Creationists deny evolution. They say that no animal could ever change into a different kind of animal. A dinosaur could never become a bird etc...
WELLLL by that logic, Latin could never become French or Italian, right?....except we know that it did.
The evolution of language is a perfect analogy to the evolution of species: Small changes over time at the population level compounding over time until the descendant is utterly dissimilar to the ancestor.
Let's look at the Lord's prayer over just a few generations of the language:
You can see that obviously these languages are saying the same thing but changing across time until they become unrecognizable....so at which point does it stop being english? Each child was speaking the same language as their parents and yet over time the language became utterly differnt. In the same way, each animal is the same as its parent but over time the population shifts until it no longer resembles the ancestral population.
In my experience Creationists are unprepared to refute this logic and i don't expect them to manage it here but i do hope it will cause a few of them to stop and think...
The fossil record shows many intermediate and branch species now extinct. That's the kind of data that makes a strong case for evolution; see below.
Here's a sequence for horses; similar sequences exist in the fossil record for many modern species and many long extinct species.
Many branches on the equine tree. Notice how the toes shrink among recent species but do not disappear.
Interesting report on extinct 3 toed horses from Tibetan Plateau https://phys.org/news/2012-04-three-toed-horses-reveal-secret-tibetan.html
You claimed, @OriginalDumbMan, that there isn't evidence for new species evolving from pre-existing species. There is a TON of evidence; I just gave you a tiny smidge.
@Pikachu more pictures of horse fossils...lol. nice work. You have 100% proved that horses exist. You have convinced me that horses exist. Along with looking at mine out the kitchen window... Lol.
Because what you might call " macro" evolution is exactly the same process as what you would call "micro" evolution. It's just more changes compounded over more generations and in the same way that small changes to spoken Latin over generations eventually becomes a totally different language like French.
I think you just feel uncomfortable by how elegantly the analogy dismantles your criticisms of biological evolution...
Ironically enough it takes a lot of faith in time and chance to believe that.
Actually, no. Actually, the DNA record shows the rate of mutations passed on in base pairs (most of them non-coding). Average base-pair mutation rate is roughly ~10^-8 mutations per base pair per individual per generation. That's a measurable mutation rate. Also note that more individuals means more mutations. Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3785239/
Let's apply that to humans: because the human genome has roughly 3.2 billion base pairs, multiplying that probability across the entire genome means each new child typically inherits about 60 to 70 brand-new (de novo) point mutations; however most of those mutations are in non-coding DNA.
In short, the time rate of change of base pairs has been measured; no faith needed🤣😂
One question for you, @Dillon7128: are you assuming the Biblical age of Earth, ~6000 years? Or are you accepting the geological age of the Earth, ~5 billion years?? It makes a BIG difference, @Dillon7128! 5 billion years is time for A LOT more species to evolve and go extinct.
So small lizards evolved into giant dinosaurs and then giant dinosaurs evolved into small birds. Hmmmm what’s next? What did the small lizards evolve from? Doesn’t seem like evolution is very logical or making a whole lot of progress does it? And it all started from what?
This is a perfect post to teach the class off of because it demonstrates a fundamental (but very common) misunderstanding of what evolution is and how it works.
You scoff at the notion that small animals turned into big animals and then into small animals again as if that is absurd. You criticize evolution for not being logical or making progress and you feel that demonstrates a flaw in the theory.
Well you are 100% correct: Evolution is not logical and it does not make progress. There is no progress because progress implies an end goal. In evolution there is no progression from bad to good or better to best because the success of any organism or population is entirely subjective and subject to a given set of circumstances. The biggest, fastest most successful lion on the Serengeti is still going to die in the ocean or in the Antarctic while even an average penguin will be just fine.
So when you guffaw at the idea that some small reptiles became very large and then some of them became small...you're not identifying any problem in the theory of evolution, you're simply failing to understand that big and small are just different ways of achieving success under given circumstances and each carries with it pros and cons. For instance: The big animal is safe from more predators and can muscle its way to the water hole and get more resources...but in a time of drought, 20 small animals can live for months on the amount of food and water that wouldn't feed one large animal for a week.
I mean, you're wrong in your characterization anyway: It wasn't the giant dinosaurs that evolved into birds but rather smaller theropods along the lines of the turkey-sized Velociraptor but i think i've made my point.
The small lizards evolved from amphibians, the amphibians evolved from lobe-finned fish, the lobe-finned fish evolved from jawless fish, the jawless fish evolved from animals like Pikaia which possessed a notochord ancestral to the backbone and so on and so forth until there is no more fossil record. That's just off the top of my head, there's far more detail if you care to look it up. The point being that as soon as organisms start having hard body parts that fossilize, we can see in the fossil record a progression of structures through time.
We are taxonomically apes already but yeah, there's no reason humans couldn't evolve into a population that more closely resembles non-human apes in appearance and behaviour
Humans and modern apes (such as chimpanzees and bonobos) split from a shared common ancestor approximately 6 to 8 million years ago. • Close Relatives: Chimpanzees and bonobos are our closest living relatives in the animal kingdom, sharing roughly 98% to 99% of their DNA with humans. • Not Descended From Apes: Humans did not evolve from chimpanzees or any living ape species today. Instead, both humans and modern apes followed separate evolutionary paths from an extinct common ancestor. • Timeline of Splits: • Chimpanzees and bonobos: Diverged from the human lineage about 6 to 8 million years ago. • Gorillas: Split off slightly earlier, around 8 to 10 million years ago. • Orangutans: Split off even earlier, about 14 million years ago.
Source: Smithsonian Institute, Scientific American, Discover Magazine
The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection explains the evidence by showing that humans, chimpanzees, and all other Great Apes share recent comon ancestry.
Would you like to examine and discuss that evidence?
