My New Fascination - Evolution!

by pale.emperor 28 Replies latest jw experiences

  • Vidiot
    Rainbow_Troll - "...All of their polemics against the theory, even what you find in books by authors who should have first read some themselves, boil down to straw-man arguments. I sometimes suspect that these books are really just covert misinformation campaigns..."

    Don't kid yourself.

    It ain't that covert.


    Seriously though, it was quite the moment when I first realized that, too.



  • cofty
    Is there any book or article you would recommend which would provide a good summary of what is known by scientists about abiogenesis? - Saename

    "The Vital Question" by Nick Lane is an excellent overview of recent research. Living things extract energy from their environment. The problem with the "organic soup" hypothesis fails to address this. Lane describes in detail how life may have emerged in alkaline vents below the ocean powered by naturally occurring chemical processes.

  • cofty
  • OneEyedJoe

    Hi pale.emperor. I will take a look but to be honest he is one of the most ignorant creationists ever. Responding to his scatter-gun approach is like inviting somebody to smash up your house for 10 minutes and then accepting the challenge of fixing it all in the next 10 minutes.

    This is such a great analogy. It's often frustrating the over-simplified arguments that creationist use because their arguments often betray such an extreme lack of understanding that to get them to understand why their one sentence is flawed could take several paragraphs.

  • Saename

    Thanks, cofty. I'll see the video, and later on I'll probably read the book as well.

  • Diogenesister

    I mean, the bones that have been found of are not ape (we know what ape bones look like) and not modern human either.

    Isn't it amazing to study the bones of our "cousins" I guess you'd call them - non Sapien hominids ( i.e. not human beings but humans of another species). You don't have to be an expert to see, wow it's so obvious, that these bones sure neither ape nor Homo Sapien, they are so radically different to either. Very quickly you learn to look for the common differences - the size of the brain case, the can quickly tell if they walked upright, the strange shape ape skulls have whereby they anchor the large cheek muscles required for chewing rough leaves and vegetation. But most of all, the teeth. It must be fascinating being a paleo-dentist ( I've just made up that name! Don't know their scientific designation). The teeth can tell you so much it's incredible. The small space behind the back molars that gets bigger the further back you go in time, until at some point it indicates another species.

    When you put a chimp, Homo Sapien, Homo Neanderthalensis, Homo habilis, Homo Erectus, Australopithecus Africanus, Homo Heidelbergensis...all together, it is blatantly obvious we share common desce##- # nt. It is also obvious they are not our species but neither are they apes.

    And, of course, they are all extinct - except us - why? Brains or braun? Time or unforeseen occurence.?.or bloody murder?

  • Diogenesister

    Sorry the first sentence above was from Pale.Emperor .

  • pale.emperor


    I reckon it might have been disease. Or something us humans were able to tolerate that our cousins just wern't. Like if we had no knowledge of fire and we all started eating raw meat. We'd quickly get sick and a lot of us would perish. The meat eating animals however would be fine. Something may have happened the other way round, disease, parasites, change in climate... who knows?

  • Vidiot

    @ pale.emperor...

    All of those environmental factors at different times, actually.

    Once you give yourself permission to learn about the evolutionary process from a source that isn't automatically biased against it, the prospect of it having happened becomes extremely plausible... even inevitable.

    And then you realize that the only true (no pun intended) obstacle to accepting it is the ideological insistence that the Genesis creation narrative be literal history.

    Once you let go of that - however it happens - accepting evolution is easy.

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