hannibal,
I hope you (and kenneson with the cute little poem) are just trying to be funny, and aren't really this ignorant about evolution. You claim to have read "both sides" of the issue, but if you really believe any scientist ever taught that humans evolved from chimps, then you know so little about evolutionary biology it's hopeless trying to make you understand anything.
The very article I referred to answers this objection directly. I like the following comment:
The deeper error is that this objection is tantamount to asking, "If children descended from adults, why are there still adults?"
Yes indeed.
Evulutions whole purpose is to prove through science how creation came about, isnt it? To dismiss how it came into existiance at the beginning is bypassing the main question that cant be answered through evulution.If that isnt sagnificant to you why are you athiest and not egnostic?
This is simply wrong. Evolution deals only with how life evolves from life.
There is a branch of biology dealing with the question of abiogenesis; the origin of life from non-living matter. It is actually a branch of biochemistry.
Even if we were totally ignorant about the chemical origin of life, theism has many more unsolved questions than atheism, like 'where did god come from?'
Of course, we are far from ignorant. We know that the basic molecules in life originate through natural proecesses in certain environments, and that it is very likely that such an envirionment existed once on this planet.
Life originated surprisingly fast after the Earth cooled down. It took much shorter to get from from non-life to life than it took from primitive life to get to a multi-celled stage.
pom,
Living molecules need to feed on something to grow and survive. That can't happen without FOOD.
There is nothing particular about the substances we eat and drink (and breathe) that makes them different from anything else in the universe. We are used to thinking about food as living things, but many organisms consume basic minerals.
The earliest life on this planet was an extremely basic form of self-replicating molecule. What distinguished it from non-living molecules was solely that it used materials from its envirionment to create copies of itself. Natural selection and a very long timespan did the rest. Eventually some replicator would start using materials from other replicators to produce these copies, and that would be the first predator on this planet.
Plm,
Can't that same comment be made about all animals?
The only thing that seperates any animal is a simple strand of DNA
Eh, that is pretty much the point, isn't it?
And this is definite evidence that all these organisms share a common ancestor. Thus, evolution is a fact. That is all there is to it.
Does anyone remember the Awake mag. That came out around the late 70's or mid 70's with a article about the biology of the frog is closer to that of the human then the ape?
Vaguely. It is rubbish. Which shouldn't surprise us given the source
JanH, if you are taking into consideration human intelligence and progress and compare it to anything else there is nothing else to compare it to, nothing we have found on this planet anyway.
It is a common misconception that humans are somehow "higher" than other life forms on this planet. We aren't. Of course, when we take a characteristic of our own choosing we do come out on top, but this is purely arbitrary, and biased to our own strengths as a species.
There is a joke about elephant anthropologists being disappointed to find that there was no general evolutionary trend among species towards a longer and longer nose.
We have a very powerful brain, true, but we have pretty mediocre vision, taste, smell. We are much weaker physically than other species of comparable size. We can't fly, our swimming sucks and we can't hold our breath under water for any significant lenght of time. Why should our strong point make us qualitatively better than other species? It doesn't. It is just near-sighted.
Plm, I just don't get what you are trying to say. True, humans are violent towards each other. But this is not uncommon in nature. Many modern humans have a very romantic view of animals, and are shocked to learn the truth.
Heck, even the most vicious lover I ever had never made any attempt to bite off my head after sex. So I guess they were all nicer than the infamous Praying Mantis female. I guess it is just my bias, but I am quite happy to be human.
- Jan
oops, edited. thanks waiting
Edited by - JanH on 4 August 2002 21:11:37
Edited by - JanH on 4 August 2002 21:12:22