Serious Evolution Question.?

Question

I am trying to decide whether to believe in evolution or creationism and I am trying to collect facts and decide logically instead of being told what's right. I have two questions about evolution though that if anyone could help answer it would be greatly appreciated.
1.) Life can't magically appear ex a rock can't just suddenly come to life....so how did life originate if it can't start randomly from anything
Creationism say God made Adam and Eve
2.) DNA can't be added to a cell since the cell splits and replicates so how do you change from a snake, to a poodle, to a monkey, to a human without adding DNA?
Creationism says God created the animals according to it's kind.
Please help me to understand the truth. Try to honestly answer these two questions if possible. Thank you so much :D

Answer 1

The Pope, Catholic Church, Church of England and mainstream churches all accept the big bang and evolution!



Lord Carey the former Archbishop of Canterbury put it rather well – “Creationism is the fruit of a fundamentalist approach to scripture, ignoring scholarship and critical learning, and confusing different understandings of truth”!



Nice that christians and atheists can agree and laugh together even if it is at fundie expense!



But behind the laughter is the despair at the fundamentalists striving so hard to destroy christianity by turning it from a religion to an ideology!



Surveys suggest that 29% of American christians are so extremist in their beliefs that they fall well outside of the accepted bounds of christianity!



Please state which extremist sect you are seeking to belong to so that GOOD christians can disassociate themselves from you and explain why that sect is so against the christian churches!

Answer 2

1- it was not magical. It was a half billion square kilometre laboratory -- a whole planet -- covered with a 'soup' of virtually all type of chemical, left brewing for dozens of million of years. At one place, the right chemicals happened to be linked in a more stable composition, until enough of them gathered up and produced a stable environment that could selectively admit chemicals end exclude others, and maintain a dynamic stability. That first cell was much simpler than the simplest bacteria existing today, as it did not need to be more sophisticated since there was no competition yet. Yet it featured the capacity of growing by accumulating more chemicals until such time it got large enough it broke in two, therefore reproducing.



2- cells do add their own information since the DNA replication is not a perfect process and transcription error do occur. When such errors happen in humans cells, we develop cancer.

But when smaller errors that do not kill the cell happen, then anything is possible; the mutations could be bad and the cell would die, neutral, and the cell simply diversify and can keep playing the game of evolution, or beneficial, and the cell (or organism) can adapt to new conditions and spread out, out-competing other organisms not as well adapted, sometime including the individuals of the same species that gave rise to it, but lack that beneficial mutation.

Answer 3

I've linked to a page that has a nice simple explanation of the whole thing. This is not out of laziness but shear time and room constraints.



1) Evolution doesn't try to answer that. Evolution by natural selection covers how speciation occurred after life began. That is a question of abiogenesis, and the honest answer to how that happened is we don't know yet. We have some very good ideas but non are more than steps that could have being taken yet. I'm trying to find another page that covers some of these ideas that isn't overly academic.



2)Mutations, recombination etc... See the source link under the heading "Mechanisms that Increase Genetic Variation".



I would also like to point out that believing in creation and trusting evolution are only mutually exclusive if you are a bible literalist/fundamentalist, and they are way in the minority.

Answer 4

These are both very complicated questions. Part of the reason that creationism is so popular that is that the explaination is short and easy to grasp where as the body of information which supports evolution wouldn't fit inside of a football stadium stacked to the roof if it was all printed out.



Also, science does not have all the answers. It has never claimed such. Science describes the world around us based on observable and measurable information and then goes about testing various interpretations of this information until it comes to the best explanation that it can given the information available at the time. To answer your question in a vastly oversimplified manner, DNA mutates randomly over time. Most of these mutations or changes in the DNA molecule are not benifical and as such the creature which has them is inferior to the others of its kind and is more likely to die without reproducing. In the rare instance that this mutation is benifical it gives the creature a slight advantage over those who do not have the mutation thus making it more likely that it will survive and reproduce. Over vast and unimaginable scales of time, these small changes slowly add up to change the overall population of creatures until they have changed enough to become a different species. There are instances of this that we have seen occur in very rapidly reproducing organims such as bacteria and moths which can be seen in the course of a couple of human lifetimes. That is why there are bacteria that are now antibiotic resistant. They evolved that way. The ones that did not have the mutation that made the resistant to antibiotics were wiped out so only the ones carrying the benificial changed gene were able to reproduce. There is so much more to this question than my simple answer but time demands that I cut it short and leave it incomplete.



Your other question which is how the first life came to be is much harder to answer. This is not evolutionary theory but rather origin theory. It basically involves extremely complex molecular biology and organic chemistry understanding. Long story short, when you have complex enough molecules that are capable of self replication such as some forms of RNA the laws of natural selection will go to work on them also. Slowly you will build more and more complex molecules that are capable of surviving in increasingly more diverse environments. There is so much more to this, but for a better answer I highly recomend looking into some college level papers on the topic. The questions you have asked are very complex.



The easiest approach on making up your mind on which is correct is basically to logically pick apart creationism since it is full of far more holes. If you discredit one answer you are left with the other. Science does not claim it knows the full answer. It just claims that this is its best guess.If you look into the logic behind evolution and the proof they have found the evidence is overwhelming. The greatest scientific minds on earth have spent centuries exploring this question and gathering data. If you just sit down and spend a couple of hundred hours studying some of the basic material, I think you find their answers and the reasons they have come to them to be quite satisfying.



It's a lot like thunder and lightning. Long ago people did not understand it and thus they invented Gods such as Thor to describe this phenomina. As man became more knowledgeable and explored the question of what thunder and lightning are, we learned of the laws of electromagnistism and most people no longer believe there are gods hiding up in the clouds which are responsible. People have always acribed that which they cannot explain to supernatural causes. The same thing happens in modern times with origin theory. There are holes in origin theory just as there were holes in our early understanding of lightning and thunder. Just because science cannot explain something completely now does not mean that you need to make up a magical explaination for it. It just means that we don't have a full understanding of it yet. Science does not know everything. Infact, the more we learn, the more we find there is that we do not understand. The difference between science and religion is that science is always looking for a better answer. It never stops searching for new ideas and better explainations. Religion claims it already has the answers and it no longer needs to look at any new information that comes up. Religion is static where as science is dynamic. I think religion is best used to provide answers to questions of meaning and purpose rather than answers to the nature of how the physical universe works. Religion is there for spiritual guidence and understanding. Science is there to help us understand the nature of how the physical universe works.

Answer 5

No matter what you say, people will continue to believe that life came from rocks (matter), it was an ooze that created life, it was the billions of years that allowed random selection to create new species, and DNA is part of the whole thing.... and not magically, of course.



All with no design and no intelligence... ( that IS magic, in my books ) .



Life cannot be "created", it just IS...like all energy. It IS. And so, a vessel has to be made (the ooze) and this then allows life to have a place to stay...and design was then used to create a cell for the life, this too had to be designed (for example, shape and size)



Random selection would have created monsters before it would create anything of credibility.



Someone once told me on here, that DNA code is random also...that is how things are created. I can just imagine what can be made, randomly, by changing the code...randomly.. Or can I? No, I cannot...that is beyond my imagination...



The DNA Code had to have intelligence designing it...



They will NOT accept DNA, with the vast amount of intelligence inside it, to be something other then natural selection. That is amazing, how close minded they are.

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Here is a quote from a web site..



" Some biologists describe DNA as an "ancient high biotechnology," containing "over a hundred trillion times as much information by volume as our most sophisticated information storage devices. "



http://deoxy.org/meme/CosmicSerpent

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And yet we assume it all came about randomly...from mere matter.



Correction, not we...they...I do not assume this. Let them blindly go about their ways of thinking.

Answer 6

1) Life isn't made from rocks and it didn't "magically" appear (that's what Christians claim, dust and magic,lol). Life is made up of hydrogen, oxygen,nitrogen and carbon, which came from exploding stars (supernovas). The initial spark may have happened all the sudden, but the rest was a slow process over billions of years. Nature doesn't need to think to create greater complexity. Gravity builds stars and planets without any conscious direction. Nature has many self organizing systems due to the immutable laws of nature.



2) It's when the cell splits that change happens, because copying errors occur (mutation). Animals don't change into other animals, rather they simply change over time and after dramatic change we call them a different name. An embryo changes into a 90 year old, but it doesn't jump from infant to toddler, to teenager, to adult in big distinct steps. Rather it phases from embryo to 90 year old seamlessly. That's how evolution works. The first one cell animal is still branching and phasing into different forms (really we are that first one cell animal that is still changing). The names we give change (different animals) are like the numbers we put on a clock to measure time. They are arbitrary and their only purpose is so we can categorize the seamless flow of time to make sense of it. In other words we digitize an analogue universe because that is how our brains work.



Evolution is considered a fact because it has mountains of evidence that is corroborated by all facets of science. Creationism has an old book that is only one of thousands of similar god myths.

Answer 7

theres alot that science cant explain. science is not history. science is about finding out new things. its just ignorant to look at a poodle while know that god didnt create it humans did by husbandry of wolves. The forced breeding for the desired traits in the offspring (poofyness lol) is some what an example of evolution. No scientist is right if they say a God cant exist. Its just obvious that whether you pray to him or not life is the same for every one and it is incredibly arrogant to look at all the evidence that says that there was no flood in the noahs ark story and that you cant live inside of a whale and still think these bed time stories actually happened. And all other religions have the same chance of being true as yours.

Answer 8

1) There is actually a grey zone between life and non-life. Viruses are such simple organisms that by modern biology standards, they are not technically living organisms. They inhabit a strange no-man's-land between complex chemistry and life. (Biologists have a certain definition of life, which certain things simply don't quite fit into).

So there is one clue into abiogenesis, which, as others will surely mention, is a different branch of study from evolution.



2) Actually, it can, in two different ways: Fusing and splitting. Fusing is when two chromosomes become one and splitting is when one separates. I am not a chemist, so I can't really get into details on that one. (My credentials are in philosophy and economics - what I write is worth what it's worth). But yes, both are possible and have been, in fact, observed.



If you really want to ask seriously, though, the biology section would be a better place.

Answer 9

The Torah takes us in several directions. It's main purpose is to provide a roadmap for civilization by being a book of laws. However, 3,500 years ago mankind was evolving from primitive savages into more civilized human forms. Chief among these were the Jews. It's likely that God created a "history" to satisfy the need to explain "the beginning". With the advent of Abraham, history began in earnest and instead of a spiritual tale of creation, the Torah moves into concrete geography and events, culminating with the giving of the law at Mt. Sinai. Evolution is also the creation of God. How? Why? Does it matter? There seems to be an intelligence behind all forms of life and inanimate objects. Torah doesn't have God "build" things; He didn't fashion man from a kidney and a liver, He spoke him into existence which tells me that the concepts for all things on earth existed in some for of intelligence before they were set in place in the universe by being spoken into existence.

Prove me wrong.

Answer 10

If this was a serious evolution question then you wouldn't be posting it here. But the answers are:

1. Nobody said it was magic. The ability of molecules to rearrange and replicate themselves is part of what we call Chemistry. I believe some schools still teach it, although possibly not in Minnesota.



2. DNA can be easily added to a cell so your entire premise is null and void.

Answer 11

Life has been made in the lab from non-living things. It doesn't require magic.



DNA mutates and that adds to it and changes it. We have observed this change to the point where there were splits big enough breeding isn't possible. Both pieces will continue to change. Add it up over mind numbingly long time periods and you've got it.

Answer 12

You have so much more work to do, and Google is your friend.





But this is stupid anyway. Lack of evidence for belief A (evolution) does not give belief B (creationism) any more credibility.



Instead of just researching evolution, you should research both evolution and creationism, and realize how stupid creationism is. And yes life can just magically appear, it did. Just from particles in the primordial ooze that could create life, not a rock.



Watch this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqc9zX04DXs

Answer 13

1)Synthesis of activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides in prebiotically plausible conditions Matthew W. Powner, Beatrice Gerland & John D. Sutherland. Nature, Vol. 460, May 13, 2009.



2)http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evo101/index.shtml

Answer 14

1. Research abiogenesis

2. Evolution occurs over hundreds of millions of years

Answer 15

Honestly, can't say I know but even when I was Atheist I didn't believe in evolution. Maybe it is a possibility but I'm sure creationism is a strong one too. I don't believe in the bible but I'm not sure how life could come out of nowhere either.

Answer 16

Okay for one, evolutionary biology is not simple, it is very very complicated. So don't start thinking it's easy sh^t to learn. Creationism is just a cop out, God made it, that's all there is to it, in other words bullsh^t

Answer 17

1.) This has absolutely nothing to do with evolution. The scientific study of the origins of life is covered by a separate topic called abiogenesis. Evolution is strictly about how life changes over time.



2.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hfYJsQAhl0

Answer 18

Do not let the small groups of Atheists and Creationists make you believe that you have to choose between God and humanity's ongoing discovery of God's Creation through Science. This is not true.



Truth cannot contradict Truth. -- Pope Leo XIII



Most Jews and Christians do not take the stories of creation in the Bible literally. We believe the stories included in first 11 chapters of Genesis tell religious truth but not necessarily historical fact.



One of the religious truths is that God created everything and declared all was good.



Catholics can believe in the theories of the big bang or evolution or both or neither.



On August 12, 1950 Pope Pius XII said in his encyclical Humani generis:



The Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter - for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God.



Here is the complete encyclical: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_12081950_humani-generis_en.html



And here is the Address of Pope John Paul II to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on October 22, 1996 speaking of the Theory of Evolution: http://www.newadvent.org/library/docs_jp02tc.htm



Here is an interesting article about Pope John Paul II's opinion in the matter: http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=4627



The Church supports science in the discovery of God's creation. At this time, the big bang and evolution are the most logical scientific explanations.



As long as we believe that God started the whole thing, both the Bible and responsible modern science can live in harmony.



Here is a nice list of Christian thinkers in science: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_thinkers_in_science



The Clergy Letter Project an open letter endorsing the Theory of Evolution signed by over 12,000 clergy from many different Christian denominations: http://www.butler.edu/clergyproject/rel_evol_sun.htm



I suggest you read "New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy" by Robert J. Spitzer http://www.amazon.com/New-Proofs-Existence-God-Contributions/dp/0802863833



http://www.magisreasonfaith.org/



With love in Christ.

Answer 19

1. It was not even close to like that. It very slow processe. We still do not fully understand the moment when it first happened, but it did.

2. That has happened.

Answer 20

Do the research. You will enjoy it. It's fascinating and wondrous, even without deities.

Answer 21

You shouldn't choose either one until you have enough facts for them to be compelling.



Rejecting both is a valid option.



(Notice from some of the answers that evolution is not defended intellectually but through childish name-calling. I for one find it impossible to accept a "science" until it's defended on a much higher level.)

Answer 22

I think you should check this site out.

Answer 23

Read a book.

Answer 24

Did you try the BIOLOGY section?