I have a question about Evolution???

Question

I am a Christian...yes, tell me I am an idiot, and shower me with abusive words for all I care.
I took a class on Evolution to better understand it and...personally I still think its a amazingly stupid concept, but...to each his own.
My main question is...If every evolved from something else...how come we stopped?
How come we dont see monkeys turning into people???
How come no one has ever seen a fish become a Shark?
Did we just get to one point and say "You know what? We have evolved enough, now lets take a break"????
Everything is about faith.
You can have faith in evolution.
You can have faith in...the whole "we came from the muck and goo" story.
You can have faith in God.
You can have faith in nature.
Everyone has faith in different things. None of these "faiths" make full sense. Admit it.
In my own opinion, "God" is the only "faith" that has ever been able to answer all of my questions.

A scientist will tell you that the world…our earth, came from the “Big Bang”….but when you ask there where this amazingly huge asteroid…or planet, or whatever the hell it was came from….they are stumped. They can’t answer that question.

Are people just getting frustrated over the fact that someone that believes in God can say “I know where it came from!”

You want to believe we came from primates…that’s your prerogative.
I want to believe in God, and that’s mine.

Why can’t we accept each other?


…Oh that’s right, because we are human, and we are all horrible to each other and we can never get along.
I guess I just answered my own question.


And you are all right, when it comes to most christians...they fear what they dont understand....

And when it comes to atheists...they fear what they dont understand.

And I did take a class, I just dont follow blindly.
I listened in my class, but there were no logical explenations.

Answer 1

i BELIEVE you deserve a star!!!!!

Answer 2

We didn't and haven't stopped evolving. It's just happening at a rate that we can't decern in our lifetimes. Just because you can't see it happening, doesn't mean it isn't. You can't really see the air you breath either, but you know it's there. Children are being born without wisdom teeth, people are taller than they were 500 years ago, 1000 years ago. We've lost alot of the body hair that used to cover our entire bodies. The list goes on, if you look. As far as the big bang, you're talking about some heavy duty concepts and they are sometimes hard for lay people to understand. The universe had a beginning and it will have an end. From such scholars like Einstein, we know that the universe started as an infinate singularity and for whatever reason, it exploded and has been expanding every since. No, we don't know what events set that all in motion, but not knowing doesn't automatically mean a divine hand. We didn't know the Earth was round and wasn't the center of the Universe for a long time either.

Answer 3

We and nature are still evolving it just takes a long time. Different species do adapt to the varying changes in the environment, fossils show us this and we are well aware that species do become extinct.
You have a total mis conception of the Big Bang Theory, no big planet or asteroid hit anything, the belief is that matter was created from forces.There is an establishment in Switzerland that tries to recreate the Big Bang they have the smartest minds in the world working there. They have created matter by smashing two electrons together and indeed they invented the Internet, it is called the Sern center.
I feel the Creationism in the Bible is from early Man's inability to understand how we got here and was a convenient story to pass down.
I am not here to knock your religion or belief but I do believe all the evidence, fossils etc certainly point to the fact that Evolution is far, far more likely than Creationism, there is not one bit of scientific evidence that supports Creationism whereas there is lots that supports Evolution.
By the way a shark is a fish .

Answer 4

Mmk, I suck at answers, but I'll give this a go.

It's not that evolution has stopped... no, it's still happening. It just takes a very long time for evolution (at least in humans and other long-lived creatures) to occur at the level you are think about. It takes many, many generations for it to happen.

No, you're not going to see monkeys turning into people (and sharks ARE fish, by the way). That's not how evolution works. It's a change in allele frequencies in a POPULATION over a period of time. You'll never see one individual animal evolve. It
happens at a much larger scale than that.

As for the whole "faith" thing...
Faith is defined as "belief that is not based on proof."
One doesn't need to have "faith" in evolution. You don't have to have faith in evidence, because faith isn't required.

The God concept, however, has not a shred of evidence for it, and thus requires faith.

And the "we came from the muck and goo" thing: That's not evolution. That's called abiogenesis, and it's a whole different field of study. Evolution doesn't explain the origin of life, just the diversity of life.

I'll link to some sites about evolution that explain it much better
than I do. They'll be down in the sources.

I hope that answered your question. :)

Answer 5

If you were being honest about taking a class on evolution, I seriously advise you to demand your money back.

We haven't stopped evolving. Notice that you're not the same person as either of your parents?

I'm not even going to dignify your 'why don't we see monkeys turning into people' question with an answer. If you took a class on evolution, or even just high school biology, you know how stupid you're being. If you don't, then please take the time to at least read something about evolution other than creationist propaganda. You seem intelligent enough to realise the arrogance and stupidity of attempting to debase a theory you aren't familiar with, and by some of your questions it is extremely obvious that you aren't familiar with even the general idea behind evolution. Seriously, walk your bridges before you burn them down.

Having faith in a scientific theory consistent with all available data is entirely different from having faith in a creation myth which contradicts virtually the entire fields of biology and cosmology.

Answer 6

The only constant is change. Whether that change is orchestrated by God or circumstances is unknown because evolution in the human species and the world in general is very slow.
There is a sea horse that has evolved to look just like the leafy plants it swims in...an awesome animal.
I think it is an amazing thing that animals and plants have evolved to have defense mechanisms and they are so complex it would seem as if an intelligence behind the scenes is causing it to happen.
The world, climate, food sources etc.change and so does everything else.

Answer 7

First of all, evolution is slow. Very, very slow. The evolutionary paths of monkeys and humans split millions of years ago. We haven't stopped evolving. The current species is homo sapiens, which is only a couple hundred thousand years old.

Second, we did not evolve from monkeys. Monkeys and humans evolved from a common ansestor.

Three, evolution isn't a planned thing were everyone in one species transforms into another species. It comes from mutation. Let's use the example of fish evolving into land-based creatures. Periodically, a fish mutates. Usually the mutation is bad and it doesn't live long: heart on the outside of the body, missing scales, no fins, whatever. But one fish grew some sort of appendage that let it move on land (for short times, since it can't breathe yet). And for some reason, this mutation was beneficial: perhaps it allowed this fish to escape predators, or find extra food. So the fish lives, has babies, and thus creates more fish with legs. Eventually, one of those fish mutates and gets lungs, and so on and so forth. Beneficial mutations survive and pass their genes on to their children. But it doesn't happen retroactively. All of the existing fish don't suddenly sprout legs and lungs. They just go on being fish, because being a fish is still relatively survivable.

Answer 8

The reason we do not continue to evolve is that we can so thoroughly manipulate our environment, we don’t need to adapt. Today, if we need an advantage in height or speed, we simply create a vehicle for this purpose. Freezing weather, we don’t have to worry about only the best adapted surviving because we can put on nice warm layers of clothing. We don’t necessarily select our mates based on their strength or speed or even intelligence.

Monkeys have adapted to their specific environments. Why do you think there are so many different types of monkeys? There is no reason why some species of monkey couldn’t further evolve, but the process is so slow you might have to wait around 100,000 years to notice.

As a Christian, I really don’t see any conflict. But perhaps that is because I think Genesis is about spiritual beginnings.

Answer 9

My main question is...If every evolved from something else...how come we stopped?

Welll, technically we haven't. Yet. It is speculated that due to the fact we no longer have selection pressures [due to civilization] we will likely stop selecting for better traits. Also, due to the lack of difficulty in getting a mate [Trust me, it's easy in this day and age] we will make the gene pool shallow.

"How come we dont see monkeys turning into people???"

A few reasons. It takes too long [our species hasn't been around long enough, especially considering before "people," the apes would require simpler hominid forms. Also, there is no selection pressure for the monkies to become equal to Homo Sapiens in cognitive ability. Well, there is, but it came about too sudden.

"How come no one has ever seen a fish become a Shark?"


As the monkies, there is no reason. That, and sharks are VERY old, and have remained relatively unchanged. And the best reason is because sharks are fish...

Answer 10

It is not a stupid concept, you just don't understand it entirely. You have just got to let things in, and give them time, all right...We haven't stopped evolving, evolving occurs incredibly gradually over generations. Everything is in the process of evolving, of genetically adapting to their environment to perform better. It takes millions of years, not an instant. And we ourselves are only humans for the time being, we ourselves have been improving and still are. Don't be so dismissive, alright?

Answer 11

You have a lot more to learn than we can teach you in a Yahoo! Answers post...

However, here are some things which may be of interest:

Humans are apes, a product of evolution, descended from other, earlier apes. Our closest relatives are chimpanzees, and the most recent common ancestor of both humans and chimpanzees was approximately 6 million years ago.

The way to understand our origins is to remember that living organisms are in a state of constant change - It's not that evolution *can* occur, but that it *must* occur, simply because there is no mechanism in living organisms to ensure perfect, flawless reproduction for ever.

Suppose you could study a population of chimpanzees in the jungle, on a timescale of millions of years. Clearly, each individual only lives a few decades, so the population is constantly being succeeded by individuals which are different from their parents, because reproduction is imperfect - and remember, this is *inevitable*. It can't *not* happen. All the time this population is inter-breeding, the genes are getting mixed together, and only genes which work well with all other chimpanzee genes will tend to get passed down to successive generations (because individuals with genes that don't work well together will tend not to survive and reproduce).

However, suppose that circumstances arise which cause a group to become genetically isolated from other chimpanzees. This could be as a result of an accident of geography (e.g. an impassable river) or breeding preference or simply great distance. There will develop two distinct groups of chimpanzees which can never again exchange genes, because they have become different enough that mating will not produce viable offspring. This is what biologists define as speciation - i.e. the population has forever split into two distinct groups. Biologists have observed many instances of speciation, so there is no doubt that it occurs.

Assuming that both groups continue to survive, it is again *inevitable* that they will diverge genetically - There is no possible way that both groups, isolated and independent from each other, can change in exactly the same ways, and the longer they continue to breed, the more different they will become. Over millions of years, given that the rate of genetic change via mutation tends to remain fairly constant, the two groups will become as distinct as today's chimpanzees and humans are from each other, and from their most recent common ancestor.

All this is based on what we *know* is true - it's not supposition or guesswork, and remember it's not just possible, it absolutely *has* to happen, because there is no mechanism in biology to make reproduction a 100% perfect, flawless process.

NB: The reason we're classed as apes is that there is no valid way to group all the other apes together that doesn't also apply to humans. In other words, whatever criteria you use to define what is an ape, in order to include chimpanzees, gorillas, orangs and gibbons, humans will also fit those criteria. Indeed, chimpanzees are more closely related to humans than to gorillas, and gorillas are more closely related to humans and chimpanzees than they are to orangs, so any classification that separated humans out from those other apes would not make any sense.