What is your take on evolution/old age earth?

[highwaystar101]

Jirakon said:

In my honest opinion, why evolutionists claim that there is so much evidence for that theory, and none for creationism, is something that I just can't fathom. Simply put:

How does it even happen? Natural selection does just what it says; it selects from existing traits. It doesn't create new ones. No matter how a species mutates, whether through deletion, repetition, or interchange it never involves addition.

Sorry, but that's quite simply wrong. New traits are created all the time and genetic "information" being added is actually incredibly common in the natural world due to errors in gene duplication (source). Besides that argument, many bacteria and other lower forms of life have considerably more DNA than us, there would be plenty of genetic material to exploit (but that's not exactly how things work, just showing a flaw in your reasoning)

In what order did it happen? The human body has eleven systems. Ten are needed to survive, and the the other one to reproduce. So which one evolved first? They all need to work together. Even with systems, various organs are useless without the other pieces.

On top of that, there's one system that's useless without another system in a different body! How could the original species evolve two different sets of reproductive systems? Their interdependence means that they would have to evolve in the same environment at the same time. And even if that happened, how could each of them be more beneficial than asexual reproduction, but not more than each other?

Yes the systems do need to work together, but evolution isn't a quick process by any means. Evolution is very slow and therefore these systems naturally adapt to each other over thousands of generations until the new animal is not recognisable from the old. The way you interpret it is that one day a dog will give birth to a bear, and I think we can both agree that is impossible.

Simply put, the reproductive system wasn't just placed out of one animal and into another, it was years of animals giving birth to slightly different animals.

It's also perfectly feasible that two populations of animals would evolve into two different species, look at horses and donkeys. Genetic differences means there offspring are sterile, so they are evolving into two distinct species, even though they share the same common ancestor. we can also see the exact same thing happening in dogs now.

And to answer your question about how our method of reproduction is better, simply put I imagine it is to do with the benefits that come form the exchange of genetic information. Our version of horizontal gene transfer that asexual organisms go through, only more effective I would think. But to be honest, I don't know, these are relatively new ideas, I haven't read up properly yet.

How did it start? If evolutionists claim that they know a situation in which life can spontaneously arise from non-life (a reducing atmosphere and whatever else), then why can't they just lay our doubts to rest by recreating that situation in a lab and producing life?

Life most likely began very simple (far more simple than a cell), it likely began with a self-replicating molecule. This is something we have demonstrated in the lab (source), and the self replicating molecules even showed signs of evolution. Over the course of hundreds of millions of years it is easy to see how these slowly become more complex and become simple cells. The evolutions are frequent and the time has certainly exited for these molecules to become increasingly complex and eventually becoming cells and then more complex life.

Either way, you are confusing biological evolution with abiogenesis.

I understand that scientific theories often don't answer every question, but at least they answer some fundamental questions. This theory of macroevolution just doesn't seem to answer anything.

Read my previous post about micro and macro evolution. And macro evolution explains a lot, and it is pretty much been proven based on genetic evidence alone.

Creationism isn't about a blind faith in any particular supernatural power, such as the God of the Bible or anyone else. That's a different discussion for a different time. All I'm saying is that I believe bacteria only produce bacteria and humans only come from humans, and that it makes more sense than the idea that humans come from bacteria.

The way you phrase it is where your errors come from. We know evolution occurs we have demonstrated many times that small evolutions occur, we have witnessed this evidence within our lifetime. If we have witnessed evolution on a small scale within a couple of decades, imagine the accumulated evolution that has occurred over 3.5 Billion years. Suddenly a single cell organism evolving into a human becomes an incredibly plausible idea.

Look at how much variation has come from canis canis in just 13,000 years, every species of dog. Imagine that on a 3.5billion year timescale.