and then there's just people not choosing to define evolution when they use the word. i'm sure for many non-believers, natural selection for benificial mutations is easy to believe. that all life on earth originated from the same single celled organisim might be a bit harder

Random points:
1) Evolution is deceptively simple. The more one delves into the topic, the more complex it becomes. Evolution seems easy to grasp after a course or two because pretty much all undergrad courses (and texts) are written and presented to appear that the topic is solved. (They're not.)

2) Humans are, in fact, evolving more rapidly than at any point in their history.

3) Evolution requires a change in selective pressures based on the environment. No mention of that yet.

The OP posted a stat to the effect of "Over 50% of Americans don't believe in evolution.". This can't possibly be correct, is it? I live in Canada and would be flabbergasted if the number here was over 3 or 4 percent.

It's only slightly less in Canada, with somewhere around 40% not accepting the theory of evolution.
http://www.science20.com/genomicron/...tion_in_canada

Most polls use the definition that humans evolved from lower animal forms. There are almost no countries in the world where the agreement with that premise gets to 80% or higher.

it might just be me reading this wrong, but i think the bolded is poorly worded.

No, bolded part is pretty much wrong, unless a few hundred thousand species have had their genome sequenced that we don't know about.

Also, most people (myself included) have a REALLY hard time grasping the time scales that evolution works on for changes and species that most people care about. It is just damned near impossible to truly envision what 100,000 years looks like....and that is basically a blink of an eye. The idea of tracing back my ancestors in an unbroken temporal line, where at NO POINT in the chain did the parents look any different, at all, from the offspring, and finding that I end up at a single-celled organism, is extremely hard to conceptualize (and really cool).

Really? Even if the Earth was found to be 1 billion years old rather than 4.54 billion years, I would STILL find it plausible that evolution turned a bacteria into all the life we see today. Here's my reasons:

1. Look at the change from a wolve to a bulldog. That's a pretty huge amount of change, and it all happened within a few hundred years. Also, duplication of organs seems to be pretty easy. The chance of an organism evolving an arm from having zero arms is astronomically small (for all practical purposes we can say it's impossible). The chance of an organism with one arm having a mutant offspring with two arms is a little higher. Sometimes humans are born with more arms, or digits, or even heads, than normal. I'm not sure if these are heritable though...

2. The quantity of individuals in evolving populations can be incredibly high. Say we have 10 million bacteria. Within three days, they reproduce and now we have 100,000 million bacteria. Natural selection acts and kills almost all the bacteria and now we have 10 million bacteria again. This is a recipe for very fast evolution.

Someone said "it might just be me reading this wrong, but i think the bolded is poorly worded."

This is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noncoding_DNA:

noncoding DNA describes components of an organism's DNA sequences that do not encode for protein sequences. In many eukaryotes, a large percentage of an organism's total genome size is noncoding DNA, although the amount of noncoding DNA, and the proportion of coding versus noncoding DNA varies greatly between species.

You've used this example twice, but it took a few thousand years (some estimates put it over 10K years), and they are still not distinct species and can freely breed with each other. That makes them essentially breeds of the same animal (technically dogs are a subspecies) which means superficial change mostly. Bad, bad example for your argument.

Say we have 100,000 million bacteria. One bacterium dies. That's it. That's evolution.

And if we have 100,000 million bacteria reduced to 10 million bacteria, the we've got evolution^(99,990)! (Not factorial, ldo.)

I honestly think that one reason ToE is so hard to accept is that it is deceptively simple. A child can understand the basics of evolution by natural selection. This makes it hard for people to take it seriously, since they realize that most scientific theories are over their heads.

Does it bother you that you've been arguing about the obviousness of evolution, yet you seem to have no relationship to the facts that are available? For example, do you have so little intuition about the "speed" of evolution that you really believe that the transition from wolf to bulldog in a few hundred years (maybe 70-80 generations) instead of thousands of years? (As an evolution apologist, you should really be ashamed and embarrassed.)

Yes, you can imagine going from 10 million bacteria to 100,000 million (aka 100 billion) in 3 days bacteria, and back to 10 million bacteria, but how much change can one realistically expect from this somewhat scenario? According to your intuition, how different will these new bacteria be relative to the old ones? Or will we already have transitioned out of bacteria and onto more complex forms of life by then?

Also, at 100,000 bacteria per square inch, your population grows from 100 square inches to 1,000,000 square inches -- almost 650 square meters. Forget for a moment the absolute quantities involved. This is a 10,000-fold increase in area in THREE DAYS. Have you ever cultured bacteria? You seem to be off by a couple orders of magnitude.)

You can imagine figuring it out for yourself because it's so simple and obvious, and everyone else must be in some form of denial if they disagree with you, yet your basic facts seem to look nothing like reality. I think there's something instructive here for you, but I'll let you work that out for yourself.

There is something in this though I'm not sure how much.

What happens a lot is that its so obviously true and simple that people assume the details will also be true and simple whereas many of the details are extremely subtle

This allows the Aarons and the creationists to claim a lack of complete understanding and mistakes about some subtleties casts doubt on the credibility of evolution believers. Its like them claiming someone doesn't know a football game is going on because of a lack of understanding of the off-side rule except that there is a willing audience of people desperate not to believe evolution.

Sure but the idea was out there. There was scant progress on anything after the Greeks until the scientific revolution and then the answers started coming in quickly.

Its not like the greeks couldn't already show creationism was nonsense both logically and from the evidence. They did know about fossils.

i'd caution you about over interpreting things from wikipedia or text books for that matter.

your quote: "They are probably technically "evolving" though because almost all genes are junk genes in all species. Most genes do nothing."

this is just outright wrong, but i was hoping that you meant "DNA" and not "genes" (under no definition that i can think of would a gene be junk, and under the genetic definition, it is the exact opposite). even with DNA, i'd caution u against labeling non protein coding DNA as junk. the phrase "junk DNA" is somewhat a relic of the 20th century. mainly until recently we lived in a protein centric world. no function for non coding DNA was known because no one cared to look. and even now, just because we don't know why it's there doesn't mean it's not needed. but with study, we do find function.

it's been known for years that many aspects of chromosome structure forms better on non some non coding sequences. while the function of some of these structures aren't necessarily understood, they're there, they're conserved even to single cell organisms. while it's thought that all of the non coding DNA is not necessary, and that the sequences handle a greater mutational load, it is generally accepted by chromosme biologists that there is a purpose. even the molecular evolutionists have found some selection for some it.

additionally, a lot of this "junk" function as transcription factor binding sites allowing for differences in spatial and temporal expression of genes (sometimes causing huge differences in morphology). or code for non-coding RNA's which in recent years have become one of the "flavors of the month" because in many cases people have now developed tools to test for functionality and not just presence.

OP, I'd be willing to bet (given your "junk genes" statement) that you have not been exposed to evo-devo thinking. Suggest your next read be Endless Forms Most Beautiful. Also suggest reading this book with a critical eye.

Also, consider that taking a course in a subject and understanding the content are not equivalent.

LOL -- personal grudge much?

Sorry, it was unfair to mention you alongside creationists. You are a different class.

To me, technology and religion have a yin and yang relationship. I can't say one is good and the other is evil... I don't think it works that way.

There's sort of just a battle that's going to play out in our culture. I think one side is sort of all in, and that's risky with great potential benefit. IMO technology is the all-in side, because it gives us the capability to do anything and to destroy everything.

Religion is very nitty. Religious groups-the bigger they are- take a lot longer to give the seal of approval to new ideas. They want to make sure the potential consequences are pondered, and that all the players are moral. It's a good way to live, for sure- at least for now. If you go to Afghanistan, religion is probably a terrible way to live- religion stopped evolving there.

without using any special literary devices, i have to say this:

Religion has to evolve to remain successful, and technology will have to borrow ideas from religion if the human race will survive.

Why don't people accept evolution? Fear. It's pretty lucky that we all got here as we did, so it's a safe bet that we don't have to mess with anything. So in a sense, they have good reason to fear any new explanation for how we ought to survive. As long as they don't have reason to get angry, then no harm is done. Fear and anger is a dangerous combo; that's how terrorists roll. The fact that the human has evolved into the terrorist is a reason to dial back a bit and make sure that everyone's OK before we go turning everybody into a cyborg.

Part of my point is that there isnt really any conceptual difference between 1 billion and 4.54 billion, or 10,000, or infinity. They are all basically "some really big number that I cant really think about."

I get your point, but really now, you are certainly capable of conceptualizing 10,000 of something in your head. I can go much much higher. Visualize a row of 100 things, then make it a square. 10,000 things. Add the z axis and you have a million things. Now start making rows of these cubes in your head. And that's just one way.

Aaron, I'm done talking to you. You don't seem to understand evolution. It seems like your understanding of it wasn't more than "one species suddenly gives birth to new species!". Then, after reading my posts you look up details on evolution in order to nitpick my posts and pretend you know what you're talking about. And that's all you've been doing. Nitpicking. You really think I was thinking carefully about the numbers 10 million or 100 million in my last post? No...


Interesting...This might be true. See my first post and my example of one colorblind person dying = evolution. That's true, and that exact same process happening hundreds of time every second (I expect Aaron to correct me and say something like "you're 1.5 orders of magnitude off, it's thousands of times every second!") for all species all around the world for billions of years is what turned bacteria into what we see today in the world.

Making predictions about evolution, and the processes that occur in the nucleus of cells at the microscopic level, are incredibly complex and we are still learning. But the process of natural selection is incredibly simple.

Like I said before, once you understand how genetics and sexual reproduction work (meiosis, mutations, reshuffling, ect), which is pretty complex, then it's really impossible for evolution NOT to occur when you think about it. Of course you have to assume that not all organisms born live to reproduce, but this is obvious (I'll explain if you don't see why).

You're welcome to say that. But I think by looking carefully at your words, you probably understand a trivialized form of it.

Interesting. I wonder if you have the ability to point to anything that actually supports your position.

You said: "That's it. That's evolution." But upon inspection, it seems very clear that that's not it, and that's not evolution. Or at least, it's not quite the mindless thing that you are trying to make it out to be.

I took the definition you presented as "there's a correct definition of evolution and that's it" and then proceeded to ask about the consequences of that definition.

I took a very simple example, which you rejected because one bacterium isn't a "population." Forget the fact that it stood as a clear example that stands in refutation of your initial characterization of evolution, which was a change in "earth's gene pool."

Fine, so I gave you another example with lots of bacteria, where we changed the frequency of the traits in the population, but maintained a constant genetic form. I pointed out that the definitions do not appear to give a consistent sense of the concept of evolution. According to the definition that talks about changing frequency, it's evolution. Yet somehow, there's a very clear sense in which having the exact same bacteria over and over again really doesn't seem like evolution.

The fact of the matter is that you have not engaged in a single substantive argument, and instead tried to simply bluster your way through the obviousness of evolution without getting any of the details right.

I don't think you thought carefully about any of your posts, really. It looks like you've ranted and rambled from beginning to end.

Let's see, the arrogant biology freshman kid who read a few books, or the PhD college professor? I think I'm gonna go with Aaron.

This is obviously true and yet ...