Are we all descendants of Adam and Eve?

You haven't even shown that Jesus exsited. So you have faith in bible stories because you have faith in the bible. That's a very circular argument you have going there.

I prefer the truth, no matter what it is. If you have evidence that God exists then present it. Otherwise, don't use such arguments as, "Well, if you believe in God then you will feel better emotionally if your child dies." That's about as lame as it gets. That's what it has always meant. We also require that atheists be human, in case you were wondering.

Ever heard of google? You should try it. Try a search for "transitional hominids". In today's age it always stuns me that people will act as if no transitional hominids have been found when a 1 second google search shows that they are wrong. No, they haven't. You need to put your skepticism back to work and filter out the lies being told to you by professional creationists.

If you are in agreement that you have no evidence that any such "first man" existed, I would be happy to move to the scientific theories we do have evidence for.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

jaywill,You have many of the same misunderstandings of evolution and biology that other creationists have. We will see if I can help clear these up for you. Your first misunderstanding is how taxonomy works, or more precisely how cladistics works. You are under the impression that if gulls undergo macroevolution that they will become something other than gulls. YOU ARE WRONG. That's not how macroevolution works. You never evolve out of your ancestry. Let me say that again. You never evolve out of your ancestry. This is a vital concept that you need to understand. This is echoed in Darwin's own writings were he described evolution as "descent with modification".So what does this mean in the case of our gulls? It means that through time the biodiversity amongst gulls will increase. They will remain gulls because their ancestors were gulls. However, the gulls of the future will look different than modern gulls. They will be modified versions of their ancestors. However, they never stop being gulls.The same applies to our own lineage. We are still apes, as was our common ancestor with other apes. Through time, the variety of ape species increased, but they never stopped being apes. The same applies to our common ancestor with other primates, other mammals, other vertebrats, and other eukaryotes. We are what our ancestors were plus modifications.When you say that "they are still gulls" you have not refuted anything since if macroevolution is true, they should still be gulls. Before we continue, just one note. In an earlier post you claimed that you were once skeptical of the whole creationist thing. I kind of laughed to myself because usually when a creationist says this they are not being truthful. They say this to try and give their posts authenticity. I think this is the case here. Why do I say this?Quite simple. Did you come across the Lewontin quote during your reading of his books or papers? My guess is that you didn't. Am I right? I would also guess that you pulled that quote from a creationist site. Am I right again? The truth of the matter is that you swallow everything from the creationist sites whole without one ounce of skepticism. If you were skeptical you would have learned a very important lesson.That lesson is this. Transitional and direct ancestor are not the same thing. A fossil or living species can be transitional without needing to be the direct ancestor of another species. For example, the platypus is transitional between reptiles and placental mammals even though the platypus is not the direct ancestor of a single placental mammal species. What makes a fossil transitional is that it contains a mixture of features from two other taxa. In the case of the platypus, it has a mixture of features from reptiles and placental mammals. That is what makes it transitional.So Lewontin is correct. There is no way that we can determine if a fossil has any living descendants. However, that has nothing to do with determining if the fossil is transitional.To extend this concept even further, it is possible that a transitional fossil would FALSIFY evolution. If we found a bird/mammal transitional fossil this would actually cast doubt on the theory of evolution. Why is that? The theory of evolution predicts which transitionals you should see, and which you should NOT see. The theory of evolution predicts that we should see a nested hierarchy, and deviations from that nested hierarchy would be evidence against the theory. A bird/mammal transitional would violate that nested hierarchy, and would falsify the theory of evolution. From what I have seen, your view is not based on evidence, nor will you change your mind based on evidence. You have a dogmatic belief. From what I can see, there is no evidence that you would ever accept as supporting evolution. Am I right? It has nothing to do with belief. The facts are that the youngest hominid fossils more closely resemble modern humans that the older hominid fossils, which more closely resemble a basal ape. This isn't based on belief. This is based on empirical fact.We also have genetic evidence demonstrating that humans and other apes share a common ancestor. These include shared pseudogenes and shared retroviral insertions. Again, these are empirical facts, not beliefs.

Did you even read the rest of my post? If macroevolution is true, then gulls should remain gulls. That's the whole point.The common ancestor of all mammals, including us, was just a single species at one point. All of the mammal species that have evolved from that common ancestor, from platypusses to kangaroos to us, are all STILL MAMMALS. We are still mammals after hundreds of millions of years of evolution from that common ancestral mammal. Why isn't it fair?

Incipient speciation is exactly what we observe. The gull ring species is in the process of speciating. Where the two ends of the ring species meet up there is no interbreeding meaning that they are different species. That is macroevolution. The common ancestor of chimps and humans was a primate. We remain primates.The common ancestor of zebras and humans was a mammal. We remain mammals.The common ancestor of trout and humans was a jawed vertebrate. We remain jawed vertebrates.Are you saying that evolving from those common ancestors is not macroevolution because we are still what those common ancestors were? So says the person passing on lies from creationist sites.

So says the person who decided that he will not listen to anything Russell says because he cheated on his wife. You need to wipe up those crocodile tears.Having a PhD does not make you infallible. You need to deal with the evidence.

That about sums it up, doesn't it? No matter what evidence we present you will stick to your religious dogmas. What is so stunning about intelligent life emerging in a universe capable of producing intelligent life? The Weak Anthropic Principle is just that, weak. Where did you show that anything has been tuned by a deity. Another irony meter explodes.

And yet you aren't pointing to God. You are pointing to the Bible. The problem is that the person who adheres to the dogma will never know if they are wrong. If I find someone who was a christian and became an atheist, would that convince you? How so?

As you have already shown, no evidence is good enough. We have the transitional fossils, and yet you run away from them. If there is a Leprechaun, that Leprechaun is not the Leprechaun of religion, but the Leprechaun of reality.Does that argument convince you that Leprechauns are real? If not, why would you think it is a convincing argument for God?

Revisionist history indeed. You are using the modern usage of the word to make Darwin say things he was not saying. Nowhere in Origin of Species does it even talk about races of humans, as in black, asian, etc. Races simply meant species or subspecies of any type.Also, nowhere did Darwin propose that we should kill off or sterilize humans that we deem to be less fit. You might as well claim that Newton's Laws of Gravity tell us to push people off of tall buildings to make them fall.

The gull species do not interbreed, making them separate species. We can observe these gulls going through macroevolution (i.e. speciation) in real time.Time after time you ask for observations which we then supply. That is followed by you retreating and claiming that it isn't evidence afterall. The truth of the matter is that you have no clue what the evidence is, and are coming to the hard realization that the evidence is stacked against you.You have two choices. Continue to shut your eyes and follow a dogma that requires you to surrender logic and reason, or be like millions of other christians and accept science for what it is. Your choice.

I am merely showing that humans and fish sharing a common ancestor and remaining vertebrates meets your criteria for what we should see in biology. You are the one who is making the claims about gulls remaining gulls, etc.Also, I have already shown you how macroevolution is falsifiable. All you need to do is show us obvious and numerous violations of the nested hierarchy in complex life. With evolution, we should see a nested hierarchy. Not so with a common designers. A common designer is free to mix and match design units as the designer sees. Even when humans design organisms we regularly violate the nested hierarchy where we move DNA from one species to a very distantly related species. That interpretation doesn't explain the nested hierarchy. Evolution does. That is why evolution is preferred, because it explains one of the most pervasive observations in biology whereas common design does not. So says the person who has ruled out evolution from the very start.

The only hype is coming from you. You are trying to put words in Darwin's mouth. What biological concepts? Nowhere in the theory of evolution or in Darwin's works does it say that we should kill or sterilize people that we deem less fit. Like I said before, you might as well blame Newton for Nazi's throwing Jews off of tall buildings. Where did he say that we should commit genocide to rid ourselves of these subspecies?