by metatron 135 Replies latest jw friends
I used to consider sharks to be evidence for creation - and against evolution because it was stated that they are largely unchanged after millions of years ( hence, 'what evolution?').
That's not the case, however. Sharks did evolve/change like everything else.
metatron
Well done for being open minded and doing your own research. So do you still believe in God?
Kate xx
Yes, in a pantheistic manner. There has to be something that keeps the universe coherent from moment to moment - but it can't be a person because the amoral nature of creation eliminates such a possibility.
Too many crocodiles, guinea worms, and......sharks!
metatron
I got deja vu about halfway through reading that article
Anyway, as you probably know now, animals that don't seem to have changed much are not proof against evolution; it just means that they have not had much competition or change in their environment over the millennia.
Increasing complexity is not inevitable. Bacteria have remained relatively simple for 3 billion years.
Even natural selection follows the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" principle.
I wish people would get that evolution is just a PROCESS!
There are no aims, goals or end targets.
cliff - "I wish people would get that evolution is just a PROCESS! There are no aims, goals or end targets."
That's a hard one for some people to get their heads around.
Most human beings are "goal-oriented", tend to anthropomorphise nonhuman and/or nonintelligent influences, and therefore subconsciously attribute aims, goals and end targets to those selfsame nonhuman and/or nonintelligent influences.
We can't really help it, and have to consciously stop ourselves from doing it when we realize that it's not actually there (as in the case of natural selection).
Not to mention that evolution progresses so slowly (relatively speaking) that it's a bit of a paradigm shift to realize that any given organism (say, the horse you went riding on, for example) isn't actually a product at the end of some kind of biological assembly line, but is itself a potential "transition form" to something else hundreds of thousands of years down the line.
That's a hard one for some people to get their heads around;
It is.
Although "simple" life forms are historically the most successful, it would be obtuse not to acknowledge the astonishing complexity of multi-cellular life.
It's easy to see why most people think it was all about us.
There seems to be an assumption that evolution has a goal and its........a human. Our ego knows no bounds. They don't realise that a frog is as evolved as we are. The motivation is the enviroment nothing more. There is also NO BLUEPRINT for a species or animal. There is no gold standard human or perfect shark, it is just constant change influenced by the enviroment, hence the term NATURAL selection.
Someone was posting here in the last 12 months claiming that white people are more evolved than african tribal people.
Ignorance can be bliss, but it can also be dangerous.
I remember reading Plato and the concept of isms, so a table is a representation of tableism. There is an ideological and gold standard 'table' concept and from that we can imagine, construct and compare the idea of a table. This concrete thinking is common to the human mind and it inteferes with our understanding of evolution. We look at a shark in 2014 and say THAT is a shark, as if there was a sharkism concept to measure from....but there isn't.
Sharks have changedvover millions of years, so much so the earlier ancestors would be unrecognisable as a 2014 shark, proving the concept of 'isms' incorrect, despite humans looking at the world with that mindset.
I am rubbish at philosophy and may have explained it poorly, sorry if that was the case xxx
