oh boy this looks like a fun thread for me

Intuitively, I wouldn't think you'd actually need very long, under 10 generations given the right conditions. But I don't know how to back this up. I tried looking for how long it took for the different breeds of dogs to develop but I worked overnight last night so I'm tired and having trouble finding good info.

How long do you think it would need to take?

Foxes and wolves only take a few generations of artificial selection - specifically breeding for tameness - to show significant dog-like morphological changes (floppy ears, piebald coats etc)... I can't remember for certain off the top of my head by it's an astonishingly low number.. maybe 3, 4 generations?.

But that's artificial selection and the changes appear to be spandrels, so YMMV on the naturally selected functional adaptations in human 'races'.

For those that haven't seen it:

Although I understand and accept evolution at the intellectual level, I admit to having some difficulties at the intuitive level (I think this is the right way to explain it). I mean that I struggle a bit with the amount of variation that must have occurred within the given time scales - not long ago I found myself standing in my yard looking at all the trees, grass, insects, birds, mammals and thinking to myself "how the **** did all this happen?!".

Ultimately I put this down to my layman's understanding of biology, and of course all this diversity is possible. But still, it can sometimes be hard to fully grasp.

Even taking that into account, I am still surprised at the number you gave of ten generations to end up with multiple geographically distinct morphologies / phenotypes (not sure which is the correct term), from a single parent pairing. I'd really like to know what kind of changes we would expect (or already know about) and the number of generations it would take (or took), since I clearly have a bit of a mental block when it comes to this.

Can we even say whether Adam and Eve would have needed to be dark-skinned (with melanin levels dropping over time for some sub-populations), rather than them being light-skinned (with melanin levels increasing over time for some sub-populations)? Seems that the former would be more likely, but I don't really know.

Interesting video. I watched a documentary in Netflix about history of dogs and the breeds and problems some breeds have, etc
Very interesting also if you liked this one about the foxes

Correction, it would have been Noah and his wife that would have been the new starting point, and a shorter time frame.

thx TheBrokenATM for pointing this out in the Noah / Flood thread.)

You are welcomed, just love science and interesting discussions.

What do you think? Are the reasons from here:

http://www.evilbible.com/Impossible.htm

good reasons to say that bible's god can't exist?

The problem is that to give formal disproofs of God you usually need to be facing a proponent of Biblical inerrancy that won't also retreat into shifting interpretations of the language of the Bible.

One I always enjoyed ran down the lines of:
God is a perfect being
A perfect being lacks nothing
Desire is born from a lack of something
Therefore God has no desires.
Therefore God would not desire to create man

If there are faults, someone can probably hash out a better form, but inevitably this argument is met with a retreat on the meaning of perfection into shady grounds where terms become meaningless.

I've said it before, but I'm a weak atheist only when facing weak Gods. Strongly defined ones are usually easy to deal with.

If you were relying on this to support skepticism of ToE (which I realise you're not doing) wouldn't it just be an argument from Personal Incredulity and doesn't that help you with that struggle?

I think that it's the timescales and the vast number of variables involved that is hard to grasp. Our minds simply aren't equipped to cope with that kind of scale. There's probably some survival benefit to that, maybe we're more likely to survive if we focus on the moment and ensure our short term survival but that's just me speculating.

I'm pretty sure it's been shown that the current human population couldn't possibly have evolved from only two individuals and that was Adam and Eve, forget about doing it all over again from Noah and his poor wife.

This whole proof feels wrong, and I think the problem is here. Is the type of stuff that a perfect being doesn't lack the same type of stuff that desire stems from the lack of? Hopefully there isn't some small error in that sentence that makes it nonsensical because it nearly is already as it's supposed to be written.

And what about that a perfect being can't lack something being an example of something a perfect being can't do and which would then refute it's perfection since a perfect being can do anything? God can't be perfect and lack something, and because he can't lack something he's not perfect. (I think I'm using the Omniscient OR Omnipotent logic here)

It might be horrible. I'm avoiding long posts because typing on a ipad tilts the shot out of me.

Essentially, shouldn't a perfect being be completely satisfied to simply exist? If so, someone should be able to write out a less horrible formal argument of that.

I'm going to leave the autocorrect in that post as an example.

I'm not sure this is true. Perfect is such an imprecise word.

Btw, I'm on my phone, so I'm with you on the short posts.

couldn't resist this fyp

Yes, it's absolutely caused by personal incredulity, but I don't think it can be any other way when we attempt to conceive of some things (massive time scales or distances) that are basically inconceivable to our puny brains. I don't think there needs to be an evolutionary explanation for humans not being able to understand awesomely difficult topics.

Scientists that study astrophysics (for example) are working on phenomena that are incomprehensible to many laypersons and in some ways even to themselves, but I suspect they look at the world in a slightly different way than most, or at least learn how to look at these things differently, otherwise how could they really study them?

I remember a Q&A between Dawkins and Krauss where they were encouraged to ask each other questions about their respective sciences, and I thought it was interesting that Dawkins asked Krauss a very layperson's type of question about the size of the universe, and what there is past the edge of it, noting that he just couldn't wrap his head around the idea of there being no end to the universe. It was reassuring in a way hearing this incredibly well educated scientist struggled with these crazy concepts like we all do.

Except for astrophysicists...

I think that there's an Evolutionary explanation for everything we do. Which is not to say that it's necessarily beneficial to us. It makes sense to me that we've evolved to focus on the immediate and local rather than being distracted by vast perspectives that paralyse us while we become prey.

Differences in perspective perhaps. I have no problem imagining activity over eons on a galactic scale let alone in our own solar system, probably because I read a lot of Sci Fi. Do you know an astro physicist or something? The 'edge' of the universe is a bit of a slippery concept to wrap our minds round isn't it.

One of the things that I thought can prove Bible is false is that humans existed before Adam.
But now I see there are Christians who think there were humans before Adam.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Adamite

How can you be a Christian and think this? It's against the Bible what these Christians think.

This site explains well why the pre-adamists are wrong:

http://creation.com/pre-adamic-man-w...th-before-adam

Why do you think creation.com is a credible source?

I've read only that article from this site.
It explains well why it's against the Bible to believe there were humans before Adam.
Do you think it's acceptable for a Christian to believe humans existed before Adam? I think the Bible says clearly that Adam was the first human.

I think it's acceptable for someone who identifies as a Christian to believe a whole range of things. I'm less convinced when non Christians tell Christians what they should believe.

What paragraph from Bible supports the fact that people may have existed before Adam? If it's not a paragraph that supports this then it's an heresy to believe Adam was not the first human.

Well, science supports it. But if you choose to believe in science you can't believe in Bible any more. Some Christians want to believe in both science and religion but unfortunately this is not possible. That's why some of them say the days are not 24h days but longer periods. Even if this was true the order in which god created the universe is still in contradiction with science. Genesis is one of the best proves that the Bible is false.

Not all Christians are biblical inerrantists.

If you want to argue that they should be then go ahead. However given that you've failed to understand a lot that's been posted in response to you over the last couple of days and have contributed to some poorly constructed discussions I'm going to pass.