They are conspiracy theorists. Their conspiracy theory of choice is that scientists are all lying to us about the very fundamentals of life on earth And that's what CTs do - attack the "official story" that runs counter to their chosen belief in a goofy attempt to elevate their unfounded, emotionally driven beliefs to the same level as what better educated & otherwise more sensible people tend to believe.
Common ancestry and speciation are essential to Darwinian Evolution. I've noticed in my research a lot of variations in how "species" is defined and how populations differ and so on. Speciation, and the five or six different explanations I've read for it, seems to be an exception rather than a rule of evolution. Fossil records show a pattern of new abrupt biological forms. Ernst Mayr and Stephen Gould accepted that, which is why punctuated equilibrium and stasis have been introduced into the science. There has to be an explanation for rapid evolution. There is evidence of speciation, but not on the grand scale required to believe in common ancestry. There should be an abundance of fossil evidence for speciation. Transitional fossils, and yes, they are observable, or else all of this would be an exercise in futility; are the exception, not the rule in fossil records. So much evidence for new species and extinction, so little for transitional speciation. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Where have I heard that one before? Common ancestry isn't proven, but interestingly enough this is boldly called "universal scientific fact." Why? Because TOL dies with the Tree of Life if common ancestry isn't true. Yes, the Tree of Life is an antiquated model. http://phys.org/news92912140.html Protein? Really? This is proof of a common ancestor? I admit the science is way over my head. But it sounds to be like another stardust theory. Carbon present in stars and present in humans, therefore we're made of stardust. I actually liked that one better than the protein explanation. Proteins are boring. Astronomy is awesome! The latest "proof" of UCA: According to biochemist Douglas Theobald, it doesn't really matter. "Let's say life originated independently multiple times, which UCA allows is possible," said Theobald. "If so, the theory holds that a bottleneck occurred in evolution, with descendants of only one of the independent origins surviving until the present. Alternatively, separate populations could have merged, by exchanging enough genes over time to become a single species that eventually was ancestral to us all. Either way, all of life would still be genetically related." Read more at: http://phys.org/news192882557.html#jCp Does that sound like a universally accepted scientific fact, or does it sound like something still being explored? Here's a peer review critique of Theobald's work: Conclusion A formal demonstration of the Universal Common Ancestry hypothesis has not been achieved and is unlikely to be feasible in principle. Nevertheless, the evidence in support of this hypothesis provided by comparative genomics is overwhelming. http://www.biologydirect.com/content/5/1/64 I can accept overwhelming. I can't accept universally accepted common ancestry.
"Although overwhelming circumstantial evidence supports the existence of the universal common ancestor of all extant life on Earth, it is still an open question whether the universal common ancestor existed or not." http://www.hindawi.com/journals/tswj/2012/479824/
Science may someday establish why human beings 'care' but I don't think that is the purpose of science. I think why human beings care- or should care is properly the place of philosophy.
Why? The likelihood of any living organism being fossilized is incredibly small. What is more shocking is that there is such an abundance of fossil evidence for speciation.
There is more abundance of new and abrupt explosions of fossils with no speciation. The standard is not observed speciation over the fossil record. The standard is new species form and become extinct. Some survive to become living fossils. What is the explanation for this?
This is astounding to me. I hear this all the time from evolutionists. Scientists should not be concerned with…the human brain? If evolution is correct, psychology can be explained by biology.
I really don't understand your question. Fossils are found- some are fossils of existing species- they aren't living fossils. Some fossils exist of species that become extinct. Speciation is observed in the fossil record. That we have not yet determined why some species speciated when they did is just one of many unanswered questions. But speciation itself is observable in the fossil record, and demonstrates the basic concept of biological evolution.
Just because we found the bones of one animal does not mean the rest died...likely many, many others lived long happy lives and had little baby animals that were ever so slightly different than mom and dad. Much later, and after lots and lots of babies being slightly different the ones born yesterday are very different than the ones alive when the original died and left it's bones...maybe so different we call them a different species.
More and more of human mental behavior is being discovered to be controlled by biology. Fascinating stuff really. Frankly, why humans care about other humans is likely a function of an evolution driven biological adaption. But since human brains have evolved enough for us to talk and think about these things, we can also talk about why we should care, which is part of the essence of philosophy.
What box are you talking about? Biological evolution is very carefully defined. That means two things: we can determine what it IS, and we can determine what it is NOT. Trying to cram a bunch of what it is NOT into what it IS doesn't help anything. For example, trees are not incoherent and confusing, simply because lakes are not trees.
There are gaps. It's undeniable. We've found roughly 2,000 bone fragments of hominids. Despite the famous artistic rendition of the evolution of man, it is based purely on speculation and models built on literal fragments of bones. The "missing link" has not been found. The latest and most complete hominid skull discovery led researchers to change the thinking from hominids being separate to hominids being the same and us different from them. Genetics has done more than paleontology to make the case for evolution. Still all we have is conjecture based on DNA similarity. There is no physical proof man evolved from ape, let alone a single organism common ancestor to all life. All of life has a code, a language, and that appears to be a design.
Even the idea of a "missing link" has become meaningless. It's not obvious from bone fragments whether we're looking at different species, or at the same species changed over time, or with varying individuals within a species. But there is enough evidence to be fairly certain that there have been quite a few species of hominids, maybe a dozen or more. One or more of which MIGHT be in our direct line of ancestry, but currently there's no way to tell. Men ARE apes, according to the taxonomic definition. Currently the ape clade has several surviving species: chimps, bonobos, orangutans, humans, gibbons, and at least one (possibly two) species of gorillas. And that's all the members of the ape clade that survive today. Next, the theory of evolution isn't established ONLY by paleontology, or ONLY by genetics, or ONLY by any other subfield of study. What tends to seal the deal is that all of these various methods are at least mutually compatible, and often mutually reinforcing. Finally, it's true that all life has much in common. But whether something "appears to be a design" is based more on preconception than on evidence. After all, anything and everything can be a design. Life without a "code" could have been designed. The "language" of organic chemistry could be designed, but if there were nothing consistent about chemistry, THAT could have been designed as well. And the problem with an explanation that can be applied to anything (because your god MIGHT have done anything, why not?) actually ends up explaining nothing. Biologists can point to things that do not evolve, but theologists can't distinguish between what the Designer did and what He didn't.
Men are apes, I get it. I understand the basics of classification. My contention is still the same. They're similar to us, but they aren't from a common ancestor, which, incredibly, hasn't been discovered. My understanding is that there are currently two categories of hominids, us and them, if you will. I'll have to go back and find the source.
Man and Ape SHARE a common ancestor. Human chromosome 2 is proof of this. We share approx 98% DNA with Chimpanzee.
Here's one geneticists who says otherwise: http://designed-dna.org/blog-2/files/9468bcb706cc4113c7f6572cc8b4c9d6-15.html
But Creationists wish to maintain the air of "credibility"....and unlike Conspiracy Theorists DESPERATELY avoid putting forth THEIR theory on the development of life on Earth, because they know it would immediately collapse.
There will always be 'gaps'. Such is the nature of fossils and evolution. Evolution itself is imperceptably gradual, fossilization is rare and unpredictable. We will find more fossils of species that are large and widespread- such as horses and wolves, than we will for small and localized, such as Galapago Marine Iguana's. We can predict that there will always be a gap, but we can also predict what the intermediate species of fossils will likely look like, and those predictions have often been proven to be correct. There is 'evidence' that man and ape evolved from a common ancestor- that evidence is both from DNA, and from the fossil record. I would agree that the fossil record for the lineage of human being is sparse, but the concensus is that it is conclusive in the nature of descent, even if we are missing some details. The ancestors of humans appear to have had a very limited range. For other species, however, we have far more extensive fossil record. It only appears to be a design because that is what the human brain wants to see- like canals on Mars. Think of this another way. There is no fossil record of ancient modern being further back than about 200,000 years ago. Beyond that fossil record, human beings appear to have not existed. Where did we come from 200,000 years ago?
They're like 9/11 trufers.. Do they ever put forth a proper alternative theory? No.. They just say they have thousands of "experts" who demand an "impartial" investigation, all the while insisting rather stupidly that the fires couldn't have brought the twin towers down and insisting that WTC7 looked *just like* a controlled demo, and so on. Very comparable.. What, after all, do the Creationists do? Claim that their view is "creation science" and simply try to attack evolution without offering a theory, as you've pointed out. So, OK, I suppose we have to acknowledge differences among CTs in order to better draw the comparison.
Intelligent people question everything, especially nonsensical claims like fire downed a building all by itself. Certainly, nothing counter to demolition has been proven either.
And the DNA evidence is actually the strongest of all.. And the funny thing is that Darwin didn't know about DNA. It was discovered long after his time
When you state it like that, it sounds just as "nonsensical" as humans "evolving from monkeys." Either way, you're misstating the views you claim to oppose in an effort to discredit them out of hand.
http://humanorigins.si.edu/ http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics While the genetic difference between individual humans today is minuscule – about 0.1%, on average – study of the same aspects of the chimpanzee genome indicates a difference of about 1.2%. The bonobo (Pan paniscus), which is the close cousin of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), differs from humans to the same degree. The DNA difference with gorillas, another of the African apes, is about 1.6%. Most importantly, chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans all show this same amount of difference from gorillas. A difference of 3.1% distinguishes us and the African apes from the Asian great ape, the orangutan. How do the monkeys stack up? All of the great apes and humans differ from rhesus monkeys, for example, by about 7% in their DNA http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-family-tree http://www.calacademy.org/human-odyssey/ Q: Humans are primates…but what’s a primate? A: “Primate” refers to a taxonomic name and location on the evolutionary tree of life. Humans belong to the genus and species Homo sapiens. Humans, along with gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, and bonobos share enough characteristics to be grouped within the order Primates. Primates are one of many orders within the mammalian class of animals. Fun fact: Hominid refers to our many different human ancestors. It’s less specific than using the names of individual early human species like Homo erectus, or Australopithecus afarensis.
