Re: Christian DESTROYS Evolutionist Teacher

To: J

Of course, this video comes across as staged rather than spontaneous.

My degree is in biology, and my education convinced me that evolution is the best explanation for the diversity of life.

I'm not going to claim to know everything, but I do try to stay well informed about the subjects I have opinions on.

I feel that the video is full of inaccuracies, and I don't think a real biologist would respond the way the person in the video does.

The claim that there are no transitional species is simply false. The fossil record is incomplete and never will be complete, but many of the species we have discovered can reasonably be viewed as transitional between earlier and later forms. For example, there is a well-documented transition between land mammals and whales and dolphins.

However, every time paleontologists discover a new fossil that fills a gap—for example, if they connect species A and C by finding an intermediate species B—critics simply argue that we are now missing the transitions between A and B, and between B and C. The expectation of an infinitely detailed fossil record is unrealistic. Fossilization is a rare event, and evolution often proceeds relatively rapidly in response to changing environmental pressures, leaving comparatively few fossils from those transitional populations.

There are a couple of facts that are strongly supported by the evidence:

1. The Earth is very old.
2. Simpler organisms appeared before more complex ones.

How did the more complex organisms arise? One could argue that God created them directly, but we do not have physical evidence for that. The simpler scientific explanation is that complex organisms evolved from simpler ones. Many creationists try to challenge the mechanisms by asking questions such as, "How could this possibly work?" But even if we did not fully understand every mechanism, that would not change the historical evidence that evolution occurred. The evidence tells us that it happened.

That said, we do have a good understanding of the mechanisms involved. DNA replication is not a perfect process, and extremely small mutations occur in every generation. If too many harmful mutations accumulate, the organsim is often not viable. In fact, roughly half of all pregnancies end in spontaneous miscarriage before the mother even realizes she is pregnant, often because of chromosomal or other genetic abnormalities.

Some mutations, however, are neutral or beneficial. Those mutations increase genetic diversity, and that diversity gives populations a better chance of surviving changing environmental pressures. Over many generations, natural selection acting on that genetic variation can produce the large-scale evolutionary changes observed in the fossil record and in living organisms.

Some limited evolution has been observed in organisms alive today.

P.S. I meant to add that birds are part of Theropods that make up dinosaurs. Many theropod dinosaurs shared characteristics in common with birds, such as feathers.


Birds have been reclassified as avian dinosaurs, with only the non-avian dinosaurs considered extinct. I'm not totally comfortable with this change in classification. It seems to me that birds are different enough from what we think of as dinosaurs to be considered separate from them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theropoda

"Birds are the only extant members of Dinosauria, and are a type of paravian theropods."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird