Posted by GaDS on August 26, 1998 at 19:45:26:
In Reply to: Do We Know? posted by GaDS on August 26, 1998 at 03:41:35:
: : For example, there is a small group of fundamentalist
: : Christians who assume such absurdities as a 6000 year old earth, a global
: : flood and that evolution does not occur...We all know how evolution works...
: :
: : Cheers
: : Joe Meert
: Do we know how evolution works?
Thanks to one and all for their responses. But as I attempted to point out, do we KNOW how evolution works? As I pointed out, I do not doubt that morphology will be influenced by environment (for instance, how many non-insulated animals live at the poles?) but genetic differentiation resulting in a new species is still a theory at best and has never been demonstrated. My point of domestication is that natural selection depends upon chance; human intervention, by directing which genes are passed along vastly accelerates the process with the result that, after the equivalent of millions of natural years, a cow is still a cow, a chicken is still a chicken, and a dog is still a dog. Scientists point out various degrees of complexity of eyes found in nature and extol it as proof of the evolution of the complex eye, but as the properties of light are fixed by physical law it is not surprising that similarities are inevitable in structures intended for sensing of light. A Sphinx moth and a hummingbird look and act very much the same (except that the moth is active at night) but to say that one arose from the other is nonsense. The niche existed, it demanded certain physical attributes for an organism to exploit it, and the moth and hummingbird adapted accordingly. Similarly, a stomach is a stomach, an intestine an intestine, an ear an ear, and so forth. The similarity may be due to speciation from a common ancestor, but more than likely they look the same because they need to if the are to perform similar functions.
As appealing as the the notion that complexity can arise spontaneously through mutation may be, I still must remain unconvinced. The mechanisms responsible for the development of organic structures are just far too precise to believe that structures as the eye and heart arose through a happy change is some codon in the DNA chain. In the case of the eye, it would require that the eye, optic nerve, and brain would all have to interract correctly to be responsible for the individual surviving to pass the genetic mutations along. As was pointed out, something as straightforward as taller giraffes has not been observable, which implies that it would take multiple instances over long periods of time for even a simple mutation to finally take hold in the gene pool. How long would something as involved as 3 interacting structures take to become established? Then too, as in the case of the four-chambered heart (presumed to be the acme of cardiac evolution thus far), most if not all abnormalities are fatal. Consider the reptile, with an autonomic nervous system designed to support a three-chambered heart. How effective would it be at controlling the function of a four-chambered heart without inducing fatal arythmia or circulating blood in the wrong sequence from heart to lung to body to heart? Living organisms are very complex - even minor changes to their systems are often fatal. Even one amino acid out of place in a protein strand can render precisely-structured biochemicals inert, and yet evolutionist pass off entirely new tissues and organs as no great thing. I defy anyone to grab a handful of miscellaneous hardware, use it to significantly modify the design of a Curta calculator, and have it still work (even supposing that blueprints for the original were at hand). Even a single cell is a marvelously complex structure, and yet no scientist ANYWHERE has been able to make one from scratch using organic materials or parts of dead cells. To argue "that would take million of years" is preposterous: at some point, at some specific instant, in the blink of an eye, according to evolutionists, what was inert became alive. The millions of years were merely to collect the pieces for the transformation to take place. Why has no scientist, able today to assemble any collection of pre-organic matter, been able to make a living cell, much less have it evolve into a more advanced organism?
As I said before, DO we know how evolution works? Or is evolution actually only an attractive theory?
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