RE: “Evolution? Ha.”

Someone made a blog with the above title, sans the RE: ”          ” and I read it.  And it was wrong.  And then the mark (that’s me) sayeth it shall be smote.

And it was good.

Yeah, blah blah blah another “RE: stupid shit” blog.

Enjoy.

“Unlike Lamarck, Darwin did not believe that evolution inevitably produces more complex life forms and that the ultimate result of this process is humans.”

Evolution doesn’t necessarily make an organism more complex. In fact almost every organism is less complex than the simplest multicellular organism.  Microbes outnumber animals and plants hundreds of billions to one.  We’re just on the far end of the size spectrum.

“and so i’m confused exactly just how everyone came to the conclusion
that humans came from bacteria. it’s really such a bizarre theory.
really… those little things that swim around in your test tubes and
grow on the agar plates. we came from them?”

No, bacteria and eukarya are completely distinct lineages.  You should learn actual science and pay less (or preferably no) attention to the idiotic ramblings of uninformed science-bashing religious advocates.

“i find that difficult to
believe. especially, when you examine the complexity of humans. just
think. the eye. how small and fragile, yet complex. all of the
different parts of the eye: rod/cone cells. retina. iris. all of those
components work together to fire an image at our brains.”

Do you really want to know how the eye evolved?  Because we’ve known for some time.

To quote charles darwin’s first book on the subject:

“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. [Creationists usually end the quote there and lie, saying darwin thought eye evolution was absurd.  But he continues…]  Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.”

The link is to a brief video explaining what those “numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor” are, all of which exist in nature today.

“oh, and the
brain. INCREDIBLY complex.  so complex that even now we have barely
begun to understand how it functions.”

Actually that’s more to do with the fact that we can’t take the brain apart and examine it without destroying it.  We’re making major advances in this area due to advancements in neural imaging, and should make even greater advancements as brain scan technology reaches higher resolutions.

“how then can one really believe
that we, humans, have developed from such small and simple creatures as
bacteria?”

We didn’t come from bacteria, we came from single-celled eukaryotes.  And in very gradual steps over the better part of a billion years after the dawn of multicellular life.  You know that you as an individual person started off as just two cells, right?  This process is undoubtedly just as mysterious to you, yet you’ve no doubt it happened.  But you are eager to reject evolution simply because you’ve not taken the time to understand properly how it works, which is no more rational than rejecting that you were born from a sperm and egg cell because you’re too scared for whatever superstitious reason to open a book and learn about it.

We know a great deal about the evolution of the brain and the gradual stages of the evolution of the brain are extremely apparent in it’s structure since we actually have THREE brains built one on top of the other.  We have a small, reptilian brain in the center which controls our baser instincts, a mammalian brain outside of that which controls memories and some other things, and a primate brain outside of that.  But no, god made it in one straight shot.  Because how a universe-creating intelligence could arise is so simple, nothing like the unfathomable mystery of how a brain that could conceive of teletubbies and the backstreet boys might arise.

“and not only that, but all BY CHANCE?”

No, by an intelligent process of selection which you’ve not bothered to really try to understand.  The same process that gives rise to more infectious viruses, bugs that are resistant to pesticides, bacteria that can digest synthetic chemicals, chemo-resistant cancer cells etc on a regular basis.  A factual, daily, NON-RANDOM phenomenon that any biology grad student can watch happen in a petri dish.

“by a series of
mutations?”

No, by innumerable mutations followed by natural selection.  Do you even know what natural selection is?

“surely, mutations cause change. but since when could any
amount of mutation result in something as complex and as efficient as
an eye? an eye… from nothing.”

No, not from nothing.  You act as if it grew in the vacuum of space.  And assuming you know what natural selection is and how it works and have at least 8th grade level reading comprehension your smug questions about the evolution of the eye should already be satisfied.

“and one cannot even begin to
explain how we, we have souls.”

If you mean soul as in a magical, invisible part of our anatomy, then we don’t.  If you mean an ego that can feel pain and fear and pleasure and prefer one over the other, lots of animals have that too.

“we think, we feel, we create, we know
right and wrong.”

You just described lots of other species.

“how have we, humans, become so individual and unique
amongst all living things: that we are such a big step away from any
other organism.”

95% identical to chimpanzees.  If you studied comparative animal anatomy you wouldn’t say such things.  Name me one interior or exterior organ or bone that you have that your dog doesn’t have some equivalent of or visa versa and you can talk about how drastically different we are to every other species.  Hell I’ll make it easier for you.  Name me an organ that you have that one other mammal species doesn’t have.

Should be easy, right?  Think again.

“truly, for evolution to work in that sense, there would
be several other species that are similar to the way we are.  other
organisms that could create and think on at least nearly the same level
as us. that would give more proof to the idea that we evolved as a
result of mutations.  but to think that the huge difference that stands
between man and monkey could be the result of ONE series of mutations?
what, one different protein? maybe even ten different proteins, a
thousand different codons. still, that would not be enough to account
for our differences.”

No, 5% of our genome or about 150 million base pairs.  And chimps are our closest living relative, not our closest relative.  This is our closest relative, neanderthals.  For your information they cared for their sick, old and crippled well into their old age, fashioned complex tools and weapons and buried their dead with tools and flowers.  Human-like enough for you?  For your information they went extinct approximately 26,000 years ago and at which point humans were one of at least three human-like species that coexisted on the planet.  Us, neanderthals, and Homo floresiensis.  We’re the only one left.

“so i’m working on a presentation for
biology right now. it’s on natural selection, which i have no problem
with. it makes sense, and i understand how it can be an effective
survival mechanism over time. what makes me irritated though, is the
last paragraph in this textbook chapter. “Some people dismiss Darwinism
as “just a theory”” well yeah… cause that’s what it is, isn’t it?”

No, “just” a theory implies use of the term in the non-scientific sense, meaning a hunch or an idea that might or might not be true.  In science this is called a hypothesis.  Gravity is “just” a theory.  Electricity is a “theory”.  That the earth goes around the sun is a “theory”, it’s called the theory of heliocentrism.  Calling something a “theory” in a dismissive way is an attempt to twist scientific meanings of words out of context.  It’s dishonest and sleazy.

“no
one was there at the beginning of time to see how this all played out.”

That’s rich coming from someone whose religious worldview is based on things they didn’t witness and wouldn’t believe today if they had witnessed them.

I’m sorry, but if you know enough about genetics you don’t need to see your parents fucking to prove they’re your parents.  You can do a simple paternity test to verify how closely related they are to you.  We can do the same thing with us and other primates and any other living thing.  Guess what, the test has been done and evolution wins every time, as usual.

“i would definitely agree with Darwin, that over time, drastic changes
could have occurred within different organisms that might even cause
them to be unrecognizable from the way they were before. but for things
like bacteria to evolve to humans… i don’t see how that could have
happened.”

It didn’t.  Stop reading creationist science-bashing garbage.

“as a Christian, i’ve been brought up all my life with
the bible stories: stories of how God created the world in seven days,
creating the fish in the water, the birds in the sky, then animals on
the land. and finally, creating humans.”

Did you read the rest of genesis where it says god invented different languages about 2800 years ago to “confuse” humans and stop them from getting into heaven by building a tower a few hundred feet high?  Or the flood story, where noah fit two to 7 of each animal on one boat he built himself at the ripe old age of about 900 years old.

Without getting into the insane logistics of this, do you sense any holes in this story so far?  Please say yes.

“ever since i was first exposed
to the creation/evolution debate, i’ve been very interested in how all
of this could have happened. i was always a bit afraid of what my
investigation might show me; after all, it is hard to change the
beliefs that one has grown up with. and what i’ve found, quite
honestly, is that my belief that there is a God, and not only a God,
but a POWERFUL God, has only grown stronger as i’ve looked deeper.”

Well that’s your problem, you’ve been watching the debate, not learning science.  Creationism vs science debates are all the same, the creationist side throws up a constant stream of craaaazy shit that isn’t true and the science side spends all afternoon sifting through and debunking it, when almost all of it’s already been debunked many times before.  You’re not going to learn anything interesting watching this bullshit process.

“this
year, i’ve learned in such detail the complexities of life, of humans.
i’ve studied natural selection, and the changes that occur as a result
of it. and what i have concluded is that there MUST be a God. the
CREATOR of creativity, the creator of complexity, because how else
could something so intricate and complicated come to be just by chance?
it can’t.”

I agree, a god that amazing couldn’t have come about by chance…  Oh wait you mean germs and ferrets and things…  Nevermind.

“what about entropy? the fact that everything SHOULD by all
means, become more and more DISORGANIZED, not MORE organized, the way
humans are.”

No, that is the stupid-ass long refuted notion anti-science dimwits put forward all the time.

I’m sorry for being rude but I HATE having to debunk this stupid shit several hundred times just because there’s no argument lame or false enough that religious people won’t keep it around.

Oh screw it.  There’s a 50 percent chance you won’t even read this.

“the textbook even says for itself, that theories are
meant to be tested, to be proven. and as far as this idea that there is
a God, and that He created this universe. i’m finding that it holds
more weight than i could ever imagine.”

It cannot be tested OR proven.  You contradict yourself.

“comments? what’s your opinion on all this?”

You have it.