evolution???

Question

if scientists DIDNT say that the Earth is a billion years old, would the evolution theroy be out the window??

Answer 1

No. The simple, but correct definition for evolution - "change in gene frequencies over time" Large changes can take a long time to occur, but small changes can occur in a few, or even a single, generation. Let's say that a chicken farmer notices a young chicken that produces red eggs. The farmer thinks that red eggs might sell well, so he backcrosses the chicken back to its father to see if more red-egg laying chickens will be produced. With selective breeding, the farmer can have a whole flock of red-egg laying chickens in just a few years. This change - from white-egg laying to red-egg laying, is one type of evolution.
This example is known as "artificial evolution" only because humans exert the selection pressure - in this case, breeding only red-egg laying chickens until you have a whole flock of them. Other examples include "super bugs" - bacteria that is now resistant to most, if not all, antibiotics. This was caused by the overuse of antibiotics, which killed all of the bacteria except for those that carried a gene that allow them to survive the antibiotics. At first, bacteria with these genes were very rare, which is why new antibiotics work so well. But as we killed off almost all of the bacteria, only those with the antibiotic-resistance genes survived, until they became very common, and the antibiotic no longer works. One "superbug" that has been in the news recently is Staphylococcus aureus. This bacteria used to be very sensitive to antibiotics, in fact Alexander Fleming used it when he developed penicillin in 1943. But now only 2% of S. aureus is sensitive to penicillin, the rest is resistant.

Answer 2

The billions number shocked scientists when it first appeared. The estimates, based on a variety of techniques, grew until radiodating became the standard. Each time, a new, larger number was announced, it was met with shock, not just in the general, but also in the scientific community.
A lot of the estimates of evolutionary time are based on dates from radiometric dating. If some grand discovery suddenly showed that the Earth were younger, many of the calculated estimates would be readjusted. Evolution started about three and a half billion years ago, but only became "interesting" half a billion years ago. I suspect that numbers under a billion years (but not much lower) could allow for evolution.

Answer 3

There is evidence in favour of evolution from so many different scientific disciplines that the case is proved beyond, not just reasonable doubt but beyond any doubt whatsoever. Evolution is a theory only in the scientific sense that a theory is a way to explain observations. Evolution is not a theory in the everyday sense that your theory that the butler is the thief might be wrong. If evolution was wrong in anything more than a few minor details, then everything we've learned from geography, geology, chemistry, physics, medicine, astronomy and biology in the last 500 years would have to be wrong. All the scientific disciplines reinforce each other. For instance, geological evidence about the last ice age, blood group frequencies among various ethnic groups, DNA evidence, linguistic studies of Asian and native American languages, zoological studies of animals and archaeological evidence all point to human migration from Siberia to Alaska across a land bridge and down to Tierra del Fuego during the last ice age. The totality of the evidence is unanswerable, even though you can argue about some minor details, and taken in isolation some pieces of evidence like radiocarbon dating are uncertain. Anybody who doubts the reality of evolution and natural selection simply doesn't understand how science works.

Answer 4

The age of the earth has been confirmed to be close to 4.6 billion years by several different and independent methods. To say this fact is wrong because some religious texts - written thousands of years ago before there was the slightest idea about the enormity of the universe - contradict it is utterly arrogant and absurd, which is why reasonable and educated people reject it.

Evolution is a fact, not a theory. The scientific definition of theory is "an explanation of a set of facts"; in other words, far more than an educated guess. Stop taking the Bible literally and you'll be able to sleep better!

Answer 5

No, because evolution can be quick -damned quick. Consider this; the superbug MRSA was unheard of only a few decades ago but through the "survival of the fittest principal" it has evolved into the resilient form we have today.

Another example; humans only split from the ancestor which gave great apes and chimps only a few million years ago - the blink of an eye on a geological time scale.

As John Gribbon points out in his book on Chaos theory, if a creature the size of a mouse gained only 1/20000 of its weight with each successive generation then in only 100000 years you would have an animal the size of an elephant. That time scale is instantaneous geologically speaking - in one strata there'd be mice and in the next above - elephants, and nothing in between.

Answer 6

um..... it wouldn't throw it out the window but be evidence against. Evolution is a probablity theory, saying that every new generation has a possibilty of evolving into a new species. This possibilty is very small but it is a possibilty non-the-less.

However, all the evidence points to an old earth with a reasonable time for evolution to take its course on life.


SECRETSAUCE - evolution was brought about by Charles Darwin, himself a priest, believing he was helping to prove God's existence.

Answer 7

Yes. (With qualifications ... see edit below.)

I am a staunch believer in the theory of evolution ... but one of its main requirements is TIME. Big TIME. Deep TIME.

But it would be a mistake to say that scientists say the Earth is billions of years old (4.6 billion to be specific) just to support evolution ... and they support evolution because they're all athiests. That would be rubbish. Scientists are not all athiests, and they do not accept a theory for any other reason than evidence, evidence, evidence. They can make mistakes as individuals ... they are human beings ... but scientists are not, as a group, dishonest or stupid.

The age of the earth has been verified by many independent pieces of evidence.

--- { edit, in response to dolomedes excellent point } ---

I should qualify my answer. Evolution itself (the slow change of a species in response to environment) does not need billions of years to occur. Evolution of a species can be seen in just a few years ... including speciation.

I was referring to the "Theory of Evolution" ... the theory that all the life on the planet is a result of the process of evolution from a common ancestry ... tracing all the way back to single-celled organisms.

It is perhaps *possible* that all multicellular life on this planet could have evolved in fewer than 1 billion years. The rise of all multicellular life from single-celled organisms occurred only in the last 600 million to 1.5 billion years. It is conceivable that, if the earth was seeded by life from outside the solar system (the Panspermia Theory), that multicellular life could have emerged in the last 600 to 900 million years. However, we would still need to answer questions like where the oxygen came from (as we currently believe that it took photosynthesizing prokaryotes almost 2 billion years to put oxygen into our atmosphere).

So I qualify my original answer:

Yes, if you are talking about the same evolutionary theory that we currently find to be the reigning theory in biology.
No, if we are talking about a panspermically-assisted version of the theory of evolution. Such a theory would be so different from the current TOE that it would be barely recognizable ... but I guess it would still be evolution.

Answer 8

Organisms such as bacteria, that have short generation times, have been observed to evolve in a few years. The development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria is evolution, for example.

Evidence for evolution is also contained in the DNA sequences of all animals---closely related species have similar DNA sequences, and the DNA of complex organisms is exactly as if it were an evolutionary progression from the DNA of more simple organisms.

Answer 9

That argument is moot. The fact is that the earth has been around in excess of 4.5 billion years, and we're stuck with discussing what's happened since then.
Keep in mind that a billion is a thousand millions.
Over 4,500 million years. That's a lot of time for teeny tiny changes to add up to huge changes.

Answer 10

I'm not sure I follow. The length of time there has been life on our planet is largely determined by dating fossils. These same fossils are used to determine how life evolved. If your intent is to prove the Earth isn't old enough to support evolutionary theories, your first problem is proving the methods scientists use to date fossils are all invalid.