Evolution 101?

Question

I need a BASIC explanation of evolution and some reasonable evidence against it.

Answer 1

Basically, cells mutate and form different organisms. Those that can do well in their environment survive, the others die out.

Since evolution is a fact of life, there is no reasonable evidence against it, and you should be very suspicious of anyone insisting that there is.

Answer 2

There is no such thing as reasonable evidence against evolution: it is a proven fact. Evolution is based on the following two propositions, both demonstrated facts:
- Variation occurs. It can happen that due to radiation, chemicals, other environmental insult, or pure happenstance that the genetic information passed to a daughter organism differs from that of the parents. The daughter will thus have somewhat different characteristics than the parents. Occasionally, these charateristics lend some benefit with respect to survival and reproduction, and the variant genetic information will be further propagated. Every commercially important animal or vegetable is a genetic variant from an original wild type, sometimes to the extent that the variant is no longer cross-fertile with the original type, i.e. it is a new species.
- Selection occurs, originally natural, but now artificial as well. A genetic variant will survive and reproduce if it is somehow as good as, or better than, its parents. This weeding increases the information content of the genes by weeding out inferior ones. Environmental pressure makes the selection process more rigorous and can speed it up; Darwin gave an example involving moths in his book.

And, that is all there is to it.

Answer 3

There is no evidence that darwin theory of evolution is not fact. and people who say "it's just a theory" don 't understand what a theory is. In the realm of science a theory is accepted as fact. There are only 2 theories of Biology. The darwin theory of evolution and the cell theory. Scientists may debate over the specifics but no one refutes it's truthfullness. Religion doesn't even refute evolution. If God did create the earth, how do you know that he created it and the organisms on it in the form they are now. Unless someone finds some photographs that God took himself of how everything was when/if he created it and everything is exactly how it is now then that would be your evidence.

Answer 4

There is no reasonable evidence agianst it, apart from holding up a 2,000 year old book and saying "See?".

Every cell in our body contains DNA. This gets copied when a cell divides. Sometimes this copying is not perfect, so teh DNA code changes. This can, on some occasions, change the shape, structure or function of part of our body.

If this change is advantageous, it will give the animal having it a competetive advantage. That animal (or plant) is therefore more likely to grow up and have young of it's own, which may well share the advantageos character.

Of course, some times the change is not an advantage, and the animal dies, or it is neutral, so the animal is no better or worse off.

Answer 5

There's no reasonable evidence against evolution - the only people who reject it are people who refuse to accept it because of fundamentalist beliefs in an ancient bronze age myth. If you really want to understand evolution I could recommend lots of books but since you ask for evidence against it, I think understanding evolution is the last thing you want to do.

Take a look at http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_fact-and-theory.html

Answer 6

Well a basic definition for evolution is “The process in which inherited traits become less or more common in a population over successive generations”. This mean that mutation occurs in the DNA can be passed to the off spring; these mutations can result in a change in the individual, which could give them an advantage over other members of that species. I will try to give you a simple example. Imagine, there was an animal, and this particular creature was a predator. It lived on open African planes, and chased down it’s pray through speed. What if there was an individual that was born who posses a mutation in one of his genes (gene X). Now gene X allows this individual to run 10% faster the other member of the same species. This mean that they would be able to catch pray with greater efficncy and therefore obtain more food, be fitter which will allow him to compete better for females (did I say he was a boy). Because of this he will have a better chance of passing on the mutation to his off spring. The cycle will then repeat it’s self with the descendents who also have the mutation. Let’s say now that this mutation has now spread over several generations to few hundred individuals. There is now a long drought, which results in reduced number of their pray. Only the fittest and fastest members of the species survive (the ones with the mutation). Which then start to increase number but all member have the mutation and all can run fast. This is a basic example; evolution happens over thousands and millions of year one small change at a time. The result is all the different forms of life on the planet. Evidence against evolution usually comes from religious opposition; all quote some of it to you.
“There are no transitional links and intermediate forms in either the fossil record or the modern world. Therefore, there is no actual evidence that evolution has occurred either in the past or the present” Absolutely no transitional forms either in the fossil record or in modern animal and plant life have been found. All appear fully formed and complete. The fossil record amply supplies us with representation of almost all species of animals and plants but none of the supposed links of plant to animal, fish to amphibian, amphibian to reptile, or reptile to birds and mammals are represented nor any transitional forms at all. There are essentially the same gaps between all the basic kinds in the fossil record as exists in plant and animal life today. There are literally a host of missing links in the fossil record and the modern world.
Natural selection (the supposed evolution mechanism, along with mutations) is incapable of advancing an organism to a "higher-order".
Although evolutionists state that life resulted from non-life, matter resulted from nothing, and humans resulted from animals, each of these is an impossibility of science and the natural world.

Answer 7

Evolution is basically saying 3 things:

1) All life on earth, past and present, are related, we're all distant relatives
2) Mutations occur which changes characteristics of organisms (bigger, faster, more eyes, etc.). Those ill-adapted to the environment don't live to reproduce, while the successful ones do, thence propagating the "advantageous" mutations.
3) It took billions of years for all of this to happen to where we are today.

"Some reasonable evidence against it"? God wouldn't have waited billions of years to put Jesus on Earth to die for us. So, Earth was created 6,000 years ago, just like the bible says.

Answer 8

Here's the evidence against it:



As for the theory, in a nut shell, variations exist within populations. As those variations are passed on to the next generation, the ones that allow offspring a better chance to survive to reproduce tend to accrue. New variations are introduced by mutation. Over time, some structures gain new functions, while others regress..

Answer 9

When people say "evolution" they mean one of two things:
(A) The process of slow change in a species in response to environment; or
(B) The "Theory of Evolution" that all species on the planet are related by common ancestry that goes all the way back to single-celled organisms.

Pretty much everybody (even creationists) agrees that the *process* of evolution occurs. (Creationists, faced with the undeniable fact that species do change even over short periods of time, try to reserve the word 'microevolution' for this short-term evolution ... but it is evolution nonetheless.)

Where creationists disagree with the *Theory of Evolution* is whether evolution can produce *speciation* (the splitting of a species into two species) ... what they call 'macroevolution'. They fail to see that 'macroevolution' is just 'microevolution' + two subpopulations of a species getting separated + TIME.

And so the argument generally boils down to one of two issues.

The first is the ingredient of TIME. This is a primary disagreement with a childlike literal reading of the book of Genesis, which lists a total time of creation of six literal *days*, and some obscure passages listing the generations from Adam, through Noah, to Moses, that puts these six days at a mere 6,000 years ago ... which is such an absurd contradiction to so many branches of science (physics, chemistry, radiometry, astronomy, astrophysics, geology, paleontology, biology, and even archaeology (the study of ancient human cultures) ) that this must be considered fundamentally *anti*-science.

The second argument is with the process of speciation itself ... i.e. that even given the amount of TIME postulated by scientists, that it is still impossible for new species to arise, or at least, all the species we see today. These arguments take a number of forms, from a misunderstanding of how species are born (i.e. they fail to recognize that the fundamental act of speciation is ALWAYS a branching of one species into two ... not a single species "evolving" into a different one), or to questioning whether genetic mutations can produce "new information" (which misunderstands both "information" and genetics), or using the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (which includes a fundamental misstatement or misunderstanding of what the 2nd Law actually says) or laws of probability (which invariably includes obvious mistakes in how you compute probabilities).

Incidentally, a third tactic is to try and overburden the word "evolution" with so many unrelated issues that it collapses under the weight. For example, they try to connect it to the question of abiogenesis (the origins of life), which is NOT part of the Theory of Evolution. Or they will digress into things like the Big Bang theory (the origins of the universe), which again is unrelated (Evolution and the Big Bang do not depend on each other ... either can be absolutely true, while the other is absolutely false). The Theory of Evolution is about the common ancestry of all modern species, to single-celled origins.

Oh, and a fourth tactic is to try to present evolution as the musings of one man, Charles Darwin, and then to attack that man. This even goes so low as to suggest that Darwin himself "recanted" his own theory (which is both incredibly false, and would be irrelevant if true). This is why I avoided equating the Theory of Evolution with Darwin's theory of Natural Selection. Natural selection is the mechanism that explains how the *process* of evolution occurs, and thus is a KEY part of the modern Theory of Evolution ... but the Theory of Evolution is far from the work of Darwin alone.

I hope that is what you were looking for. Good luck!