if evolution is fact instead of just theory how come?

Question

we don't see any half human apes walking around? why did everything just stop evolving? and if we do evolve how come we are so worried about global warming? will we not just evolve into something that can withstand it's effects?

Answer 1

It's still technically a theory, because there's no way to absolutely, irrefutably prove it, but come one, there's overwhelming evidence, it's very hard to deny the presence of evolution. So yes, it is a theory, but it's usually accepted as fact.

Evolution has not stopped. You have to understand the time scale of evolution. There are roughly 4 mutations in a species every 10,000 years. That's a lot of time. And these 4 mutations may be random, not affecting anything significant, or even anything at all. The amino acid coded for by the mutated DNA could be exactly the same amino acid coded for by the original. And this is also why we're worried about global warming. We could eventually evolve, but not at the rate required here. Also, global warming could potentially wipe out most of the life on earth, regardless of adaptations. Meanwhile, the "lower" life forms such as plants, wild animals, oceanic life, etc., is dying, and we depend on those organisms for our own survival. They definitely can't evolve fast enough, especially organisms such as phytoplankton, which produce 1/3 of the earth's oxygen, and supply by far most of the energy for the oceanic food web, but are very simple and cannot adapt well if ocean temperatures change too rapidly.

By the way, there is almost irrefutable evidence that evolution did happen. First of all, it's happening right now, at a rate we can observe. Bacteria, which reproduce incredibly fast and have very simple DNA, allowing for a simple mutated gene to cause tremendous difference in the bacterium, are constantly becoming resistant to our drugs. Penicillin, the most popular antibiotic since the 1930's when it was discovered, is now becoming less and less useful because bacterial strains are becoming more and more resistant. There are strains of tuberculosis that have become completely resistant to all of the common antibiotics (penicillin, amphotericin, tetracycline, etc.). Viruses are also mutating. Since viruses can only reproduce via other organisms, human virus species usually have to deal with the drugs we've come up with. The most common drugs to fight influenza, Relenza and Tamiflu, are becoming less and less useful. 2% of influenza B strains are resistant to these, and fully 18% of influenza A strains, the more common type, are resistant. That's evolution at its finest. A species adapting as a whole because its old form wasn't working.

And by the way, evolution does not contradict the existence of a god. A god could have very well created the process of evolution. Those who use God as an excuse to not believe in evolution are mainly just afraid of change, especially any theory that details constant change. Also, it's just so hard to actually comprehend the time scale we're talking about. At our best guess, life began about 500 million years ago. That's 500,000,000 years. Sometimes we humans have long days. It's kind of hard to think about. This reasoning actually goes against the idea of a god, too. The idea of an incomprehensibly large being cannot really be much easier to believe than tiny chemical reactions occurring over hundreds of millions of years.

Answer 2

Arr. So many misconceptions.

First, you misunderstand the nature of a scientific theory. This is not the same as when you tell your buddy "I have a theory what's going to happen on Lost next season." No. In science, "theory" is a specific term that describes a particular scientific model, a way of understanding the world. E.g., Newton's theory of gravitation is a particular way of understanding gravitational attraction, entailing certain laws of gravitation and motion and so on. Einstein's theory of relativity provides a DIFFERENT (and apparently more accurate) model of gravitation. Similarly, the "theory" of evolution is a scientific model describing how species change over time.

As to your question, which is an oft-repeated trope perhaps as old as the modern theory theory of evolution itself, the answer is: every species is constantly evolving. Every generation, each species acquires and accumulates new mutations. In fact, this process is well-studied and the rate of mutation is a well-known quantity. Thus, over time, species WILL and MUST evolve. It is an almost equally inevitable fact that this will result in phenotypic evolution (physical changes in the structure of the organism). So, after the passage of a significant period of time, any organism will be phenotypically (and genetically) different from its ancestor. The "half-human ape" ancestor you describe could not exist any more, because it is a relic of the past. Also, you'll note that not every divergence and form that evolves survives - extinction is the rule rather than the exception. We only see the few sparse branches of the tree of life that manage to survive. Thus, most of our cousins in the descent from our common ancestor with chimps have died out (or, perhaps, been killed off by us).

As to "how come we are so worried about global warming", the same could be said of anything - evolving to meet a challenge takes time, and in the meantime entails suffering. People in the Old World eventually built up all sorts of genetic resistances to smallpox - but smallpox was still a great scourge for many years and killed millions of people. Similarly global warming. Maybe evolution will help us weather those changes, but it isn't a magic shield - better to avoid those problems.

Answer 3

Evolution is necessarily a theory because it happens on a timescale which is impossible for us to observe directly.

The question of why we don't see intermediate stages between species is one biologists argue about. The simplest answer is that only particular creatures can fit in available ecological niches. A half-man half-ape type creature would not survive as well as an ape or a man does (perhaps in part because of having to compete with both other species) so it does not survive and we do not see it. Also, modern apes that we see are not the ancestors of man, they are just as adapted and evolved as man is.

Everything did not stop evolving. Evolution happens too slowly to observe. It is similar to the way we can't directly observe the origin of the sun but we can draw predictive conclusions about it from scientific law and logic.

We're worried about global warming because warming could happen far faster than the world's life could evolve to adapt to a warmer climate. Warming could happen this fast because the changes man has wrought that would cause it, happened on a very short time scale.

Eventually, life on earth would definitely evolve, to adapt to whatever changes occur to the environment on this planet. That is what life does, by its nature. But when an event causes huge changes to the environment, entire species and even larger groups may die out (example: dinosaurs). We don't know for sure what our contribution to apparent warming is, but it's possible that man-caused warming could be rapid enough and severe enough a disruption that it could cause such die-offs. When a species dies off, it is yet another disruption of the environment we're all adapted to, so a seemingly small cause could have a concerningly large ripple effect that could affect the quality of human life noticeably.

Answer 4

First of all, you have to check the definition of theory. Einstein's Theory of the conservation of matter (a.k.a E=mC^2) was more than "just a theory" to the residents of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

While many people outside of science have a tendency to use theory and hypothesis interchangably, a theory is really "an explanation or model that covers a substantial group of occurrences in nature and has been confirmed by a substantial number of experiments and observations. A theory is more general and better verified than a hypothesis."

In answer to your second question, evolutionary theory does not say that humans evolved from apes. Instead, it says that humans and apes once shared a common ancestor 15 to 20 million years ago. Since the time that our ancestors split off, both lineages have undergone 15 million years of evolutionary changes. When you look at the fossil record, you see evidence of human ancestors with ape-like brains that walked upright on two legs. This would be your "half human ape" if you want to call it that. Most people refer to it as Australopithicus afarensis (or Lucy).

As for your third question, who says that we have stoped evolving? Evolution is occuring on a daily basis all around you.

As for global warming, it is a political cause more than a scientific one. The earth has warmed around 1 degree in the past 100 years. Politicians eager to make political notariety (and movies) as well as scientists and environmentalists looking to make money (scientists in the form of research grants which they know are more likely to be funded if it concerns a "hot topic"; environmentalists in the form of donations to their cause) are pushing the idea that global warming is man-made. And a ceratin amount may be, although the most recent estimate I've seen is that humans contribute around 0.3% to global warming. Most of the people on this board are too young to remember in the 70's when everyone was concerned about global cooling, which was said to be caused by pollution clouds like smog reflecting much of the sun's rays into the atmosphere. It was as much a concern in the scientific and political arena as global warming is today. Not that global warming isn't happening. In fact, it certainly is. The records show that the earth is much cooler today than is was even 500 years ago. And the fossil records indicate that when the dinosaurs roamed the planet it was much warmer than it is today.

One of the biggest causes of global warming is the periodic temperature fluctuations of the sun. Currently the sun is increasing in temeprature. Recent measurements of mars indicate that it is also experiencing an increase in temperatures. If only those darn martians would stop driving their SUVs....

Answer 5

Humans are apes. What you, and others, fail to realise, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, is that evolution is not the individuals within one species spontaneously changing into another. It is the gradual accumulation of beneficial mutations over many, many generations, so that one species may give rise to another, or many species. Humans and other apes had a common ancestor, between 7 and 10 million years ago. One day scientists will find it. Evolution has not stopped, just look at bacterial resistance to antibiotics, and insect resistance to insecticide, that is evolution by natural selection.
Global warming may well see humans evolving, but the whole of humanity does not have to survive in order for it to take place. "Survival of the fittest" is a double edged sword, in that those that are more suitable for the climate will survive, but those that are not, will die. That, too, is natural selection. Humanity may well survive and evolve into something that can withstand its effects, but there may not be enough of us left to maintain a population. Extinction is also a natural and common result of evolution. It has occurred to every life form that has ever existed on Earth since its formation, humans are not special in this regard. We will eventually become extinct. Consider that the dinosaurs survived for about 450 million years, and may well have still dominated the Earth now, were it not for a stray asteroid wiping them out 65 million years ago, because they could not adapt to the conditions after impact. Can you see humans surviving 450 million years?
I can't.

Answer 6

sigh....we have not stopped evolving, nor have apes or any other thing on Earth...its still happening.....but its pretty slow to our eyes.

We and apes of the past, who incidentally did not look like they do today either, had a common ancestor, some changed and after numerous changes and many different species have ended up as us, while others changed and over many species and changes are the apes of today (of which there are several species, the chimp, gorilla etc).
The common ancestor has long since bit the dust (eg at least 10 milliom years ago) as have the other human like ancestors, of which there are around 20 species......they were superceded by other forms more successful and suited to the environment of that particular time, and these too were eventually selected against and died.
AS the apes of today have changed so much since the split from our common ancestor, the chances that they could evolve into more human forms are remote as are the habitats and environmental conditions being the sam (apes of today do not live in the same habitats as the ancestors of both humans and apes)....
Global warming has not that much to do with our personal evolution (but does affect other plants and animals etc which would impact us is they either died out or became more prevalent)

Answer 7

It is both theory and fact. Facts are observations and theories are our tried and tested explanations for them. We have observed evolution on a small scale in living organisms, and on a larger scale in fossils. These are facts (two of many applicable examples). The theory is the New Synthesis of natural selection and genetics, and it describes the processes and dynamics behind it.

The reason we don't see any half-human apes walking around is the same reason we don't see dinosaurs or our great great great great grandparents walking around: they're all dead (though technically, "half-human apes" is one of those things NOT denoted by evolution). But they have living descendants that are different than they were. Descendants of ape-like creatures: us. Descendants of (some) dinosaurs: birds. Descendants of our great great great great grandparents: that would be us again.

Populations change- gene frequencies are redistributed within it as the environment and selection pressures change, and new genes arise due to mutation that enter the dynamic. Over extended periods of time, the morphology of most species in most populations is expected to change, and the longer the time period involved, the greater the change, as more will have been able to accumulate.

Evolution has not stopped at all- what we see in our lives is a very tiny snapshot of a very slow process, so it is easy to think that, because we are not aware of the future. It's not like prehistoric time periods, where you have both earlier and later forms preserved and observed- we have only the previous and current.

Finally, while global warming is not expected to have a devastating effect to our species ("merely" a significant and necessary change to our lifestyles- but many other species will not be so lucky) it is a very short time period of change we are talking about here. 50-100 years is not enough time for anything significant evolutionary adaptations to arise.

Answer 8

First of all, let me say that I am a Christian and I have absolutely NO problem with the theory of evolution. This is so because I understand it.

Now, as far as a "half human half ape" goes, that is one of the fallacies that the so called creationists try to foster. In fact, if you understand evolution you would realize that evolution prohibits the existence of a "missing link"!

Evolution is not in response to a change in environment. Mutations occur continuously (at various rates) in all organisms having their own DNA. If they are more suited to the environment then they are more likely to survive and reproduce. It is not the changed environment that causes the mutations. In fact if you think about it, Jewish boys have been circumcised since God knows when, and they are still being born with foreskins despite the "environmental change" caused by the scalpel (I realize that's kind of graphic and I apologize in advance, but it is a good example nonetheless).

Evolution is exceedingly slow. It has to be. A quick significant change in an organism would likely prohibit it from reproducing or surviving.

And, part of evolving, as far as humans are concerned, is adaptation. We were given the brainpower to be able to alter our local environments for comfort and safety. It is because of medical advances and our technology that we seem not to be evolving. Many mutations that would ordinarily be fatal are able to be treated (and passed on generation to generation--like haemophilia) due to modern medical techniques.

Gosh, I hope I answered your question in there somewhere, but one of the bottom lines is that the creationists are lining their pockets by expounding against evolution by invoking concepts that do not exist in that theory (like the missing link thing), and by using a document (the Bible) that is notably lacking in scope (the Bible, for example, makes no mention of the element Mercury...does that mean that element doesn't exist? Oh, and Mercury (the element) was known to exist in Biblical times).

Anyway, I hope I answered your question. The bottom line: the only fallacy is that evolution is anti-God..remember, the "body is only a temple", and when you die your soul leaves you..the rest is chemicals, and the way I look at it, although the species evolves the soul, being emplaced there by God, does not.

Answer 9

Evolution is both fact and theory ... factual because most of the answers can be reproduced with the same results... Theory because some of the ideas change through testing.

Evolution is a VERY long term process... Thousands of years to see any change. New creatures are found every year and many become extinct (not due to human intervention).

Human lives are too short to see any changes and without proper historical writings, we have no way of comparing time lines.

Global warming is a joke !... The Earth has been going through temperature changes for millennium. We do not have enough history to relate our times to earlier times. Remember the "Little Ice Age" of the 18th Century ?

Answer 10

Even if we COULD evolve into a "super human being" , it would take ohh,about a million years!We probably didn't stop evolving, just took a break-like a dormant volcano-or a hibernating bear. I don't know if there is an actual answer to your question-but this is what i think :)