Topic: Do You Believe that Evolution is True?

[mark]

And when I point out they are not and explain the problems you go to your next copy paste. You want to say you are using science then defend it don't just go to your next copy paste.

Many times its because your so far off, I can' bring myself to even respond. But mostly its the way you cut it up into 20 different comments. I'm old Dude! I can easily show you the flaws in your religion....Just not 20 at a time.

[ebilly99]

Many times its because your so far off, I can' bring myself to even respond. But mostly its the way you cut it up into 20 different comments. I'm old Dude! I can easily show you the flaws in your religion....Just not 20 at a time.

Fine then stop asking so many. Ask one question, and I will give you one answer, and ask you a question.

[mark]

Fine then stop asking so many. Ask one question, and I will give you one answer, and ask you a question.

You are the STUDENT grasshopper! When you can take the pebble from my hand.........

[ebilly99]

You are the STUDENT grasshopper! When you can take the pebble from my hand.........

Be careful, there are no bad students only bad teachers.

[mark]

I have one for you.......How did the DNA code originate? The code is a sophisticated language system with letters and words where the meaning of the words is unrelated to the chemical properties of the letters—just as the information on this page is not a product of the chemical properties of the ink (or pixels on a screen).  What other coding system has existed without intelligent design? How did the DNA coding system arise without it being created? Please spare me your RNA hypothesis!

[fish]

did you quit college? no longer trying to be a teacher? the public education system will benefit!! LOL LOL LOL LOL ya might want to take your own advice  about the cut and pastes! you are just retyping instead of c&p! LOL LOL

and remember, rednecks built this country!

[ebilly99]

I have one for you.......How did the DNA code originate? The code is a sophisticated language system with letters and words where the meaning of the words is unrelated to the chemical properties of the letters—just as the information on this page is not a product of the chemical properties of the ink (or pixels on a screen).  What other coding system has existed without intelligent design? How did the DNA coding system arise without it being created? Please spare me your RNA hypothesis!

Well what is wrong with RNA, you keep saying I can't use it but what is wrong with it. It exist in nature, and is simpler. Tying it with TNA, a sugar molucule I do not understand why you are against it.

[mark]

Well what is wrong with RNA, you keep saying I can't use it but what is wrong with it. It exist in nature, and is simpler. Tying it with TNA, a sugar molucule I do not understand why you are against it.

Got nothing huh?

[mark]

How could mutations—accidental copying mistakes (DNA ‘letters’ exchanged, deleted or added, genes duplicated, chromosome inversions, etc.)—create the huge volumes of information in the DNA of living things?  How could such errors create 3 billion letters of DNA information to change a microbe into a microbiologist? There is information for how to make proteins but also for controlling their use—much like a cookbook contains the ingredients as well as the instructions for how and when to use them. One without the other is useless. See: Meta-information: An impossible conundrum for evolution. Mutations are known for their destructive effects, including over 1,000 human diseases such as hemophilia. Rarely are they even helpful. But how can scrambling existing DNA information create a new biochemical pathway or nano-machines with many components, to make ‘goo-to-you’ evolution possible? E.g., How did a 32-component rotary motor like ATP synthase (which produces the energy currency, ATP, for all life), or robots like kinesin (a ‘postman’ delivering parcels inside cells) originate?

[fish]

God created dna,rna,tna, all the molecules, pretty simple for most to understand! LOL LOL LOL

[mark]

  How did life originate? Evolutionist Professor Paul Davies admitted, “Nobody knows how a mixture of lifeless chemicals spontaneously organized themselves into the first living cell.”1 Andrew Knoll, professor of biology, Harvard, said, “we don’t really know how life originated on this planet”.2 A minimal cell needs several hundred proteins. Even if every atom in the universe were an experiment with all the correct amino acids present for every possible molecular vibration in the supposed evolutionary age of the universe, not even one average-sized functional protein would form. So how did life with hundreds of proteins originate just by chemistry without intelligent design? Sure looks like God to me Fish!  LOL LOL

[Hi]

I learnded everthing i need to know about evolution 40 years ago.........funniest thing ive read all thread....

[mark]

I learnded everthing i need to know about evolution 40 years ago.........funniest thing ive read all thread....

Hi can't answer the questions either. Funniest thing I've seen all day! (Try to get your quotes straight) I learneded yur version of how the world wurks 40 years ago!

[ebilly99]

  How did life originate? Evolutionist Professor Paul Davies admitted, “Nobody knows how a mixture of lifeless chemicals spontaneously organized themselves into the first living cell.”1 Andrew Knoll, professor of biology, Harvard, said, “we don’t really know how life originated on this planet”.2 A minimal cell needs several hundred proteins. Even if every atom in the universe were an experiment with all the correct amino acids present for every possible molecular vibration in the supposed evolutionary age of the universe, not even one average-sized functional protein would form. So how did life with hundreds of proteins originate just by chemistry without intelligent design? Sure looks like God to me Fish!  LOL LOL

More from the great Paul davis, or Why Quote mining fails in the age of the internet.

How the unique properties of life originated from inert matter is still one of the great unsolved problems of biology. Creationists, of course, claim that our failure to solve it means that God did it: as Ingersoll noted in yesterday’s quote, “Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.”

And perhaps we’ll never know precisely how life began, for it happened in the distant past and involved chemical reactions that could not fossilize.  But I have confidence in three things: life originated naturally and not through God’s fiat; that we will show that this was possible within 50 years or so by demonstrating the evolution of life-like systems in the laboratory under primitive Earth conditions; and that while life may have originated more than once, all living species descended from only a single proto-organism (lots of evidence for that one). If we can demonstrate the origin of life in the lab through realistic experiments, then—although we may not know how it really happened several billion years ago—we can say that it could have happened naturally, and therefore we need not invoke God.

Got nothing huh?

Actually I answered, tell me what is wrong with TNA. .

[ebilly99]

  How did life originate? Evolutionist Professor Paul Davies admitted, “Nobody knows how a mixture of lifeless chemicals spontaneously organized themselves into the first living cell.”1 Andrew Knoll, professor of biology, Harvard, said, “we don’t really know how life originated on this planet”.2 A minimal cell needs several hundred proteins. Even if every atom in the universe were an experiment with all the correct amino acids present for every possible molecular vibration in the supposed evolutionary age of the universe, not even one average-sized functional protein would form. So how did life with hundreds of proteins originate just by chemistry without intelligent design? Sure looks like God to me Fish!  LOL LOL

Hate to do the copy paste thing but you are asking for a encyclopedia here and a simple word or a hundred won't do.

Introduction
Every so often, someone comes up with the statement "the formation of any enzyme by chance is nearly impossible, therefore abiogenesis is impossible". Often they cite an impressive looking calculation from the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, or trot out something called "Borel's Law" to prove that life is statistically impossible. These people, including Fred, have committed one or more of the following errors.

Glossary
Acyl transferase:
An enzyme or ribozyme that synthesizes peptides.
Ligase:
An enzyme or ribozyme that adds a monomer to a polymer, or links two shorter polymers together.
Monomer:
Any single subunit of a polymer. An amino acid is a monomer of a peptide or protein, a nucleotide is a monomer of an oligonucleotide or polynucleotide.
Nucleotide:
Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine and Uracil. These are the monomers that make up oligo- or polynucleotides such as RNA.
Oligonucleotide:
A short polymer of nucleotide subunits.
Polymerase:
A enzyme or ribozyme that makes a polymer out of monomers. For example, RNA polymerase makes RNA out of single nucleotides.
Ribozyme:
A biological catalyst made from RNA.
Self-replicator:
A molecule which can make an identical or near-identical copy of itself from smaller subunits. At least four self-replicators are known.
Problems with the creationists' "it's so improbable" calculations

1) They calculate the probability of the formation of a "modern" protein, or even a complete bacterium with all "modern" proteins, by random events. This is not the abiogenesis theory at all.

2) They assume that there is a fixed number of proteins, with fixed sequences for each protein, that are required for life.

3) They calculate the probability of sequential trials, rather than simultaneous trials.

4) They misunderstand what is meant by a probability calculation.

5) They seriously underestimate the number of functional enzymes/ribozymes present in a group of random sequences.

I will try and walk people through these various errors, and show why it is not possible to do a "probability of abiogenesis" calculation in any meaningful way.

A primordial protoplasmic globule
So the calculation goes that the probability of forming a given 300 amino acid long protein (say an enzyme like carboxypeptidase) randomly is (1/20)300 or 1 chance in 2.04 x 10390, which is astoundingly, mind-beggaringly improbable. This is then cranked up by adding on the probabilities of generating 400 or so similar enzymes until a figure is reached that is so huge that merely contemplating it causes your brain to dribble out your ears. This gives the impression that the formation of even the smallest organism seems totally impossible. However, this is completely incorrect.

Firstly, the formation of biological polymers from monomers is a function of the laws of chemistry and biochemistry, and these are decidedly not random.

Secondly, the entire premise is incorrect to start off with, because in modern abiogenesis theories the first "living things" would be much simpler, not even a protobacteria, or a preprotobacteria (what Oparin called a protobiont [8] and Woese calls a progenote [4]), but one or more simple molecules probably not more than 30-40 subunits long. These simple molecules then slowly evolved into more cooperative self-replicating systems, then finally into simple organisms [2, 5, 10, 15, 28]. An illustration comparing a hypothetical protobiont and a modern bacteria is given below.


The first "living things" could have been a single self replicating molecule, similar to the "self-replicating" peptide from the Ghadiri group [7, 17], or the self replicating hexanucleotide [10], or possibly an RNA polymerase that acts on itself [12].



Another view is the first self-replicators were groups of catalysts, either protein enzymes or RNA ribozymes, that regenerated themselves as a catalytic cycle [3, 5, 15, 26, 28]. An example is the SunY three subunit self-replicator [24]. These catalytic cycles could be limited in a small pond or lagoon, or be a catalytic complex adsorbed to either clay or lipid material on clay. Given that there are many catalytic sequences in a group of random peptides or polynucleotides (see below) it's not unlikely that a small catalytic complex could be formed.

These two models are not mutually exclusive. The Ghadiri peptide can mutate and form catalytic cycles [9].

No matter whether the first self-replicators were single molecules, or complexes of small molecules, this model is nothing like Hoyle's "tornado in a junkyard making a 747". Just to hammer this home, here is a simple comparison of the theory criticised by creationists, and the actual theory of abiogenesis.


Note that the real theory has a number of small steps, and in fact I've left out some steps (especially between the hypercycle-protobiont stage) for simplicity. Each step is associated with a small increase in organisation and complexity, and the chemicals slowly climb towards organism-hood, rather than making one big leap [4, 10, 15, 28].

Where the creationist idea that modern organisms form spontaneously comes from is not certain. The first modern abiogenesis formulation, the Oparin/Haldane hypothesis from the 20's, starts with simple proteins/proteinoids developing slowly into cells. Even the ideas circulating in the 1850's were not "spontaneous" theories. The nearest I can come to is Lamarck's original ideas from 1803! [8]

Given that the creationists are criticising a theory over 150 years out of date, and held by no modern evolutionary biologist, why go further? Because there are some fundamental problems in statistics and biochemistry that turn up in these mistaken "refutations".

The myth of the "life sequence"
Another claim often heard is that there is a "life sequence" of 400 proteins, and that the amino acid sequences of these proteins cannot be changed, for organisms to be alive.

This, however, is nonsense. The 400 protein claim seems to come from the protein coding genome of Mycobacterium genetalium, which has the smallest genome currently known of any modern organism [20]. However, inspection of the genome suggests that this could be reduced further to a minimal gene set of 256 proteins [20]. Note again that this is a modern organism. The first protobiont/progenote would have been smaller still [4], and preceded by even simpler chemical systems [3, 10, 11, 15].

As to the claim that the sequences of proteins cannot be changed, again this is nonsense. There are in most proteins regions where almost any amino acid can be substituted, and other regions where conservative substitutions (where charged amino acids can be swapped with other charged amino acids, neutral for other neutral amino acids and hydrophobic amino acids for other hydrophobic amino acids) can be made. Some functionally equivalent molecules can have between 30 - 50% of their amino acids different. In fact it is possible to substitute structurally non-identical bacterial proteins for yeast proteins, and worm proteins for human proteins, and the organisms live quite happily.

The "life sequence" is a myth.

Coin tossing for beginners and macromolecular assembly
So let's play the creationist game and look at forming a peptide by random addition of amino acids. This certainly is not the way peptides formed on the early Earth, but it will be instructive.

I will use as an example the "self-replicating" peptide from the Ghadiri group mentioned above [7]. I could use other examples, such as the hexanucleotide self-replicator [10], the SunY self-replicator [24] or the RNA polymerase described by the Eckland group [12], but for historical continuity with creationist claims a small peptide is ideal. This peptide is 32 amino acids long with a sequence of RMKQLEEKVYELLSKVACLEYEVARLKKVGE and is an enzyme, a peptide ligase that makes a copy of itself from two 16 amino acid long subunits. It is also of a size and composition that is ideally suited to be formed by abiotic peptide synthesis. The fact that it is a self replicator is an added irony.

The probability of generating this in successive random trials is (1/20)32 or 1 chance in 4.29 x 1040. This is much, much more probable than the 1 in 2.04 x 10390 of the standard creationist "generating carboxypeptidase by chance" scenario, but still seems absurdly low.

However, there is another side to these probability estimates, and it hinges on the fact that most of us don't have a feeling for statistics. When someone tells us that some event has a one in a million chance of occuring, many of us expect that one million trials must be undergone before the said event turns up, but this is wrong.

Here is a experiment you can do yourself: take a coin, flip it four times, write down the results, and then do it again. How many times would you think you had to repeat this procedure (trial) before you get 4 heads in a row?

Now the probability of 4 heads in a row is is (1/2)4 or 1 chance in 16: do we have to do 16 trials to get 4 heads (HHHH)? No, in successive experiments I got 11, 10, 6, 16, 1, 5, and 3 trials before HHHH turned up. The figure 1 in 16 (or 1 in a million or 1 in 1040) gives the likelihood of an event in a given trial, but doesn't say where it will occur in a series. You can flip HHHH on your very first trial (I did). Even at 1 chance in 4.29 x 1040, a self-replicator could have turned up surprisingly early. But there is more.

1 chance in 4.29 x 1040 is still orgulously, gobsmackingly unlikely; it's hard to cope with this number. Even with the argument above (you could get it on your very first trial) most people would say "surely it would still take more time than the Earth existed to make this replicator by random methods". Not really; in the above examples we were examining sequential trials, as if there was only one protein/DNA/proto-replicator being assembled per trial. In fact there would be billions of simultaneous trials as the billions of building block molecules interacted in the oceans, or on the thousands of kilometers of shorelines that could provide catalytic surfaces or templates [2,15].

Let's go back to our example with the coins. Say it takes a minute to toss the coins 4 times; to generate HHHH would take on average 8 minutes. Now get 16 friends, each with a coin, to all flip the coin simultaneously 4 times; the average time to generate HHHH is now 1 minute. Now try to flip 6 heads in a row; this has a probability of (1/2)6 or 1 in 64. This would take half an hour on average, but go out and recruit 64 people, and you can flip it in a minute. If you want to flip a sequence with a chance of 1 in a billion, just recruit the population of China to flip coins for you, you will have that sequence in no time flat.

So, if on our prebiotic earth we have a billion peptides growing simultaneously, that reduces the time taken to generate our replicator significantly.

Okay, you are looking at that number again, 1 chance in 4.29 x 1040, that's a big number, and although a billion starting molecules is a lot of molecules, could we ever get enough molecules to randomly assemble our first replicator in under half a billion years?

Yes, one kilogram of the amino acid arginine has 2.85 x 1024 molecules in it (that's well over a billion billion); a tonne of arginine has 2.85 x 1027 molecules. If you took a semi-trailer load of each amino acid and dumped it into a medium size lake, you would have enough molecules to generate our particular replicator in a few tens of years, given that you can make 55 amino acid long proteins in 1 to 2 weeks [14,16].

So how does this shape up with the prebiotic Earth? On the early Earth it is likely that the ocean had a volume of 1 x 1024 litres. Given an amino acid concentration of 1 x 10-6 M (a moderately dilute soup, see Chyba and Sagan 1992 [23]), then there are roughly 1 x 1050 potential starting chains, so that a fair number of efficent peptide ligases (about 1 x 1031) could be produced in a under a year, let alone a million years. The synthesis of primitive self-replicators could happen relatively rapidly, even given a probability of 1 chance in 4.29 x 1040 (and remember, our replicator could be synthesized on the very first trial).

Assume that it takes a week to generate a sequence [14,16]. Then the Ghadiri ligase could be generated in one week, and any cytochrome C sequence could be generated in a bit over a million years (along with about half of all possible 101 peptide sequences, a large proportion of which will be functional proteins of some sort).

Although I have used the Ghadiri ligase as an example, as I mentioned above the same calculations can be performed for the SunY self replicator, or the Ekland RNA polymerase. I leave this as an exercise for the reader, but the general conclusion (you can make scads of the things in a short time) is the same for these oligonucleotides.

Search spaces, or how many needles in the haystack?
So I've shown that generating a given small enzyme is not as mind-bogglingly difficult as creationists (and Fred Hoyle) suggest. Another misunderstanding is that most people feel that the number of enzymes/ribozymes, let alone the ribozymal RNA polymerases or any form of self-replicator, represent a very unlikely configuration and that the chance of a single enzyme/ribozyme forming, let alone a number of them, from random addition of amino acids/nucleotides is very small.

However, an analysis by Ekland suggests that in the sequence space of 220 nucleotide long RNA sequences, a staggering 2.5 x 10112 sequences are efficent ligases [12]. Not bad for a compound previously thought to be only structural. Going back to our primitive ocean of 1 x 1024 litres and assuming a nucleotide concentration of 1 x 10-7 M [23], then there are roughly 1 x 1049 potential nucleotide chains, so that a fair number of efficent RNA ligases (about 1 x 1034) could be produced in a year, let alone a million years. The potential number of RNA polymerases is high also; about 1 in every 1020 sequences is an RNA polymerase [12]. Similar considerations apply for ribosomal acyl transferases (about 1 in every 1015 sequences), and ribozymal nucleotide synthesis [1, 6, 13].

Similarly, of the 1 x 10130 possible 100 unit proteins, 3.8 x 1061 represent cytochrome C alone! [29] There's lots of functional enyzmes in the peptide/nucleotide search space, so it would seem likely that a functioning ensemble of enzymes could be brewed up in an early Earth's prebiotic soup.

So, even with more realistic (if somewhat mind beggaring) figures, random assemblage of amino acids into "life-supporting" systems (whether you go for protein enzyme based hypercycles [10], RNA world systems [18], or RNA ribozyme-protein enzyme coevolution [11, 25]) would seem to be entirely feasible, even with pessimistic figures for the original monomer concentrations [23] and synthesis times.

Conclusions
The very premise of creationists' probability calculations is incorrect in the first place as it aims at the wrong theory. Furthermore, this argument is often buttressed with statistical and biological fallacies.

At the moment, since we have no idea how probable life is, it's virtually impossible to assign any meaningful probabilities to any of the steps to life except the first two (monomers to polymers p=1.0, formation of catalytic polymers p=1.0). For the replicating polymers to hypercycle transition, the probability may well be 1.0 if Kauffman is right about catalytic closure and his phase transition models, but this requires real chemistry and more detailed modelling to confirm. For the hypercycle->protobiont transition, the probability here is dependent on theoretical concepts still being developed, and is unknown.

However, in the end life's feasibility depends on chemistry and biochemistry that we are still studying, not coin flipping.

[Hi]

Hi can't answer the questions either. Funniest thing I've seen all day! (Try to get your quotes straight) I learneded yur version of how the world wurks 40 years ago!

Whats the point in answering you at all?  I already know you think god did it all because if you look around the world screams God, and I also know you don't understand anything we say to you that is science related because you think our understanding of evolution hasnt changed in 40 years.  Anything i say to you you'll promptly type into google looking for a creationists point of view and cut and paste it, and I can do that myself if i needed to.

[mark]

More from the great Paul davis, or Why Quote mining fails in the age of the internet.

How the unique properties of life originated from inert matter is still one of the great unsolved problems of biology. Creationists, of course, claim that our failure to solve it means that God did it: as Ingersoll noted in yesterday’s quote, “Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.”

And perhaps we’ll never know precisely how life began, for it happened in the distant past and involved chemical reactions that could not fossilize.  But I have confidence in three things: life originated naturally and not through God’s fiat; that we will show that this was possible within 50 years or so by demonstrating the evolution of life-like systems in the laboratory under primitive Earth conditions; and that while life may have originated more than once, all living species descended from only a single proto-organism (lots of evidence for that one). If we can demonstrate the origin of life in the lab through realistic experiments, then—although we may not know how it really happened several billion years ago—we can say that it could have happened naturally, and therefore we need not invoke God.Actually I answered, tell me what is wrong with TNA. .

Where are the scientific breakthroughs due to evolution? Dr Marc Kirschner, chair of the Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, stated: “In fact, over the last 100 years, almost all of biology has proceeded independent of evolution, except evolutionary biology itself. Molecular biology, biochemistry, physiology, have not taken evolution into account at all.”9 Dr Skell wrote, “It is our knowledge of how these organisms actually operate, not speculations about how they may have arisen millions of years ago, that is essential to doctors, veterinarians, farmers … .”10 Evolution actually hinders medical discovery.11 Then why do schools and universities teach evolution so dogmatically, stealing time from experimental biology that so benefits humankind? 

[Hi]

Heres the explain it like Im 5 version

The theory of evolution is the scientific theory that explains why there is so much variety and complexity in the natural world. Be warned that it doesn't explain what initially started life in the first place - all it explains is the variety of life we have. Also: it is not in any sense a moral philosophy. It is our understanding of our observations of the natural world. Evolution does not equal eugenics or anything like that. It's just a statement of the facts we see in the world. What we choose to do in light of understanding these facts does not come into it — in fact, understanding evolution can improve human wellbeing, as we can understand diseases much better.
Another thing: the word ‘theory’. In normal everyday language, we usually use theory to mean ‘guess’ or ‘hypothesis’. In scientific terms, the theory is an explanation of the observable facts. A body of knowledge, if you will. For instance, ‘music theory’ is the body of knowledge surrounding musical composition. ‘Germ theory’ is the body of knowledge that explains illness and disease. ‘Cell theory’ is the theory that explains that all life is made of cells. ‘The theory of gravity’ is the study of gravity, and the explanations for the facts (or even laws) of gravity that we see in nature. The theory of evolution is no different. Evolution is a scientific, observable, fact, just like cells, germs, and gravity. The ‘theory of evolution’ is the study and explanation of these facts. If you've ever heard a creationist say ‘evolution is still only a theory’ or ‘evolution is not yet a law’ or ‘they're still trying to prove the theory of evolution’, then they are simply wrong, and misunderstanding the scientific meaning of the word theory. Theories don't become laws — theories contain laws. A law is just a simple mathematical observation that always seems to be true e.g. in electronics, ohm's law is that electrical current is equal to the voltage divided by resistance. Ohm's law is a part of the ‘theory of electronics’ if you like, although that term isn't really used.
Ok, let's take 3 basic principles and then extend them.
The children of parents are different to their parents. A puppy is not identical to its parents, just like you are not identical to your parents, but offspring does share qualities of both parents.
Some changes are actually due to ‘mistakes’ made when reproducing. Sometimes the genes of a parent are slightly distorted when they make a baby. Most of these mistakes have no noticeable effect on the offspring. However...
Some differences/mistakes can aid survival, some can cause premature death. For instance, an animal might be born with a genetic disease. This would be a ‘bad’ mutation. Alternatively, an animal might be born with slightly thicker fur. If this animal lived in a cold place, this would be a ‘good’ mutation. Organisms with better chance of survival have a better chance of passing their genes on to the next generation — including the new and improved ‘mistake’ genes. This is the most important principle. Once you fully internalise this, you will understand evolution.
Now take these principles, and let them do their thing for millions of years. Eventually, these tiny mistakes and changes will build up. If we start with a very simple organism, a series of very gradual changes could turn it into a more complex organism.
Now, is evolution ‘chance’? No! But is it therefore designed with an end goal? Also no! So what is the guiding force behind evolution? Well, it's called natural selection. This also explains the variety of organisms in the world. The world is full of different kinds of place. Let's take 3 places in the world as examples. Arctic, desert and forest. And now let's take an organism - the fox. Foxes live in all 3 of these places, but they're very different. Let's imagine a creature called (for now) proto-fox who lived hundreds of thousands of years ago. And now imagine that proto-foxes have spread out all over the world. Proto-foxes with thicker fur and more fat will survive better in the arctic, so out of a given litter of proto-foxes, the fat furry ones are more likely to live to have babies and and the skinny bald ones are more likely to die. These changes are essentially random, but whether they live or die is not random. After many generations, there will be no skinny bald ones left - just furry ones.
Now let's look at the desert. Proto-foxes in the desert are better off skinny and with big ears to help them lose heat and keep cool. So out of a given litter, babies with bigger ears and skinny bodies are more likely to live and have more babies than fat ones with small ears. After many generations, there will be no fat small-eared proto-foxes left in the desert. Finally, the proto-foxes living in the forest will do better if they can eat lots of different things - there is such a variety of food in the forest, having a strong stomach able to handle all kinds of meat, fish and plant is a huge bonus. Baby proto-foxes living in the forest with strong stomachs are more likely to live and have more babies, while a baby with a weak stomach will more likely die and have no babies. Eventually, all the foxes in the forest will have strong stomachs.
Now these 3 animals are too different to be called a proto-fox. We just have arctic, desert and red foxes! By just putting these animals in a different habitat and letting them either live to have babies or die childless based on the random changes they inherited from their parents, we get 3 distinct strands of what was once the same animal. This works with plants, bacteria, animals and fungi - all living things inherit from their parents, and all can potentially make good or bad mistakes. Whether these mistakes are passed on to their young is decided by the place in which they live and other factors. Now remember, the offspring of these 3 kinds of fox may find themselves in new environment, which will cause the offspring to diverge still into more and more varieties. From this, we can start with a single cell billions of years ago, with variety in its offspring, who had variety in their offspring, who had variety in their offspring, who had variety in their offspring. This makes evolution a beautiful family tree. It means we can look at our cousin the chimpanzee and look for a common ancestor we both share. But it also means we can look at an oak tree, and discover that a much longer time ago, we share a common ancestor with this oak tree. A starfish is nothing like a human, but at some point in history, our ancestors were begat by a single species. All life on Earth is related distantly, because we all evolved from the first life.
The evidence for evolution: how do we know it is true? There is an overwhelming body of evidence for evolution. To roughly go over a few...
The fossil record is one handy piece of evidence. Rocks lower down in the earth are ‘older’ (as more rock piles up over then, they get buried). In these older rocks, deeper in the earth, we find much simpler fossilised organisms, and can observe a change to more complex organisms in the higher up rocks. We know the rocks are older because we have many dating methods, which we can cross-reference when examining a rock. They give the same answer each time, which is strong evidence that the dating methods are accurate.
Another way we know is by looking at DNA, the stuff that makes us us. Here's a triumphant example. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, but our closest relatives, the great apes - chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans - all have 24 pairs of chromosomes. This seems to suggest that the ancestor we all share had 24 pairs of chromosomes too (the great apes are not our ancestors - they are our cousins, like our 3 foxes above were cousins). Where did this chromosome go in humans? This would seem to put the theory of evolution in jeopardy, but no! We have mapped and understood all the chromosomes in both chimpanzees and humans and compared them and... what's this?? One of the pairs of chromosomes in humans is exactly the same as 2 of the chimp chromosomes but fused together! We can perfectly see the exact difference and mechanism by which human chromosomes became different from the other great apes - 2 of them joined together into a single chromosome.
The life on Earth is evidence of evolution itself. We can see the different stages of evolution in different organisms. Take, for instance, the amazingly complex and clever eye. Our eyes are very well developed compared with most animals (save some birds of prey etc). How could such a complex thing have evolved? Well, we have a pretty good idea how, and we can actually see every stage of eye evolution in other organisms. An eye at its most basic is a light sensitive cell. We can find those in nature. Next is a patch of cells in such a shape that can detect direction of light. We can find those too. Next is a hole of cells creating a simple pin-hole. We see those in nature. And then we find the next step up, creatures with a lens. Then animals with a further step, muscles to focus the lens. Each ‘stage’ of the eye can be found in other animals. We can use this to trace the development of our own eyes.
The last evidence for evolution I will mention here is observation. Evolution is an ongoing process - everything is still evolving and we can see it evolving. The easiest example is the bacteria and viruses that make us ill. These organisms live, die and reproduce so quickly that they evolve extremely quickly, too. Why do we need to have a new flu vaccination every year? Because the influenza virus evolves. Why do we need to finish a course of anti-biotics if they are prescribed? Because if we only use half of the anti-biotics, we only kill the weakest half of the bacteria making us ill. The strongest half lives on and reproduces even more (because they won't have competition from their weaker brethren). We'd be helping the bacteria to evolve. This experiment is an example of a way that we have actually observed evolution, including a new irreducibly complex adaptation — the ability to digest citric acid.
The mechanism for evolution - natural selection - is simple, logical and effective. The evidence is overwhelming (there is a lot more than what I mentioned above). In fact, there is more evidence for evolution than any other theory in science. Just remember: natural selection, natural selection, natural selection. Random good changes will help an organism have more babies thanks to their environment. Random bad changes will cause an organism to have fewer babies thanks to their environment. Nature naturally selects the best changes! From here it is a numbers game. Things die and things live. The genes of those who live long enough to reproduce are passed on.
There are other mechanisms than natural selection that guide evolution, but they have a much smaller impact.
Now, if you've been raised under creationism, you may have been taught some misleading things. If you have any objections or questions, please ask. I'd be happy to try to answer your questions - I was once a creationist myself and realised that a lot of what the people at my Church told me about evolution was not true.
tl;dr Random changes are naturally selected by non-random factors such as climate. Over millions of years, this produces big changes and a wide variety of species.
Edits and errata: clarity, spelling and missing words. eslice corrected me on the consistency of the fossil record. RaindropBebop pointed out to me that ‘I'd also add one thing for the OP: natural selection does not select for good traits. It selects against bad ones. Traits which do not result in the extinction of a genetic line may not be good traits; but merely good enough.’ but simply distinguishing between good and bad is more LI5. mattc286 and CubicKinase point out that some other mechanisms that act on evolution are: Non-random mating, genetic drift, genetic migration, biased mutation, gene flow, sexual/artificial selection, and linkage. mattc286 also warns against equivocating evolution with natural selection.

[mark]

Evolution is taught as HISTORY! Science involves experimenting to figure out how things work; how they operate. Why is evolution, a theory about history, taught as if it is the same as this operational science? You cannot do experiments, or even observe what happened, in the past. Asked if evolution has been observed, Richard Dawkins said, “Evolution has been observed. It’s just that it hasn’t been observed while it’s happening.

[mark]

1.How did life originate? Evolutionist Professor Paul Davies admitted, “Nobody knows how a mixture of lifeless chemicals spontaneously organized themselves into the first living cell.”1 Andrew Knoll, professor of biology, Harvard, said, “we don’t really know how life originated on this planet”.2 A minimal cell needs several hundred proteins. Even if every atom in the universe were an experiment with all the correct amino acids present for every possible molecular vibration in the supposed evolutionary age of the universe, not even one average-sized functional protein would form. So how did life with hundreds of proteins originate just by chemistry without intelligent design?

[ebilly99]

Where are the scientific breakthroughs due to evolution? Dr Marc Kirschner, chair of the Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, stated: “In fact, over the last 100 years, almost all of biology has proceeded independent of evolution, except evolutionary biology itself. Molecular biology, biochemistry, physiology, have not taken evolution into account at all.”9 Dr Skell wrote, “It is our knowledge of how these organisms actually operate, not speculations about how they may have arisen millions of years ago, that is essential to doctors, veterinarians, farmers … .”10 Evolution actually hinders medical discovery.11 Then why do schools and universities teach evolution so dogmatically, stealing time from experimental biology that so benefits humankind?

Appeal to authority now? Dr Skell is a chemist not a Biologist. That would be like learning Spanish from William Shakespeare.

[mark]

Appeal to authority now? Dr Skell is a chemist not a Biologist. That would be like learning Spanish from William Shakespeare.

Typical evolutionist....Thinks he's smarter than the staff at Harvard! What is it that you do again? Come on Dude, I really can't remember if it was taco's or burgers?

[ebilly99]

Typical evolutionist....Thinks he's smarter than the staff at Harvard! What is it that you do again? Come on Dude, I really can't remember if it was taco's or burgers?

Typical Creationist. Uses logical fallacies and then when found out change the subject. I do think in evolution I am smarter than someone who does not study evolution. Now my question... If prayer works why do some christian starve while some atheist are rich.

[mark]

Typical Creationist. Uses logical fallacies and then when found out change the subject. I do think in evolution I am smarter than someone who does not study evolution. Now my question... If prayer works why do some christian starve while some atheist are rich.

Define rich.

[fish]

proof of God.......again! LOL LOL LOL LOL

And perhaps we’ll never know precisely how life began, for it happened in the distant past and involved chemical reactions that could not fossilize.  But I have confidence in three things: life originated naturally and not through God’s fiat; that we will show that this was possible within 50 years or so by demonstrating the evolution of life-like systems in the laboratory under primitive Earth conditions; and that while life may have originated more than once, all living species descended from only a single proto-organism (lots of evidence for that one). If we can demonstrate the origin of life in the lab through realistic experiments, then—although we may not know how it really happened several billion years ago—we can say that it could have happened naturally, and therefore we need not invoke God.


can't explain it, can't prove any theory. but ignores sound reasoning! LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOLLOL LOL LOL LOLLOL LOL LOL LOLLOL LOL LOL LOLLOL LOL LOL LOLLOL LOL LOL LOL

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How did new biochemical pathways, which involve multiple enzymes working together in sequence, originate? (This video simply explains the concept of a short biochemical pathway.) Every pathway and nano-machine requires multiple protein/enzyme components to work. How did lucky accidents create even one of the components, let alone 10 or 20 or 30 at the same time, often in a necessary programmed sequence. Evolutionary biochemist Franklin Harold wrote, “we must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations.”3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJzAvTAL9WI

[mark]

Living things look like they were designed, so how do evolutionists know that they were not designed? Richard Dawkins wrote, “biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose.”4 Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, wrote, “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.”5 The problem for evolutionists is that living things show too much design. Who objects when an archaeologist says that pottery points to human design? Yet if someone attributes the design in living things to a designer, that is not acceptable. Why should science be restricted to naturalistic causes rather than logical causes?

[mark]

How did sex originate? Asexual reproduction gives up to twice as much reproductive success (‘fitness’) for the same resources as sexual reproduction, so how could the latter ever gain enough advantage to be selected? And how could mere physics and chemistry invent the complementary apparatuses needed at the same time (non-intelligent processes cannot plan for future coordination of male and female organs).

[ebilly99]

Define rich.

In all ways measurable by science. More money, happier, has more love in there life, never hungry.

[mark]

In all ways measurable by science. More money, happier, has more love in there life, never hungry.

where does happiness and love come from?