Here’s something I find amusing- 99.9999% of counties teach evolution as “fact” and offer no religious alternative. No, I am not religious, and yes, I do believe in evolution but I’m not sure how it became a fact. I’m not even going to try to defend that county, that’s just something I find interesting.

I agree that it should not be taught as fact; rather, evolution should be presented as a theory like most everything else in science. If history has taught us one thing, it is that perceived scientific truth and ‘laws’ tend to be revised, even upturned, over time.

Though I agree with the idea that many ‘laws, etc.’ are proven false, we can see evolution in action. There are slight mutations in our DNA that naturally occu; some of these mutations enhance our abilities, while others impair them. Over time, the people (or any other species…) with the “better” DNA will tend to propagate more. I’m not going to dare argue about the beginning of life on earth, but the fact remains that evolution takes place.

I agree that evolution takes place; I believe in evolution. My point (and Aymond’s too, I think) is that information presented science “fact” is often truly just theory, and theory is subject to change. As Stephen Hawking wrote:

“Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis; you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory.”

An important skill that I feel does not get enough attention in public skills is that of thinking with a critical, open mind. Imagine how much better the world would be…

I agree with that completely, I’m just saying that our theory of evolution has more scientific proof than the geocentric view of the universe did in its time.
Though I guess, in that statement, I rely on our proof being correct ;). Touche.

As Keacher basically said, all “scientific” proof we have today relies on implicit logic and reasoning rather than deductive- save the only pure science- mathematics :).

Thiede, for the sake of argument, I challenge you to give me an example where we’ve visually seen evolution take place with positive results. There are (obviously) substantial differences between micro and macro evolution, and we’ve seen micro evolution take place, but that is completely different than what we commonly think of as “evolution.” As far as I know (and I haven’t researched this in a while), a natural genetic mutation has never been witnessed which gives a species a positive result. If not every, the vast majority of mutations are completely negative, most with a fatal flaw.

My main point is this: there are substantial holes in the theory of evolution and I don’t believe it should be taught in high school, especially not without an opposing (religious) viewpoint. My main inspiration for this would have to be opening my biology textbook senior year and seeing the remains of a “human” skeleton that had years ago been proven to be just an extinct pig. (I believe it was Lucy, but I’m too lazy to look it up)

Aymond, think of bacterial infections and antibiotics. Remember how you are always supposed to finish antibiotics so that you kill of the infection completely? The reason is that if you do not kill it off completely, the ones that survive will be the ones whose random mutations have given them a better tolerance against antibiotics. Things can actually get pretty bad from there, because when the surviving strains reproduce, their offspring will be better adapted to living in environments where antibiotics exist, and thus, will be harder to kill of in the future. That is evolution at work, benefitting the bacteria.

Unfortunately, the bacteria argument is flawed in a number of ways. It isn’t evolution at work, it is adaptation at work.

First, these mutations did not occur out of “need.” Rather, due to an extremely large sample size of bacteria, some will randomly mutate to be able to withstand an antibiotic. That is, they didn’t mutate because of the antibiotic, they would have mutated anyways. There have been bacteria found that have been frozen for hundreds of years that would be resistant to an antibiotic created after the bacteria was frozen. Thus, the chemical needed to mutate was already present in the bacteria, and the bacteria did not fundamentally change.

It is the same bacteria as before the trait was recieved, so this is not actually evolution, rather adaptation. There is no fundamental difference between the natural strain of bacteria and the one with the resistance.

Another important factor is that although the mutated bacteria may be immune to an antibiotic, it may have decreased viability in the process. The surviving strains are usually less virulent, and have a reduced metabolism. This could hardly be considered survival of the fittest, because absent the antibiotic, the remaining strain would be inferior. So just because the bacteria was mutated, that doesn’t mean the bacteria as a whole was improved.

Scientists have studied a few bacterium extensively, e. coli in particular. Alledgedly they have witnessed a billion years’ worth of mutations, but it has remained “stabilized” in its “nested pattern.” Although mutations have occured within the species, no long term evolutionary change has occured; it is still the same species.

There are a billion cases of adaptation that can be cited, but as far as I know full scale evolution has yet to be witnessed.

http://www.apologeticspress.org/rr/rr1994/r&r9408b.htm

(that was basically a summary of that particular article, he says it much better than I do)

You make the point for evolution if only your conclusion were different.

Of course the mutations did not occur because of need; all mutations are random. However, the individuals expressing the mutations *survived* and proliferated because of the “need.” The bacterial is not “the same;” you admit that the trait came to be in the individual after some random event, ergo the individual is not identical to its ancestors. I can only assume by your comment that “there is no fundamental difference” means that you were expecting a new species to arise immediately from every mutation. Such is not the case. Imagine if every mutation that caused humans to by slightly more myopic than their parents caused them to be reproductively incompatible with other humans — it doesn’t happen.

Yes, mutations often come at the expense of some other survival characteristic of the organism. Often, but not always. An antibiotic-resistant bacteria “may” have decreased viability in the short term compared to “normal” strains when in an environment devoid of antibiotics; however, when in an antibiotic-laced environment, the “normal” strains will have a survival rate close to zero, hence the antibiotic-resistant strains will be significantly more viable in such conditions. If the presence of antibiotics represents a permanent change to the environment, then the antibiotic resistant bacteria will eventually supplant the “normal” strain to become the “normal” strain. By providing for survival of the species, the “bacteria as a whole was improved” by the mutation.

Regarding E. coli: yes, the species appears to have survived relatively unchanged for a long time. However, who’s to say that there haven’t been branched from the E. coli tree resulting in new species? Just because an individual has a mutation does not mean that the unmutated individuals in a species die out.

A good reference for the argument is: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ . I won’t butcher Dr. Thoebald’s argument by trying to summarize it, but I find most of his argument compelling.

Though you might be challenging evolution for the sake of argument, Aymond, I’m curious: you said above that, “yes, I do believe in evolution,” so what evidence do you use to support your personal belief?

Yes Keacher, I am just playing devil’s advocate, I believe in evolution because most scientific/fossil/dna evidence leads to it. I’m just saying it’s not proven. I don’t really have time right now to go over the 29+ reasons, but I will later.

Of course two bacterium are never the exact same, considering there are always random mutations. My point is that it is still the same species, you didn’t witness any change in chemicals or anything like that. Maybe it’s just me, but I think it’s a gigantic stretch of an argument to correlate a resistance to a antibody to a change in species. For a change in species, something FUNDAMENTAL would have to occur, that did not happen. Until then it’s just horizontal micro-evolution, I don’t see how it would be otherwise.

As I think about it, survival of the fittest isn’t a necessity to evolution, so I’m going to try to come up with a better argument soon. As you probably can tell, I’m a skeptic in almost all sitautions, and need absolute proof to convince me that both sides shouldn’t be taught. I got two hours of sleep so this probably sounds retarded, I’ll work on it later.

I agree that restistance to antibiotics does not in itself define a new species; that was in fact one of my points (a single mutation does not usually lead to speciation). There must be profound change to classify a group of organisms as a distinct species, most notably the inability for the new species to procreate with its ancestor and produce fertile offspring. However, it is possible that antibiotic resistance is merely one step along the path to the point where cross-breeding becomes impossible.

If you agree that it doesn’t determine a new species then you have to agree with me that we haven’t witnessed any macro-evolution. Of course we have theories and evidence on how it occurs, but we haven’t actually seen it happen. That’s just my point, I think we’re making it overly complex.

I believe that a good chicken or egg debate is what we need to put this to rest 😛

At least I can answer that one, reptiles came before chickens and reptiles have eggs so oooobviously the egg came first. But why did the chicken cross the road?

Smartass…