From: foolm0ron | #076
I mean Evolution as in the "fact" that life started off as the primordial ooze and just evolved from there to our current state.
That's not evolution. That's abiogenesis. Evolution makes absolutely zero predictions about how life originated.
Personally, I believe that evolution exists in the micro, but not necessarily in the macro. In other words, yes, I believe that individual species are more than capable of evolving via natural selection over a long period of time.
And responding to SmartMuffin, there is only one difference between macro and micro evolution. The time span. Believing that a species can change over time is all that evolution really claims. We have actually found mountains of evidence that the species that currently exist arose from common ancestors, but I can't really explain that very well. I'm a physics student, not a biology one. I will point out that we predicted the evolutionary path leading to whales, then went out and found so many transitional fossils that it's entirely impossible to determine where one species ends and the other begins.
Of course, evolution on that scale takes millions of years, so I can't exactly point out a recent example to you or anything.
Where it gets trickier, and still has yet to be proven is that species can evolve to radically different other species.
Its been proven better than gravity has. I'm not really kiding about that, the theory of gravity has so many holes in it it isn't funny. But moving on...
Keep in mind, the practical message from this is that humanity is no more unique and significant than a catfish. Whether it's "true" or not, I'm not prepared to have a society where that is the prevailing value system.
See, I don't get this. Every species is unique, and we've established importance pretty well through our takeover of the entire world. And do you really think that people who believe that humans aren't all that special are bad people? Do their actions offend you? Because if not, then I fail to see why you'd fear such a society.
Anyways, I keep runing into your posts when I have to leave fairly shortly. I'll get back to you later today.
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