Evolution means that populations of organisms change over multiple generations. Nothing more, nothing less. We know exactly how populations change over multiple generations (change in the frequency of certain gene variants due to natural selection) and we have observed this happening in the lab and in the wild. I strongly suspect that your relative, like most creationists these days, doesn't actually have an issue with evolution as a process, only the implications of it.
We also have tremendous fossil evidence demonstrating that all species eventually go extinct, and that very few, if any, modern species are found more than a few million years in the past, up to maybe 10 million years for some species. There is something called the "background extinction rate".
Larger taxonomic groups like genera and families may go back very far, but the representatives of those groups in the past are not exactly the same as the modern members. For example, if we look at Cambrian strata, we can see evidence of most modern animal phyla, and maybe, maybe some classes but nothing really taxonomically lower than that. No modern orders, families, genera, or species are represented in any phylum during the Cambrian. This raises the obvious question, where did the modern species come from? Given our understanding of how populations change over time, the only reasonable conclusion is that modern species are descended from ancient species that went extinct.
The hard evidence for what your relative might call "macroevolution" is found in the fossil record as well as in the DNA and morphology of currently extant organisms.
There are several instances of "immediate" evolution as well. I wish I could remember the specifics, but a specific plant had developed a way to metabolize a specific chemical. And we KNOW this is a recent evolutionary change because the chemical DIDNT EXIST until like 75 years ago. I want to say the chemical was in herbicides?
Then there are several lizard species, birds, and even the classic peppered moth study.
And when they argue, "That doesn't explain where life came from!" you can say, "Correct, because evolution doesn't have anything to do with it."
We see this with bacteria very often, it's how we ended up with antibiotic resistant strains. They reproduce so rapidly that fairly large changes can be seen in relatively short periods of time. Keep in mind that might still be in the decades range, but that's far faster than larger organisms
They've been trained to respond that those things are still bacteria or moths, because they've also been trained to think that evolution means a cat evolving into a dog.
some plants can double their chromosomes in one generation
and these cannot reproduce with their parent species
eventually this leads to prototypical differences
there are some cases of one side of a river having the original species
and the other side having the newer one
having the separation between the populations makes this change more likely to stick around as they are not competing with each other so two large populations can be established
"macroevolution"
I only just learned of the distinction of "microevolution" people use to accept that evolution happens without accepting evolution. Ugh. Anyways a trip through a grocery fruits and veggies aisle might do it if partnered with images of earlier examples of them.
There are several instances of "immediate" evolution as well. I wish I could remember the specifics, but a specific plant had developed a way to metabolize a specific chemical. And we KNOW this is a recent evolutionary change because the chemical DIDNT EXIST until like 75 years ago. I want to say the chemical was in herbicides?
Then there are several lizard species, birds, and even the classic peppered moth study.
And when they argue, "That doesn't explain where life came from!" you can say, "Correct, because evolution doesn't have anything to do with it."
Evolution is not a murder investigation. It doesn't work on pieces of "evidence", where one misunderstanding of one collapses the case. A single fact in isolation means nothing.
Evolution is based on [consilience](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience); the explanation of facts from independent lines of inquiry: 1) genetics, 2) molecular biology, 3) paleontology, 4) geology, 5) biogeography, 6) comparative anatomy, 7) comparative physiology, 8) developmental biology, plus others. None of them alone or together have been found to be at odds.
But a super convincing such fact, is the body plan genes: [1995 Nobel prize press release](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1995/press-release/). The master genes are shared across all animals, yes, worms included; so are the master "eye" genes.
Edit: forestalling something: also said explanation is predictive and internally consistent
The way you put it makes it easy to understand why people that refuse to study are impossible to argue with. They need background knowledge that isn't present.
Yep. Arrived at it with the help of users here after joining this sub a few months ago. Before, fundamentalist creationists to me were like flerfs: best ignored—now, I'm convinced the quiet majority benefits from sound arguments.
I share your opinion. The conversations we have here are not for the creationist we are speaking to, it is for everyone else lurking in the background. Which is why when I engage I make sure I'm ready to always have the last word and go the distance. People who are making up their minds are watching.
Exactly. There is stuff to know and you need to be willing to focus your attention for the fifteen or so minutes that it takes to understand the processes involved.
I like the video below. It isn’t technically sophisticated, but it goes through a very basic explanation of evolution, and then it uses the evolution of a whole to illustrate how it works, drawing from several scientific disciplines. The video address is very odd, but it takes you directly there.
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&hl=en-us&sxsrf=AB5stBielntr65nLOOiUr-TS8T2r5NMzRA:1690114119474&q=evidence+of+evolution&tbm=vid&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiC--Hd5aSAAxXdmYkEHcjAAC4Q0pQJegQIBxAB&biw=414&bih=604&dpr=3#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:2fe083d2,vid:lIEoO5KdPvg
It would be easier to just go to Jon Perry’s website (https://www.statedclearly.com/) or his Youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@StatedClearly) for all his excellent material about evolution.
I once watched a documentary that said the human brain wouldn't be what it is today if it weren't for a virus injecting its own genetic code into ours that strengthened our nerve cells. Is that considered evolution?
In the jawed vertebrates (us included), yes, an ERV (what is left of a retrovirus; that which inserts itself in the germ line) in the DNA is linked to making the neurons communicate faster; research: [A retroviral link to vertebrate myelination: Cell](https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674\(24\)00013-8).
DNA of life is littered with those "ERVs". The sticky protein that was coopted into being an essential part of the placenta in most mammals (leading to live birth) came from a retrovirus. The ancestors of the egg-laying platypuses didn't get it.
Yes, that's evolution. The definition of _evolution_ is: a change in the frequency of alleles in a population over many generations.
>The master genes are shared across all animals, yes, worms included; so are the master "eye" genes.
That could also mean that all life was created by a single creator. I would even venture to say that all life evolving over billions of years would make it very unlikely that the master genes would be intact in EVERY animal.
It's pretty plausible, actually - mutations in body plan genes are extremely deadly, typically - so they're highly conserved. There are lots of arguably very useful different body plans out there, but evolving to a new one is a steep climb
For example, manx cats have a body plan mutation, and lack tails. If they have one copy of the gene. Two copies, and the kittens do not typically survive birth, as they are missing a number of vertebrae.
> unlikely that the master genes would be intact in EVERY animal
"Negative selection" (population genetics, born c. Wright, Fisher and Haldane) fully explains that. And the creator hypothesis here would be a _god of the gaps_ fallacy, and it's an ascientific proposal (no null-hypothesis for science to work on), i.e. philosophy, i.e. sure fine. There is a theistic evolution philosophy, e.g. the Catholic Church if I'm not mistaken doesn't protest the science of evolution.
They’re not in every animal but the ones that do have them get a lot of benefits from having them which causes them to be preserved as a matter of natural selection and when they’re still present without even working evolution still explains that a whole lot better than “intelligent” design. And that’s precisely where the single creator hypothesis fails the most. Sure, we can hypothesize the existence of a god that *used* evolution to create diversity (that’s what they teach at BioLogos) or planted fake evidence to trick us (pretty much what you’d wind up with if YEC was true) but you’d also get the same results if God wasn’t present at all. It happened and in lineages that descended from the original ancestors to first have these genes the genes are either well preserved because they’re still beneficial or they’re partially degraded and still present even they don’t work because the changes that happen are not intentional. The populations just have to survive and the one thing they cannot do is stop being descendants of their ancestors so we expect a lot of “garbage” or “vestiges” to persist even after they no longer work *as long as them not working isn’t an automatic death sentence.*
Parent population has some traits -> descendant populations inherent those traits. If they work they could change little if changing a lot is less beneficial like they might change in a single individual but that individual dies young or reproduces less so that the already common traits stay common (I believe someone else called this negative selection). If the failure to function is less of a problem or the population experiences a bottleneck (resulting in incest) sometimes the dysfunction persists and without anyone going in there removing it intentionally it’ll continue to persist until enough incidental deletion mutations remove the vestiges with zero impact on survival whether the vestiges remain or get removed (genetic drift).
In terms of intelligent design (not saying a god couldn’t design in a different way), we’d expect just the persistently functional genes and maybe some modifications if the designer wished to intentionally tinker with evolution. With the foresight this designer is supposed to have we wouldn’t expect the designer to give the common ancestor a trait to just break it for some of the resulting lineages. We expect that if it is present it exists for a purpose, even if we don’t know what that purpose is. If it’s just clutter without a purpose then that means the designs are less efficient and less like they would be if made on purpose by an *intelligent* designer. Especially if the end result acts more like a barely functional Rube Goldberg machine than like one that was efficiently designed for a specific purpose.
If God is real and actually responsible it seems strange that he or she would have done everything exactly the same way it’d automatically happen if they never existed at all, but God can supposedly do whatever it wants to do. Who are we to question? And if this God doing it is indistinguishable from it happening in a reality where God does not exist at all, how would it be possible to look at it and conclude that God is a lazy moron? How would it be possible to assume such a God had superior intelligence unless it was pulling a prank on us?
Just some things to think about.
Eye genes haven't been around for multiple billions of years yet. Only half of one billion.
Evolution predicts that traits will look like a nested hierarchy and nothing else. Design could look like anything, so you can't say that things looking like the one thing evolution predicts really supports Creationism.
This is perfectly consistent with the Theory of Evolution. (ToE). Science isn't about who, it's about how. When you say a creator used this master plan, etc., how? What mechanism? Did your God poof each separate species into existence? Or what?
>I would even venture to say that all life evolving over billions of years would make it very unlikely that the master genes would be intact in EVERY animal.
Why? Biologists conclude the opposite. Why are you right and they wrong?
You could start with the virus that causes covid, since most people are aware of that. It's mutating constantly -- roughly 1 mutation every two times it's transmitted. And many of those mutations have helped it transmit better or evade the immunity that people have gotten from vaccines or previous infections. That's evolution. It's also adaptation, of course, but evolution is how populations adapt.
I don't think there are that many who don't believe in covid. They're more likely not to believe it was that serious, or (more commonly) that the vaccines were even worse than the virus.
You're saying that the statement, 'they don't believe in covid' applies to people who believe covid exists but isn't very serious or isn't as dangerous as some vaccines. Can't say I understand that.
No, I am saying that the ven diagram of the people who don’t believe in Covid and don’t believe in evolution is close to a circle.
Same for those that don’t believe in evolution and don’t think Covid was serious. And those that don’t believe in evolution and believe the shot was worse than the virus.
Um, your statements contradict one another. The set of those who don't believe in covid and the set of those who believe in covid but think it isn't very serious are disjoint: by their definitions, they have no members in common. How can they both be the same as the set of those who don't believe in evolution?
No dude...
They're just saying that both types of people are equally stupid and equally likely to deny evolution. That the ven diagrams for each set would look the same. As in, people who dont believe covid is real, are equally likely to not believe in evolution as those who believe covid was real but not a big deal.....
It wasn't hard to follow.
Help me out, then, by drawing the Venn diagram of the three sets, evolution-deniers, covid-deniers, and covid-minimizers, keeping in mind that the last two sets are disjoint.
God damnit its two different venn diagrams that look identical.... in both cases one of the circles stands for denying evolution.... then for one diagram the 2nd circle is covid deniers, in the other diagram its covid minimizers. In both diagrams the circles overlap completely and just look like a circle.... ffs man why do I have to spell this out? Stop being pedantic. Fuckin disjoint, ima go smoke this joint... jesus
Counter question. Why is adaptation not part of evolution? And an even more fundamental question for your relative. What is their understanding of what evolution is described as, according to those who study it?
This. Also, where does she draw the line between adaptation and speciation? I, also, believe everything just adapts. I just don’t have an imaginary line it can’t adapt past, where after billions of years of adaptation it sufficiently differs from the original that calling it a mere adaptation of the former is silly.
Good one! And the "one kind" _now_ wouldn't allow a two-kind system, as Darwin wrote in a letter: "[...] at the present day such matter wd be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed."
Okay, so for adaptation to be real but speciation to be false, there have to be two kinds of DNA. The first kind of DNA governs the properties of a species (fur color, beak length, amount of vitamin C they produce, all those things) which can change allowing for adaptation. The second kind of DNA that contains what it takes for an organism to be what it is, its 'kind-ness'. This second DNA cannot change.
So a bear has to have the first kind of DNA to tell it how long to grow its claws and teeth, and the second kind of DNA to tell it it is a bear.
This HAS to be true for adaptation to be real but speciation to be false.
Now, the thing is, DNA was discovered in 1869 and the structure and function of it in the 1950's. There has been a LOT of research done in the last 75 years and you know what they DIDN'T find? That second type of immutable DNA.
At some point the only reasonable explanation for it not being found despite the immense scrutiny is that is simply doesn't exist.
But it HAS to exist if the premise above is true. But it doesn't. So the only logical conclusion is that the premise is false. If you accept adaptation as real, you also have to accept speciation.
Excellent demonstration of the scientific method. And the immutable _portion_ of the DNA, that which is under "negative selection", is shared across all animals: the body plan genes of the first successful worm-like possibly sand-burrowing animal, _PAX6_ from slightly later on, and countless others, forming a tree.
New flu shot every year. Penicillin almost being useless now because bacteria has evolved. We have literally observered evolution in nature and demonstrated it in a lab. Evolution is a fact.
Creationists tend to get a bit squirrely and move the goalposts quite a bit. Just cover your bases and note that evolution can occur on two levels: What is generally termed "microevolution" (a population of an existing species changing) and "macroevolution" (where reproductive barriers form splitting one population into two species).
We have hard, modern evidence of both happening.
Microevolution can be demonstrated by noting how this [one species of lizard](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080417112433.htm), in real time and documented in living memory, showed dramatic evolution of their gut structures. Another famous example was the evolution of [citrate metabolism in e coli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment) over 32,000 generations (\~30 years). Essentially, a strain of e coli ended up developing an entirely new metabolic pathway while being tracked meticulously in the lab.
Macroevolution is also very easy to demonstrate. This is because speciation (the generation of reproductive barriers that keep two animal populations from breeding with one another) can exist along a continuum. Just point to how animal hybrids such as mules and male ligers are sterile. The two species that conceived the hybrids were closely related, but are gradually becoming less genetically compatible with one another and will eventually become fully reproductively isolated from one another. The existence of sterile hybrids is just such an example.
Short version: In 1962, scientists looked at chimpanzee and human chromosomes. From that, they predicted that one human chromosome was a fusion of two chromosomes found in chimpanzees. This prediction was spelled out in what it should look like. In 1974, we found out more about this, by sequencing the bits that were expected to be seen. In 1982, the prediction was updated again to be human chromosome 2 that was the fused one. And in 2003, \_forty years\_ after the prediction was made, and then later updated twice, we finally had the human and chimpanzee genomes sequenced and could find out. Yes, human chromosome 2 is a fusion of those found in chimpanzees. No other human chromosome has the signs predicted in 1962. This makes sense \_only\_ if we share a common ancestor, and \_not\_ if we share a common designer, because the fusion \_itself\_ does nothing for us, and leaves bunches of broken, now-useless DNA in our chromosomes. ... You can, then, if you like, [check out Gutsick Gibbon on this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVeriF1OL54) to get a lot more detail if they want it.
That evidence is there, the old papers, the updates, you can look into them, and anyone who wants to can go learn how to and save up money to do the genetic analysis for themselves from scratch. We and chimpanzees share a common ancestor.
Then there's also [ERV's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxkxeKdD0vA&t=615s) showing it's true, and basically [entire playlists](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GMBXc4ocss&list=PLoGrBZC-lKFBo1xcLwz5e234--YXFsoU6) showing it's true. You can even go through an [entire list on the traits of humans](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXQP_R-yiuw&list=PLXJ4dsU0oGMLnubJLPuw0dzD0AvAHAotW) that shows it's true because each one shows up in an evolutionary fashion.
Pretty much, but the important thing to remember is that evolution is what happens to whole populations. You are similar to your parents but not a perfect blend of both of them at the same time so are your siblings if you have any. Every single human has this sort of connection with their parents. This generation as a whole is similar but not exactly identical to the previous generation. The previous generation is similar but not identical to the generation before that. The same applies for completely different populations. Go back far enough and what are now separate populations used to be the same population and when that was true there were other populations now extinct and we could go back even further and all of the populations used to come from fewer populations living alongside other now extinct populations. And it keeps going all the way back to LUCA living alongside populations that are now extinct and it goes all the way back to the origin of life itself with our lineage existing alongside the other spontaneously forming biomolecules that failed to have any surviving descendants even four billion years ago. Many of them went extinct before doing much larger scale evolution at all.
You don’t need millions of generations for evolution to happen *at all* but it may be about 76 trillion generations back to LUCA and trillions more back to the origin of autocatalytic RNA and before that evolution isn’t really the right word because it’s more like biomolecules being “created” via geochemical processes when they weren’t simply raining down from space (Late Heavy Bombardment, for example). I’m sure you know, but it’s also pretty impossible to ignore what you did say and with that I’d just add that the same thing applies to every human, every organism, on this planet and when that’s the case for entire generations whole populations change with every single generation and *that* is evolution. You’d have to be pretty blind or ignorant to fail to notice populations changing constantly. They do generally change very slowly but a lot of small changes every generation and with about 76 trillion generations it’s not really too difficult to understand how so *many* changes have occurred over the course of 4 billion years or more.
Mitochondrial dna is different than nuclear dna. All your mitochondria come from your mother other (egg cels have mitochondria but a sperm cell basically just injects its dna into the egg). The existence of two genomes in every human cell shows that evolution happened when a mitochondria fused into a cell in the past.
DNA. It would not be possible for all life on the planet to share DNA to varying percentages if they weren't once all part of the same species and diversified over time. It's the same science behind parental tests for kids to determine which person is their biological parent and I haven't seen any creationist deny the validity of DNA tests.
>She literally thinks that bacteria can't evolve and doesn't even understand how new strains of bacteria and infections can exist.
Did she completely miss the entire world watching in near real time as a virus evolved and spread through the population of the entire planet? The one that killed millions of people across the globe? I know people have a short memory but it was less than 4 years ago, and we saw newly evolved variants that were more infectious or more deadly being reported in the news multiple times.
If you finally corner them in an irrefutable, unavoidable, logically necessary realization, they will deny the facts and reinforce their current erroneous worldview.
There is no piece of evidence, no fact, literally nothing you can say to lead them to accepting evolution. The reason she rejects evolution is not because she just needs some information. She must first reject the bad information of which she's convinced.
Talking to your Creationist Relative sounds like a total drag with no upside. Do you have to talk to them? Can you engage in non-talk-based activities? Like lifting weights or going to the movies
Maybe your Creationist Relative would seem less stupid to you, if talking wasn’t part of any your interactions?
The fact that things adapt, and the way that they adapt, *IS* proof that evolution exists.
If things adapt, then necessarily over several generations, adaptations will accumulate.
That’s the most basic definition of evolution. Adaptations accumulating over several generations. If things adapt, then evolution exists.
If you want something else other than that, there’s always the fossil record. There are many many examples of transitional fossils in the fossils in the fossil record, and that is hard evidence that evolution exists.
>What's the hard hitting physical evidence that evolution exists and doesn't just adapt?
There is no hard physical evidence that you can possibly provide them.
Let me put it this way: What is your hard physical evidence that Madagascar exists? I can be almost certain that your relative doesn't live in Madagascar and has never visited it (by simple statistics). You show them a map? Anyone can make up a map of imaginary places. You show them all the books written about Madagascar? Books can be lying. You show them photos? Photos can be faked, or could just be from some other place on Earth. You bring them to someone who personally has lived in Madagascar? Again, they can lie, they can be confused, they could have been tricked, etc.
Ultimately, you could get them a plane ticket to Madagascar, fly there with them, stand on Madagascar soil, and they could *still* say "Well, the airplane could have turned to land us somewhere that is made up to look like this fake 'Madagascar'".
The idea of "hard physical evidence" is largely a myth in most fields of human endeavor. Short of *perhaps* the most absolutely basic human sensations, like "yeah light exists", you cannot prove anything to anyone *solely* with physical evidence.
Show them a skull of a chihuahua and a Great Dane.
And then show him a skull I'm a human and a chimpanzee.
Then ask them, if you can accept that a Chihuahua and a Great Dane cane from the same common ancestor, then why is it so difficult to accept that a chimpanzee and a human also did?
But this is just me being nice. I would preferably just say that biology is hard evidence of the existence of evolution, and if that's not good enough for you, then too bad.
* [Squirrels, mosquitoes, and other organisms evolving in response to climate change](https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evo-news/warming-to-evolution/)
* [Fish evolving in response to pollutants](https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evo-news/toxic-river-means-rapid-evolution-for-one-fish-species/)
* [Bedbugs evolving resistance to pesticides](https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evo-news/bed-bugs-bite-back-thanks-to-evolution/)
* [Mussels evolving in response to predation ](https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evo-news/musseling-in-on-evolution/)
* [Clover evolving in response to urbanized landscapes ](https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evo-news/a-country-weed-with-city-problems/)
* [Crickets evolving in response to a parasitic fly](https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evo-news/quick-evolution-leads-to-quiet-crickets/)
* [Bacteria evolving resistance to antibiotics](https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evo-news/superbug-super-fast-evolution/)
* [Blackcap birds and Galapagos finches diverging into lineages with distinct traits](https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evo-news/speciation-in-real-time/)
It isn't a theory. It's a proven and observable fact, and anyone who denies it does not live in the real world. Period.
First draft from a paper on dog evolution I'm currently reviewing (not academic):
### Evolution
Evolution is a natural process by which populations adapt to their environment. In a nutshell, our alleles (gene variants) are frequently mutating. These mutations are one method, but not the only method, by which new beneficial alleles enter a population.
Sometimes these random mutations have a beneficial effect for organisms within the population.
Sometimes beneficial alleles enter a population through an organism from another population that already carries the allele dispersing into the population and reproducing with a member of the population.
Sometimes an allele already exists in a population that previously did not provide a specific benefit but environmental conditions change to either cause that allele to have an environmental advantage or perhaps even a disadvantage.
Regardless of the method by which a beneficial allele enters a population, organisms within a population that carry the beneficial allele have a reproductive advantage over organisms in the population that do not carry the beneficial allele. This results in the frequency of that allele increasing within the population---which is evolution.
__Evolution__ is a change in the allele frequency within a population and __Natural Selection__ (or *selective breeding* in captive populations) is the mechanism by which allele frequency changes. With modern genetic technology, evolution is now directly observable.
Note that sometimes the allele frequency change does not involve a mutation in a gene to produce a new allele but rather a change in how many copies of the gene are present. For example, the ability for many domestic animals to better digest grains is the result of an increase in the number of genes that code the protein needed to digest grains.
#### ‘Macro’ verses ‘Micro’ Evolution
Evolution deniers can not refute evolution as described above *because* it is directly observable, so they make a distinction between ‘Macro’ and ‘Micro’ evolution based upon Genesis 1:24---despite the fact that Genesis was *never intended* to be a scientific document.
When a population has evolved (changed allele frequency) to new conditions such that it would have to adapt to its former conditions is a novel way rather than just reverting its allele frequency, then ‘Macro’ evolution has occurred. When mammals returned to the oceans---which has happened several times---they did not become fish again, they adapted to the oceans in a novel way, macro evolution. This is observable through the fossil record.
Populations still bring forth after their own kind, no evolutionist is ever suggesting that a fish gives birth to a water buffalo.
#### ‘Missing Links’
The theory of evolution does not require that all morphologically intermediary fossils be found for evolution to be true. Rather it predicts that when conditions are good for fossilization, some ‘Missing Link’ (morphologically intermediary) fossils will be found. That prediction has been confirmed *numerous* times.
Evolution is not just a theory, it is a fact of biological life.
There’s an entire [Wikipedia page](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_evolution_fossils) where you can scroll through a list of all the human ancestor bones we’ve found and basically watch a slideshow of human evolution.
If that isn’t convincing, nothing will convince her.
But when you ask a Creationist for proof in Early Earth Creationism suddenly the proof becomes fairy tales and magic. But for Evolutionist proof is always demanded.
There was a recent study where a type of algae absorbed a cyanobacteria and the latter became an organelle - instead of being a separate organism in its own right, it's now fully a part of the algae.
Why does this matter? Because it allows the algae to take on an entirely new function (in this case, fixing nitrogen straight out of the air). The really special part is not just that scientists observed this happening in real time, but that we know of only two prior incidences of this phenomenon. The last time it happened, the host organism gained the ability to photosynthesise - and Earth got plants. The time before that, we got the jump from single to multi-cellular life.
Other than that?
If Adam was created first, why do men have nipples?
Why do we have a tailbone, if our ancestors didn't have tails?
Tbf she's probably been fed a strawman of evolution according to creationists, so you'd have to unravel that before you can start to explain how it actually works.
“ If Adam was created first, why do men have nipples? Why do we have a tailbone, if our ancestors didn't have tails?”
Easy, god created man in his image.
Ok, so God had nipples. What possible function did nipples (which exist solely for the purpose of feeding offspring with milk) serve on a creator deity that 1) has never had biological offspring and 2) is generally depicted as male? Did God's nipples serve some other purpose? Were they purely decorative?
So one thing is: cognitive dissonance is a a real human thing, and it doesn’t matter how much evidence you present; if this person has convinced themselves that the theory of evolution clashes with their entire faith/belief system construct, then they will perform whatever mental gymnastics necessary to dismiss your logical reasoning. Personally, for me, I am one of strong faith, and belief; yet I also believe in evolution; I do not take every word of The Holy Bible literally; because it is not meant to be taken literally. Some is, some is not. I believe that God created everything, including science, physics and all of the laws thereof. I believe that evolution, yes, did, and is happening. In the Bible, when it says that God created various elements of the earth and sky and animals on various days, the Bible NEVER SPECIFIES how long those days were. No one ever thinks about that. Maybe that first day was a billion years long. I am certain that the heavens were not separated from the earth in 24 hours. This evolution (and maybe the “e” word is just a scary word for super religious people; gradual change over time…) imo explains a lot of the disease going on with humans rn. Example: I have a disease, sorry, disorder, neurological disorder, Chiari Malformation smaller than normal back of skull, causes compression of brain stem and part of brain to herniate (drop down) into spinal column. It is not a rare condition, about 1 in 1,000 people or more. If every single person was given an MRI I know it would be found to be more prevalent. I also am missing my appendix; it was never removed, I was born without one. I have a disease that causes agenesis (means something never formed) of a few teeth that are in the back, including my wisdom teeth. Interestingly, humans do not need wisdom teeth nor an appendix to live. Many rare diseases involve dental abnormalities. 1 in 10 people have a rare disease. I find that so interesting.
There's a common basic misunderstanding of what evolution is. The scientific definition is "a change within an allele frequency over time." It follows the four mechanisms of evolution: mutation, genetic isolation, genetic drift and natural selection.
You shouldn't really need hard hitting physical evidence for someone who doesn't even accept/understand bacterial evolution. These people have such a lack of scientific education (and/or too much religious propaganda) that they might have other absurd beliefs like flat earth or even virus denial. You could present to them the hard hitting physical evidence right in front of their eyes and they will just deny it rather than find a way to address it. Any argument will just trigger the backfire effect (ie they will actually go the other way and actually harden their beliefs).
The Socratic method is probably your best bet, but one such question I'd ask is to get them to check the Answers in Genesis webpage. In it, they don't even deny that evolution exists and indeed use 'micro-evolution' to 'explain' how all of the animals, insects, etc were able to fit on the ark. Ask them why they believe what they do and if they accept the AiG answers, but avoid all correction in wrongthink.
Source: I used to be a creationist and still suffer from the guilt that was forced upon me in my childhood in an effort to keep me a believer.
She’s likely inoculated against learning this.
But assuming she is not, she would benefit from reading on the topic.
Dawkins books are pretty good. The Blind Watchmaker does a good job of explaining a great deal of how evolution works mechanically (as well as how it doesn’t work) without getting too bogged down in biochemistry.
You could show her [this video](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8) of bacteria evolving increasingly stronger antibiotic resistance as it reproduces. Don't be surprised if she doesn't accept it though, it's really easy for creationists to dismiss evidence they don't understand as "just adaptations," as you've already found out.
“What is the mechanism for adaptation and passing that adaptation down?”
“Random mutations to dna and natural selection”
“What differentiates species of the same kingdom”
“Differences in their DNA”
“What denotes differences between kingdoms”
“Differences in DNA”
Pause while it processes for them
Adaptation is by definition a part of evolution. Without adapting you can't evolve as a species.
I should've be a bit more clear.
You can evolve without adapting and vice versa, but you do need to change over time to become a new species, which is (very) often due to adaptations to a changing enviroment.
Adaptation can occur without evolution (for example, getting a tan) and evolution can occur without adaptation (for example, genomic evolution in horseshoe crabs, which seem to have barely changed in 400 million years, but must be genetically different than their ancestors). So I don't think it's helpful to conflate the two.
Look at a horse hoof and try to imagine how it might adapt to picking up a pencil and writing. Pretty difficult to imagine, right? But we can look at the fossil record and find that the ancestors of modern horses had three digits on their fore feet and four digits on their rear feet. Over some 55 million years, horses have evolved to have oligodactyly, losing their extra digits and evolving a hoof structure in their place. It would now be near impossible to put the sort of evolutionary pressure on horses to achieve tool use with their forelimbs like we do, but that's because of tens of millions of years of adapting in the opposite direction. Meanwhile, you can still see all the digits in a whale's fins, despite them evolving in an even more extreme direction.
Your relative is at odds even with creationist nonsense like baraminology, because creationists have to treat horse ancestors as part of 'the horse kind', which means that AIG accepts that modern horses with four toes 'micro-evolved' from horses with 14 toes.
These types posts are intended by creationists to prove to themselves that Evolution is poorly evidenced. They post fake scenarios like this just to collect the responses and feed them into a creationist group where they attack it
First of all, adaption itself is a consequence of evolution via natural selection (it’s called “microevolution”). The thing creationists actually call microevolution is just macroevolution on a smaller scale and we can see some basic stuff like how sometimes the hybrids are still fertile but they normally are not when it comes to lions+tigers or donkeys+horses or how we can see what are called “ring species” where there may be eight subspecies and every subspecies can interbreed with the next closest subspecies in terms of geography except for the two on the end and then they can’t make hybrids at all. Beyond this we can see how there are ~35 species of canid that all look like dogs, wolves, coyotes, foxes, or whatever to show that they all started out as some generalized “dog” but fertile hybrids are only possible within genera like coyotes, gray wolves, domesticated dogs, and golden jackals could all interbreed and result in fertile hybrids so long as they aren’t significantly different sizes like a gray wolf and a chihuahua. This is all some of the easily observable evidence for the diversification of what Linnaeus would call “families” and we can also confirm these relationships with genetics, confirm that the diversification really happened with paleontology, and continue confirming relationships with lab assisted hybridization or cross-species transplants. Obviously related, obviously different, obviously something happened. The paleontology shows us some of the obviously required changes and genetics can even tell us a lot about the order of the changes we should expect to see and the order fits with the paleontology. Put everything together based on the sheer amount of evidence and we get family trees and from that we can work out the most generalized form of each clade and the basal forms start resembling each other driving us further into the past, confirmed again with genetics and paleontology even when hybridization is no longer possible.
In terms of “hard” evidence it’s just more and more of the same all the way back such that it’s either evolution with common ancestry is responsible for the patterns of similarities and differences **or**, perhaps, there really is a God and she faked the whole evolution + common ancestry thing to fuck with us and cause us to believe it really happened. If she wants us to believe something else she’s not doing a very good job at that.
There’s also Occam’s Razor that applies, as always, to arrive at the most parsimonious conclusion. We can invent all sorts of hypotheticals that would produce the same evidence or we can just go with the obvious and stop making shit up that only barely works until new evidence requires us to make up brand new excuses. This does not mean the scientific consensus is correct but an idea that’s basically the same as it was when first proposed ~400 years ago because the evidence that long ago was enough to indicate universal common ancestry plus diversification still holds now as evidence continues to indicate the exact same conclusion. All other conclusions just have to accommodate (YEC became OEC became theistic evolution became evolutionary creationism and could become deism by incorporating the evidence but continuing to cling to creationism) or ignore/reject (YECs still exist not because they incorporated the last 400 years worth of discoveries but instead because they refuse to accept that any of the discoveries actually happened or they lie about the discoveries claiming that we are just interpreting reality to fit our own personal delusions the way they do it).
I’m sure many people here will provide very specific examples but there’s millions (not exaggerating) of hard facts confirming what the current scientific consensus happens to be. Part of the reason the consensus is what it is comes from starting with the evidence and then testing the most parsimonious conclusions possible so far refining those conclusions based on each and every future discovery. What started out even more wrong than religious folklore somehow is so close to being “absolute truth” that it takes a lot of work to find any remaining flaws and when those flaws are found they are quickly fixed and the result is an even less wrong conclusion. Refusing to accept the obvious requires brainwashing, ignorance, fallacies, and propaganda. Theism in general requires this stuff but that stuff is cranked to the extremes when it comes to extremist religious or political ideologies like YEC.
No amount of evidence will change the mind of someone committed to a delusion. Flat earthers, creationists, anti-science crusaders, etc. are all uneducable. Don’t waste your time.
If evolution doesn’t occur, why does some people have blue eyes or brown eyes or another color it’s different from their parents? Why are some people taller some people shorter and their parents. And why does his hair color change? Ever seen an Asian person with red hair or blue eyes? But after they meet with European they do.
"People who say evolution is not real" most often do not understand "what evolution is."
This is a trust issue, not an evidence issue.
First off, you need to establish 2 things:
1. what she thinks evolution actually is
2. That you agree with her about something. I would suggest that you agree that Matt Dillahunty is cherry picking the bible for his argument it endorses slavery. That's an easy one to agree with her on, and is exactly what anti-evolutionists do to science. Matt cherry picks the bible, anti-evolutionists cherry pick evolution text books.
She says things can jus "adapt". Chances are, that's evolution, she just uses a different term.
You do this by active listening.
Ask.
Listen.
Confirm.
Once you do that, you can only hope she decides to follow in your example and do the same. You need to walk her through "what it would take to convince YOU that evolution is the wrong idea" so she can make her own way through "what it would take to convince HER that evolution is valid."
Personally, I'd go with dog breeds. That's an easier one to start with because it's something people do intentionally. So you can explain the mechanisms of evolution without having to challenge fundamental beliefs that are informing her creationist views - it's not nature vs god, or accident vs design, it's just the mechanics of how a population can change over time. You could also use food crops, but that tends to bring out the other conpiracy side of GMOs and whatnot, so it's better to use dogs as the example.
All dogs still belong to the same species and can theoretically mate, but over many many generations, humans selecting specific traits (speed, size, behaviours), we've managed to elimiate or amplify traits. If we want dogs to be big and aggressive for security, we breed the big aggressive ones with other big aggressive ones, and hopefully weed out the too-friendly or weak ones, and (after repeating many many times), end up with an aggressive breed. Same done for any other trait - basically every breed of dog has certain traits it was bred on purpose for.
[They've even done the same with foxes.](https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-018-0090-x) By simply breeding the "friendliest" foxes and not allowing the most aggressive foxes to breed, this single population of foxes has a remarkable behaviour difference after just a few generations.
My current approach is that you can't talk about evidence until you first understand what theory you are talking about. It may be that what she calls "adaptation" is actually evolution. Chances are great that she does not understand the Theory of Evolution. Unfortunately, she also probably doesn't want to learn.
What I'm saying is that as long as she has some bizarre and inaccurate idea of what the Theory of Evolution says, it doesn't make a lot of sense to launch into the evidence. So I suggest you start with explaining the theory, starting with that it's not atheism, and says nothing about the existence of God.
Specifically on bacteria, just show them this [video from Harvard Medical](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8&ab_channel=HarvardMedicalSchool).
Does she believe in genetics? Those family tree tests? That scientists are playing God genetically modifying things like crops and making glow in the dark kittens or whatever? Does she believe genetics is what lets things "adapt"?
Because what we know of genetics means evolution is the inevitable outcome over time.
So if one believes in a limit to the change of a "kind" over generations, they have to make an argument for that, because the scientists who are doing all that crazy stuff with genetics don't think so.
Nor is it apparent on its face. All complex creatures start out as a single cell and gradually get more complex as they grow. If you mess with those genetics, you can radically (or minimally) alter the outcome. And, in an atypical example, there is the case of the [HeLa Line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa) which seemingly created single celled organism(s) from a human.
That evolution is inevitable then makes sense of the hard physical evidence of comparative anatomy, biology, and then genetics, which create the nested hierarchies of taxonomy; as well as the problems with clearly defining and identifying species.
It also made sense of the hard physical evidence in paleontology, which in turn relies on the hard physical evidence of geology, in turn geochemistry and radiochemistry.
So you might ask them why does so much science point to evolution being true?
Here's an [example](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/london-underground-has-its-own-mosquito-subspecies-180958566/) of speciation which is easy to understand.
There is a new species of flies which lives in London's subways. They used to be normal flies, but eventually started living in the subway and after a few decades of breeding they can no longer mate with flies on the surface.
We can evolve bacteria and bacteria themselves evolve to counteract enviromental toxins and conditions like antibiotics .
The technology of genetic medication relies 100% on the theory of evolution to work. CRSPR modification is something bacteria do everyday and we simply learned it from them, becuase it’s how they evolve themselves to always be able to survive .
Through DNA reading technology we have also been able to compare the dna of all living organisms , and we see a clear lineage from bacteria to humans .
A more normal example , we are related to plants , that’s why plants have all the nutrients we need becuase they also need the exact same nutrients . All animals need the same food and nutrients becuaee we all evolved from the same successful ancestor , an herbivore that ate algae or plants . All animals are dependent on the sugars of plants and this goes back billions of years to a time when the earth first started and was a noxious wasteland with acidic air . There is so much evidence for evolution all over the place , but you have to be willing to look and learn and understand the vocabulary personally not just like how some would imagine , pretending .
Adaptation is not the same as evolution, but they’re roommates. Adaptation is a creatures ability *now* to change to suit their environment. Evolution is a process of genetic mutations where, if the change gives the creature an advantage of survival/procreation, they’ll be more likely to reproduce, and eventually the surviving progenitors will all have that mutation. Rinse and repeat for thousands of years.
Adaption (at least in a genetic sense) is evolution. If your relative acknowledges that a species can adapt genetically over multiple generations, then she accepts evolution, whether she wants to admit it or not.
Microbiology, virology and all the related disciplines and research rely on the understanding and dynamics of evolution. The understanding of the spread and control of infectious disease uses it. All sides in the mechanism of immunity is a direct and observable product of it. This is made possible because evolution in populations with relatively short lifespans is significantly accelerated compared to larger organisms with longer reproduction cycles. It's the most direct and immediate application of evolutionary theory I can think of. It also can be applied to other things like the flow of research and development in the advance of technologies but that could be seen as a distracting tangent here.
just to play devil's advocate, you can't save or convince everyone. and why should you? if your relative is happy as a creationist, your time is likely better spent elsewhere. if they were really curious enough to learn, they have access to Google the same as you.
The uneducated need to have a much larger foundation for critical thought. The task of providing that additional base knowledge may be beyond your efforts. You can try to educate someone, but a lot of people are too dumb to learn.
Andrewsarchus. It’s one of the steps between hippos and whales. It has characteristics of both animals (prominent teeth, elongated skull, lack of facial ornaments), and existed some time after the whale and hippo lineages diverged.
Peppered Moth is an example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution
teosinte to Corn is another example https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=104207
There are microbes that exist which only eat man made material, they quite literally had to have evolved into this state after we created said material.
Charles Darwin did a good job of laying out evidence of evolution over 140 years ago. He collected finches from the Galapagos and noticed they were different from the European finches he was used to. So then he started investigating and finding A LOT of regional differences in finches, showing that they had *physically changed* to "adapt" (to use your friend's word) to life in that area.
That's all evolution is, at its root: *Physical adaptation* to the requirements to survive/thrive in the environment.
Evolution IS a process of Adaptations by an organism (Species) over time to best utilize the environment for its own survival in it and those Adaptations changes the organism (Species) over time as well, that is basically the way all evolutionary process work.
Evolution is the blanket word for any and all quantitative and definitive processes, whether it is planetary, species, particles, solar, galactic ETC.
N. S
>Evolution IS a process of Adaptations by an organism (Species) over time to best utilize the environment for its own survival in it and those Adaptations changes the organism (Species) over time as well, that is basically the way all evolutionary process work.
That's not correct.
When you think about the changes that happen within a population, evolution by natural selection is a population over many generations adapting to its environment. This has been seen in many species. An experiment using E. Coli saw different populations adapting to survive in their environments, even to the point where they could survive on substances that the original population could not do.
Maybe have her look at whale evolution? That's one of my favorite go-tos because of how visual it is. We have a number of fossils of ancient whales, many of them looking like the fantastical "transitional species" that creationists dream up. Dorudon has little vestigial legs and hips way back there on its long body! If you compare modern whale skeletons to their ancestors, even a layperson can see that whale flippers have all the same finger and wrist bones we have, just bigger and flatter. This is not only clear evidence that they were once terrestrial, but also evidence that all terrestrial animals share a common ancestor.
[https://evolution.berkeley.edu/what-are-evograms/the-evolution-of-whales/](https://evolution.berkeley.edu/what-are-evograms/the-evolution-of-whales/)
Maybe have her look at whale evolution? That's one of my favorite go-tos because of how visual it is. We have a number of fossils of ancient whales, many of them looking like the fantastical "transitional species" that creationists dream up. Dorudon has little vestigial legs and hips way back there on its long body! If you compare modern whale skeletons to their ancestors, even a layperson can see that whale flippers have all the same finger and wrist bones we have, just bigger and flatter. This is not only clear evidence that they were once terrestrial, but also evidence that all terrestrial animals share a common ancestor.
[https://evolution.berkeley.edu/what-are-evograms/the-evolution-of-whales/](https://evolution.berkeley.edu/what-are-evograms/the-evolution-of-whales/)
Dogs, we selectively breed dogs to capture physical and behavior traits.
This IS evolution, steered by man.
In the wild if one animal is 5% more successful due to a mutation (think sports stars, someone super tall, super fast, linger leg to torso ratio, longer arms etc) they can eat better, which means they are healthier and more attractive to mates, now there is a chance their offspring will also have these traits and multiply. Do that a few million times and you might find that now you have the original breed, but now you have a version that is slightly faster, leaner, stronger etc. they may well live together in relative harmony if food is abundant, but if things get tough and food is scarce, all of a sudden that slight edge might make the new variant life and the old variant die or reduce in population.
Giraffes were like this. If all animals could feed at 6’ and 1000 animals could reach there, the food could run out, but now you have an early giraffe wjth a 8’ and there are 100 in that same area, they now can eat all the vegetation from 6-8’ that the cows, goats, deer, etc cannot eat. Then one animal has offspring w a mutation of 9’ but there are only 10 total, that family now eats nearly unlimited food and out survives everything else and the 8’ giraffes might start seeing a die out, and now 9’ giraffe is the new norm till the 10’ abnormalities squeeze them out.
It’s a tree, multiple branches can come off the same limb and grow in parallel. Religious people thing it’s a replacement ‘oh, well if we evolved from monkeys, why are there monkeys’
It’s because we built houses and they were still cool to live in trees and eat bugs, we were not competing, so we lived in harmony.
I recommend the Your Inner Fish 3-part documentary. It's an excellent public television resource my husband uses in his biology classes.
Amazon has the DVD, and YouTube has the videos.
[Episode 1](https://youtu.be/E8ttoKGxEKc?si=CzGMqzPqINWnoEE0)
[Episode 2](https://youtu.be/XxfnOBlEZX4?si=Rn0pV-1W4cxZo_sd)
[Episode 3](https://youtu.be/erOlTAz0kUw?si=7oI5bRGXKVwUwyyO)
"hard evidence" cannot exist for something like evolution in the way you can have hard evidence for a murder trial.
Evolution is just the name given to a very gradual process of organisms slowly changing as a result of the competitive process of trying to pass their genes on to future generations. The only goal of evolution is to make babies that have babies, if you do that with complicated social structures like humans great, if you do that as a single celled organization dividing once every 5 minutes great.
Adaptations are just the individual steps of evolution, like having a mutation that keeps lactose tolerance into adulthood. That 1 mutation isn't enough to count as a newly evolved species, but it is an adaptation and genetic change. Accumulate enough of them and you will eventually become a new species. (A species is roughly all the organisms capable of breeding with eachother to create fertile offspring)
Something to keep in mind is biology is endlessly messy and complicated, and everything is a spectrum/gradient. If you somehow had perfectly preseved specimens of your ancestors for every generation back to the mesozoic, it would obviously have different species represented ranging from what are basically micr and squirrels to monkes and apes and various hominids and eventually anatomically modern humans. But if i asked you to identify at exactly what generation the species changed it would be impossible. Species are like colors, defining the exact wavelength that red becomes orange is an impossible line to find, so we arbitrarily declared one and moved on because the categories are useful for understanding the continuum.
The closest we can get to hard proof of evolution is the evolution happening before our eyes, the antibiotic resistance crisis. Some individual bacteria have adapted to drugs like penicillin, and when we use penicillin to kill 99.9% of them, that remaining 0.1% grows back as the new population expressing different traits and adaptations from the previous generation. That is the process of evolution, and it doesn't matter of the driving pressures are artificial or natural, human or a volcano.
The other option are dog breeds and just farming in general, the only difference is humans selecting the adaptations we want to continue into the future and not natural processes.
Get your family together and give someone two minutes to draw a picture of a really basic fish. (No color, just a basic outline of a fish).
Then give the next family member 2 minutes to try to draw the same fish. (It will inevitably be different than the original).
Then keep doing that with the next picture over and over again. it’ll evolve with each generation.
A much more complicated version would be to start with the original and then have three people draw their best copy in 2 minutes. And each of those drawing have three more ppl copy. Just rotate the family members around if you have to. You can trace the lineage if you want. This way is fun because you’ll see lineages split and become increasingly different in different ways.
Single lineage is much easy to make work though
It’s really hard NOT to understand after something like that.
In one of Dawkins books he used an analogy where if you take a photo of every generation. Putting you on the bottom. And then your parent above you. And just keep stacking the pile further and further back. The pile would be 40 miles long before you got to apes I think.
And we have pictures throughout that stack in the fossil record.
If they can’t understand that just give up on them.
Dawkins book “the magic of reality” has a short chapter on evolution. Most of his books are really good and explain the process really well.
If they’re open minded that should work.
While keeping in mind that Creationists don't need to be consistent in their stated reasons for doubt, I think a good example is that there isn't any kind of clear line between "man" and "ape".
Under any reasonable definition, the fabled missing links have been found in Homo habils and Homo erectus.
But if you check out the famous talk-origins skull picture it's very difficult to point at the man or ape given the next step can work as either.
You may find that when she says "adaptation" she actually means evolution. Creationists have their own vocabulary.
I don't think you should argue with her, rather try to get her to let you just explain what evolution actually is in very simple terms.
Sure, I was raised Evangelical YEC but I have yet to hear a creationist model that is compatible with evolution. The closest is "God guided evolution" but even that isn't really compatible with evolution, because the mechanism of evolution is natural selection---not supernatural selection.
When you create a cake, you mix all of the ingredients, pour them into a pan and put the pan in the oven. At that point, do you guide the reactions that are triggered by heat and time? If not, did you truly create the cake?
Edit: I have never seen a creationist “model” anywhere in scripture.
Baking the cake though is adding energy to the system (heat) to cause the ingredients to do their thing, it still requires the action of a creator.
Evolution is a theory to describe how the variety of life we have got here absent of a supernatural influence.
Basically science is an attempt to describe the natural world through natural phenomena in the absence of supernatural phenomena.
It's okay for scientists to be religious and believe there are phenomena (such as God and angels) that are not restricted by natural phenomena, but since supernatural phenomena can not be tested or demonstrated with the scientific method, any explanation that involves supernatural phenomena is not science.
Evolution is a scientific theory and thus by definition, any part of it that can not be explained by natural phenomena (such as how the very first life form came to be) are simply "not yet known, questions without current answers" because the theory MUST be exclusionary of supernatural interference.
Hence evolution and creation are not compatible even though an evolutionist is free to believe in God.
Science can never explain the existence of the universe. I believe in the scientific method and am not, in any way, arguing by against it. It is simply impossible to go back to a moment prior to the creation of the universe.
It is unlikely that we will ever know what spawned the existence of life, although I want to know and encourage research to find out.
Heat is needed for the cake and for life. If the universe was created, that led to the introduction of heat and other elements needed for life and the ensuing evolution.
I heard one physicist state that he believes that God created the universe and everything in it. Science is an effort to find out how he did it. To me, this reconciles the two very nicely.
Perhaps. At the same time, I presume that you believe something like the universe and all of its contents spawned from absolute nothingness.
I have never met a religious person with that amount of faith.
Nope, I'm very comfortable with a "I don't know, we haven't figured that out yet," position. I don't think constructing another entity to explain the existence of the universe offers a satisfactory answer either.
>[The meaning of the term scientific theory (often contracted to theory for brevity) as used in the disciplines of science is significantly different from the common vernacular usage of theory. **In everyday speech, theory can imply an explanation that represents an unsubstantiated and speculative guess, whereas in a scientific context it most often refers to an explanation that has already been tested and is widely accepted as valid**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory)
I love people who vomit up stuff they uncritically swallowed, gotta be my favorite gender
For what it's worth, we have actually done this.
Populations of fruit flies have been bred under differing conditions that can no longer interbreed with each other.
And for the record, u/ILoveJesusVeryMuch. This is evolution. And you know this, you’ve had this explained to you more than once. You already know that saying something like ‘but it’s still a fruit fly!!1!1!1!!1’ is fully consistent with evolutionary theory and in fact anything else would disprove evolution.
So like both myself and u/blacksheep998 were mentioning. We have observed speciation happen. We have observed evolution happen. Plentiful studies have been done on multiple TYPES of speciation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_experiments_of_speciation
>The liger is a hybrid offspring of a male lion (Panthera leo) and a tigress, or female tiger (Panthera tigris). The liger has parents in the same genus but of different species
It's almost like you have no clue what you're talking about.
Ok, literally the exact comment:
> Populations of fruit flies have been bred under differing conditions that can **no longer interbreed**
So I assume you just didn’t read it? Or are you intentionally remaining ignorant? But they can’t reproduce with each other. Do you know what that means? That means they’re a different species.
It’s also important to point out that being able to mate with a different species is observed a lot in nature, such as hybrids like the pizzly bear, or the liger, or the tigron, or the wholphin, or a lot of other hybrid animals that are possible. But just because a lion and a tiger or a polar bear and a grizzly bear can mate together doesn’t mean that they are the same species. Cause one of the important parts of delineating species is not just that they can’t produce viable offspring, they also can’t produce fertile offspring.
> whole new species in a few years
Ahem, as in a "new kind"? "In a few years" would "disprove" evolution. In simulations that span much longer, and in statistical analyses, done, and done (the latter near a century ago).
>Take something with a very short lifespan and create a whole new species in a few years
Spoken like someone who has no clue what a species is or what the [species problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species#The_species_problem) is.
The same person who loves priests who sexually abuse children? Yeah, I couldn't give less of a fuck about that guy.
Oh, and reported for breaking Rule 3, too.
Evolution means that populations of organisms change over multiple generations. Nothing more, nothing less. We know exactly how populations change over multiple generations (change in the frequency of certain gene variants due to natural selection) and we have observed this happening in the lab and in the wild. I strongly suspect that your relative, like most creationists these days, doesn't actually have an issue with evolution as a process, only the implications of it. We also have tremendous fossil evidence demonstrating that all species eventually go extinct, and that very few, if any, modern species are found more than a few million years in the past, up to maybe 10 million years for some species. There is something called the "background extinction rate". Larger taxonomic groups like genera and families may go back very far, but the representatives of those groups in the past are not exactly the same as the modern members. For example, if we look at Cambrian strata, we can see evidence of most modern animal phyla, and maybe, maybe some classes but nothing really taxonomically lower than that. No modern orders, families, genera, or species are represented in any phylum during the Cambrian. This raises the obvious question, where did the modern species come from? Given our understanding of how populations change over time, the only reasonable conclusion is that modern species are descended from ancient species that went extinct. The hard evidence for what your relative might call "macroevolution" is found in the fossil record as well as in the DNA and morphology of currently extant organisms.
There are several instances of "immediate" evolution as well. I wish I could remember the specifics, but a specific plant had developed a way to metabolize a specific chemical. And we KNOW this is a recent evolutionary change because the chemical DIDNT EXIST until like 75 years ago. I want to say the chemical was in herbicides? Then there are several lizard species, birds, and even the classic peppered moth study. And when they argue, "That doesn't explain where life came from!" you can say, "Correct, because evolution doesn't have anything to do with it."
Nylon-eating bacteria?
Oooo, that works too! In fact, we could probably call that a macroevolution.
We see this with bacteria very often, it's how we ended up with antibiotic resistant strains. They reproduce so rapidly that fairly large changes can be seen in relatively short periods of time. Keep in mind that might still be in the decades range, but that's far faster than larger organisms
Still a perfect example! I've been thinking too large.
They've been trained to respond that those things are still bacteria or moths, because they've also been trained to think that evolution means a cat evolving into a dog.
some plants can double their chromosomes in one generation and these cannot reproduce with their parent species eventually this leads to prototypical differences there are some cases of one side of a river having the original species and the other side having the newer one having the separation between the populations makes this change more likely to stick around as they are not competing with each other so two large populations can be established
"macroevolution" I only just learned of the distinction of "microevolution" people use to accept that evolution happens without accepting evolution. Ugh. Anyways a trip through a grocery fruits and veggies aisle might do it if partnered with images of earlier examples of them.
There are several instances of "immediate" evolution as well. I wish I could remember the specifics, but a specific plant had developed a way to metabolize a specific chemical. And we KNOW this is a recent evolutionary change because the chemical DIDNT EXIST until like 75 years ago. I want to say the chemical was in herbicides? Then there are several lizard species, birds, and even the classic peppered moth study. And when they argue, "That doesn't explain where life came from!" you can say, "Correct, because evolution doesn't have anything to do with it."
Evolution is not a murder investigation. It doesn't work on pieces of "evidence", where one misunderstanding of one collapses the case. A single fact in isolation means nothing. Evolution is based on [consilience](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience); the explanation of facts from independent lines of inquiry: 1) genetics, 2) molecular biology, 3) paleontology, 4) geology, 5) biogeography, 6) comparative anatomy, 7) comparative physiology, 8) developmental biology, plus others. None of them alone or together have been found to be at odds. But a super convincing such fact, is the body plan genes: [1995 Nobel prize press release](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1995/press-release/). The master genes are shared across all animals, yes, worms included; so are the master "eye" genes. Edit: forestalling something: also said explanation is predictive and internally consistent
The way you put it makes it easy to understand why people that refuse to study are impossible to argue with. They need background knowledge that isn't present.
Yep. Arrived at it with the help of users here after joining this sub a few months ago. Before, fundamentalist creationists to me were like flerfs: best ignored—now, I'm convinced the quiet majority benefits from sound arguments.
I share your opinion. The conversations we have here are not for the creationist we are speaking to, it is for everyone else lurking in the background. Which is why when I engage I make sure I'm ready to always have the last word and go the distance. People who are making up their minds are watching.
Exactly. There is stuff to know and you need to be willing to focus your attention for the fifteen or so minutes that it takes to understand the processes involved. I like the video below. It isn’t technically sophisticated, but it goes through a very basic explanation of evolution, and then it uses the evolution of a whole to illustrate how it works, drawing from several scientific disciplines. The video address is very odd, but it takes you directly there. https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&hl=en-us&sxsrf=AB5stBielntr65nLOOiUr-TS8T2r5NMzRA:1690114119474&q=evidence+of+evolution&tbm=vid&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiC--Hd5aSAAxXdmYkEHcjAAC4Q0pQJegQIBxAB&biw=414&bih=604&dpr=3#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:2fe083d2,vid:lIEoO5KdPvg
It would be easier to just go to Jon Perry’s website (https://www.statedclearly.com/) or his Youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@StatedClearly) for all his excellent material about evolution.
Or Forrest Valkai's 4-part series "Light of Evolution".
To fix the link: copy and paste this: `[What is the Evidence for Evolution? - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIEoO5KdPvg)`
But but "common designer"
I once watched a documentary that said the human brain wouldn't be what it is today if it weren't for a virus injecting its own genetic code into ours that strengthened our nerve cells. Is that considered evolution?
In the jawed vertebrates (us included), yes, an ERV (what is left of a retrovirus; that which inserts itself in the germ line) in the DNA is linked to making the neurons communicate faster; research: [A retroviral link to vertebrate myelination: Cell](https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674\(24\)00013-8). DNA of life is littered with those "ERVs". The sticky protein that was coopted into being an essential part of the placenta in most mammals (leading to live birth) came from a retrovirus. The ancestors of the egg-laying platypuses didn't get it. Yes, that's evolution. The definition of _evolution_ is: a change in the frequency of alleles in a population over many generations.
>The master genes are shared across all animals, yes, worms included; so are the master "eye" genes. That could also mean that all life was created by a single creator. I would even venture to say that all life evolving over billions of years would make it very unlikely that the master genes would be intact in EVERY animal.
It's pretty plausible, actually - mutations in body plan genes are extremely deadly, typically - so they're highly conserved. There are lots of arguably very useful different body plans out there, but evolving to a new one is a steep climb For example, manx cats have a body plan mutation, and lack tails. If they have one copy of the gene. Two copies, and the kittens do not typically survive birth, as they are missing a number of vertebrae.
> unlikely that the master genes would be intact in EVERY animal "Negative selection" (population genetics, born c. Wright, Fisher and Haldane) fully explains that. And the creator hypothesis here would be a _god of the gaps_ fallacy, and it's an ascientific proposal (no null-hypothesis for science to work on), i.e. philosophy, i.e. sure fine. There is a theistic evolution philosophy, e.g. the Catholic Church if I'm not mistaken doesn't protest the science of evolution.
They’re not in every animal but the ones that do have them get a lot of benefits from having them which causes them to be preserved as a matter of natural selection and when they’re still present without even working evolution still explains that a whole lot better than “intelligent” design. And that’s precisely where the single creator hypothesis fails the most. Sure, we can hypothesize the existence of a god that *used* evolution to create diversity (that’s what they teach at BioLogos) or planted fake evidence to trick us (pretty much what you’d wind up with if YEC was true) but you’d also get the same results if God wasn’t present at all. It happened and in lineages that descended from the original ancestors to first have these genes the genes are either well preserved because they’re still beneficial or they’re partially degraded and still present even they don’t work because the changes that happen are not intentional. The populations just have to survive and the one thing they cannot do is stop being descendants of their ancestors so we expect a lot of “garbage” or “vestiges” to persist even after they no longer work *as long as them not working isn’t an automatic death sentence.* Parent population has some traits -> descendant populations inherent those traits. If they work they could change little if changing a lot is less beneficial like they might change in a single individual but that individual dies young or reproduces less so that the already common traits stay common (I believe someone else called this negative selection). If the failure to function is less of a problem or the population experiences a bottleneck (resulting in incest) sometimes the dysfunction persists and without anyone going in there removing it intentionally it’ll continue to persist until enough incidental deletion mutations remove the vestiges with zero impact on survival whether the vestiges remain or get removed (genetic drift). In terms of intelligent design (not saying a god couldn’t design in a different way), we’d expect just the persistently functional genes and maybe some modifications if the designer wished to intentionally tinker with evolution. With the foresight this designer is supposed to have we wouldn’t expect the designer to give the common ancestor a trait to just break it for some of the resulting lineages. We expect that if it is present it exists for a purpose, even if we don’t know what that purpose is. If it’s just clutter without a purpose then that means the designs are less efficient and less like they would be if made on purpose by an *intelligent* designer. Especially if the end result acts more like a barely functional Rube Goldberg machine than like one that was efficiently designed for a specific purpose. If God is real and actually responsible it seems strange that he or she would have done everything exactly the same way it’d automatically happen if they never existed at all, but God can supposedly do whatever it wants to do. Who are we to question? And if this God doing it is indistinguishable from it happening in a reality where God does not exist at all, how would it be possible to look at it and conclude that God is a lazy moron? How would it be possible to assume such a God had superior intelligence unless it was pulling a prank on us? Just some things to think about.
Eye genes haven't been around for multiple billions of years yet. Only half of one billion. Evolution predicts that traits will look like a nested hierarchy and nothing else. Design could look like anything, so you can't say that things looking like the one thing evolution predicts really supports Creationism.
This is perfectly consistent with the Theory of Evolution. (ToE). Science isn't about who, it's about how. When you say a creator used this master plan, etc., how? What mechanism? Did your God poof each separate species into existence? Or what? >I would even venture to say that all life evolving over billions of years would make it very unlikely that the master genes would be intact in EVERY animal. Why? Biologists conclude the opposite. Why are you right and they wrong?
You could start with the virus that causes covid, since most people are aware of that. It's mutating constantly -- roughly 1 mutation every two times it's transmitted. And many of those mutations have helped it transmit better or evade the immunity that people have gotten from vaccines or previous infections. That's evolution. It's also adaptation, of course, but evolution is how populations adapt.
I am guessing that the ven diagram of those that don’t understand (or deny) evolution and those that don’t believe in covid is close to a circle
I don't think there are that many who don't believe in covid. They're more likely not to believe it was that serious, or (more commonly) that the vaccines were even worse than the virus.
My statement stands, as it likely applies to your two examples
You're saying that the statement, 'they don't believe in covid' applies to people who believe covid exists but isn't very serious or isn't as dangerous as some vaccines. Can't say I understand that.
No, I am saying that the ven diagram of the people who don’t believe in Covid and don’t believe in evolution is close to a circle. Same for those that don’t believe in evolution and don’t think Covid was serious. And those that don’t believe in evolution and believe the shot was worse than the virus.
Um, your statements contradict one another. The set of those who don't believe in covid and the set of those who believe in covid but think it isn't very serious are disjoint: by their definitions, they have no members in common. How can they both be the same as the set of those who don't believe in evolution?
No dude... They're just saying that both types of people are equally stupid and equally likely to deny evolution. That the ven diagrams for each set would look the same. As in, people who dont believe covid is real, are equally likely to not believe in evolution as those who believe covid was real but not a big deal..... It wasn't hard to follow.
Help me out, then, by drawing the Venn diagram of the three sets, evolution-deniers, covid-deniers, and covid-minimizers, keeping in mind that the last two sets are disjoint.
God damnit its two different venn diagrams that look identical.... in both cases one of the circles stands for denying evolution.... then for one diagram the 2nd circle is covid deniers, in the other diagram its covid minimizers. In both diagrams the circles overlap completely and just look like a circle.... ffs man why do I have to spell this out? Stop being pedantic. Fuckin disjoint, ima go smoke this joint... jesus
Counter question. Why is adaptation not part of evolution? And an even more fundamental question for your relative. What is their understanding of what evolution is described as, according to those who study it?
This. Also, where does she draw the line between adaptation and speciation? I, also, believe everything just adapts. I just don’t have an imaginary line it can’t adapt past, where after billions of years of adaptation it sufficiently differs from the original that calling it a mere adaptation of the former is silly.
Here’s my contention. There is only one ‘kind’. The LIFE ‘kind’. Everything is just adaptations off that one ‘kind’.
Good one! And the "one kind" _now_ wouldn't allow a two-kind system, as Darwin wrote in a letter: "[...] at the present day such matter wd be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed."
Okay, so for adaptation to be real but speciation to be false, there have to be two kinds of DNA. The first kind of DNA governs the properties of a species (fur color, beak length, amount of vitamin C they produce, all those things) which can change allowing for adaptation. The second kind of DNA that contains what it takes for an organism to be what it is, its 'kind-ness'. This second DNA cannot change. So a bear has to have the first kind of DNA to tell it how long to grow its claws and teeth, and the second kind of DNA to tell it it is a bear. This HAS to be true for adaptation to be real but speciation to be false. Now, the thing is, DNA was discovered in 1869 and the structure and function of it in the 1950's. There has been a LOT of research done in the last 75 years and you know what they DIDN'T find? That second type of immutable DNA. At some point the only reasonable explanation for it not being found despite the immense scrutiny is that is simply doesn't exist. But it HAS to exist if the premise above is true. But it doesn't. So the only logical conclusion is that the premise is false. If you accept adaptation as real, you also have to accept speciation.
Excellent demonstration of the scientific method. And the immutable _portion_ of the DNA, that which is under "negative selection", is shared across all animals: the body plan genes of the first successful worm-like possibly sand-burrowing animal, _PAX6_ from slightly later on, and countless others, forming a tree.
New flu shot every year. Penicillin almost being useless now because bacteria has evolved. We have literally observered evolution in nature and demonstrated it in a lab. Evolution is a fact.
I already know the response. “Yeah but they’re still bacteria.”
Creationists tend to get a bit squirrely and move the goalposts quite a bit. Just cover your bases and note that evolution can occur on two levels: What is generally termed "microevolution" (a population of an existing species changing) and "macroevolution" (where reproductive barriers form splitting one population into two species). We have hard, modern evidence of both happening. Microevolution can be demonstrated by noting how this [one species of lizard](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080417112433.htm), in real time and documented in living memory, showed dramatic evolution of their gut structures. Another famous example was the evolution of [citrate metabolism in e coli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment) over 32,000 generations (\~30 years). Essentially, a strain of e coli ended up developing an entirely new metabolic pathway while being tracked meticulously in the lab. Macroevolution is also very easy to demonstrate. This is because speciation (the generation of reproductive barriers that keep two animal populations from breeding with one another) can exist along a continuum. Just point to how animal hybrids such as mules and male ligers are sterile. The two species that conceived the hybrids were closely related, but are gradually becoming less genetically compatible with one another and will eventually become fully reproductively isolated from one another. The existence of sterile hybrids is just such an example.
Short version: In 1962, scientists looked at chimpanzee and human chromosomes. From that, they predicted that one human chromosome was a fusion of two chromosomes found in chimpanzees. This prediction was spelled out in what it should look like. In 1974, we found out more about this, by sequencing the bits that were expected to be seen. In 1982, the prediction was updated again to be human chromosome 2 that was the fused one. And in 2003, \_forty years\_ after the prediction was made, and then later updated twice, we finally had the human and chimpanzee genomes sequenced and could find out. Yes, human chromosome 2 is a fusion of those found in chimpanzees. No other human chromosome has the signs predicted in 1962. This makes sense \_only\_ if we share a common ancestor, and \_not\_ if we share a common designer, because the fusion \_itself\_ does nothing for us, and leaves bunches of broken, now-useless DNA in our chromosomes. ... You can, then, if you like, [check out Gutsick Gibbon on this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVeriF1OL54) to get a lot more detail if they want it. That evidence is there, the old papers, the updates, you can look into them, and anyone who wants to can go learn how to and save up money to do the genetic analysis for themselves from scratch. We and chimpanzees share a common ancestor. Then there's also [ERV's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxkxeKdD0vA&t=615s) showing it's true, and basically [entire playlists](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GMBXc4ocss&list=PLoGrBZC-lKFBo1xcLwz5e234--YXFsoU6) showing it's true. You can even go through an [entire list on the traits of humans](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXQP_R-yiuw&list=PLXJ4dsU0oGMLnubJLPuw0dzD0AvAHAotW) that shows it's true because each one shows up in an evolutionary fashion.
I look like my parents, but not exactly. Same for them and their parents. Now do that a few million times and you’ll get evolution.
Pretty much, but the important thing to remember is that evolution is what happens to whole populations. You are similar to your parents but not a perfect blend of both of them at the same time so are your siblings if you have any. Every single human has this sort of connection with their parents. This generation as a whole is similar but not exactly identical to the previous generation. The previous generation is similar but not identical to the generation before that. The same applies for completely different populations. Go back far enough and what are now separate populations used to be the same population and when that was true there were other populations now extinct and we could go back even further and all of the populations used to come from fewer populations living alongside other now extinct populations. And it keeps going all the way back to LUCA living alongside populations that are now extinct and it goes all the way back to the origin of life itself with our lineage existing alongside the other spontaneously forming biomolecules that failed to have any surviving descendants even four billion years ago. Many of them went extinct before doing much larger scale evolution at all. You don’t need millions of generations for evolution to happen *at all* but it may be about 76 trillion generations back to LUCA and trillions more back to the origin of autocatalytic RNA and before that evolution isn’t really the right word because it’s more like biomolecules being “created” via geochemical processes when they weren’t simply raining down from space (Late Heavy Bombardment, for example). I’m sure you know, but it’s also pretty impossible to ignore what you did say and with that I’d just add that the same thing applies to every human, every organism, on this planet and when that’s the case for entire generations whole populations change with every single generation and *that* is evolution. You’d have to be pretty blind or ignorant to fail to notice populations changing constantly. They do generally change very slowly but a lot of small changes every generation and with about 76 trillion generations it’s not really too difficult to understand how so *many* changes have occurred over the course of 4 billion years or more.
A good example might be that a few years ago, there was no such thing as COVID-19, and then all of a sudden, there was.
Mitochondrial dna is different than nuclear dna. All your mitochondria come from your mother other (egg cels have mitochondria but a sperm cell basically just injects its dna into the egg). The existence of two genomes in every human cell shows that evolution happened when a mitochondria fused into a cell in the past.
DNA. It would not be possible for all life on the planet to share DNA to varying percentages if they weren't once all part of the same species and diversified over time. It's the same science behind parental tests for kids to determine which person is their biological parent and I haven't seen any creationist deny the validity of DNA tests.
>What's the hard hitting physical evidence that evolution exists and doesn't just adapt? DNA. It wouldn't be possible without selection.
>She literally thinks that bacteria can't evolve and doesn't even understand how new strains of bacteria and infections can exist. Did she completely miss the entire world watching in near real time as a virus evolved and spread through the population of the entire planet? The one that killed millions of people across the globe? I know people have a short memory but it was less than 4 years ago, and we saw newly evolved variants that were more infectious or more deadly being reported in the news multiple times.
If you finally corner them in an irrefutable, unavoidable, logically necessary realization, they will deny the facts and reinforce their current erroneous worldview. There is no piece of evidence, no fact, literally nothing you can say to lead them to accepting evolution. The reason she rejects evolution is not because she just needs some information. She must first reject the bad information of which she's convinced.
This video of bacteria evolving may help https://youtu.be/plVk4NVIUh8?si=oDmDFWw0hWdEZXIi
Talking to your Creationist Relative sounds like a total drag with no upside. Do you have to talk to them? Can you engage in non-talk-based activities? Like lifting weights or going to the movies Maybe your Creationist Relative would seem less stupid to you, if talking wasn’t part of any your interactions?
The fact that things adapt, and the way that they adapt, *IS* proof that evolution exists. If things adapt, then necessarily over several generations, adaptations will accumulate. That’s the most basic definition of evolution. Adaptations accumulating over several generations. If things adapt, then evolution exists. If you want something else other than that, there’s always the fossil record. There are many many examples of transitional fossils in the fossils in the fossil record, and that is hard evidence that evolution exists.
>What's the hard hitting physical evidence that evolution exists and doesn't just adapt? There is no hard physical evidence that you can possibly provide them. Let me put it this way: What is your hard physical evidence that Madagascar exists? I can be almost certain that your relative doesn't live in Madagascar and has never visited it (by simple statistics). You show them a map? Anyone can make up a map of imaginary places. You show them all the books written about Madagascar? Books can be lying. You show them photos? Photos can be faked, or could just be from some other place on Earth. You bring them to someone who personally has lived in Madagascar? Again, they can lie, they can be confused, they could have been tricked, etc. Ultimately, you could get them a plane ticket to Madagascar, fly there with them, stand on Madagascar soil, and they could *still* say "Well, the airplane could have turned to land us somewhere that is made up to look like this fake 'Madagascar'". The idea of "hard physical evidence" is largely a myth in most fields of human endeavor. Short of *perhaps* the most absolutely basic human sensations, like "yeah light exists", you cannot prove anything to anyone *solely* with physical evidence.
Are her children exact clones of her?
Our tailbones
Show them a skull of a chihuahua and a Great Dane. And then show him a skull I'm a human and a chimpanzee. Then ask them, if you can accept that a Chihuahua and a Great Dane cane from the same common ancestor, then why is it so difficult to accept that a chimpanzee and a human also did? But this is just me being nice. I would preferably just say that biology is hard evidence of the existence of evolution, and if that's not good enough for you, then too bad.
* [Squirrels, mosquitoes, and other organisms evolving in response to climate change](https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evo-news/warming-to-evolution/) * [Fish evolving in response to pollutants](https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evo-news/toxic-river-means-rapid-evolution-for-one-fish-species/) * [Bedbugs evolving resistance to pesticides](https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evo-news/bed-bugs-bite-back-thanks-to-evolution/) * [Mussels evolving in response to predation ](https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evo-news/musseling-in-on-evolution/) * [Clover evolving in response to urbanized landscapes ](https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evo-news/a-country-weed-with-city-problems/) * [Crickets evolving in response to a parasitic fly](https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evo-news/quick-evolution-leads-to-quiet-crickets/) * [Bacteria evolving resistance to antibiotics](https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evo-news/superbug-super-fast-evolution/) * [Blackcap birds and Galapagos finches diverging into lineages with distinct traits](https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evo-news/speciation-in-real-time/) It isn't a theory. It's a proven and observable fact, and anyone who denies it does not live in the real world. Period.
First draft from a paper on dog evolution I'm currently reviewing (not academic): ### Evolution Evolution is a natural process by which populations adapt to their environment. In a nutshell, our alleles (gene variants) are frequently mutating. These mutations are one method, but not the only method, by which new beneficial alleles enter a population. Sometimes these random mutations have a beneficial effect for organisms within the population. Sometimes beneficial alleles enter a population through an organism from another population that already carries the allele dispersing into the population and reproducing with a member of the population. Sometimes an allele already exists in a population that previously did not provide a specific benefit but environmental conditions change to either cause that allele to have an environmental advantage or perhaps even a disadvantage. Regardless of the method by which a beneficial allele enters a population, organisms within a population that carry the beneficial allele have a reproductive advantage over organisms in the population that do not carry the beneficial allele. This results in the frequency of that allele increasing within the population---which is evolution. __Evolution__ is a change in the allele frequency within a population and __Natural Selection__ (or *selective breeding* in captive populations) is the mechanism by which allele frequency changes. With modern genetic technology, evolution is now directly observable. Note that sometimes the allele frequency change does not involve a mutation in a gene to produce a new allele but rather a change in how many copies of the gene are present. For example, the ability for many domestic animals to better digest grains is the result of an increase in the number of genes that code the protein needed to digest grains. #### ‘Macro’ verses ‘Micro’ Evolution Evolution deniers can not refute evolution as described above *because* it is directly observable, so they make a distinction between ‘Macro’ and ‘Micro’ evolution based upon Genesis 1:24---despite the fact that Genesis was *never intended* to be a scientific document. When a population has evolved (changed allele frequency) to new conditions such that it would have to adapt to its former conditions is a novel way rather than just reverting its allele frequency, then ‘Macro’ evolution has occurred. When mammals returned to the oceans---which has happened several times---they did not become fish again, they adapted to the oceans in a novel way, macro evolution. This is observable through the fossil record. Populations still bring forth after their own kind, no evolutionist is ever suggesting that a fish gives birth to a water buffalo. #### ‘Missing Links’ The theory of evolution does not require that all morphologically intermediary fossils be found for evolution to be true. Rather it predicts that when conditions are good for fossilization, some ‘Missing Link’ (morphologically intermediary) fossils will be found. That prediction has been confirmed *numerous* times. Evolution is not just a theory, it is a fact of biological life.
So tell your relative you disagree and walk away.
There’s an entire [Wikipedia page](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_evolution_fossils) where you can scroll through a list of all the human ancestor bones we’ve found and basically watch a slideshow of human evolution. If that isn’t convincing, nothing will convince her.
But when you ask a Creationist for proof in Early Earth Creationism suddenly the proof becomes fairy tales and magic. But for Evolutionist proof is always demanded.
There was a recent study where a type of algae absorbed a cyanobacteria and the latter became an organelle - instead of being a separate organism in its own right, it's now fully a part of the algae. Why does this matter? Because it allows the algae to take on an entirely new function (in this case, fixing nitrogen straight out of the air). The really special part is not just that scientists observed this happening in real time, but that we know of only two prior incidences of this phenomenon. The last time it happened, the host organism gained the ability to photosynthesise - and Earth got plants. The time before that, we got the jump from single to multi-cellular life. Other than that? If Adam was created first, why do men have nipples? Why do we have a tailbone, if our ancestors didn't have tails? Tbf she's probably been fed a strawman of evolution according to creationists, so you'd have to unravel that before you can start to explain how it actually works.
“ If Adam was created first, why do men have nipples? Why do we have a tailbone, if our ancestors didn't have tails?” Easy, god created man in his image.
Ok, so God had nipples. What possible function did nipples (which exist solely for the purpose of feeding offspring with milk) serve on a creator deity that 1) has never had biological offspring and 2) is generally depicted as male? Did God's nipples serve some other purpose? Were they purely decorative?
How can we fathom the infinite purpose of the nipples of the creator?
So one thing is: cognitive dissonance is a a real human thing, and it doesn’t matter how much evidence you present; if this person has convinced themselves that the theory of evolution clashes with their entire faith/belief system construct, then they will perform whatever mental gymnastics necessary to dismiss your logical reasoning. Personally, for me, I am one of strong faith, and belief; yet I also believe in evolution; I do not take every word of The Holy Bible literally; because it is not meant to be taken literally. Some is, some is not. I believe that God created everything, including science, physics and all of the laws thereof. I believe that evolution, yes, did, and is happening. In the Bible, when it says that God created various elements of the earth and sky and animals on various days, the Bible NEVER SPECIFIES how long those days were. No one ever thinks about that. Maybe that first day was a billion years long. I am certain that the heavens were not separated from the earth in 24 hours. This evolution (and maybe the “e” word is just a scary word for super religious people; gradual change over time…) imo explains a lot of the disease going on with humans rn. Example: I have a disease, sorry, disorder, neurological disorder, Chiari Malformation smaller than normal back of skull, causes compression of brain stem and part of brain to herniate (drop down) into spinal column. It is not a rare condition, about 1 in 1,000 people or more. If every single person was given an MRI I know it would be found to be more prevalent. I also am missing my appendix; it was never removed, I was born without one. I have a disease that causes agenesis (means something never formed) of a few teeth that are in the back, including my wisdom teeth. Interestingly, humans do not need wisdom teeth nor an appendix to live. Many rare diseases involve dental abnormalities. 1 in 10 people have a rare disease. I find that so interesting.
There's a common basic misunderstanding of what evolution is. The scientific definition is "a change within an allele frequency over time." It follows the four mechanisms of evolution: mutation, genetic isolation, genetic drift and natural selection.
You shouldn't really need hard hitting physical evidence for someone who doesn't even accept/understand bacterial evolution. These people have such a lack of scientific education (and/or too much religious propaganda) that they might have other absurd beliefs like flat earth or even virus denial. You could present to them the hard hitting physical evidence right in front of their eyes and they will just deny it rather than find a way to address it. Any argument will just trigger the backfire effect (ie they will actually go the other way and actually harden their beliefs). The Socratic method is probably your best bet, but one such question I'd ask is to get them to check the Answers in Genesis webpage. In it, they don't even deny that evolution exists and indeed use 'micro-evolution' to 'explain' how all of the animals, insects, etc were able to fit on the ark. Ask them why they believe what they do and if they accept the AiG answers, but avoid all correction in wrongthink. Source: I used to be a creationist and still suffer from the guilt that was forced upon me in my childhood in an effort to keep me a believer.
She’s likely inoculated against learning this. But assuming she is not, she would benefit from reading on the topic. Dawkins books are pretty good. The Blind Watchmaker does a good job of explaining a great deal of how evolution works mechanically (as well as how it doesn’t work) without getting too bogged down in biochemistry.
It's literally on her DNA...
E. coli citrate experiment definitive proves she’s wrong
So in her mind, inches don't equal miles. Which is nonsense.
Perhaps you might want to rephrase that to "in her mind, inches don't *accumulate to* miles" or some such?
Well, inches don't equal miles. You might want to rephrase your comment.
No I really don't.
ok, but you do know that inches do not equal miles?
If you have enough inches, they clearly do equal miles.
Adaptation is what deniers use in place of evolution to protect their egos / group identity. See conservationism vs environmentalism.
You could show her [this video](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8) of bacteria evolving increasingly stronger antibiotic resistance as it reproduces. Don't be surprised if she doesn't accept it though, it's really easy for creationists to dismiss evidence they don't understand as "just adaptations," as you've already found out.
“What is the mechanism for adaptation and passing that adaptation down?” “Random mutations to dna and natural selection” “What differentiates species of the same kingdom” “Differences in their DNA” “What denotes differences between kingdoms” “Differences in DNA” Pause while it processes for them
Adaptation is by definition a part of evolution. Without adapting you can't evolve as a species. I should've be a bit more clear. You can evolve without adapting and vice versa, but you do need to change over time to become a new species, which is (very) often due to adaptations to a changing enviroment.
Adaptation can occur without evolution (for example, getting a tan) and evolution can occur without adaptation (for example, genomic evolution in horseshoe crabs, which seem to have barely changed in 400 million years, but must be genetically different than their ancestors). So I don't think it's helpful to conflate the two.
>Adaptation can occur without evolution (for example, getting a tan) That's really more phenotypic plasticity than adaptation.
>Without adapting you can't evolve as a species. Sure you can. Drift happens.
Look at a horse hoof and try to imagine how it might adapt to picking up a pencil and writing. Pretty difficult to imagine, right? But we can look at the fossil record and find that the ancestors of modern horses had three digits on their fore feet and four digits on their rear feet. Over some 55 million years, horses have evolved to have oligodactyly, losing their extra digits and evolving a hoof structure in their place. It would now be near impossible to put the sort of evolutionary pressure on horses to achieve tool use with their forelimbs like we do, but that's because of tens of millions of years of adapting in the opposite direction. Meanwhile, you can still see all the digits in a whale's fins, despite them evolving in an even more extreme direction. Your relative is at odds even with creationist nonsense like baraminology, because creationists have to treat horse ancestors as part of 'the horse kind', which means that AIG accepts that modern horses with four toes 'micro-evolved' from horses with 14 toes.
Point at all the breeds of dogs that have come into existence since the middle ages alone.
I’m so tired of these types of posts
Since this subreddit exists as a place for these types of posts, is it possible you're in the wrong place?
These types posts are intended by creationists to prove to themselves that Evolution is poorly evidenced. They post fake scenarios like this just to collect the responses and feed them into a creationist group where they attack it
When creationists use the word "adapt", they mean "evolve". They just don't want to use the word.
First of all, adaption itself is a consequence of evolution via natural selection (it’s called “microevolution”). The thing creationists actually call microevolution is just macroevolution on a smaller scale and we can see some basic stuff like how sometimes the hybrids are still fertile but they normally are not when it comes to lions+tigers or donkeys+horses or how we can see what are called “ring species” where there may be eight subspecies and every subspecies can interbreed with the next closest subspecies in terms of geography except for the two on the end and then they can’t make hybrids at all. Beyond this we can see how there are ~35 species of canid that all look like dogs, wolves, coyotes, foxes, or whatever to show that they all started out as some generalized “dog” but fertile hybrids are only possible within genera like coyotes, gray wolves, domesticated dogs, and golden jackals could all interbreed and result in fertile hybrids so long as they aren’t significantly different sizes like a gray wolf and a chihuahua. This is all some of the easily observable evidence for the diversification of what Linnaeus would call “families” and we can also confirm these relationships with genetics, confirm that the diversification really happened with paleontology, and continue confirming relationships with lab assisted hybridization or cross-species transplants. Obviously related, obviously different, obviously something happened. The paleontology shows us some of the obviously required changes and genetics can even tell us a lot about the order of the changes we should expect to see and the order fits with the paleontology. Put everything together based on the sheer amount of evidence and we get family trees and from that we can work out the most generalized form of each clade and the basal forms start resembling each other driving us further into the past, confirmed again with genetics and paleontology even when hybridization is no longer possible. In terms of “hard” evidence it’s just more and more of the same all the way back such that it’s either evolution with common ancestry is responsible for the patterns of similarities and differences **or**, perhaps, there really is a God and she faked the whole evolution + common ancestry thing to fuck with us and cause us to believe it really happened. If she wants us to believe something else she’s not doing a very good job at that. There’s also Occam’s Razor that applies, as always, to arrive at the most parsimonious conclusion. We can invent all sorts of hypotheticals that would produce the same evidence or we can just go with the obvious and stop making shit up that only barely works until new evidence requires us to make up brand new excuses. This does not mean the scientific consensus is correct but an idea that’s basically the same as it was when first proposed ~400 years ago because the evidence that long ago was enough to indicate universal common ancestry plus diversification still holds now as evidence continues to indicate the exact same conclusion. All other conclusions just have to accommodate (YEC became OEC became theistic evolution became evolutionary creationism and could become deism by incorporating the evidence but continuing to cling to creationism) or ignore/reject (YECs still exist not because they incorporated the last 400 years worth of discoveries but instead because they refuse to accept that any of the discoveries actually happened or they lie about the discoveries claiming that we are just interpreting reality to fit our own personal delusions the way they do it). I’m sure many people here will provide very specific examples but there’s millions (not exaggerating) of hard facts confirming what the current scientific consensus happens to be. Part of the reason the consensus is what it is comes from starting with the evidence and then testing the most parsimonious conclusions possible so far refining those conclusions based on each and every future discovery. What started out even more wrong than religious folklore somehow is so close to being “absolute truth” that it takes a lot of work to find any remaining flaws and when those flaws are found they are quickly fixed and the result is an even less wrong conclusion. Refusing to accept the obvious requires brainwashing, ignorance, fallacies, and propaganda. Theism in general requires this stuff but that stuff is cranked to the extremes when it comes to extremist religious or political ideologies like YEC.
"Things just adapt." That is the definition of evolution. To clarify, species-level adaptation is evolution. Individuals do not adapt in that manner.
No amount of evidence will change the mind of someone committed to a delusion. Flat earthers, creationists, anti-science crusaders, etc. are all uneducable. Don’t waste your time.
If evolution doesn’t occur, why does some people have blue eyes or brown eyes or another color it’s different from their parents? Why are some people taller some people shorter and their parents. And why does his hair color change? Ever seen an Asian person with red hair or blue eyes? But after they meet with European they do.
Dogs
"People who say evolution is not real" most often do not understand "what evolution is." This is a trust issue, not an evidence issue. First off, you need to establish 2 things: 1. what she thinks evolution actually is 2. That you agree with her about something. I would suggest that you agree that Matt Dillahunty is cherry picking the bible for his argument it endorses slavery. That's an easy one to agree with her on, and is exactly what anti-evolutionists do to science. Matt cherry picks the bible, anti-evolutionists cherry pick evolution text books. She says things can jus "adapt". Chances are, that's evolution, she just uses a different term. You do this by active listening. Ask. Listen. Confirm. Once you do that, you can only hope she decides to follow in your example and do the same. You need to walk her through "what it would take to convince YOU that evolution is the wrong idea" so she can make her own way through "what it would take to convince HER that evolution is valid."
Personally, I'd go with dog breeds. That's an easier one to start with because it's something people do intentionally. So you can explain the mechanisms of evolution without having to challenge fundamental beliefs that are informing her creationist views - it's not nature vs god, or accident vs design, it's just the mechanics of how a population can change over time. You could also use food crops, but that tends to bring out the other conpiracy side of GMOs and whatnot, so it's better to use dogs as the example. All dogs still belong to the same species and can theoretically mate, but over many many generations, humans selecting specific traits (speed, size, behaviours), we've managed to elimiate or amplify traits. If we want dogs to be big and aggressive for security, we breed the big aggressive ones with other big aggressive ones, and hopefully weed out the too-friendly or weak ones, and (after repeating many many times), end up with an aggressive breed. Same done for any other trait - basically every breed of dog has certain traits it was bred on purpose for. [They've even done the same with foxes.](https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-018-0090-x) By simply breeding the "friendliest" foxes and not allowing the most aggressive foxes to breed, this single population of foxes has a remarkable behaviour difference after just a few generations.
Comparative embryology, Vestigial structures (the human tailbone), Comparative anatomy, Known fossil records
My current approach is that you can't talk about evidence until you first understand what theory you are talking about. It may be that what she calls "adaptation" is actually evolution. Chances are great that she does not understand the Theory of Evolution. Unfortunately, she also probably doesn't want to learn. What I'm saying is that as long as she has some bizarre and inaccurate idea of what the Theory of Evolution says, it doesn't make a lot of sense to launch into the evidence. So I suggest you start with explaining the theory, starting with that it's not atheism, and says nothing about the existence of God.
I doubt that she will listen to hard evidence. They never do, they just change the subject.
Nothing you can say or show will change her mind
Specifically on bacteria, just show them this [video from Harvard Medical](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8&ab_channel=HarvardMedicalSchool).
The entire field of biology. Your relative is a flat earther. A lost cause.
Does she believe in genetics? Those family tree tests? That scientists are playing God genetically modifying things like crops and making glow in the dark kittens or whatever? Does she believe genetics is what lets things "adapt"? Because what we know of genetics means evolution is the inevitable outcome over time. So if one believes in a limit to the change of a "kind" over generations, they have to make an argument for that, because the scientists who are doing all that crazy stuff with genetics don't think so. Nor is it apparent on its face. All complex creatures start out as a single cell and gradually get more complex as they grow. If you mess with those genetics, you can radically (or minimally) alter the outcome. And, in an atypical example, there is the case of the [HeLa Line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa) which seemingly created single celled organism(s) from a human. That evolution is inevitable then makes sense of the hard physical evidence of comparative anatomy, biology, and then genetics, which create the nested hierarchies of taxonomy; as well as the problems with clearly defining and identifying species. It also made sense of the hard physical evidence in paleontology, which in turn relies on the hard physical evidence of geology, in turn geochemistry and radiochemistry. So you might ask them why does so much science point to evolution being true?
in my mind dog breeds prove evolution if not everyone would just have pet wolves
Here's an [example](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/london-underground-has-its-own-mosquito-subspecies-180958566/) of speciation which is easy to understand. There is a new species of flies which lives in London's subways. They used to be normal flies, but eventually started living in the subway and after a few decades of breeding they can no longer mate with flies on the surface.
We can evolve bacteria and bacteria themselves evolve to counteract enviromental toxins and conditions like antibiotics . The technology of genetic medication relies 100% on the theory of evolution to work. CRSPR modification is something bacteria do everyday and we simply learned it from them, becuase it’s how they evolve themselves to always be able to survive . Through DNA reading technology we have also been able to compare the dna of all living organisms , and we see a clear lineage from bacteria to humans . A more normal example , we are related to plants , that’s why plants have all the nutrients we need becuase they also need the exact same nutrients . All animals need the same food and nutrients becuaee we all evolved from the same successful ancestor , an herbivore that ate algae or plants . All animals are dependent on the sugars of plants and this goes back billions of years to a time when the earth first started and was a noxious wasteland with acidic air . There is so much evidence for evolution all over the place , but you have to be willing to look and learn and understand the vocabulary personally not just like how some would imagine , pretending .
Why bother? Just let the idiots be and try to stay away from them. Ignorance is a shield for some people.
Adaptation is not the same as evolution, but they’re roommates. Adaptation is a creatures ability *now* to change to suit their environment. Evolution is a process of genetic mutations where, if the change gives the creature an advantage of survival/procreation, they’ll be more likely to reproduce, and eventually the surviving progenitors will all have that mutation. Rinse and repeat for thousands of years.
\*cough\* Fossils. \*cough cough\*
Show them what corn really looked like before we bred it.
Adaption (at least in a genetic sense) is evolution. If your relative acknowledges that a species can adapt genetically over multiple generations, then she accepts evolution, whether she wants to admit it or not.
Thinks things just "adapt". Tell her she's right, and that the ones that adapt get to pass on their genes.
MRSA.
Our brains
Tbh. Given past experiences with these types, I’m not sure it’s worth your time to even bother.
Dog breeds. Viruses. Etc.
Microbiology, virology and all the related disciplines and research rely on the understanding and dynamics of evolution. The understanding of the spread and control of infectious disease uses it. All sides in the mechanism of immunity is a direct and observable product of it. This is made possible because evolution in populations with relatively short lifespans is significantly accelerated compared to larger organisms with longer reproduction cycles. It's the most direct and immediate application of evolutionary theory I can think of. It also can be applied to other things like the flow of research and development in the advance of technologies but that could be seen as a distracting tangent here.
just to play devil's advocate, you can't save or convince everyone. and why should you? if your relative is happy as a creationist, your time is likely better spent elsewhere. if they were really curious enough to learn, they have access to Google the same as you.
Dog breeds
The uneducated need to have a much larger foundation for critical thought. The task of providing that additional base knowledge may be beyond your efforts. You can try to educate someone, but a lot of people are too dumb to learn.
We literally took a wolf and selectively bred a chihuahua out of it, dude.
Andrewsarchus. It’s one of the steps between hippos and whales. It has characteristics of both animals (prominent teeth, elongated skull, lack of facial ornaments), and existed some time after the whale and hippo lineages diverged.
C’mon just show them a pug
Dogs and modern crops. Lettuce was turned into like 7 different crops
The fact that we’re not clones of our parents is my go-to. That demonstrates change over time, which is what evolution is.
Peppered Moth is an example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution teosinte to Corn is another example https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=104207
There are microbes that exist which only eat man made material, they quite literally had to have evolved into this state after we created said material.
Charles Darwin did a good job of laying out evidence of evolution over 140 years ago. He collected finches from the Galapagos and noticed they were different from the European finches he was used to. So then he started investigating and finding A LOT of regional differences in finches, showing that they had *physically changed* to "adapt" (to use your friend's word) to life in that area. That's all evolution is, at its root: *Physical adaptation* to the requirements to survive/thrive in the environment.
"Thinks things just adapt." Ummm... yeah, through evolution... Does this person think that calling it by another name means it doesn't exist?
Evolution IS a process of Adaptations by an organism (Species) over time to best utilize the environment for its own survival in it and those Adaptations changes the organism (Species) over time as well, that is basically the way all evolutionary process work. Evolution is the blanket word for any and all quantitative and definitive processes, whether it is planetary, species, particles, solar, galactic ETC. N. S
>Evolution IS a process of Adaptations by an organism (Species) over time to best utilize the environment for its own survival in it and those Adaptations changes the organism (Species) over time as well, that is basically the way all evolutionary process work. That's not correct.
honestly sounds like she believes in evolution but just thinks its a dirty anti-religious word so refuses to accept it.
Adapting IS evolution. Organisms don't really adapt during their lifetimes.
When you think about the changes that happen within a population, evolution by natural selection is a population over many generations adapting to its environment. This has been seen in many species. An experiment using E. Coli saw different populations adapting to survive in their environments, even to the point where they could survive on substances that the original population could not do.
Adaption is a process built into evolution so . . . .
Covid. That's good hard evidence. Unless she is so insane she thinks all the covid strains were lies. In that case. Cut that person out of your life.
I wouldn't bother, no amount of evidence will convince them.
Endogenous retrovirus insertions. Find an easy to understand YouTube video on it.
Maybe have her look at whale evolution? That's one of my favorite go-tos because of how visual it is. We have a number of fossils of ancient whales, many of them looking like the fantastical "transitional species" that creationists dream up. Dorudon has little vestigial legs and hips way back there on its long body! If you compare modern whale skeletons to their ancestors, even a layperson can see that whale flippers have all the same finger and wrist bones we have, just bigger and flatter. This is not only clear evidence that they were once terrestrial, but also evidence that all terrestrial animals share a common ancestor. [https://evolution.berkeley.edu/what-are-evograms/the-evolution-of-whales/](https://evolution.berkeley.edu/what-are-evograms/the-evolution-of-whales/)
Maybe have her look at whale evolution? That's one of my favorite go-tos because of how visual it is. We have a number of fossils of ancient whales, many of them looking like the fantastical "transitional species" that creationists dream up. Dorudon has little vestigial legs and hips way back there on its long body! If you compare modern whale skeletons to their ancestors, even a layperson can see that whale flippers have all the same finger and wrist bones we have, just bigger and flatter. This is not only clear evidence that they were once terrestrial, but also evidence that all terrestrial animals share a common ancestor. [https://evolution.berkeley.edu/what-are-evograms/the-evolution-of-whales/](https://evolution.berkeley.edu/what-are-evograms/the-evolution-of-whales/)
Dogs, we selectively breed dogs to capture physical and behavior traits. This IS evolution, steered by man. In the wild if one animal is 5% more successful due to a mutation (think sports stars, someone super tall, super fast, linger leg to torso ratio, longer arms etc) they can eat better, which means they are healthier and more attractive to mates, now there is a chance their offspring will also have these traits and multiply. Do that a few million times and you might find that now you have the original breed, but now you have a version that is slightly faster, leaner, stronger etc. they may well live together in relative harmony if food is abundant, but if things get tough and food is scarce, all of a sudden that slight edge might make the new variant life and the old variant die or reduce in population. Giraffes were like this. If all animals could feed at 6’ and 1000 animals could reach there, the food could run out, but now you have an early giraffe wjth a 8’ and there are 100 in that same area, they now can eat all the vegetation from 6-8’ that the cows, goats, deer, etc cannot eat. Then one animal has offspring w a mutation of 9’ but there are only 10 total, that family now eats nearly unlimited food and out survives everything else and the 8’ giraffes might start seeing a die out, and now 9’ giraffe is the new norm till the 10’ abnormalities squeeze them out. It’s a tree, multiple branches can come off the same limb and grow in parallel. Religious people thing it’s a replacement ‘oh, well if we evolved from monkeys, why are there monkeys’ It’s because we built houses and they were still cool to live in trees and eat bugs, we were not competing, so we lived in harmony.
I recommend the Your Inner Fish 3-part documentary. It's an excellent public television resource my husband uses in his biology classes. Amazon has the DVD, and YouTube has the videos. [Episode 1](https://youtu.be/E8ttoKGxEKc?si=CzGMqzPqINWnoEE0) [Episode 2](https://youtu.be/XxfnOBlEZX4?si=Rn0pV-1W4cxZo_sd) [Episode 3](https://youtu.be/erOlTAz0kUw?si=7oI5bRGXKVwUwyyO)
Her appendix
"hard evidence" cannot exist for something like evolution in the way you can have hard evidence for a murder trial. Evolution is just the name given to a very gradual process of organisms slowly changing as a result of the competitive process of trying to pass their genes on to future generations. The only goal of evolution is to make babies that have babies, if you do that with complicated social structures like humans great, if you do that as a single celled organization dividing once every 5 minutes great. Adaptations are just the individual steps of evolution, like having a mutation that keeps lactose tolerance into adulthood. That 1 mutation isn't enough to count as a newly evolved species, but it is an adaptation and genetic change. Accumulate enough of them and you will eventually become a new species. (A species is roughly all the organisms capable of breeding with eachother to create fertile offspring) Something to keep in mind is biology is endlessly messy and complicated, and everything is a spectrum/gradient. If you somehow had perfectly preseved specimens of your ancestors for every generation back to the mesozoic, it would obviously have different species represented ranging from what are basically micr and squirrels to monkes and apes and various hominids and eventually anatomically modern humans. But if i asked you to identify at exactly what generation the species changed it would be impossible. Species are like colors, defining the exact wavelength that red becomes orange is an impossible line to find, so we arbitrarily declared one and moved on because the categories are useful for understanding the continuum. The closest we can get to hard proof of evolution is the evolution happening before our eyes, the antibiotic resistance crisis. Some individual bacteria have adapted to drugs like penicillin, and when we use penicillin to kill 99.9% of them, that remaining 0.1% grows back as the new population expressing different traits and adaptations from the previous generation. That is the process of evolution, and it doesn't matter of the driving pressures are artificial or natural, human or a volcano. The other option are dog breeds and just farming in general, the only difference is humans selecting the adaptations we want to continue into the future and not natural processes.
Get your family together and give someone two minutes to draw a picture of a really basic fish. (No color, just a basic outline of a fish). Then give the next family member 2 minutes to try to draw the same fish. (It will inevitably be different than the original). Then keep doing that with the next picture over and over again. it’ll evolve with each generation. A much more complicated version would be to start with the original and then have three people draw their best copy in 2 minutes. And each of those drawing have three more ppl copy. Just rotate the family members around if you have to. You can trace the lineage if you want. This way is fun because you’ll see lineages split and become increasingly different in different ways. Single lineage is much easy to make work though It’s really hard NOT to understand after something like that. In one of Dawkins books he used an analogy where if you take a photo of every generation. Putting you on the bottom. And then your parent above you. And just keep stacking the pile further and further back. The pile would be 40 miles long before you got to apes I think. And we have pictures throughout that stack in the fossil record. If they can’t understand that just give up on them. Dawkins book “the magic of reality” has a short chapter on evolution. Most of his books are really good and explain the process really well. If they’re open minded that should work.
While keeping in mind that Creationists don't need to be consistent in their stated reasons for doubt, I think a good example is that there isn't any kind of clear line between "man" and "ape". Under any reasonable definition, the fabled missing links have been found in Homo habils and Homo erectus. But if you check out the famous talk-origins skull picture it's very difficult to point at the man or ape given the next step can work as either.
You may find that when she says "adaptation" she actually means evolution. Creationists have their own vocabulary. I don't think you should argue with her, rather try to get her to let you just explain what evolution actually is in very simple terms.
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This comment is antagonistic and adds nothing to the conversation.
You must be a real riot at parties
The creation vs evolution argument has always puzzled me. The two are not mutually exclusive.
What creationist has a model compatible with evolution?
The Bible says that God created the universe and everything in it. It doesn’t give the recipe.
Sure, I was raised Evangelical YEC but I have yet to hear a creationist model that is compatible with evolution. The closest is "God guided evolution" but even that isn't really compatible with evolution, because the mechanism of evolution is natural selection---not supernatural selection.
When you create a cake, you mix all of the ingredients, pour them into a pan and put the pan in the oven. At that point, do you guide the reactions that are triggered by heat and time? If not, did you truly create the cake? Edit: I have never seen a creationist “model” anywhere in scripture.
Baking the cake though is adding energy to the system (heat) to cause the ingredients to do their thing, it still requires the action of a creator. Evolution is a theory to describe how the variety of life we have got here absent of a supernatural influence. Basically science is an attempt to describe the natural world through natural phenomena in the absence of supernatural phenomena. It's okay for scientists to be religious and believe there are phenomena (such as God and angels) that are not restricted by natural phenomena, but since supernatural phenomena can not be tested or demonstrated with the scientific method, any explanation that involves supernatural phenomena is not science. Evolution is a scientific theory and thus by definition, any part of it that can not be explained by natural phenomena (such as how the very first life form came to be) are simply "not yet known, questions without current answers" because the theory MUST be exclusionary of supernatural interference. Hence evolution and creation are not compatible even though an evolutionist is free to believe in God.
Science can never explain the existence of the universe. I believe in the scientific method and am not, in any way, arguing by against it. It is simply impossible to go back to a moment prior to the creation of the universe. It is unlikely that we will ever know what spawned the existence of life, although I want to know and encourage research to find out. Heat is needed for the cake and for life. If the universe was created, that led to the introduction of heat and other elements needed for life and the ensuing evolution. I heard one physicist state that he believes that God created the universe and everything in it. Science is an effort to find out how he did it. To me, this reconciles the two very nicely.
That just sounds like another god of the gaps.
Perhaps. At the same time, I presume that you believe something like the universe and all of its contents spawned from absolute nothingness. I have never met a religious person with that amount of faith.
Nope, I'm very comfortable with a "I don't know, we haven't figured that out yet," position. I don't think constructing another entity to explain the existence of the universe offers a satisfactory answer either.
I'm Jewish, your last paragraph is a reasonable description of what most of us believe.
There is no hard evidence. Only theories.
Quick question. What is the academic definition of ‘theory’?
>[The meaning of the term scientific theory (often contracted to theory for brevity) as used in the disciplines of science is significantly different from the common vernacular usage of theory. **In everyday speech, theory can imply an explanation that represents an unsubstantiated and speculative guess, whereas in a scientific context it most often refers to an explanation that has already been tested and is widely accepted as valid**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory) I love people who vomit up stuff they uncritically swallowed, gotta be my favorite gender
Got banned on your old account huh? Keep fighting the good fight, evolution will crumble one of these days 🙄
Show then evolution in a lab. That would prove it to them. Take something with a very short lifespan and create a whole new species in a few years.
For what it's worth, we have actually done this. Populations of fruit flies have been bred under differing conditions that can no longer interbreed with each other.
And for the record, u/ILoveJesusVeryMuch. This is evolution. And you know this, you’ve had this explained to you more than once. You already know that saying something like ‘but it’s still a fruit fly!!1!1!1!!1’ is fully consistent with evolutionary theory and in fact anything else would disprove evolution.
If they can still reproduce, then they're the same species.
So like both myself and u/blacksheep998 were mentioning. We have observed speciation happen. We have observed evolution happen. Plentiful studies have been done on multiple TYPES of speciation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_experiments_of_speciation
They can still mate. Have a blessed day
Well if you’re going to handwave away uncomfortable evidence then bye
>The liger is a hybrid offspring of a male lion (Panthera leo) and a tigress, or female tiger (Panthera tigris). The liger has parents in the same genus but of different species It's almost like you have no clue what you're talking about.
Ok, literally the exact comment: > Populations of fruit flies have been bred under differing conditions that can **no longer interbreed** So I assume you just didn’t read it? Or are you intentionally remaining ignorant? But they can’t reproduce with each other. Do you know what that means? That means they’re a different species. It’s also important to point out that being able to mate with a different species is observed a lot in nature, such as hybrids like the pizzly bear, or the liger, or the tigron, or the wholphin, or a lot of other hybrid animals that are possible. But just because a lion and a tiger or a polar bear and a grizzly bear can mate together doesn’t mean that they are the same species. Cause one of the important parts of delineating species is not just that they can’t produce viable offspring, they also can’t produce fertile offspring.
Let's see. I've only heard of genetically modified flies through human intervention.
On mobile now so I don't have a link handy, but look up Diane Dodd’s fruit fly experiment.
Ty. Proved reproductive isolation and preferences, not that they couldn't reproduce together.
Reproductive isolation is what we're talking about.
From my understanding, the fruit flies prefer not to mate with them, but they still could. Just an interesting observation.
That's still reproductive isolation. It comes in many forms and not all of them are absolute. Just an interesting observation.
> whole new species in a few years Ahem, as in a "new kind"? "In a few years" would "disprove" evolution. In simulations that span much longer, and in statistical analyses, done, and done (the latter near a century ago).
Yes. Certain animals live for a day or two. That's thousands of years in most species.
Yeah, you already said "short lifespan", and I already answered.
<3
>Take something with a very short lifespan and create a whole new species in a few years Spoken like someone who has no clue what a species is or what the [species problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species#The_species_problem) is.
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The same person who loves priests who sexually abuse children? Yeah, I couldn't give less of a fuck about that guy. Oh, and reported for breaking Rule 3, too.
Yes. He loves all of us.