Is Evolution a science or a faith?

[Harris]

I don't understand why creationists bother with trying to discredit evolution? Even if they could prove the theory of evolution wrong it gets them no closer to proving creation. I also don't know why they bother posting their objections to evolution on an atheist forum, go post your bad understanding of evolution on a biology forum. Reading the headline of this thread made my blood boil, if you have to ask if evolution is based on faith then you either are completely ignorant of how science works or you are trying to denigrate science in order to bring it down to the level of your unfounded faith based position of creation.

As I stated earlier, I am not trying to prove or disprove existence of God by using science. Science is a wrong address for the question of God. However, you guys are persistent to put evolution in place of God. In other words, you are trying to eliminate the idea of God using science, which is logically a fault. What I am trying here is to convey that Theory of evolution has ridiculous amount of flaws and all these flaws make this theory unscientific. Henceforth, using theory of evolution to eliminate the concept of God is nothing more than an absurd.

[Fidel_Castronaut]

I don't understand why creationists bother with trying to discredit evolution? Even if they could prove the theory of evolution wrong it gets them no closer to proving creation. I also don't know why they bother posting their objections to evolution on an atheist forum, go post your bad understanding of evolution on a biology forum. Reading the headline of this thread made my blood boil, if you have to ask if evolution is based on faith then you either are completely ignorant of how science works or you are trying to denigrate science in order to bring it down to the level of your unfounded faith based position of creation.

As I stated earlier, I am not trying to prove or disprove existence of God by using science. Science is a wrong address for the question of God. However, you guys are persistent to put evolution in place of God. In other words, you are trying to eliminate the idea of God using science, which is logically a fault. What I am trying here is to convey that Theory of evolution has ridiculous amount of flaws and all these flaws make this theory unscientific. Henceforth, using theory of evolution to eliminate the concept of God is nothing more than an absurd.

Evolution/science does not care about any gods, and neither do we. We're not trying to elevate evolution or science to a position that was never occupied by any imaginary being in the first place.

'Science' is only concerned with examining the data avaliable and expanding the realms of what we know. Theorising and testing to (in)validate the thesis.

Evolution is a fact. ToE is a theory to explain it.

[StuW]

Fossil record is incomplete not because Palaeontologists have not collected sufficient amount of fossil but because fossil record lacks fossils of transitional animals. Out of millions of records, not a single fossil has been declared to be a transitional animal.

That's because a transitional fossil is a misnomer, they are all what you claim a transitional fossil is (are?).

You've seen paintings by Van Gough?


They are made up of thousands of tiny brush strokes each like a tiny mutation of the canvas, brush stroke upon brush stroke until the canvas is a completed painting. At what point do the accumulated brush strokes become transitional from blank canvas to the completed painting?

[Esquilax]

As I stated earlier, I am not trying to prove or disprove existence of God by using science. Science is a wrong address for the question of God. However, you guys are persistent to put evolution in place of God. In other words, you are trying to eliminate the idea of God using science, which is logically a fault. What I am trying here is to convey that Theory of evolution has ridiculous amount of flaws and all these flaws make this theory unscientific. Henceforth, using theory of evolution to eliminate the concept of God is nothing more than an absurd.

So basically you start this thread to tell us what we think, even in the face of numerous comments to the contrary from people that are us, which you then ignore.

What is wrong with you?

[Harris]

All these links have took me to junkyard only. If you are so sure then bring livescientific evidence that apes transformed into humans.

That would be in your blood.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome_2_(human)

Anything else?
(go ahead and click on those links to each gene in that sequence btw, see if a narrative develops.....)

First, if 4 percent difference between ape and human genes that means 3 billion base pairs of DNA in every cell that represents 120,000,000 entries in the DNA code that are different. In our DNA instruction book, that’s equivalent to about 12 million words—a seemingly small percentage that has a tremendous impact.

Second, if 96 percent similarity of our genes with chimps make them our ancestor then we also share about 50% of our DNA12 with bananas but that does not make us half bananas. Or do you think otherwise.

Here are some other animals who have similar genes if compared to human genes.

Cat: 90%
Cow: 80%
Mouse: 75% (do we have anything resembling to mouse?)
Fruit Fly: 60%

Why only chimps are the favourite option for an evolutionist why not a cat.

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If Atheism is not a FAITH at all or say LACK of FAITH in God then how your mind adopted the concept that God does not exist. Funny isn’t it?

dafuq?

If there is no God or anything supernatural (a creator) then there is nothing. If you have FAITH in nothingness instead of God only then you can have belief in things like evolution, multiuniverse, blind and unguided forces etc. Without having Faith in something, you cannot have belief in that thing. In any case FAITH is crucial for mind to work or not to work.

[pocaracas]

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Wow! Most ignorant forum member here! Everybody crowd round while we school this idiot.

1) You got one thing right, evolution uses science. From that point on you are wrong about everything.
Intelligent design (as anybody with the smallest amount of skepticism and intellectual honesty knows) is simply a cover for creationism. What they do is not science. They do not apply the scientific method at all. They start with an assumption and then look for evidence for it and ignore the evidence against. The theory of evolution was made by observing nature and following the evidence to where it pointed. IT twists the evidence to get what it wants. Anyone who believes IT uses science is an ignorant dolt.

Evolution do not use science but it abuse science by misusing it to support conjectures. If you want to learn about Intelligent design then start with these documentaries.

http://vimeo.com/71162398

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c63awtAyHdU&feature=kp

DNA: The DNA evidence alone would be enough to prove evolution. All species share some DNA, we can tell which species are closely related to each other and which aren't. We can trace back genetic bottlenecks of species. We can tell exactly how we evolved to be more intelligent than our ape ancestors. And you have the arrogance to say that there isn't any evidence?

If you mean Evolution is about adaptation and variation in same specie then it is science. If you are talking about evolution from single embryo to complete human baby then it is science. If you are talking about evolution that can turn ape into human then it is FAITH

DNA do not and cannot produce new specie out of existing specie. DNA can produce varied specie but in same specie. Like children who are little similar and little different to their parents. Mutations rarely occur natural world and when they occur, 100% of them are injurious. Scientist have not found such beneficial mutations that makes them confident to say that new specie has born out of mutation. Neutral mutations only give variations in the same specie if not the same property.

If you see some argument that ape and human have almost similar genes and this is the evidence for ape transformed into human then these argument are not from scientists. If scientist saying something like this then he is saying not for a scientific purpose rather to support some ideology.

Fossil record: We can track the evolution of species through fossils. A snapshot in time, these fossils show us how many species evolved to be how they are today. Like the horse and the even toad undulates. We know that they have evolved to be marine, then terrestrial, then marine, then back to terrestrial. We can accurately predict what fossils we are going to find at different depths.

Fossil record is incomplete not because Palaeontologists have not collected sufficient amount of fossil but because fossil record lacks fossils of transitional animals. Out of millions of records, not a single fossil has been declared to be a transitional animal.

Biology: The composition of many living species all show evolution. One of my favorites is the laryngeal nerve. Its sole purpose is to control the voice box. However, it stretches from the base of the brain, loops around your aorta and then goes all the way back up to the larynx. Why could this be? Oh wait, we know why that is! Because millions and millions of years ago, our ancestors were fish-like creatures. They had no neck, which meant that the larngeal nerve didn't need to travel far at all. But then as our ancestors evolved, their bodies got longer but the laryngeal nerve had to stretch to carry out its function. This is exactly the kind of thing we would expect if a species evolved slowly over millions of years. Other examples include the sloth bear, which has lost its front teeth and the rest are very small as it has evolved to eat termites and ants. The tiger and the lion are very similar creatures to the point that they can actually breed and produce offspring, because they are incredibly closley related and share a common ancestor.

Biology by no mean can prove that one specie is transformed out from another. If you find such a claim then it is purely based on conjecture and would not be able to provide any hard scientific fact on which scientists around the world would be agreed unequivocally. Remember, not anyone who try to prove ape transform into human can run away from using conjectures, postulates and guesswork in his explanation. He cannot give hard scientific facts that can be tested in labs.
[/quote]

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Oh, look, a crocoduck!!







Come on, mr allah-man... tell us how all dogs, jackals and wolves sprouted from Noah's pair of domestic dogs... and remember than there were jackals in ancient Egypt, some 4000 years ago.

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What I am trying here is to convey that Theory of evolution has ridiculous amount of flaws and all these flaws make this theory unscientific.

Any flaw the theory does have can't be so bad that the whole theory becomes obsolete.
Actually, as someone else noted previously, the present version of the theory is not called "theory of evolution", it is "modern synthesis".

Now, how could Darwin have predicted that there must have been a mechanism that passed on traits from one generation to another, before the discovery of DNA?

Henceforth, using theory of evolution to eliminate the concept of God is nothing more than an absurd.

LOL!
You're the one trying to push the notion of god, by disproving evolution.

Awareness of evolution brings light to how fabricated and non-divinely inspired some stories in every holy book are... and that scares the believers out of their wits.
If a part of the book is clearly not inspired by god, then... what other parts are also not inspired?
Everyone says it is all inspired, so... everyone is wrong... everyone has been deceived... why?
Who stands to gain with such deception? the clerics, of course...
So they must have been the ones who started it... the ones who ordered the scribes to write those stories...

Yeah... it can snowball and severely damage the foundations of the buildings of "religion"... but if you can just make sure that people are given enough disinformation, then doubt sprouts and the building stands, even if rickety...
It must the frightening to stand in a rickety building, huh?

[FreeTony]

Mouse: 75% (do we have anything resembling to mouse?)

To quote genome.gov:

"Overall, mice and humans share virtually the same set of genes. Almost every gene found in one species so far has been found in a closely related form in the other. Of the approximately 4,000 genes that have been studied, less than 10 are found in one species but not in the other.

Both the mouse and human genomes contain about 3.1 billion base pairs (or chemical letters). Only about 5 percent of the sequence consist of protein-coding regions (genes). More than 90 percent of the genome is non-coding DNA, sometimes called "junk" DNA, that has no known function. Because of the vast amount of non-coding DNA, it is very hard to recognize the genes simply by looking at one sequence alone; even the best of today's computational programs fail to identify many coding sequences and misidentify others. It is similarly difficult to identify regulatory regions within DNA - the "switches" that turn gene expression on or off, up or down - as they exist only as poorly defined "consensus" sequences.

On average, the protein-coding regions of the mouse and human genomes are 85 percent identical; some genes are 99 percent identical while others are only 60 percent identical. These regions are evolutionarily conserved because they are required for function. In contrast, the non-coding regions are much less similar (only 50 percent or less). Therefore, when one compares the same DNA region from human and mouse, the functional elements clearly stand out because of their greater similarity. Scientists have developed computer software that automatically aligns human and mouse sequences making the protein-coding and regulatory regions obvious.

Human, mouse and other mammals shared a common ancestor approximately 80 million years ago. Therefore the genomes of all mammals are comparably similar. Comparisons of the DNA sequence of the dog or the cow with that of the human theoretically would be quite informative. However, the mouse has a major advantage in that it is a well-established experimental model. Not only can genes easily be found in mouse genome sequence, but it also is possible to test experimentally the function of those genes in the mouse. Thus, scientists can mimic in mice the effect of DNA alterations that occur in human diseases and carefully study the consequences of these DNA misspellings. Mouse models also afford the opportunity to test possible therapeutic agents and evaluate their precise effects."

[pocaracas]

Cat: 90%
Cow: 80%
Mouse: 75% (do we have anything resembling to mouse?)
Fruit Fly: 60%

Why only chimps are the favourite option for an evolutionist why not a cat.

cat, cow and mouse are mammals: 4 legs, lungs, heart, warm blood, brain, sexual breeding, etc...

Fly... I don't know enough about insects to say anything.

[FreeTony]

If there is no God or anything supernatural (a creator) then there is nothing.

How would you demonstrate this?

[Fidel_Castronaut]

dafuq?

If there is no God or anything supernatural (a creator) then there is nothing. If you have FAITH in nothingness instead of God only then you can have belief in things like evolution, multiuniverse, blind and unguided forces etc. Without having Faith in something, you cannot have belief in that thing. In any case FAITH is crucial for mind to work or not to work.

That is literally one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read on here.

I don't generally like to make wild generalisations (lolz) but really, Harris, the world of 'science' has nothing to fear if this is the best evolution deniers have to offer. Are your views typical of Muslims you know?