Do You think that evolution has really taken place? Why?

Answer 1

No I do not think that Macro evolution has occurred. I will let some of the leading evolutionists of our time do the explaining for me:

STEPHEN J. GOULD, HARVARD, "The Cambrian Explosion occurred in a geological moment, and we have reason to think that all major anatomical designs may have made their evolutionary appearance at that time. ...not only the phylum Chordata itself, but also all its major divisions, arose within the Cambrian Explosion. So much for chordate uniqueness... Contrary to Darwin's expectation that new data would reveal gradualistic continuity with slow and steady expansion, all major discoveries of the past century have only heightened the massiveness and geological abruptness of this formative event..." Nature, Vol.377, 26 10/95, p.682

Stephen J. Gould, Harvard, "Our modern phyla represent designs of great distinctness, yet our diverse world contains nothing in between sponges, corals, insects, snails, sea urchins, and fishes (to choose standard representatives of the most prominent phyla).", Natural History, p.15, Oct. 1990

Steven J. Gould, Harvard, "The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of the fossils.", Nat.His., V.86, p.13

STEPHEN J. Gould, Harvard , "Every paleontologist knows that most species don't change. That's bothersome....brings terrible distress. ....They may get a little bigger or bumpier but they remain the same species and that's not due to imperfection and gaps but stasis. And yet this remarkable stasis has generally been ignored as no data. If they don't change, its not evolution so you don't talk about it." Lecture at Hobart & William Smith College, 14/2/1980.

S.J.Gould, Harvard, "We can tell tales of improvement for some groups, but in honest moments we must admit that the history of complex life is more a story of multifarious variation about a set of basic designs than a saga of accumulating excellence. ...I regard the failure to find a clear 'vector of progress' in life's history as the most puzzling fact of the fossil record. ...we have sought to impose a pattern that we hoped to find on a world that does not really display it." Natural History, 2/82, p.2

Richard Dawkins, Cambridge, "And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. ...the only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation...", The Blind Watchmaker, 1986, p229-230

COLIN PATTERSON, Senior Paleontologist, British Museum of Nat. History, "You say I should at least 'show a photo of the fossil from which each type or organism was derived.' I will lay it on the line--there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument." "It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another.... But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test. .... I don't think we shall ever have any access to any form of tree which we can call factual." HARPER'S, Feb.1984, p.56

Colin Patterson, B.M.N.H. "Well, it seems to me that they (evolutionists) have accepted that the fossil record doesn't give them the support they would value so they searched around to find another model and found one. ...When you haven't got the evidence, you make up a story that will fit the lack of evidence." Darwin's Enigma, p.100

Mark Ridley, Oxford, "...a lot of people just do not know what evidence the theory of evolution stands upon. They think that the main evidence is the gradual descent of one species from another in the fossil record. ...In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favour of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation." New Scientist, June, 1981, p.831

H.S. Ladd, UCLA, "Most paleontologists today give little thought to fossiliferous rocks older than the Cambrian, thus ignoring the most important missing link of all. Indeed the missing Pre-Cambrian record cannot properly be described as a link for it is in reality, about nine-tenths of the chain of life: the first nine-tenths.", Geo. So. of Am. Mem. 1967, Vol.II


Now let me show you what one of England's leading atheists and evolutionists declared.

Former Atheist Says God Exists
By: Cliff Kinkaid (Editor of the AIM Report)
Insight On The News
December 21, 2004
Dallas Morning News

It didn't make news, on the front or back pages of leading American newspapers, but Professor Antony Flew, a prominent British philosopher who is considered the world's best-known atheist, has cited advancements in science as proof of the existence of God. This is comparable to Hugh Hefner announcing that he is becoming a celibate.

At a symposium sponsored by the Institute for Metascientific Research, Flew said he has come to believe in God based on developments in DNA research. Flew, author of the book, Darwinian Evolution, declared, "What I think the DNA material has done is show that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements together. The enormous complexity by which the results were achieved look to me like the work of intelligence."

Associated Press distributed a December 9 story by religion writer Richard N. Ostling about Flew's conversion. Flew told AP that his current ideas had some similarity with those of U.S. "intelligent design" theorists, who believe the complexity of life points to an intelligent source of life, rather than the random and natural processes posited by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

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Last week, The Associated Press broke the news that the most famous atheist in the academic world over the last half-century, Professor Antony Flew of England's University of Reading, now accepts the existence of God.

Mr. Flew's best-known plaint for atheism, "Theology and Falsification," was delivered in 1950 to the Socratic Club, chaired by none other than C.S. Lewis. This paper went on to become the most widely reprinted philosophical publication of the last five decades and set the agenda for modern atheism.

Now, in a remarkable reversal, Mr. Flew holds that the universe was brought into being by an infinite intelligence.

"What I think the DNA material has done is show that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements together," he said. "The enormous complexity by which the results were achieved look to me like the work of intelligence."

Given the conventional wisdom of some psychologists that people rarely, if ever, change their worldview after the age of 30, this radical new position adopted by an 81-year-old thinker may seem startling.

But Mr. Flew's change was consistent with his career-long principle of following the evidence where it led him. And his newfound theism is the product neither of a Damascus road experience nor of fresh philosophical arguments, but by his sustained analysis of scientific data.

Mr. Flew's conclusion is consistent with the actual beliefs of most modern scientific pioneers, from Albert Einstein to quantum physicists like Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg. In their view, the intelligence of the universe - its laws - points to an intelligence that has no limitation - "a superior mind," as Einstein put it.

Not a few of our men and women of letters, it would seem, have been looking for God in all the wrong places. Those who dismiss God as a product of psychological conditioning or pre-scientific myth-making have not come to terms with the essential assumptions underlying the scientific enterprise.

Science assumes that the universe follows laws, which leads to the question of how the laws of nature came into being. How does the electron know what to do? In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking asks what breathes fire into the equations of science and gives a universe for them to describe. The answer to the question of why the universe exists, he concluded, would reveal to us "the mind of God."

Last May, I helped organize a New York University symposium on religion and science, with the participation of Mr. Flew and others. Our starting point was science's new knowledge that the universe's history is a story of quantum leaps of intelligence, the sudden yet systematic appearance of intrinsically intelligent systems arranged in an ascending order.

Many people assume that the intelligence in the universe somehow evolved out of nonintelligence, given chance and enough time, and in the case of living beings, through natural selection and random mutation. But even in the most hardheadedly materialistic scenario, intelligence and intelligent systems come fully formed from day one.

Matter came with all its ingenious, mathematically precise laws from the time it first appeared. Life came fully formed with the incredibly intelligent symbol processing of DNA, the astonishing phenomenon of protein-folding and the marvel of replication from its very first appearance. Language, the incarnation of conceptual thought with its inexplicable structure of syntax, symbols and semantics, appeared out of the blue, again with its essential infrastructure as is from day one.

The evidence we have shows unmistakably that there was no progressive, gradual evolution of nonintelligence into intelligence in any of the fundamental categories of energy, life or mind. Each one of the three had intrinsically intelligent structures from the time each first appeared. Each, it would seem, proceeds from an infinitely intelligent mind in a precise sequence.

We can, if we want, declare that there is no reason why there are reasonable laws, no explanation for the fact there are explanations, no logic underlying logical processes. But this is manifestly not the conclusion adopted by Einstein, Heisenberg and, most recently, Antony Flew.

Roy Abraham Varghese of Garland is the author of The Wonder of the World: A Journey from Modern Science to the Mind of God (Tyr Publishing). He helped organize presentations by Antony Flew in Dallas on two occasions. Readers may contact Mr. Varghese through tyrpublishing.com.

Answer 2

Yes, because there are much evidence that evolution has taken place and is an on-going process.
First we've got the fossils, which shows how certain animals could have undergone changes to become as they are now, one of the most interesting findings is the fossils of the horse which shows a great deal of the evolution of this animal.
then there is the fact that the environments on the earth's surface are forever-changing ones so that it is logical that animals should also change, proof is that those that cannot adapt to changes become endangered and finally extinct.
the presence of vestigial organs, e.g. the appendix is also among the different pieces of evidence.
And then there are the notions of analogy and homology among the different body parts of different groups of animals, e.g the fins of dolphins and fishes are analogous, that is they are similar due to similarity in function, on the other hand, it has been found that the skeletal structure of different mammals have a similar plan due to the same evolutionary origin, in this case these structures are said to be homologous...

it is sad that these days evolutionary scientist have perverted the idea of evolution so much that people no longer believe in it!!!
Of course all pieces of evidence are not true!!! some have been modified or misinterpreted, for example the australopithecus was never a primitive human but a primitive orang utan! others have been created by some scientists themselves only for the sake of glory!!

Answer 3

I believe evolution occurred and is still happening. If you look at the evidence of fossils trapped in rocks and the similarities of features of different species in locations, you can note they must have a common ancestry. Also our blood salt content, if dated back to the theorized beginning of life, is quite accurate. Finally you can see microevolution every day (mutations in bacteria and viruses and some species of animals)--if you add up all the microevolution changes over a long period of time, you get evolution.

This is much more believable than a story how the earth was made by some being.

Answer 4

Evolution is at work as we speak. Nature is seemingly cruel, but the weak are doomed to fail, the strong to survive. Genetics pass on from those that have adapted to changing environments, making their offspring more able to cope with circumstances that their predecessors would have found intolerable. This is something that worries me much, as there is a lot of interference from mankind, anymore, and the system is breaking down on certain levels.
Are we humans a result of evolution? Without question.
Even if you believe that Adam and Eve were the first, consider how we became white, black, red or yellow. Our environments dictate the need to protect ourselves from the sun or extreme cold. Pigments in the skin developed in darker races in hotter climates, while those who needed clothing to protect them from cold were also, then protected fron the sun and became pale skinned. I could elaborate further, but hope to have made my point.
A very good read is the book 'Naked Ape', by Desmond Morris. You may find it very interesting.

Answer 5

I do.

1) Plenty of articles in New Scientist giving details of evolution going on right now.

2) When I was studying Microbiology in university we studied bacteria evolving.

3) In Biology textbooks the example is given of mothhs in England which evolved in polluted areas to have darker wings.

Answer 6

i think evolution is an ongoing process. so long as we are alive we are evolving. to me there is no definite end to evolution only stages or periods in time of how we are and how we have come to be...maybe one day we will reach a level of total enlightenment and evolution would no more be necessary, but that seems unlikely unless we can assure ourselves with infinite time to know and understand practically everything in the universe ;)

Answer 7

Yes.

Because, come on.. And Suddenly there was light!


There is NO EVIDENCE to support that there is a higher power. But there is evidence to support evolution. Why believe in something you can't prove is real?

Answer 8

Yeah, what's with those stupid scientists??

How can they take thousands of pieces of experimental and observational evidence, from almost field of scientific endeavour - from physics and geology to paleontology and biogeography to chemisty, microbiology, anatomy, genetics and medicine, and come to the conclusion that all of these pieces of evidence are real?

How can they accept hard physical data over wild speculation and superstitious gospel?

What is with these people?

Just because every single piece of evidence gathered for over one hundred and fifty years completely and totally supports the theory of biological evolution through natural selection, these scientists actually accept it as true?

What a bunch of sillies.

Answer 9

Yes, but not to the extreme of my grandpa was a monkey!
The whole thing with mammoth and elephants is the type of evolution I believe to have taken place, and still slowly around us is.

Answer 10

Yes, the Discovery Channel is very entertaining.

Answer 11

Yes, that conclusion is inescapable. Unless your religion dictates otherwise.