Evolution...are there any rules?

Originally posted by rhinoceros

Originally posted by jiggerj
reply to post by heineken

 

Has anyone ever wondered (and come up with a reason) WHY creatures moved from sea to land? If there was no life on land (no vegetation or bugs to eat) what compelled creatures to climb out of the water in the first place?

Maybe because of the vast unused resources (vegetation)? Why did you assume the opposite? I'm almost certain land plants precede land animals in the fossil record. I stated another possible reason ITT..

edit on 30-9-2012 by rhinoceros because: (no reason given)

Vegetation is life. Life started in the sea (or some bubbly stew). In order for vegetation to get onto land it also would have started in the sea, and evolved to grow onto land. Why did it do this? Maybe cling to rocks on the shore first?

reply to post by totallackey

How an organism accomplishes things such as eating, reproducing, sleeping, is how you define lifestyle, rather than the act itself?

Yes.

An organism's purpose is to eat, rest, and reproduce

The purpose of an organism is to protect and preserve the genes it contains, or, putting it anthropomorphically, to have grandchildren.

the survival of the fittest rule, would necessarily accomplish this according to the path of the least resistance (i.e., all adaptations would result in one simplest form).

Forgetting about those random mutations, are we?

reply to post by Astyanax


Grandchildren? So, we agree on the reproduction. Eating and resting are vital to perform reproduction processes efficiently, are they not? This is what I mean by lifestyle. You say, "protecting the genes." Eating and resting are also vital to this process. It seems you are forgetting this. How the organism accomplishes the protection is by the acts of eating, resting, and reproducing.

Random mutations are not the simplest means. Do you have an example?

reply to post by totallackey

You appear to think there is a debate here,. You are sadly mistaken: the course of nature does not hinge on your ability to chop logic and play to a gallery of fellow-creationists. Nature is what it is, and nature is evolution in action.

I could refute your nonsense point for point, but I know this is precisely what you and every other creationist on this board wants – attention. Well, you have now received all you are going to get from me.

reply to post by Astyanax


It seems you mistake a Q&A for a debate. Obviously no example.

I am a horrible artist, so no need to remind me of that. However, I think I have summarized natural selection, random mutations, etc. in a short, easy to understand picture.



I would be very interested in what the OP thinks of this.

Here is a random paper using "creature" without any fear of repercussions from ivory tower evolutionist academics

2.96 MB pdf fulltext biology.kenyon.edu/courses/biol241/bird flight 2005 Feduccia_Alan.pdf

Wiley-Blackwell link onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jmor.10382/abstract

Journal of Morphology
Volume 266, Issue 2, pages 125–166, November 2005

Do Feathered Dinosaurs Exist? Testing the Hypothesis
on Neontological and Paleontological Evidence

Alan Feduccia, 1* Theagarten Lingham-Soliar, 2 and J. Richard Hinchliffe 3

1 Department of Biology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599-3280

2 Department of Zoology, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville Campus, Durban 4000,
KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

3 Institute of Biological Sciences, University of Wales, Aberystwyth SY23 3DA, United Kingdom

The remiges of this bird are attached, as
are those of the earlier Archaeopteryx and modern
birds (Fig. 26). It was not a creature with a theropodan
lifestyle. The problem in reasoning is clear:
Chiappe (1997) argued that non-avian theropods
were terrestrial cursors, and therefore the ancestral
mode of life for birds was that of an earthbound
predator, and Padian and Chiappe (1998) further
argued that the cursorial hypothesis for flight origins
was strengthened by the fact that the immediate
theropod ancestors of birds were terrestrial.
Similarly, Padian (1983, and subsequent decades)
argued equivalently that pterosaurs were the sistergroup
of dinosaurs and were therefore bipedal cursors
that evolved flight from the ground up. As noted
earlier, this hypothesis can now be discarded.

One of the best resources on the age of the earth question which uses both the biblical data and the scientific data can be found at: How old is the earth? Attempts to make the Bible fit in with old earth thinking is relying on faulty Bible exegesis rather than sound Bible exegesis.

An excellent summary of summary Bible exegesis principles can be found at: Bible exegesis. Old earth theology fails because it attempts to impose errant and speculative modernist ideas on the Book of Genesis rather than seek to discern what the text clearly meant to it's original writer and readers.

sagent
One of the best resources on the age of the earth question which uses both the biblical data and the scientific data can be found at: How old is the earth?

If that's one of the best resources...

Actually, 90 percent of the methods that have been used to estimate the age of the earth point to an age far less than the billions of years asserted by evolutionists.

For starters, "evolutionists" (which I assume means evolutionary biologists) don't care about the age of the earth - that's a job for geologists.

Creationists admit that they can’t prove the age of the earth using a particular scientific method.

That's because creationists don't resort to outlandish methods like testable, repeatable, peer reviewed, verifiable science.

Creationists ultimately date the earth using the chronology of the Bible. This is because they believe that this is an accurate eyewitness account of world history, which can be shown to be consistent with much data.

"Much data" is, of course, creationist code for "no data".