[ARCHIVED] - Creation vs. Evolution

[Hope]

right. and my mistake, I thought is was Sunday. Duh. MONDAY it's school. Wow.

[Amanda]

By Creation we mean that God created the universe. Things were CREATED, with a purpose, by God. They didn't just happen. We believe life came from life. We don't believe that any creatures have ever evolved. (to GAIN information.)

By evolution, we mean the big bang, I guess. And the changing of a species, over millions of years. That is, evolving from one species to another by gaining information.

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And Hope and Ashlyn just emailed me. They're not going to be coming back on tonight. I have to go too.

[Becki]

I'm still here. (actually, I have to go for, like, maybe half hour but I'll be back.)

[Tiberius]

Ok, I don't quite see how the big bang theory has anything to do with the theory of evolution, but if you want to debate that as well then I think we can do that. So I think first I should clear up something, and that is how evolution works.

Evolution does not work by species "gaining information" as you put it. Evolution works by random mutations that are then selected by nature according to which mutations are most beneficial to the species in the current environment. These mutations could add new code to the genome, or they could delete it, make it redundant, or even duplicate it. Whichever of these occurs, the "information" that is stored in the genome is changed, and depending on what the DNA of that specific section of the genome was doing, the result of the mutation in the animal could either be beneficial, inert, or negative to the species. Most of the time, the mutation is inert, although it may become beneficial later in a different environment. Mutations are passed on when offspring are produced.

If a mutation is beneficial to a species in a specific environment, that mutation will be more likely to be passed on, since the carriers of the mutation will have a slightly higher survival rate than the other members of the species that don't have it. If the mutation continues to be beneficial, it will spread through the entire population of the species as the carriers will be the "fittest" and more likely to survive and pass on their genes. This process is called natural selection.

We'll leave it there for now, and I await your rebuttal / comments / questions. I don't want to overload the debate on my first post

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Added sangreal2999 to our team, so that completes the list.

[Becki]

I appretiate you trying not to overwhelm us, adrian. On previous forums, some people would bombard us with a ton of info, and then when it took us days to get through, they accused us of not having answers. This is a lot better, and actually, kind of fun for once. XD

First of all, Amanda doesn't want you to debate the big bang, particularly. We don't really care. If you want to, that's fine. If not, that's fine with us too.

Next. I agree with most of what you said. I have the perfect example we learned about in school. Beetles on a windy island. These beetles had a mutation where they lost their wings. It actually helped the beetles, because they didn't blow away into the water. But I have a couple of points to make here. First, the mutation was a loss of information, not a gain. No one has ever observed a species GAINING info. Second, although the beetles changed, they did not turn into a totally different species, like a frog. I believe that a species can change within its species, but that there are limits.

So basically, the beetles are an example of micro-evolution. That's all that has EVER been observed. What evolutionists typically refer to as evolution is Macro-evolution, which has never been observed. Any comments?

[Tiberius]

First, the mutation was a loss of information, not a gain. No one has ever observed a species GAINING info.

Not true. The E. coli long-term evolution experiment conducted by Richard Lenski has been going on for the last 20 years (project site here: https://myxo.css.msu.edu/ecoli/ ) and has seen the evolution of one of the 12 groups of E. coli to use citrate as an energy source. A normal strain of E. coli doesn't have this ability, nor did the original strain that Dr. Lenski started off with 20 years ago. The citrate was present in the growth solution at the beginning of the experiment, but none of the E. coli were able to use it for a food source. The mutation that occurred in one of the strains he was monitoring enabled the strain to use the citrate, which was a beneficial mutation in the environment (it meant that more of the species survived).

Second, although the beetles changed, they did not turn into a totally different species, like a frog. I believe that a species can change within its species, but that there are limits.

Species do not suddenly change families (or indeed phylum as your beetle -> frog example has). The theory of Evolution says that species change into different species. The definition of a species is an organism that can only produce fertile offspring within its own group of organisms. So although a lion and a tiger can produce offspring together, they are never fertile. So all that is required for speciation (the change of a species into another) is a mutation that causes the organism to not be able to breed successfully with its ancestor. There is a list of observed instance of speciation here: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html if you are interested.

So whilst species to species evolution has been well observed and documented, what you are really after is when organisms change entirely into very different organisms (as ancient bacteria has evolved to become humanity for example). This is of course not observed by scientists because it takes millions of years to occur, as it is the result of millions of examples of micro-evolution, gradually changing features of the species over time. Since we cannot see this in action, we need to look at the fossil record, which luckily records a lot of life that has existed on Earth. The fossil record shows a large number of animals that were alive at different periods, and the subtle differences between them can be seen as they gradually evolve and branch off into different species, from the ancient single-celled organisms to all of life today.

So basically, the beetles are an example of micro-evolution. That's all that has EVER been observed. What evolutionists typically refer to as evolution is Macro-evolution, which has never been observed.

As I hope you can see, there are no "macro" or "micro" evolution. There is only one type, and scientists do not refer to either as "micro" or "macro" (they are words generally made up by creationists). If anything, "macro" evolution is just lots and lots of "micro" evolution, naturally selected over time.

[Becki]

i'll check out the links.

[Tiberius]

I tried to explain everything in as simple terms as I possibly could, but the links are really needed to show the actual evidence. I mean it's all fine and good for me to say there is evidence, but I needed to present it . Hopefully we'll keep the number of links down though.

[Becki]

the first link won't work, it just says HTTP 404 page not found. What's the full E.? I'll look it up myself and see if I can find a different page.

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Right, I agree.

[Tiberius]

I changed it, sorry I just noticed that. The forum interpreted the ")" as part of the link