Your thoughts on Evolution?

[Luxeraph]

I would say that the only real "gap" the theory has is what makes living organisms eat to grow to duplicate, or are there living organisms that just exist till they run out of fuel or other that just eat but just to regain the energy lost or ones that eat and grow but never duplicate?

[Viaje]

So why is it remarkable that our million sided die rolled specifically on "create life as we know it"?

I rephrased my statement as you quoted me, but you seem to have a hard time understanding that your comparison of people doing stuff to life surviving through evolution was utter shit.

I never compared rolling a die to the creation of life; in fact, the purpose of the die analogy was the exact opposite.
The die analogy was created as a parallel of your "people doing stuff" example.
The probability of a die roll is nothing like the probability of life evolving in a specific manner.
Therefore, the "people doing stuff" example is nothing like the probability of life evolving in a specific manner.

Now, again, would you care to explain how anything you said here has anything to do with what I said here?

[Kalovale]

Uh.. It's a verifiable theory, what's there to disagree? Whether or not that's how we came to be what we came to be cannot be objectively known with 100% certainty, but then again, neither can any other scientific discovery. Just draw a line where you feel comfortable to be "good enough", find enough evidence and move on doing other things.

[Abbeh]

What do the members of southperry think of this? Is Evolution a big conspiracy? Is it real? fake?

I'm currently double-majoring in geology and biology at my university, emphasizing paleontology and evolution, respectively.

That probably says more than enough about where I stand on the subject and I think that's all I'm gonna say here.

[Sardines]

Hey guys, I think this is a pretty neat topic. But what is evolution?

[DrRusty]

Hey guys, I think this is a pretty neat topic. But what is evolution?

Well, putting it in my own words - the gradual change of a species over generations that is influenced by that species' environment and/or mutations in a species' genome.

I would say that the only real "gap" the theory has is what makes living organisms eat to grow to duplicate, or are there living organisms that just exist till they run out of fuel or other that just eat but just to regain the energy lost or ones that eat and grow but never duplicate?

Living organisms consume and multiply to further the continuation of their kind. If we could live forever, there would be no need to consume and reproduce. Organisms either develop a means of reproduction (budding, autogamy, mitosis, meiosis, and allogamy) or die out.

[Shidoshi]

I would say that the only real "gap" the theory has is what makes living organisms eat to grow to duplicate, or are there living organisms that just exist till they run out of fuel or other that just eat but just to regain the energy lost or ones that eat and grow but never duplicate?

All the living organisms that couldn't feed themselves died off. All the ones that couldn't duplicate also died off. The remaining ones could duplicate and feed themselves. Easy as pie!

[SaptaZapta]

I would say that the only real "gap" the theory has is what makes living organisms eat to grow to duplicate, or are there living organisms that just exist till they run out of fuel or other that just eat but just to regain the energy lost or ones that eat and grow but never duplicate?

As far as I know, that's simply how we define "life".
Things that grow but don't multiply, like stalactites, aren't considered "alive".
Things that multiply but don't grow, like viruses, are also not strictly considered "alive".

[KhainiWest]

All the living organisms that couldn't feed themselves died off. All the ones that couldn't duplicate also died off. The remaining ones could duplicate and feed themselves. Easy as pie!

So now, we only kill animals to, quote, thin out their numbers. If we don't hunt, then these animals will grow too big in number and they won't have enough food. So you see, we have to kill animals, or else they'll DIE.

Mmmwe're environmentalists.

Comin' up next, we're gonna drop some napalm on an unsuspecting family of beavers. And also, try to thin out the numbers of some endangered species.

Flawless logic.

[Razmos]

I've grown up knowing that evolution was just a fact of life, something that happens over thousands of years and is something interesting which will never affect me in my lifetime.

I don't understand how people can "Not believe it" on the basis of no proof when there is more proof of evolution than there is proof of a god. and saying that things we don't know about are proof of gods existence is just silly.

Bringing faith and belief into something factual like evolution is just stupid, i think that what Dr Rusty said is true, belief does not change fact. And i think that it only bothers some people because it challenges their vision of how the Earth was formed.

Also:
Read this just recently.

[Sardines]

Well, putting it in my own words - the gradual change of a species over generations that is influenced by that species' environment and/or mutations in a species' genome.

So your little sister doesn't believe this?

[The Great One]

Are some people really that unwilling to accept change that they are willing to ignore years upon years of evidence supporting evolution.

[Luxeraph]

Living organisms consume and multiply to further the continuation of their kind. If we could live forever, there would be no need to consume and reproduce. Organisms either develop a means of reproduction (budding, autogamy, mitosis, meiosis, and allogamy) or die out.

What made them do so?

All the living organisms that couldn't feed themselves died off. All the ones that couldn't duplicate also died off. The remaining ones could duplicate and feed themselves. Easy as pie!

As far as I know, that's simply how we define "life".
Things that grow but don't multiply, like stalactites, aren't considered "alive".
Things that multiply but don't grow, like viruses, are also not strictly considered "alive".

The virus I get, but stalactites? O.o
What I meant is thing like bacteria that:
1) As the first living organism it had to came from non-living material so an organism that only borns and dies could still be around, just like stars are born and never "eat" or "grow" or "duplicate" but we have billions upon billions of them.
2) Once it somehow got the urge to "eat" to live longer it didn't mean it had to "eat" more than what it needed to restore the energy used or damaged tissue(not sure on that word) but this stage is quite fragile since the next one is way too easy to progress to from this one.
3) So we now have an organism that pretty much can live forever since it figured out that "eating" all it can find would mean that in worse times (whatever it eats is no longer around, so either it waits or searchs for it) it can manage to survive, but is there any reason to multiply? it most likely would just shorten its supply.

So even though our definition of live is it eats, it grows, it duplicates, where are the ones that didn't reach it?
It seems we only have one right now, viruses, that only duplicate but don't eat nor grow.
But still the big question is, how it went from inorganic material to something that started eating, growing and duplicating.

[Polantaris]

Considering all the evidence, it's pretty obvious at this point that evolution is true, and what happened.

More recently, the thing I hear is that (a) God started the process for our evolution, and purposely gave us an edge so that we would evolve and end up superior to the other races on the planet. Is that true? No way to know one way or the other, really, since we don't have an understanding of everything (and probably never will).

I have a question for people who believe this though: If that is true...who then created this God? You want me to believe it just popped into existence out of no where and decided to screw around with some stuff? If it's not possible for us, why is it possible for another entity?

For all those posts about very slim chances that our race could have evolved out of mere chance: Well think about this; how many hundreds of millions of planets are there? There's a lot. If the chances of sentient life being created was high, there would be other races all over the place. We'd be seeing space ships, at the very least when we're looking around with telescopes and what not. If the chances were high, at some point we would have run into another species by now, considering that we ourselves have space travel (in a very limited form, granted). If you want to consider those numbers true, it's quite possible that we're one of the lucky races that passes evolution's test. It's not like there's 3 planets in the entire universe and this one has sentient life. There's (seemingly) unlimited amounts of planets. Unlimited trails for evolution. We're just really really really lucky.

[Luxeraph]

For all those posts about very slim chances that our race could have evolved out of mere chance: Well think about this; how many hundreds of millions of planets are there? There's a lot. If the chances of sentient life being created was high, there would be other races all over the place. We'd be seeing space ships, at the very least when we're looking around with telescopes and what not. If the chances were high, at some point we would have run into another species by now, considering that we ourselves have space travel (in a very limited form, granted). If you want to consider those numbers true, it's quite possible that we're one of the lucky races that passes evolution's test. It's not like there's 3 planets in the entire universe and this one has sentient life. There's (seemingly) unlimited amounts of planets. Unlimited trails for evolution. We're just really really really lucky.

Huh?
There is also unlimited space but limited time (since the big bang), plus it took us airplanes and even satellites to find some humans (not to mention that we are still discovering new species regulary) and thats just our tiny little planet, wonder how much time and technology it would require for any other sentient life to find us and thats thinking they are looking for us.
In other words, you could have a planet with sentient life for each star but that doesn't mean they would act like us, heck not even most of the people on earth care about extraterrestrial life.

[Polantaris]

Huh?
There is also unlimited space but limited time (since the big bang), plus it took us airplanes and even satellites to find some humans (not to mention that we are still discovering new species regulary) and thats just our tiny little planet, wonder how much time and technology it would require for any other sentient life to find us and thats thinking they are looking for us.
In other words, you could have a planet with sentient life for each star but that doesn't mean they would act like us, heck not even most of the people on earth care about extraterrestrial life.

If you had sentient life in every star system, then how would every single one of those be as slow as us? There's been a lot of time since the Big Bang. Consider the fact that almost all recent technological achievement has been in the last 100-150 years. Consider also all the different cultures that basically did nothing different from each other in terms of technology. You have cultures that go back 20,000 years and more. When we gained sentience, we basically did nothing for a very long time (Once again, at a technology standpoint).

If there was sentient life at every single star system, there would undoubtedly races that did not have these issues. It's very possible there would be at least a few races that had no technological standstills at all.

Yes, not many people care about extraterrestrial life on Earth, but that's also because even if we knew they existed...what could we possibly do about it? They haven't visited us, and we can't possibly visit them. Hell, a lot of people are stuck in the mindset that God created us and no one else, and therefore we're the only race in the universe with sentience.

[Alloy]

To anyone saying that life popping out is stadistically almost impossible.

Do you know what would have happened if it didn't happen here?

We wouldn't be discussing this. But any other lucky ones that actually "happened", most likely would.

[Corn]

Considering Southperry is pretty liberal, I doubt anyone will disagree with you.

[Viaje]

So your little sister doesn't believe this?

There are some people that believe in microevolution but not macroevolution, oddly enough.
Personally, I find this silly since the former, with enough time, results in the latter.

I have a question for people who believe this though: If that is true...who then created this God? You want me to believe it just popped into existence out of no where and decided to screw around with some stuff? If it's not possible for us, why is it possible for another entity?

"Who created God?" is a dumb question and always will be. See, it ignores the fact that, regardless of how you believe the universe and, eventually, life came into being, you damn well have to believe that there are certain things that simply existed.
For example, matter.
There will always be a "well, what came before that?" that will probably never be answered.

Your last question is rather asinine. Are you seriously asking why we can't simply will ourselves to exist as if it were a matter of choice?

For all those posts about very slim chances that our race could have evolved out of mere chance: Well think about this; how many hundreds of millions of planets are there? There's a lot. If the chances of sentient life being created was high, there would be other races all over the place. We'd be seeing space ships, at the very least when we're looking around with telescopes and what not. If the chances were high, at some point we would have run into another species by now, considering that we ourselves have space travel (in a very limited form, granted). If you want to consider those numbers true, it's quite possible that we're one of the lucky races that passes evolution's test. It's not like there's 3 planets in the entire universe and this one has sentient life. There's (seemingly) unlimited amounts of planets. Unlimited trails for evolution. We're just really really really lucky.

That's all utterly horrible speculation; far too many assumptions.
Namely, the one where you seem to equate sentience to sapience.
Then you assume that intelligent life would inevitably aim for the stars.
You also have a remarkably flawed understanding about exactly how big space is.

To anyone saying that life popping out is stadistically almost impossible.

Do you know what would have happened if it didn't happen here?

We wouldn't be discussing this. But any other lucky ones that actually "happened", most likely would.

That was the most nonsensical post I've seen in a while.
Your argument against people saying life "popping out" is statistically impossible is that, if we weren't alive, we wouldn't be able to talk about it? Hurrwhat?

Seriously people, I'm all for clarifying that evolution is an inarguable fact, but some of you have the most ridiculous justifications for believing it.

[Satellite]

People who say evolution is false are uneducated (most of the time religious) people living in denial.

Now going into details is another thing.