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  1. #1
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    Creationist versus Evolutionist - all encompassing thread

    For anyone who wants to discuss Creation versus Evolution.

    To start off:

    1. What is the thoery of Evolution?
    2. What is micro-evolution?
    3. What is macro-evolution?

    Be my guess.

  2. #2
    We all know what those 3 terms of Evolution mean. Thing is, even though something changes over time and over time, my thing is that something still had to create that species so it can evolve over time into something else.


    We can argue it down to the dirt, but it all comes down to your beliefs. basically
    Money is the root of all evil. So if you don't want to go crazy, give it all to me

  3. #3
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    I don't think some people do.

    Evolution is a proven fact and is observed.

    Creationist cannot denied that evolution is a proven and observed fact. Thus they devided it into micro-evolution and macro-evolution. They admit only micro-evolution exist, but not macro-evolution.

  4. #4
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    It just so happens that we had a debate in english class about evolution vs. Creationism.

    I wrote an opening statement.
    You can find it here: www.420th.com/temp/religion.doc
    very interesting read...

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    Well as a practising Catholic I don't really think arguing about this will do anyone any good. Just add to their ego?

  6. #6
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    This isn't a religious forum and this type of thread keeps popping up. It usually ends up in my religion is better than yours or whatever. Thank you forproving my point by starting it again and I'll give it a awhile before the fun starts.

    *begins making popcorn
    *waits for LaurenStephens to soapbox
    Patron: I'd like my free lunch please.
    Cafe Manager: Free lunch? Did you read the fine print stating it was an April Fool's joke.
    Patron: I read the same way I listen, I ignore the parts I don't agree with. I'm suing you for false advertising.
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  7. #7
    It really doesn't end up in a My religion is better than yours. It always end up with someone trying their best to prove you wrong with links that God doesn't exist. Crazy huh haha
    Money is the root of all evil. So if you don't want to go crazy, give it all to me

  8. #8
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    Atheism is a religion whether you like it or not.

    * It begins dun dun dun
    Patron: I'd like my free lunch please.
    Cafe Manager: Free lunch? Did you read the fine print stating it was an April Fool's joke.
    Patron: I read the same way I listen, I ignore the parts I don't agree with. I'm suing you for false advertising.
    Cafe Owner: Is our lawyer still working pro bono?

  9. #9
    If your Atheist.. ok


    Im not going to try to make you believe in God, just don't question my beliefs.. People tend to ask crazy questions.. "Have You Seen God"


    To my knowledge, no religion has Seen their God. Some build statues, but have they actually seen their God. Plus, its a crazy question.

    People tend to ask that stupid question because they know you can't answer the whys. NO ONE KNOWS
    Money is the root of all evil. So if you don't want to go crazy, give it all to me

  10. #10
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    Originally posted by ilyash
    It just so happens that we had a debate in english class about evolution vs. Creationism.

    I wrote an opening statement.
    You can find it here: www.420th.com/temp/religion.doc
    very interesting read...
    Wow! You blinded me with your brilliance. Anyway, your paper is so superficial, fallacious, and opinionated that at merely seeing the title I stopped reading it. But since I was bored I decided to give you a chance. No, I am not religious. I don't see how you differ from those religious people that push their ideas down you throat. You don't impress anyone, buddy. If you want to formulate an educated opinion about this topic, then I suggest you read many, many books of other authors. I can tell you haven't, because you wouldn't have come up with such a half-assed idea.

  11. #11
    Tooken from the .doc : If anything God is female because only women can give life

    lol.. Not to offend you , but thats the dumbest and most unthought comment I have ever read. Where do some of you guys come up with this stuff at.


    Oh well.. this is my last reply on topics like this... its really useless.
    Money is the root of all evil. So if you don't want to go crazy, give it all to me

  12. #12
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    To start off:

    1. What is the thoery of Evolution?
    Well, to start off, you didn't list this option but "evolutionary change" is a proven fact. According to the fossil record, all living things have changed over time, and life as we know it now was not the same life millions of years ago. Now, the "theory of evolution," is Darwin's idea that this change was a result of natural selection. Meaning slight genetic changes that resulted in a better ability to survive and reproduce, given enough time, resulted in new species.

    2. What is micro-evolution?
    3. What is macro-evolution?
    Evolution had been seen and tested time and time again in the lab. For example, it's been used in the lab to create new medicines, as well as discover how bacteria are becoming immune to some of our current medicines. Well, creationists obviously had to believe that evolutionary change was possible, but they did not want to believe that natural causes could result in creating new species. So they called these small, observed chages "micro-evolution." "Macro-evolution" was what they called the creation of new species, and this is what they chose not to believe.

    I am a christian who happens to believe in evolution. Macro, micro, or whatever, evolution is real. The only way you can choose not to believe it is to either be ignorant of, or choose to ignore mountains of scientific data. The debate we're having about evolution is the same debate that was happening when scientists discovered dna, or that disease was caused by germs, or that the earth was round, orbits the sun, and is NOT the center of the universe. Just because we can explain all this "magic" in nature (even our own existance) with science, it doesn't mean we have to stop believing in God, or stop believing we are his special creation.

  13. #13
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    Originally posted by blaix

    I am a christian who happens to believe in evolution. Macro, micro, or whatever, evolution is real. The only way you can choose not to believe it is to either be ignorant of, or choose to ignore mountains of scientific data. The debate we're having about evolution is the same debate that was happening when scientists discovered dna, or that disease was caused by germs, or that the earth was round, orbits the sun, and is NOT the center of the universe. Just because we can explain all this "magic" in nature (even our own existance) with science, it doesn't mean we have to stop believing in God, or stop believing we are his special creation.

    Although I'm an atheist, I say props to you.

    I respect your beliefs as well as being an intellectual.

  14. #14
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    Originally posted by hycloud
    . . . Thus they devided it into micro-evolution and macro-evolution.
    Can you show the absolute and undisputed origins of the terminology "micro and macro evolution"?

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    Originally posted by Aussie Bob
    Can you show the absolute and undisputed origins of the terminology "micro and macro evolution"?
    I don't know about "absolute and undisputed" but a quick google search turned up this link: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/macroevolution.html

    The terms macroevolution and microevolution were first coined in 1927 by the Russian entomologist Iurii Filipchenko (or Philipchenko, depending on the transliteration), in his German-language work Variabilität und Variation, which was the first attempt to reconcile Mendelian genetics and evolution. Filipchenko was an evolutionist, but as he wrote during the period when Mendelism seemed to have made Darwinism redundant, the so-called "eclipse of Darwinism" (Bowler 1983), he was not a Darwinian, but an orthogeneticist. Moreover Russian biologists of the period had a history of rejecting Darwin's Malthusian mechanism of evolution by competition.
    Looks like I was wrong to say that it was created by creationists and I'm sorry. However, the terms have been used by creationists to create a distinction between the "small-scale" evolution which has been seen and tested and the "large-scale" evolution that we have physical evidence for, despite the fact that it is commonly accepted that it is the same process that results in both. They see this as a loophole they can use to still make their case.
    Last edited by blaix; 05-23-2004 at 09:09 AM.

  16. #16
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    I started reading further on that website and found:

    The term has been revived by a number of authors such as Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, the authors of punctuated equilibrium theory (see Eldredge's 1992 Macroevolutionary Dynamics ), but there is a tendency in these authors to revert to the orthogenetic view that something other than within-species processes are causing macroevolution, although they disavow the orthogenetic view that evolution is progressing anywhere.
    Looks like these terms were used by a couple of scientists who came up with a theory called punctuated equilibrium that says new species were created suddenly, not gradually like Darwin thought. Now, this theory is sort of a pet peeve of mine, so prepare for a rant...

    Creationists jumped on the new terms and this new theory to argue that only God could explain the sudden creation of new species. But it turns out this theory was only a different way of looking at Darwinian evolution (gradualism, "slow" chage). When you look at a chart showing punctuated equilibrium next to another showing Darwinian gradualism, you can see that they show the exact same thing, only with different timelines. Punctuated equilibrium looks at a broad range of time, making it appear that new species were created "instantly" despite the fact that this "instant" was actually a very long period in history. Darwinian gradulism simply looks at this long period when species are actually changing, not worrying about the other periods when they remain constant.

    Anyway, I'm off the subject, but here's the interesting conclusion to the web page regarding the history of micro and macro evolution:

    Conclusion

    There is no difference between micro- and macroevolution except that genes between species usually diverge, while genes within species usually combine. The same processes that cause within-species evolution are responsible for above-species evolution, except that the processes that cause speciation include things that cannot happen to lesser groups, such as the evolution of different sexual apparatus (because, by definition, once organisms cannot interbreed, they are different species).

    The idea that the origin of higher taxa, such as genera (canines versus felines, for example), requires something special is based on the misunderstanding of the way in which new phyla (lineages) arise. The two species that are the origin of canines and felines probably differed very little from their common ancestral species and each other. But once they were reproductively isolated from each other, they evolved more and more differences that they shared but the other lineages didn't. This is true of all lineages back to the first eukaryotic (nuclear) cell. [snip]
    Basically saying that micro and macro evolution are just two ways of looking at the same process. We can look at these small gradual changes and call it micro evolution, but given enough time, micro evolution will result in a small change that splits the species into two groups that can not reproduce with each other. After the species has split, and more and more changes happen after they are reproductively seperated (more micro evolution), we look back on the whole thing, see how different they've become, and say this was macro evolution.

  17. #17
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    Originally posted by blaix
    . . . Looks like I was wrong to say that it was created by creationists and I'm sorry.

    No worries. Just so as we are all clear that the terminology of micro/macro evolution was not originally created by creationists.

  18. #18
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    Originally posted by JWise
    lol.. Not to offend you , but thats the dumbest and most unthought comment I have ever read. Where do some of you guys come up with this stuff at.


    Oh well.. this is my last reply on topics like this... its really useless.
    Have you ever seen a man give life?
    How is that unthoughtful and dumb.

  19. #19
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    Originally posted by Aussie Bob

    No worries. Just so as we are all clear that the terminology of micro/macro evolution was not originally created by creationists. [/B]
    Nope, I never said creationist coin the terms micro/macro evolution. All I said was that creationist likes to divide evolution into microevolution and macroevolution, and then twist those terms.

    The only real difference between microevolution and macroevolution is scale. The scale of how much genes can vary before they are considered a new species.

    http://atheism.about.com/library/FAQ..._evo_micro.htm

  20. #20
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    Here is something else I found. This scientist who studies evolution agrees with me that the only difference between microevolution and macroevolution is "scale".

    A new book by Niles Eldredge (who co-authored the famous paper explaining the theory of punctuated equilibrium with now more well-known colleague Stephen Jay Gould) discusses this very topic, among many others. It's called The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism, and I encourage everybody to go out and buy a copy. Maybe two. Guys like this need all the support they can get.

    One of Eldredge's statements in the book summarizes the main point here: "There is utter continuity in evolutionary processes from the smallest scales (microevolution) up through the largest scales (macroevolution)" [p. 119].

    Here are some of the other things he had to say on the microevolution/macroevolution topic:

    Evolutionary processes taking place in relatively small scales of space and time connect to larger-scale entities, processes, and events to produce the entire history of life from the smallest incremental evolutionary change to the vast spectrum running from the simplest bacteria on up through the complex fungi, plants, and animals--from, in other words, the small-scale changes of so-called microevolution on up through the larger-scaled changes often referred to as macroevolution. This tremendously diverse array of life, spanning at least 3.5 billion years of Earth history, is all connected by a pattern of nested sets of genetic and anatomical similarity that can rationally be explained only as the simple outcome of a natural shared descent with modification [pp. 62-3].

    Patterns of evolutionary change within species seem no different in principle just milder in degree from the sorts of changes we see between closely related species. All evolutionary changes are produced by natural selection working each generation on the variation presented to it [p. 76].

    The evolution of a family should be no different in its basic nature, and should involve no different processes, from the evolution of a genus, since a family is nothing more than a collection of related genera. And genera are just collections of related species. The triumph of evolutionary biology in the 1930s and 1940s was the conclusion that the same principles of adaptive divergence just described--primarily the processes of mutation and natural selection--going on within species, accumulate to produce the differences we see between closely related species--i.e., within genera. Q.E.D.: If adaptive modification within species explains the evolutionary differences between species within a genus, logically it must explain all the evolutionary change we see between families, orders, classes, phyla, and the kingdoms of life [emphasis in original, p. 76].

    Microevolution and macroevolution differ only as a matter of scale, as we have seen from the connectedness of all life, and from the sliding scale of events--from the simplest, smallest evolutionary changes up through the enormous effects wrought as the aftermath of global mass extinctions [p. 88].

    Creationists say there can be variation within kinds (microevolution) but not between kinds (macroevolution). Biologists assert that there has been one history of life: all life has descended from a single common ancestor; therefore one process--evolution--is responsible for the diversity we see [p. 123].

  21. #21
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    Tooken from the .doc : If anything God is female because only women can give life
    Originally posted by JWise
    lol.. Not to offend you , but thats the dumbest and most unthought comment I have ever read. Where do some of you guys come up with this stuff at.


    Oh well.. this is my last reply on topics like this... its really useless.
    Tooken? Just to let you know, that is not the proper past tense form of the word 'take'. Please go here for help.

    unthought?

    Where do some of you guys come up with this stuff at.
    You can't use a preposition at the end of a sentence, and there should be a question mark (?) at the end, rather than a period.

    I sincerely hope English is not your first language, otherwise I cannot ever even consider your point of view due to your lack of 3rd-grade grammatical and spelling skills.

  22. #22
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    Originally posted by SniperDevil
    . . . I sincerely hope English is not your first language, otherwise I cannot ever even consider your point of view due to your lack of 3rd-grade grammatical and spelling skills.
    No need to degrade someone because of their grammatical abilities. English is not everyone's first language and in discussions like this, rather than looking for some vantage point to attack them, it's best to let grammatical issues slide a bit.

  23. #23
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    Originally posted by nzbm
    Well as a practising Catholic I don't really think arguing about this will do anyone any good. Just add to their ego?
    ... precisely.
    Originally posted by blaix

    I am a christian who happens to believe in evolution. Macro, micro, or whatever, evolution is real. The only way you can choose not to believe it is to either be ignorant of, or choose to ignore mountains of scientific data.
    .. you mean pushing your beliefs onto others? There is no solid proof of macro evolution in humans...
    Last edited by s.h.a.zz.y; 05-23-2004 at 12:37 PM.
    ^^ IM WITH STUPID!! ^^

    "The only way to overcome fear, is to challenge it head on"
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  24. #24
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    No need to degrade someone because of their grammatical abilities. English is not everyone's first language and in discussions like this, rather than looking for some vantage point to attack them, it's best to let grammatical issues slide a bit.
    I couldn't disagree more... this applies in all facets of personal and business communication. For instance, when you sign up for a hosting package on a company's site that has several blatant and embarrassing grammar and spelling errors, and moreso when you receive support replies and such, it definitely lowers the expectations of the customer, and the overall professionalism and reputation of the company.

  25. #25
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    Originally posted by SniperDevil
    I couldn't disagree more... this applies in all facets of personal and business communication. For instance, when you sign up for a hosting package on a company's site that has several blatant and embarrassing grammar and spelling errors, and moreso when you receive support replies and such, it definitely lowers the expectations of the customer, and the overall professionalism and reputation of the company.
    Well, we ain't (heh..) exactly talking about web hosting. Not everyone here does tech support for a webhosting company.

    Then again, not everyone is cartering their services to the English speaking public.

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