Your theory is not 100%, trace it all the way back and get back to me. Just like my belief is not 100% to you, I would have to be able to 100% prove it. Your argument has gotten you nowhere with me on any point you have tried to make.
You have your belief and I have my faith. I am not dogging you or anyone on their belief, yet I have been dogged by several people for having my faith while not having their belief of evolution in this thread.
The detest for religion here is strong.
Key word: religion.
If you read my posts, I praise spirituality. I don't have it, but I accept it and see there are strengths to the concept.
I am not nearly as fancy with my wording as I'd like to be with this topic and thus can be seen as more offensive than I care to be; the point I strive to make, however, is that blind ignorance, where you pick and choose what you would like to accept from science and what you would like to ignore, is a rather dogmatic approach.
I see it as this: evolution goes against your interpretation, and that of the religious authorities that helped hone your belief, and thus you choose to not accept it.
Any scientific theory you choose to accept, is one that is not directly opposing your religious beliefs.
Please, correct me if I am wrong. I am merely stating the trend I have observed on many occasions, both in-person and in online discussions.
You have so far ignored the more specific scientific approaches made by Cerpin Taxt.
You're personal beliefs I have no personal taste for, but it is not what most of us here are questioning. I care not what an individual chooses to believe spiritually, I truly do not. I propose completely freedom of spirituality, raise your kids how you see fit, teach them spirituality however one sees fit. I do, however, despise the dogmatic approach of organized religion which sees certain scientific concepts accepted because going against them is just impossible with the tools available today, and yet others remain completely rejected because the scientific accuracy still can be called into question because the facts aren't as obvious.
What do I mean?
Accepting almost everything related to astronomy. It just is there now, and the observations are so obvious questioning it in this day in age is the new heresy. You'd be a complete fool to reject the positions of the Earth within the solar system and within the Universe at large.
Also, sciences at the molecular level are essentially completely accepted because they too are readily obvious with the correct observational tools. These tools can be had with relative ease, so again, questioning them would be a foolish undertaking.
Yet, evolution, something that occurs over a timespan that 1) apparently contradicts the Book of Genesis in every way imaginable, and 2) is incredibly difficult to comprehend for most humans anyhow... this is easy to dispute for some. Yet, why? Merely because the observation, while equally as scientifically accurate, is not exactly an easy task for the layman.
Science best works when it is readily reproduced by the layman - that is when theories become practical facts, because refuting what one can witness directly is just ridiculous. Evolution cannot be directly witnessed at any particular moment, this much is true. But the scientific approach that grants it such acceptance in the scientific community is one that means it has as equal of validity as any other scientific theory. But it can be challenged, still foolishly I'd argue, but nonetheless, it can be challenged.
Because it
can be challenged, it will be challenged - yet even more foolishly, it is challenged with something even
less observable. At least there is documentation and scientific grounds, and a large amount of reproducible findings for many of the incremental concepts within the grand concept of evolution itself.
Hell, scientists just fabricated DNA using a computer, impregnated a blank/empty cell, and got it to reproduce. The DNA was constructed, altered, on computer, using pure code and chemistry notations. It was then formulated by computer into actual genetic material. It was at one point pure code in a computer before becoming a self-replicating lifeform.
And also of importance, the reproduction of extremely important proto-components of life, as theorized as happened at the beginning of life on Earth, using lab techniques.
Sure, the very concept of life coming from nowhere and turning into us... that's fucking nuts amiright?! But seriously, looking at it that way is the worst way to do so. We are the end product of over 4 billion years of Earth stirring up some potent chemicals. Looking at anything, a blank slate, and then seeing the end result, one will almost always say "how the
fuck did that actually happen?". When you look at it from the end result to whatever the beginning may be, you see the steps. Nature itself is not predictable over that length of time. Mankind itself is hardly predictable as an entire civilization. Look at mankind sitting around Africa diddling their thumbs, not sure whether to climb down the tree now or in another hour... and look at us now. How the fuck? I'm not going to get into that one, because I've made novel-length posts in multiple religion threads discussing just that (and some not even in religion threads discussing the same topic! How/why? Hell if I know.), and I just don't care to repeat every post of mine 100 times.
Humanity, and even life itself, is not something you can read from the first page to the last. It could not possibly make sense. Not when the majority of those pages are blank. Not everything becomes a fossil, and evolution works often in small scale - a few genetic modifications that lead to the next link in the chain, may have only lasted for a few generations at most. There may have been 6 genetic shifts before the species looked remarkably different from the ancestor, yet there may only be a fossil of one of those shifts, and because nature is cruel it may be the first genetic shift or the last that found a specimen becoming a fossil.
Most animals do not become fossils. For every fossil, there could have been countless specimens. Some evolutionary links between major species may have been short-lived, but they still were able to reproduce and at some point the population boomed to survive a long time. The species that survived for a long time, statistically speaking, are more likely to leave behind fossils. Some genetic links will be impossible to find because they were not preserved for us to discover. So, if you demand to see a 100% path throughout time of all species, you will be disappointed. There is not a single scientific theory that is 100% provable in every specific way that scientists postulate make it possible.
Gravity is still often misunderstood at the levels of astrophysics that matter. There isn't a single theory that really incorporates the 4 readily observable fundamental forces of the universe, and by that I mean perfectly, 100% proven without any dissenting opinion. Yet everyone readily accepts all four forces because we can observe them. 100% perfectly explaining them, and getting it all to agree with the others, is proving difficult.
So ultimately, believe what you want to believe, but I strongly resent those who pick and choose what science they care to accept as fact. Science is readily amended, this is true, but we are at a point where we have all of this evidence in front of us, and for things we see all the time we can't quite make 100% proven through every level of what we see. The universe is complex as shit, and chaos theory (given time, almost everything and anything is possible - to sum it up to simple terms) essentially allows it all to coexist.
Earth is a pure product of chaos theory, and quite simply, natural phenomena occurring at the right place. But it was bound to happen, one could argue.
We can question our origin, because we are here in the first place. If we weren't here, if life didn't develop on Earth, this would obviously not be happening.
😉 But over four billion years, the first 2 of which science has so far argued Earth was a terrible, inhospitable planet. Enough lucky comet strikes, a large planetoid striking Earth and destroying us a little and giving us the moon as a reward for playing along... created the conditions on Earth to even make
us a remote possibility.
Of course, all of that is heresy according to the Book of Genesis when it is taken at face value, so who am I kidding?
😛
But as I mentioned earlier, for semi-recent events, please acknowledge the notion that non-African humans have 1-4% DNA that comes directly from
H. neanderthalensis. We had a genetic cousin, one that was a separate species, that was genetically compatible enough for us to breed with. And not only was it genetically compatible, not every human has it.
Specifically, Africans do not. Why? The Neanderthals were a European species, they were older than our species so wherever they developed, they ultimately found themselves in Africa. Eventually, when
H. sapiens migrated from Africa, of course not every member of the species migrated. Some stayed behind in Africa and flourished there, and some moved North. Those that moved North, ended up near the Neanderthals. What happened to the Neanderthals, we don't know exactly. Nasty conflicts with Humans? Maybe. Did they suffer at the hands of nature for a few years, and ultimately there numbers never recovered to survive the test of time? That's the more popular theory, but again, we can't say for sure. Doesn't quite matter. We DO know that Humans and Neanderthals mated. It goes perfectly with the theory of origins in Africa for humans, and that another human-like (among quite a few very similar species) creature existed. It could also breed with us, and in general shared many genetic traits with us (as do we with our common, more ancient primate ancestors...). But some genetic traits, it had uniquely. And a majority of our species now has those bonus segments of DNA, but one group did not get that bonus because they never left Africa during that epoch. Further human migration and breeding would serve to either dilute or not dilute that DNA (depending on ancient blood origins of a particular human), and here we are today.
edit:
This is what I do instead of writing a paper. And this is long enough to
be a paper.
well dammit.
Gotta go now, put this off way too long.
😀