(March 13, 2014 at 12:10 pm)professor Wrote: You guys seem to have missed the foundation of Darwin's theory.And those organisms whose changes made them less likely to survive and breed died off, while those whose changes made them more likely to survive and breed continued to evolve. This is what is called natural selection or survival of the fittest. In a man-made product like a car, this process is guided intelligently and therefore moves forward in a faster and more efficient manner. In nature, it moves slowly and inefficiently and you wind up with a very long list of extinct organisms, such that only a tiny fraction of the species that have ever existed at any time exist today.
That RANDOM changes occured over time.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
