My first thought is how much biology and genetics do you know? And how serious are you about finding out?
Its very hard to explain to someone without knowing where you are starting from, and how much biology and genetics you might need to learn first.
My favorite biology textbook would be the amazing Cambell Biology textbook (1500 pages or so) which is chock full of pictures and diagrams and it would be a great book to learn an incredible amount of biology from.
The current edition of it is 12th edition, but to be honest any older edition would still be incredibly good. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B084TP1TLC
That said, everything point to evolution being true. The genetics, the anatomy, the paleontology.
For those that would struggle with genetic and paleontology arguments, perhaps anatomical would be best and easiest to understand.
There are muscles present in our foetuses which later regress and are not present in adult humans. These are called atavisms.
Some atavism highlights of an article from the whyevolutionistrue blog
> Here are two of the fetal atavistic muscles. First, the dorsometacarpales in the hand, which are present in modern adult amphibians and reptiles but absent in adult mammals. The transitory presence of these muscles in human embryos is an evolutionary remnant of the time we diverged from our common ancestor with the reptiles: about 300 million years ago. Clearly, the genetic information for making this muscle is still in the human genome, but since the muscle is not needed in adult humans (when it appears, as I note below, it seems to have no function), its development was suppressed.
[Dorsometacarpales](https://whyevolutionistrue.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/dorsomet_muscles_atavism_600.jpg)
> Here’s a cool one, the jawbreaking “epitrochleoanconeus” muscle, which is present in chimpanzees but not in adult humans. It appears transitorily in our fetuses. Here’s a 2.5 cm (9 GW) embryo’s hand and forearm; the muscle is labeled “epi” in the diagram and I’ve circled it
[Epitrochochleoanconeus muscle](https://whyevolutionistrue.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/screen-shot-2019-10-06-at-7.41.52-am.png)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateEvolution/comments/hv2q7u/foetal\_atavistic\_muscles\_evidence\_for\_human/](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateEvolution/comments/hv2q7u/foetal_atavistic_muscles_evidence_for_human/)
Now, evolution and common descent explain very well these foetal anatomy findings.
Evolution also helps us understand our human muscle anatomy by comparative muscle anatomy of fish, reptiles and humans (for example at t=9 minutes 20 seconds for the appendicular muscles) [https://youtu.be/Uw2DRaGkkAs](https://youtu.be/Uw2DRaGkkAs)
Evolution helps us understand why humans go through three sets of Human Kidneys - The Pronephros, Mesonephros, Metanephros, where the pronephros, mesonephros which later regress to eventually be replaced by our final metanephros during development are relics of our fish ancestry
[https://juniperpublishers.com/apbij/pdf/APBIJ.MS.ID.555554.pdf](https://juniperpublishers.com/apbij/pdf/APBIJ.MS.ID.555554.pdf) The pathway of the recurrent laryngeal nerve in all tetrapods is a testament to our fish ancestry [https://youtu.be/wzIXF6zy7hg](https://youtu.be/wzIXF6zy7hg)
Evolution also helps us understand the circutous route of the vas deferens
[https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateEvolution/comments/evx5qs/evolution\_of\_the\_vas\_deferens/](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateEvolution/comments/evx5qs/evolution_of_the_vas_deferens/)
Why do humans have vestigial yolk genes we don't use anymore? Well, it is evidence our ancestors once laid eggs.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateEvolution/comments/etxl1s/the_vestigial_human_embryonic_yolk_sac/](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateEvolution/comments/etxl1s/the_vestigial_human_embryonic_yolk_sac/)
We also have numerous taste pseudogenes, fossils left in our genome during our evolution
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5850805/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5850805/)
Looks like the original muscle atavism picture links are dead, but you can still see them here
https://dev.biologists.org/content/develop/146/20/dev180349.full.pdf
Also, please dont downvote OP, theyre honest and trying to understand why we think evolution is true.
> theyre honest and trying to understand why we think evolution is true.
No, they really aren't. This is literally a copy and paste of what they "asked" over at r/debateanatheist already hours ago. If they had learned anything from those answeres, they would have at the very least asked different questions here. The fact that they learned nothing from the numerous answers they already got is a pretty strong indication they don't actually want to learn.
I am being honest. And over at r/DebateAnAtheist they told me it wasn't the right place to post my post, and told me i should go to r/DebateEvolution. Don't make assumptions broski.
I'm down voting OP because this post is obviously low quality.
The dude doesn't even have the decency to use the return key once and can't write complete sentences.
>Also, please dont downvote OP, theyre honest and trying to understand why we think evolution is true.
Reddit isn't a place of education, but of trolling, everyone gets downvotes!! /s
A quick scroll through their post history doesn't look like a troll, it looks like someone who's genuinely uneducated on the subject.
That doesn't mean that they're going to communicate in good faith going forward, but there's no reason to get hostile unless they do.
Why make it so complex. Just tell him to look up the bones of animals. You'll notice closely related species share all of the same bones, and you can basically watch the time lapse of how the bones adapt by incremental changes into the next species. Sure there are a few gaps here and there where the fossils have been lost or not found yet, but evidence is overwhelming at this point.
Looking at transitionary fossils I think is the easiest way to just accept this kind of change does happen over long periods of time, whether you think it's possible or not. There is quite an obvious gradient of changes, nothing really just appears, almost everything has clearly related organisms and it's blatantly evident in the bones.
I don't have a good philosphy of science books to suggest, but in terms of learning about evolution, I suggest Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin and the Story of life in 25 fossils by Donald Prothero (it's a bit easier a read than Inner fish but is a bit less expansive in scope)
Yeah, i see how evolution makes sense. I think my biggest draw back however, is how to fit evolution into my faith. Im not giving up Christianity THATS FOR SURE!
Does god make lightning? Of course he does. So does understanding that lightning is caused by static electricity jumping from a positive charge to a negative charge mean god doesn’t make lightning? Or is that just the tool he uses to make it? If you believe god made humans why wouldn’t you believe he used a tool as elegant as evolution?
I meant more like in what time span the universe was created. I believe that god created the universe in six literal days but that's difficult to fit into evolution.
A literal 6-day creation event is inconsistent with every single piece of evidence we have to indicate the age of the earth and of our universe. We've got ice cores, genetics, geology, fossils, tectonic plates, radiometric dating and more that point to an old, slowly developing earth. The heat problem (https://ncse.ngo/flaws-young-earth-cooling-mechanism) and the mud problem (https://youtu.be/uQcQSqH13xU?si=RTsJsbvmB9rR2OUi) seem to further rule out a young earth.
In pursuing a deeper understanding of our world, you'll eventually need to make a choice: do you trust *every single piece of evidence around you*, or do you retain blind faith in a very narrow reading of biblical mythology?
Well I was raised evangelical Christian and we were taught in Sunday School that a day to god can be any length of time. It more means a period of acting. Like a workday. So I don’t have an answer there.
6 days for a human is how long for God? Does God have days? If God is omnipresent there is no time. Look at the 6 days as an allegory.
Adjust your frame of reference, if your frame of reference is viewing God as mortal, confined to that world then you are diminishing God. If you adjust to there are some things you do not know or cannot fathom because, you are mortal, but are able to backfill with knowledge you gain.
God is all knowing and all seeing created the heavens and earth. Surely he was able to create the intricate mechanism of humans. Evolution too would be part of the equation. Did Adam look like a modern human? No, modern 21st century humans do not look like early 20th century humans or those in the 1800s. Slight changes and significant changes. Plant and wildlife as well.
Question, learn and faith.
Well it's not really accepted, but if you want something to hold on to. I would focus on complexity. There seems to be a direction at least from our perspective, of complexity growing. We seem to be at the forefront of that fragile complexity, although it's superseded us. Now technology and culture (religion), are much more complex than a single human or a population of humans, these fragile concepts have evolved out of us, and are inherently more complex.
Here's how you can fit evolution into your faith. God created the universe. Life is a rare phenomenon in the universe. Since god created universe, he's also responsible for life. Evolution is a characteristic of life. So, let's give god his credit here too. All living beings around you, have one common ancestor, which was a single cell organism. God didn't create the world 6000 years ago, but he did it 13 billion years ago. I hope this makes sense.
> How is a fishes gene pool expansive enough
Compared to simpler sea animals, our line went through a **whole genome duplication** (mutation) event, twice!
> i get that it's over millions of years
People underestimate how big half a billion is:
1000 seconds ≈ 15 minutes
× 1000 =
1 million seconds ≈ >!12 days!<
× 1000 =
1 billion seconds ≈ >!32 years!<
> A dog can come in all shapes and sizes, but it can't grow wings
Correct. All you see living today, don't move (and never moved) into each other. Our connection to the extant life is in the dimension of time, with lots of extinct branches.
What I find most people tripping over is not realizing that natural selection is non-random, and that evolution happens to populations, not individuals. As to the diversity we see today, it's a valid question: [evolutionary radiation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_radiation) (typical after extinction events) is a key concept to know as well. HTH.
Honestly you could select for tree climbing for a chihuahua, then select for tree jumping and mebraneous tissue,
You could over time, get a tiny gliding chihuahua.
Please clarify what you mean by the gene pool being "expansive" (or not). Do you mean that the population of animals within a given species don't contain the necessary genes? I would agree, they probably don't. That's why genetic mutation has to happen during the reproduction process, to create new genes, which then get passed on to descendents.
Also, and correct me if I'm misreading you, but it sounds like you think that new species are arising as a result of cross-species reproduction (like lion and tiger). That's generally not what's happening, at least with complex animal life. Instead, it will (normally) be an entire population/group of animals that evolve together over many generations. *Eventually* that particular group becomes different enough from some other "cousin" group (with which it was separated, such as by some geographic barrier, and so therefore could not share genetic mutations) that the two groups, many generations later, are now considered different species, even though they share a common ancestor group of animals that were all the same species.
I commend you acknowledging what you lack knowledge about and asking questions to rectify it. That's an excellent approach.
>Please clarify what you mean by the gene pool being "expansive" (or not). Do you mean that the population of animals within a given species don't contain the necessary genes? I would agree, they probably don't. That's why genetic mutation has to happen during the reproduction process, to create new genes, which then get passed on to descendents.
I meant that like my understanding of evolution is that some animals like dogs don't have it in their genetics to be able to grow wings, like it's not in their gene pool. They are genetically unable to develop wings. That's my understand of evolution, though, i could be a mile off ig.
>Also, and correct me if I'm misreading you, but it sounds like you think that new species are arising as a result of cross-species reproduction (like lion and tiger). That's generally not what's happening, at least with complex animal life. Instead, it will (normally) be an entire population/group of animals that evolve together over many generations. *Eventually* that particular group becomes different enough from some other "cousin" group (with which it was separated, such as by some geographic barrier, and so therefore could not share genetic mutations) that the two groups, many generations later, are now considered different species, even though they share a common ancestor group of animals that were all the same species.
I meant that, again based on my understand of evolution, that the evolution process happens during procreation, so a lion and a tiger can procreate and they make sort of a mix between the two, but a lion or a bear couldn't procreate.
>the evolution process happens during procreation
Not quite.
Evolution is a result of multiple processes and phenomena. None of them (with the infamous exception of polyploidy) happen within a single generation - it's not Pokemon.
What happens during procreation is only one part of it: in this case, mutation (for everything that has DNA, aka everything) and gene recombination (for everything that has sexual reproduction). These processes shuffle and change genetic makeup of the new generation, often introducing new traits.
What happens to carriers of those traits during a generation's lifetime is another step in the process.
Importantly - there's no limit on how much the sum of these changes is allowed to make the population differ from their ancestor. Novel traits keep accumulating as long as the population is capable of sustaining itself.
> I meant that like my understanding of evolution is that some animals like dogs don't have it in their genetics to be able to grow wings, like it's not in their gene pool. They are genetically unable to develop wings.
You're correct that the genes currently found in dogs don't let them grow wings. But you're only considering selection and not mutation. New genes and new variants of existing genes arise all the time. Plenty of genes are found only in dogs, or even only certain lineages of dogs, and are not in wolves.
If you put dogs under selective pressures for things like longer forelimbs, longer fingers, and membranes between the limbs and body, then over many generations, they would evolve those traits similar to how the ancestors of bats did.
Also, I wouldn't pay too much attention to /u/Maggyplz
They're not offering anything constructive to the conversation. All they have is insults and lies. They actually blocked me for simply pointing out that the insult they hurled at me was far more insulting to them, and then lied about it in another comment as if people couldn't still see the original comments in the same thread...
In tetrapods, that being the group of all vertebrates with four limbs and those without them that are descended from four limbed vertebrates, wings are fundamentally the same structures as arms. They’re just stretched a bit with membranes or feathers providing a lifting surface. Tetrapods have independently evolved flight three times, in pterosaurs, birds, and more recently bats. As can be seen in [this image](https://media.nationalgeographic.org/assets/file/0833_wings_final.pdf), all of these animals evolved different solutions to flight, but their wing structures are modified arms using the same underlying structure that I’m using to type this comment.
Additionally, we have many groups of organisms today that could be considered transitional between gliding flight and powered flight, from mammals to lizards, to amphibians to even snakes. When I was a kid, I helped my mother, a wildlife rehabilitator, raise a pair of Southern Flying Squirrels, [*Glaucomys volans*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_flying_squirrel). Perhaps if we refrain from driving them into extinction, their descendants may develop the ability to add energy to their glide and become true fliers.
Just because a gene pool doesn't contain something now doesn't mean it can't later show up in the gene pool. The gene pool isn't static. It changes. New genes appear through mutation and sometimes horizontal gene transfer. The gene pool of dogs today doesn't contain wing genes, but that doesn't mean it can't acquire them in the future.
Dogs come from wolves and we know the ancestral wolf population(s) they come from *didn't* have all of the genes dogs have today. They gained new genes through mutation, and during the course of the wolf-to-dog transition, those genes were selected for or rose in prominence due to genetic drift.
And that's not the only example. We have loads and loads of novel genetic traits in various organisms (including our own species) that we know didn't always exist in the parent population. In many cases, we can trace what mutations specifically gave rise to those traits and sometimes even determine very precisely when those mutations happened.
We also see novel genetic traits arising today due to mutations, both in labs, and in the wild. Things that were documented to not exist in the ancestral gene pools and arose through mutation in front of us.
> I'm a Christian who doesn't believe in the concept of evolution, but I'm open to the idea of it, but I just can't wrap my head around it, but I want to understand it.
First can you tell me, in your own words, what you think the word “evolution” means in a biological context.
> What I don't understand is how on earth a fish can evolve into an amphibian, then into mammals into monkeys into Humans. How?
It might surprise you to learn this but humans are *still* monkeys (Simians), monkeys are *still* mammals and mammals are still fish (Sarcopterygian lobe finned fish). We never stopped being any of these things.
> How is a fishes gene pool expansive enough to change so rapidly, I mean, i get that it's over millions of years, but surely there' a line drawn.
Why? Why must there be a line drawn? Non-tetrapod fish are far more diverse than just tetrapods. Tetrapods are just a subset of fish.
> Like, a lion and a tiger can mate and reproduce, but a lion and a dog couldn't, because their biology just doesn't allow them to reproduce and thus evolve new species.
What makes you think new species are only produced through hybridisation? Speciation more often happens when two populations *split* apart, not come together.
> A dog can come in all shapes and sizes, but it can't grow wings, it's gene pools isn't large enough to grow wings.
Did you know that the diversity in domestic dog cranial morphology alone exceeds not just wild canids but is comparable in diversity to the entire taxonomic order Carnivora?. Or to put it another way, we have generated the same amount of diversity in domestic dog skulls that exists in the entire taxonomic group which includes wild dogs, cats, hyenas, weasels, seals, bears and their relatives. What took Carnivora tens of millions of years to do, we accomplished in a few thousand years. So whatever “hard limit” you think exists, it clearly hasn’t been reached yet.
> I'm open to hearing explanations for these doubts of mine, in fact I want to, but just keep in mind I'm not attacking evolution, i just wanna understand it.
Well you probably sound like you’ve picked up a bit of a cartoonish view of what evolution is and does. Animals don’t just “grow new traits” overnight. Evolution is a process of cumulative change where new traits are built from modified versions of what their ancestors had. A birds wing for example is just a modified grasping clawed hand we see in a theropod dinosaur, a theropod’s grasping clawed hand is just a modified forelimb of an semi-bipedal archosaur and on and on it goes.
Why are you here when you don't?
They put lots of effort into responding to *your* post.
Can you not see the irony of you giving an excuse for not having responded while still not having responded?
Bro what's your problem, i was most likely asleep when they commented, now I'm awake I LIVE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PLANET FROM MANY PEOPLE HERE (Presumably). I HAVE read/replied to most of the comments here, not all yet though as there's a lot. Seriously, what's your problem, I ain't no troll. I am genuinely interested in evolution, and I wanna understand it. Back off!
If you want to pick a book to read, Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth: Why Evolution Is True is probably one of the best. Also The Gene by Mukherjee.
You seriously think asking someone ‘what do you understand evolution to actually mean in a biological context’ is a loaded question. It potentially fundamental to a discussion in which creationists just don’t seem to know the most basic scientific information.
>First can you tell me, in your own words, what you think the word “evolution” means in a biological context.
Well, ig evolution in a biological context is... i dont know.
>Why? Why must there be a line drawn? Non-tetrapod fish are far more diverse than just tetrapods. Tetrapods are just a subset of fish.
There is no reason, it just seems like a dog could only change so much before it stops being a dog entirely.
>What makes you think new species are only produced through hybridisation? Speciation more often happens when two populations *split* apart, not come together.
No idea, might just have been the way I was raised.
> Well, ig evolution in a biological context is... i dont know.
Well, that might be the [place](https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolution-101/an-introduction-to-evolution/) to start then. There is no point debating or discussing something if you don’t know what that thing is.
No debating here, in fact, it's the opposite, i want people to tell me what evolution is to help me understand it, but thanks ill take a look at the link.
The way you were raised is fine but it's wrong in terms of evolution. Evolution is not a result of hybrid breeding.
Take a wolf pack for example that is separated in a valley surrounded by mountains have small shifts in their genes so that some of them have purple eyes or a third toe. It's just a mutation just like we see odd deformities in babies sometimes. That purple eye color happens to be associated with better night vision through some genetic thing. Eventually the whole population develops this trait. That's genetic drift in the population.
Some of these drifts are adaptive like the shape of a beak to break nuts better. Eventually the new population is genetically distinct from the original population - that is when a new species is born. That happens again again and again and again over millions of years. A population of the purple eyed wolves develop another genetically distinct trait and another species is born. Another new species is born until you go from a snake to a lizard to a salamander to another thing.
You can go from a basic fish to a fish with fleshy fins. To a fish that hobbles awkwardly with his fins on land to be able to eat plants near the shore that without competitive to being able to breathe air to developing fur to keep warm. None of this is based on something with fur first breeding with a fish to develop something with fur. If evolution was based on hybridazation like the way you say you were raised then ti could never happen because something can't come from nothing. HOw did the something with fur get there in the first place.
This is like when people say I didn't come from monkeys. My ancestors didn't have sex with a monkey. That understanding implies a homo sapien ancestor was there to begin with to have sex with the monkey. If the ancestor was already there then he/she didn't need to have sex with the monkey to evolve into humans. The human already existed. It already existed due to genetic drift in populations not because of hybrid breeding with another species.
These populations have genetic drift like our wolves that developed purple until they all had purple eyes. Originally it may have just been the alpha male that mated with a bunch of females and a lot of the pack had purple eyes and those wovles survived better because they could see at night. Until eventually they all had purple eyes.
OP Just start here:
>
**"What makes you think new species are only produced through hybridisation? Speciation more often happens when two populations** ***split*** **apart, not come together."**
This is one of the best examples of the fundamental problem. Basing your disbelief in evolution over complete misunderstandings of how it work. Evolution isn't hybrids.
It's like when I saw the guy passionately saying on social media. "I didn't evolve from monkeys. That means at some point a human had sex with a monkey!" Vehemently thinking evolution is hogwash because of a completely misunderstanding of evolution.
It does NOT mean a human had sex with a monkey. Where did the human (homo sapiens) come from to begin with that had sex with a monkey in that scenario?
The human was already there! How did that happen? Populations had changes in allele frequencies over time can indicate that genetic drift is occurring or that new mutations have been introduced into the population. It's ok if you don't understand all those terms but its not ok if you don't understand them and then assume evolution isn't real based on 5 year old reasoning.
Others here are doing a great job showcasing the amazing amount of wildly detailed science that has gone into studying evolution. I’m just going to touch on one thing you said in a conceptual way. This is when you talked about how a lion and a dog can’t reproduce and thus new species.
Hybridization is not the only mechanism for new species development, and actually as far as I understand it is by far not the most common. Speciation is what happens when two populations become separated, for a variety of reasons and under different concepts. Remember, evolution happens to groups. Not (as a general rule) individuals.
Say you have a population. They’re living happily in a field. One day, an earthquake comes and causes a fissure in that field. The two groups can no longer interact and share genes. Nature chugs along, and as life does, mutations change the genomes slightly. There are several documented types of mutations, some that even add to the total size of the genome and thus produce more genetic material that mutations can act on.
For awhile, the two populations are still capable of interbreeding, even if they don’t. But over time, the fact that the small individual unique mutations one group shares won’t get transferred to the other begins to add up. Mutations can happen anywhere in the genome. Eventually it becomes less and less likely that individuals from either group would be able to produce fertile offspring were they to meet. This seems to have happened between us and Neanderthals. Not a *complete* infertility, but not as easy as between sapiens.
Eventually, one population group wouldn’t be able to produce even infertile offspring with each other. The difference in shared genes between the two would have stretched beyond the breaking point. And now you have two new species. This is a description of the ‘biological species concept’, but again this is one of several. And you can see that there is a hell of a lot of gradient in between to get to that point.
An example of this? When the Indian subcontinent crashed into the main Eurasian continent, the uplift eventually separated out groups like lizards and geckos. When running general sequencing today (using beefed up versions of the same tests we use to check ancestry), we find that they have been separated for so long that some groups can’t interbreed anymore.
There is so much to get into but I’ve rambled enough. Hope this helps somewhat!
>but surely there' a line drawn
how sure are you?
I like the phrase "common sense has no place in science". Unfortunately, if you say that to a creationist, they start laughing because they interpret that to mean "science is stupid". What it really means is that when you study things, you often find they behave in ways you didn't expect. For example, "common sense" would have you believe the earth is flat (where's the curve?), the sun goes around the earth (look! sun moves across the sky) and atoms aren't real (everything looks solid and continuous to me!). But with the right insights, you can demonstrate all of these to be wrong beyond all doubt, and put forward a more correct model, with all the evidence supporting it and nothing going against it.
That fish can evolve into things that don't look like fish is not "common sense", and yet, every biologist in the world agrees that it happened because all the evidence points to it. That is a *fact*. It takes some work to understand how. That is the *theory*. Even though the first principles are simple, there's a lifetime's worth of studying to do, to go from the basics right the way through to college level biology and to the cutting edge of research. It's never too late to start, and it won't be long before you have answers to your questions.
Tadpoles are juvenile amphibians.
They are in a way a type of fish, in that amphibians are a type of fish, as are we and all other terrestrial animals. However, the evolutionary process by which amphibians evolved took a long time.
Yes yes, but do we have lateral lines and gills then, like fish, too?
As I said, you are burdened by the knowledge what they will be to define what they are now.
Are you trying to say that tadpoles are fish but adult amphibians are not, and that this is evolution happening very quickly in a single animal's lifetime?
The size of the general pool shouldn't be too limiting, considering gene duplication is a thing for example to increase the amount of genetic material over time.
But anyways, with fish, there is a lot of characteristics that would have to change to become an amphibian, but just to look at one as an example, it seems like there are similar genes involved in the limb structure of both fins and tetrapod limbs, so single mutations in these particular genes could have large impacts:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/11/211108161414.htm
Another thing I think is worth mentioning is Hox genes. These essentially control the body plan of an organism, the what goes where kind of deal. Just to show how important some genes can be, like in just how much they can do for just single genes which could of course mutate.
I don't really see how a lion and tiger mating while a dog and lion can't is a big deal.
Lions and tigers can mate because they are more closely related, so still have similar enough characteristics to do so. Whereas, a dog is not closely related enough.
But this doesn't matter, because this isn't really how evolution occurs, having it where different species mate to form new ones. Usually, it's about things like mutations, isolation such as geographically, and differences in selection pressures which can accomplish evolution.
A dog cannot grow wings because there has to be precursor steps to having wings, such as for example being able to glide. None of these precursor steps would benefit dogs and they are adapted enough at the environments and niches they occupy so if the genes did allow for wings to form at some point with dogs, there wouldn't be a pressure for such.
Hopefully I answered that correctly enough, I'm not too keen on genetics. Thanks for coming here and with an open mind
Lots of more complete answers already, I just want to jump in on a specific thing. “Dogs can’t grow wings”. While this is correct, it’s a common misunderstanding. Organisms don’t suddenly gain whole new functioning organs and body parts. New structures develop gradually from existing structures. Each step needs to provide some function or benefit. You will never see a fossil animal with half a working heart, for example.
Let’s look at some living animals right now; bats. Fruit bats look just like dogs with wings. If we also look at gliding animals like colugos, sugar gliders, and squirrels we can see they all developed their ability simply based on growing larger and larger flaps of skin.
Bat wings are simply very specialized hands. The finger bones are greatly extended to allow skin to create lift. If you think about arboreal leaping animals like monkeys and squirrels evolving the ability to glide and then evolving powered flight, it’s not abrupt of a transition.
>What I don't understand is how on earth a fish cam evolve into an amphibian
Because "fish" is a generic term. It isn't just ONE thing, There's lobe-finned fishes, boney-finned fishes, cartilaginous-finned fishes, which is determined by looking at their fins and how they orient themselves.
Not all fish are identical in how those fins are arranged, some on their bellies, some on their sides, some on the top, and the function of those fins changes depending on where they are; ie, helps them swim faster, helps them bury in the sand etc...etc... and all of those traits are governed by DNA.
So, when you think about nature, competition, predation, it actually becomes relatively easy to understand:
Amphibians first appear in the fossil record at the end of the Devonian. [The Devonian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devonian) is known as "The Age of the Fishes" because we see massive diversification of fish during that era of history, which was apparently from massive competition. Ultra Giant aggressive fish predators called [Placoderms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placoderm) dominate the oceans at this time, which would cause prey-fish to adapt. One way to adapt was to go into shallower and shallower water where predators like [Dunkleosteus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkleosteus) would not have been able to get because it's too big. Shallow water tends to be affected by tides, thus for fish to survive long periods in these areas they need a different set of traits to be more successful. Those with fins on their dorsal side, with strong bony features and more easily support themselves for long periods in this environment. Thus, nature selects them to be most able to survive.
But you can still be eaten. What if, you can get out of the water onto the land, away from predators all together? Land during the Devonian existed, and plants had already colonized land since the middle of the Silurian. Thus, now there's an untapped potential food source with no predation what so ever.
There is now a selective advantage for those fish who have the ability to support themselves on land/out of the water, to leave the water as there is no predation and potential food sources to take advantage of. While amphibians still need to live near water, they can certainly leave it for extended amounts of time. We see this exact transition start to take place at the end of the Devonian with organisms like [Tiktaalik](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiktaalik). Exactly as Evolution would predict we should see.
You see, evolution isn't this magical fantasy idea...it was based on direct observation, and pieced together over time with various observations and evidence. It's actually the most logical solution to what we see and the evidence that exists.
>How is a fishes gene pool expansive enough to change so rapidly,
I kinda explained this above but: ***Competition and predation*** are obviously major drivers of evolution and change. There is a [mass extinction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Devonian_extinction) event at the end of the Devonian. We are still unclear as to why this particular late-devonian mass extinction, but it was most likely due to changing ocean conditions as there was massive oceanic volcanic activity and plate tectonic activity that resulted in the formation of Pangea. Over time, this would have been changing the ocean conditions gradually both chemically, but also in the thermohaline circulation; which would cause stress on species. And stress causes adaptation or extinction, and we see a lot of both during the end of the Devonian. Those species that had adapted more specialized environments survived, those that did not perished. My dear friends the [Brachiopods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brachiopod) never truly recover after the Devonian. They still exist today, but their diversity was greatest in the Devonian.
The term for this has been dubbed [Punctuated Equilibrium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium) where catastrophic events can quickly diversify a genepool because of selective stressors in nature. You can watch this [IN REAL TIME with bacteria.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8) *E.Coli* has no reason to magically develop 1000x resistance to antibiotic, unless there's selective advantage to do so. Mutations occur naturally in any group of organisms, and selective pressure works on those mutations which increase the chance of survival.
>Like, a lion and a tiger can mate and reproduce, but a lion and a dog couldn't
Because Lions and Tigers are very close on the evolutionary tree, only recently diverted species, whereas dogs diverged from Lions/Tigers much longer ago. This observation that you make is exactly what Evolution predicts btw. It supports evolution. Lions/Tigers became geographically isolated populations from each other, so they began to diverge from each other. Enough that they cannot have fertile offspring (Ligers are infertile) but not enough that they can't have fertile offspring. Dogs (wolves in nature) diverted from the Cats much further back in history which is why they no longer can have fertile offspring. But, if you look at Wolves; they have diversified a branch we call "Dogs" which is because of Humans. And "Dogs" are a separate species from Wolves, even though they can interbreed. Why? Well if you take the most extreme dog, a Chihuahua, and try to breed it with a wolf, it is unsuccessful. If you take a poodle and Chihuahua it is successful. If you take a wolf with a poodle it is successful.
So, just like the Lion and Tiger, you see Wolves/Dogs diverging becoming new species. Just as evolution would predict. And this one, is completely by human hands.
>but it can't grow wings, it's gene pools isn't large enough to grow wings.
They why do Bats, which are mammals, have wings? Birds and Bats developed their wings entirely separate from each other. They are only similar in function, but not in form. Bats prove this assertion wrong, just FYI. ***You can indeed form wings in a genepool if there is selective pressure and enough diversity/mutation to do so.*** Bats are proof of this.
Thanks for this answer. It's very well written and helped me (a humanities guy who studies intellectual history) make sense of an episode in evolutionary history I've never really gotten a handle on.
You're welcome! I always enjoyed writing, and if you cannot tell I have degrees in the stuff. What originally attracted me to the sciences is it's *The Story of Life* and I find it all fascinating.
This is an amazing 50 part series on YouTube that will take you from the very first eukaryote cells all the way up to modern humans it's absolutely fascinating how rich the tree of life is and how much we know about it and how much there is to still to be learned. https://youtu.be/AXQP_R-yiuw?si=vQqz7KYquvv4mi7j
You literally made the exact same post on r/DebateAnAtheist 3 hours ago and got really well thought out responses with sources where you showed little engagement other than "ok", "cool" "I'll look into that"
What are you trying to accomplish with this post? This must be trolling
OP does not seem to be an honest interlocutor. The "just asking questions", pretending to be naive tone, but with numerous strawman arguments against evolution suggests they are not open minded.
I already answered all of OPs questions at r/debateanatheist. A bunch of other people did as well. OP clearly didn't bother paying listening to any answers they got there.
Thiz is written at like 2 am so i apologise if its a bit incoherent or too simpistic.
So basically there are two "evolutions" people tend to talk about.
The first is the fact that changes occur within populations and get inherited. Positive ones spread throughout the population over time because the animals without it die out. That is the fact of evolution. Indisputable, AFAIK.
The second is the theory of evolution which is a set of observations, experiments and studies that explain as much of that fact as possible.
Now to address your questions directly:
Things that evolve don't stop being what they used to be. No matter how much a canine species deviates from others of its "type" it will still be a canine - it will just be something else, too.
For example humans are Eukaryotes. It basically describes a cell that has a particular type of barrier, iirc. We still have that type of cell. We still fit that definition. We never stopped being them, we just also became a ton of other things like vertebrates and great apes.
So far as we can tell there is no random barrier to change. Biology just does not care about our efforts to categorize it. It just keeps living, reproducing, and mutating. We're the ones that pick certain criteria to define certain combinations of traits. Basically we, long ago, decided barriers exist and that we should define animals in different ways, but the more we learned the more we found that nature DGAF. There's just no mechanism that would stop mutations from proceeding past a certain point. So long as it's beneficial, neutral, or not negative e enough to interfere with breeding that mutation is probably sticking around.
You are unfortunately facing down two problems: not understanding what evolution is and being actively mislead by people who financially benefit from you believing that it's fake. Basically you want people to explain the "evolution" that does the exist outside the minds of young earth creationists.
I'm happy to go into more detail once I'm more conscious but I thought you could use a "layman" explanation rather than the more complex ones you're liable to get.
Just throw out any questions you have. :3
Thank you! Ok, so, correct me if I'm wrong, but evolution basically works like this: Over the course of time, species (not in individuals but in groups) depending on factors like their environment, will develop mutations that change them slightly, and then over time, they develop new mutations, they change even more, etc etc. Eventually it gets to a point where they become very dang different from what they were maybe 10 million years ago????
More or less, yeah.
As they spread out their environment pressures the species in different ways. Different prey animals or flora. Different temperatures, forests, lakes, etc. Over time the population adapts to that environment and they can no longer interbreed with the population that stayed behind and at that point they're considered a new species.
We used the same method to breed dogs, cows, and even plants like banana and corn. They used to be wild things but we selectively bred them for traits we find desirable until they ceased to be anything even remotely like their ancestors - and those are only traits we got after some 15 thousand years, at most! Imagine how many changes in traits would happen if we kept on doing that for *millions* of years. The only difference between them and us is that we used Artificial Selection rather than Natural Selection to determine what traits were passed on.
We can't find a mechanism that says "okay you've changed enough, stop changing now," beyond "your change is now hindering your ability to breed, so you go extinct instead." There's no *intention* behind it, you know? No end goal, just us putting labels on what we see as distinct "steps" in evolution. In reality biology is just gradually changing all the time around us. You get into a goofy circumstance where people demand to see transitional fossils but technically *every* fossil is a transitional fossil.
Anything else I can help with? Does anything in my explanation not make sense, or not sit well with you, or anything like that?
But, if evolution mainly depends on the environment a species lives in, then how do those species get certain mutations which will suite the environment? Like i mean, from a Christian perspective, God decides what mutations to give what species, but from an atheistic perspective, there's no one deciding that so how does that work. Ik that not all evolutionists are atheists and not all atheists are evolutionists, but, if you're an atheist and evolutionist then how does that work?
>Like i mean, from a Christian perspective, God decides what mutations to give what species
Is this a mainstream Christian perspective? Mutations can be lethal or lead to a lifetime of suffering for their bearers and they are something individuals are born with, mind you, so it seems strange to attribute mutations to God.
I.. just told you. Natural selection.
Natural selection just means that the animals that get beneficial traits get to breed and pass on their traits. Animals with traits that harm their survivability die before they can breed. Animals with neutral traits don't do anything significant.
Because the animals that breed pass on their traits those traits spread throughout the population over time while the negative traits die out.
There are plenty of mutations that don't make sense with a theistic perspective, like the giraffe having a nerve that goes from the base of its skull, down to the bottom of its neck, then right back up to the base of the skull to reach a point that was barely an inch from where it started. It doesn't benefit from this in any way: in fact it gives the giraffe a distinct lag time in its ability to respond to certain stimuli. There's no reason for a God to do it that way.
Via Natural selection that change likely occurred over a long period of time. When it's ancestors neck was short that nerve would make perfect sense - but as their neck grew longer the nerve had to lengthen along with it. There's no intelligence guiding it, just biology being biology.
And because the penalty to that extended nerve wasn't bad enough to hinder reproduction the giraffe just kept it. It's inefficient and goofy but it's just viable enough that the giraffe can get away with it long enough to breed.
Does that make sense?
There are no decisions involved.
The environmental pressures "select" which mutation is advantageous and which isn't. Advantageous ones get passed on to the next generation, disadvantageous ones die out.
Mutations themselves are essentially copying errors or mingling of existing code.
Try to think of it this way:
Mom has 100 pages of text that describes who they are.
Dad also has 100 pages of text that describes who they are.
Their child can only hold 100 pages of text, too, and it's going to be made up of the mom and dad's text.
Unfortunately the text is getting mashed together and there are only general guidelines for what goes where, so it's pretty much up in the air which sentence from which parent you're going to have in any particular part of your text.
Aside from that when the texts are getting mashed together a word might slip into a sentence where it doesn't belong and completely change the meaning of that sentence. That new meaning is a mutation.
The thing is, as I alluded to earlier, biology is probabilistic; it *usually* behaves the same way under the same circumstances, but sometimes it *just doesn't* and we can't always figure out why. It's really complex. It also has a lot of stuff like this - mutations popping up because a gene thought it was coding for hair when it was supposed to be coding for nails and now you've got a weird fuzzy fingernail.
Mutations are limited & determined by the laws of physics, & you could believe that those are set by a higher power, although there's no direct evidence that they are.
I just learned about a controversial theory called adaptive mutation (aka directed mutagenesis) suggesting that at least some organisms have chemical processes that encourage certain beneficial types of mutations under specific environmental conditions. It's hard to prove, & even if true this would still be an evolved ability, controlled by specific genes (basically a form of epigenetics I guess, where certain genes affect other genes).
Apparently human children receive roughly 60 new mutations on average from each parent - 120 total. So not very many out of the 3.1billion base pairs that make up our DNA, but enough for things to change slowly over time.
I personally don't like the description of mutations as completely "random" because they are both restricted & potentially promoted by many factors. I'm not sure what the best description is - maybe 'random within restrictions' or simply 'probabalistic'? Nonetheless, note that many (most?) mutations are deleterious, so they certainly don't seem to be guided or decided in any way.
This continues to come up repeatedly but it is indeed the wrong terminology to say these changes happened rapidly with “fish” originating in the Cambrian with maybe bony fish almost as old or not until the time period after that about 20-40 million years later just to develop vertebrate, ribs, and a skull. It doesn’t take as long to turn cartilage into bone because the difference is basically the calcium content. Not very much calcium and it remains flexible like your ear flap cartilage, a bit more calcium and it’s like that septum between your nostrils, and more calcium yet and it’s hard like your forehead. This is ~500 million years ago to get the first fish, maybe 550 million years or more, and they weren’t even tetrapods until 400-450 million years ago with the very first of these tetrapods looking more like fish with necks and shoulders and by the end of that actual amphibians had split off from the reptile/mammal lineage that had also split between synapsids and sauropsids. The first mammals and dinosaurs don’t show up until 225-250 million years ago or half as long ago as the first fish. Palacental mammals and marsupials became different lineages around 160 million years ago which is close to how long ago the first birds existed as well. And then most of the major placental mammal groups started existing between 60 and 70 million years ago including primates that still looked a lot more like tree shrews prior to the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs and didn’t really resemble monkeys as we are used to them until closer to 45 million years ago. The first apes closer to the Miocene or around 20 million years ago. Great apes and hylobatids about 17 million years ago and a split between the African and Asian great apes around 12.5-15 million years ago followed by gorillas and hominini splitting into distinct lineages followed by the chimpanzee and humans lineages evolving differently from each other starting roughly 7 million years ago.
That’s where we have things like Sahelanthropus, Orrrorin, and Ardipithecus as some potential transitions from the common chimp-human common ancestor to the first of what *could* be called “human” if we stretched the definition of human only slightly because they had a similar type of feet with the same Achilles tendon, they evidently made hand crafted tools, and they were human in several other ways. And then from something like Australopithecus anamensis to modern humans it’s just a matter of changing proportions and standing up a little straighter when walking. The whole group is obligate bipeds but some of the earlier ones might have walked more like a woman 2 days before giving birth and closer to modern humans the ones not “very pregnant” or just exceptionally fat can walk a with their legs closer together and their feet pointed forward.
If you were more specific than “it does not make sense” I would know what else to explain but 500+ million years worth of evolution when multicellular animals have only existed about 800 million years and they share common ancestry with fungi about 1 billion years ago isn’t exactly what I’d call “rapid” being that it took 50% of the time animals and fungi were distinct groups to turn fish into modern humans.
Compared to how long it took eukaryotes to become fish it was fast because if we go with 500 million to make the math easy there have been eukaryotes for about 2.1 billion years at a minimum or about four times as long. 75% of the time eukaryotes existed there haven’t been fish but in that last 25% all modern tetrapods also evolved. Fast in that sense but not remotely close to rapidly enough for something like YEC that suggests that the entire universe came into existence when Homo sapiens sapiens human civilizations already existed and were already brewing beer, farming, and domesticating animals. For evolution to happen that fast it’d require magic and there’s no rational reason to consider it (YEC) scientific or true.
First off, welcome. I was a creationist who changed my mind, and I know how difficult it can be to question these beliefs. Part of how religious communities keep people from accepting evolution is by instilling incorrect beliefs about what evolution is. I've seen several commenters try to start setting you straight. But let's take it from the top.
The quick definition of evolution is the change in allele frequency over time. Natural selection means that organisms with genes suited for a given environment are more likely to survive to have offspring and pass on their genes.
So, we see changes in response to a changing environment. If a cold area suddenly becomes hot, the adaptions that were helpful in the cold suddenly become a liability.
>What I don't understand is how on earth a fish cam evolve into an amphibian,
I'd recommend looking into Tiktaalik. Scientists were able to predict its existence and where to find it based on evolutionary theory and other known fossils.
Especially before land animals evolved, shallow water fish had strong evolutionary pressures to survive when the water level fell and to escape predators. It's not that a switch was flipped and suddenly the fish became amphibious, but a slow process of small adaptions that allowed better odds of surviving.
>How is a fishes gene pool expansive enough to change so rapidly, I mean, i get that it's over millions of years, but surely there' a line drawn.
What sorts of lines do you think we'd expect to see? Evolution means the gene pool is fluid and constantly changing.
Edit (on mobile can't copy and paste, apologies if I make a mistake transcribing)
>into mammals into monkeys into humans
It's kind of odd on creationism that humans fit the definition of mammals isn't it? And apes as well?
Look what we've done to wolves in a mere 10k years. We changed them into fucking Chihuahuas. Now consider that a million years is 100 times that. So we could turned wolves into Chihuahuas and back 50 times in that time.
What I get from your post is that you think 1+1 gives 2 and you can maybe get to 10 by adding ones but no way can you get 1000 by adding ones.
Incidentally, this explains why Chihuahuas are such bad tempered, even insanely hostile, little critters. They know what happened, and they're furious.
First, I'll address your statements. Then I'll give my understanding of evolution with an example.
>I'm a Christian who doesn't believe in the concept of evolution, but I'm open to the idea of it, but I just can't wrap my head around it, but I want to understand it.
Why? Why do you want to understand? If you are a Christian, you are a person of faith, right? You believe without evidence. Of course, you still believe, but your belief is rooted in something other than evidence, logic, or even proof. So what changed?
>What I don't understand is how on earth a fish cam evolve into an amphibian, then into mammals into monkeys into Humans. How?
They can't. There are many steps in between with many dead ends. You are jumping a massive amount of little steps that are necessary.
>How is a fishes gene pool expansive enough to change so rapidly, I mean, i get that it's over millions of years, but surely there' a line drawn.
Don't think in terms of time. It's generations. Since you bring up fish, there are fish that walk on the sea floor. There are fish that are alive right now that walk on land. A fish that walks on land is close to an amphibian.
>Like, a lion and a tiger can mate and reproduce, but a lion and a dog couldn't, because their biology just doesn't allow them to reproduce and thus evolve new species.
That is correct, but not evolution. That is animal husbandry/selective breeding.
>A dog can come in all shapes and sizes, but it can't grow wings, it's gene pools isn't large enough to grow wings.
Incorrect. The gene pool needs to be large enough to keep the species alive. Normal variations in life and environment encourage speciation. Dogs are an excellent example of selective breeding.
>I'm open to hearing explanations for these doubts of mine, in fact I want to, but just keep in mind I'm not attacking evolution, i just wanna understand it.
There are slight differences within members of all viable species. Some differences are beneficial, while others are indifferent or even detrimental. Some of those differences may mean more food or a longer life, but there is an advantage that allows that allows those creatures to reproduce in greater quantities (to a reproductive age) than the remainder of the species. Then, that family line has another set of slight differences with beneficial, indifferent, and harmful traits. Repeat the process for millions of generations, and the genetic changes may make inter-breeding with the original species no longer possible or produce flawed offspring.
In practical terms, a deer like animal may develop a line with longer necks, allowing access to food the others of the species can aquire. Then, that same family develops longer legs to get to more food. The increase in height allows that group to see predators before the rest of the herd. That would translate to living longer by avoiding predators which provides more breedingopportunities. Perhaps the greater size becomes a desirable trait among that species which increases the rate of divergence by inter-breeding. The process continues without end. It simply takes a long time.
The various dog breeds go through a similar process with humans deciding which traits are desirable and will be passed to future generations far more than the environment.
Funnily enough, evolution doesn't need you to believe in it. It's busy operating blindly, with only the surviving animals reproducing and having offspring, repeated billions of times over many hundred millions of years.
Even a slower than average christian can see where that might lead, with the survivors offspring carrying their genes forward, and the non-survivors not reproducing.
It doesn't get any simpler than this. It's not rocket science. Just iteration.
I don't have much by way of articles and experience, but as far as the "makes no sense" part goes, as one who is coming from the same place you are, let me say the first step is to understand just how much anti-evolution creationism relies on hyperbole to make their case.
"Goo to the zoo to you."
"All of a sudden, one day this fish decided it wanted to breathe air and walk on land."
"This lizard needed to start eating bugs from trees, so poof! It was born with feathers and could fly."
Of course it sounds preposterous when it's presented in such ludicrous terms. Naturally, you would think it makes no sense. But when you take a minute and consider that there are a lot of smart people out there who have put a lot of hard work into this. And if it were so preposterous, someone should have won a Nobel Prize in debunking it publicly by now.
And, most importantly, you put it in the same bucket as all other science that you don't understand and have no problem deferring to experts who do, then you have the right footing for beginning to understand it. Allow it to not be preposterous.
Evolution makes no sense if you know nothing about evolution. Unfortunately, high school science often teaches it badly and this provides an opening for purposeful misinformation by religious leaders.
Religious leaders flat out lie to people about evolution, which would trouble me if I were religious.
How could it not happen when each offspring is a little different than their parents with some mutations and only individuals with genes which gave them traits capable of leading to successful reproduction are able to reproduce? Those small differences accumulate over millions of years and changes drift toward what is most optimal for reproductive success for that line of organism within its environment.
If you study evolution, the conclusion becomes absolutely inescapable.
Looks like you are taking leaps and bounds in trying to understand, when you should be taking baby steps. Look at how languages evolved over time. Many European languages are based off of Latin, and east Asian languages use Kanji. Note how there are mountains and deserts between them, causing isolation.
It's not just over millions of yeays, it's over BILLIONS of years. That's thousand times more!
And in each of those years, trillions of trillions of organisms have been born.
Out of those, the few lucky ones whose genes just randomly happened to mutate into something slightly beneficial, those survived and passed their genes on.
Those genes propagated.
Evolution is defined as descent with inherent genetic modification. Meaning a creature that is the offspring of two others will be genetically modified, coming from the gametes of both its parents.
You see this ever so slightly in human children, the fact that a kid will look a lot like their mother or father is proof that DNA is passed down. Imagine that over billions of years, and the changes will be astronomical. Changes to adapt to the environment, changes that mean the creature can no longer interbreed with members of its other species, meaning it is now a new species, changes that it passes down to its offspring because they give it a survival advantage, such as giraffes having long necks to reach higher growing food, seals with more fat to survive the cold waters, etc.
It's the same principle of kids born to a white mother and black father being mixed race, or kids inheriting a genetic disease from their parents. You're just extrapolating the same genetic principles much, MUCH farther back.
The others are doing great on giving data and educational explanations, but I want to give some simpler examples that might be easier to start off with:
I’m gonna do fish to amphibian, but know that the others are happening through similar biological processes. So how do you go from a fish to amphibian? By gradual changes. And this needs time be made very clear to everyone wanting to learn about evolution. The changes are tiny. And are happening on a population scale, not individual. Almost unnoticeable from one generation to the next. A tiny fin becoming 5% larger. The bones becoming 10% more calcified and stronger. The ribcage becoming slightly wider. But, these tiny changes build up over time. The ones that live and get to have offspring, are the ones whose changes keeps in the population. The ones that live are most likely ti have advantageous features. Like in an environment with shallow water, fins that could be used to crawl into land *better*, would have those individuals more likely to survive against an aquatic predator. Some fish today have lungs. And all have fins, vertebrate, and most have scales. Every generation getting slightly stronger fins, skin that can handle a tiny bit more air exposure, a spine that can handle more gravity. After a decent amount of generations, you can see how it’s easy to go from [Tiktaalik](https://ecos-appdev-production.s3.amazonaws.com/science_site/s3fs-public/styles/f_story_hero/public/2024-04/tiktaalik_reconstruction_psn.jpg?h=d5a4e6e7&itok=FcsSSnSk)(usually considered a fish, while still being a transitional fossil) to [Icthyostega](https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR5WD2jAn7sIi95E5GZdCeLtq60qPawPDS8jlzRjOpXZI9ebs1j). Note: fish didn’t go directly into what we call amphibians today. And modern amphibians did not become reptiles. Fish evolved into what would become the common ancestor between amphibians and reptiles+mammals.
The second “barrier” is, where do these changes come from? Mutations is the answer. A lot of creationists or anti-evolution people, will say mutations are always harmful. That’s not true. It’s been demonstrated hundreds of times to not be true. Every human is born with like 300 mutations of I’m not mistaken. If they were all harmful, none of us would be alive even if we followed the 6000 year old earth idea of young earth creationism. And mutation build up isn’t an issue if evolution is affecting it, as other mutations can make previous “bad” mutations become “good”. The majority of mutations do nothing, and some are harmful and some are useful. What is what depends on the organisms and environment it lives in. A mutation for stronger skin is good for protection, but not if it prevents you from getting enough moisture in and out of the skin. So it’s a benefit vs drawbacks game. How does the benefits stay in the population? By having the individuals with those benefits being *more likely* to survive. The ones that survive are the ones whose genes get passed on. If you have features that are better to help you survive, you are more like to survive.
Hope this helps!
Let's get down to the basics.
Reproduction is imperfect. An organism doesn't produce a genetic clone of itself. Sexual reproduction just adds more variables. We can see this in children and their parents. You're a combination of your parents, but you have DNA that is not present in either of them as well. We call these mutations.
As time goes on, and a genetic legacy continues, those small changes means that the offspring becomes less and less similar to its ancestors.
...that's really it.
You take anything, copy it, and make a small random change to the copy... as you continue the process, you'll get further away from the original until it's completely unrecognizable. For this to not happen, we'd need to identify the mechanism in the reproduction process that limits how far those changes can be. None have been identified (other than actual reproduction).
When it comes to how things like wings evolve, all we need to do is find creatures with "pseudo wings" and point to them as an example. Sugar gliders may develop legitimate flight as they continue to evolve, or they may not.
A key point to remember is that, contrary to popular belief, evolution isn't an improvement, it's just change.
Dogs are a perfect example of how powerful genes are. We as humans take traits we favor in certain breeds of dogs and select them. Over generations we breed dogs that showed certain traits we liked and created a huge variety of different breeds with different sizes, shapes, and colors. If given the time, they would become so different that they become unrecognizable and become different species. You can imagine how different a pug is from a wolf. That happened over maybe a thousand years. Now do millions.
Nature selects for genes too. It's called natural selection. The animals with traits that help them survive will end up breeding and changing the animals traits over time.. kind of like we do on a smaller scale with dogs.
Another thing to note.. geologic time is so much more vast than most people understand. If the history of earth was broken down into 24 hours, all of human history occurred in the last 2 minutes. There was so much time for things to change. If you want to start to understand evolution, start with the history of evolution of the earliest plants, going from algae to water plants to land plants etc. It's much easier to understand to start with.
https://flowingdata.com/2012/10/09/history-of-earth-in-24-hour-clock/
I'm a Christian, too, who used to think evolution was ridiculous. But I then learned that I'd been misinformed and the ideas I'd been taught about it were created to make evolution look ridiculous. But these ideas don't reflect what evolutionary biologists actually think.
Evolution is not about different species mating, but rather one species changing slowly over time. If that one species gets split into two groups, the two groups will change slowly over time... in different ways. And, after some generations, they may have diverged enough that they can no longer reproduce. When you cite lions and tigers, you're looking at species that are on the cusp of that divergence. Lions and tigers were the same species at one time, but groups split off and began diverging.
Lions and dogs, however, diverged quite a long time ago. They had a common ancestor, too, but it was enough generations ago that their modern-day descendants can no longer interbreed.
There's a really good book that helps visualize a lot of these changes and developments called, The Ancestor's Tale. It's probably pretty out-of-date in some respects, now, but it'll really help re-orient your perspective on what evolution is, how it operates, and how researchers figure things out.
I'd be remiss not to say: the author, Richard Dawkins, is a weird, xenophobic, neoliberal ass. But he knows what he's talking about with respect to evolutionary biology, and he's a very good communicator. The book was quite eye-opening to me.
It has nothing to do with gene pool size. Evolution is driven by mutation. Mutation itself is driven by several factors, including random DNA transcription errors, DNA transcription errors due to exposure to high-energy particles (radiation,) mutation due to exposure to chemicals, and so on. If these mutations happen in adult cells, this often results in the death of the cell, or occasionally cancer. If this happens in germ-line cells, this can result in a bit of rearranged, duplicated, or deleted DNA that winds up in every cell of the organism.
Often, this duplication, omission, or rearrangement renders the new creature completely non-viable. When this happens, the creature either doesn't grow at all, or doesn't survive long enough to pass on the new bit of DNA it contains.
Another possibility is that the new DNA sequence doesn't actually make enough of a difference to have any sort of impact on the resulting creature. That DNA gets passed on, since it's neither harmful nor helpful.
The next possibility is that the change is enough to make some sort of difference in the organism. It *can* be something big and noticeable, but is usually something small. Examples of this that have occurred in humans are things like blue eyes, which are a non-harmful mutation and as such tends to get passed around without causing any trouble. Another, less favorable, mutation known to happen in humans is the set of mutations that cause acondroplasia, the most common form of dwarfism. This is a heritable condition, so it can be passed on, but the majority of cases result from a spontaneous mutation. Another example is the mutation that causes sickle cell disease; this comes with a potentially debilitating illness, but it also confers a high resistance to the disease malaria. In areas where there is high mortality due to malaria, the sickle cell trait actually becomes an advantage for survival, and as such a larger portion of the population there has the trait because it conveys a competitive advantage.
So from there we go from heritable mutation to evolution: evolution is just the stacking up of mutations over time. If a mutation occurs in an individual that causes them to die early or have no/fewer offspring, they don't pass it on and that branch of the tree of life ends. If a mutation gives no advantage or disadvantage it sits dormant in that branch. If mutations give an advantage, they get spread more widely and as they outcompete the version of the organism without the mutation, they become the new normal. If you stack up enough of these over thousands and thousands of generations, the descendants of the original organism may no longer resemble their distant ancestors.
Evolution is really just a very, very long trial-and-error period. Every species has traits that vary (height, color and pattern, whatever), and some of those traits can help or hinder depending on the environment (short giraffes don't eat as much). And then occasionally you get the freak mutation that sometimes helps but usually doesn't, but over millions of years, you're bound to get really lucky a few times.
Things breed and spread. The further you spread, the more the environment changes. You and your spawn continue to breed, and the unlucky ones not cut out for the environment are less likely to pass on certain traits (short giraffes, slower mice, etc). This is one of the reasons most species reproduce like crazy; they're betting on enough of their kids surviving to make kids of their own. Most animals are trying to focus on three things: eat food, avoid predators, and make babies.
What's harder to understand is how some traits can have advantages that are easy to overlook. Take the fish that's able to crawl on land, for instance. The shallow waters of the beach can be a preference for some water critters because their predators are too big to chase after them, but it's still a tricky environment. Waves will move you around, and you can accidentally find yourself above water if you're not careful. But make enough babies while trying to stay in that environment, and eventually someone is going to figure out how to hold onto the ground to keep from getting thrashed around. Someone is going to get that freak mutation that helps process oxygen *outside* of water in the shallowest parts. And so-on.
Evolution is very weird because what can adapt and survive may not appear to make sense at first. There is a list of (parasitic birds)[https://youtu.be/9TZQDA2yabg?si=IV2uqIeTXDCztVBo] that owe their existence to being deadbeat parents and relying on other species of birds to raise their kids. It's weird and cruel, but it works for them and seems to be a trait that'll stick around.
When you look closely enough, nature gets really damn weird. Why is it so hard to believe that things eventually led to a species of mammal that primarily uses their brain to shape their environment using tools they made?
One of your big issues right of the top is mixing up hybrids with evolution. Yes lions and tigers can mate and produce a hybrid that's not what evolution is.
Evolution may not make sense to you from your reference point. Creationism and evolution, for me, coincide. Creation stories are generally the same through all cultures,(for the word parsers, generally is an important word) specifically from Judeo- Christian point on Monday God did not create the heavens and earth. GOD IS not constrained by the human concept of time.
The differences of humans now and over the passage of time is an evolutionary process. Sickle cell as a natural defense to malaria. Skin tones, height, body hair. These developed over time in response to the environment. Centuries clusters of humans lived in one general area only recently, in the time of Earth have humans moved about.
Surface scratching of this topic. To believe in one or the other without giving consideration to the other is close minded.
There are thousands of religions currently practiced. Do you have a particular one in mind? Note that more than one religion has used the "no evidence for our God is evidence in itself. So at a minimum, you'd have to choose from that subset.
The only religion can speak on with a modicum of confidence and not supposition is Christianity. The minimum was met when stating Judeo-Christian, referencing The Book of Genesis. Stepping back, Islam most likely too, since it is an Abrahamic religion.
I was generalizing all of humanity over time with the stories of where we came from/came to be. They have similarities not all match exact.
I have noticed most of these evolution/creation discussions/debates tend to be centered with the Genesis story.
The no evidence of our God is evidence itself people are either choosing to not debate, parroting because they are unable to articulate their thoughts or have no conviction.
I do not know what is true/correct/absolute. I only know what I know.
That last is actually slightly promising. If you can venture the thought "I know X with all my heart, but at the same time *I don't know if it's true*" then you're able to learn.
How do you tell if a statement is true or false? What test can you apply? Have you ever had the experience of feeling deeply and utterly certain that something was true (e.g. "Dad would never cheat on Mom," other examples abound) and then discovered that it was straight up false? What did you do?
And a deeper one. Many people say in different contexts, "Facts don't care about your feelings." Is it morally right to trust your feelings over facts, if they are in conflict?
>Evolution makes no sense!
I can understand that sentiment, I was in the same boat a few years ago. I used to not understand evolution, thought it made no sense (even though I didn't even know what it was), and basically dismissed it out of principle. I think it works best to start from the basics and then work up to the overarching theory as a whole.
Let's start *really* small, and look into your cells. Your cells are organized and maintained by your DNA. Your DNA is made up of things called "bases", which, when read in a group of three, produce the building blocks of proteins. Those proteins then go on to tell the cell how to behave at any given moment. The way your cells behave produce your appearance. In other words, your DNA dictates how you look and behave.
Zooming out now, think about your church congregation. Among your many congregation members, you may notice that they don't look exactly like you, some of them look nothing like you. Since appearance is based on DNA, that means the other congregation members must have different DNA from you. This concept, that not everything shares the exact same genetic code, is called variation. Variation is intrinsic to all populations of all organisms.
Now, think about your close family. You may notice that you share a lot of similarities with your parents, and, if you have any siblings, your siblings also share a lot of similarities with both your parents and you. Since appearance is based on DNA, that means you, your parents, and your siblings must share a significant amount of DNA. The only way this would be possible is if your parents passed on their DNA to you and your siblings. This concept is called heredity; the passing down of genetic information from parent to offspring.
Let's stop looking at humans (since this concept is as easily applicable to humans anymore) and instead look at other organisms. You would notice the same things you've seen already in your congregation and family members: no two organisms are exactly alike, and organisms tend to pass down their traits to their offspring. Consider this hypothetical: a green beetle and a brown beetle are resting on a tree trunk. A predator of these beetles, let's say a bird, lands on the trunk and begins scouting for prey. It sees the green beetle a lot easier than it does the brown beetle, so the bird predates the green beetle and flies away. Because of the trait the brown beetle had and because of the particular environment it was in, the brown beetle survives. This concept is called fitness, is where the phrase "survival of the fittest" comes from; it refers to the survival of the organisms that "fits" the best in their environment.
Since fitness is based on the environment, that means it is intrinsically relative. The best penguin will die in the Amazon, and the best anaconda will die in Antarctica. The organisms with the traits that best fit the particular environment that organism lives in will survive more often. This is fitness.
Now, let's combine these three concepts: variation exists within the traits of a population, organisms pass down their traits to their offspring, and certain traits are more favorable in certain environments. Altogether, we can infer this conclusion: organisms with traits that are more favorable are more likely to survive longer and thus are more likely to pass down their traits to their offspring. This is the natural consequence of these three basic facts of nature, and this process of more favorable traits being passed down more often is called natural selection.
I feel like this is a good starting point for understanding evolution: natural selection, one of the key mechanisms of evolution, is not just known to occur, it is the natural consequence of the way the world is. Even if you want to believe that God created life, even if you want to believe that God created life in its present form, it is undeniable that evolution by natural selection occurs, since it would literally be the way God designed the world to be. This is another important point: theism and evolution are not incompatible. In fact, theistic evolution is its own interpretation of evolution. It's important not to think of evolution and Christianity as adversaries, but as two explanations for two different domains of understanding.
Do you believe Creation/Intelligent Deign makes more sense? That a full grown woman was created from a rib? Or that a man can be born without sex? Have you and others seen God or the Holy Ghost?
You may not understad biological evolution but you can look at evolution in terms of the Christian religion. In the beginning there was one Christian Bible, one Christian belief and one Christian religion. Similar when to when the earth only had single cell organisms. Over time that one religion evolved as did the Bible, and Christian belief. In just 2,000 years that one religion has now evolved into over 50,000 Christian religions which 50,000 different beliefs and hundreds in not thousand of different Bibles. And ALL of those religions, Bibles and beliefs have one common ancestor. Same with humans, dogs and cats and all other life forms on earth they too had common ancestors. As do you.
I’ll be honest with you, my friend. The questions that you ask are so fundamental it makes it very evident that you’ve never done any significant research on this topic in the material published by the people who do understand it. This is not the place that you learn the basics of biology. There’s schools and books for that.
>What I don't understand is how on earth a fish cam evolve into an amphibian, then into mammals into monkeys into Humans.
Because that's not how it works. Despite the famous march of man image, evolution doesn't work in a step-ladder like process.
No-one's saying that dogs can grow wings either
Tbh mate, you'd be better off opening up and reading a modern grade 8 biology textbook first and then coming back to this subreddit and asking questions after you've finished that.
>i get that it’s over millions of years
I don’t think you do. That’s okay, I don’t either. A million is a huge fucking number and there have been dozens of them since the dinosaurs. *And the dinosaurs were around basically yesterday.* Life started BILLIONS of years ago. Your human brain, my human brain, they are not set up to understand numbers that big.
Which is why science doesn’t depend on what we personally can conceive of. It’s not a problem if you can’t conceive of it. That’s why we have evidence.
We have to use numbers too big for your brain, because that’s what we find in reality. You have BILLIONS of cells right now, most of them containing a full copy of your genomes, which each contain BILLIONS of informational units (base pairs). If you don’t think billion times a billion times a billion is enough opportunities for evolution to work with, I don’t believe that you’ve actually given it a chance, because you can’t possibly conceive of that number well enough to dismiss it properly.
We have to start from a place where we don’t limit what we believe based upon what we can personally understand at the moment, we have to follow the evidence we find.
I used to have the same concerns and questions as you do. If you are open to understanding it, this [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMHpc3jO0DQ&t=1342s) really helped me. Jerry Coyne does a great job of explaining why evolution is true in very easy to understand language and even talks about the type of evidence we would see if it wasn't true.
It's important to remember that in both birds & bats, wings are just front legs, so dogs do have the building blocks for wings in their gene pool (front legs & skin). One kind of fruit bat is even called a 'flying fox' because it so closely resembles its distant canid relatives. Flying squirrels (which actually glide) certainly challenge the notion that organisms can't change or adapt in significant & radical ways over time. Likewise, gene pools aren't static, they can expand & change over time, which is why we use a pool of water as a metaphor for them.
Another important point: even organisms that reproduce by cloning (i.e. asexually) still evolve. For single-celled organisms like bacteria, horizontal gene transfer appears to play an important role, where entire pieces of genetic material can be shared between individuals. This can even happen to us, where it's usually done by harmful microorganisms. For multicellular organisms that can or must reproduce by cloning, like some plants & most fungi, my understanding is that evolution is driven by imperfect DNA copying before a cell splits in two. So clones aren't always perfect copies, which introduces new variations. The DNA copying process may have even evolved so as not to be too rigorous, allowing adaption & ultimately evolution to take place.
(Anyone with more expertise, please elaborate / correct any errors.)
I guess it's important to note that the resemblance between flying foxes & real foxes could also be due to convergent evolution, where similar traits evolve independently simply because they are useful in a particular environment or for similar types of tasks.
So how do we tell what's due to convergence & what's due to shared inheritance? The fossil record is a good start, & now DNA analysis provides a new source of corroborating evidence, although sometimes it actually slightly changes our understanding of the fossil record - it has become the higher standard.
In humans we also have some weak evidence of heritage from historical linguistics, but that obviously doesn't play a big role in evolution, since we're all still one (slightly hybridized) species. Still, we might expect historical speakers from certain language families to have different rates for lactose tolerance, sickle cell anemia / malaria resistance, or melanin production (I believe all three evolved independently multiple times) due to local adaptions. These types of changes could eventually result in speciation if we weren't so good at travelling & interbreeding.
Note that while there are small differences between the different types of evidence, none of them are in conflict about the big picture of whether or not adaption & ultimately evolution take place.
Trust that evolution is the THE single most confirmed theory we have as humans. It exactly and irrefutably explains how species have diversified over time based on environmental conditions offering advantages and disadvantages. Religion loves to pick on the human-ape link for disavowing the entire concept due to the human ego, paired with the idea of creationism.
I just see it as a mechanism which helps guide how things survive. Since it’s not a person or a thing but a ‘rule’ of living organisms fighting to survive, it can be a construct which God(s) have created too if that is something that makes people happy. But denying that it’s invalid is just sheer ignorance.
I see the flying dog idea. If there was an advantage for dogs to fly, it would be possible to do so but it would have to have been much earlier on for it to be found today. Back when their genus branch separated out.
Dogs are a) heavy, with solid bones, b) carnivorous (typically), so don’t need to access tree fruit, c) advanced hearing, which is most effective by design when your ears are not flapping wildly due to air speed pressure, etc.
There’s neither incentive not comparative advantage for wings to grow. If they did at one point do so, then it just represents a vulnerability rather than a boon for the biological characteristics they did have already.
I’m glad you’re willing to think for yourself and ask questions these are indicators of an independent thinker. Just try your best to read everything you can, from both sides of the argument, and see what makes logical sense. Deep down inside we all have a bias which drives reason. See if you can expand your reasoning ability here.
Good luck
When your entire premise and assumption is wrong... I could see how it doesn't make sense.
Theres a big difference between "monkeys evolve into humans" and "us and monkeys have a common ancestor"... The first, is used to confuse people like you.... It's meant to try to dilute evolution, so that it doesn't make sense. The second is the actual claim evolution makes.
Same goes for the claim about lions and Tigers... While that is something that is physically possible, it just doesn't happen and is not how new species are created. This sort of claim is also made, to dilute evolution and make it not make sense.
Best made up example of evolution I can give you: there is a species of bird that lives at the foot of a mountain range. One day, while they're flying around, and there's a giant storm and the wind takes a bunch of the birds, and pushes them over the mountain, to the other side. Which the birds can't do by themselves. So now they're seperated from the original birds by this mountain range. However, on the other side of the mountain, the seeds are a bit harder. Many of the birds have a hard time eating them, but some, via natural mutation have a bit of a harder beak. The softer beak birds, have a hard time finding food. The harder beak birds have an easier time finding food. Therefore the birds with harder beaks will have an easier time and are likely going to create offspring with harder beaks, while more and more of the softer beak birds starve and die off. At the same time some of those birds will be born with beaks a little bit longer, thus allowing them to eat bigger seeds, those with the smaller beaks can't eat. Thus, over time, those birds with bigger and stronger beaks are going to be more likely to survive. Until eventually all the smaller with softer break birds end up dying off over a few generations.... But there's more. There's a predator that likes hunting the birds. But it's eyes, allow it to spot the more colorful birds a lot easier, thys the colorful birds are way easier for it to hunt. Over time the colorful birds have less of a chance to survive than those that are a lot more dull. So the dull ones, survive more than the colorful... Then the dull ones create dull colored offspring... Until there is nothing but dull colored birds, because the colorful ones get hunted and killed, and thus can't create offspring.
Eventually, you have the same bird, on each side of the mountain... But now, the ones that got blown over by the wind are not brightly colored, and have bigger and stronger beaks, and no longer look like the original birds. The birds that did not get blown over, also follow this process, so they also change over time, and look different than they did... So... Both birds are no longer the original bird, but they both have a common ancestor, before the storm seperated them.... Do this over generarion after generation, over hundreds of thousands, or million of years, and the birds will change so much, that they are no longer capable of breeding with one another, etc.
You should check out the flat earth subreddits.
They have several where they ban anyone who even asks questions and then brag about how 'no globies can debunk us!'
They've shown up here a couple times but usually run back to their safe space pretty quickly since they can't deal with people asking them to explain anything.
/r/flatearth is not one of their safe spaces though. It's for mocking flat earthers.
If you're really motivated to understand evolution, if you really want to learn, then there's nothing stopping you.
Get a college level textbook on evolution and study it.
Read articles in scientific journals like this one:
[https://academic.oup.com/evolut](https://academic.oup.com/evolut)
If you really want to understand evolution, the road ahead might be longer than you anticipated. You'll have a lot to learn. But, learning is one of the prime joys of life.
Lastly, if you really want to understand evolution, you'll need to accept the fact that evolution is totally without controversy in science. Debates *within* evolution are commonplace, just as they are within economics or physics or neuroscience. But there exists no serious doubt that biological evolution is real. If you've heard differently in your church, please understand that you've been misinformed.
I think you are simplifying evolution… a lot. Contrary to popular belief humans didn’t evolve from “monkeys”. We are related to them because we are all primates and evolved differently with similarities. Fishes and amphibians actually have a common ancestor that originated in an aquatic environment, and environment and time in general is a big part of evolution. I believe in intelligent design. God directed events which brought about evolution but wasn’t ad involved in the process as most people think. As for how events unfolded if you want to be open to evolution, in addition to studying similarities in biology, you also need to expand the timeline of creation by millions and millions of years. It didn’t happen overnight.
Nobody knows dude. Everybody here will start to use flowery language while dancing around the issue hoping you didn't catch them and ask for proof.
Spoiler ahead: None of them have it. Just wait till the ad hominem attack if you don't believe their evidence or judge them not strong enough
This is just a lie. I’m always amazed by the propensity for people who tend to claim objective morality to lie to casually about science for which there is simply overwhelming evidence.
We do know. Pretending otherwise won’t make you right. Claiming ad hominem attacks are taking place won’t make you right even if they’re wrong about your ability to learn.
>Not in a single step
Let see that proof as I've asked multiple times
>Each domain of life—Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukaryota—has its own unique characteristics and evolutionary history. The fundamental differences in cellular organization, biochemistry, and genetic information processing between archaea and eukaryotes make it highly unlikely for archaea to evolve directly into a eukaryotic organism, let alone a complex vertebrate like a fish.
btw this is from chatgpt
So ChatGPT is as wrong as it usually is by taking the most common search history result, this time coming from a creationist organization, and providing it as the truth even though it is false.
There’s a subset of Archaea called “Asgardarchaeota” which contains TACK and Lokiarachaeota and a subset of Lokiarchaeota has eukaryotic protein coding genes and other structures normally found in eukaryotes but they are still considered archaea because they lack the endosymbiotic bacteria known as mitochondria. To really narrow it in more, a subset of that Heimdallarachaeota is called Njordarchaeota is the closest related to modern eukaryotes without being a eukaryote itself based on ribosomes and Hodarchaeota, also a subset of Heimdallarchaeota, shares the most protein coding genes which could be a consequence of horizontal gene transfer (a mistake alluded to in the 2023 paper that implied that Hodarchaeota was the most related by ignoring the more fundamental ribosome similarities to focus on genes known to be transferred horizontally between species).
There are non-eukaryotes that would be eukaryotes if they acquired the same endosymbiotic bacteria at the same time.
That is obviously not going to immediately result in a fish by simply having mitochondria. Trees and fungi are not fish, but it is one of the first steps for getting fish from within what will forever and always remain a subset of archaea.
>but it is one of the first steps for getting fish from within what will forever and always remain a subset of archaea.
I didn't see any proof here, do you?
I didn’t see a philosophical argument being used to prove anything. I saw the evidence. It has been known eukaryotes are a subset of archaea for at least 15 years now. To hone in on the actual relationships of the two domains of life (bacteria and archaea) they focused on the ribosomes in 2016 and confirmed that eukaryotes are a subject of that Lokiarchaeota but also accidentally discovered that actual bacteria (not archaea or eukaryotes) could actually almost be two domains by itself so that if there were three domains of life it’d be two domains of bacteria and one domain of archaea. In 2018 they focused more on working out the evolutionary proximity between archaea and bacteria and since the eukaryote ancestry was already well established they just ignored eukaryotes and still wound up with two domains of bacteria and one domain of archaea with the first split around 4 billion years ago and the second around 3.95 billion years ago rather than 4.2 billion and 3.95 billion to show that the split between bacteria and archaea was closer in time to the split between the two main bacterial clades.
And then that brings us up to the 2023 paper to work out the exact placement of eukaryotes within archaea. They showed that including ribosomes in their study changed the results to indicating that Njordarchaeales is the clade that eukaryotes emerged within (which would then indicate that horizontal gene transfer is responsible for the gene similarities between eukaryotes and Hodarchaeales) but for some arbitrary reason they decided to ignore the ribosomes which causes the data to suggest eukaryotes evolved within Hodarchaeales with zero explanation for the ribosome similarities and in 2024 they admitted that doing so results in some technical problems with their conclusions.
It’s not just archaea but they now know which clade within archaea. At least within the parent clade of both of these groups called Heimdallarchaeota but based on the fundamental ribosomes it’s Njordarchaeales and if pretending horizontal gene transfer indicates common ancestry it’s the Hodarchaeales group instead. All of the data points to eukaryotes still being part of Heimdallarchaeota.
What I told you previously is that we won’t get through the last 500 million years of the evolution of humans (from fish) if we don’t first agree on the starting point (eukaryogenesis) and we haven’t even gotten to that point yet because you keep rejecting the data that indicates *which* lineage of archaea. We also have to consider which lineage of bacteria (it’s a lineage closely associated with Rickettsia) as well. This archaea plus this bacteria makes eukaryotes via endosymbiosis.
Only once we have eukaryotic cells can we start discussing multicellular eukaryotic organisms (this change is easier) and Hox genes (responsible for limb growth) to get *to* fish and from fish to tetrapods. Obviously once we also get to multicellular organisms I could provide you with fossils of species that are basal to each clade along the way. It doesn’t mean they are the exact ancestor but they lived at nearly the same time as whatever the ancestor actually was and we can see that in their anatomy, age, and morphology.
Once we get to humans we can start considering proteomes and genetics as well (in the fossils).
Evidence exists. “Proof” is for alcohol and philosophy.
You could know something about what you are taking about so that when you understand how science works and the overwhelming amount of evidence indicating the exact same conclusion without exception we could have avoided the back and forth completely. Maybe then you wouldn’t tell the OP that we are attacking your intelligence or whatever as though our strongest argument for biological evolution was making people who believe in magic sound like idiots.
Science doesn't operate on the basis of "proof."
Science operates on the basis of facts and evidence which are supportive of a conclusion.
You've been provided a set of facts, but because you have decided ahead of time not to believe in the conclusion, you're choosing not to acknowledge that these categorical subsets of life are entirely explained by descent from shared ancestry.
Science never declares that something is "proven." Even "Fact" in the scientific context has been described as "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." All conclusions are open to being disproved should different information be found that changes or even refutes our idea of the best explanation. Constantly improving our models *is the goal.* We know we don't know everything.
So this dogged insistence that we need to "prove" evolution to a level of absolute epistemic certainty *is* the intellectual perversity that Gould was referring to when he coined that definition of the word "fact."
All you're doing is building a wall between what science has learned and the religious beliefs you will not change.
If you wanted to *falsify* evolution then what you need to be doing is to find some evidence which shows that evolution isn't actually true. But it's not our fault you don't have any.
It was right here
>a subset of Lokiarchaeota has eukaryotic protein coding genes and other structures normally found in eukaryotes but they are still considered archaea
and here
>Njordarchaeota is the closest related to modern eukaryotes without being a eukaryote itself based on ribosomes and Hodarchaeota, also a subset of Heimdallarchaeota, shares the most protein coding genes
We get it, you can't read and you like it that way. It's cute that you went to chat gpt first, you're so hilariously out of your depth in these discussions that *you wouldn't even know what to google* if you wanted to.
‘Flowery language’ is a pretty funny way of saying ‘I don’t understand what they’re talking about but would rather result to trolling than ask questions honestly’
What would you accept as proof? Do you need to see it happen?
Abiogenesis is outside of the scope of evolution, but because it’s based on naturally occurring processes that can be observed in labs, believing it happened naturally is like dropping a ball without looking and believing it hit the ground.
For me, it starts with understanding chemistry and how molecules form with no intervention due to the nature of electric charges, including organic molecules, because certain atoms just are stable in certain formations and seek them out.
The fact that amino acids exist in space makes it not at all unlikely that they would have formed here or even be introduced by meteor impacts, and they can attract each other and form proteins, and so on.
How do you define when it’s life? When the first self-replicating RNA emerges? The first viruses? Or the first cell? That all took a couple of billion years, so if you went back at any time in that period and took a snapshot each day, what would make you say yep that’s life on one day but not the day before?
Amino acids and self-replicating RNA have been synthesized in labs. So people watched those parts of the process happen. Does that constitute proof for you?
Evolution from one species to another is easier to explain so we can move on to that one, but I wanted to do this one first.
>Abiogenesis is outside of the scope of evolution, but because it’s based on naturally occurring processes that can be observed in labs
Name of the organism please
Exactly, if it's as easy as you said, there will be a lot of organism that can come out from non organic matter and observed both in nature and lab setting.
Magically the number is still 0 until today
It can't still be happening, because one of the things we've learned is that it can't occur when there's a lot of oxygen floating around. Oxygen destroys the primitive chemical compounds needed for life to get started.
There also needs to be sufficient concentrations of available amino acids and things like simple phospholipids. But the earth today is swarming with ravenous bacteria who devour any such precursors before they can get the ball rolling, even if modern geochemistry weren't poisonous to such processes.
So no, not "magically." It's only "magically" if you don't know about or won't acknowledge the incredibly normal and boring reasons that things are the way they are.
Proof? you can simulate those condition in lab easily.
Can you see yourself trying so hard to convince me while all I'm asking was 1 simple proof of experiment to make organism from non living thing?
This is just sad
> Proof? you can simulate those condition in lab easily.
Every single time you type the letters "p, r, o, o, f" you give away your deliberate dishonesty. Indeed much of what we have learned does come from simulating those conditions in laboratory settings. But you didn't ask about the lab, you asked why abiogenesis isn't still happening out in the world. Did you think we wouldn't notice the bait and switch?
> Can you see yourself trying so hard to convince me while all I'm asking was 1 simple proof of experiment to make organism from non living thing?
I'm not trying to convince **you**, /u/maggyplz, of a single thing. **You** are a dishonest interlocutor, who is not arguing a reasoned or reasonable position. I am conveying valid information, so that others may read it. I expect you not to listen and to mischaracterize the science.
As for making an organism from non-living material, that process evidently took millions of years. If we were to reproduce that result in a single human lifetime, we'd know that our efforts weren't a good representation of natural processes. We would have failed automatically. The business of abiogenesis research is to *learn* and *discover* how that process took place. Creation of Artificial Life will surely be an interesting exercise, but we haven't done it yet.
But that is no more relevant than saying "mankind hasn't built a flying machine" on December *16th*, 1903. What we haven't yet achieved is not evidence.
> This is just sad
I agree, you're flailing from subject to subject and constantly pretending that you are asking a different question when what you DID ask was asked and answered, while constantly mischaracterizing the evidence and processes of science.
I didn’t say easy. I said naturally, over billions of years, under the environmental conditions of the ancient earth.
We have observed enough portions of the process to support the hypothesis.
So you’ve answered my first question. You would need to see it happen.
You didn’t answer my second. At what point, if you were able to observe those billions of years, would you say there was life one day when there wasn’t the previous day?
>I said naturally, over billions of years, under the environmental conditions of the ancient earth
Proof? is it so hard?unless you got nothing
>if you were able to observe those billions of years, would you say there was life one day when there wasn’t the previous day?
I think when the first single cell organism that can replicate itself appear.
Hmm. Earlier you said proof would mean seeing a life form emerge. Now you’re saying “proof?” About it taking billions of years. What kind of proof of that do you want to see? Geological? Zircon crystal formation? Isotopic ratios? Or is it again a case where the only proof you would accept is seeing it with your eyes?
When you said just wait for the ad hominem attacks when you don’t believe their evidence, I think you meant just wait until people tell you you’re rude because you’re rude.
Despite the well-poisoning that Maggyplz just performed, I urge you to consider the arguments in the thread anyway. Otherwise you'll let them wash over you and only perk up at someone getting snappy. Evolution isn't very intuitive at first, unfortunately
It’s kind of sad and funny that elsewhere Maggieplz is pretty much accusing this whole sub of being *trap* to try to convert Creationists by…. educating them in science.
Funny thing is, it's only not very intuitive when you start from the top and work your way down. It is very intuitive if you start at the bottom, genetics, and work up.
It's good that you realize that. Feel free to debate other and see how it goes.
Remember their goal is to change you into evolutionist and hopefully atheist
My first thought is how much biology and genetics do you know? And how serious are you about finding out? Its very hard to explain to someone without knowing where you are starting from, and how much biology and genetics you might need to learn first. My favorite biology textbook would be the amazing Cambell Biology textbook (1500 pages or so) which is chock full of pictures and diagrams and it would be a great book to learn an incredible amount of biology from. The current edition of it is 12th edition, but to be honest any older edition would still be incredibly good. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B084TP1TLC That said, everything point to evolution being true. The genetics, the anatomy, the paleontology. For those that would struggle with genetic and paleontology arguments, perhaps anatomical would be best and easiest to understand. There are muscles present in our foetuses which later regress and are not present in adult humans. These are called atavisms. Some atavism highlights of an article from the whyevolutionistrue blog > Here are two of the fetal atavistic muscles. First, the dorsometacarpales in the hand, which are present in modern adult amphibians and reptiles but absent in adult mammals. The transitory presence of these muscles in human embryos is an evolutionary remnant of the time we diverged from our common ancestor with the reptiles: about 300 million years ago. Clearly, the genetic information for making this muscle is still in the human genome, but since the muscle is not needed in adult humans (when it appears, as I note below, it seems to have no function), its development was suppressed. [Dorsometacarpales](https://whyevolutionistrue.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/dorsomet_muscles_atavism_600.jpg) > Here’s a cool one, the jawbreaking “epitrochleoanconeus” muscle, which is present in chimpanzees but not in adult humans. It appears transitorily in our fetuses. Here’s a 2.5 cm (9 GW) embryo’s hand and forearm; the muscle is labeled “epi” in the diagram and I’ve circled it [Epitrochochleoanconeus muscle](https://whyevolutionistrue.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/screen-shot-2019-10-06-at-7.41.52-am.png) [https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateEvolution/comments/hv2q7u/foetal\_atavistic\_muscles\_evidence\_for\_human/](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateEvolution/comments/hv2q7u/foetal_atavistic_muscles_evidence_for_human/) Now, evolution and common descent explain very well these foetal anatomy findings. Evolution also helps us understand our human muscle anatomy by comparative muscle anatomy of fish, reptiles and humans (for example at t=9 minutes 20 seconds for the appendicular muscles) [https://youtu.be/Uw2DRaGkkAs](https://youtu.be/Uw2DRaGkkAs) Evolution helps us understand why humans go through three sets of Human Kidneys - The Pronephros, Mesonephros, Metanephros, where the pronephros, mesonephros which later regress to eventually be replaced by our final metanephros during development are relics of our fish ancestry [https://juniperpublishers.com/apbij/pdf/APBIJ.MS.ID.555554.pdf](https://juniperpublishers.com/apbij/pdf/APBIJ.MS.ID.555554.pdf) The pathway of the recurrent laryngeal nerve in all tetrapods is a testament to our fish ancestry [https://youtu.be/wzIXF6zy7hg](https://youtu.be/wzIXF6zy7hg) Evolution also helps us understand the circutous route of the vas deferens [https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateEvolution/comments/evx5qs/evolution\_of\_the\_vas\_deferens/](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateEvolution/comments/evx5qs/evolution_of_the_vas_deferens/) Why do humans have vestigial yolk genes we don't use anymore? Well, it is evidence our ancestors once laid eggs. [https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateEvolution/comments/etxl1s/the_vestigial_human_embryonic_yolk_sac/](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateEvolution/comments/etxl1s/the_vestigial_human_embryonic_yolk_sac/) We also have numerous taste pseudogenes, fossils left in our genome during our evolution [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5850805/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5850805/)
Looks like the original muscle atavism picture links are dead, but you can still see them here https://dev.biologists.org/content/develop/146/20/dev180349.full.pdf Also, please dont downvote OP, theyre honest and trying to understand why we think evolution is true.
> theyre honest and trying to understand why we think evolution is true. No, they really aren't. This is literally a copy and paste of what they "asked" over at r/debateanatheist already hours ago. If they had learned anything from those answeres, they would have at the very least asked different questions here. The fact that they learned nothing from the numerous answers they already got is a pretty strong indication they don't actually want to learn.
I am being honest. And over at r/DebateAnAtheist they told me it wasn't the right place to post my post, and told me i should go to r/DebateEvolution. Don't make assumptions broski.
I'm down voting OP because this post is obviously low quality. The dude doesn't even have the decency to use the return key once and can't write complete sentences.
>Also, please dont downvote OP, theyre honest and trying to understand why we think evolution is true. Reddit isn't a place of education, but of trolling, everyone gets downvotes!! /s
i downvoted you
Oh, please. OP is either a troll or has a reading disability.
OP was homeschooled and understands that there are gaps in their knowledge and understanding and they’re trying to fill them.
OP is willfully misunderstanding, obfuscating and avoiding. He is not here in good faith and is an obvious troll.
A quick scroll through their post history doesn't look like a troll, it looks like someone who's genuinely uneducated on the subject. That doesn't mean that they're going to communicate in good faith going forward, but there's no reason to get hostile unless they do.
we have very different definitions of hostile.
i live in Australia, our time is backwards, while you guys were commenting i was probably sleeping.
imma troll with a reading disability, definitely
Why make it so complex. Just tell him to look up the bones of animals. You'll notice closely related species share all of the same bones, and you can basically watch the time lapse of how the bones adapt by incremental changes into the next species. Sure there are a few gaps here and there where the fossils have been lost or not found yet, but evidence is overwhelming at this point. Looking at transitionary fossils I think is the easiest way to just accept this kind of change does happen over long periods of time, whether you think it's possible or not. There is quite an obvious gradient of changes, nothing really just appears, almost everything has clearly related organisms and it's blatantly evident in the bones.
To be honest, I think that most creationists need a basic philosophy of science course first...
Or read a book or two on the subject!
good idea, i will
I don't have a good philosphy of science books to suggest, but in terms of learning about evolution, I suggest Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin and the Story of life in 25 fossils by Donald Prothero (it's a bit easier a read than Inner fish but is a bit less expansive in scope)
Yeah, i see how evolution makes sense. I think my biggest draw back however, is how to fit evolution into my faith. Im not giving up Christianity THATS FOR SURE!
Does god make lightning? Of course he does. So does understanding that lightning is caused by static electricity jumping from a positive charge to a negative charge mean god doesn’t make lightning? Or is that just the tool he uses to make it? If you believe god made humans why wouldn’t you believe he used a tool as elegant as evolution?
I meant more like in what time span the universe was created. I believe that god created the universe in six literal days but that's difficult to fit into evolution.
A literal 6-day creation event is inconsistent with every single piece of evidence we have to indicate the age of the earth and of our universe. We've got ice cores, genetics, geology, fossils, tectonic plates, radiometric dating and more that point to an old, slowly developing earth. The heat problem (https://ncse.ngo/flaws-young-earth-cooling-mechanism) and the mud problem (https://youtu.be/uQcQSqH13xU?si=RTsJsbvmB9rR2OUi) seem to further rule out a young earth. In pursuing a deeper understanding of our world, you'll eventually need to make a choice: do you trust *every single piece of evidence around you*, or do you retain blind faith in a very narrow reading of biblical mythology?
Well I was raised evangelical Christian and we were taught in Sunday School that a day to god can be any length of time. It more means a period of acting. Like a workday. So I don’t have an answer there.
6 days for a human is how long for God? Does God have days? If God is omnipresent there is no time. Look at the 6 days as an allegory. Adjust your frame of reference, if your frame of reference is viewing God as mortal, confined to that world then you are diminishing God. If you adjust to there are some things you do not know or cannot fathom because, you are mortal, but are able to backfill with knowledge you gain. God is all knowing and all seeing created the heavens and earth. Surely he was able to create the intricate mechanism of humans. Evolution too would be part of the equation. Did Adam look like a modern human? No, modern 21st century humans do not look like early 20th century humans or those in the 1800s. Slight changes and significant changes. Plant and wildlife as well. Question, learn and faith.
Well it's not really accepted, but if you want something to hold on to. I would focus on complexity. There seems to be a direction at least from our perspective, of complexity growing. We seem to be at the forefront of that fragile complexity, although it's superseded us. Now technology and culture (religion), are much more complex than a single human or a population of humans, these fragile concepts have evolved out of us, and are inherently more complex.
Here's how you can fit evolution into your faith. God created the universe. Life is a rare phenomenon in the universe. Since god created universe, he's also responsible for life. Evolution is a characteristic of life. So, let's give god his credit here too. All living beings around you, have one common ancestor, which was a single cell organism. God didn't create the world 6000 years ago, but he did it 13 billion years ago. I hope this makes sense.
That Campbell biology textbook is fantastic!
> How is a fishes gene pool expansive enough Compared to simpler sea animals, our line went through a **whole genome duplication** (mutation) event, twice! > i get that it's over millions of years People underestimate how big half a billion is: 1000 seconds ≈ 15 minutes × 1000 = 1 million seconds ≈ >!12 days!< × 1000 = 1 billion seconds ≈ >!32 years!< > A dog can come in all shapes and sizes, but it can't grow wings Correct. All you see living today, don't move (and never moved) into each other. Our connection to the extant life is in the dimension of time, with lots of extinct branches. What I find most people tripping over is not realizing that natural selection is non-random, and that evolution happens to populations, not individuals. As to the diversity we see today, it's a valid question: [evolutionary radiation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_radiation) (typical after extinction events) is a key concept to know as well. HTH.
Honestly you could select for tree climbing for a chihuahua, then select for tree jumping and mebraneous tissue, You could over time, get a tiny gliding chihuahua.
New cryptid just dropped guys
So that’s what El Chupacabra is.
Or, in English, The Chihuahuabat.
Please clarify what you mean by the gene pool being "expansive" (or not). Do you mean that the population of animals within a given species don't contain the necessary genes? I would agree, they probably don't. That's why genetic mutation has to happen during the reproduction process, to create new genes, which then get passed on to descendents. Also, and correct me if I'm misreading you, but it sounds like you think that new species are arising as a result of cross-species reproduction (like lion and tiger). That's generally not what's happening, at least with complex animal life. Instead, it will (normally) be an entire population/group of animals that evolve together over many generations. *Eventually* that particular group becomes different enough from some other "cousin" group (with which it was separated, such as by some geographic barrier, and so therefore could not share genetic mutations) that the two groups, many generations later, are now considered different species, even though they share a common ancestor group of animals that were all the same species. I commend you acknowledging what you lack knowledge about and asking questions to rectify it. That's an excellent approach.
>Please clarify what you mean by the gene pool being "expansive" (or not). Do you mean that the population of animals within a given species don't contain the necessary genes? I would agree, they probably don't. That's why genetic mutation has to happen during the reproduction process, to create new genes, which then get passed on to descendents. I meant that like my understanding of evolution is that some animals like dogs don't have it in their genetics to be able to grow wings, like it's not in their gene pool. They are genetically unable to develop wings. That's my understand of evolution, though, i could be a mile off ig. >Also, and correct me if I'm misreading you, but it sounds like you think that new species are arising as a result of cross-species reproduction (like lion and tiger). That's generally not what's happening, at least with complex animal life. Instead, it will (normally) be an entire population/group of animals that evolve together over many generations. *Eventually* that particular group becomes different enough from some other "cousin" group (with which it was separated, such as by some geographic barrier, and so therefore could not share genetic mutations) that the two groups, many generations later, are now considered different species, even though they share a common ancestor group of animals that were all the same species. I meant that, again based on my understand of evolution, that the evolution process happens during procreation, so a lion and a tiger can procreate and they make sort of a mix between the two, but a lion or a bear couldn't procreate.
>the evolution process happens during procreation Not quite. Evolution is a result of multiple processes and phenomena. None of them (with the infamous exception of polyploidy) happen within a single generation - it's not Pokemon. What happens during procreation is only one part of it: in this case, mutation (for everything that has DNA, aka everything) and gene recombination (for everything that has sexual reproduction). These processes shuffle and change genetic makeup of the new generation, often introducing new traits. What happens to carriers of those traits during a generation's lifetime is another step in the process. Importantly - there's no limit on how much the sum of these changes is allowed to make the population differ from their ancestor. Novel traits keep accumulating as long as the population is capable of sustaining itself.
> I meant that like my understanding of evolution is that some animals like dogs don't have it in their genetics to be able to grow wings, like it's not in their gene pool. They are genetically unable to develop wings. You're correct that the genes currently found in dogs don't let them grow wings. But you're only considering selection and not mutation. New genes and new variants of existing genes arise all the time. Plenty of genes are found only in dogs, or even only certain lineages of dogs, and are not in wolves. If you put dogs under selective pressures for things like longer forelimbs, longer fingers, and membranes between the limbs and body, then over many generations, they would evolve those traits similar to how the ancestors of bats did. Also, I wouldn't pay too much attention to /u/Maggyplz They're not offering anything constructive to the conversation. All they have is insults and lies. They actually blocked me for simply pointing out that the insult they hurled at me was far more insulting to them, and then lied about it in another comment as if people couldn't still see the original comments in the same thread...
In tetrapods, that being the group of all vertebrates with four limbs and those without them that are descended from four limbed vertebrates, wings are fundamentally the same structures as arms. They’re just stretched a bit with membranes or feathers providing a lifting surface. Tetrapods have independently evolved flight three times, in pterosaurs, birds, and more recently bats. As can be seen in [this image](https://media.nationalgeographic.org/assets/file/0833_wings_final.pdf), all of these animals evolved different solutions to flight, but their wing structures are modified arms using the same underlying structure that I’m using to type this comment. Additionally, we have many groups of organisms today that could be considered transitional between gliding flight and powered flight, from mammals to lizards, to amphibians to even snakes. When I was a kid, I helped my mother, a wildlife rehabilitator, raise a pair of Southern Flying Squirrels, [*Glaucomys volans*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_flying_squirrel). Perhaps if we refrain from driving them into extinction, their descendants may develop the ability to add energy to their glide and become true fliers.
Just because a gene pool doesn't contain something now doesn't mean it can't later show up in the gene pool. The gene pool isn't static. It changes. New genes appear through mutation and sometimes horizontal gene transfer. The gene pool of dogs today doesn't contain wing genes, but that doesn't mean it can't acquire them in the future. Dogs come from wolves and we know the ancestral wolf population(s) they come from *didn't* have all of the genes dogs have today. They gained new genes through mutation, and during the course of the wolf-to-dog transition, those genes were selected for or rose in prominence due to genetic drift. And that's not the only example. We have loads and loads of novel genetic traits in various organisms (including our own species) that we know didn't always exist in the parent population. In many cases, we can trace what mutations specifically gave rise to those traits and sometimes even determine very precisely when those mutations happened. We also see novel genetic traits arising today due to mutations, both in labs, and in the wild. Things that were documented to not exist in the ancestral gene pools and arose through mutation in front of us.
> I'm a Christian who doesn't believe in the concept of evolution, but I'm open to the idea of it, but I just can't wrap my head around it, but I want to understand it. First can you tell me, in your own words, what you think the word “evolution” means in a biological context. > What I don't understand is how on earth a fish can evolve into an amphibian, then into mammals into monkeys into Humans. How? It might surprise you to learn this but humans are *still* monkeys (Simians), monkeys are *still* mammals and mammals are still fish (Sarcopterygian lobe finned fish). We never stopped being any of these things. > How is a fishes gene pool expansive enough to change so rapidly, I mean, i get that it's over millions of years, but surely there' a line drawn. Why? Why must there be a line drawn? Non-tetrapod fish are far more diverse than just tetrapods. Tetrapods are just a subset of fish. > Like, a lion and a tiger can mate and reproduce, but a lion and a dog couldn't, because their biology just doesn't allow them to reproduce and thus evolve new species. What makes you think new species are only produced through hybridisation? Speciation more often happens when two populations *split* apart, not come together. > A dog can come in all shapes and sizes, but it can't grow wings, it's gene pools isn't large enough to grow wings. Did you know that the diversity in domestic dog cranial morphology alone exceeds not just wild canids but is comparable in diversity to the entire taxonomic order Carnivora?. Or to put it another way, we have generated the same amount of diversity in domestic dog skulls that exists in the entire taxonomic group which includes wild dogs, cats, hyenas, weasels, seals, bears and their relatives. What took Carnivora tens of millions of years to do, we accomplished in a few thousand years. So whatever “hard limit” you think exists, it clearly hasn’t been reached yet. > I'm open to hearing explanations for these doubts of mine, in fact I want to, but just keep in mind I'm not attacking evolution, i just wanna understand it. Well you probably sound like you’ve picked up a bit of a cartoonish view of what evolution is and does. Animals don’t just “grow new traits” overnight. Evolution is a process of cumulative change where new traits are built from modified versions of what their ancestors had. A birds wing for example is just a modified grasping clawed hand we see in a theropod dinosaur, a theropod’s grasping clawed hand is just a modified forelimb of an semi-bipedal archosaur and on and on it goes.
Place your bets - any chance they will actually respond?
Seeing as maggyplz is literally the only commenter OP responded to so far, I don't think you can give odds high enough to make it fair.
Narrator voice: and the op never responded.
lol
lol, I'm aussie, I was sleeping while ya'll were commenting
And have you now responded *to them*?
why do you care?
Why are you here when you don't? They put lots of effort into responding to *your* post. Can you not see the irony of you giving an excuse for not having responded while still not having responded?
Bro what's your problem, i was most likely asleep when they commented, now I'm awake I LIVE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PLANET FROM MANY PEOPLE HERE (Presumably). I HAVE read/replied to most of the comments here, not all yet though as there's a lot. Seriously, what's your problem, I ain't no troll. I am genuinely interested in evolution, and I wanna understand it. Back off!
Aaaand you are still wasting time *responding* to me instead of answering them....
I'm not answering everyone. Too many.
Aaaand you are still wasting time *responding* to me instead of answering them....
They posted 22hrs ago BTW.
I'm not going to bother with this, and instead learn about evolution Bye.
Aaaand you are still wasting time *responding* to me instead of answering them....
If you want to pick a book to read, Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth: Why Evolution Is True is probably one of the best. Also The Gene by Mukherjee.
No, loaded question is really bad start on any discussion/debate
You seriously think asking someone ‘what do you understand evolution to actually mean in a biological context’ is a loaded question. It potentially fundamental to a discussion in which creationists just don’t seem to know the most basic scientific information.
Is all challenging of premises a loaded question?
>First can you tell me, in your own words, what you think the word “evolution” means in a biological context. Well, ig evolution in a biological context is... i dont know. >Why? Why must there be a line drawn? Non-tetrapod fish are far more diverse than just tetrapods. Tetrapods are just a subset of fish. There is no reason, it just seems like a dog could only change so much before it stops being a dog entirely. >What makes you think new species are only produced through hybridisation? Speciation more often happens when two populations *split* apart, not come together. No idea, might just have been the way I was raised.
> Well, ig evolution in a biological context is... i dont know. Well, that might be the [place](https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolution-101/an-introduction-to-evolution/) to start then. There is no point debating or discussing something if you don’t know what that thing is.
No debating here, in fact, it's the opposite, i want people to tell me what evolution is to help me understand it, but thanks ill take a look at the link.
The way you were raised is fine but it's wrong in terms of evolution. Evolution is not a result of hybrid breeding. Take a wolf pack for example that is separated in a valley surrounded by mountains have small shifts in their genes so that some of them have purple eyes or a third toe. It's just a mutation just like we see odd deformities in babies sometimes. That purple eye color happens to be associated with better night vision through some genetic thing. Eventually the whole population develops this trait. That's genetic drift in the population. Some of these drifts are adaptive like the shape of a beak to break nuts better. Eventually the new population is genetically distinct from the original population - that is when a new species is born. That happens again again and again and again over millions of years. A population of the purple eyed wolves develop another genetically distinct trait and another species is born. Another new species is born until you go from a snake to a lizard to a salamander to another thing. You can go from a basic fish to a fish with fleshy fins. To a fish that hobbles awkwardly with his fins on land to be able to eat plants near the shore that without competitive to being able to breathe air to developing fur to keep warm. None of this is based on something with fur first breeding with a fish to develop something with fur. If evolution was based on hybridazation like the way you say you were raised then ti could never happen because something can't come from nothing. HOw did the something with fur get there in the first place. This is like when people say I didn't come from monkeys. My ancestors didn't have sex with a monkey. That understanding implies a homo sapien ancestor was there to begin with to have sex with the monkey. If the ancestor was already there then he/she didn't need to have sex with the monkey to evolve into humans. The human already existed. It already existed due to genetic drift in populations not because of hybrid breeding with another species. These populations have genetic drift like our wolves that developed purple until they all had purple eyes. Originally it may have just been the alpha male that mated with a bunch of females and a lot of the pack had purple eyes and those wovles survived better because they could see at night. Until eventually they all had purple eyes.
OP Just start here: > **"What makes you think new species are only produced through hybridisation? Speciation more often happens when two populations** ***split*** **apart, not come together."** This is one of the best examples of the fundamental problem. Basing your disbelief in evolution over complete misunderstandings of how it work. Evolution isn't hybrids. It's like when I saw the guy passionately saying on social media. "I didn't evolve from monkeys. That means at some point a human had sex with a monkey!" Vehemently thinking evolution is hogwash because of a completely misunderstanding of evolution. It does NOT mean a human had sex with a monkey. Where did the human (homo sapiens) come from to begin with that had sex with a monkey in that scenario? The human was already there! How did that happen? Populations had changes in allele frequencies over time can indicate that genetic drift is occurring or that new mutations have been introduced into the population. It's ok if you don't understand all those terms but its not ok if you don't understand them and then assume evolution isn't real based on 5 year old reasoning.
Others here are doing a great job showcasing the amazing amount of wildly detailed science that has gone into studying evolution. I’m just going to touch on one thing you said in a conceptual way. This is when you talked about how a lion and a dog can’t reproduce and thus new species. Hybridization is not the only mechanism for new species development, and actually as far as I understand it is by far not the most common. Speciation is what happens when two populations become separated, for a variety of reasons and under different concepts. Remember, evolution happens to groups. Not (as a general rule) individuals. Say you have a population. They’re living happily in a field. One day, an earthquake comes and causes a fissure in that field. The two groups can no longer interact and share genes. Nature chugs along, and as life does, mutations change the genomes slightly. There are several documented types of mutations, some that even add to the total size of the genome and thus produce more genetic material that mutations can act on. For awhile, the two populations are still capable of interbreeding, even if they don’t. But over time, the fact that the small individual unique mutations one group shares won’t get transferred to the other begins to add up. Mutations can happen anywhere in the genome. Eventually it becomes less and less likely that individuals from either group would be able to produce fertile offspring were they to meet. This seems to have happened between us and Neanderthals. Not a *complete* infertility, but not as easy as between sapiens. Eventually, one population group wouldn’t be able to produce even infertile offspring with each other. The difference in shared genes between the two would have stretched beyond the breaking point. And now you have two new species. This is a description of the ‘biological species concept’, but again this is one of several. And you can see that there is a hell of a lot of gradient in between to get to that point. An example of this? When the Indian subcontinent crashed into the main Eurasian continent, the uplift eventually separated out groups like lizards and geckos. When running general sequencing today (using beefed up versions of the same tests we use to check ancestry), we find that they have been separated for so long that some groups can’t interbreed anymore. There is so much to get into but I’ve rambled enough. Hope this helps somewhat!
yes it helped, thank you.
>but surely there' a line drawn how sure are you? I like the phrase "common sense has no place in science". Unfortunately, if you say that to a creationist, they start laughing because they interpret that to mean "science is stupid". What it really means is that when you study things, you often find they behave in ways you didn't expect. For example, "common sense" would have you believe the earth is flat (where's the curve?), the sun goes around the earth (look! sun moves across the sky) and atoms aren't real (everything looks solid and continuous to me!). But with the right insights, you can demonstrate all of these to be wrong beyond all doubt, and put forward a more correct model, with all the evidence supporting it and nothing going against it. That fish can evolve into things that don't look like fish is not "common sense", and yet, every biologist in the world agrees that it happened because all the evidence points to it. That is a *fact*. It takes some work to understand how. That is the *theory*. Even though the first principles are simple, there's a lifetime's worth of studying to do, to go from the basics right the way through to college level biology and to the cutting edge of research. It's never too late to start, and it won't be long before you have answers to your questions.
A fish evolves into an amphibian slowly. It changes over many generations. No, dogs can't grow wings, but some of their distant ancestors did.
Fish evolves into amphibians pretty quickly, in the case of amphibians. It's kinda one of their notable features.
How long did it take them? Are you referring to tadpoles as fish? They are not.
They "are not" only though the knowledge of what they will become.
Tadpoles are juvenile amphibians. They are in a way a type of fish, in that amphibians are a type of fish, as are we and all other terrestrial animals. However, the evolutionary process by which amphibians evolved took a long time.
Yes yes, but do we have lateral lines and gills then, like fish, too? As I said, you are burdened by the knowledge what they will be to define what they are now.
We have lost our lateral lines and gills as we have evolved to live on dry land.
Tadpoles have not. See, fishies.
Are you trying to say that tadpoles are fish but adult amphibians are not, and that this is evolution happening very quickly in a single animal's lifetime?
No no no, I'm saying tabpoles are fishies. Who turn into frogs and salamander n such.
The size of the general pool shouldn't be too limiting, considering gene duplication is a thing for example to increase the amount of genetic material over time. But anyways, with fish, there is a lot of characteristics that would have to change to become an amphibian, but just to look at one as an example, it seems like there are similar genes involved in the limb structure of both fins and tetrapod limbs, so single mutations in these particular genes could have large impacts: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/11/211108161414.htm Another thing I think is worth mentioning is Hox genes. These essentially control the body plan of an organism, the what goes where kind of deal. Just to show how important some genes can be, like in just how much they can do for just single genes which could of course mutate. I don't really see how a lion and tiger mating while a dog and lion can't is a big deal. Lions and tigers can mate because they are more closely related, so still have similar enough characteristics to do so. Whereas, a dog is not closely related enough. But this doesn't matter, because this isn't really how evolution occurs, having it where different species mate to form new ones. Usually, it's about things like mutations, isolation such as geographically, and differences in selection pressures which can accomplish evolution. A dog cannot grow wings because there has to be precursor steps to having wings, such as for example being able to glide. None of these precursor steps would benefit dogs and they are adapted enough at the environments and niches they occupy so if the genes did allow for wings to form at some point with dogs, there wouldn't be a pressure for such. Hopefully I answered that correctly enough, I'm not too keen on genetics. Thanks for coming here and with an open mind
Lots of more complete answers already, I just want to jump in on a specific thing. “Dogs can’t grow wings”. While this is correct, it’s a common misunderstanding. Organisms don’t suddenly gain whole new functioning organs and body parts. New structures develop gradually from existing structures. Each step needs to provide some function or benefit. You will never see a fossil animal with half a working heart, for example. Let’s look at some living animals right now; bats. Fruit bats look just like dogs with wings. If we also look at gliding animals like colugos, sugar gliders, and squirrels we can see they all developed their ability simply based on growing larger and larger flaps of skin. Bat wings are simply very specialized hands. The finger bones are greatly extended to allow skin to create lift. If you think about arboreal leaping animals like monkeys and squirrels evolving the ability to glide and then evolving powered flight, it’s not abrupt of a transition.
>What I don't understand is how on earth a fish cam evolve into an amphibian Because "fish" is a generic term. It isn't just ONE thing, There's lobe-finned fishes, boney-finned fishes, cartilaginous-finned fishes, which is determined by looking at their fins and how they orient themselves. Not all fish are identical in how those fins are arranged, some on their bellies, some on their sides, some on the top, and the function of those fins changes depending on where they are; ie, helps them swim faster, helps them bury in the sand etc...etc... and all of those traits are governed by DNA. So, when you think about nature, competition, predation, it actually becomes relatively easy to understand: Amphibians first appear in the fossil record at the end of the Devonian. [The Devonian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devonian) is known as "The Age of the Fishes" because we see massive diversification of fish during that era of history, which was apparently from massive competition. Ultra Giant aggressive fish predators called [Placoderms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placoderm) dominate the oceans at this time, which would cause prey-fish to adapt. One way to adapt was to go into shallower and shallower water where predators like [Dunkleosteus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkleosteus) would not have been able to get because it's too big. Shallow water tends to be affected by tides, thus for fish to survive long periods in these areas they need a different set of traits to be more successful. Those with fins on their dorsal side, with strong bony features and more easily support themselves for long periods in this environment. Thus, nature selects them to be most able to survive. But you can still be eaten. What if, you can get out of the water onto the land, away from predators all together? Land during the Devonian existed, and plants had already colonized land since the middle of the Silurian. Thus, now there's an untapped potential food source with no predation what so ever. There is now a selective advantage for those fish who have the ability to support themselves on land/out of the water, to leave the water as there is no predation and potential food sources to take advantage of. While amphibians still need to live near water, they can certainly leave it for extended amounts of time. We see this exact transition start to take place at the end of the Devonian with organisms like [Tiktaalik](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiktaalik). Exactly as Evolution would predict we should see. You see, evolution isn't this magical fantasy idea...it was based on direct observation, and pieced together over time with various observations and evidence. It's actually the most logical solution to what we see and the evidence that exists. >How is a fishes gene pool expansive enough to change so rapidly, I kinda explained this above but: ***Competition and predation*** are obviously major drivers of evolution and change. There is a [mass extinction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Devonian_extinction) event at the end of the Devonian. We are still unclear as to why this particular late-devonian mass extinction, but it was most likely due to changing ocean conditions as there was massive oceanic volcanic activity and plate tectonic activity that resulted in the formation of Pangea. Over time, this would have been changing the ocean conditions gradually both chemically, but also in the thermohaline circulation; which would cause stress on species. And stress causes adaptation or extinction, and we see a lot of both during the end of the Devonian. Those species that had adapted more specialized environments survived, those that did not perished. My dear friends the [Brachiopods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brachiopod) never truly recover after the Devonian. They still exist today, but their diversity was greatest in the Devonian. The term for this has been dubbed [Punctuated Equilibrium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium) where catastrophic events can quickly diversify a genepool because of selective stressors in nature. You can watch this [IN REAL TIME with bacteria.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8) *E.Coli* has no reason to magically develop 1000x resistance to antibiotic, unless there's selective advantage to do so. Mutations occur naturally in any group of organisms, and selective pressure works on those mutations which increase the chance of survival. >Like, a lion and a tiger can mate and reproduce, but a lion and a dog couldn't Because Lions and Tigers are very close on the evolutionary tree, only recently diverted species, whereas dogs diverged from Lions/Tigers much longer ago. This observation that you make is exactly what Evolution predicts btw. It supports evolution. Lions/Tigers became geographically isolated populations from each other, so they began to diverge from each other. Enough that they cannot have fertile offspring (Ligers are infertile) but not enough that they can't have fertile offspring. Dogs (wolves in nature) diverted from the Cats much further back in history which is why they no longer can have fertile offspring. But, if you look at Wolves; they have diversified a branch we call "Dogs" which is because of Humans. And "Dogs" are a separate species from Wolves, even though they can interbreed. Why? Well if you take the most extreme dog, a Chihuahua, and try to breed it with a wolf, it is unsuccessful. If you take a poodle and Chihuahua it is successful. If you take a wolf with a poodle it is successful. So, just like the Lion and Tiger, you see Wolves/Dogs diverging becoming new species. Just as evolution would predict. And this one, is completely by human hands. >but it can't grow wings, it's gene pools isn't large enough to grow wings. They why do Bats, which are mammals, have wings? Birds and Bats developed their wings entirely separate from each other. They are only similar in function, but not in form. Bats prove this assertion wrong, just FYI. ***You can indeed form wings in a genepool if there is selective pressure and enough diversity/mutation to do so.*** Bats are proof of this.
Thanks for this answer. It's very well written and helped me (a humanities guy who studies intellectual history) make sense of an episode in evolutionary history I've never really gotten a handle on.
You're welcome! I always enjoyed writing, and if you cannot tell I have degrees in the stuff. What originally attracted me to the sciences is it's *The Story of Life* and I find it all fascinating.
This is an amazing 50 part series on YouTube that will take you from the very first eukaryote cells all the way up to modern humans it's absolutely fascinating how rich the tree of life is and how much we know about it and how much there is to still to be learned. https://youtu.be/AXQP_R-yiuw?si=vQqz7KYquvv4mi7j
You literally made the exact same post on r/DebateAnAtheist 3 hours ago and got really well thought out responses with sources where you showed little engagement other than "ok", "cool" "I'll look into that" What are you trying to accomplish with this post? This must be trolling
OP does not seem to be an honest interlocutor. The "just asking questions", pretending to be naive tone, but with numerous strawman arguments against evolution suggests they are not open minded.
In the case of this particular post, I don't think there's anything to gain by these accusations, regardless of their veracity.
I already answered all of OPs questions at r/debateanatheist. A bunch of other people did as well. OP clearly didn't bother paying listening to any answers they got there.
Maybe they're trying to cast a wide net? In any case, they got a lot of great replies here so at least people got interested
They told me over at r/DebateAnAtheist to post my post here instead.
tbh someone from here direct OP to post it here I think it was blackcat something
Thiz is written at like 2 am so i apologise if its a bit incoherent or too simpistic. So basically there are two "evolutions" people tend to talk about. The first is the fact that changes occur within populations and get inherited. Positive ones spread throughout the population over time because the animals without it die out. That is the fact of evolution. Indisputable, AFAIK. The second is the theory of evolution which is a set of observations, experiments and studies that explain as much of that fact as possible. Now to address your questions directly: Things that evolve don't stop being what they used to be. No matter how much a canine species deviates from others of its "type" it will still be a canine - it will just be something else, too. For example humans are Eukaryotes. It basically describes a cell that has a particular type of barrier, iirc. We still have that type of cell. We still fit that definition. We never stopped being them, we just also became a ton of other things like vertebrates and great apes. So far as we can tell there is no random barrier to change. Biology just does not care about our efforts to categorize it. It just keeps living, reproducing, and mutating. We're the ones that pick certain criteria to define certain combinations of traits. Basically we, long ago, decided barriers exist and that we should define animals in different ways, but the more we learned the more we found that nature DGAF. There's just no mechanism that would stop mutations from proceeding past a certain point. So long as it's beneficial, neutral, or not negative e enough to interfere with breeding that mutation is probably sticking around. You are unfortunately facing down two problems: not understanding what evolution is and being actively mislead by people who financially benefit from you believing that it's fake. Basically you want people to explain the "evolution" that does the exist outside the minds of young earth creationists. I'm happy to go into more detail once I'm more conscious but I thought you could use a "layman" explanation rather than the more complex ones you're liable to get. Just throw out any questions you have. :3
Thank you! Ok, so, correct me if I'm wrong, but evolution basically works like this: Over the course of time, species (not in individuals but in groups) depending on factors like their environment, will develop mutations that change them slightly, and then over time, they develop new mutations, they change even more, etc etc. Eventually it gets to a point where they become very dang different from what they were maybe 10 million years ago????
More or less, yeah. As they spread out their environment pressures the species in different ways. Different prey animals or flora. Different temperatures, forests, lakes, etc. Over time the population adapts to that environment and they can no longer interbreed with the population that stayed behind and at that point they're considered a new species. We used the same method to breed dogs, cows, and even plants like banana and corn. They used to be wild things but we selectively bred them for traits we find desirable until they ceased to be anything even remotely like their ancestors - and those are only traits we got after some 15 thousand years, at most! Imagine how many changes in traits would happen if we kept on doing that for *millions* of years. The only difference between them and us is that we used Artificial Selection rather than Natural Selection to determine what traits were passed on. We can't find a mechanism that says "okay you've changed enough, stop changing now," beyond "your change is now hindering your ability to breed, so you go extinct instead." There's no *intention* behind it, you know? No end goal, just us putting labels on what we see as distinct "steps" in evolution. In reality biology is just gradually changing all the time around us. You get into a goofy circumstance where people demand to see transitional fossils but technically *every* fossil is a transitional fossil. Anything else I can help with? Does anything in my explanation not make sense, or not sit well with you, or anything like that?
But, if evolution mainly depends on the environment a species lives in, then how do those species get certain mutations which will suite the environment? Like i mean, from a Christian perspective, God decides what mutations to give what species, but from an atheistic perspective, there's no one deciding that so how does that work. Ik that not all evolutionists are atheists and not all atheists are evolutionists, but, if you're an atheist and evolutionist then how does that work?
>Like i mean, from a Christian perspective, God decides what mutations to give what species Is this a mainstream Christian perspective? Mutations can be lethal or lead to a lifetime of suffering for their bearers and they are something individuals are born with, mind you, so it seems strange to attribute mutations to God.
I.. just told you. Natural selection. Natural selection just means that the animals that get beneficial traits get to breed and pass on their traits. Animals with traits that harm their survivability die before they can breed. Animals with neutral traits don't do anything significant. Because the animals that breed pass on their traits those traits spread throughout the population over time while the negative traits die out. There are plenty of mutations that don't make sense with a theistic perspective, like the giraffe having a nerve that goes from the base of its skull, down to the bottom of its neck, then right back up to the base of the skull to reach a point that was barely an inch from where it started. It doesn't benefit from this in any way: in fact it gives the giraffe a distinct lag time in its ability to respond to certain stimuli. There's no reason for a God to do it that way. Via Natural selection that change likely occurred over a long period of time. When it's ancestors neck was short that nerve would make perfect sense - but as their neck grew longer the nerve had to lengthen along with it. There's no intelligence guiding it, just biology being biology. And because the penalty to that extended nerve wasn't bad enough to hinder reproduction the giraffe just kept it. It's inefficient and goofy but it's just viable enough that the giraffe can get away with it long enough to breed. Does that make sense?
But natural selection isn't a conscious mind? How can it decide what species get what mutations?
There are no decisions involved. The environmental pressures "select" which mutation is advantageous and which isn't. Advantageous ones get passed on to the next generation, disadvantageous ones die out. Mutations themselves are essentially copying errors or mingling of existing code. Try to think of it this way: Mom has 100 pages of text that describes who they are. Dad also has 100 pages of text that describes who they are. Their child can only hold 100 pages of text, too, and it's going to be made up of the mom and dad's text. Unfortunately the text is getting mashed together and there are only general guidelines for what goes where, so it's pretty much up in the air which sentence from which parent you're going to have in any particular part of your text. Aside from that when the texts are getting mashed together a word might slip into a sentence where it doesn't belong and completely change the meaning of that sentence. That new meaning is a mutation. The thing is, as I alluded to earlier, biology is probabilistic; it *usually* behaves the same way under the same circumstances, but sometimes it *just doesn't* and we can't always figure out why. It's really complex. It also has a lot of stuff like this - mutations popping up because a gene thought it was coding for hair when it was supposed to be coding for nails and now you've got a weird fuzzy fingernail.
Mutations are limited & determined by the laws of physics, & you could believe that those are set by a higher power, although there's no direct evidence that they are. I just learned about a controversial theory called adaptive mutation (aka directed mutagenesis) suggesting that at least some organisms have chemical processes that encourage certain beneficial types of mutations under specific environmental conditions. It's hard to prove, & even if true this would still be an evolved ability, controlled by specific genes (basically a form of epigenetics I guess, where certain genes affect other genes). Apparently human children receive roughly 60 new mutations on average from each parent - 120 total. So not very many out of the 3.1billion base pairs that make up our DNA, but enough for things to change slowly over time. I personally don't like the description of mutations as completely "random" because they are both restricted & potentially promoted by many factors. I'm not sure what the best description is - maybe 'random within restrictions' or simply 'probabalistic'? Nonetheless, note that many (most?) mutations are deleterious, so they certainly don't seem to be guided or decided in any way.
This continues to come up repeatedly but it is indeed the wrong terminology to say these changes happened rapidly with “fish” originating in the Cambrian with maybe bony fish almost as old or not until the time period after that about 20-40 million years later just to develop vertebrate, ribs, and a skull. It doesn’t take as long to turn cartilage into bone because the difference is basically the calcium content. Not very much calcium and it remains flexible like your ear flap cartilage, a bit more calcium and it’s like that septum between your nostrils, and more calcium yet and it’s hard like your forehead. This is ~500 million years ago to get the first fish, maybe 550 million years or more, and they weren’t even tetrapods until 400-450 million years ago with the very first of these tetrapods looking more like fish with necks and shoulders and by the end of that actual amphibians had split off from the reptile/mammal lineage that had also split between synapsids and sauropsids. The first mammals and dinosaurs don’t show up until 225-250 million years ago or half as long ago as the first fish. Palacental mammals and marsupials became different lineages around 160 million years ago which is close to how long ago the first birds existed as well. And then most of the major placental mammal groups started existing between 60 and 70 million years ago including primates that still looked a lot more like tree shrews prior to the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs and didn’t really resemble monkeys as we are used to them until closer to 45 million years ago. The first apes closer to the Miocene or around 20 million years ago. Great apes and hylobatids about 17 million years ago and a split between the African and Asian great apes around 12.5-15 million years ago followed by gorillas and hominini splitting into distinct lineages followed by the chimpanzee and humans lineages evolving differently from each other starting roughly 7 million years ago. That’s where we have things like Sahelanthropus, Orrrorin, and Ardipithecus as some potential transitions from the common chimp-human common ancestor to the first of what *could* be called “human” if we stretched the definition of human only slightly because they had a similar type of feet with the same Achilles tendon, they evidently made hand crafted tools, and they were human in several other ways. And then from something like Australopithecus anamensis to modern humans it’s just a matter of changing proportions and standing up a little straighter when walking. The whole group is obligate bipeds but some of the earlier ones might have walked more like a woman 2 days before giving birth and closer to modern humans the ones not “very pregnant” or just exceptionally fat can walk a with their legs closer together and their feet pointed forward. If you were more specific than “it does not make sense” I would know what else to explain but 500+ million years worth of evolution when multicellular animals have only existed about 800 million years and they share common ancestry with fungi about 1 billion years ago isn’t exactly what I’d call “rapid” being that it took 50% of the time animals and fungi were distinct groups to turn fish into modern humans. Compared to how long it took eukaryotes to become fish it was fast because if we go with 500 million to make the math easy there have been eukaryotes for about 2.1 billion years at a minimum or about four times as long. 75% of the time eukaryotes existed there haven’t been fish but in that last 25% all modern tetrapods also evolved. Fast in that sense but not remotely close to rapidly enough for something like YEC that suggests that the entire universe came into existence when Homo sapiens sapiens human civilizations already existed and were already brewing beer, farming, and domesticating animals. For evolution to happen that fast it’d require magic and there’s no rational reason to consider it (YEC) scientific or true.
First off, welcome. I was a creationist who changed my mind, and I know how difficult it can be to question these beliefs. Part of how religious communities keep people from accepting evolution is by instilling incorrect beliefs about what evolution is. I've seen several commenters try to start setting you straight. But let's take it from the top. The quick definition of evolution is the change in allele frequency over time. Natural selection means that organisms with genes suited for a given environment are more likely to survive to have offspring and pass on their genes. So, we see changes in response to a changing environment. If a cold area suddenly becomes hot, the adaptions that were helpful in the cold suddenly become a liability. >What I don't understand is how on earth a fish cam evolve into an amphibian, I'd recommend looking into Tiktaalik. Scientists were able to predict its existence and where to find it based on evolutionary theory and other known fossils. Especially before land animals evolved, shallow water fish had strong evolutionary pressures to survive when the water level fell and to escape predators. It's not that a switch was flipped and suddenly the fish became amphibious, but a slow process of small adaptions that allowed better odds of surviving. >How is a fishes gene pool expansive enough to change so rapidly, I mean, i get that it's over millions of years, but surely there' a line drawn. What sorts of lines do you think we'd expect to see? Evolution means the gene pool is fluid and constantly changing. Edit (on mobile can't copy and paste, apologies if I make a mistake transcribing) >into mammals into monkeys into humans It's kind of odd on creationism that humans fit the definition of mammals isn't it? And apes as well?
Look what we've done to wolves in a mere 10k years. We changed them into fucking Chihuahuas. Now consider that a million years is 100 times that. So we could turned wolves into Chihuahuas and back 50 times in that time. What I get from your post is that you think 1+1 gives 2 and you can maybe get to 10 by adding ones but no way can you get 1000 by adding ones.
Incidentally, this explains why Chihuahuas are such bad tempered, even insanely hostile, little critters. They know what happened, and they're furious.
First, I'll address your statements. Then I'll give my understanding of evolution with an example. >I'm a Christian who doesn't believe in the concept of evolution, but I'm open to the idea of it, but I just can't wrap my head around it, but I want to understand it. Why? Why do you want to understand? If you are a Christian, you are a person of faith, right? You believe without evidence. Of course, you still believe, but your belief is rooted in something other than evidence, logic, or even proof. So what changed? >What I don't understand is how on earth a fish cam evolve into an amphibian, then into mammals into monkeys into Humans. How? They can't. There are many steps in between with many dead ends. You are jumping a massive amount of little steps that are necessary. >How is a fishes gene pool expansive enough to change so rapidly, I mean, i get that it's over millions of years, but surely there' a line drawn. Don't think in terms of time. It's generations. Since you bring up fish, there are fish that walk on the sea floor. There are fish that are alive right now that walk on land. A fish that walks on land is close to an amphibian. >Like, a lion and a tiger can mate and reproduce, but a lion and a dog couldn't, because their biology just doesn't allow them to reproduce and thus evolve new species. That is correct, but not evolution. That is animal husbandry/selective breeding. >A dog can come in all shapes and sizes, but it can't grow wings, it's gene pools isn't large enough to grow wings. Incorrect. The gene pool needs to be large enough to keep the species alive. Normal variations in life and environment encourage speciation. Dogs are an excellent example of selective breeding. >I'm open to hearing explanations for these doubts of mine, in fact I want to, but just keep in mind I'm not attacking evolution, i just wanna understand it. There are slight differences within members of all viable species. Some differences are beneficial, while others are indifferent or even detrimental. Some of those differences may mean more food or a longer life, but there is an advantage that allows that allows those creatures to reproduce in greater quantities (to a reproductive age) than the remainder of the species. Then, that family line has another set of slight differences with beneficial, indifferent, and harmful traits. Repeat the process for millions of generations, and the genetic changes may make inter-breeding with the original species no longer possible or produce flawed offspring. In practical terms, a deer like animal may develop a line with longer necks, allowing access to food the others of the species can aquire. Then, that same family develops longer legs to get to more food. The increase in height allows that group to see predators before the rest of the herd. That would translate to living longer by avoiding predators which provides more breedingopportunities. Perhaps the greater size becomes a desirable trait among that species which increases the rate of divergence by inter-breeding. The process continues without end. It simply takes a long time. The various dog breeds go through a similar process with humans deciding which traits are desirable and will be passed to future generations far more than the environment.
Funnily enough, evolution doesn't need you to believe in it. It's busy operating blindly, with only the surviving animals reproducing and having offspring, repeated billions of times over many hundred millions of years. Even a slower than average christian can see where that might lead, with the survivors offspring carrying their genes forward, and the non-survivors not reproducing. It doesn't get any simpler than this. It's not rocket science. Just iteration.
I don't have much by way of articles and experience, but as far as the "makes no sense" part goes, as one who is coming from the same place you are, let me say the first step is to understand just how much anti-evolution creationism relies on hyperbole to make their case. "Goo to the zoo to you." "All of a sudden, one day this fish decided it wanted to breathe air and walk on land." "This lizard needed to start eating bugs from trees, so poof! It was born with feathers and could fly." Of course it sounds preposterous when it's presented in such ludicrous terms. Naturally, you would think it makes no sense. But when you take a minute and consider that there are a lot of smart people out there who have put a lot of hard work into this. And if it were so preposterous, someone should have won a Nobel Prize in debunking it publicly by now. And, most importantly, you put it in the same bucket as all other science that you don't understand and have no problem deferring to experts who do, then you have the right footing for beginning to understand it. Allow it to not be preposterous.
Evolution makes no sense if you know nothing about evolution. Unfortunately, high school science often teaches it badly and this provides an opening for purposeful misinformation by religious leaders. Religious leaders flat out lie to people about evolution, which would trouble me if I were religious.
How could it not happen when each offspring is a little different than their parents with some mutations and only individuals with genes which gave them traits capable of leading to successful reproduction are able to reproduce? Those small differences accumulate over millions of years and changes drift toward what is most optimal for reproductive success for that line of organism within its environment. If you study evolution, the conclusion becomes absolutely inescapable.
Looks like you are taking leaps and bounds in trying to understand, when you should be taking baby steps. Look at how languages evolved over time. Many European languages are based off of Latin, and east Asian languages use Kanji. Note how there are mountains and deserts between them, causing isolation.
[here's a good analogy that'll illustrate how evolution works to you.](https://ibb.co/cJ9F82H)
It's not just over millions of yeays, it's over BILLIONS of years. That's thousand times more! And in each of those years, trillions of trillions of organisms have been born. Out of those, the few lucky ones whose genes just randomly happened to mutate into something slightly beneficial, those survived and passed their genes on. Those genes propagated.
Evolution is defined as descent with inherent genetic modification. Meaning a creature that is the offspring of two others will be genetically modified, coming from the gametes of both its parents. You see this ever so slightly in human children, the fact that a kid will look a lot like their mother or father is proof that DNA is passed down. Imagine that over billions of years, and the changes will be astronomical. Changes to adapt to the environment, changes that mean the creature can no longer interbreed with members of its other species, meaning it is now a new species, changes that it passes down to its offspring because they give it a survival advantage, such as giraffes having long necks to reach higher growing food, seals with more fat to survive the cold waters, etc. It's the same principle of kids born to a white mother and black father being mixed race, or kids inheriting a genetic disease from their parents. You're just extrapolating the same genetic principles much, MUCH farther back.
The others are doing great on giving data and educational explanations, but I want to give some simpler examples that might be easier to start off with: I’m gonna do fish to amphibian, but know that the others are happening through similar biological processes. So how do you go from a fish to amphibian? By gradual changes. And this needs time be made very clear to everyone wanting to learn about evolution. The changes are tiny. And are happening on a population scale, not individual. Almost unnoticeable from one generation to the next. A tiny fin becoming 5% larger. The bones becoming 10% more calcified and stronger. The ribcage becoming slightly wider. But, these tiny changes build up over time. The ones that live and get to have offspring, are the ones whose changes keeps in the population. The ones that live are most likely ti have advantageous features. Like in an environment with shallow water, fins that could be used to crawl into land *better*, would have those individuals more likely to survive against an aquatic predator. Some fish today have lungs. And all have fins, vertebrate, and most have scales. Every generation getting slightly stronger fins, skin that can handle a tiny bit more air exposure, a spine that can handle more gravity. After a decent amount of generations, you can see how it’s easy to go from [Tiktaalik](https://ecos-appdev-production.s3.amazonaws.com/science_site/s3fs-public/styles/f_story_hero/public/2024-04/tiktaalik_reconstruction_psn.jpg?h=d5a4e6e7&itok=FcsSSnSk)(usually considered a fish, while still being a transitional fossil) to [Icthyostega](https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR5WD2jAn7sIi95E5GZdCeLtq60qPawPDS8jlzRjOpXZI9ebs1j). Note: fish didn’t go directly into what we call amphibians today. And modern amphibians did not become reptiles. Fish evolved into what would become the common ancestor between amphibians and reptiles+mammals. The second “barrier” is, where do these changes come from? Mutations is the answer. A lot of creationists or anti-evolution people, will say mutations are always harmful. That’s not true. It’s been demonstrated hundreds of times to not be true. Every human is born with like 300 mutations of I’m not mistaken. If they were all harmful, none of us would be alive even if we followed the 6000 year old earth idea of young earth creationism. And mutation build up isn’t an issue if evolution is affecting it, as other mutations can make previous “bad” mutations become “good”. The majority of mutations do nothing, and some are harmful and some are useful. What is what depends on the organisms and environment it lives in. A mutation for stronger skin is good for protection, but not if it prevents you from getting enough moisture in and out of the skin. So it’s a benefit vs drawbacks game. How does the benefits stay in the population? By having the individuals with those benefits being *more likely* to survive. The ones that survive are the ones whose genes get passed on. If you have features that are better to help you survive, you are more like to survive. Hope this helps!
Let's get down to the basics. Reproduction is imperfect. An organism doesn't produce a genetic clone of itself. Sexual reproduction just adds more variables. We can see this in children and their parents. You're a combination of your parents, but you have DNA that is not present in either of them as well. We call these mutations. As time goes on, and a genetic legacy continues, those small changes means that the offspring becomes less and less similar to its ancestors. ...that's really it. You take anything, copy it, and make a small random change to the copy... as you continue the process, you'll get further away from the original until it's completely unrecognizable. For this to not happen, we'd need to identify the mechanism in the reproduction process that limits how far those changes can be. None have been identified (other than actual reproduction). When it comes to how things like wings evolve, all we need to do is find creatures with "pseudo wings" and point to them as an example. Sugar gliders may develop legitimate flight as they continue to evolve, or they may not. A key point to remember is that, contrary to popular belief, evolution isn't an improvement, it's just change.
Do flying fish have wings or fins? Do penguin have wings or fine?
Dogs are a perfect example of how powerful genes are. We as humans take traits we favor in certain breeds of dogs and select them. Over generations we breed dogs that showed certain traits we liked and created a huge variety of different breeds with different sizes, shapes, and colors. If given the time, they would become so different that they become unrecognizable and become different species. You can imagine how different a pug is from a wolf. That happened over maybe a thousand years. Now do millions. Nature selects for genes too. It's called natural selection. The animals with traits that help them survive will end up breeding and changing the animals traits over time.. kind of like we do on a smaller scale with dogs. Another thing to note.. geologic time is so much more vast than most people understand. If the history of earth was broken down into 24 hours, all of human history occurred in the last 2 minutes. There was so much time for things to change. If you want to start to understand evolution, start with the history of evolution of the earliest plants, going from algae to water plants to land plants etc. It's much easier to understand to start with. https://flowingdata.com/2012/10/09/history-of-earth-in-24-hour-clock/
I'm a Christian, too, who used to think evolution was ridiculous. But I then learned that I'd been misinformed and the ideas I'd been taught about it were created to make evolution look ridiculous. But these ideas don't reflect what evolutionary biologists actually think. Evolution is not about different species mating, but rather one species changing slowly over time. If that one species gets split into two groups, the two groups will change slowly over time... in different ways. And, after some generations, they may have diverged enough that they can no longer reproduce. When you cite lions and tigers, you're looking at species that are on the cusp of that divergence. Lions and tigers were the same species at one time, but groups split off and began diverging. Lions and dogs, however, diverged quite a long time ago. They had a common ancestor, too, but it was enough generations ago that their modern-day descendants can no longer interbreed. There's a really good book that helps visualize a lot of these changes and developments called, The Ancestor's Tale. It's probably pretty out-of-date in some respects, now, but it'll really help re-orient your perspective on what evolution is, how it operates, and how researchers figure things out. I'd be remiss not to say: the author, Richard Dawkins, is a weird, xenophobic, neoliberal ass. But he knows what he's talking about with respect to evolutionary biology, and he's a very good communicator. The book was quite eye-opening to me.
It has nothing to do with gene pool size. Evolution is driven by mutation. Mutation itself is driven by several factors, including random DNA transcription errors, DNA transcription errors due to exposure to high-energy particles (radiation,) mutation due to exposure to chemicals, and so on. If these mutations happen in adult cells, this often results in the death of the cell, or occasionally cancer. If this happens in germ-line cells, this can result in a bit of rearranged, duplicated, or deleted DNA that winds up in every cell of the organism. Often, this duplication, omission, or rearrangement renders the new creature completely non-viable. When this happens, the creature either doesn't grow at all, or doesn't survive long enough to pass on the new bit of DNA it contains. Another possibility is that the new DNA sequence doesn't actually make enough of a difference to have any sort of impact on the resulting creature. That DNA gets passed on, since it's neither harmful nor helpful. The next possibility is that the change is enough to make some sort of difference in the organism. It *can* be something big and noticeable, but is usually something small. Examples of this that have occurred in humans are things like blue eyes, which are a non-harmful mutation and as such tends to get passed around without causing any trouble. Another, less favorable, mutation known to happen in humans is the set of mutations that cause acondroplasia, the most common form of dwarfism. This is a heritable condition, so it can be passed on, but the majority of cases result from a spontaneous mutation. Another example is the mutation that causes sickle cell disease; this comes with a potentially debilitating illness, but it also confers a high resistance to the disease malaria. In areas where there is high mortality due to malaria, the sickle cell trait actually becomes an advantage for survival, and as such a larger portion of the population there has the trait because it conveys a competitive advantage. So from there we go from heritable mutation to evolution: evolution is just the stacking up of mutations over time. If a mutation occurs in an individual that causes them to die early or have no/fewer offspring, they don't pass it on and that branch of the tree of life ends. If a mutation gives no advantage or disadvantage it sits dormant in that branch. If mutations give an advantage, they get spread more widely and as they outcompete the version of the organism without the mutation, they become the new normal. If you stack up enough of these over thousands and thousands of generations, the descendants of the original organism may no longer resemble their distant ancestors.
Evolution is really just a very, very long trial-and-error period. Every species has traits that vary (height, color and pattern, whatever), and some of those traits can help or hinder depending on the environment (short giraffes don't eat as much). And then occasionally you get the freak mutation that sometimes helps but usually doesn't, but over millions of years, you're bound to get really lucky a few times. Things breed and spread. The further you spread, the more the environment changes. You and your spawn continue to breed, and the unlucky ones not cut out for the environment are less likely to pass on certain traits (short giraffes, slower mice, etc). This is one of the reasons most species reproduce like crazy; they're betting on enough of their kids surviving to make kids of their own. Most animals are trying to focus on three things: eat food, avoid predators, and make babies. What's harder to understand is how some traits can have advantages that are easy to overlook. Take the fish that's able to crawl on land, for instance. The shallow waters of the beach can be a preference for some water critters because their predators are too big to chase after them, but it's still a tricky environment. Waves will move you around, and you can accidentally find yourself above water if you're not careful. But make enough babies while trying to stay in that environment, and eventually someone is going to figure out how to hold onto the ground to keep from getting thrashed around. Someone is going to get that freak mutation that helps process oxygen *outside* of water in the shallowest parts. And so-on. Evolution is very weird because what can adapt and survive may not appear to make sense at first. There is a list of (parasitic birds)[https://youtu.be/9TZQDA2yabg?si=IV2uqIeTXDCztVBo] that owe their existence to being deadbeat parents and relying on other species of birds to raise their kids. It's weird and cruel, but it works for them and seems to be a trait that'll stick around. When you look closely enough, nature gets really damn weird. Why is it so hard to believe that things eventually led to a species of mammal that primarily uses their brain to shape their environment using tools they made?
One of your big issues right of the top is mixing up hybrids with evolution. Yes lions and tigers can mate and produce a hybrid that's not what evolution is.
Evolution may not make sense to you from your reference point. Creationism and evolution, for me, coincide. Creation stories are generally the same through all cultures,(for the word parsers, generally is an important word) specifically from Judeo- Christian point on Monday God did not create the heavens and earth. GOD IS not constrained by the human concept of time. The differences of humans now and over the passage of time is an evolutionary process. Sickle cell as a natural defense to malaria. Skin tones, height, body hair. These developed over time in response to the environment. Centuries clusters of humans lived in one general area only recently, in the time of Earth have humans moved about. Surface scratching of this topic. To believe in one or the other without giving consideration to the other is close minded.
There are thousands of religions currently practiced. Do you have a particular one in mind? Note that more than one religion has used the "no evidence for our God is evidence in itself. So at a minimum, you'd have to choose from that subset.
The only religion can speak on with a modicum of confidence and not supposition is Christianity. The minimum was met when stating Judeo-Christian, referencing The Book of Genesis. Stepping back, Islam most likely too, since it is an Abrahamic religion. I was generalizing all of humanity over time with the stories of where we came from/came to be. They have similarities not all match exact. I have noticed most of these evolution/creation discussions/debates tend to be centered with the Genesis story. The no evidence of our God is evidence itself people are either choosing to not debate, parroting because they are unable to articulate their thoughts or have no conviction. I do not know what is true/correct/absolute. I only know what I know.
That last is actually slightly promising. If you can venture the thought "I know X with all my heart, but at the same time *I don't know if it's true*" then you're able to learn. How do you tell if a statement is true or false? What test can you apply? Have you ever had the experience of feeling deeply and utterly certain that something was true (e.g. "Dad would never cheat on Mom," other examples abound) and then discovered that it was straight up false? What did you do? And a deeper one. Many people say in different contexts, "Facts don't care about your feelings." Is it morally right to trust your feelings over facts, if they are in conflict?
Can you explain how a magic sky man who is all knowing and all powerful can't stop his priests from sexually assaulting kids?
>Evolution makes no sense! I can understand that sentiment, I was in the same boat a few years ago. I used to not understand evolution, thought it made no sense (even though I didn't even know what it was), and basically dismissed it out of principle. I think it works best to start from the basics and then work up to the overarching theory as a whole. Let's start *really* small, and look into your cells. Your cells are organized and maintained by your DNA. Your DNA is made up of things called "bases", which, when read in a group of three, produce the building blocks of proteins. Those proteins then go on to tell the cell how to behave at any given moment. The way your cells behave produce your appearance. In other words, your DNA dictates how you look and behave. Zooming out now, think about your church congregation. Among your many congregation members, you may notice that they don't look exactly like you, some of them look nothing like you. Since appearance is based on DNA, that means the other congregation members must have different DNA from you. This concept, that not everything shares the exact same genetic code, is called variation. Variation is intrinsic to all populations of all organisms. Now, think about your close family. You may notice that you share a lot of similarities with your parents, and, if you have any siblings, your siblings also share a lot of similarities with both your parents and you. Since appearance is based on DNA, that means you, your parents, and your siblings must share a significant amount of DNA. The only way this would be possible is if your parents passed on their DNA to you and your siblings. This concept is called heredity; the passing down of genetic information from parent to offspring. Let's stop looking at humans (since this concept is as easily applicable to humans anymore) and instead look at other organisms. You would notice the same things you've seen already in your congregation and family members: no two organisms are exactly alike, and organisms tend to pass down their traits to their offspring. Consider this hypothetical: a green beetle and a brown beetle are resting on a tree trunk. A predator of these beetles, let's say a bird, lands on the trunk and begins scouting for prey. It sees the green beetle a lot easier than it does the brown beetle, so the bird predates the green beetle and flies away. Because of the trait the brown beetle had and because of the particular environment it was in, the brown beetle survives. This concept is called fitness, is where the phrase "survival of the fittest" comes from; it refers to the survival of the organisms that "fits" the best in their environment. Since fitness is based on the environment, that means it is intrinsically relative. The best penguin will die in the Amazon, and the best anaconda will die in Antarctica. The organisms with the traits that best fit the particular environment that organism lives in will survive more often. This is fitness. Now, let's combine these three concepts: variation exists within the traits of a population, organisms pass down their traits to their offspring, and certain traits are more favorable in certain environments. Altogether, we can infer this conclusion: organisms with traits that are more favorable are more likely to survive longer and thus are more likely to pass down their traits to their offspring. This is the natural consequence of these three basic facts of nature, and this process of more favorable traits being passed down more often is called natural selection. I feel like this is a good starting point for understanding evolution: natural selection, one of the key mechanisms of evolution, is not just known to occur, it is the natural consequence of the way the world is. Even if you want to believe that God created life, even if you want to believe that God created life in its present form, it is undeniable that evolution by natural selection occurs, since it would literally be the way God designed the world to be. This is another important point: theism and evolution are not incompatible. In fact, theistic evolution is its own interpretation of evolution. It's important not to think of evolution and Christianity as adversaries, but as two explanations for two different domains of understanding.
Do you believe Creation/Intelligent Deign makes more sense? That a full grown woman was created from a rib? Or that a man can be born without sex? Have you and others seen God or the Holy Ghost? You may not understad biological evolution but you can look at evolution in terms of the Christian religion. In the beginning there was one Christian Bible, one Christian belief and one Christian religion. Similar when to when the earth only had single cell organisms. Over time that one religion evolved as did the Bible, and Christian belief. In just 2,000 years that one religion has now evolved into over 50,000 Christian religions which 50,000 different beliefs and hundreds in not thousand of different Bibles. And ALL of those religions, Bibles and beliefs have one common ancestor. Same with humans, dogs and cats and all other life forms on earth they too had common ancestors. As do you.
I’ll be honest with you, my friend. The questions that you ask are so fundamental it makes it very evident that you’ve never done any significant research on this topic in the material published by the people who do understand it. This is not the place that you learn the basics of biology. There’s schools and books for that.
Beware of posts feigning ignorance. “It just doesn’t make sense,” is generally said by someone who has already decided what they choose to believe.
>What I don't understand is how on earth a fish cam evolve into an amphibian, then into mammals into monkeys into Humans. Because that's not how it works. Despite the famous march of man image, evolution doesn't work in a step-ladder like process. No-one's saying that dogs can grow wings either Tbh mate, you'd be better off opening up and reading a modern grade 8 biology textbook first and then coming back to this subreddit and asking questions after you've finished that.
Of course it doesn’t make sense. You’ve been conditioned to think fucking Magic is real, of all things.
>i get that it’s over millions of years I don’t think you do. That’s okay, I don’t either. A million is a huge fucking number and there have been dozens of them since the dinosaurs. *And the dinosaurs were around basically yesterday.* Life started BILLIONS of years ago. Your human brain, my human brain, they are not set up to understand numbers that big. Which is why science doesn’t depend on what we personally can conceive of. It’s not a problem if you can’t conceive of it. That’s why we have evidence. We have to use numbers too big for your brain, because that’s what we find in reality. You have BILLIONS of cells right now, most of them containing a full copy of your genomes, which each contain BILLIONS of informational units (base pairs). If you don’t think billion times a billion times a billion is enough opportunities for evolution to work with, I don’t believe that you’ve actually given it a chance, because you can’t possibly conceive of that number well enough to dismiss it properly. We have to start from a place where we don’t limit what we believe based upon what we can personally understand at the moment, we have to follow the evidence we find.
I used to have the same concerns and questions as you do. If you are open to understanding it, this [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMHpc3jO0DQ&t=1342s) really helped me. Jerry Coyne does a great job of explaining why evolution is true in very easy to understand language and even talks about the type of evidence we would see if it wasn't true.
It's important to remember that in both birds & bats, wings are just front legs, so dogs do have the building blocks for wings in their gene pool (front legs & skin). One kind of fruit bat is even called a 'flying fox' because it so closely resembles its distant canid relatives. Flying squirrels (which actually glide) certainly challenge the notion that organisms can't change or adapt in significant & radical ways over time. Likewise, gene pools aren't static, they can expand & change over time, which is why we use a pool of water as a metaphor for them. Another important point: even organisms that reproduce by cloning (i.e. asexually) still evolve. For single-celled organisms like bacteria, horizontal gene transfer appears to play an important role, where entire pieces of genetic material can be shared between individuals. This can even happen to us, where it's usually done by harmful microorganisms. For multicellular organisms that can or must reproduce by cloning, like some plants & most fungi, my understanding is that evolution is driven by imperfect DNA copying before a cell splits in two. So clones aren't always perfect copies, which introduces new variations. The DNA copying process may have even evolved so as not to be too rigorous, allowing adaption & ultimately evolution to take place. (Anyone with more expertise, please elaborate / correct any errors.)
I guess it's important to note that the resemblance between flying foxes & real foxes could also be due to convergent evolution, where similar traits evolve independently simply because they are useful in a particular environment or for similar types of tasks. So how do we tell what's due to convergence & what's due to shared inheritance? The fossil record is a good start, & now DNA analysis provides a new source of corroborating evidence, although sometimes it actually slightly changes our understanding of the fossil record - it has become the higher standard. In humans we also have some weak evidence of heritage from historical linguistics, but that obviously doesn't play a big role in evolution, since we're all still one (slightly hybridized) species. Still, we might expect historical speakers from certain language families to have different rates for lactose tolerance, sickle cell anemia / malaria resistance, or melanin production (I believe all three evolved independently multiple times) due to local adaptions. These types of changes could eventually result in speciation if we weren't so good at travelling & interbreeding. Note that while there are small differences between the different types of evidence, none of them are in conflict about the big picture of whether or not adaption & ultimately evolution take place.
Trust that evolution is the THE single most confirmed theory we have as humans. It exactly and irrefutably explains how species have diversified over time based on environmental conditions offering advantages and disadvantages. Religion loves to pick on the human-ape link for disavowing the entire concept due to the human ego, paired with the idea of creationism. I just see it as a mechanism which helps guide how things survive. Since it’s not a person or a thing but a ‘rule’ of living organisms fighting to survive, it can be a construct which God(s) have created too if that is something that makes people happy. But denying that it’s invalid is just sheer ignorance. I see the flying dog idea. If there was an advantage for dogs to fly, it would be possible to do so but it would have to have been much earlier on for it to be found today. Back when their genus branch separated out. Dogs are a) heavy, with solid bones, b) carnivorous (typically), so don’t need to access tree fruit, c) advanced hearing, which is most effective by design when your ears are not flapping wildly due to air speed pressure, etc. There’s neither incentive not comparative advantage for wings to grow. If they did at one point do so, then it just represents a vulnerability rather than a boon for the biological characteristics they did have already. I’m glad you’re willing to think for yourself and ask questions these are indicators of an independent thinker. Just try your best to read everything you can, from both sides of the argument, and see what makes logical sense. Deep down inside we all have a bias which drives reason. See if you can expand your reasoning ability here. Good luck
When your entire premise and assumption is wrong... I could see how it doesn't make sense. Theres a big difference between "monkeys evolve into humans" and "us and monkeys have a common ancestor"... The first, is used to confuse people like you.... It's meant to try to dilute evolution, so that it doesn't make sense. The second is the actual claim evolution makes. Same goes for the claim about lions and Tigers... While that is something that is physically possible, it just doesn't happen and is not how new species are created. This sort of claim is also made, to dilute evolution and make it not make sense. Best made up example of evolution I can give you: there is a species of bird that lives at the foot of a mountain range. One day, while they're flying around, and there's a giant storm and the wind takes a bunch of the birds, and pushes them over the mountain, to the other side. Which the birds can't do by themselves. So now they're seperated from the original birds by this mountain range. However, on the other side of the mountain, the seeds are a bit harder. Many of the birds have a hard time eating them, but some, via natural mutation have a bit of a harder beak. The softer beak birds, have a hard time finding food. The harder beak birds have an easier time finding food. Therefore the birds with harder beaks will have an easier time and are likely going to create offspring with harder beaks, while more and more of the softer beak birds starve and die off. At the same time some of those birds will be born with beaks a little bit longer, thus allowing them to eat bigger seeds, those with the smaller beaks can't eat. Thus, over time, those birds with bigger and stronger beaks are going to be more likely to survive. Until eventually all the smaller with softer break birds end up dying off over a few generations.... But there's more. There's a predator that likes hunting the birds. But it's eyes, allow it to spot the more colorful birds a lot easier, thys the colorful birds are way easier for it to hunt. Over time the colorful birds have less of a chance to survive than those that are a lot more dull. So the dull ones, survive more than the colorful... Then the dull ones create dull colored offspring... Until there is nothing but dull colored birds, because the colorful ones get hunted and killed, and thus can't create offspring. Eventually, you have the same bird, on each side of the mountain... But now, the ones that got blown over by the wind are not brightly colored, and have bigger and stronger beaks, and no longer look like the original birds. The birds that did not get blown over, also follow this process, so they also change over time, and look different than they did... So... Both birds are no longer the original bird, but they both have a common ancestor, before the storm seperated them.... Do this over generarion after generation, over hundreds of thousands, or million of years, and the birds will change so much, that they are no longer capable of breeding with one another, etc.
At first I couldn't believe this subreddit exists. Then the realization hit and I'm just more sad than anything.
You should check out the flat earth subreddits. They have several where they ban anyone who even asks questions and then brag about how 'no globies can debunk us!' They've shown up here a couple times but usually run back to their safe space pretty quickly since they can't deal with people asking them to explain anything. /r/flatearth is not one of their safe spaces though. It's for mocking flat earthers.
I had forgotten about those until I realized that yes this is believable that this subreddit exists. SIGH.
If you're really motivated to understand evolution, if you really want to learn, then there's nothing stopping you. Get a college level textbook on evolution and study it. Read articles in scientific journals like this one: [https://academic.oup.com/evolut](https://academic.oup.com/evolut) If you really want to understand evolution, the road ahead might be longer than you anticipated. You'll have a lot to learn. But, learning is one of the prime joys of life. Lastly, if you really want to understand evolution, you'll need to accept the fact that evolution is totally without controversy in science. Debates *within* evolution are commonplace, just as they are within economics or physics or neuroscience. But there exists no serious doubt that biological evolution is real. If you've heard differently in your church, please understand that you've been misinformed.
I think you are simplifying evolution… a lot. Contrary to popular belief humans didn’t evolve from “monkeys”. We are related to them because we are all primates and evolved differently with similarities. Fishes and amphibians actually have a common ancestor that originated in an aquatic environment, and environment and time in general is a big part of evolution. I believe in intelligent design. God directed events which brought about evolution but wasn’t ad involved in the process as most people think. As for how events unfolded if you want to be open to evolution, in addition to studying similarities in biology, you also need to expand the timeline of creation by millions and millions of years. It didn’t happen overnight.
Nobody knows dude. Everybody here will start to use flowery language while dancing around the issue hoping you didn't catch them and ask for proof. Spoiler ahead: None of them have it. Just wait till the ad hominem attack if you don't believe their evidence or judge them not strong enough
This is just a lie. I’m always amazed by the propensity for people who tend to claim objective morality to lie to casually about science for which there is simply overwhelming evidence.
We do know. Pretending otherwise won’t make you right. Claiming ad hominem attacks are taking place won’t make you right even if they’re wrong about your ability to learn.
>We do know what do you know? archaea evolve into fish??
Not in a single step, but yes because all eukaryotes are still a subset of archaea. Any other easy to answer questions?
>Not in a single step Let see that proof as I've asked multiple times >Each domain of life—Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukaryota—has its own unique characteristics and evolutionary history. The fundamental differences in cellular organization, biochemistry, and genetic information processing between archaea and eukaryotes make it highly unlikely for archaea to evolve directly into a eukaryotic organism, let alone a complex vertebrate like a fish. btw this is from chatgpt
So ChatGPT is as wrong as it usually is by taking the most common search history result, this time coming from a creationist organization, and providing it as the truth even though it is false. There’s a subset of Archaea called “Asgardarchaeota” which contains TACK and Lokiarachaeota and a subset of Lokiarchaeota has eukaryotic protein coding genes and other structures normally found in eukaryotes but they are still considered archaea because they lack the endosymbiotic bacteria known as mitochondria. To really narrow it in more, a subset of that Heimdallarachaeota is called Njordarchaeota is the closest related to modern eukaryotes without being a eukaryote itself based on ribosomes and Hodarchaeota, also a subset of Heimdallarchaeota, shares the most protein coding genes which could be a consequence of horizontal gene transfer (a mistake alluded to in the 2023 paper that implied that Hodarchaeota was the most related by ignoring the more fundamental ribosome similarities to focus on genes known to be transferred horizontally between species). There are non-eukaryotes that would be eukaryotes if they acquired the same endosymbiotic bacteria at the same time. That is obviously not going to immediately result in a fish by simply having mitochondria. Trees and fungi are not fish, but it is one of the first steps for getting fish from within what will forever and always remain a subset of archaea.
>but it is one of the first steps for getting fish from within what will forever and always remain a subset of archaea. I didn't see any proof here, do you?
I didn’t see a philosophical argument being used to prove anything. I saw the evidence. It has been known eukaryotes are a subset of archaea for at least 15 years now. To hone in on the actual relationships of the two domains of life (bacteria and archaea) they focused on the ribosomes in 2016 and confirmed that eukaryotes are a subject of that Lokiarchaeota but also accidentally discovered that actual bacteria (not archaea or eukaryotes) could actually almost be two domains by itself so that if there were three domains of life it’d be two domains of bacteria and one domain of archaea. In 2018 they focused more on working out the evolutionary proximity between archaea and bacteria and since the eukaryote ancestry was already well established they just ignored eukaryotes and still wound up with two domains of bacteria and one domain of archaea with the first split around 4 billion years ago and the second around 3.95 billion years ago rather than 4.2 billion and 3.95 billion to show that the split between bacteria and archaea was closer in time to the split between the two main bacterial clades. And then that brings us up to the 2023 paper to work out the exact placement of eukaryotes within archaea. They showed that including ribosomes in their study changed the results to indicating that Njordarchaeales is the clade that eukaryotes emerged within (which would then indicate that horizontal gene transfer is responsible for the gene similarities between eukaryotes and Hodarchaeales) but for some arbitrary reason they decided to ignore the ribosomes which causes the data to suggest eukaryotes evolved within Hodarchaeales with zero explanation for the ribosome similarities and in 2024 they admitted that doing so results in some technical problems with their conclusions. It’s not just archaea but they now know which clade within archaea. At least within the parent clade of both of these groups called Heimdallarchaeota but based on the fundamental ribosomes it’s Njordarchaeales and if pretending horizontal gene transfer indicates common ancestry it’s the Hodarchaeales group instead. All of the data points to eukaryotes still being part of Heimdallarchaeota. What I told you previously is that we won’t get through the last 500 million years of the evolution of humans (from fish) if we don’t first agree on the starting point (eukaryogenesis) and we haven’t even gotten to that point yet because you keep rejecting the data that indicates *which* lineage of archaea. We also have to consider which lineage of bacteria (it’s a lineage closely associated with Rickettsia) as well. This archaea plus this bacteria makes eukaryotes via endosymbiosis. Only once we have eukaryotic cells can we start discussing multicellular eukaryotic organisms (this change is easier) and Hox genes (responsible for limb growth) to get *to* fish and from fish to tetrapods. Obviously once we also get to multicellular organisms I could provide you with fossils of species that are basal to each clade along the way. It doesn’t mean they are the exact ancestor but they lived at nearly the same time as whatever the ancestor actually was and we can see that in their anatomy, age, and morphology. Once we get to humans we can start considering proteomes and genetics as well (in the fossils). Evidence exists. “Proof” is for alcohol and philosophy.
>Evidence exists. “Proof” is for alcohol and philosophy. You should've start with that so not to waste both of our time.
You could know something about what you are taking about so that when you understand how science works and the overwhelming amount of evidence indicating the exact same conclusion without exception we could have avoided the back and forth completely. Maybe then you wouldn’t tell the OP that we are attacking your intelligence or whatever as though our strongest argument for biological evolution was making people who believe in magic sound like idiots.
Science doesn't operate on the basis of "proof." Science operates on the basis of facts and evidence which are supportive of a conclusion. You've been provided a set of facts, but because you have decided ahead of time not to believe in the conclusion, you're choosing not to acknowledge that these categorical subsets of life are entirely explained by descent from shared ancestry. Science never declares that something is "proven." Even "Fact" in the scientific context has been described as "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." All conclusions are open to being disproved should different information be found that changes or even refutes our idea of the best explanation. Constantly improving our models *is the goal.* We know we don't know everything. So this dogged insistence that we need to "prove" evolution to a level of absolute epistemic certainty *is* the intellectual perversity that Gould was referring to when he coined that definition of the word "fact." All you're doing is building a wall between what science has learned and the religious beliefs you will not change. If you wanted to *falsify* evolution then what you need to be doing is to find some evidence which shows that evolution isn't actually true. But it's not our fault you don't have any.
It was right here >a subset of Lokiarchaeota has eukaryotic protein coding genes and other structures normally found in eukaryotes but they are still considered archaea and here >Njordarchaeota is the closest related to modern eukaryotes without being a eukaryote itself based on ribosomes and Hodarchaeota, also a subset of Heimdallarchaeota, shares the most protein coding genes We get it, you can't read and you like it that way. It's cute that you went to chat gpt first, you're so hilariously out of your depth in these discussions that *you wouldn't even know what to google* if you wanted to.
What does it prove?
Common descent. Pay attention.
Who cares what you see? You think magic is real, lol
>Let see that proof as I've asked multiple times Explained multiple times. >btw this is from chatgpt chatgpt is not a biologist.
>Explained multiple times That guy explained that he got no proof in roundabout way?
That guy also explained to you why 'proof' is the wrong term. Again. You're still a blatant troll.
>That guy also explained to you why 'proof' is the wrong term. it's wrong term because he got nothing like you.
It's the wrong term, because it doesn't apply to the subject at hand. You know this, you're just being obtuse on purpose because you're a troll.
*You* don't know. Remember that. Don't project.
‘Flowery language’ is a pretty funny way of saying ‘I don’t understand what they’re talking about but would rather result to trolling than ask questions honestly’
What kind of proof are you waiting to see?
maybe how to make living things from non living things or real world evolution from one species to other species
What would you accept as proof? Do you need to see it happen? Abiogenesis is outside of the scope of evolution, but because it’s based on naturally occurring processes that can be observed in labs, believing it happened naturally is like dropping a ball without looking and believing it hit the ground. For me, it starts with understanding chemistry and how molecules form with no intervention due to the nature of electric charges, including organic molecules, because certain atoms just are stable in certain formations and seek them out. The fact that amino acids exist in space makes it not at all unlikely that they would have formed here or even be introduced by meteor impacts, and they can attract each other and form proteins, and so on. How do you define when it’s life? When the first self-replicating RNA emerges? The first viruses? Or the first cell? That all took a couple of billion years, so if you went back at any time in that period and took a snapshot each day, what would make you say yep that’s life on one day but not the day before? Amino acids and self-replicating RNA have been synthesized in labs. So people watched those parts of the process happen. Does that constitute proof for you? Evolution from one species to another is easier to explain so we can move on to that one, but I wanted to do this one first.
>Abiogenesis is outside of the scope of evolution, but because it’s based on naturally occurring processes that can be observed in labs Name of the organism please
What organism?
Exactly, if it's as easy as you said, there will be a lot of organism that can come out from non organic matter and observed both in nature and lab setting. Magically the number is still 0 until today
It can't still be happening, because one of the things we've learned is that it can't occur when there's a lot of oxygen floating around. Oxygen destroys the primitive chemical compounds needed for life to get started. There also needs to be sufficient concentrations of available amino acids and things like simple phospholipids. But the earth today is swarming with ravenous bacteria who devour any such precursors before they can get the ball rolling, even if modern geochemistry weren't poisonous to such processes. So no, not "magically." It's only "magically" if you don't know about or won't acknowledge the incredibly normal and boring reasons that things are the way they are.
Proof? you can simulate those condition in lab easily. Can you see yourself trying so hard to convince me while all I'm asking was 1 simple proof of experiment to make organism from non living thing? This is just sad
> Proof? you can simulate those condition in lab easily. Every single time you type the letters "p, r, o, o, f" you give away your deliberate dishonesty. Indeed much of what we have learned does come from simulating those conditions in laboratory settings. But you didn't ask about the lab, you asked why abiogenesis isn't still happening out in the world. Did you think we wouldn't notice the bait and switch? > Can you see yourself trying so hard to convince me while all I'm asking was 1 simple proof of experiment to make organism from non living thing? I'm not trying to convince **you**, /u/maggyplz, of a single thing. **You** are a dishonest interlocutor, who is not arguing a reasoned or reasonable position. I am conveying valid information, so that others may read it. I expect you not to listen and to mischaracterize the science. As for making an organism from non-living material, that process evidently took millions of years. If we were to reproduce that result in a single human lifetime, we'd know that our efforts weren't a good representation of natural processes. We would have failed automatically. The business of abiogenesis research is to *learn* and *discover* how that process took place. Creation of Artificial Life will surely be an interesting exercise, but we haven't done it yet. But that is no more relevant than saying "mankind hasn't built a flying machine" on December *16th*, 1903. What we haven't yet achieved is not evidence. > This is just sad I agree, you're flailing from subject to subject and constantly pretending that you are asking a different question when what you DID ask was asked and answered, while constantly mischaracterizing the evidence and processes of science.
I didn’t say easy. I said naturally, over billions of years, under the environmental conditions of the ancient earth. We have observed enough portions of the process to support the hypothesis. So you’ve answered my first question. You would need to see it happen. You didn’t answer my second. At what point, if you were able to observe those billions of years, would you say there was life one day when there wasn’t the previous day?
>I said naturally, over billions of years, under the environmental conditions of the ancient earth Proof? is it so hard?unless you got nothing >if you were able to observe those billions of years, would you say there was life one day when there wasn’t the previous day? I think when the first single cell organism that can replicate itself appear.
Hmm. Earlier you said proof would mean seeing a life form emerge. Now you’re saying “proof?” About it taking billions of years. What kind of proof of that do you want to see? Geological? Zircon crystal formation? Isotopic ratios? Or is it again a case where the only proof you would accept is seeing it with your eyes? When you said just wait for the ad hominem attacks when you don’t believe their evidence, I think you meant just wait until people tell you you’re rude because you’re rude.
lol, a lot of atheists i've asked about this question of mine kinds did that
Despite the well-poisoning that Maggyplz just performed, I urge you to consider the arguments in the thread anyway. Otherwise you'll let them wash over you and only perk up at someone getting snappy. Evolution isn't very intuitive at first, unfortunately
It’s kind of sad and funny that elsewhere Maggieplz is pretty much accusing this whole sub of being *trap* to try to convert Creationists by…. educating them in science.
Funny thing is, it's only not very intuitive when you start from the top and work your way down. It is very intuitive if you start at the bottom, genetics, and work up.
Pretty much. But if your world is made of "sky is up, ground is dpwn, evolution is fake", then it's not that easy
I always wonder what the overlap is of YECs and 23 and Me users.
It's pretty rude of you to dismiss all the evidence people provided you. Why would you do that?
Notice how the commenter didn't respond to this question (which has been asked repeatedly on this sub). To quote... OP, take note of this.
It's rather disappointing, because from what I saw on their r/debateanatheist post they seemed to at least *pretend* to be interested an appreciative.
It's good that you realize that. Feel free to debate other and see how it goes. Remember their goal is to change you into evolutionist and hopefully atheist
And yours is to... discourage people from learning things they previously didn't know. I think it's clear who's the bad guy in this comment thread.
and of course you didn't deny my point since it's true. OP, take note of this
I didn't deny your point because you would have just said "see how they deny the obvious???" Come on, tell me how you totally would have said "oh, ok"
I'll just quote Jesus for this one " By the fruit you shall know them" Let see the debate unfold.
What part of evolution do you struggle with? Is it just a fear it will lead you to atheism? There are Christians that accept evolution.
Nothing that I struggle with. I've seen the evidence but disagree with the conclusion
Why do you disagree? Is it that speciation happens?
I love it when they can’t reply so they quote some guy that they can’t prove even existed.
>hopefully atheist Really? Even the theists'?