http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome
Nutshell version: WTF?
Genetiscists have been baffled since the genome was mapped. It should have been much more complex in the normal way, instead it behaves differently than anything on earth. This has been explained away as evolution, but you are saying the mechanism of evolution evolved. It's not a very neat explanation.
I don't really understand your objection here--like I said before, there are innumerable types of "unique" life. I don't see anything in the article implying we took a "new" mechanism of evolution. You sound bitter/resentful (the "explained away" part) about it--I don't really understand why. Seeking an explanation of empirical observations is what science is..
DiebytheSword said:
These things are seperate, and not interchangeable. If life can simply happen, without animating force, it has not ever happened somewhere where it can be observed. Why does new life not spring up from primordial oozes still with us?
Conditions of modern Earth aren't anything like what they were billions of years ago when life evolved. We're created life out of nothing in the laboratory--if you consider viruses alive. The polio virus was completely synthesized out of materials. (
http://www.sunysb.edu/ovprpub/tsc/polio.html)
In controlled experiments, we're also recreated what we think were the primordial conditions back on Earth--gas composition, frequent lightning, etc--and found that base amino acids (the "building blocks of life") are created--though we don't yet know how they made the jump to actual life.
DiebytheSword said:
A human can choose to be evil or good. A human can choose to be close to god, or far from him. That is the purpose of the soul. It is the part of you that will be beside god or as far away from him as possible when you pass (be that hell or back to recycling on earth). That is my "romantic" notion: the ability to choose. Some animals display this, that is why I say there may be a dividing line.
This is an interesting subject of research--both from a philosophical and biological standpoint. Different philosophers argue that we do, or don't, have free will. But the more we come to understand psychiatry and biology, the more we're seeing that behavior is a result of our genetics.
Part of this is "the blame game," like Jack Thompson--Grand Theft Auto
made Johnny shoot up his school! While we can see that's pretty unlikely, genetics are being used to explain all sorts of human behaviors, even accepted in the court room: predispositions to violence, addiction, even sex.
As it relates to liability, culpability and our justice system--this is something that conservatives in general, and especially religious people, dislike. Our contemporary criminal justice system is based on the (not exclusively) Judeo-Christian notion that people choose to commit crimes out of weakness of character, moral flaw, evilness, etc.
However, the more research is done, the more and more we find that behavior is largely influenced by our genetics and environment--factors an individual, at least as a child, has no control over. A child who sees his mother beaten by his father is
much more likely to beat his own future wife. A child who has been sexually abused is orders of magnitude more likely to abuse children themselves.
Kids who see violence in the street, live with school shootings and gang warfare in the streets are much more likely to get involved with it.
Does this mean that they're just evil people who decided to be evil, when a "rational" person should've been able to see avoiding that, getting an education, etc--is the way to succeed?
The usual conservative objection to this is that "but not
every person abused as a child turns into an abuser himself." Yes, that's true. But you can't account for every factor. Who knows if the children who didn't end up abusing themselves didn't have a better support system to deal with the trauma, or opportunities to better themselves/escape from it? There are far too many factors and no way to perform a controlled study, which is why we're using statistics in the first place.
Our criminal justice system almost exclusively places blame solely on the criminal, rather than the genetics that influenced and the environment that created the criminal. Which is why we have the highest, in both absolute and relative terms, number of people in jail in the US than anywhere on the planet--including communist China, Iran, Russia, you name it.
We end up with a criminal justice system that actually makes people even more hardened criminals--turns a petty thief into a hardened criminal--and punishes scores of drug-users for being poor people looking for an escape FROM that criminal world, without helping to rehabilitate them.
Note that none of this has anything to do with evolution--except in that I don't believe the "ability to choose" you mentioned is actually real. I think we do have free will in a certain sense--but the rosy pink ideal that everyone "chooses" to be either good or evil is ignorant, wishful thinking. It's much easier to simply "blame" someone for choosing to be evil. But it doesn't mean much, and doesn't
help either side.
DiebytheSword said:
Yet you are willing to have faith in science? Everyone has their truths, I think you have yours, and I certainly have mine.
What exactly are you trying to imply?
Science is the search for truth using empirical observations ("facts") and formulating
theories to explain them. What exactly do I have faith in? Empirical, unbiased observation?
DiebytheSword said:
You simply choose to believe in evolution though it cannot be proven.
Wikipedia said:
Critics of evolution frequently assert that evolution is "just a theory", with the intent of emphasizing evolution's unproven nature, or of characterizing it as a matter of opinion rather than of fact or evidence. This reflects a misunderstanding of the meaning of theory in a scientific context: whereas in colloquial speech a theory is a conjecture or guess, in science a theory is simply an explanation or model of the world that makes testable predictions. When evolution is used to describe a theory, it refers to an explanation for the diversity of species and their ancestry. An example of evolution as theory is the modern synthesis of Darwinian natural selection and Mendelian inheritance. As with any scientific theory, the modern synthesis is constantly debated, tested, and refined by scientists. There is an overwhelming consensus in the scientific community that it remains the only robust model that accounts for the known facts concerning evolution.[16]
Critics also state that evolution is not a fact. In science, a fact is a verified empirical observation; in colloquial contexts, however, a fact can simply refer to anything for which there is overwhelming evidence. For example, in common usage theories such as "the Earth revolves around the Sun" and "objects fall due to gravity" may be referred to as "facts", even though they are purely theoretical. From a scientific standpoint, therefore, the theory of evolution may be called a "fact" for the same reason that gravity can: under the technical definition, this applies to the observed process of evolution occurring whenever a population of organisms genetically changes over time, whereas under the colloquial definition, this applies to evolutionary theory's well-established nature. Thus, evolution is widely considered both a theory and a fact by scientists.[17][18][19]
Similar confusion is involved in objections that evolution is "unproven";[20] strict proof is possible only in logic and mathematics, not science, so this is trivially true, and no more an indictment of evolution than calling it a "theory" is. The confusion arises, however, in that the colloquial meaning of proof is simply "compelling evidence", in which case scientists would indeed consider evolution "proven". The distinction is an important one in philosophy of science, as it relates to the lack of absolute certainty in all empirical claims, not just evolution.[21]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objections_to_evolution (This, far better than I could, documents essentially every objection to evolution).
DiebytheSword said:
Again, Micro vs Macro. Whenever I mention Evolution alone, it is in the context of Macro evolution. I do believe that types change withing their type, wolves can domesticate and become dogs, and evolve to suit their new parasitic lifestyles. They do not become opposable thumb weilding, ape like, animals to get at the pantry door though.
You've already acknowledged macro-evolution;
through micro-evolution. Yes, species may change a little, creating many slightly different species.
But give those species enough time, enough micro-evolution, and those species are no longer recognizable as the same creature.