Biology Forums - Study Force

Argue for your side!

The first one is science the other one is a bedtime story, I don't think there's much to argue.

We have the same basic DNA structure as all other living life forms.

We have many of the same needs (air, water, food...)

Ape DNA is less than five percent different than our own.

Animals reproduce in the same way.

Fossil evidence shows progression from one species to another over time.

There's nothing to argue.  One is accepted as fact by every reputable scientist, being backed up by overwhelming evidence.  The other is an enduring creation myth with all sorts of cultural significance.  One should be taught in the science lab, the other in RE and Literature classes.  It's like arguing gravity against the Force.  

I'm not trying to compare Creationism to a product of George Lucas' imagination directly, just to say that Creationism and Darwinism are two different things, each with their own place.  They don't overlap, and there's no reason you can't believe both.

There is plenty of evidence for evolution: fossils, molecular structures...

Is there ANY evidence for creationism?

creationism

one of the main things is that (the pymorial soup) you need a lot of right hand amino acid if one if left its dead and thing to the ^52 is impossible(math theorm) think as if you were to flip a coin and try to get 100 heads in a row get a tails you have to start over. so you need outside intelligence too also that pretty much saying that we are related to onions and dogs didnt evolve they just had different genes look at people one has blue eyes and blond the other brown eyes and hair that doesnt mean we elvoved no we just banched off from different things

oh and look and up and you might find it canyons can be formed in a day there was a canyon formed by a volcano and made in only one day and the peta(can remember name) down there from the tree and soon we shoul dfind coal down there

and for the great flood they found fish and whales at mountian tops before how could the get there (i belive clams too)

evelution is also a theory we have the bible which is written down what happened did anyone SEE these animals change

there are big differences between us and apes mostly posture and you see them walk with their hands down down (almost swinging) the biggest one is self consis we can think and decide between right and wrong apes cant they just do

for the big bang theory(another example on science) it said nothing was there if nothings there want can explode

if your a chirstian you cant belive evelution at the same time

for Creationism

If life on a cellular level is basically composed of just a bunch of chemical reactions with the dna making protiens and mitochondria making enery to move then how would we have our own oppinions and actually live
would a bunch of unicellular creatures just decide to stick together and act as one living thing

it makes me upset that they teach evolution as fact in text books even though it is theory they dont even recognize creationism. they give you only one side.
Life is so complex how could you say it happened just by a bunch of mutations

Did you ever wonder why lions and a pet cat look very similar to each other? Or why the Dodo bird was flightless, seemingly just waiting for man to come to their island and hunt them to extinction?
It is ignorance to accept that these things were just put there.
Evolution is the only theory which explains the differences and similarities between all species of life on Earth. It is one of the most robust, yet elegant, theories to be put forward.
It is supported by many branches of science, in fact, I cannot think of a branch of science which can be used to reject it. The main objections to it are faith based and are not scientific. People seem to be insulted that they can be related to other forms of life. Why? Because then it would challenge their beliefs that they were created in God's image, rather than having an ape-like ancestor as a template for humankind. It is this arrogance which keeps some people from accepting evidence.

Science may not be able to explain every step of every stage of every animal, and this is seen by creationists as proof that evolution is incorrect. Darwin never claimed to have all the answers, neither do scientists today make that claim, but the theory of evolution is too compelling and logical to be simply dismissed just because it carries the tag of "Theory". Go to a science book and look up the term Theory to see what it means in a scientific context.
There are many current examples of the theory at work, including bacterial resistance to medication, locust resistance to pesticides etc.
Evolution is better understood than the theory of gravity.
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EDIT :

emucompboy, you're a worse liar than you are a creationist. Do I detect a whiff of sarcasm?

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ryan your claim to knowledge is a video?   You have not the slightest sense of what you are takling about...There is so much convergent evidence from geology, paleontology, molecular genetics , chemistry biochemistry, etc etc for evolution and your creationist buddies have NOT one testable hypothesis, not one shred of acceptable , reproducible evidence ..not one bit of information derived without obfuscation and distortion for their "cause ". That video, probably by answersingenesis, is nothing but a bedtime story...get into  this century and read the white paper from the National Academy of Sciences , the Dover Decision , etc etc ..where  your perfect, placid and wrong ideas were shown in the light of scientific truth to be nothing but nonsense.I sure hope you are going into some area of work that does not need thinking..

As an award-winning Creationist, I must say that God did it.

As for apes and people being a lot alike, that's because they have the same Creator, Our Loving Heavenly Father.  Besides, apes are ugly and people aren't, I mean, you're not going to stand there and say "Hayden Panettiere is descended from apes" and get away with it.

And we know that things tend to decay over time:  energy is lost irretrievably as heat, and information decays.  Without some huge external power source that you could see every day, life could never get more complex and not less.  So life must be a miracle, and that's totally God's department and not science's.

And as for those fossils, I mean, come on.  Like they're real.  Yeah.  I'm saying that The Deceiver put them in rock strata to confuse us, to test our Faith.

So forget Evil-Lution.  Faith is belief without evidence.  You have faith, so you don't even need evidence.  I mean, Creationism is good enough for former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, and for former governor Mike Huckabee, so it's good enough for anyone.

Science is finding out new stuff all the time, and changing and modifying its "theories."  The Holy Bible hasn't changed in hundreds and hundreds of years, so The Holy Bible is better.

So yeah, you should take it from me!  After all, I am a ranking Top Contributor in Biology, even if my "Best Answer" percentage rate is WAY WAY lower than that of any of the other Top Contributors!

emucompboy - First LAW of thermodynamics: energy can be neither created nor destroyed, so there goes that huge external power source that created complex life. The theory of evolution has proof supporting it's postulates; creationism doesn't. How do you PROVE that a greater being created all life?

Ryan - Bible is written down so it must be true? So I guess what I've written down here is the truth.

Evolution
1) Form
Many living things have the same basic structures slightly modified.  One would not expect this if each was designed uniquely for its environment from scratch.  The common structures allow living things to be classified into families and are also united this way with the fossil record.  Since all living things can be unified in this way, this is very strong evidence for them all being related.
2)Extinction
The existence of animals and plants that have died out must also count against creationism since it provides no explanation for why, in the absence of man, animals and plants would be removed from the world.  Are these god?s mistakes?  Evolution explains these as forms that have failed in competition with others in specific environments.
3)Development
Consider the early development of a single human.  One might expect it to grow from a large collection of cells into a human being.  That doesn?t happen.  First you get a single cell, then a group of cells, then a worm like structure, then later on fish-like structures appear and these are then replaced, etc.. finally the child may be covered in lanugo body hair that disappears before birth although premature babies sometimes are born with it and it falls out later.  Hard to explain unless you consider evolution.  Evolution says that each animal is a step-wise development from something simpler.  Therefore a man is a modified ape, which is a modified proto-mammal, which is a ... etc.  Then you would expect their individual development to model their evolutionary history, which it does.
4)Insight
Creationism tells us nothing about why we are the way we are.  Evolution tells us a lot.  Why are people different to apes for example?  Why do we walk upright, are able to speak (hold our breath), have little hair, have downwards facing noses, have ?emotional tears?, have such large brains, sweat to keep cool, etc.  One evolutionary theory suggests this is because we evolved from apes living around lots of water.  C.f. aquatic ape theory for a history lesson you can?t get from religion.
5)DNA
Our cells have DNA that tells them how to be human cells.  There?s a lot of it and we can read the genes in it that tell the cell how to make proteins and how to use those proteins together.  Evolution tells us this DNA has been copied countless times from animals we evolved from right back to the earliest forms.  The evidence is clearly on evolution?s side here.  In human DNA for example, we can find genes that are ?broken?.  Either they don?t read correctly or they are perfect but have no code in front of them to allow them to be turned on.  These broken genes are not used in humans, but simpler animals have perfect copies of these genes and use them.  Hard to explain that with creationism!  Why would god make man with a few broken fish genes in our DNA?  Why would have disused, derelict DNA in our genome from reptiles?  Evolution explains that these genes have simply been copied from our ancestors that were fish and reptiles and needed these genes.  As we evolved we didn?t need them any more and so we could live without them working now, as we do.  They are still there in their broken state because evolution doesn?t go out to remove them.  Such broken genes are called ?pseudogenes?.
6)Complexity
An explanation of where life came from is incomplete without an explanation of where the properties we associate with life came from.  Where did complexity come from for example?
Finally, evolution explains the increasing complexity we see in the animal and plant world.  Creationism assumes a very complex thing, god, made everything else.  This explains nothing because it fails to explain where god came from.  Evolution does explain how simple things can become more complex.  For example, consider a type of cell, as it becomes better able to survive and reproduce in its environment it might evolve little sensors to test the environment to move closer to food, for example.  As it starts to dominate its environment it will find itself more and more often closely packed with others of its kind.  In effect its environment becomes itself.  Now its little sensors can evolve to exchange messages with each other.  In fact the type of cell would have to in order to better exploit its environment ? itself.  Conventions, randomly created that allowed a cell type to exploit its environment, like an association between a sensed material and food, would be created in the same way but be pure signals between multiple cells of the same sort.  (Or different sorts in fact since there are many symbiotic relationships).
These singles would be simple things at first - let?s all move this way towards food, or ?stay where you are, it?s dangerous over here?.  This information helps the cells survive in a collective and starts to provide benefits of the group in looking for food, avoiding danger and of course reproduction.  The cells that can manage in large groups and cooperate are often the ones that can reproduce the most.  Cells that don?t like crowds are going to have real limits on their reproduction in anything other than very large environments which not everything ends up living and evolving in.
How would a cell tell another to come this way to food ? simple, it would excrete onto its own surface the signal the cell looked for in the environment to lead it to food.  One cell places the part of the environment for the other cell.  The danger signal would be a chemical that the cell normally associated with danger in its environment.  So given complex sensing systems and responses have evolved in the cells, and given that they end up next to each other, it is very likely that random chance will allow a cell to be able to start to send signals that will be picked up by the cells around it for the common good.
This approach also explains how the simple organelles within a cell could have come together to form cells in the first place.  The conventions of communication and regulation needed evolve by random chance and then result in something that can reproduce better then the bits on their own.  After that, that bit of random chance isn?t needed again and the scene is set, after more millions of years, for the next unlikely thing to happen that increases the complexity more, multi-cellular creatures for example.
7)Ranking
Finally, evolution can explain creationism: a combination of an association between existence and construction coupled with a natural emphatic and anthropomorphic tendency that works well for us social creatures and allows us to imagine things happening in the world around us and to have faith in abstract ideas not immediately sensed by us.  Easy to see how such mental states as ?theory of mind? can evolve in groups of apes, to be refined in man as religion and then be better refined when we have better maths and better ideas into science.  The same basic leap of faith is there throughout however, that the world is understandable, that there are things not immediately obvious that can explain the world around us.
Can creationism explain evolution?  Well, only by saying that god created it.  Rather an odd idea for god to create unless he intended to use it himself perhaps...