Dr. Venkman wrote:
The Kiwi of Australia has mammal like traits, so, over millions of years, a bird can certainly take on traits of a different species based on it's enviornment.
A Kiwi having mammal like traits is not evolution. At least not in the sense of where do whales come from something. It could be like a fish and a dolphin having the same body shape but having no genetic relation (convergent evolution)
scott wrote:I didn't mean to suggest that one morning a snake wakes up and has become an eagle. I don't think I've ever even heard of a person misunderstanding evolution that poorly, though I'm sure it happens.
.
99% of the world's population not only understand evolution poorly, the parts they do understand they reject as "just a theory"
Back when I was in grad school I did hours of "observation" in classroom as mandated by the class reqs. So watching a Fresh HS bio class, one student asked
"If people evolved from Apes, how come we don't see it happening today? Only historically"
Its actually a very valid question, and thats one of the many reasons people reject evolution. "You don't see it happening"
The answer is of course Chimps in 2007 and Humans in 2007 are both the 2007 model. A 2007 Chimp has a 0.00% chance of evolving into a human. A 2007 Human has a 0.00% chance of evolving into an ape.
Since that is the case, how can it be that Humans evolved from apes? The answer - we didn't. We are apes, we are simply a diff species of ape and the common ancestor is so old and debated, that we still don't know what exactly we evolved from in the short term. (millions of years)
In the long term all mammals evolved from something
like one of those bad ass uber ferrets they draw.
The other main problem w/ evolution besides the fact that 99% of the world considers it a crime to believe in, is that many times phenotype confuses people. People eat dolphin all day and night, to them its just another fish. Phenotypically it looks kinda like a fish so why not?
Genetically its nothing like a fish but joe japanese fishing boat guy doesn't know anything about genetics.
chairman_hall wrote:Hexpane wrote:Thats the main problem w/ evolution. Its complicated and incomplete. This causes most people who don't bother studying it ever to simply reject it as "just a theory" and no one has a good counter argument to that yet. Even tho the "just a theory" argument simply demonstrates ignorance for scientific terminology.
I'd like to hear more of this please. Your thoughts/links.
As far as evolution goes I'm sceptical. I don't know if this scepticism is due to the patchwork reading I have done on the subject, or that emotional part of me that really wants to reject it.
The answer is both. You can't link to evolution, its a gigantic theory w/ hundreds of thousands of pages of published work that has been reviewed by the world's best biologists.
Just so you know you can't qualify as a theory in biology unless you have boat loads of proof in the form of repeatable experiments.
Being a theory in bio isnt like Joe Six Pack having a theory on the NBA refs. A theory is not just some armchair half baked idea, its a collection of many tested hypothesis, experimental data all backed up w/ a unifying statement based on the evidence.
However if you doubt evolution, just read up on antibiotics, its one of the more simple examples of evolution due the nature of the speed at which m icrobe species can evolve.
I gave up on the world ever accepting evolution. I hated the classes I needed to take to get the masters in EDU, so fucking boring that I dropped out and switched careers. I don't regret it either, after working in commercial science for a decade now, I realize that half the people in Biotech don't even believe in evolution, even tho without it they would be shoveling shit.
