Are there any people here who don't believe in evolution?

Just to throw in my two cents:

There are many rational arguments made from people of faith who believe in evolution and make it work within their faith.

If the poll simply asks "Do you believe in evolution?" and "Do you consider yourself to be religious?" then the poll is thus inherently flawed as it leaves no room for any kind of amalgamation between science and faith which can, believe it or not, peacefully co-exist.

EDIT
Sorry....I got this thread mixed up with that silly poll about 'religiousness.'

 

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No, I was merely pointing up that the creationist argument sufficiently explained how the variety of modern humans could have "evolved" from an original specie-- a pair of course!

I know that humans have migrated great distances across time but if that is the case why is there not more homogeneity amongst humans around the world? Of course, the creationist argument cannot address that either.

Theories are fun but the mystery rules...

 

You can argue in the footnotes about evolution, and there are entire chapters yet to be written... But DNA has locked in the gist beyond a reasonable doubt.

We didn't just evolve from an ancient monkey thing, but from those first self replicating single cell organisms. We are closely related to all life on Earth from this perspective.

 

^^^THIS^^^

All life on earth is very, very closely related.

More than we think...

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You're wrong here. The Big Bang Theory deals with the origin of the universe. Evolution on Earth is completely independent of how the universe came to exist. All that matters for evolution is that the universe does exist, Earth does exist, and life has formed on Earth. How these things happened doesn't matter.

 

What do you mean? Genetically we are pretty darn homogeneous. Superficial physical differences can easily be attributed to settling after migration and local climates, diet, etc.. Again, we are talking about ~30-40,000 years since people settled into what we now think of as the various ethnic regions.

To me, evolution answers your question quite easily.

 

The fact that you can bang chicks from around the world and get them impregnated is proof that we are genetically homogeneous, no matter how different we might look.

 

They aren't created by different evolutionary forces. They are both homo sapiens. They can be much variety within one species, and if you look at genes, chromosomes, DNA and all that it makes sense that there would be a lot of variety.

 

The easy answer is lots of people hate science, most of which is boring and difficult. And the second coolest stories in any religion or culture's mythology are the ones about creation. I may not believe in ribs and sawdust or whatever, but I'd sure as heck watch a cartoon or CGI about it.

 

Evolution is one of my favorite subjects. I wish I could make time read up on the latest theories.

Here's a simple geek analogy that could help explain punctuated equilibrium.

Imagine you're running Windows 95 on your computer. You've been adding and removing programs. Over time, your registry gets bogged down by all the changes. At some point, your computer stops working. Individually, the changes weren't necessarily detrimental. Collectively, it changed too much.

Changes in your registry is happening in your jewels all the time. Mutations aren't necessarily immediately "positive" or "negative". They can stay neutral as long as they're passed on. But a change is a change and the overall picture becomes...different.

There are other theories on macroevolution and that isn't to say each are exclusive to others.

 

Only slightly related, but I thought the following was an interesting Google knol on Why Northern Europeans are White.

The summary is that sunlight on the skin creates vitamin D and reduces folate. In the Gulf Stream creates a unique situation where it is warm enough to farm in far northern latitudes. No Vitamin D from sunlight, and farmers get no Vitamin D from food, so the skin had to get more efficient at letting in light to maintain the balance between Vitamin D and folate.

[rquoter]

The Puzzle: Northern Europeans are Uniquely Depigmented

"White," of course, is a a social designation. The question really is, "Why are northern Europeans depigmented?" Here is a map of human skin tone.



The natives of northern Europe are oddly light-skinned. They are paler than anyone else on earth.

Most people know that it has something to do with sunlight, UV, latitude, and vitamin D. Here is a map of solar UV at the surface taken from satellite.



It matches the skin-tone map everywhere but Europe.

The closer you are to the equator, the darker your skin. This is because humans are extraordinarily sensitive to sunlight on the skin. Humans lack fur.

It Has Something to do With Solar UV and Oceans

UV rays produce vitamin D and reduce folate when they hit naked skin. And embryos are terribly vulnerable to both substances in the mother. When it comes to sunlight and skin tone, furless humans are balanced on a knife-blade.

Too much UV penetrating the skin (too pale-skinned under intense sunlight) increases Vitamin D but reduces folate. Lack of folate causes neural tube defects in the fetus, causing such congenital abnormalities as craniorachischisis, anencephalus, and spina bifida, leading to many miscarriages.

On the other hand, too little UV penetrating the skin (too dark-skinned under dim sunlight) increases folate but reduces vitamin D. Lack of vitamin D causes skeletal neonatal abnormalities (skull, chest, and leg malformations), rickets being the best known. Again, this causes miscarriages.

And so, humans adapt very quickly to solar UV. Prehistoric groups that migrated towards the equator got darker. Prehistoric groups that migrated away from the equator got lighter.

But this explanation fails for Europe. Northern Europeans are lighter than everyone to the south (Mediterraneans), to the east (Mongols and east-Asians), to the west (Native Americans across the Atlantic), and to the North (Inuit, Sammi, Chukchi, Aleut).

Clearly, there once was a factor at work in Europe other than dim sunlight. Here is another map of skin tone.



Again, the blob surrounding the Baltic Sea is like nothing else on the planet. That this pale population surrounds the Baltic gives the first hint. It must have something to do with the oceans.

Skin, Hair, and Eyes: Neoteny

Baltic depigmentation is not just in the skin. Here is a map of hair color.



The pigment "melanin" colors hair as well as skin. Adult blonds are native only to the same unique region.

Children around the world are often blond, but their hair darkens at puberty. So it is not just northern European adult skin that lacks pigment. It is also adult European hair.

The Baltic depigmentation is not just in the skin and hair. Here is a map of eye color.



Melanin colors eyes, as well as skin and hair. Adults with blue eyes are native only to the same unique region.

(Babies around the world are often born with blue eyes, but their eyes darken within a few months.)

So it is not just northern European skin and hair that lack pigment. It is also northern European eyes. Skin, hair, eyes: adult European pigmentation resembles that of children elsewhere. This gives the second hint--neoteny.

When Did it Happen?

To solve the puzzle, find out when it happened. When did the inhabitants of the Baltic region lose their melanin? It must have happened after 16 KYA (16 thousand years ago). The Baltic region was covered by ice before then and nobody lived there.

In fact, it happened after 13 KYA. Cave art from that time always shows normally pigmented people. Notice that in this painting from 13 KYA, the hunters are the same color as the deer.

It must have happened before 4.6 KYA because depigmented people first began to appear in art at that time. These Egyptian statues were painted in 2613 BC.



They portray Prince Rahotep and his consort Nefret, of the Old Kingdom, early Fourth Dynasty. Notice that he is brown but she is pink.

And so, the next step in solving the puzzle is to ask, "What happened in Europe between 13 KYA and 4.6 KYA?"

What happened was the invention and spread of agriculture. Before 10 KYA people everywhere lived by hunting and gathering. Then, almost simultaneously, cereal growing was invented in four spots around the globe:

Iraq (wheat, barley, rye), China (rice), Nigeria (sorghum), and Mexico (corn or maize).

It is Connected With Eating Cereal

What does skin tone have to do with eating cereal? Even in darkness, humans get vitamin D from eating meat and fish. Otherwise they could never inhabit the arctic.

This USDA chart shows the vitamin D content of various foods.



All meats have some vitamin D. Fish have very high amounts. But grains have no vitamin D at all.

People who eat grains do not get vitamin D from food; they must get it from sunlight.

This usually works out fine because grains grow only where it is warm. And this means only in latitudes with bright sunlight, with one exception.

People who live in low latitudes, where they can live off grains, get plenty of sunlight. People who live in dim sunlight cannot grow grains, and so they get vitamin D from the meat and fish that they eat.

The Gulf Stream is the Cause

The exception? There is only one spot on the planet where grains will grow despite sub-arctic sunlight.

It is where the warm waters of the Gulf Stream wash ashore. The Baltic is the only place on earth where ocean currents keep it warm enough to grow grain despite dim sunlight.

When the inhabitants of this region switched to grain about 6 KYA, they suddenly got insufficient vitamin D to survive. They had stopped eating mostly meat and fish in a place where sunlight was too dim to produce vitamin D in normally pigmented skin.

And so they adapted by retaining into adulthood the infantile trait of extreme paleness. Blond hair and blue eyes were other infantile traits that were just swept along accidentally.

For the detailed text of this topic, complete with footnoted references, citations, and all the peer-reviewed material, visit The Paleo-Etiology of Human Skin Tone.

To hear the presentation of this topic as an audio file recorded in Second Life, complete with PowerPoint slides, visit Audio Lecture E1.

[/rquoter]

And for people interested in prehistoric migration patterns, National Geographic is in the middle of a massive undertaking called The Genographic Project that maps out patterns of human migration in prehistory using genetic markers. And this matches up with language drift, which clearly indicates that all the Indo-European languages (and therefore the people who speak them) evolved from a baseline language from somewhere in Central Asia.

 

Yes that is true but then you could say that but that is such a generality as to be meaningless. Every theory then is a subset of the Big Bang but you don't hear people bringing up how the Universe was created when discussing the theory of aerodynamic lift.

 

australians are all black??

 

The natives are. The ex-cons aren't...

 

In theory I could agree with this, but in practice this it’s not how these discussions go. If we were to limit the scope of the discussion the way you suggest then of course we’d have to apply the same rules to the other theories being discussed as well, and in the case of Creation that would mean that any discussion about the existence of God would be out, because that would be outside of the scope of the discussion. We’re not talking about the existence of God, after all. We’re talking about the origin of life on earth. I’m quite sure many people who post in these threads would have none of that, however, because their primary purpose here is to argue against the existence of God. A number of them have essentially denied Creation by saying that there could not possibly be a life form in the universe so great that it could construct the earth. To believe in such a thing is to believe in magic, some have said, but if you open that door then of course you have to do the same for the theory of evolution, and you have to explain the magic of how the matter in the universe appeared out of nothing.

Wherever you set the boundaries for the discussion you have to apply the same rules to both sides, and since many of the anti-creation people would never accept the existence of God as a precondition, then we are necessarily left with a broader discussion that includes questions about the existence of God and the question of where all the matter in the universe came from.

 

Very cool. It’s a bit odd that Nefret is light skinned given where she’s from, however. I wonder if there is at least a small percentage of light skinned people in all populations. This would make sense. In climates where they would be subjected to more of the sun’s radiation they would tend to burn and get skin cancer more, and therefore have a higher mortality rate and a lower reproduction rate, while in northern Europe they would have an advantage, and their genes would eventually become dominant. Natural selection at work.

 

It does answer it better than creationism (take that rhadamanthus). I'm choosing to focus on the majesty and grandeur of the earth and humanity. As the kids (used to) say: It's all good!

Some effects of evolution are inarguable. Some version of creation is still plausible. I'm not going to worry about it too much.

I've enjoyed the contributions and will try and catch up on the reading.

 

Ottomaton - thanks for sharing that!