To be honest,its far more far-fetched to believe that (somehow some incredibly powerful being was created and then this incredibly powerful being then somehow magically made the universe and this earth and then again somehow magically made a human and everything else on this earth) than the idea that we evolved over a huge amount of time into the complex organisms that we are today.

Plus theres the fact that,you know,there is actually evidence for evolution.

Evolution is actually quite easy to understand. If you explain evolution to a creationist without using the words "evolution" and "mutation" and ask him whether he agrees he'll say "yes of course, that's only logical."

The reason why some people don't "believe" in evolution is religion. Once you realize what religion is really all about (which is, simply put, not letting you believe facts but supporting you in life) you won't have to deny evolution anymore. Once religion forces you to deny things it isn't religion anymore. The purpose of religious belief is expand your horizon not to narrow it.

Duplications are one of the many ways genes are created and/or changed.

Hmm macroevolution.... I just look at the fossils they found of the Homo genus and its pretty simple to come to a conclusion about the subject. Why do they all looks so similar to humans and they oldest ones look less like humans but as you go further up in time the more they look like us. But surely God created each one as he was trying to create humans. It's the only logical possibility and after he created Homo sapiens he wiped out the other useless homos.

• Homo sapiens
• †Homo habilis
• †Homo erectus
• †Homo antecessor
• †Homo ergaster
• †Homo heidelbergensis
• †Homo neanderthalensis
• †Homo floresiensis

Speaking to human evolution we are vastly different from other living things in that we are undergoing two distinct forms of evolution at the same time. Humans do not respond to change just biologically. We also have an evolution of the mind. We create new mental frameworks to understand and value our surroundings. Sometimes those new frameworks help to expand a culture or refine it while other times those frameworks utterly fail, and the societies that create them collapse.

This is far more observable even then natural selection, because we can even see it within our life times. Take recent history for example say the last 150 years. I live in the United States, and if you go a few hundred miles from my current location and back a century and a half you will find a morality that said that the owning of slaves was equitable and fair. Now fast forward to today if you are found owning slaves well don't make plans for the rest of your life current morals say that you are a deviant fuck that needs to be locked in a cage for the rest of your life. For the vast majority of modern Americans there is just no excuse to do this to another human being period. Back then people could easily justify their act or even feel good about doing what they were doing.

The truth is humans are born immoral, and only develop morals later in life. Humans literally learn to lie before they learn to tell the truth. We start lying to others before we even learn to talk. Then we learn our morals from our parents, and then at some point we develop sufficient self resolve to a point where we can question those morals, and even create our own morals.

You want another good example look to the Old Testament. Supposedly a great moral authority. Let me say this first the god of the Old Testament, and the New Testament are not the same god. The god of the Old Testament behaves in a fashion that we would consider nothing less then barbaric, and honestly it makes complete sense. That is a god that is a tribal god, and only cares for that tribe. That god not only had no qualms about committing heinous acts on behalf of that tribe, but actively encouraged those acts. The god of the Old Testament is a war god. He readily orders to murder of men, women, and helpless children, but he also actively orders genocide. There is basically little to no difference between the god of the Old Testament and Adolph Hitler.

Most of us would not condone this behavior, and this is the bedrock of three major world religions. Why don't those that follow these religions behave like this in mass. Well the truth is at the time this book was written they would have, and felt justified in doing so. They might even feel it a moral obligation. However over the centuries our morality about such things has radically changed. We basically don't take the god of the Old Testament as an example. Nobody would say their god wants them to genocide everyone they come across.

Morality isn't riggid, and it isn't even exactly flexible either. Further more it isn't even universal. You name a value that you think is universal, and I will find an example of a society who practiced the exact opposite. Remember those nice guy Spartans. Yeah they left their own children out to die of exposure, and encouraged their children to murder. Not killing in combat either. They encouraged their kids to go out and murder someone to prove their metal. There are nomadic cultures that encourage their members to rape and murder travelers. There are even tribes today that think nothing of members killing or murdering one another. How about some Central American cultures that practiced human sacrifice. Would just drag one of their own up to a slab, and cut their heart out. Probably right in front of family members which would probably be very happy for the honor.

Human beings aren't innately moral. They might understand fair trade, or non violence at an almost instinctual level, but at the higher abstract level those things are not only flexible. They are damn near negotiable. Read human history, or just watch the nightly news, and you will see human social groups that behave without anything that resembles what you would consider moral. Morality is just a mental construct that is reworked over time. What we consider to be moral today given a thousand years may seem barbaric. Perhaps they will think us disturbed for locking people up just as we are disturbed by the torture devices used a few hundred years ago. Hell its looking like Solitary confinement is perhaps the worst torture possible. It never corrects bad behavior. Hell it seems to be a trifecta for reinforcing bad behavior. Basically it causes prolonged mental anguish, strips the individual of social skills, and causes a profound form of post traumatic stress. Then we toss them out into the loud world. Then act shocked when they go fucking nuts on us.

Anyway don't give me this moral argument showing the ascendancy of man over nature. I mean yeah it is impressive that we took natural instinctive behavior, and introduced abstract thought to the mix. Meaning that we can behave in a way, but also understand why it can be good or bad for us, but it also means we can discount behaving well towards others. Morality is just the Evolution of Society.

The evolutionists backed away from the bacteria argument you posed? I think lestatdark would beg to differ on that point. Personally I didn't notice it first time round, I just had to search for it; anyway...

"We've gone through some things before, things I have problems with. Like the lack of evolution in bacteria."

Well that wasn't exactly long, easy to skip over. The first thing that pops into my mind is the commonly cited (and I'm sure you've heard of it before) long term evolution experiment on E-coli (it even has its own Wikipedia page it's that commonly cited).

It is an experiment which began in 1988 to monitor the evolution of 12 populations of E-coli. The results proved that all populations evolved, an distinctly from each other. One population even made the (rather major) transition from acidophobe to acidophile in 40,000 generations (about 20 years as I recall?). That's like us evolving to having cyanide as our staple food. The experiment has showed that many mutations occurred, and whilst most were unsuccessful and died out relatively quickly, a few dozen were extremely beneficial and gradually became a prominent mutation throughout the population.

I think this shows that evolution in bacteria is pretty quick. 40,000 generations isn't that many when you take into account the massive evolution that occurred in the e-coli.

In a way this is kind of similar to another commonly cited case that you must come across constantly, and that is MRSA. For a bacteria to become resistant to penicillin is a big evolution. And it has been fairly rapid too because it only took around 50 years of penicillin use to develop a resistance that has allowed it to thrive. I was reading only the other week in New Scientist about how medical researchers are finding it increasingly more and more difficult to develop new ways to combat bacteria, who rapidly evolve to become resistant to treatments.

These are just two examples out of literally thousands.

To be honest, I would say that even if you claim that bacteria evolution is slow, I think I have clearly shown that it does happen and I am certain that it is not as slow as you make it out to be.

I actually met a researcher at my University a few weeks ago who is looking at the evolution in CO2 consuming bacteria. I wish I had his number right now, I bet he would be full of answers lol.

...

Anyway, as for the human evolution tree. It is fairly complete, complete enough to know how we evolved. I mean as we dig further down and "go further back in time" fossils become increasingly rare, so this is why gaps exist in the early tree of humanoid evolution, hence the "missing links". But we have found many of the so called missing links and I think you are posing this argument because you know it can never be fully satisfied.

I think that if you were shown 100 skeletons in evolutionary order you would say "I don't believe you because you don't have 200?", then when you come back a few years later and they have 200 you would say "I don't believe you because you don't have 500", and I've seen this as a typical creationist response to evolution time and time again.

The truth is though that we have found fossils of of early hominids that are clearly different to humans, if I may I would like to dust off an old chestnut...

These skulls are clearly not homosapien skulls (except the last one), they are clearly hominid though. So what does this mean? They're not our type of human, but they are human, and there's plenty of them and the further you go back the more "primitive" they become (not the right word, but you know what I mean).

There's not much room for interpretation of something so broad, it's clear as day, humans evolved.

Your arguments do not centre on the broad picture, they want to focus on the more detailed picture, which is where evolutionist and creationists agree that there is room for further development and evidence. The difference is evolutionists use it to further refine their theory, where as creationists are convinced this is evidence that falsifies the theory, which it isn't.

And whichever way you reinterpret the data, there are just many fossils that whichever way you reinterpret them, they would not be homosapien, which is what you argument relies on (that they are homosapien and can be interpreted as such).

Which brings me nicely onto my next point. Reinterpretation is why palaeontologists deserve to be acknowledged. If you never reinterpret anything, then you will never get the correct answer.

To use you example, when they thought it was bipedal did they leave it at that? No. They knew it required further study and concluded that it was possibly a quadraped. Is this bad? Again no. They have redefined the answer so it becomes more correct. They had a wrong answer before, and now they have a more right answer.

And the key thing to realise with reinterpretation is that it would rarely be a step in the wrong direction. Again I point you towards the essay I referred to earlier by Isaac Asimov, where he talks about studying the shape of the Earth, and the constant reinterpretation of it's shape.

You say reinterpretation as though it's bad, when it's actually good.

Actually, this seems like a nice thread to mention this. When I was learning how to program in Delphi I came across this little computer program. 

http://delphi.about.com/od/humorandfun/a/fdac_critters.htm

You're actually quite right. That long-term evolution experiment with E.Coli strands was achieved using experimentation with the Campbell's recombinant mechanisms that E.Coli have, and which is especially helpful, since their F plasmids has a high rate of conjugation. 

40.000 bacteria generations isn't that much, since E.Coli is one of the bacteria with the most longevity, due to it's primordial reproduction method is sexual pili conjugation, instead of binary division. That allows for events of cross-linking and conjugation similar (in a very small scale, since bacteria only have one chromosome and in some cases multiple plasmids) that animal and plant gametes recombine their genetic material. 

That experience was one of the very first we studied in our class, as it's very important to explain the effect that bacterial recombination through controlled mutagenesis (by controlling the medium in which the bacteria are incubated) has on it's  adaptation to sudden changes to it's physiological stable environment.  

Also, there's the consideration of viral infection, which allows for DNA transformation and transpossonic shifts via movable genomic elements (this is called HGT, and it's also a source for adaptability in eukoryotic cells, especially plants, especially on millet and rice plants, see http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer and http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.0040035)

Vector cloning is also one of the major proofs on how evolution in bacteria has been preponderant to large scale evolution. By using inserction vectors, which can range from phages, plasmids and even full scale chromosomes (in the case of BAC and YAC genomic libraries construction) we can artificially "implant" new functional genes in a bacteria's chromosome (E.Coli is a prime source for Vector Cloning, due to it's F Plasmids working in merozigoty/pseudozygoty with the chromosome, adding more stability and recombination rate in the DNA), thus expressing new proteins in bacteria that originally would never have this protein to begin with.

Thus, this simplifies the ability to comprehend natural recombination for expression of proteins that would allow bacteria to survive in conditions that normally would be fatal to them. Transporting this to large scale generational gaps, one would easily see how bacteria evolved through the millenia. 

About MRSA adaptation of bacteria, this has been very prominent on beta lactamase Gram   bacteria (S.Aureus). Normally, the expression of the pbp1, pbp2, pbp3 and pbp4 genes that code for the PBPA, PBPB, PBPC and PBPD proteins (PBP - Peptidoglycan Binding Protein) would be inhibited on the presence of Penicillin (or it's more potent form, Meticillin) by inhibiting the transpeptidase functional group of the PBP2 (which is the strongest D-Alanyl-alanine cross-linker protein).

These bacteria have become resistant to Penicillin because their genes have begun expressing a new protein, PBP2A. This protein has a low affinity for beta-lactamase antibiotics, thus, in the presence of Penicillin and/or Meticillin, this protein substitutes the function of the native PBP proteins, which are inhibited. 

Such a quick adaptation (as you said, 50 or so years), demonstrates how generations and generations of fortuitous mutations, recombinations and many other synergistic genomic processes have allowed (for some seriously bad consequences, as Penicillin is still used the large-spectrum antibiotic of reference in most countries) the surge of new S.Aureus strands, which will inevitably take over the strands that are sensitive to Penicillin/Meticillin.

These are but a few cases of how bacteria have successfully evolved and adapted through evolution of their own genetic code. I think the evidence speaks for itself in this case. 

Of course that doesn't matter since we already learned from genetics that big differences are not due to genes. A human with spider genes will not become Spider-man that shoots web out his hand or his butt.