Monday, August 20, 2007

a basic concern i have with evolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution

the basic concern i have with evolution is that it suggests that one species changes into another over time.

maybe that is true over say, um, a couple of million years........maybe.

but here`s the thing.

for apes to change into humans it would have had to happen quickly.

in a generation.

apes live in treed and vegitative areas for a number of reasons. food, protection from the elements, and from large carnivorous predators.

apes are mostly vegitarian and non-predatory themselves and so tend hide out. studies have borne out the fact they are passive group dwellers whiling away thier time together in large extended families.

given this varifyable fact what would motivate a species of primates to give up food sources and protection from the elements and predators to go and compete with those same predators for food that they didn`t ordinarily eat, and at the same time drastically change thier social dynamic.

this evolutionary model further suggests that the new human species not only managed to walk upright and learn to use weapons to hunt and kill food and protect themselves from lions and tigers, but also became master farmers at the same time.

and all of this genetic mutation would have had to have been comprehensive and species wide and immediate, i.e. happening in one generation........otherwise the new species would have been eaten or starved to death.

even though there is no evidence for this actually happening, and has certainly never happened to any other species, darwinian theory is taught in schools as gospel.

there has been some conjecture recently that some smaller dinosaurs evolved into birds, and i can`t comment one way or another other than to say it is still only a theory.

10 comments:

BBC said...

"The basic concern i have with evolution is that it suggests that one species changes into another
over time."

You have a problem with that?
"maybe that is true over say, um, a couple of million years........maybe. but here`s the thing. for apes to change into humans it would have had to happen quickly. in a generation.

Stop being a fool, most things do not happen in just a generation. Well, you happened, but that was a fuck up. LOL
Hugs.

Dr.Alistair said...

bill,if you read my reasons for questioning the position of the darwinists you would have understood my thinking and the large hole in the idea of long-term evolutionary change from ape to human.

and the reasons i raised here are only touchig the surface of the holes in the darwinian position.

Unknown said...

I doubt if Darwinian theory is being thought as gospel - it is called the THEORY of evolution.

It would be silly to accept a scientific theory as the immutable truth.

I don't think of it as "apes chnages into humans" but that humans are a kind of ape. Many ape species gorillas, orangs, chimps, neanderthals and humans must have competed and for various reasons some of them survived while others went extinct. Then there was inter-species breeding we have ligers and tigons. Yeah quite a lot of stuff happened then ...

Dr.Alistair said...

in discussion, the word theory is rarely stressed for clarification unless there are questions, and many scientists will suggest that they have enough data to be certain that darwin is right.

my children are presented with the theory as fact by teachers who themselves take the theory as fact.

ligers and tigons are engineered species utilising highly sophisticated labs and procedures.

to turn an ape into a human in one generation would take that level of sophistication.

unless we were brought here from somewhere else, but the bible doesn`t say that.

the biblical tale hints at genetic manipulation.

but i get ahead of myself.

and the evolutionary scientists who go into court to fight for the right to be the only ones to teach thier ideas in science class don`t stress the theory bit either.

pressing theory as fact is dogma in my view......no different than gospel.

BBC said...

Someday scientific facts won't be called a theory anymore. Maybe in an other hundred or so years.

By then mankind should have a good understanding genetics and creating a better strain of humans than the monkeys we evolved from.

It's just God working through humans being as they have opposable thumbs that allow them to do many things.

Well, a lot of those things are stupid things, but hopefully that will be corrected in the future.

Dr.Alistair said...

i would welcome a simple scientific proof of darwin`s ideas regarding the change of one species to another.

darwin himself was unsure of the concept, so much so that he stuck to natural selection, which discussed adaptive features of a species due to changes in environment.

his study was largely based on the finches of the galapagos islands.

he found that beaks and wings and claws and behaviours changed due to changes in available food types. i.e. berries or insects or shelled beetles.

nowhere did darwin ever find evidence for the change from one species to another.

Anonymous said...

If you haven't read 'On the Origin of Species', it's pretty much essential. Deepy, deeply boring but essential. Most of the book is made up of interminable discussions of variety within single species... tail feathers of pigeons etc. The bold hypothesis, reached after pages and pages of this stuff, is that two varieties of a species optimised for different environments can eventually become two species. It's a hypothesis made to explain the observations. I'm pretty certain no mechanism is proposed. It's not a great conceptual leap, but obviously it remains unproven either way. The real problem is the social implications. Not just that it would seem that monkeys and humans have a common ancestor. The entirely unhelpful phrase 'survival of the fittest' has been repeatedly spun by the finest political minds of various ages to mean that it's good and proper for any group of people to attempt to dispose of those they disapprove of.

Dr.Alistair said...

thanks for the balanced comment speedbird.

i read the book many years ago as i toyed with the idea of what "to do when i grew up", and saw the possibility that apes and humans may have had a common ancestor......

but since then i have read much about darwin and lamarck and others and realised that, much like scientists in other fields, they are after grants and patronage more than they are after truths.

the seperate species known as human wouldn`t have survived transitionally as darwin suggested, but would have been eaten or starved long before discovering fire or agriculture or packhunting.

http://www.lloydpye.com/A-Origins1.htm

we haven`t begun to touch on metalurgy yet.

and eugenics? part of the natural process of being alive. the desire to be the best and be part of that community.

without that will innate in us we would lose sports teams, peer review, universities, research, invention, commerce, art.......culture in general.

being good and proper to dispose of people is pathological and lurks in the minds of neurotics, paranoids and other types of politicians and popes.

Anonymous said...

I've actually got quite a lot of time for Lamarck... what's to stop a mechanism for the inheritance of acquired characteristics evolving by random selection?

The question about what sort of environment a proto-human could evolve in is a good one and (I think) still wide open. I like the 'aquatic ape' one myself that says we lost our hair and gained our fat by living off the water. Though the evidence is far from conclusive.

The other thing I forgot to mention about evolutionary 'spin' is this idea that competition for resources demands conformance to some sort of strict normalised ideal. The Darwinian thesis is more like the opposite: that competition drives diversity.

Dr.Alistair said...

there is nohing to stop a mechanism from adapting to environmental pressures, as long as the pressures aren`t rapid and energetic enough to do catastrophic damage to the mechanism.

a tree ape would have lasted about five minutes on the savannah amongst the lions and tigers, scorching hot sun and lack of vegitary food sources, as it would today.

clearly we see apes and other primates remaining in thier own environments today and when thier patch is threatened they fail to adapt in a darwinian fashion and die.

same with owls, pandas, cheetahs etc.

that`s why they are endangered.

and competition drived diversity every time.......unless you are a socialist and are pro-union.

but now we are talking human behaviour.

we are the only species that will break into the lab at night when the scientists have gone home, just to run the maze.