by ILoveTTATT 130 Replies latest jw friends
Giordano said-
Agreed Adamah. My tongue in cheek point was it all seems so dark and hopeless when leaving the 'truth'. So give yourself a little time to adjust and you will see what's really there.
OK, I got you now, so sorry for the friendly fire.
It's a little hard to tell if you were serious or not, since that kind of comment is pretty standard fare around here, and you didn't indicate intent with an emoticon, eg
double post
Marked
I read the following article on Wikipedia, proving adaptation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment
This is an experiment that has been running since 1988... reached 50,000 generations of E.Coli. "One particularly striking adaption was the evolution of a strain of E. coli that was able to use citric acid as a carbon source in an aerobic environment".
Now, 50,000 generations of humans, according to the WT, could be overlapping to 100,000 generations of humans... LOL
50,000 generations of humans, at 30 years per generation, would be 1.5M years. THIS is why human speciation, or any large animal speciation, is not "observable"... I at one point thought, "well, if speciation is a fact, then we could potentially see it in ancient drawings of animals." Now I know how wrong that would be... human recorded history is, at most, around 20,000 years (if you count drawings in caves, not writing)... this would be only aproximately 670 human generations.... 2500 dog generations... you get the point... in all likelihood they would look exactly the same.
OK so now my question is,
Suppose a species turns into another one. Why did chimpanzees, gorillas, and other large apes "remain" in their past form, and then the intermediaries to humans died off?
If the large apes had the same circumstances as the ones that branched off and became humans, why didn't THEY die off?
I am missing something here?
Yes that is a common misunderstanding. Humans did not evolve from apes.
Chimps, bonobos, apes, old world monkeys and new world monkeys all branched off from common ancestors. The "concestor" would have looked more like a modern ape than a human but it was neither.
The lineage leading to modern apes have evolved to become well adapted for the task of being a modern ape.
Lenski's experiment is outstanding. The change that led to one groups ability to metabolise citric acid resulted from a cascade of mutations. Exactly the thing that proponents of ID claim is impossible.
Its refereshing to have honest enquiry about evolution for a change.
I didnt read your whole OP but you could do a test of prayer if you like.
Instead of saying God or Jehovah or whoever you pray to normally just replace that with "giant pink teapot".
Pray as normal with whatever normal level of intent you use but pray to the giant pink teapot for 1 full week, no other prayers are allowed otherwise the test becomes voided for obvious reasons.
Tell us how you get on...
Any decrease of prayer outcomes will be as a result of your own doubts, the placebo effect should work as normal.
We will never know the answers since we will all be dead before life changes enough to prove it.
Ken P.
"Suppose a species turns into another one. Why did chimpanzees, gorillas, and other large apes "remain" in their past form, and then the intermediaries to humans died off?
If the large apes had the same circumstances as the ones that branched off and became humans, why didn't THEY die off?
I am missing something here?"
Yes, you are. You're making the incorrect assumption that evolution is a steady, progressive process, which is not necessarily the case. Evolution is driven by two factors: Mutation and natural selection. Mutations happen all the time. The simple fact that no two animals-including humans- are alike, bears this out. Natural selection simply favors a creature whose mutations make it better able to cope with its environment, survive, and then pass on its mutated genes to the next generation. So evolution affects different species in different ways. Some species evolve rapidly-like Homo Sapiens Sapiens, and some evolve or change hardly at all- like sharks.
All species of modern apes, which includes humans, have undergone evolutionary change and many "intermediate" species of all great apes have died off. (I put "intermediate" in quotation marks because all species living today and in the past are in fact intermediate. Biological evolution does not have a finish line.) It is interesting that of all the hominids only humans remain today, (even though there is a movement afoot to declare chimpanzees and bonobos as hominids). However this is easily explained, given human nature. These other hominids, like Homo Erectus and Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis, simply couldn't compete. They were probably assimilated or simply wiped out by the superior Homo Sapiens.
CyrusThePersian
Your questions are very interesting and I think you’ve got a lot of god answers. However from a philosophical point of view there are other questions that also need an answer. As some mentioned evolution has created over 10 million of species. Various kind of monkeys apes gorillas, kangaroos, and others. Humans seem to stand for the moment on the top of this chain. But how?
The terrible answer is by eating one another.
Every specimen from insects, fishes, frogs, mammals, birds, cats, dogs and humans are in fact living only by eating the other. If good has created us (with sharp tees, poison A.S.F) with this ability He must have understood, that it would cause disaster for all his children on earth. Only the smartest and strongest can survive this battle. If good has created us in this way, he must have had plan to come back and see who or what has survived?.. In fact, if you go on the Bible stories it looks like good really like to play with his puppies, like a child. He/she killed all these humans and animal in masses, when he feels for it. No regrets, no answers on prayers from any the millions Catholics, Muslims, Pentecostal, Lutherans (or whatever).
From my philosophical point of view, good is better off if he really doesn´t exist. We as humans can understand with our own wisdom, that evilness, comes from evolutionary facts. We have no alternative then just to eat each other.
Bugbear
Decided said- We will never know the answers since we will all be dead before life changes enough to prove it.
Nope, that's just not true. We know things that you apparently are unaware of, so you're arguing from personal ignorance.
For one, we can look into the PAST since we have the fossil record, where visible changes of those organisms who lived long ago can be seen in their bone structure (palentology); furthermore, we can examine the DNA of various extant (non-extinct) species and compare their similarity to others, and can even extract DNA from tissue found in long-extinct organisms (eg the wooly mammoth, which are occasionally discovered preserved in ice in cold locations like Siberia) to compare it to still-living closely-related descendents (eg elephants).
Here's Hendrick Poinar, PhD, who as a young undergrad (and a classmate at Cal Poly, SLO) was involved in the project that extracted ancient DNA from mosquitos encased in amber (his father was a professor of entomology at Cal Poly, and the team was led by Dr Raul Cano; the project served as inspiration for the movie, "Jurassic Park"). Hendrick went on to conduct research at Max Planck Institute and McMaster Univ, and is considered an expert in the field of molecular evolutionary genetics, seen in the video discussing his research into sequencing the wooly mammoth genome:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ytw0I6ytRto
Adam
