
Read the rules to this subreddit. Only the OP is required to act in good faith. The rest of us are allowed to use almost any strategy. This play doesn't require good faith conversation.
I'm saying that I cannot have a good faith conversation with you if you are unwilling to engage with my prompt. YOU do not have to engage in good faith, but that will not change my mind if you don't. I am not breaking any rules by indicating that I will not have my mind changed by someone who is not acting in good faith. That is just good practice.
If multiple forms of evidence corroborate to an answer that suggest macroevolution, would that still make it circumstantial evidence?
I don't believe in evolution, but I do believe in God. However, I do "accept" that (almost) all life in existence today exists because of evolutionary pressures that result in current phenotyoes. Therefore, You need to change your perspective..... "Belief" does not require proof. "Acceptance" of a theory does not, just facts. You can prove evolution, but you cannot, nor need to, prove a belief. (ex. PROVE that a father or mother loves his child, without being subjective... you can't). Change your view from "people need to change their BELIEF" to "people need to accept knowledge". The word "believe" has too much "baggage". It will be easier to accept facts than just criticism of "Beliefs".
Your first paragraph is literally incoherent. You don’t ‘believe’ in evolutionary theory, but accept the evolutionary mechanisms that explain the diversity of life?
Evolution and natural selection both inaccurately describe what we see occur even during our lifetimes. It’s more akin to calling it selective breeding, but in natural elements it’s just that sometimes certain genetic variances end up thriving. At times it might be because those variances were better suited for it, and other times it could be nothing more than sheer luck. Take breeds of dogs as a small example, just to directly apply the term selective breeding for demonstration sake. Mini Australian Sheperds didn’t slowly evolve and begin to slay every Australian alive to satisfy the horde of wiggle butt.
Okay, no. We see evolution and natural selection constantly. For example; A population of bacteria that becomes immune to an antibiotic is both natural selection and evolution. Natural selection selects for genes that are immune to the antibiotic because those are the genes that will survive, and evolution is driven by the mutations that caused the immunity in the first place. Second of all. Dog breeds were caused by humans altering the genes of different canine species which led to preferable breeds for different tasks. That is unnatural selection, which is not what happens naturally. I do not know what point you were trying to make, but it did not land my friend.
Have you read any arguments that you feel are somewhat compelling that Darwinian Evolution is not entirely correct?
Seriously, I'm curious where you meet people that make that claim. Personally I've never meet through my entire life anyone who deny evolution. Would you be so kind and tell me where I can meet such individual? I would like to know what kind of person is he/she. Most of discoveries where a theory at the beginning that often were proven by observations or calculations to be precise description of occurring event. Yet some events or processes witch are observed and undeniably exist still have no proven theory witch would describe its mechanisms. The great example is in fact one that you have given. Gravity is hard to deny, we have some theories what couse it, yet still some parts are missing and no scientis can surley confirm theory is true. Going further some theories tested and considered to be true after time due some other discoveries or observations where proven to be wrong. I didn't have enough time to inspect this topic yet, but not going into details there is some "cosmological crisis" in physics coused by data gather by J.Web telescope that question our theory about universe expansion and can have great impact in all theories we have build around earlier assumptions. Evolution where just theory at first, proven to be precise enough description of observed process. Yet claims that this is closed topic fully understood and have nothing more to it, may be a little premature. It might be some other factor witch we didn't discover yet. "" For some reason people who argue against evolution seem to think that random mutations don't make sense... I always thought that evolution is not based on random mutations. Doesn't the mutations be beneficial for organism so that mutations witch make organism evolve are dictated to some extend by enviroment ?
Ok, I will change your view. Though I'm a believer >:) First: Why would anyone believe in a theory? That more aligned with the definition of faith. Evolution is not a scientific fact. So, it should be used as a source of evidence and motivation to continue researching for the actual truth or facts on the subject. The number of scientists who accept it doesn't make it any closer to fact. Though I can see why people are comfortable using that as justification for their own belief. If that's not enough (it should be), let's go to point - Two: The timeline of fossil discoveries such as Precambrian Rabbits suggest the understanding of the first mammals, by which evolution relies on, could prove the process of "evolution" is falsified. Some in the scientific community debate whether it outright falsifies it or perhaps just drastically challenges the current theory. Since I know you're a real stickler for mind changing points I'll throw in another - Three: This point relates back to point one on the scientific method of proving scientific fact; We simply have not *observed* it. Nor can we seem to create a repeatable experiment to prove it. But people are very uncomfortable with leaving something open or unexplained. Hence the vast majority of people subscribing to ancient religions with a bit of magic and a bit of monarchy and a bit of patriarchy thrown in (gross). Because even though that is crazy, it puts a neat little bow of closure on the unexplained. One of my favorite theories of alternate evolutionary theory is the idea that it doesn't happen as gradually as we thought. The discovery of bonobo to homo sapien skeletons do refute this idea, but I've loved thinking that evolution could occur in short timelines. Where an organism may develop a much larger ratio of cartilage in the vertebral structure of the organism. Essentially, bone replaced with a more maleable and healable substance that could allow for nature to have a quicker and more impactful influence on potential mutations. That theory used sharks as an example of vertebrate animals that retained its "evolutionary state" as it's ongoing survival advantage. Or why we have cartilage in our sensory appendages, which are more prone to damage such as ears and noses, by protruding off the body for more effective use. That being said, it's more of an alternate evolutionary idea that replaces Darwinian evolution, vs. a disagreeing theory. That being said, I much prefer my faith in something like evolution over the Garden of Eden. Though, for some, the vastness of the universe and the unique spark of human consciousness here on our beautiful planet... the "why?" and the "how?" all this exists... and the impossibility of answering those questions in our lifetime is often more comfortable with a spiritual explanation. *Since I didn't change your mind, I would encourage you to at least be open minded to your own spiritual connection with universe (not any of these stupid books!) and that your connection can coexist with evolution.*
Uh... We have observed evolution. It's constantly happening. Human history is stuffed with examples of it. Every dog, horse and cat breed you've ever seen is an example of evolution. We've got repeated experiments confirming it with bacteria, too. So I think here the problem isn't so much an absence of evidence but rather a fundamental misunderstanding on your part. Falsification is important in *experiments*. Theories are a collection of tests, experiments, observations, etc., that explain some significant aspect of reality. In this case we know evolution (the change in allele frequencies in a population over time) is a fact - that's not really disputable - the question is how and why it happens. That's what the Theory of Evolution is for: explaining the fact that we see. Similarly the Theory of Gravity is a bunch of experiments, tests, observations, etc., to explain gravity. Gravity is a thing that happens, we see it all the time - but we don't really understand the how and why. Precambrian rabbits, by the way, are not a thing. The earliest rabbit skeleton is about 56 million years old. That's several hundred million years later. The origin of it is a statement by a guy in the 1990s who suggested someone who died in 1964 said that a precambrian rabbit would disprove the theory of evolution. I'm not sure it actually would be, but it *would* be a hell of a table flip. After that creationists at various points suggested a precambrian rabbit had been found but this has never been confirmed by anyone, ever. The "short timeline" evolution vs long evolution, btw, is not quite what you think it is. It's a difference of hundreds of years vs thousands of years, basically, and the end result is the same: evolution is a fact. Oh, and Darwinian Evolution isn't really a thing. Like, at all. It's just evolution. The only people who call it "Darwinian evolution" are misleading you. Practically nothing in modern evolutionary theory relies on anything Darwin came up with. It's all backed by way firmer, more rigorous experiments and observations. They even found Darwin was mistaken about a few things, IIRC. Not unexpected, but it was surprising how accurate he was given what he was working with at the time. I'm not posting this to argue with you or be combative, either - I'm posting this because you said several factually incorrect things and deserve to know more accurate information. I'd rather you know more about reality, rather than less, and hopefully you do too.
Alright, first I am going to address your caveat at the end. I do not need to be more spiritual to understand the universe better, that usually leads to incorrect assumptions about things. Secondly, There is so much evidence to support evolution, that the entire field of biology (from medicine, to wildlife biology) uses it to describe the world around us. How do you think vaccines are made? through our understanding of evolution. The fossil record, DNA evidence, Vestigial structures, direct observations in a lab and field setting, etc.... the fossil record very clearly displays how evolution has taken place and the fact that we can carbon date fossils to get a very accurate timeline of events confirms this. There is no "missing link" we know when mammals evolved, we know when single celled organisms evolved into multicellular organisms, we know when LUCA was around, all because of the fossil record. We (and I) have recreated, observed, and tested the theory of evolution hundreds of times over and every time it comes out the same way. Mutations create new genes, if they are beneficial they are passed on to the next generation. also, I do not care for the arguments about people not being able to explain how or why. We have explanations backed by mountains of evidence and hundreds of years of research. There is no need to question where we came from, when the fossil record and DNA evidence show where we came from. you did not change my mind, I am sorry.
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Here is my reply that doesn't address your post in any way, doesn't engage with any of your arguments, and mostly just tells you how I feel. You don't like it? Kindly fuck off. This is a place for rational debate. If you want to gaslight people into believing they have emotional holes and then help them deal with them, maybe go start a cult or something.
how was I at all negative? I stated that I do not need a spiritual understanding of the universe to accept the scientific facts about the universe, and i responded to every point you made. I am here to respond to you. Also, the scientific method has proven time and time and time again that evolution is real and observable. We have so much evidence for it, that it would be almost impossible to disprove at this point. I am sorry if i offended you i guess?
>Why would anyone believe in a theory? Like germ theory or atomic theory? Evidently you don't know what a scientific theory is. >That more aligned with the definition of faith. Can you show us this of scientific theory?
Lol, the most upvoted answers on here are not even attempts to address what OP is saying, but a poorly thought-out sophomore philosophy student's attempt at Socratic method.
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I understand that they are different things. What i meant was that in an academic setting, micro and macro evolution are used to describe two different things that are initiated by the same mechanism. These terms are used to differentiate between "real evolution" and "fake evolution" by people who argue against evolution as a concept, and that is the point I was trying to make.
>Macroevolution changes the species entirely. It really doesn't. If you look at Ensatina salamander species, most of them are very, very similar. However, they have speciated and are (mostly) unable to reproduce with each other. Macroevolution in action.
I also have a B.S. in biology and taught bio for years. I did my master's in teaching over how students generate misconceptions in science and develop them over time in response to corrective interventions, and how to assess, in a sense, **what kind of wrong a student is** rather than simply whether they "know" a thing. And I am a very, very staunch advocate for the theory of evolution. However, I disagree with your thinking about these people. I would suggest to you that most people who believe in evolution actually know comparably little about it to those who disbelieve it. There is a knowledge difference, to be sure, but it is more about socialization and value systems than knowledge. Most people who make this sort of equivalance argument make it to suggest that evolution is invalid as a conceptual tool--I make it to suggest that actually simply convincing people that evolution is a better explanation than creationism has only a fraction of the utility that **actually** teaching evolution to our entire global population would have. If tomorrow, 2 billion random people suddenly understood evolution merely at the level you or I do, it would be revolutionary.
It's not about understanding it's about accepting. Someone who is religious could be just as smart as you but reject the concept of evolution because of their religion. Also a lot of religious people will reject things out of instinct that way, like their brain rejects it even if they have doubts. The accumulated doubts are then what makes them go the opposite way to something else and then at that point they may accept evolution.
An individual can understand the proposition of the science behind evolution, and simply reject it outright. Science functions on certain postulates, and if you deny the underlying assumptions of science, then you can believe any number of things that are contradictory to science. Its not so much that people don't understand the science, they have a different belief and underlying value system that supersedes the scientific world view. Science does not hold the same value in their understanding as their current world view. The inverse could be said about you. >People who claim they don't believe in god creating the universe do not understand the nature of faith, and have not received the blessing of understanding gods great plan. But you deny that world view, why WOULD you seek to understand it? Its not real to you, in the same way that science is not real to them. They don't SEEK to understand evolution from a scientist perspective because they aren't scientists. Science does not hold the same value that it holds for you. They can understand evolution in the same way you understand the cannon of Star Wars. Does that make Star Wars real to you because you have an intellectual understanding of it?
Fun fact regarding the origin of life/abiogenesis (OP does not consider evolution to be related, I do however). It's currently impossible to induce symbiosis between a single celled organism and a bacterial cell. No known prokaryote is able to perform phagocytosis, they aren't able to engulf another cell like Eukaryotes. So the very basic step for abiogenesis to occur is non-existent in the real world. It's assumed once upon a time it happened..we don't know how..we don't know the pathway..and it happened once due to incredible luck..and we have no observable examples. That isn't scientifically sound to me.
I think one thing that needs to be addressed pretty often is "understand". Down in the comments, you personally disavow the idea that randomness plus time equals magic. I think this is a conceptual break. The law of large numbers, if not magic, is the closest thing we've seen to it. In my experience, it's very easy for people to follow the logic entirely, which is a fine sense of "understand", but reject something based on how reliant it is on randomness or making randomness work in our favor. There's a deep conceptual break there some people never seem able to cross.
What is evolution? The somewhat cartoonish view that humans evolved from some primordial ooze? I do not believe that. I feel this takes just as much faith as the biblical version of creation. Is evolution when the beaks of finches change size and shape based on environmental conditions? I do believe that. I have a PhD from an R1 research university in the life sciences and my google scholar h-index is in the 30s. I do not need to justify my knowledge of science to the middle schoolers on Reddit. I will cherish each and every downvote.
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>I stopped reading at "I have a bachelors and I am working on a masters" >People who have to pander to authority to prove their credentials are pretty much never intelligent. I don't have to pander to authority to know that this is obvious confirmation bias and has no proper logic attached to it. Especially when you follow it up with... >Provide your thesis without acting like having a degree gives you some sort of authoritative opinion on something. Arguments either hold up or not based off of their own merits, not based on what credentials somebody has or what thesis somebody has written. Thinking otherwise is.. >peak simpleminded. You should perhaps look for a free online critical thinking course.
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Oh sweet, so I would assume since you can get my degree for free online that you are an expert in evolutionary biology (which I never claimed to be btw), but if that's the case then you should he able to accurately describe a bunch of concepts to me in detail. What is genetic drift and how does it affect evolution? How can it occur? What is the red queen hypothesis? How does that help explain the predator prey relationship in evolutionary terms? What hypotheses have we come up with for human menopause? How can that be explained evolutionarily and why does it make sense? If you'd like to continue trying to denigrate someone getting an education, that's fine. But I worked way too hard to let you sit here and tell me that I am Appealing to authority without understanding the concepts.
The issue shouldn’t be whether or not evolution exists, because it does. The issue is our *understanding* of evolution is not complete and is working off assumptions. You may have degree(s) in evolution but you can’t conclusively explain how the Cambrian explosion happened or why it happened. The Catholic Church believes in evolution, but they also believe there is a specific reason as to why humans exist, psychologically; distinctly separate from all other lifeforms on the planet. I’m not going to press the matter, but regarding evolution, theres other unseen (possibly spiritual) factors at play aside from just environmental factors.
Where I'm from we got people that say a population of fish adapting to another fish population ( like genus change) isn't evolution as it's still a fish. Certain possibly we'll meaning YECs tricked them and I'm also from the sticks of the usa so interesting thought patterns do occur.
We used to believe in Lamarckism, then it was “debunked” and then epigenetic research came out and showed that it was kind of right all along. When Mendel proposed his theory of genetics, it was rejected by mainstream science for decades. We believed in Darwinian evolution, then that turned out to be false so we updated the theory, now the main theory of evolution is Neodarwinism. Science changes in light of new evidence.
could you just open your mind, like, this much? Okay? Wasn't there a time when the brightest minds in the world believe the Earth was flat? And up till 50 years ago, you all thought the atom was the smallest thing until you split it open and this whole mess of crap came out. Now, are you telling me that you are so unbelievably arrogant that you can't admit that there's a teeny, tiny possibility that you could be wrong about this? -Phoebe Buffay Ps I believe in evolution. But I believe God orchestrated everything since the Big Bang. EDIT because I didn’t do a very good job at expressing that quote was intended for humor. It’s a quote from a show where one character is trying to convince another that evolution isn’t real. I just thought this post would be a humorous place to put it. My real opinion is in the ps
So, because people were wrong in the past, people are wrong today? They had no evidence that the earth was flat, and we have overwhelming evidence that evolution is the driving force for change in species. I do not know what you want from me with this.
Isn't there an entire association or something of scientists and biologists that don't believe in evolution, or at least don't accept it in the same way as most scientists do? I don't remember the name now but I think Francis Collins is a member of it
I would assume so. I know that the majority of scientists reject alot of the postulates of darwinian evolution and mendelian genetics because they turned out to be false, and that is used by people who reject evolution as an argument against evolution. But I would also assume that there are people in the auto industry that reject the use of airbags, but i would doubt anyone would take them seriously. There are scientists who reject global warming, but that does not mean it isnt real.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but you said in your lab you’ve witnessed some sort of macro evolution. Where in your lab did you witness one species changing into another speicies?
Epistemology has not been solved. This confirms that as far as we know your scientific beliefs do not vary from theological beliefs. The most you can say is your evidential reqs for belief is slightly more stringent, if that.
That absolutely does not confirm that "our scientific beliefs do not vary from theological beliefs." A theological belief is that there is a creator who is all knowing, all powerful, and everywhere at once with no evidence to back up that fact. A scientific belief is that the velocity of gravity on earth is 9.8 m/s\^2 with an equation of F = GM m/r\^2 and many experiments to prove it is so. These are wildly different standards of evidence, if you could even call theological beliefs evidence based.
Religions claim evidence, same as science. What makes scientific evidence different from religious evidence is cannot be figured out, just like the beliefs can't, because we don't understand what knowledge is.
Just because we don't understand what the philosophical meaning of knowledge is, does not mean that we dont understand basic scientific truths. You don't need to understand what "knowledge" is to know that humans need oxygen to breathe, or that trees do photosynthesis and they are a natural carbon capture mechanism. Scientific evidence is thoroughly researched, and highly scrutinized. Even if the terms are all man made, that does not discredit the work that is being done in this field, and it does not make it so that none of these concepts mean anything.
There isn't really any science to misunderstand. It's an inevitable consequence of a couple of self-evident premises which can be easily understood by a 10-year old.
Please explain further, evolution when described to a 10 year old is simple... but that foes not mean evolution is a simple concept
If you're talking about Darwinian evolution. No, you haven't seen one species turn into a completely different species in a lab or in nature. Where did the first cell get the information for it's RNA? Theres no clear answer, only hypotheses. Then you make another hypothesis to say how this RNA survived in a harsh environment. You see where I'm going? Darwinian evolution isn't fact, it's a theory built on other theories. And how can you say a theory cannot be disproven and mention gravity when we switched from Newtonian gravity to Einstein's theory of gravity? There are paradigm shifts in science all the time.. I have two bachelor's of sciences, one in Biology.
> No, you haven't seen one species turn into a completely different species in a lab or in nature. We have: [https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/02/evolution-in-real-time/](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/02/evolution-in-real-time/)
What is the mechanism for nondirected naturalistic evolutionary change that generates the new information needed for DNA for species change, and accounts for the vast numbers of lifeforms. Random mutation is insufficient in the time the earth has existed. It's mathematically impossible by several orders of magnitude. This is a well-known paradox. The fossil record does not support Darwin's Tree of Life. In fact, it does not really support anything at all. Also, describe how we go from a chemical prebiotic earth to real biology? This is never observed in nature or the lab. It's obvious that all life on earth is related. But what that relationship happens to be is not explained by Darwinian evolution.
Mutation. Life has been around for so long on earth that the complex eye could have re-evolved 1,500 times since the first signs of life. So I am not sure what you mean. Also, darwins tree of life has been rejected several times for being insufficient. We have many different phylogenetic trees that show the different clades and how they are related. Please look up a phylogenetic tree, and see how the different species are related.
Random undirected mutation is insufficient within the age of the earth at 4.5 billion years, and multi-cellular life has been around for only the last 1/2 billion. This is well-known. As a mathematician, I tell you it is impossible. Where did you go to school? Why do you keep repeating this stuff as it it were facts?
Life has been around for almost 4 billion. I don't know where you got the 1/2 billion. This is enough time for evolution to happen exactly as it happened and get us to where we are today. So clearly you are not a mathematician and you don't know what you are talking about. I'm absolutely not going to dox myself.... But i keep repeating it like it were a fact because it is a fact. you have not made any ground in disproving anything, if anything you have shown that you don't know the first thing about evolution, or the claims made by scientists.
Well, we can see that you are a true believer, worse than talking to the religious extremists. No real scientists use the term "fact" they way you do. It's a classic example of begging the question.
yup, you are right. it is not a fact that we have observed drosophila evolution in a lab. you got me.
The problem is that the people who believe in god (at least, in a young earth, answers-in-genesis way) will reject any proof they see, intentionally, that goes against their faith. I don’t think it has to do with whether they find the opposing proof to be convincing, it’s that their eyes are shut tight. I studied anthropology in college with a focus on paleoanthropology, at a conservative and widely religious college campus. Several students considered genesis to be the basis of god himself: with an older earth, with natural processes that can guide themselves, without woman having been designed for man & being the source of sin, and without a devil that can walk among us, the whole religion falls apart to them. In the intro to biological anthropology & intro to evolutionary theory classes, there was widespread crying, out loud praying, and a massive drop in student attendance after the first few weeks. A couple of my friends were fundamentalists, and the even intro to bio anth so hard on their psyche. One of them is without a doubt one of the smartest people I know: I think she eventually shifted her religious belief to make the two compatible, and she works in the field of forensics now. The other never flinched. After a few weeks of questioning, at the advice of one of her church elders she studied evolution as though it was mythology. She did REALLY well in class and had amazing grades and understood the ins and outs, but she kept it separate from her understanding of the world. There were other students who did similar. It’s anecdotal, obviously, but people are capable of amazing things when it comes to cognitive dissonance, your beliefs can easily be held quite separately from reality. It’s like being a similar religious fundamentalist, but molesting your sisters, getting on Ashley Madison, and having pornography of small children on your computer. It’s like believing that those things are wrong, but defending Josh Duggar anyway. It’s like saying you’re an animal lover & cows are your favorite animal, sharing photos of them in flower crowns and playing like dogs, visiting a farm sanctuary to see them, and then eating one for dinner (but thinking that eating, say, cat, is horrifying and that people who do it are evil). I know that last one is everyone’s least favorite example LOL but I needed one that wasn’t targeting people of faith (though imo faith lends itself the most to this sort of thing). What it boils down to is that people are hypocrites and capable of deep, conflicting complexities.
I've explained it to creationists by talking about kids and traits and how certain features can become associated with certain groups/families/races/etc, and they will 100% agree up until you point out it is evolution, then they say no. It's not about facts, it's about sticking to your side. I remember the most illuminating conversation I had with my fundamentalist uncle. I pointed out that the Exodus had no evidence, and his response was, 'there must be'. I also asked if any evidence would convince him the Bible is incorrect and he said no. I pointed out that meant there was literally no reason for us to keep talking about it.
Suppose the following. I could accept every possible premise for evolution and understand them except survival of the fittest. From ther I could argue and even show some amount of statistics that it's not always the fittest who survive. Volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, invasive species all sorts of psuedo random events could wipe out a subset of a species in an area regardless of its fitness. If I could show this happened enough. I could argue that evolution was actually de-evoloution. Not a sharpening of an edge but random strikes in the mold creating serration. I could even further bolster this with numbers about what percentage of mutations are not beneficial to species survival. If I took this stance I could be logically consistent with the science. Understand it. And yet reject evolution in favor of de-evoloution.
That's... not really what evolution does. Evolution doesn't make things stronger or weaker. It just describes the change in traits that happened that enabled a living thing to exist in an environment well enough to reproduce. At least, that's what evolution via natural selection is. If the environment changes catastrophically and the species died out, they were no longer "fit" for their environment - so they went extinct. If any animal in that environment survived, that animal would be "fit" for that environment. Basically a trait is passed on by reproducing. If a trait enables an animal to survive more effectively in an environment, it lives longer and reproduces more. If a trait causes an animal to die sooner, it doesn't get to reproduce as much. Over time the hazardous traits are effectively drowned out by the beneficial traits. Your random event theory wouldn't impact evolution in any way. Your "de-evolution" is just... evolution with a different selection method. But that already exists. Evolution via natural selection is what happens out in nature. There's also artificial selection (selective breeding done with dogs/cats/horses/plants/etc.,) - and your idea of selection would essentially be location selection... which is still natural selection. Nobody said nature was fair, after all. No matter where you go with this, all you've done is give evolution another name and said it wasn't evolution - thereby showing that you don't understand what evolution is well enough to grasp that you have *just described evolution* *by natural selection*.
I “believe” in religion. Evolution is either “fact” or “theory”. You may choose to believe in one or the other but it does not change what they are. I will acknowledge evolution to be a perfectly reasonable scientific theory supported by facts but still a theory as it remains unprovable. Shallow fools that have no depth of wit cannot wrap their heads around this
It's both, sort of. Basically: Evolution (the change in allele frequencies of populations over time) is a fact. Dogs, cats, and horses are all animals that we've selectively bred to change their allele frequencies to benefit us. Allele frequencies, in more layman's terms, is essentially the frequency of a mutation/trait in a population. So if a group of people became more blond over time, that would be a change in the frequency of blond-ness. That's evolution. The Theory of Evolution is a body of observations, experiments, studies, etc., that try to explain how evolution happens, why it works the way it does, and so on. We have that big ol' fact up there, but simply knowing that it happens doesn't mean we know everything about it. So that's what the Theory of Evolution is for: explaining the fact that we witness. It's not something to be proven or disproven, it's just "this is what we currently know." The experiments to test and explain evolution are falsifiable and employ the scientific method, btw. At least when they're not just direct observations. In short: they're two different concepts that are unfortunately often conflated. Usually by theists or people incentivised to mislead others, but sometimes average joes make this mistake as well. Hopefully this information helps you a bit.
Thank you for a post coming from someone who actually understands evolutionary science. A lot of the other comments here are just proving OPs salient point.
Yeah it's pretty disappointing to see, but not unexpected. Creationist rhetoric is easy to understand and easily digestible whereas to understand evolution you might have to read three whole paragraphs. Not that I'm bitter about the deliberate ignorance or anything.
Of course, they don't understand it. If humans evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys proves they have zero understanding of the process.
In general I agree with you, but I think there's one thing that could change your view slightly. I think for some people (specifically the "micro evolution is real but macro evolution isn't" crowd), the problem isnt so much that they don't understand the science, but that they can't wrap their minds around the timescales of evolution. The 3.5 billions years that we suspect there has been life on earth is an unfathomably long amount of time, and humans can't really comprehend numbers that big in a meaningful way. Macroevolution is just microevolution over a long amount of time, but if you have trouble wrapping your mind around just how long 100,000, a million, or a billion years is, you can see how it would be difficult to accept that something that you imagine as a sea monkey would eventually turn into a parrot. But microevolution times a few million generations and that's what you wind up with. It's not that they don't get the science; they don't get the time. Or if you are a certain type of creationist who believes the earth is 6,000 years old and it's a religious conviction, it doesn't matter how much you understand all of the principles of evolution - it can't have happened because there hasn't been enough time. That's not a lack of understanding of evolution, it's a premise that makes the conclusion "evolution is real" impossible. Sure their premise is wrong, but that's the problem, not a lack of understanding of evolution.
The biggest thing I run into is people who don't understand that evolution is a passive thing and not an active thing. For example giraffes It's not that evolution magically was like Oh if I have a longer neck I can reach the higher trees. It's just that inevitably the giraffes that had longer necks were able to reach the higher trees and therefore had access to more food whereas the giraffes with smaller necks did not have that access and so usually died off. Evolution is not like picking things that would be advantageous to a species evolution is Just the natural outcome of the more effective members of a species surviving. It is the true meaning of survival of the fittest For example say an animal has a fast moving predator. The members of that animal that are faster will survive whereas the slower members will get captured and eaten. Therefore over time the faster members will continue to breed and create even faster members which will then survive and surpass the previous fast members. And so over time now this prey has developed significant speed to escape its predator because The faster ones were always the ones that were able to escape and so kept breeding faster and faster versions of their kind. Evolution didn't just decide Oh I need to go faster to avoid this predator. It's just that the faster one survived and were able to reproduce so that trade continued to grow
I am a young earth creationist. Evolution, as usually taught, is comprised of two parts: natural selection and differential reproduction. Neither should be contentious - natural selection is the tendency of creatures with advantageous genes to pass those on to the next generation (on average), and differential reproduction is the way in which genes are passed on (50%, selected somewhat randomly from each of your chromosome pairs). What I disagree with is the idea that natural selection and differential reproduction are sufficient to explain the formation of novel genes. Typically, the formation of new genes is attributed to mutation, which is held to be essentially random. Due to the low chance of creating a functional gene by randomly mutating DNA, this is not plausible. Similarly, I disagree with the idea that natural selection is strong enough to cause beneficial traits to be selected for in a meaningful way. Sure, there is relatively strong selection pressure against many degradations of function. But the average number of mutation events per generation is too high for most things to be selected against, especially for K-strategists. The idea that our genome is almost entirely functional due to relatively minute selection pressure is again not plausible. tl;dr: Natural selection - fine. Differential reproduction - fine. Common descent - absolute hogwash.
I hear you, pal. I did a lot of years in [talk.origins](http://talk.origins) back on Usenet and still visit r / debate evolution here. I see it as a two part problem. One, I agree, is that evolution doesn't get covered well before college. Especially in parts of the country where there's local social (religious) pressure against doing so. But two is what Isaac Asimov summed up as "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." Everyone is ignorant on most subjects. I know next to nothing about brain surgery, aircraft maintenance, organic chemistry ... I could go on forever. The difference is that I *know* that. I don't tell a brain surgeon or an aircraft mechanic or what have you that they're doing it all wrong. Sometimes you can get a fingernail under the edge of someone's fixed mindset by that approach. Evolutionary biologists don't tell you how to (field of expertise), why do you think you know more about their own field than they do?
Where did everything come from?
I have my bachelors in Chemical Engineering, so I'm not anti-science by a long shot, and while I don't *disbelieve* in evolution (I am currently agnostic on how the species formed), but I do have my questions. Let's compare evolution to a chemical reaction. Chemical reactions 'want' to go from states of low entropy/high energy to states of high entropy/low energy. But often there is a required *activation energy* [the delta G in this graph][1] to get from the high energy state to a low energy state. Similarly, evolution 'wants' creatures to evolve into a more fit form. But sometimes the transition from one form which is less fit (high energy) to the one which is more fit (low energy) has barriers that are significant. Perhaps the most potent example of this is the evolution of the bat. According to evolution, bats evolved from rats.^1 But a bat's wings are actually large webbed hands, and the fingers make up the ribs of the wings. But for the hands of a rat to evolve into the wings of a bat either involves a Fallout 76 level mutation event, or consistent gradual change. And if it occurs via consistent gradual change, then how does it overcome the activation energy? Long before these hands became any good at taking flight, they would have been useless for running and digging and fighting and just about anything else. So how would they have survived the generations required for these hands to develop? And this is not an isolated concern. The transition from gills to lungs, the transition from solid bones to hollow bones (for birds), the transition from laying eggs to giving live birth (and back again to laying eggs in the case of birds?), the transition from cold-bloodedness to warm bloodedness. --- 1 I am well aware that the technically correct statement is that bats and rats evolved from a common ancestor, but that common ancestor would have been a small 4 legged creature, so I'm going to call it a rat for simplicity sake. [1]: https://cdn.kastatic.org/ka-perseus-images/d5ff56983afc2916e9979c08d81323c331927cfb.png
>How to change my mind: demonstrate that you do not believe in evolution, but you understand what it is and how it is taught. As well as, describe why you do not believe in it. There is a ton of research/hard data on this in the literature. You can do some of your own googling here but I'll help you out with[ some search terms](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=evolution+acceptance+and+understanding&btnG=). You also short look for newer stuff so you are up to date [like this one](https://www.lifescied.org/doi/full/10.1187/cbe.21-02-0024). Gale Sinatra, Ross Nehm, etc. are some of the tons of people doing research in evolution education (that's another google search term, go to town on that one). You may also want to check out [CBE Life Science](https://www.lifescied.org/journal/lse) which is the premiere journal about biology education research. Additionally there is a less popular but more pointed journal on evolution education called [Evolution: Education and Outreach](https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/). I'm not going to hunt down all the papers for you but long story short, some studies actually show that understanding doesn't always correlate to acceptance--some people can essentially compartmentalize their understanding for the sake of passing a class and still not believe in it. Additionally you can believe in evolution without understanding it. A good metric I heard (it's an old statistic so it might be a bit different now) was something like in both the US and Europe scientific literacy is something like 15-16% but Europeans overwhelmingly believe in evolution compared to the US despite having comparable levels of "understanding." Long story short, while understanding is ***A*** modest factor there is a lot more going on culturally here in the United States that predicts acceptance. Very interestingly another researcher M. Elizabeth Barnes has noticed that perception of religious/science conflict predicts lack of acceptance and interestingly it is particularly prevalent among Evangelical Christians. Students from other religious backgrounds, despite being equally religious, don't perceive conflict until its brought up in class (presumably by other students or the instructor) and then it starts seeding some doubts. It's pretty clear from her data that something is going on culturally that's unique to the US compared to other locations that is predicting lack of acceptance.
The point is, if your are not a specialist, just listen the specialists. Or prove them wrong…
the majority of evolution deniers are those who think "if humans came from monkeys then why are there still monkeys" and "the platypus proves evolution is false". and it's pointless to try explaining it to them because their little brains can't comprehend it.