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It's so hard to read what you're saying but I'll try to answer.

Nobody helps anybody evolve. It's not as extreme as you're putting it. Evolution is adaptation over thousands of years to an evironment and it's surroundings. An insect-eating bird probably found that bugs nest inside limbs and whatnot and he can get at them. Over time, the beak gets larger and stronger and more suited to the birds movements (longer and skinny to get deep in or larger and pointed to pick away at stuff). It doesn't explode/die and think "wish I had a better beak", that's ignorant. If you're going to be involved in a conversation, at least bring some common sense.

Fish jumping out of water... Ever see the flying fish? The only way for them to escape the predators is to fly. Look it up.

Evidence of human changes, I don't have it either way. Nobody does. That's what I'm saying, we don't know either way if it's been a constant for the last 2000 years or if anything has changed.

I don't get your car comment.

People being exactly the same eh? I guess you've never heard of Negros. We lost the skin pigment because we moved out of Africa into higher latitudes where there's less sun, thus to intake more, we turned white. No this didn't happen overnight, we're still talking thousands of years. There's still blacks because they came directly from Africa recently (last couple hundred years, a lot of the slave stuff) and they simply haven't had enough time to change. This is of course one extreme example, there's many other races with different attributes, I'm sure you've heard of some stereotypes.

For the seeds and emu, I've said twice it's thousands of years. Pretty much impossible for something significant to change from the parent to the offspring.

I think your last comment is silly. Whether it's meant to be or not, I don't know but I'm not going to respond to it.

Let's be careful not to say "GOD IS RIGHT" or "evolution is 100% factual". Ok?

Adaptation isn't different, it is a crucial part to evolution. Look up the definition of "mutation" from a non-biased (no God or evolution sites) source and you'll see that it is a negative "process".

I don't see how that quote gets anyone anywhere. Valve sizes can change in size to allow flow. Think about a garden hose then think about a fire truck hose. Bit of a difference in terms of GPM.

P.S:. I never said I trusted or even agreed with Ancient theories (Energy-based, etc). I don't. I used it to prove evolution is within the roots of the most pure knowledge of humanity; that's it has never truly been something logic would have ever questioned.

lol wings aren't skin. I've never done that to a goldfish but I'm imagining that it's due to the lack of UV and vitamin e although I don't know if they produce that. Yea, chameleons have that ability but the last time I checked, moths aren't chameleons. The moths didn't change their color, the light ones got eaten when the trees became dark, thus the darker ones survived more and replaced the population. The moths don't know, it would be like you getting killed and not knowing it was coming. You don't evolve, the rest of the world's population's attributes continue to spread while yours... are gone. Predators pick the weakest, easy to spot prey, while the stronger and faster live on to spread their attributes.

This is why I say you're narrow minded, you just haven't learned. You think evolution is 1 animal changing in a lifetime and if it doesn't it dies. You're also humanizing it which doesn't work.

Delta, you bring up a lot of good questions. While I wouldn't call myself smart or all-knowing, I know a couple of unique things and I can reason so I'll try to explain at least some of the things you've mentioned. Also we can talk about God and we can talk about evolution but again neither of us can undeniably prove one way or another. We can just explain and understand.

So all we really have to go on is the Bible.

Observations as well for evolution. I'll tell you why I don't trust the Bible. If it was written on total truth (I'll cover this in a sec), it had to have been translated and altered. I highly doubt it was originally written as it exists today. I do realize that revisions happen and people's accounts can be added to the original version but who verifies those accounts? Today, knowledge can go through a lot of checks to make sure it's accurate. Now to the truth part, with our developed brains it can get very lonely thinking that we live such a emotional and far-reaching life and then when we die, that's it. I'll admit, that's pretty hard to swallow and it flat out sucks. I wish I could live forever but that's not possible as our bodies age but spiritually (totally bogus word) it would be nice to have my mind forever. It seems highly possible to me that the Bible is fiction. People getting depressed, thinking there's no real reason to live and it doesn't matter what you do in your life (especially way back then). Now wait, people start saying that there's this guy that walked the earth and spoke of God. Now you have purpose, now you should do good and lead a good life, appreciate your maker and fellow man. I think the Bible can give people purpose, in fact I know it does. It's not a bad thing at all but it's gotten a little out of hand. Saying that there's a reason to live and a reason to do good, that's great but it's too complex now. It's conflicting science and doing things it was never intended to do.[/quote]

Does the theory of evolution make sense to me, yes, somewhat. But there are still many things left to theory. Like how life began, no one really knows because no one was there.

How life began... I can't tell you, I just don't know for sure. However there's a pretty good idea of it here: http://www.physforum.com/index.php?showtopic=3717
Summarized:
From what I understand, when the Earth was just forming, it was a hot core, the surface had cooled a bit in some areas forming rock along side of water and other elements. There were a lot more asteroids, rocks and whatnot floating around in space and Earth didn't really have it's atmosphere 100% yet. So gravity doing what it does, pulls these rocks in. With the atmosphere just forming, there's less friction so you get a faster velocity from one of those rocks. Now I can't remember what elements are needed but heat and energy is part of it which is what a rock brings when it's flying towards Earth. Anyway, you get the right elements smashing together and get this, you get an Amino Acid. Amino acids (building blocks of life) have been produced in lab experiments simulating the shock of a meteor impact. Deep sea Black Smoker Chimneys produce very high pressure(deep sea pressures) very hot (volcanic vents) mineral rich (sulfur compounds) environments protected from UV rays by thousands of feet of water. Energy provided by heat and,later, chemosynthesis. This is the perfect environment for bio-genesis.

And there's still the really complex fact of how something knows it needs to change? What prompts these changes, and how are they so perfect in their design? How does evolution know that in order to fight gravity, you need an equal and opposite reaction, which comes from the flapping of wings? Is evolution intelligent, does it remember what works and what doesn't?

Nothing knows it needs to change. I can explain it like this; certain athletes have certain larger muscles. Football players can have big legs, baseball players have big arms and such. This is the building of muscle. This is 1 generation. Imagine that baseball player's son playing baseball and his son and his son's son. Keep going for a few hundred or thousand years or maybe more. Because they use their arms more, you would see differences starting to appear. For example, larger veins/arteries to power the muscles. Larger bones to handle the force. Maybe even longer arms. Repetitive actions, the need to do something and pushing your body to the limit in order to accomplish that is basically evolution. A couple hundred generations after that initial baseball player and you might see the latest "revision" as naturally growing large arms, even if he doesn't play baseball. It's the same reason why people can be genetically tall, short, have larger or smaller features. There was a need and over many generations that need now has an attribute. Again, this isn't racist but I have to touch on the white vs black thing again. We are white because our skin needed to absorb more sunlight since we started moving out of Africa into higher latitudes where there, by location, is less sun. We are white because we evolved. Black people haven't because they live in Africa still. Some were brought over for slavery and that's why we see so many established (several generations of) black people in America.

For flight and formation of wings it could be something as simple as webbing between fingers. Wing structures in bats are very similar to hands. A bat looks similar to a bird so there you go. For initial flight, you could assume an animal wanted to jump from tree to tree or something. As it did that more and more (like the flying squirrel), the squirrels or whatever animal that had abnormally larger quantities of webbing would be better, thus natural selection kicks in and more and more of them have more and more webbing.

Why did that amino acid that arrived on that meteor so long ago choose to change? What made it change? What was the influence on it to grow into what is now everything that is alive? Why are there still simple organisms if evolution is always bettering things? We depend on things like bacteria more than people know, why haven't they evolved into something as complex as a human yet. Did evolution see that we needed something to stay as a simple as a bacteria?

Pretty good question. I don't know the answer and I can't think of a logical answer. It could just be that they don't have a need to change or can't change.

Maybe things only evolve when they need to, but how do they know when they need to? They don't have a complex brain like a human, and even a human can barely adapt to changes in the environment. Something has to prompt these changes.

I think you're right on the first part but the second I already went over. Nothing knows it needs to change, it just knows the limits of it's body. Evolution doesn't drive, it's being driven by the needs of the animal, repetitive movements and a lot of time.

If I chop my arm off, and my children's children do the same, will we eventually gain the ability to regrow that arm? Will our bodies get the point overtime? Arms are critical to survival, so I would assume, under the theory of evolution, that eventually we would gain the ability to grow said arm back.

It seems possible. Maybe that's how other animals did it. Maybe a lot of those lizards (are they lizards, I can't remember the animal that does that) got pecked at by birds and whatnot and while they could survive with 3 limbs, things would be a lot better if they had the original 4. This may be a case of a problem mutation that was actually beneficial and not the cause of physical harm.

It all seems too easy. Over countless years we evolve, yeah got that part. The most that has changed in humans over the last 2000 years, has been are ability to share knowledge. I wouldn't call that evolving in the context that evolution would present. More like, since America, the world has taken leaps and bounds.

What needs to be changed? Sure there's human wants like wings and an extra arm or something but it's not crucial to survival nor do we stress the need for a new feature over several generations. I'm sure we still evolve but probably not that much. You don't know if we have or haven't changed in the last 2000 years.

So is evolution all knowing? How does it know what gravity is? How does it know how to counteract its forces? What defines a wing? And how did evolution over countless years seem to figure out what took humans, that have an actual brain, thousands of years to figure out?

What took us thousands of years to figure out?

Evolution to me suggests the presences of an intelligent force be it a god, or what have you. I don't know, Spanky, tell me how evolution figures this stuff out? And how does it know when its figured it out?

Yea it still can I guess. It's hard to describe but evolution isn't a force or a power, evolution is a need for change.

How does it figure out how to wire a brain?

It doesn't. The brain probably started off small, an automatic way to regulate necessary systems such as the heart and lungs and it grew from there.

in the end it doesn't matter which one I believed in, because I'll be dead.

Yup.

Skrewup, it's funny that all your links come from religious sites that would definitely be biased.

Why couldn't we evolve the capacity of thought? The computers we have can match (I can't do 12 things at once or draw 3D graphics that fast), but also can't match because they're built for different reasons and with obviously different parts.

Animals evolve at different rates. The reason we have the ability to think is that we have a larger cerebral cortex (pretty sure I brought this up before).

While I realize there's cooler climates in Australia, there's probably many climates that mimic Africa. It has to do with the amount of sunlight received by the skin.

Quote from: Spanky on Monday, April 12, 2010, 15:05:37 PM

Skrewup, it's funny that all your links come from religious sites that would definitely be biased.

Why would a religious based site definitely be biased? While there are so called "Christian" people at there that portray Christianity in a bad light. Christianity teaches the importance of honesty, and the value of truth. I wouldn't be so fast to just say all religious people are closed minded and ignorant.

Why would a religious site be biased on the topic of evolution? Because evolution goes against the bible. It's as simple as that.

Also, you say "I don't lose anything by believing in the Bible". I say, yes you do. You, and many many others believing it and doing things by it. You don't have to believe in God to have christian values. Look at me But really, I don't want to drag another topic into this but it ties in with what you believe. You've told me directly that you're not concerned about the environment or your impact on it because God will take care of it. While I'm being dramatic, there's a pretty big christian population out there and if they all think like you, losing Earth might be a little bit of a loss. Not to mention your Sundays.

Ultimately, God is just an excuse to be good and do good things when people should do it anyway.