Do You Believe In Evolution?

Discussion in 'Earth Science' started by will_ebert, Jun 23, 2002.

?

Who here believes in evolution?

  1. The Universe Was Created By God, No Less Than 10,000 Years Ago

    7 vote(s)
    4.8%
  2. Evolution Is True, But It Was Controlled By God. The Universe Is Billions Of Years Old

    35 vote(s)
    24.0%
  3. There Is No God. Evolution Is True. The Universe Is Billions Of Years Old

    104 vote(s)
    71.2%
  1. stupidgirl Registered Member

    Messages:
    13
    Thank you very much!

    I do agree with a lot of what you said. I just look around at our other achievements and can't quite understand how we can't get free of the God crutch just yet. Religious values are just very simplified versions of common sense advice. Don't sleep around because people who do tend to catch something awful. Don't kill or steal because others don't like people who do that and you'll end up with your head on a pike. Don't lie because catching a liar causes paranoia among the masses and we all know what humans do when paranoid... we end up with heads on pikes again. Jews not eating pork, makes sense, people were getting sick.

    But aren't we at a point yet that we can peel away the fantasy from the logic and open a "church" of common sense? Where people who enjoy socializing with people of like minded values can get together to persue prosperity? I guess technically we can (hehe actually I've been wanting to start one for some time. I wanted to call it The People's Fellowship of Good Will and Better Popcorn

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

    hehe). I would love to see the majority come away from the hysteria of religion.

    And then there's the whole God gene thing. A predisposition to this kind of behavior could have been a very necessary part of our evolution, critical to our survival. Which is fine. I'm a rehabilitated "believer" of some pretty extreme things myself. The question is, do we still need it? When will we grow out of it? Because for me, for productivity, relationships, morality, and general prosperity, religion-free logic and objectivity has been a "God send"

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. wesmorris Nerd Overlord - we(s):1 of N Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    9,846
    You're welcome very much.

    Oh, remember - logic is only as valid as its inputs and execution.

    Hehe... you should have been around for The taoist trap. You might get a kick out of perusing it.
     
  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. vip Registered Member

    Messages:
    1
    Very interesting posts - thoughts and pattern of behavoiur of HUMANS running scared. It all boils down to the human ego - cannot live with the idea of fellow human being better let alone a " Superintelligent force" being superior then MAN. If regilious values are just simplified versions of common sense advice, how come over 80% of the human population is incapable of taking heed of this advice - considering it is a SIMPLIFIED VERSION OF COMMON SENSE ADVICE.
    Look in the mirror and ask your self how am I ?
     
  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. wesmorris Nerd Overlord - we(s):1 of N Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    9,846
    Oh? Can you demonstrate it for real, or is this all you have:

    How egotistical is it to make such a statement of ignorance? Quite I think.

    You ask and then tell in the same sentence, while getting your stats all wrong in between? At least 80% of the human population claim to believe in what you ask and then tell is a "simplified version of common sense" - at least a religion of some sort. Perhaps you're speaking of a particular religion that only consists of 20% of the world?

    I'm a complicated ape, like the rest of us. You?
     
  8. Xylene Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,398
    Because we're all a bunch of raving idiots at heart, and our minds haven't come out of the caves yet?

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  9. kmguru Staff Member

    Messages:
    11,757
    Do You Believe In Evolution?

    No I do not. Our monkey genes were tampered by energy beings that were part of the creation process and hence the intelligent design. What else could it be?

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!



    Once we open up this kind of reasoning we will have several million stories to our origin - all speculation of course.

    Then again who is to say, that did not happen?

    As Rig Veda says: Who knows how the creation began?
     
  10. valich Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,501
    If you do not believe in evolution, then you can simply repeat Mendel's expirements in your bedroom. Take many different distinct type of pea plants: round, wrinkled, yellow, green, tall, short, and differences in flower colors. At first you breed them individually together and you see no change, Then you mix the together and they evolve into new forms. You can do this with animals too, as we have done with dogs, pigs, cows, and horses for thousands of years.
     
  11. stupidgirl Registered Member

    Messages:
    13
    LOL Bingo!

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  12. stupidgirl Registered Member

    Messages:
    13
    I took a look at the thread you suggested. Entertaining. I grew up steeped in philosophy so I try to avoid it at all costs these days. I do agree though, human interpretation (or sometimes the lack) can muddle up reality pretty good. There's gotta be a way around it though, or at least a better effort to clear it up. Blaming everything on an invisible man just feels like we're not even TRYING. Maybe if we settled on an SOP for interpreting our input... hehe That sounds so cold. I swear I'm a warm person, really.
     
  13. Russ723 Relatively Hairless Ape Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    158
    I was always amused by people who say change via genetic mutation/selection is BS, then go right back to breeding their champion Chihuahuas.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!



    Don't you love proving an argument to be invalid, only to have to explain why you won ?

    My countrymen are embarassing me.
     
  14. kmguru Staff Member

    Messages:
    11,757
    First, my answer was a satire...but...

    Are you telling me that the peas will turn into green apples in a few years? I am yet to see a human screwing a monkey to produce a monkeyman or the sheepherders having their way with the sheeps producing who knows what....

    The point is, just because the DNA is similar does not mean they are automatic without any conscious intervention designed from whence. Just because, we have a modern car from the Model T does not mean, that the Model T after many years becomes Lincoln Town Car.

    Is not it possible that if nature can produce humans who have the mastery over the physical laws and manipulate their environment, so it can produce yet unknown forms of intelligence who manipulated the Earth environment?

    And are the mutations accidental or obeys some yet unknown laws? And how is that accident or randomness creates the most sophisticated automated control system to control the chemical processes in the body even in rats that we have difficulty duplicating in industrial complexes, without sophisticated computers?

    Evolution has so many holes that even evolutionists are asking "what else could it be"...why not search what other possibilities are with the new knowledge we have gathered since?

    It may turn out that the whole Universe has a DNA that grows from a primary equation and could answer our human origin....rather than figuring our the process in the middle (like trying to answer the existence of a plant without a seed) then the question comes...where did that seed come from....?
     
  15. spuriousmonkey Banned Banned

    Messages:
    24,066
    Mendel didn't believe in evolution.
     
  16. guthrie paradox generator Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    4,089
    But as you are well aware, you dont need to believe in evolution for it to work righ tin front of your eyes. (or microscope)
     
  17. guthrie paradox generator Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    4,089
    One source to answer all your questions:
    http://www.talkorigins.org/
    Read it.

    Because Evolutionary theory doesnt have that many holes. And moreover, theres plenty of people willing to say that its junk, most noticeably the intelligent design proponents. But none of them want to spend money on actual scientific experiments to search for new possibilities. How do you explain that?


    Pardon? How woudl you detect this DNA? What equation? Then what do you have to suggest apart from Big bang theory?
     
  18. spuriousmonkey Banned Banned

    Messages:
    24,066
    Yes, I was trying to make the point that the evidence has always been right in front of us. But that doesn't mean evolution was always obvious, as was maybe inferred by the previous poster. Mendel was interested in studying the Lord's work. The same was the case for for instance Newton.

    Mendel was what they call 'rediscovered'. Did mendel really have a clue about the significance on what he was doing? No, that is why his work needed to be 'rediscovered'.

    Interestingly if mendel had worked on different plants he could have easily not have discovered his mendelian laws of inheritance. If you would like to call him like that.
     
  19. guthrie paradox generator Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    4,089
    Fair enough. I do recall reading that if he had studied something else he wouldnt have found anything interesting, but I cant remember what plant it was.
    It is also perhaps a good example of why communication is important in scientific discoveries.
     
  20. valich Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,501
    Yes I am, but not in "a few years." Give peas about 2 billion years and see where they go - far beyond apples and oranges! Heck we can breed a donkey and a horse in our backyard to get a mule: an entirely new hybrid species - and then? What else do you need to see? And then when you see that, I'll have to ask the same question again? And again? And again? Until your holes become equally smaller, and smaller, and smaller, until no one, except you perhaps?, would be able to see them anymore.

    It is estimated that if every person in the United States were suddenly all annihilated, there would only be three fossils left to prove that we ever existed: and good luck finding those three fossils in a haystack, let alone all the other ancestrial paleontological fossils that we haven't found yet.

    You can't see this?
     
  21. valich Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,501
    Mendel is considered the father of genetics because he was the first to understand crossbreeding and the evolutionary effects that it had on future generations. In Mendel's day the concept off evolution was thought of in terms of the "Laws of Inheritance," which was later disproven in its strict sense, but proven by Mendel. Mendel's discoveries proved his "law of segregation" in inheritance (a.k.a Punnet's Square), then his law of dihybrid crosses through independently assorted alleles, dominant inheritance. In those days they did not talk about evolution as we are able to talk about it today, but he believed in the inherited change of organisms that created a new type, thus "evolution" as we know what the word means today..
     
  22. TheAlphaWolf Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    445
    Nah, The devil was the intelligence that tampered with the creation process. That is why we live such puny little lives full of pain, suffering, and wars. That's why we have randomly put things in us, such as erector pili (muscles that give us goosebumps), the appendix, etc. That's why our memories are horrible, why genes make us want to be fat, that's why it's in our nature (species as a whole) to be ruthles to the "outgroup", to supress people, etc. It's all evidence for an evil intelligence designing us. I blame the devil.

    --------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Anyway, I accept evolution. It's not really a matter of belief, it's about knowing the facts and HAVING to accept them and the logical conclusion they point to. It's not reality's job to satisfy our egos.
     
  23. kmguru Staff Member

    Messages:
    11,757
    It may turn out that the whole Universe has a DNA that grows from a primary equation and could answer our human origin....rather than figuring out the process in the middle (like trying to answer the existence of a plant without a seed) then the question comes...where did that seed come from....?

    Can you see this?
     

Share This Page