new topic: What are you beliefs and theories on evolution?

[Andrew Toll]

The last post from the mosquito discussion got me thinking on this.....

[Quoc-Thuy Vuong]

Heh. Evolution coming from the Christian guy. The irony.

Well, my theory is that of the one's taught in schools. We evolve from primitive organisms that survived and changed over time. My only twist is that our souls transmigrate into new worlds or new dimensions, maybe even new bodies in this world. These souls hold our emotions and how we react to situations or in other words, our personality. TANGENT!

All in all, we change over time and aren't created one way.

Cheers,
Thuy

[Andrew Towle]

I didnt' say I believe in evolution. I just want to see what people think of it. Personally, I don't believe in evolution, and by that, I mean I don't believe in Darwin's theory. I do believe that we humans may have made adaptations, but I don't believe we come from apes or anything like that.

--
Andy T.

[Quoc-Thuy Vuong]

I didn't refer to you believing in evolution, either. I see the irony in where you propose a topic concerning evolution even though you don't believe in it yourself. It's funny.

Now I try to find a coexisting theory to evolution and creationism where God created all of these organisms but not the human first. Over time, God added all of these problems to the world in order for his creations to change and adapt or evolve. Now this theory is completely and utterly false since Christians believe that humans were created first before everything. Maybe the snake was first for Christians.

Cheers,
Thuy

[David Reich]

Oh no, this isn't going to get argumentative at all.  

Now, without saying _anything_ about humans, evolution occurs.  And by that I mean that the phenotypes of organisms change dramatically over a large number of generations.

This is proven, both empirically (experimentally) and theoretically.  Experimentally, this took me about 2 minutes to find on google, I'm sure I could find a more scholarly paper as well - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment.  Without a doubt, species display adaptation to their environments over long periods of time.  Of course, it's almost redundant to conduct this experiment.  Assuming three conditions, which natural organisms exhibit, evolution is inevitable:

1.  Entities that reproduce themselves imperfectly

2.  That those imperfections are passed on to further reproductions

3.  That those entities are in competition, and that abillity in this competition can be affected by the imperfections.

This can easily be demonstrated in a computer simulation, even one with no other ties to biological organisms - genetic algorithms are an interesting topic.

Thuy, your theory of soul evolution is... intriguing,  Rather speculative, but I like it!  Your Christian theology may need a bit of work though.  There are two (contradictory) creation stories in the Bible, one of which has humans being created after snakes.  Also, I've heard claims that both are to be taken metaphorically, but that seems a bit absurd to me.

[Paul Gully]

Yeah, david pretty much hit the nail on the head. if you accept that
any science works, you pretty much have to concede that evolution by
natural selection holds a lot of water as a theory, and that without
it, modern biology just doesn't make sense.

[robert burdick]

precisely, and @david, "Thuy's theory" is i'm fairly certain, (correct me if i'm wrong) the buddhist theology, which i'm given to understand does not have any theories about the creation and or evolution of humans or other creatures other than the travel of their souls through bodies in this and other dimensions (i.e. heaven, hell, or buddhist equivalents of such things whose names i do not know)

--
just because

[Mvpeh]

Religon is not philisophy.

"Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language."


--
-Marton

[Quoc-Thuy Vuong]

Of course it's a Buddhist theology. I am Buddhist, after all.
Since we are yet again going on another tangent, I found the dictionary definition of evolution.

ev·o·lu·tion

 –noun 1. any process of formation or growth; development

So evolution isn't just the changing of an organism's structure or genetic algorithm. It's also the development of an organism. For example, the mouse ran into a mouse-trap and died. Its friend saw what happened and learned to avoid it. It taught that lesson to it's children and its children taught its children. Within a few generations, the mouse evolved without changing the genetic structure. Later on, the mouse-trap changed in design in order to trick the mouse. The mouse-trap evolved, also.

I used that example because my family recently caught a mouse in those old fashioned mouse-traps.
Not another tangent!

Cheers,
Thuy

[David Reich]

Good rhetorical technique, Thuy, but a fallicious one.  'Evolution' was only contextually defined, yes, but it's rather apparent that this topic is using the biological definition, rather than the more general one.  I think we can all agree that things change (or maybe not... another topic perhaps?).  Correct me if i'm wrong, but I have been using the following definition, or something like it: "a gradual change in thecharacteristics of a population of animals or plants oversuccessive generations: accounts for the origin of existingspecies from ancestors unlike them."   With such a definition, the ideas passed between mice arn't part of any evolution but a memetic one - but the mental structure that lets mice consider, remember, and pass on the idea is a genetic adaptation.  

Of course, memetics demonstrates an evolution well too - a given, seeing as it satisfied the conditions I detailed earlier.