Does everything evolve at the same rate?

See, here is another thing. How is there such a strong belief in evolution if the best mutation you can think of is the sickle cell disease. It just blows my mind. Yes! Africans are getting the sickle cell disease. So they may no longer get malaria. Sure, it stops one problem, and starts another. While malaria may be worse, it still stops one problem, and starts another. I do not see that as evolution. I wish you could have a more solid example than sickle cell disease. Since there is so much evidence, you shouldnt have to pick a disease.Edited by romajc, : No reason given.

As for my example of the splitting of species and bringing them back together. It is actually something we could test over hundreds and thousands of years. I can have a more solid belief that they would change greatly in the new climates but still be able to reproduce. Because it has to do with something I see going on today, which is natural selection.But evolution, while you may say it is a scientific theory that most everything we find seems to agree on. Yea right. Who are you kidding? Evolution was a made up theory. And now, any time evolutionist make new discoveries, they fit it into the evolution belief. Which is why the evolution belief is forever changing. No matter what the dictionary meaning is for theory, I wouldnt call something that just keeps changing over and over a theory. The reason, I think, evolution keeps changing over the years is because everytime something happens that proves a PART of evolution wrong, they change it around so it fits.This is why I think that evolutionist fit their findings into evolution. It doesnt just fit by itself.

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Evolution was a made up theory.

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Maybe you could take a look at my Evolution Simplified thread. Evolution is not only consistent with what we observe in the world around us, but according to what we know about the world around us life must evolve.Of course that doesn't mean that life did evolve in the past, but fortunately we have a lot of good evidence that it did evolve.These are tremendous problems for creationists. The only thing that we know of that can prevent evolution would be the lack of enough time for it to occur; but the evidence that we have pretty much unequivocably shows that there has been enough time, and that evolution has occurred.

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"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the same sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."
-- H. L. Mencken (quoted on Panda's Thumb)

That in a nutshell is why science works. Things that don't change to accommodate new evidence simply remain wrong. That's the problem with Biblical Creationism. It is built on myths that were wrong when they were first proposed and are still wrong today.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Why not? Why do you think it's so unreasonable that, as our ability to measure and observe things about the universe increases, we would have to adjust our explanations?I mean, to suit you, scientists would have to get it absolutely right, the first time. Take disease, for instance. The microscope wasn't invented until the 1700's, but diseases have been plaguing humans for all of history. To satisfy you, cavemen would have had to develop a full-fledged model of microbiology with absolutely no reason to believe it was true.Does that really seem reasonable to you? Does it really seem so unreasonable that, for instance, our models of epidemiology had to change when technology allowed us to see tiny organisms we had never seen before, but had been there all along?Why does changing your mind in the face of new information seem so unreasonable to you? Why would that be wrong? Who told you that you don't get to change your mind about stuff when you learn new things?

Either you're under the age of 12, or science education in the Florida school system is much worse than I thought.You have it completely backwards.Evolution is the fact, not the theory. Life forms are changing all around us every generation. We can see that. It becomes a question of 'by what mechanism' are they changing. Here is where the 'theories' come in. Natural selection is one of those theories, but not the only one by any means. It explains some forms of change, but not all. Other theories of evolutionary change include genetic drift and sexual selection.If you accept natural selection as a mechanism of change, you have already accepted evolution. Now you just have to understand how it works. There are a lot of people here that could help you with that, but you're going to have to keep an open mind and relinquish those predetermined misconceptions so you can reason properly.(AbE: We don't ask that you abandon your religious convictions - only that you check them at the door - and PLEASE, pick them up on the way out.)Edited by EZscience, : No reason given.

Do you have any idea what you are talkibng about? Is this the level of your argument. You ask for an example and when you are given one instead of addressing it you flap your hands and tell me to pick up another one? How would I choose the 'best' mutation, I would have thought that the 'best' mutation in this sort of debate would be one which has been extensively studied as the mutation causing SCA has. It is not my choice that vast amounts of research have been directed towards mutations involved in disease, but I don't see why I should forgoe that resource simply because you have an aesthetic objection to disease. Are you really so naive that you think that people put more research into looking for theoretically interesting mutations which allow people to reproduce slightly more often than into mutations which severely debilitate or kill? If you look in the Beneficial Mutations Made Simple thread you will see some other examples which help to prevent atherosclerosis and heart disease, again medically relevant mutations. That is your problem. You obviously have some wierd cat giving birth to dog version of evolution in your head. Surely it doesn't take a genius to work out that studying populations in the timescales available to humans is never going to allow you to directly observe the evolution of complex developed systems in a population other than of bacteria perhaps.You haven't shown any way in wich sickle cell anaemia is not a solid example. Perhaps you should focus on that rather than moaning and prevaricating.TTFN,WK

Uh huh, because the research councils are just waiting to fund a grant for a 10,000 year research project. Why not just look at already extant studies on the development of reproductive isolation in experimetal populations such as drosophila, there you will see instances of both the outcome with interbreeding and without.TTFN,WK

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It is actually something we could test over hundreds and thousands of years.

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Uh huh, because the research councils are just waiting to fund a grant for a 10,000 year research project.

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Not only that, but judging from the posts I read on this board, that is well beyond the attention span of most of our creationist comrades.

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"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the same sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."
-- H. L. Mencken (quoted on Panda's Thumb)

yes evolution is a made up theory ... all theories are they are made up by the scientic workers in the relavent field.. the are then put to the test , to see if predictions based upon the theory are correct , a theory is a work in progress , its not a law , theories all change as new data arises , as new methods arise , and when definative proof that a theory is wrong it is discarded and a new theory will arise to see if it can be proven .are you claiming that changes invalidates evolution , if so why ?
and do you think we can take that as a general rule that any change invalidates any theory ?

Perhaps the CCR5-delta-32 mutation meets your requirements.If you have two copies of the mutation you are effectively immune from HIV/AIDS and if you have one you tend to have delayed progression to AIDS.I'd call that a pretty good mutation.

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Never put off until tomorrow what you can put off until the day after

In regards to the first post, I have pondered a similar thought. (I am not anti-evolution, I just have a few problems with it.)Why does evolution not proceed as one would expect a slow acting process to? I mean, Why are there no elephants with wings and lighter bone structures? (Extream example.)Evolution is supposed to effect all living things right? It should be staggered. Right now there should be an animal halfway between it's origional species and a new species. All we seem to have is variations due to adaptation.The theory of evolution borrows the fact of adaptation, because it would be a neccisarry step in evolution. But evolution is a compleate changeover from one animal to another. No matter how much time evolution takes, we should have at least one of the thousands of animals today that are obviously transitional.(I am positive that this is going to be misread, mostly due to the fact that I am enjoying a bit of scotch at the moment, lol.)

Can you explain more ?

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Why does evolution not proceed as one would expect a slow acting process to? I mean, Why are there no elephants with wings and lighter bone structures? (Extream example.)

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I don't see a connection between the speed of the process and the result. Or why elephants should be evolving in that direction or not.

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Evolution is supposed to effect all living things right? It should be staggered. Right now there should be an animal halfway between it's origional species and a new species. All we seem to have is variations due to adaptation.

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What's the difference ? It's accumulating variables due to adaption that are supposed to produce new species. And how exactly could you tell if a specimen were "halfway between it's original species and a new species" or just showing "variations due to adaptation" ?

Do you mean you would expect to see a 'finer granularity' in the existing species? For example (probably bad) not only elephants and rhinos, but maybe a couple of hundred different creatures that can be situated somewhere between them?

No, we should not have at least one. We should have all of them. And we do. Please, read this.But before you do, I'd like to point out a slight problem with the phrase "obviously transitional". If an animal is obviously transitional, it could mean either of two things: 1. that you know where a species is going, evolutionarily speaking; 2. that the animal you see looks "unfinished".Knowing where evolution is going is impossible, so we can rule out number 1. As for number 2, imagine you're back in the sixties, admiring a beautiful car. You know what cars in the roaring twenties looked like and this car definitely looks more advanced. But does it look unfinished? Does it have half a spoiler? Or a non-functional turbo-charger? Of course not, these are the sixties and cars are better than ever.Now come back to the present and see what cars are like in 2006. All of a sudden, the sixties car is "obviously" a transitional between the cars of the twenties and present cars. With hindsight, it looks like a transitional.But at all times, cars look like finished products.Now, translate that back to the animals you see around you. Do you get the picture?Edited by Parasomnium, : Spelling.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.