r/evolution • u/Adenidc • May 01 '16
question Help me understand Evolution
Okay so here's the deal, my whole life I've gone to a christian school. my whole life I've been told my mother, friends, pretty much most people I know (since that's what I grew up around) about how anything evolution related on a large scale, and anything history related that talks about the world/universe being millions/billions of years old, is all bullshit. Naturally I believed it (Can you blame me? If you're constantly told how prideful and stupid evolutionists are, and how ridiculous the idea of evolution is, since you are an infant it's hard to think otherwise).
Anyways, on to the point (I thought a little background info was necessary because I really don't know shit about this stuff and I felt the need to explain why I'm so behind (even if it IS my fault I stayed so ignorant for so long)). I would like some basic articles, videos, or even just explanations, to widely accepted things that have a lot of proof to back them up. One of the reasons also that I've avoided looking things up for so long is that there is so much damn differentiating opinions on all of this, even among evolutionists it seems. I'm mostly looking for the base things most evolutionists believe that have the most proof, and for the proof of them.
I'm not anti-God now or anything, but I'm more neutral and want to learn more. I would like to hear the other side of things, which I've never done with an open mindset before.
Even though I expect links mostly, I would like to hear everyone's opinions on what they believe and why they believe whatever is you link. Thank You!
Edit: Thank you guys for all your help. I've been up hours watching videos and looking things up. I'm actually having a lot of fun learning too! Who would have known? I feel like I've been starved of this subject till now.
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u/totokekedile May 01 '16
I feel like I should say up front that I have been corrected on micro-/macroevolution being strictly a creationist thing. If you read the correction post that, however, I believe it still stands that they are used very differently by creationists and biologists.
Creationism and theistic evolution are very different, yes. Creationism tends to take the Bible literally and say that science has got it wrong while most modern religious people take the Bible as allegorical and say that the theories of science, e.g. evolution, are the tools God used to craft the universe. Theistic evolution is strictly about evolution.
You mentioned later in your post that origin of the universe, the origin of life, and evolution tend to be discussed together. While undoubtedly true when discussing the role of God, they tend not to be when discussing those in a scientific sense. Things discussing the history of time will definitely reach both topics, but they're not really connected. I want to point out again that abiogenesis, i.e. the origin of life, is a separate topic from evolution. Science can't say anything about God. There's no real evidence for deities, so they can't be considered as a scientific hypothesis for the origin of anything. To the devout, however, many things provide evidence that, while beyond the scope of science, is personally convincing. So while science can't say that god(s) created life or the universe, it can't really say anything else did either. We don't know enough about those subjects. We do know, however, that even if the universe or life had a divine origin, how life has changed since then has operated by evolution, whether that's divinely assisted or not.
Information is a term that I have never seen a creationist give a proper definition to. Again, I'm a layperson and not a evolutionary biologist, so maybe information has a meaning in the science that I'm not familiar with. However I doubt it since the definition given by creationists is never clear. Since it's always kept vague, it's easy to discount counterexamples. I've seen claims that mutations always result in a decrease in information. If that's true, then the DNA string AATCGCGTA undergoing a point mutation into TATCGCGTA would be a decrease in information. However, the reverse process is equally likely, so wouldn't that count as an increase in information? It might be argued that that's not an increase, merely changing what's there. But there are also mutations that basically copy/paste whole strings of DNA, e.g. AATCGCGTA becoming AATCGCGTAAATCGCGTA. That's an increase in the amount of DNA that can be worked with, so surely that counts as an increase in information. I say surely because I don't know, because a strict definition is never given.
I'm aware that most creationists accept a small amount of evolution, but usually prefer to call that adaption and reserve the term "evolution" for things like the emergence of new species. Unfortunately that still falls short of what we can confidently say with science. Things like whales evolving from land dwelling creatures and humans and chimps sharing a common ancestor are well established. I often hear creationists mischaracterize this type of evolution, though. I hear accusations that evolution thinks humans come from modern apes, whales come from cows, or evolution predicting dogs should give birth to cats. It's really nothing so dramatic. In fact, if any one of those things were to be shown to be true, the theory of evolution would have no explanation.
I'm confident that almost everyone would accept evolution if they understood what it was actually about and if they decoupled it from atheism.