Posted by Chris on April 24, 1998 at 10:24:48:
In Reply to: EVOLUTION posted by Brian on April 23, 1998 at 20:30:25:
: Well, I will first start by saying that I do not believe in evolution if it means that all life on this planet came from the same original lifeform. All these arguments that I hear are of thing I classify as adaption. All things adapt to their enviroment and yes, some things do change slightly for the better, but the belief that we all came from a single cell lifeform, COME ON. Only the strong survive and that is why things change slightly as time goes on. If these things such as "evolution" did accur from a single cell organism, it would have taken literaly Trillions of years for all the diversified types of life forms today. Scientists have already said how old the world is, and it is NOT trillions of years old. Well my argument has come to a close.
: Steve Forbes
: Phd. Biological Science, OSU
So is your name Brian, or is it Steve? Do you have a PhD in Biological Science, or some other educational background?
Since you don't "believe" that all life on earth shares a common ancestor, I'm wondering how you explain something I deal with on an almost daily basis. I am a graduate student, working on a PhD in biology. The model I currently use is the mouse pituitary. This is not an isolated model standing on its own out in left field as one might think--no biological model can be. When an interesting protein is found in the mouse brain, one can safely assume that identical or closely related proteins will be found in other biological models: zebrafish, nematode worms, sea urchins, fruit flies, yeasts, and of course even in humans. This expectation can be satisfied by searching a gene or protein database for these cousin-molecules. Some small differences will be found, yet they are graded differences: mice are biochemically more similar to humans, mice and humans are more similar to zebrafish, etc. Why else would someone use a model like a mouse brain? It would be trivial if its principles could not be applied to other organizms (and ultimately to medical research). What I have described is data. These are facts. Evolution explains this data--it provides a mechanism that can be tested and reproduced in the laboratory. Since you don't "believe" in the evolutionary explanation for the phenomenon I have described, what alternate explanation do you offer?