What evidence would you accept for human evolution?

[Alexiev]

Good. Then let's have some relevant inferences, starting with what you infer from the video about monkey morality.
Well, because you didn't offer anything relevant. Pretty obvious, actually.

I'm not sure why you want to know...

Well, because you claimed to have insight on the moral motives of dogs, Dr. Doolittle.

You're not this dumb. I know you're just evading a question you can't answer.

I can answer it and I have answered it. Of course figuring out the motives of chimpanzees in a video is more difficult than understanding a very smart dog with whom I had a very close relationshi9p. If you saw a video of some bushmen hunters, could you guess at their moral grounding from watching it? Of course not. You're making this stuff up. By the way since you don't want to discuss the Gopnik article because it's off topic, what do you make of DNA testing that shows we share 98% of our genetic material with chimpanzees? When God created humans did He just want to confuse everyone? Was it a cosmic joke? Or could we just possibly have evolved from the same ancestors?

[Immanuel Can]

I'm not sure why you want to know...

Well, because you claimed to have insight on the moral motives of dogs, Dr. Doolittle.

You're not this dumb. I know you're just evading a question you can't answer.

I can answer it and I have answered it.

Neither of the above is true, and you know it. If we're going to discuss it, you have to be at least minimally honest. If you're not, I guess it's happy trails to you.

[Will Bouwman]

...we'd have multitudinous transitional forms...

As far as I can gather, you mean by "transitional forms" beings of this nature:

...chicken-to-man or banana-to-man...

To be clear: is that what you think evolution predicts?

[Immanuel Can]

...we'd have multitudinous transitional forms...

As far as I can gather, you mean by "transitional forms" beings of this nature:

...chicken-to-man or banana-to-man...

To be clear: is that what you think evolution predicts?

I'm mocking, obviously. But Evolutionism does logically require us to expect to find cross-species transitions, and lots and lots of such. So if not chicken-to-man, why is fish-to-frog-to-amphibian-to-humanoid-to-man, or ape-to-man, any better? All they've done to make the absurd and non-evident plausible to the naive and trusting is to stretch out the timeline. The essence is still the same: given enough time, species are supposed to transition into each other.

Where's the evidence? We should be awash in it, even now, not just in the fossil record. There should be billions of transitional forms in different phases everywhere...why then do we have nothing but fixed species, instead?

[Alexiev]

Well, because you claimed to have insight on the moral motives of dogs, Dr. Doolittle.

You're not this dumb. I know you're just evading a question you can't answer.

I can answer it and I have answered it.

Neither of the above is true, and you know it. If we're going to discuss it, you have to be at least minimally honest. If you're not, I guess it's happy trails to you.

You are a liar. I don't "know it". Since you claim to intuit what I know, but further claim that I cannot intuit what my dog thought, you are clearly dissembling. I knew my dog a lot better than you know me. Of course I cannot be sure of my dog's thought processes, but I can make a better educated guess about them than you can make about mine.

Wittgenstien wrote, "If a lion could talk, we couldn't understand him." He was wrong. Circus lion tamers understand the lions quite well; dog trainers understand dogs.

You conveniently ignore the rest of my post, including the observation that chimps share 98% of their DNA with humans. Hmmm. Maybe you're better off ignoring that inconvenient (to your position) fact.

[Immanuel Can]

I can answer it and I have answered it.

Neither of the above is true, and you know it. If we're going to discuss it, you have to be at least minimally honest. If you're not, I guess it's happy trails to you.

I don't "know it".

Yeah, you do. I know you know it, and you know you know it. So there's nobody left to fool, really. Better you give it up.

[Alexiev]

Neither of the above is true, and you know it. If we're going to discuss it, you have to be at least minimally honest. If you're not, I guess it's happy trails to you.

I don't "know it".

Yeah, you do. I know you know it, and you know you know it. So there's nobody left to fool, really. Better you give it up.

I know we share 98% of our DNA wirh chimps (if by "know" we mean accept standard scientific knowledge). I also know that you are a liar and hence in the rhrall of Satan, the father of lies (acc. to you).

[Immanuel Can]

I don't "know it".

Yeah, you do. I know you know it, and you know you know it. So there's nobody left to fool, really. Better you give it up.

I know we share 98% of our DNA wirh chimps

We share 60% of the genes of bananas. Nobody's imagining we evolved from them, even if we hang around in bunches. We have 84% in common with dogs, and 90% with cats. So what's your point? Since all creatures are composed out of the substances of the earth itself, it's not at all surprising if all creatures share some of the material properties. It doesn't mean Evolutionism is true. That would be a logical fallacy of the correspondence-causality sort.

[Alexiev]

Yeah, you do. I know you know it, and you know you know it. So there's nobody left to fool, really. Better you give it up.

I know we share 98% of our DNA wirh chimps

We share 60% of the genes of bananas. Nobody's imagining we evolved from them, even if we hang around in bunches. We have 84% in common with dogs, and 90% with cats. So what's your point? Since all creatures are composed out of the substances of the earth itself, it's not at all surprising if all creatures share some of the material properties. It doesn't mean Evolutionism is true. That would be a logical fallacy of the correspondence-causality sort.

What are you yammering about? Of course we share ancestry with all living things, according to evolutionary science. The more DNA we share, the closer out ancestral connection. That's why we share more DNA with chimps than with dogs or bananas. Thanks for making my point for me.

The idiotic obsession with logical fallacies is irrelevant. All scientific reasoning is inductive and thus logically unprovable. So what?

[Immanuel Can]

I know we share 98% of our DNA wirh chimps

We share 60% of the genes of bananas. Nobody's imagining we evolved from them, even if we hang around in bunches. We have 84% in common with dogs, and 90% with cats. So what's your point? Since all creatures are composed out of the substances of the earth itself, it's not at all surprising if all creatures share some of the material properties. It doesn't mean Evolutionism is true. That would be a logical fallacy of the correspondence-causality sort.

What are you yammering about?

Sorry if it was too complicated for you. Maybe just read it again.

[Alexiev]

We share 60% of the genes of bananas. Nobody's imagining we evolved from them, even if we hang around in bunches. We have 84% in common with dogs, and 90% with cats. So what's your point? Since all creatures are composed out of the substances of the earth itself, it's not at all surprising if all creatures share some of the material properties. It doesn't mean Evolutionism is true. That would be a logical fallacy of the correspondence-causality sort.

What are you yammering about?

Sorry if it was too complicated for you. Maybe just read it again.

Sorry my post was so simple. Your failure to understand it makes you look stupid. So I apologize.

[Gary Childress]

Yeah, you do. I know you know it, and you know you know it. So there's nobody left to fool, really. Better you give it up.

I know we share 98% of our DNA wirh chimps

We share 60% of the genes of bananas. Nobody's imagining we evolved from them, even if we hang around in bunches. We have 84% in common with dogs, and 90% with cats. So what's your point? Since all creatures are composed out of the substances of the earth itself, it's not at all surprising if all creatures share some of the material properties. It doesn't mean Evolutionism is true. That would be a logical fallacy of the correspondence-causality sort.

DNA is supposedly the same instruction code used by all life on Earth for using the raw materials of Earth to build living organisms. According to Evolution theorists, all life on Earth descended from a common ancestor but then branched off and branches branched off of those branches. Bananas might be way out on a branch that humans didn't descend from, so, yes, it would be incorrect to say that we "descended" from bananas. However, according to evolutionary theorists, we all share a common single-celled ancestor that got the whole show started.

The genes we share with bananas, I believe, are fundamental for basic cellular functions. So it's not just that we share a high percentage of DNA with chimpanzees but maybe that we share many higher order genes with chimps that go beyond the level of basic cellular functions. If God or whoever/whatever is responsible for life on Earth, then why might that "creator" not use a similar blueprint for all life just to make things easy and to allow it to adapt and change?

I mean, perhaps there is a God. However, perhaps God made evolution the vehicle that would end up producing extraordinarily intelligent living organisms. Or are you suggesting that the story in Genesis is indeed the actual story of how life started on Earth?

[Immanuel Can]

I know we share 98% of our DNA wirh chimps

We share 60% of the genes of bananas. Nobody's imagining we evolved from them, even if we hang around in bunches. We have 84% in common with dogs, and 90% with cats. So what's your point? Since all creatures are composed out of the substances of the earth itself, it's not at all surprising if all creatures share some of the material properties. It doesn't mean Evolutionism is true. That would be a logical fallacy of the correspondence-causality sort.

DNA is supposedly the same instruction code used by all life on Earth for using the raw materials of Earth to build living organisms.

The Scriptures say the same. It says that man was created not out of special materials, but "out of the dust of the Earth."

...according to evolutionary theorists, we all share a common single-celled ancestor that got the whole show started.

Yep. That's what they say. Too bad for them that, as the old axiom goes, "correspondence is not causality." Similarities in structure are not evidence for, far less proof of common ancestry.

If God or whoever/whatever is responsible for life on Earth, then why might that "creator" not use a similar blueprint for all life just to make things easy and to allow it to adapt and change?

Well, because we can see that's NOT what's going on. Instead, we have fixed species. Dogs are dogs, and cats are cats. Penguins are penguins, and are not transforming into orca whales. Bananas are bananas, and aren't becoming birds.

In fact, fixed species is ALL we ever observe. And this is a huge, huge problem for Evolutionism. We should be able to observe it, because the longer the posited timeline, the greater the number, duration and extent of transitions and the greater the multiplicity of transitional forms there would have to be. We don't observe it at all.

[Gary Childress]

We share 60% of the genes of bananas. Nobody's imagining we evolved from them, even if we hang around in bunches. We have 84% in common with dogs, and 90% with cats. So what's your point? Since all creatures are composed out of the substances of the earth itself, it's not at all surprising if all creatures share some of the material properties. It doesn't mean Evolutionism is true. That would be a logical fallacy of the correspondence-causality sort.

DNA is supposedly the same instruction code used by all life on Earth for using the raw materials of Earth to build living organisms.

The Scriptures say the same. It says that man was created not out of special materials, but "out of the dust of the Earth."

...according to evolutionary theorists, we all share a common single-celled ancestor that got the whole show started.

Yep. That's what they say. Too bad for them that, as the old axiom goes, "correspondence is not causality." Similarities in structure are not evidence for, far less proof of common ancestry.

If God or whoever/whatever is responsible for life on Earth, then why might that "creator" not use a similar blueprint for all life just to make things easy and to allow it to adapt and change?

Well, because we can see that's NOT what's going on. Instead, we have fixed species. Dogs are dogs, and cats are cats. Penguins are penguins, and are not transforming into orca whales. Bananas are bananas, and aren't becoming birds.

In fact, fixed species is ALL we ever observe. And this is a huge, huge problem for Evolutionism. We should be able to observe it, because the longer the posited timeline, the greater the number, duration and extent of transitions and the greater the multiplicity of transitional forms there would have to be. We don't observe it at all.

How do you account for the apparent fact that the fossil record seems to show progress over time? Simpler creatures yielded to more complex creatures over millions of years. Did God make Trilobites before he created humans as a test species? And why are there so many similar creatures? Why aren't creatures more radically different from each other? Why would they have any similarity at all if species didn't evolve from others?

Going back to Darwin's finches, we don't see a finch hatch out of an ostridge egg, but we do see certain genetic traits dominate over others on different Islands that all had very similar Finches. Doesn't that suggest that all those finches shared a common ancestor? And might that suggest that species can evolve out of earlier ancestors?

If all species were made at the same time, then wouldn't we see human remains on the same layers of sediment as trilobites and other primordial creatures? Might the fossil record suggest that species changed over time? And might the fossil record suggest a possible linkage between species, such as horses and zebras, for one example? Or why would God create species hundreds of thousands of years apart that bear a receding resemblance to earlier species and then give us the Bible story that they were all created at the same time? Did God periodically create new species out of scratch to replace older ones that went extinct? Or might he have used the same species to evolve into ones better suited to survival over time?

Regarding the fossil record not showing transition species, I've heard that horses have a relatively complete lineage (compared to other creatures) that has been traced through time. Doesn't that suggest that evolution is possible, at least as far as subspecies go? And if most genetic mutations are unsuccessful, might the most unsuccessful ones die off after only one or two generations if they were highly dysfunctional or else die off more slowly, resembling slower evolutionary transformation?

[Immanuel Can]

How do you account for the apparent fact that the fossil record seems to show progress over time?

It doesn't, actually.

Did God make Trilobites before he created humans as a test species?

What mechanism God used to make lower species is both uninteresting and purely speculative. Only human beings, which are the subject of this thread, make any difference to theology.

And why are there so many similar creatures? Why aren't creatures more radically different from each other? Why would they have any similarity at all if species didn't evolve from others?

Au contraire, if they HAD evolved, we'd expect there to be such a radical spectrum of differences within each species that there would, in fact, be no distinct species at all, because everything would be distinct.

Going back to Darwin's finches,...

Boring and irrelevant. Nobody doubts the possibility of modification of a species within that same species. What Darwin needed was a finch that would turn into a Galapagos tortoise, or into saltwater iguana, or some other species. That, he never found...so he made up the idea of inter-species evolution out of nothing.