Why some people reject evolution

[Danmark]

[you can skip the intro and go right to the last paragraph]

Growing up, I was seldom interested in math. At first it seemed tedious and boring. I invented my own shortcuts to make it easier. Later it required discipline when it got too difficult to do in my head. So, i loved geometry, but lost interest after trig, which I didn't even try to understand. I've been thinking of trying to teach myself calculus, just to see if, at 69 I can do it. So, I looked for a free online course of study and found this:

As Henry Ford said, " Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs ". Too much of the world is complicated by layers of evolution. If you understand how each layer is put down then you can begin to understand the complex systems that govern our world. Charles Darwin wrote in 1859 in his On The Origin of Species,

"When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become! " http://www.understandingcalculus.com/

So here's the question, do people not believe in evolution just because the Bible tells them so? Or is there another factor; that rather than try to understand it in small steps, one tiny transition at a time, since the entirety of the process ("microbe to man") seems impossible to them, do they reject it out of hand without looking at it step by step?

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to post 288 by 101G]

If the earth is only 6,000 years old, question, "how can we see stars more than 6,000 light years away?"

That statement alone shows that you don't really understand what a light year is. It is simply the distance that light travels in one year in a vacuum (about 5.9 trillion miles). If a star is 100 million light years away, and we see its light in the night sky, that just means we are seeing the light after it has travelled 5.9e20 miles through space, originating at the star 100 million years ago and reaching Earth today. The start could well be gone now, but if the Earth were only 6,000 years old (it isn't ... it is 4.6 billion years old) that doesn't have any bearing on whether or not we can see the light from a star that is 100 million light years away.

Do you believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old? That is not at all consistent with your earlier comment that you believe humans are billions of years old.

... with the latest discoveries in quantum physic, especially with the double slit experiment, nothing is not sure anymore.

The double-slit experiment is not "new", but it demonstrated wave-particle duality (Thomas Young did a similar experiment with light in 1801, long before quantum mechanics was developed). Quantum effects are far more understood now than in the mid 1920s when the first double-slipt experiment was done using electron scattering:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davisson% ... experiment

Science is never "finished", with new discoveries and refinement of prior results continuously occurring. But there are some things we do know with such high probability that they can be considered "facts." The age of the Earth is one of those ... 6,000 years from biblical chronology is ridiculous and easily proven to be false.

[101G]

[Replying to post 289 by DrNoGods]

I quess you didn't read or understand my post. I never said the earth is 6,000 years old.
two, I was making an analysis of light which is the same for all observers. and if the Light is the same from the beginning and has been traveling from a single event at a certain point in time, then the earth is more that 6,000 years old.

and third it do. light have a bearing on time by distance. if not post your finding that say the opposite.

[brunumb]

[Replying to post 286 by 101G]

second, I believe man been here way longer than 300, 000 years ago, let say possibly in the billions. of years range

to me according to science it is not a matter of "FACTS".

I'm curious 101G. If you don't consider science as reliable, on what do you base your assertion that man has been here for possibly billions of years? I have never encountered anything anywhere that makes that claim.

[brunumb]

[Replying to post 1 by Danmark]

not saying that you're right or wrong, but consider this. what would you say if MAN was here on earth before the animals. that would put evolution in a jam. well that's exactly what the bible tells us. man was made/formed on day three, just after "dry" land was brought forth. as a matter of fact according to the Bible, man was here before the plants, trees, and the grass.

so according to the bible "evolution" is a incorrect teaching.

My motto: "Where there is Knowledge, stay not ignorant".

The Bible contains just one of the many origin stories that have been the foundations of religions and societies from all over the world. It has no more validity than any of the others. There has never been any evidence to support the fantastic claims made by any of them. Any acceptance of them as truth relies on faith alone. That is not the case with the theory of evolution. It is not just a made up story. It is the inevitable conclusion that you reach when you examine all of the observations regarding life on this planet. The evidence comes from disparate fields which all support each other. It has not been refuted. There is knowledge aplenty and no one need stay ignorant of it.

[101G]

[Replying to post 291 by brunumb]

first thanks for the reply.

I have a few reasons.

#1. the earth is a water planet, supportive scripture, 2 Peter 3:5 "For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water" and scientist today understand that water have been here on the planet longer than the sun have existed. here are just one of many papers stating this."Much of Earth's Water Is Older Than the Sun". https://www.space.com/27256-earth-water ... n-sun.html

but science is also finding water every where, on the moon on other planets, and even in space it self.

#2. Adam the man was formed before the plants, and herbs and grass, this is proven out in the following scriptures, Genesis 1:9-13, and compare these scriptures with the detailed account in chapter 2 starting with the 4th verse through the 7th verse. note the detail "before".

only the woman EVE was formed after the animals on day 6th.

knowing that man was formed on day three the bible do not tell us how long Adam the Man was on this planet alone, (but with fellowship in spirit with God). and from the "DAYS" account which are not solar 24hrs days, this to me an evening and a morning day could be thousands or even millions of years in natural time. for the bible states that generations, and that's with an "s" at the end are in "a" one creation DAY. so that tells me that there are many years in just one creation day.

so Adam nor the Rocks really know how old they are, because of none decay from the begining. only when man sinned did the biological clock began to tick, (because of decay.. sin, it produce Death) THE RESULT FROM SIN.

the bible only records the decay of man not his eternity from the begining.

so based on these conclusion, I'm an old earth in decay believer. a very very old earth believer.

[brunumb]

[Replying to post 293 by 101G]

#1. the earth is a water planet, supportive scripture, 2 Peter 3:5 "For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water" and scientist today understand that water have been here on the planet longer than the sun have existed. here are just one of many papers stating this."Much of Earth's Water Is Older Than the Sun". https://www.space.com/27256-earth-water ... n-sun.html

but science is also finding water every where, on the moon on other planets, and even in space it self.

The solar system formed some 8 billion years after the universe. In that time many stars were born and died and their products were the heavier elements, including oxygen. We see water, the product of reacting hydrogen and oxygen everywhere. Water is believed to have been delivered to the planet via collisions with icy comets. It is not unusual to find that most of the water on Earth is therefore older than the solar system itself. It was all formed earlier. The biblical description is extremely vague and inconsistent with what we have since learnt.

#2. Adam the man was formed before the plants, and herbs and grass, this is proven out in the following scriptures, Genesis 1:9-13, and compare these scriptures with the detailed account in chapter 2 starting with the 4th verse through the 7th verse. note the detail "before".

This is nothing more than an unsupported assertion.

knowing that man was formed on day three the bible do not tell us how long Adam the Man was on this planet alone, (but with fellowship in spirit with God). and from the "DAYS" account which are not solar 24hrs days, this to me an evening and a morning day could be thousands or even millions of years in natural time. for the bible states that generations, and that's with an "s" at the end are in "a" one creation DAY. so that tells me that there are many years in just one creation day.

Again, this is part of a story that does not necessarily have any basis in reality. Days and nights are determined by the rotation of the earth, one rotation every 24 hours. Any interpretation to extend a day into millions of years smacks of a desperate attempt to sweep the truth under the carpet in favour of biblical fiction.

only when man sinned did the biological clock began to tick, (because of decay.. sin, it produce Death) THE RESULT FROM SIN.

Sin is a man-made concept and has no power to affect the functioning of the universe.

[rikuoamero]

[Replying to post 293 by 101G]

#2. Adam the man was formed before the plants, and herbs and grass, this is proven out in the following scriptures, Genesis 1:9-13, and compare these scriptures with the detailed account in chapter 2 starting with the 4th verse through the 7th verse. note the detail "before".

Proven. You use that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

[otseng]

The Bible contains just one of the many origin stories that have been the foundations of religions and societies from all over the world. It has no more validity than any of the others. There has never been any evidence to support the fantastic claims made by any of them. Any acceptance of them as truth relies on faith alone. That is not the case with the theory of evolution. It is not just a made up story. It is the inevitable conclusion that you reach when you examine all of the observations regarding life on this planet. The evidence comes from disparate fields which all support each other. It has not been refuted. There is knowledge aplenty and no one need stay ignorant of it.

This is quite a claim to say the Bible has no evidence to support it and evolution is an inevitable conclusion. We'll ignore your first claim since it's not related to the thread. But, the second is disputable. In fact, I've already posted several times in this thread the many contradictions of evolutionary theory.

The problem that I see is people just accept what other people say about evolution and just take what authorities say as a fact. Few people even bother to critically examine the theory of evolution.

An example from this thread. In post 212, it is claimed the Aetiocetus is "an excellent example of a transitional form in the fossil record" between "ancestral form Pakicetus and the modern gray whale." If you stop right there, one can believe this is strong evidence of evolution. But, few would go further to see if this is a valid argument.

What exactly is a Pakicetus? Here is an illustration of it from Wikipedia.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakicetus

Strangely, paleontologists classify the Pakicetus as a whale.

Here is an illustration of Aetiocetus:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aetiocetus

And here's modern gray whale:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_whale

The Pakicetus is not very similar to Aetiocetus. If anything, they appear to be quite distant from each other, so how can it be classified as a transitional form? Why not pick a lizard, or a rabbit, or a fox as related to Aetiocetus?

Another contradiction is when baleen whales existed. Modern gray whales are baleen whales. However, baleen whales existed before Aetiocetus.

"Hence, whales whose feeding relied entirely on baleen made their stratigraphic appearance before Aetiocetus, meaning that “true� baleen whales existed before Aetiocetus."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aetiocetus

So, there is a discrepancy between if Aetiocetus came first or baleen whales came first.

[Neatras]

[Replying to post 296 by otseng]

Your skepticism over the relationship between Pakicetus and Aetiocetus is respectable. But the problem is you stopped immediately after coming to an intuitive, biased conclusion that the Aetiocetus could not be a transitional form between Pakicetus and whales because it doesn't look similar (and you equivocate between using Pakicetus as a delineating fossil, or a set of other animals), and because Aetiocetus appeared in the fossil record after other baleen whales.

When you say "I'm skeptical," and you look for 15 minutes, decide it doesn't make sense, and stop immediately, you're doing it wrong. What you should've done is look to see what sort of explanations they made that addresses the discrepancy. In other words, you should've actually been interested in finding out about the body of knowledge and facts that scientists have access to, not merely dismissive.

So I'll finish the homework you started.

1. Aetiocetus is a baleen whale. It is also not a direct ancestor to modern baleen whales.

Aetiocetus is a genus of extinct basal mysticete, or baleen whale that lived 33.9 to 23.03 million years ago, in the late Oligocene in the North Pacific ocean, around Japan, Mexico, and Oregon, U.S.

Almost all phylogenies agree that Aetiocetus is a stem mysticete with no affiliation with crown Mysticeti. This result is not entirely surprising, given its symplesiomorphic condition, meaning that Aetiocetus still retains many primitive features and few derived ones. Its phylogenetic placement among stem mysticetes is also in line with its late Oligocene stratigraphic occurrence, where crown Mysticeti had yet to appear in the fossil record.

This took 3 minutes to read.

What does this mean? Well it means that if we look at the branching tree of life, and observe the branch that modern baleen whales derive from, we should expect that, going back several hundred million years, there was a fork,, from which the ancestors to Aetiocetus and the ancestors to modern baleen whales diverged.

Why was Aetiocetus stated to be a transitional form between Pakicetus and gray whales? Not because of direct genetic ancestry; we cannot make that kind of claim because of the state of the fossils.

What we can do is show that a population of organisms possessed traits that resemble what we would expect from a modern species' ancestors, and also were transitional from a more distant ancestor. In this way, because we are not absolutely sure what a modern gray whale's ancestor looked like in the intermediary between pakicetus and the present, we have to isolate data points based on what we can find.

If a population of Aetiocetus existed, then it stands to reason that the ancestral species it derived from, which also produced the actual gray whale ancestor, possessed a range of traits similar enough to Aetiocetus that we can use Aetiocetus to triangulate the phylogeny of baleen whales.

This is because sister populations that haven't had an enormous amount of time to diverge will maintain similar characteristics. After a few million years, the difference in genetic drift causes the populations to become so different that a later iteration would not be heavily useful in predicting the phylogeny of the related species. It's better if they're closely related, meaning the closer they are to the fork, the better.

Now I'm going to be very blunt: You used a quote mine, and that is a very bad, very dishonest thing to do.

Aetiocetus is unique in its representation of transition from toothed archaeocete to toothless mysticete. It is important, however, to make the distinction that Aetiocetus is not a transitional form in the strictest sense, that is, it cannot be an ancestor to extant Mysticeti.[2] More derived forms, such the Cetotheriidae, a family of toothless baleen whales, are contemporaneous with Aetiocetus. Hence, whales whose feeding relied entirely on baleen made their stratigraphic appearance before Aetiocetus, meaning that “true� baleen whales existed before Aetiocetus.

You left this first part of the quote out, and used only the latter part. You misrepresented what the article was saying. The article itself claimed that Aetiocetus was never considered a strictly transitional form because of its non-ancestral relation to baleen whales. That means that the entire discussion, from the start, was piecing together how Aetiocetus informs phylogenic study of baleen whale ancestry due to its apparent traits that resemble what we would expect from a baleen whale's ancestor. So from the start, this discrepancy was fabricated by you.

Now onto Pakicetus. You discount the possibility that it is a whale because, shocker, it looks like a land-dwelling mammal. But it is classified as a whale due to taxonomic reasons.

Pakicetus was originally described as being a mesonychid, but later research reclassified it as an early cetacean due to characteristic features of the inner ear found only in cetaceans; namely, the large auditory bulla is formed from the ectotympanic bone only.

Once again, there is no genetic evidence that Pakicetus is a direct ancestor of modern whales. But because it is a part of the baleen whale's ancient lineage (due to the fact that it has traits it inherited from its ancestors, which are what we expect to find in a transitional form, in the location we expected to find it, in the part of the fossil record it's easy to predict at), it is considered to be a good approximation of what baleen whales' ancestors looked like in the transition from land-dwelling mammals to semi-aquatic mammals.

That's how paleontology works.

Your skepticism is little more than incredulity. You're using your intuition more than facts themselves, and I've had to point out your obfuscation of what the actual scientific consensus shows in order to make it clear that you are not representing the theory of evolution in good faith.

If you have beef with the theory of evolution, great. But cut this strawman out of it, I'm not happy with what you've done today.

[benchwarmer]

The problem that I see is people just accept what other people say about evolution and just take what authorities say as a fact. Few people even bother to critically examine the theory of evolution.

While this may be true to an extent, the vast amount of scientifically peer reviewed research on the topic is difficult to ignore. The TOE has evidence from multiple disciplines of science. There is no doubt a Nobel prize for any scientist that can disprove the theory and bring forth a better one.

At the most basic level, evolution is most definitely a fact of life. Organisms reproduce and there is genetic similarity and differences (mutations) from one reproductive generation to the next. The only sticking point seems to be that some religious folks either can't or won't extend this to the logical conclusion because it refutes their scripture stories.

Are there debates about where a particular fossil fits exactly in the timeline? Sure! That, however, does nothing to refute the overall theory, it simply points to the lack of information about that particular specimen. Also remember that the field of genetics is what has really cinched the theory. We obviously can't dig up every single organism that has ever lived and place them all on an exact timeline. We can look for genetic markers that show which species are related and have common ancestors.

An example from this thread. In post 212, it is claimed the Aetiocetus is "an excellent example of a transitional form in the fossil record" between "ancestral form Pakicetus and the modern gray whale." If you stop right there, one can believe this is strong evidence of evolution. But, few would go further to see if this is a valid argument.

What exactly is a Pakicetus? Here is an illustration of it from Wikipedia.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakicetus

Strangely, paleontologists classify the Pakicetus as a whale.

Here is an illustration of Aetiocetus:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aetiocetus

And here's modern gray whale:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_whale

The Pakicetus is not very similar to Aetiocetus. If anything, they appear to be quite distant from each other, so how can it be classified as a transitional form? Why not pick a lizard, or a rabbit, or a fox as related to Aetiocetus?

How something 'looks' has nothing to do with the TOE. You will have to dig much deeper to understand why these fossils were classified as they are. I suggest reading the first link a little closer might help:

https://www.amnh.org/explore/news-blogs ... pakicetus/

Over time, fossils also revealed that Pakicetus had an ear bone with a feature unique to whales and an ankle bone that linked it to artiodactyls, a large order of even-toed hoofed mammals that includes hippos, pigs, sheep, cows, deer, giraffes, antelopes, and even cetaceans, the only aquatic artiodactyls.

Another contradiction is when baleen whales existed. Modern gray whales are baleen whales. However, baleen whales existed before Aetiocetus.

"Hence, whales whose feeding relied entirely on baleen made their stratigraphic appearance before Aetiocetus, meaning that “true� baleen whales existed before Aetiocetus."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aetiocetus

So, there is a discrepancy between if Aetiocetus came first or baleen whales came first.

I'm not clear what the discrepancy is that you are referring to. I'm probably just misreading or not understanding the full context here.

Anyways, you might want to give this a read which talks about the evolution of baleen:

https://ecologicablog.wordpress.com/201 ... orphology/

Again, confusion of where exactly a particular fossil fits in the timeline really does nothing to refute the theory. Now, if you could conclusively show a human fossil that can be dated before all other mammals then maybe we can talk about throwing out the TOE and going back to the Bible fables.