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Before I start this article I thought I'd mention that my last article was published on January 28th. I haven't posted since then not because my computer wasn't working or that I was bottled down with work, but because I'm a lazy bum. No excuses, I have just been pretty lazy. Regardless I'm back and I hope you all enjoy this one!
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A while ago, my Environmental Science class has been studying The theory of Evolution by means of natural selection. Many people, religious and secular, believe that science and religion don't mix and that one must pick which army to fight with. I talked about this a previous article here. In this post I want to point out what makes sense and what doesn't when it comes to Evolution.
Literally, evolution is simply change in organisms over time. This is undeniable fact. There are no longer dinosaurs and woolly mammoths roaming the Earth, and there are no Dodo Birds and Pteradactyls commanding the skies. Most organisms present today weren't present hundreds of millions of years ago and vice-versa. The arguing and debate comes in when the cause of this change is questioned.
Charles Darwin, along with many progressive scientists of his area, accepted this theory of slow and gradual change overtime. Darwin furthered his theory with natural selection. While he didn't know of genes and DNA his explanation, in a nutshell, was that when the environment changes, organisms with certain traits that are more able to handle this change, survive longer and pass on those traits while the other traits die out. Fitness, or an organism's ability to survive by competing for resources, is the main determiner of the most common traits in a population. This is what we call natural selection.
The caveat in natural selection is that individual organisms do not change. These are simply organisms that already have whatever adaptations proved useful in increasing the organism's fitness. There is a set gene pool for that population and any adaptations to a change in the environment must come from that set gene pool. For example, lets say that there is a species of bird called Bird X. Bird X drinks nectar from flower Y, which is the most common flower in the area. Short is the most common type of beak in the Bird X population because the Flower Y's nectar is at the top. Long beak Bird Xs are rare but do exist. All of the sudden a fire hits the prairie and burns every single Flower Y. Now the only flowers left is Flower Z. Its nectar is really down in its stem and can only be reached by a long beak. Since the short beak Bird Xs can't eat anymore, they die and the only ones remaining are the long beak Bird Xs. That is natural selection. It makes logical sense, the genes that are already present in a population that make the organism more fit for its environment are always the most common ones. The fact that the dominant traits can change means it works, plain and simple.
So organisms change over time, and species can also change within themselves to adapt to their environment. That makes sense, now here's what doesn't.
Natural selection is great, but it wouldn't work if there wasn't already life on Earth. So where did the first organism come from? The odds of random elements around the Earth coming together and forming and single functioning bacterial cell are.......and then the odds of that bacterial cell changing into all the organisms around the world is simply impossible.
Evolution simply can't account for the first organism which is a gaping hole that can't be ignored. If your job is to build houses but all you can do is improve on houses that are already there, you're a useless home builder. You wouldn't invest in a company that knows how it's going to succeed with 10 million dollars but doesn't know how to get that start-up cash in the first place. You simply can't have a middle and an end without the beginning.
So there isn't a beginning, and the middle is pretty flimsy itself. Evolution and natural selection explain how species change, but not how speciation occurs. Speciation is the formation of a new species. So if organisms change, why can't they form new species? The reason is that the gene pool, the basic DNA that forms an organism doesn't change. No matter what traits come up and go away, that Bird X is still Bird X, regardless of the size of its beak. Scientists say that mutations in an organism create some of the adaptations in a species. Which makes sense, sometimes 'faulty' DNA replication ends up helping the organism's fitness. which, I might add, has some tremendously low odds by itself. But again, those new traits are still the same species. A mutation that maybe makes an organism faster, gives it a bigger beak doesn't turn it a new animal. A fish doesn't magically sprout lungs and feet and walks on land. Scientists claim that these mutations, when enough of them happen, turn the organism into a completely different species, but as we've seen. Mutations tend to lead to genetic disorders and death, as opposed to creating a completely new species through faulty DNA replication.
In essence, new species occur when other animals have a ton of mutations in their DNA, none of which kill them, and which replace the most vital genes of the organism. The chances of this? You have a better shot of winning the lottery...without buying a ticket.
Evolution has its merits, but simply has too many holes to be considered the answer to life. We need to take it for what it is, and nothing more. If people can believe that this world happened by chance, a fluke, then what right do those people have to tell someone else that a supernatural being such as God couldn't have done it himself?
In my humble opinion, to be a scientist familiar with statistics and probability, and accept The Theory of Evolution as the answer to all aspects of life on Earth is simply ludicrous. The true scientists know that with every question asked, a thousand more form. Science will never be "finished", there will always be questions unanswered and hypotheses unproven. The mystery of the world is one that we are slowing uncovering but never totally will. This drives us to explore, to question and to understand, and once we understand the complexities of life we realize that the answers aren't always what enlighten, but rather, the questions we asked to get them.
Before I start this article I thought I'd mention that my last article was published on January 28th. I haven't posted since then not because my computer wasn't working or that I was bottled down with work, but because I'm a lazy bum. No excuses, I have just been pretty lazy. Regardless I'm back and I hope you all enjoy this one!
--
A while ago, my Environmental Science class has been studying The theory of Evolution by means of natural selection. Many people, religious and secular, believe that science and religion don't mix and that one must pick which army to fight with. I talked about this a previous article here. In this post I want to point out what makes sense and what doesn't when it comes to Evolution.
Literally, evolution is simply change in organisms over time. This is undeniable fact. There are no longer dinosaurs and woolly mammoths roaming the Earth, and there are no Dodo Birds and Pteradactyls commanding the skies. Most organisms present today weren't present hundreds of millions of years ago and vice-versa. The arguing and debate comes in when the cause of this change is questioned.
Charles Darwin, along with many progressive scientists of his area, accepted this theory of slow and gradual change overtime. Darwin furthered his theory with natural selection. While he didn't know of genes and DNA his explanation, in a nutshell, was that when the environment changes, organisms with certain traits that are more able to handle this change, survive longer and pass on those traits while the other traits die out. Fitness, or an organism's ability to survive by competing for resources, is the main determiner of the most common traits in a population. This is what we call natural selection.
The caveat in natural selection is that individual organisms do not change. These are simply organisms that already have whatever adaptations proved useful in increasing the organism's fitness. There is a set gene pool for that population and any adaptations to a change in the environment must come from that set gene pool. For example, lets say that there is a species of bird called Bird X. Bird X drinks nectar from flower Y, which is the most common flower in the area. Short is the most common type of beak in the Bird X population because the Flower Y's nectar is at the top. Long beak Bird Xs are rare but do exist. All of the sudden a fire hits the prairie and burns every single Flower Y. Now the only flowers left is Flower Z. Its nectar is really down in its stem and can only be reached by a long beak. Since the short beak Bird Xs can't eat anymore, they die and the only ones remaining are the long beak Bird Xs. That is natural selection. It makes logical sense, the genes that are already present in a population that make the organism more fit for its environment are always the most common ones. The fact that the dominant traits can change means it works, plain and simple.
So organisms change over time, and species can also change within themselves to adapt to their environment. That makes sense, now here's what doesn't.
Natural selection is great, but it wouldn't work if there wasn't already life on Earth. So where did the first organism come from? The odds of random elements around the Earth coming together and forming and single functioning bacterial cell are.......and then the odds of that bacterial cell changing into all the organisms around the world is simply impossible.
Evolution simply can't account for the first organism which is a gaping hole that can't be ignored. If your job is to build houses but all you can do is improve on houses that are already there, you're a useless home builder. You wouldn't invest in a company that knows how it's going to succeed with 10 million dollars but doesn't know how to get that start-up cash in the first place. You simply can't have a middle and an end without the beginning.
So there isn't a beginning, and the middle is pretty flimsy itself. Evolution and natural selection explain how species change, but not how speciation occurs. Speciation is the formation of a new species. So if organisms change, why can't they form new species? The reason is that the gene pool, the basic DNA that forms an organism doesn't change. No matter what traits come up and go away, that Bird X is still Bird X, regardless of the size of its beak. Scientists say that mutations in an organism create some of the adaptations in a species. Which makes sense, sometimes 'faulty' DNA replication ends up helping the organism's fitness. which, I might add, has some tremendously low odds by itself. But again, those new traits are still the same species. A mutation that maybe makes an organism faster, gives it a bigger beak doesn't turn it a new animal. A fish doesn't magically sprout lungs and feet and walks on land. Scientists claim that these mutations, when enough of them happen, turn the organism into a completely different species, but as we've seen. Mutations tend to lead to genetic disorders and death, as opposed to creating a completely new species through faulty DNA replication.
In essence, new species occur when other animals have a ton of mutations in their DNA, none of which kill them, and which replace the most vital genes of the organism. The chances of this? You have a better shot of winning the lottery...without buying a ticket.
Evolution has its merits, but simply has too many holes to be considered the answer to life. We need to take it for what it is, and nothing more. If people can believe that this world happened by chance, a fluke, then what right do those people have to tell someone else that a supernatural being such as God couldn't have done it himself?
In my humble opinion, to be a scientist familiar with statistics and probability, and accept The Theory of Evolution as the answer to all aspects of life on Earth is simply ludicrous. The true scientists know that with every question asked, a thousand more form. Science will never be "finished", there will always be questions unanswered and hypotheses unproven. The mystery of the world is one that we are slowing uncovering but never totally will. This drives us to explore, to question and to understand, and once we understand the complexities of life we realize that the answers aren't always what enlighten, but rather, the questions we asked to get them.
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