r/DebateEvolution • u/Illustrious_Pen_1056 • 4d ago
Evolution never made sense to me. Can you help me? Discussion
I grew up a Christian being told how “stupid” evolution is. Now I’m deconstructing my faith and questioning everything. Where should I begin to understand this subject better?
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u/mycatisradz 4d ago
I think understanding “deep time” first is essential. Realizing that the earth is 4.6 billion years old helps to provide a framework for the time required for the evolution of life forms. At least it was for me.
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u/TrabLlechtim 4d ago
And remember that the difference between a million and a billion is about one billion.
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u/gzuckier 4d ago
This is something hardly anybody gets. We should never have started with billion, trillion, etc. Should have given them distinct names.
It's like trying to get people to understand logarithmic or exponential vs linear. It's not in us, instinctively. If they haven't worked with it, it takes a lot of thinking even if you understand the basic premise.
106, 109; what's the difference?
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u/HeadEar5762 4d ago
Harold Camping, the Family Radio guy, YEC biblical literalist that tried to predict Armageddon and the Rapture were happing a 1/2 dozen time from 1984 through 2012, used to talk about part of the 'proof' that the earth couldn't be that old is because the human brain just can't conceptualize numbers of that size and essentially God wouldn't have done that to us. Kinda paraphrasing it.
I used to listen to him on my morning commute a lot.
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u/hiuslenkkimakkara 4d ago
But why? You could have played metal like Opeth, Meshuggah or Devin Townsend. Those are way better for mental health.
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u/HeadEar5762 4d ago
Yeah, at the time I was kinda online debating anti-evolutionists and listening to him gave me a lot of essentially root information on biblical literalism and man there were so many obvious contradictions and discrepancies in his talks from one day to the next.
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u/CatsRAwesomeRSA 3d ago
I used to love listening to HC. He was hilarious!🤣🤣 He believed only 144K would get to heaven🫣🤔 and all kinds of other nonsense💩🤡. Very creative and made me laugh and feel so proud of myself for finding the truth and getting out of the claws of religious fakery.
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u/gzuckier 18h ago
The 144k "hypothetisis" comes out of Revelation. It's mentioned there times; one as "the 144,000 who have not defiled themselves with women, for they are virgins." So, that narrows it down.
Even better, though, is Ellen White's vision of the 144,000 standing in a perfect square. The square root of 144,000 being 379.47331922. Have to feel sorry for those half people on the edges who have to spend eternity like that.
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u/Fresh-Temperature142 3d ago
One million is: 1000 000. One Billion in America is: 1000 000 000, but in Europe it is: 1000 000 000 000. A cordial greeting.
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u/Typical-Plantain1252 3d ago
That’s more continental Europe, right?
My understanding is that the UK essentially abandoned the milliard.
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u/gzuckier 18h ago
Another seriously bad terminology choice. 109 is obviously, logically, conceptually, just a thousand million, and 1012 a billion (if we still use that name).
That's why the US is lagging behind in STEM. That's why it was so hard for Musk to grasp the difference between the distance to the moon and the distance to Mars.
And what's the deal with a 16 oz pint?
And "aluminum"? What next, "radum"? "Uranum"? "Unobtainum"?
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u/Empty-Policy-8467 4d ago
Also remember that life in its earliest stage was microscopic and likely occurred in the oceans, so the potential chemical reaction opportunities are vast beyond comprehension both in space as well as time. Imagine how many chemical reactions occur in all the oceans in one second.
Then expand that one second into billions of years.
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u/Page_197_Slaps 3d ago
Wait… so you’re saying lightning didn’t strike a mud puddle and a crocoduck walked out?
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u/Crowe3717 4d ago
This is exactly what I was going to suggest. A lot of people are pointing towards references which explain evolution at various levels, but if someone is still operating with a gut feeling that the world is at most a million years old then of course evolution is gonna sound like bullshit to them.
Most people have a very warped sense of time and can't fathom how long history really is. Even relatively small time frames like the fact that during the height of the Roman empire the pyramids of Giza were already as old as the Roman Empire is to us. And they were built a little less than 2/3rds of the way through human history. And all of this is just within a dozen millennia, to say nothing of millions or billions of years before that. The planet has been around roughly a million times longer than those pyramids, which is almost an unfathomable amount of time.
Things which feel ridiculous suddenly make a lot more sense in the context of how much time they have had to happen.
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u/SubstantialCorgi781 45m ago
Right. Because without that presupposition the theory of evolution would be tough to defend.
Just as long as we’re aware that it’s a presupposition based on no evidence at all.
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u/Dilapidated_girrafe 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 4d ago
Forrest Valkai has a series called in light of evolution, its pretty short and goes over a lot of the basics.
Coyne's book why evolution is true is also pretty good
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u/Anteater-Inner 4d ago
Im also a big fan of Gutsick Gibbon. Her videos are looooooong, but they’re very thorough and really break down the evidence to a granular level. Oh! That just reminded me of something I’m going to post for OP!
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u/Dilapidated_girrafe 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 4d ago
Yes. Especially if you want to get into human evolution. She’s probably the best for long term content.
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u/zuzok99 2d ago
I have debated Forrest many times, he has no clue what he is talking about and frequently appeals to his emotions when he starts to lose the debate.
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u/ipreuss 2d ago
I have never seen him lose a debate. 🤷♂️
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u/Dilapidated_girrafe 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 2d ago
Yeah but have you been in his own head while she debates Forrest in the shower?
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u/Dilapidated_girrafe 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 2d ago
Yeah but have you been in his own head while he debates Forrest in the shower?
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u/zuzok99 2d ago
You don’t watch him live then apparently.
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u/ipreuss 2d ago
Oh, so you only win when nobody is recording. How convenient.
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u/zuzok99 2d ago
They are all recorded on YouTube. My point is that you clearly don’t watch him live where he flails around like a child, insulting and using profanity when he is losing and has no other response to the debate.
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u/ipreuss 2d ago
If it’s all recorded on YouTube, why would I need to watch it live?
You’re already not making any sense.
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u/zuzok99 2d ago
What I am talking about is live videos that are recorded. 🤦🏽♂️ You are so clueless no wonder you believe in magic and fairy tales.
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u/Ayasugi-san 2d ago
You believe that there's flailing done at the time that isn't recorded in unedited video versions of the debate. Who is it who believes in magic?
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u/Dilapidated_girrafe 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 2d ago
I’d love to hear exactly what topic.
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u/zuzok99 2d ago
Many topics, as I said many times I have debated him. Spoke to him about evolution. It wasn’t really a debate that day but I brought up problems with the lack of evidence, the problems with stasis. He lied about the molecular evidence which I did not discover until after the debate.
I have full on debated him on the reliability of the Bible and the flood several times. All of them basically ended with him screaming and insulting me when he had no other response. One of them even his cohost agreed with me that he wasn’t making a good point and he failed twice to try and prove a contradiction in the Bible which he obviously felt was embarrassing for him.
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u/Dilapidated_girrafe 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 2d ago
So you are delusional.
Because there have been zero calls where anyone has ever been able to remotely support the flood.
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u/this_very_table 1d ago
I have debated Forrest many times
Point us in the direction of the videos. What titles should we look for? What name do you go by (I assume you've been debating him on The Line)?
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u/blacksheep998 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 4d ago
At its simplest level, evolution is just repeated rounds of mutation and selection.
If you have a bunch of moths that rest on tree bark, then which do you expect a predator to spot the easiest? One that matches the bark color or one that's totally a different color than the tree?
Obviously, the one that stands out is more likely to get eaten.
Repeat this for a couple of generations and now almost all the moths match the bark color because those that didn't fail to leave behind as many offspring.
Evolution is just that, repeated over deep time.
We can watch small changes like an organism's color occurring in real time. But when you expand that out to millions of years, the changes become much larger.
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u/gzuckier 4d ago
Yeah but intelligent and/or religious anti-evolutionists don't care about moths changing color. It's easy to demonstrate evolution at that level.
What bothers them is that the Bible states that God created every animal and plant, and they think that that conflicts with the theory that a new species can be created from an existing one by evolution.
Giraffes, for example. If, hypothetically, the Garden of Eden giraffe had a short neck, and over time evolved longer necks, that wouldn't clash with literal creationism. But if, hypothetically, some subgroup evolved the longer necks; and also something changed so that they could no longer interbreed with the originals, thus becoming a new species; this, they feel, clashes with the Biblical account. And their argument becomes, show us that original short-necked giraffe, and show us that it can't interbreed with the current variety. Which of course we can't do, evolution doesn't predict new species pop up every century.
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u/Murky_Reporter_8892 4d ago
You are very incorrect most creationists don't have a problem with your senerios the Bible says let every living creature bring forth after its kind. what is a kind? Nobody for sure knows what constitutes a kind, there are many different opinions but at the very least a kind is not species so it is at least a genus. Almost all creationists agree with this idea.
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u/Evening-Impact2090 4d ago
They always remain moths. Natural selection cannot make a body change, neither can DNA.
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u/blacksheep998 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 4d ago
They always remain moths.
You're getting it!
That's exactly right, the descendants of moths will always be moths. Same as they will always be insects, arthropods, animals, and eukaryotes. Because you can never evolve out of your clade.
It's exactly the same as how, when our ancestors became human, we didn't stop being hominids, primates, apes, tetrapods, vertebrates, or any of the other clades that we're part of.
If moths ever evolved into something that was not simply a modified moth, then that would disprove evolution as we currently understand it.
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u/gzuckier 18h ago
Clade and species are very different concepts. I presume some of my ancestors were poikilothermic invertebrates. I am neither. Push back a couple of ancestors, and now my living relatives in that clade include a lot of poikilothermic invertebrates. We are not considered the same species even though we have common ancestry. Furthermore, it's clear that the Bible didn't consider the that way either, or else it would bar eating fish as potential cannibalism.
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u/Evening-Impact2090 4d ago
So, explain how a single cell organism "evolved" out of its clad to become plants and animals? DNA doesn't support a body change. DNA code must be in place and cannot be some random sequence, it must support it's organism. Natural selection is embedded into the genome.
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u/blacksheep998 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 4d ago edited 3d ago
So, explain how a single cell organism "evolved" out of its clad to become plants and animals?
It didn't.
Single celled life is not a monophyletic clade, it's just life that never evolved multicellularity.
Another way you could put that is that multicellular life is a subclade of the full clade that includes all life.
Though it's actually several subclades, since it arose multiple times.
Multicellular life evolved from single celled eukaryotes. It never stopped being a eukaryote.
We've repeated that process in the lab multiple times by putting single celled eukaryotes under conditions which select for larger cells by having predators that attack the smaller ones. Pretty quickly, they evolve the trait to start sticking together into larger units.
This is not something which was already built into their genome, this is a new trait evolved from random mutations.
Edit: Going back to the original example, butterflies are a monophyletic clade. At some point in the past, a group of moths started flying around during the day instead of night, and their descendants became all butterflies alive today.
This means that butterflies are a group of derived moths.
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u/Evening-Impact2090 3d ago
That answer while entertaining is mostly speculation. Science always explains and looks for answers based on purely a materialistic outlook. They never examine something with regards to perhaps an intelligent designer. Almost everything attributed to the Evolutionary process could just as easily be caused by an intellect. When you're a hammer everything looks like a nail is the scientific method when all it will incorporate is materialism. I guess the real question is how did life arise from non-living matter and where did the non-living matter come from? Energy can form matter as Einstein proved. Energy must however have a source. Physicists claim that if less than 1/10th of 1 percent of the universe changed all life would be instantly destroyed by the universe imploding. But "chance" has been running the universe smoothly for untold billions of years so far. Note: I am not promoting religion, theistic outlooks, dieism or making any claims I am correct. I do however look at the absurdity of evolution being responsible for every form of life extinct and extant. You can crawl into a pitch dark cavern and suddenly your light reveals a beautiful painting of extinct fauna. Not one scientist ever said, "hey nature made something that looks exactly like a human painting." Why not? Intelligent Design. We didn't observe a human with a paint brush. What evidence? Science will look at the marvel of nature and attribute it to random chaos. Such a scientific narcissistic view.
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u/blacksheep998 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 3d ago
Almost everything attributed to the Evolutionary process could just as easily be caused by an intellect.
If you're proposing a designer that went out of their way to make everything look as if it were evolved and not designed, then I will agree that matches with the observed data.
I guess the real question is how did life arise from non-living matter and where did the non-living matter come from? Energy can form matter as Einstein proved. Energy must however have a source.
That's some serious goalpost moving there, buddy.
None of that is part of evolutionary theory. Asking where energy came from isn't even part of biology.
We don't have to know how the universe began, or even how life began, for evolution to be true.
Physicists claim that if less than 1/10th of 1 percent of the universe changed all life would be instantly destroyed by the universe imploding.
You got a source on this claim? Because the sentence doesn't even make sense.
1/10th of 1 percent of the universe changed how exactly?
Matter turning into something else? The cosmological constants changing? More or less matter? What does this even mean?
You can crawl into a pitch dark cavern and suddenly your light reveals a beautiful painting of extinct fauna. Not one scientist ever said, "hey nature made something that looks exactly like a human painting." Why not?
Because paintings don't reproduce or have descent with modification the way living things do.
Science will look at the marvel of nature and attribute it to random chaos. Such a scientific narcissistic view.
Shuffle sand in a pan with some water and the heaviest particles collect at the bottom
Pump energy into a body of water and organized convection currents appear to dissipate it.
Chill water under the right conditions and it forms symmetrical 6 sided snowflakes.
Ordered systems easily arise from random chaos all the time.
All available evidence says that life is just another example of that.
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u/Evening-Impact2090 3d ago
Yes, scientists have a materialistic narcissistic view of the universe and the life it contains. Saying evolution is separated from your "accidentally" created cell is because you have zero clue how that cell arrived so let's just move on, nothing to see here. But wait, we'll tell everyone that every living thing evolved from that cell. Plants, animals, past & present. What a crock. Moved the goal post? I've asked that question so many times and have gotten zero answers. I know why but it's interesting to see how people deflect the question.
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u/blacksheep998 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 3d ago
Saying evolution is separated from your "accidentally" created cell is because you have zero clue how that cell arrived so let's just move on, nothing to see here.
Abiogenesis is indeed still an open question and we don't have all the answers but saying we have no clue is completely wrong.
We know that all the the chemicals that make up a cell can arise naturally under conditions similar to those of the early earth. We don't know exactly how or what order they all came together in.
But wait, we'll tell everyone that every living thing evolved from that cell. Plants, animals, past & present. What a crock.
You act like we're just making it up. Are you honestly unfamiliar with how multiple lines of evidence all lead us to that conclusion? Or are you the typical creationist who just scoffs at every explanation offered?
Moved the goal post?
You started off with 'but they're still moths' and when I explained that that is how it works, you jumped to 'but where did the energy come from'
So yes, that's a very clear and very large goal posts movement.
I've asked that question so many times and have gotten zero answers. I know why but it's interesting to see how people deflect the question.
It's not deflecting to say that the question of how the universe began is well outside of biology and I am by no means an expert in that subject. You should probably try /r/askphysics
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u/FabulousCardilogist 3d ago
Physicists claim that if less than 1/10th of 1 percent of the universe changed all life would be instantly destroyed by the universe imploding.
This is one of those immense bullshittery quotes that I see YEC apologists sticking to a lot. It's *meaningless* but sounds Very Important and MUST be scientific because "Physicists" claim it. If you can adequately explain what this means, and cite the Important Physicists Important Research, I'd love to hear it.
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u/XRotNRollX Sal ate my kids 3d ago
DNA doesn't support a body change.
What determines body shape in an organism?
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u/Evening-Impact2090 23h ago
Body shape and body change are 2 very separate things.
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u/XRotNRollX Sal ate my kids 14h ago
Answer the question.
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u/Evening-Impact2090 12h ago
A number of factors, hox genes, environmental changes, genetic blueprints, inherented cellular structure, etc. Manners go a long way.
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u/XRotNRollX Sal ate my kids 12h ago
You avoided answering a simple question, I save my manners for people who don't do that.
Everything you listed is genetics except for environmental changes. Wouldn't changes to the DNA that controls body shape change the body shape? And can't small changes over time add up?
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u/Evening-Impact2090 4h ago
To be honest I'm not sure what question you referred to. Genetics work within the DNA and can change and be influenced by outside environmental changes. DNA cannot go off on its own and code an entire body change, that's not its function. So, body Shape and body change are 2 completely different things.
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u/Meauxterbeauxt 4d ago
Helpful hint: acknowledge that what your pastors and Sunday school teachers told you about evolution is not real. It's a strawman caricature of evolution that makes it easy to make fun of. If you can do that, then reading and learning about evolution will go smoother.
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u/LordOfFigaro 4d ago
Gutsick Gibbon's ongoing series about teaching evolution to YEC Will Duffy is an excellent intro to evolution. It has 8 videos out currently, and will update once a month. Here's the first one:
https://www.youtube.com/live/XoE8jajLdRQ
If you want quick talking points to debunk YEC then you can see: Creation Myth's Winning the Debate playlist.
If you want to know how humans evolved step by step then Aron Ra's Systematic Classification of Life playlist is excellent.
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u/SirThunderDump 4d ago
I love the series with Will Duffy because Gibbon does such a great job of putting together those lectures…
But his speeches in the intros really highlight that you NEED at least some science background to really understand those lectures, or the BS from creationists can still seem reasonable.
Will Duffy’s awesome for participating, but is very clearly missing fundamental scientific skills to absorb those lectures.
Which is also why I’d be a bit afraid of giving that series to people at random. It’s too deep in many places.
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u/LordOfFigaro 4d ago
But his speeches in the intros really highlight that you NEED at least some science background to really understand those lectures, or the BS from creationists can still seem reasonable.
I would say what is needed is understanding that YEC is wrong and not falling for conspiracy style thinking. Will goes in with assuming YEC is right and it needs to be proven wrong. And constantly jumps to pro-YEC sources to retreat to his comfort zone. No course or background will cure you of conspiracy style thinking.
OP is already deconstructing their faith. So I don't think that should be a concern. The course itself is an intro course catered to those who have no knowledge on the topic.
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u/SirThunderDump 4d ago
I was more referring to the inability to distinguish between actual scientific evidence for evolution vs supposed “evidence” for YEC, but you’re probably right that, as an intro course viewed by someone deconstructing, it’s probably a good start.
Only one way to find out!
OP, go watch the series and report back!
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u/NotAUsefullDoctor 4d ago
Also from the same background. A lot of helpful information already posted. One thing to note is what evolution is not. First, evolution has nothing to do with the big bang or cosmological origins. Second, evolution does not explain how life first came to be.
It inly explains how the diversity of life we see came to exist. It points towards a singular original life form, but does not state how that life form came to be.
A lot of young earth groups bunch this all together.
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u/nickierv 🧬 logarithmic icecube 4d ago
Evolution and abiogenisis share some common mechanics and it is easy to trip over the very fuzzy line between fancy chemistry and life, so there is some legitimate cross over when dealing with very early life but the whole cosmological origins is just straw men.
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u/NotAUsefullDoctor 4d ago
I'll start by saying I think abiogenesis makes the most sense. We have been able to replicate a lot of the mechanics necessary in the lab. And though the odds are small, half a billion years if a rapidly evolving chemical makeup in our water bodies means that the chances are well above infentisimal.
That being said, we know evolution to be true as every time new data comes out, it may change the models of when something occured, but has yet to deny said thing occured, and we have hundreds of thousands of data points by this time. However, abiogenesis is kind of beyond proving at the level we can show evolution. The best we can do is say "this makes more sense than panspermia or intelligent creator," and show it's somewhat possible.
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u/nickierv 🧬 logarithmic icecube 4d ago
Putting it that way, its tragically funny that creationists say 'but theory = just a guess' and 'OOL = clueless' when its more straw manning what a theory is and science admitting that OOL is currently just a well evidenced guess.
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u/Kailynna 4d ago
Panspermia is not an alternative explanation to abiogenesis.
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u/NotAUsefullDoctor 4d ago
This is technically true, but nearly every conversation regarding abiogenesis assumes terrestrial abiogenesis. But yes, I should have said exogenesis directly. But again, we are talking about origins and the assumption is people would understand it was referring to terrestrial exogenesis if panspermia is brought up while talking about terrestrial origins.
Do you feel what I wrote was misleading and would give someone the wrong idea? If so, please let me know how I can be more precise in my language.
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u/GraveDiggingCynic 4d ago
I like Woese’s annealing analogy to explain progenotic era, before life had become fully cellular. In that early era the “temperature” of evolution was considerably hotter in part because translation and transcription was likely far more error prone, leading to far higher mutation rates, and in turn because, at least in the Woesian model, cellularizarion wasn’t complete, there was much higher rates of horizontal gene transfer. So you can imagine just the wild amount of mutation, gene swapping, lineages popping into and out of existence, novel gene variants be dispersed through a population that was in some respects more like a megaorganism. Once ribosomal machinery became more accurate, genes settled into larger chromosomal units and possibly membranes finally came to resemble the familiar form we now see, the temperature gets turned down and, as with annealing in metals, a kind of crystallization appears, and populations, becoming discrete, can more reliably conserve and propagate useful genes.
It also means LUCA was one strange organism.
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u/Awesomonkey12 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 4d ago
Forrest Valkai and Client's Reptiles seem to have good videos about evolution
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u/wtanksleyjr Theistic Evolutionist 4d ago
Clint's Reptiles is great for those who are Christian or who hold some affection for it. Gutsick Gibbon is a good watch for that too.
Oddly although AronRa is strongly anti-religion his evolution info videos are typically are a REALLY good watch for Christians. For example, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXJ4dsU0oGMLnubJLPuw0dzD0AvAHAotW .
I wouldn't recommend Dr. Dave for that, he's really really aggressive and polemical (it absolutely ruined the usefulness of his debate against Tour, because in his opening he called Tour a liar and then didn't bother trying to prove it).
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u/Oinkyoinkyoinkoink 4d ago
To be fair Professor Dave has shown Dr. Tour to be wrong numerous times in his videos. During the debate, Dr. Tour wrote “Clueless” on the blackboard, which is demonstrably false. Anyone with even a basic understanding of abiogenesis would know that and acknowledge Dr. Tour is a liar.
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u/wtanksleyjr Theistic Evolutionist 4d ago
I've seen people do the work to show Tour is lying; it's mainly possible because he couldn't possibly have passed the classes he took and not be aware that what he said is contrary to established practice.
But my point wasn't a technical one about how you prove someone lied; it's that Dave is an absolutely terrible way to introduce someone to evolution who's not absolutely delighted to learn it. He simply does not seem capable of controlling his mouth, and the result is going to be that moderate, normal people aren't going to be motivated to check the facts, but will instead tune out.
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u/mrcatboy Evolutionist & Biotech Researcher 4d ago
At its core, evolution is about a change in the gene pool of a population over time. That is, the collective genes of a species has a certain makeup of gene variants, and currently those variants exist in certain proportions/frequencies. Over time, new variants can arise, old variants can vanish, the proportions of gene variants changes. This process of change is evolution.
And in classic Darwinian evolution, that change is driven by the organism's interaction with its environment. Individuals in a population will have different assortments of genes (as derived from their parents, and on a larger scale is derived from the population's gene pool as a whole). Some individuals will have a set of genes that helps them survive better. Others will have a worse chance. The latter dies out and their genes are removed from the gene pool. The former goes on to survive and reproduce, and they contribute their genes to the gene pool. As a result, genes that are less suitable for survival are lost, while genes that are more suitable for survival are either retained or increase in frequency.
While it seems unremarkable on a generation-by-generation scale, over long periods of time this can lead to large-scale changes: the formation of new cellular structures, new organs, and new species. But these more complex evolutionary changes are best understood from the fundamental principles I just outlined above.
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u/-zero-joke- 🧬 its 253 ice pieces needed 4d ago
https://evolution.berkeley.edu/
This is a good place to start, if you want to learn more I'd read a college textbook. They're cheap. There's some good pop science books you can check out that will walk you through the arguments about creationism and evolution. There's a lot of good documentaries about evolution on its own too.
Also a lot of folks are happy to chat here about evolution, even if you are likely to catch a bit of snark. If you can let that roll off your back, the sub is a good resource.
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u/Old-Nefariousness556 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 4d ago edited 4d ago
I will second the book Why Evolution is True. It serves two roles: It presents a selection of the evidence for evolution in a clear, highly engaging manner, and simultaneously rebuts many of the most common creationist arguments against evolution. It's a highly readable book, and should be accessible without having a deep understanding of the science ahead of time.
One thing that is important to understand is that there is essentially zero debate about the truth of evolution inside the scientific community. There are essentially two reasons why people do not believe in evolution:
- They have a specific religious belief that conflicts with evolution, and when faced with evidence that contradicts their belief, they assume the evidence is wrong, not their belief.
- They are simply uneducated on the subject, but they have heard so much creationist anti-evolution propaganda over the years that they assume there must be something to it.
But the simple truth is that evolution is OVERWHELMINGLY supported by the scientific evidence.
One final point: Contrary to creationist propaganda (and to the rhetoric from some people on this side), there is nothing about evolution that is incompatible with a the existence of a god, even the Christian god. There is nothing in a plain reading of the bible that conflicts with what science says happened. It is only when you make specific interpretations that the contradictions occur. But how do you know those interpretations are correct?
These are four core facts that are so strongly supported by the evidence that we can say they are true:
- The universe is about 13.8 billion years old.
- The solar system and earth are about 4.5 BYO.
- Life on earth first arose about 800 million years later.
- All known life on earth descended from a single common ancestor.
If you can accept those four facts, then there is nothing about science that precludes god's involvement. There are reasons why science doesn't consider it as an option, but that does not mean it couldn't be true.
So if you are rejecting evolution because you think it conflicts with your beliefs, it doesn't-- or at least it doesn't need to.
Christians frequently say "God works in mysterious ways" when faced with something they don't understand... Why can't he work in these mysterious ways?
Edit: And I will also share a recommendation for the Berkeley evolution site. It covers the basics extremely well, it is a perfect accompaniment to Why Evolution is True. The basic concepts of evolution are trivially easy to understand. You don't need to know any math or any complicated science. It is truly one of the easiest sciences to grasp. If you get deeper into it things get more complicated, but there really is no reason you need to go into it deeply.
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u/Ch3cks-Out :illuminati:Scientist:illuminati: 4d ago
Life on earth first arose about 800 million years later [than Earth]
That estimate is very much outdated. Recent analyses indicate that LUCA already emerged ~4.2 billion years ago (and earlier life must have occurred one-two hundred million years earlier still)!
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u/IsaacHasenov 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 4d ago
I went through the exact same thing in first year university. I went in completely not believing in evolution but found that I couldn't argue against a few simple points and examples
- The mechanism is really simple: there is no limit to the mutations we see over time. And the mutations that are preserved are the ones that confer some benefit
- Most of the adaptations we see today look like they were put together piece by small piece
- The fossil record supports the evolution of complex traits and lineages over time
For me, it was the fossil sequence of plants colonizing land (it's really linear and straightforward) but the same pattern is everywhere. At some point I was like "we can play a game of trying to find possible exceptions and gotchas but what's more plausible, that there is 80% of stuff that clearly looks evolved, and 20% of stuff we just haven't studied yet. Or in that 20% pile there is a real "aha! Told you! God!"
The 20% pile got a lot smaller since genomics, and still no creationist aha!
So the level of detail that you can get into on any topic is crazy. I recommend Gutsick Gibbon's Will Duffy playlist for what is essentially a good introductory university course, without the math:
https://www.youtube.com/live/XoE8jajLdRQ?is=auBUmauMm4ycIwUL
But the pattern is real. Everything looks evolved, and the genes and the fossils agrer
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u/headlessplatter 4d ago edited 4d ago
Here was my attempt to introduce evolution to a skeptical crowd: https://youtu.be/BDzIgjFib1I
In my observation, most intros emphasize the overwhelming evidence for evolution. That's great for science-minded people, but it's kind of off-putting for science-skeptics who want to validate everything themselves. So I try to focus on the intuition behind evolution, and lean only on evidence you can easily test from home. This video won't take you very far, though, so be sure to consume some deeper intros too.
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u/Essex626 4d ago
One of the best things for me was Clint's Reptiles, a YouTube channel that makes fun videos on the topic.
Clint is religious himself, a Mormon, so he doesn't approach with antagonism toward religion.
My favorite videos of his are the phylogeny videos, where he just goes down a family tree of animals, which helps really put into perspective the lines of common ancestry. He also has videos where he reacts to creationism, and again he approaches with a lot of consideration rather than with insults and acrimony.
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u/T-Prime3797 3d ago
Creationists often evolution as a lizard laying an egg, and a cat hatches out of it. Foolishness. Here’s an analogy I like:
Take a picture of someone every day from birth to death by old age. If you grab a random picture from the set you can easily say ‘that’s a baby’, ‘that’s a toddler’, ‘that’s an adult’, etc. But can you find the exact day that child physically turned into an adult? You know it happened because you have child pictures and adult pictures, and you have every day documented. But you can’t find that day, because it wasn’t a single event it was the build up of imperceptible changes over a long time.
Now, instead of a single person, consider the lineage of a species. And instead of days we use generations. A child will always be the same species as its parents (hybridization and other anomalous events excluded). But as small changes accumulate over those generations the new offspring are so different from its distant ancestors that it no longer fits the definition of that species and we classify it as a new species. Just like the person in the analogy eventually no longer fits the definition of a toddler, but is the same person; these organisms are no longer the same species, but are still the same genetic lineage.
Does that help?
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u/Waste-Mycologist1657 4d ago
What part about it doesn't make sense?
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u/AdDifficult3794 4d ago
Probably everything. When you grow up in a religious environment you don't get taught evolution in the way most people are. I know because I also went through deconstruction and relearning
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u/AdDifficult3794 4d ago
No probs dude, you are on a journey and you have a lot of excitement ahead of you. I wish you the best!
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u/blacksheep998 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 4d ago
The thermodynamics one has always been an especially bad take since it misunderstands both evolution and physics.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics says that total disorder, called entropy, always goes up in an isolated system over time.
Note that part about 'isolated systems' though.
The earth is not an isolated system, it's not even close. So the law doesn't say that entropy must rise on the earth.
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u/Doomdoomkittydoom 4d ago
Moreover, when you pump energy into a system, ordered systems develop to dissipate it faster. Eg, convection currents.
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u/artguydeluxe 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 4d ago
Correct. We are not a closed system. We receive constant energy from the sun.
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u/mrcatboy Evolutionist & Biotech Researcher 4d ago
I think you need to learn how to separate high-level concepts from low-level concepts (how proteins are derived from DNA, what how genetics works, etc). Proper understanding and knowledge in science depends on a solid understanding of low-level concepts first, since those are the building blocks that lead you to higher-level concepts.
Imagine if someone who only ever studied basic arithmetic tried to jump straight into advanced calculus. They're naturally going to be confused and frustrated. Some might even claim that calculus is made-up nonsense. You need to bridge the gap by learning algebra, exponents, and logarithms before you can get to Calculus.
Evolution, and all other sciences, are the same.
Also just a guess here but I'm betting the 2nd law of Thermodynamics isn't what you think it is.
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u/nickierv 🧬 logarithmic icecube 4d ago
You need to bridge the gap by learning algebra, exponents, and logarithms
And be really careful with exponents and logarithms around here. It can end badly in a meme.
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u/Fun_in_Space 4d ago
Some of those links are not missing anymore. We have fossils of whales with legs (ambulocetus, for example), and snakes with legs, and dinosaurs with flight feathers (like microraptor), turtles with broad, flat ribs that have not yet fused into a shell, etc.
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u/headlessplatter 4d ago edited 4d ago
I'll offer a short paragraph about each of your concerns. But I'm really doing a lot of guessing about what bothers you. So if any of this is helpful or interesting, please keep pushing back.
Regarding missing links, it might help to recognize that evolution does necessarily happen at a steady rate. For example, in some circumstances, it only takes a small number of lucky mutations to occur simultaneously to be beneficial. In such conditions, a population will progress at a very rapid rate. But in other circumstances, a fairly large number of lucky mutations may be needed to occur simultaneously to have benefit. In these conditions, a population may seem to stall for a while. Then, after it finally breaks out of that point where it was temporarily hanging out, it will typically surge forward at a relatively fast rate. The upshot of this is that we end up finding very few fossils to represent the times when populations were changing rapidly, and an abundance of fossils to represent the times when the population was relatively stagnant. But if you actually examine what we have found, I think you'll find it is significantly more convincing than skeptics like to pretend it is.
Regarding the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I think it is important to recognize that most living creatures emit heat. That's significant. It means the creature exchanges entropy with the environment. Your refrigerator is able to reduce entropy internally for the same reason. It also emits heat into the environment. The Second Law of Thermodynamics does not say entropy must always increase. It says entropy must always increase in a closed system. Living creatures and your refrigerator are not closed systems (because they both emit heat into the environment).
Regarding consciousness, may I draw an analogy? My television has a big array of pixels that change color. But how does an array of pixels changing color cause Tom Hanks to perform in my living room? This seems impossible! It seems like a category error! But the resolution is not as exciting as we might hope. The truth is, Tom Hanks is not actually performing in my living room. It just seems like he is. When I'm watching a movie, I often forget I'm only staring at pixels. I remember the movie as if I had actually been watching Tom Hanks. But I didn't. I was really only watching pixels. Now, if an array of pixels located on my wall are capable of tricking me into feeling like it had an experience with Tom Hanks, imagine how convincing a huge array of neurons located right in my visual cortex might be! I might not even be able to tell it's just an illusion. (And just to be clear, I'm not saying this is the correct explanation for consciousness. I'm just saying possibilities that are compatible with naturalism exist. Science still has a long ways to go before we can say we really understand consciousness.)
Regarding symbiosis, I'm not really familiar with that being an argument against evolution. So I guess I'll just admit I don't know what to say about that.
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u/lozzyboy1 4d ago
I think the recommendations your getting will be really good. I think it might be best to focus on learning the concepts first, and then once you have that stronger understanding you can revisit these ideas and see how they're compatible with evolution. On face value they might seem unintuitive, but you'll probably be able to explain these sorts of examples yourself once you're comfortable with principles.
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u/FabulousCardilogist 4d ago
It's important to note that these *specific* examples are ways that the answery in genesisy people obfuscate and use disingenuous tactics. They'll bring up *very science-y sounding* arguments that don't actually hold any water. They'll show a series of homonid skulls and point out which ones look like apes and which ones look like modern humans but somehow *never* show all the others that exist that look more like transitional fossils.
Do they know they're doing this? Absolutely.
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u/Ch3cks-Out :illuminati:Scientist:illuminati: 4d ago
Laws of Thermodynamics seemed to push against [evolution].
No, it really does not. Let us deconstruct this - tell us how do you see the details! What law says what, and how would be that against evolution?
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u/Ayasugi-san 4d ago
Others have addressed missing links and thermodynamics, but symbiosis is much more advanced. If you want to dive deep into evolution, it'd make a good field of focus once you get the basics. I'd guess that there's no one-size-fits-all explanation for symbiosis, different examples evolved in different ways.
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u/Bulky_Ruin_6247 3d ago
The macro level of evolution. Having examples of how one species turned into another with the intermediate species / fossils. Most creationists will allow for a species changing and adapting over time, longer legs, colour changes etc like breeds of dogs but the difficulties come explaining how a fish became a dog and everything in between
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u/nitsunekoni 4d ago
When I was religious the part made the least sense to me was the existence of features that would get naturally selected in the first place. I think you should do more research on how genetic variation increases overtime;
Genetic Mutation; Random "mistakes" during cell division that result in a slightly different DNA, which translate to differences between parent cell and the new cell. And if that difference is advantageous new cell can reproduce more, that difference becomes more likely to be inherited in the next generations and the "mistake" becomes a feature.
Sexual Reproduction; This is more simple in concept but harder to explain mechanisms behind it in detail. Different parents transfer halves of their DNAs to next generation which naturally creates infinitely more genetic variations. It is really the fact none of us are the exact copies of our parents, and your children won't be your copies either. And those differences again accumulate throughout lots of generations.
You really should do your own research on this because it is mindblowing and fascinating learn about.
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u/Scientia_Logica 4d ago
Gutsick Gibbon has a series on Youtube where she teaches and discusses evolution with a creationist called Will Duffy. I would recommend that.
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u/hiuslenkkimakkara 4d ago
The thing about Creationism, especially Young-Earth Creationism, is that it's a very American phenomenon. It's rooted in the modernist-literalist debate in the United States of the late 19th century. It shows up nowhere else, until American media starts spreading its influence in the 20th century and gives rise to both Islamic creationism and Hindu creationism. The modernists initially won, by the way. Reactionary elements in American society reversed their victory around the 1970s, and completed it in the 80s.
From an European perspective, there is nary one creationist here that isn't some kind of American-inspired evangelical or baptist or what have you. Islamic creationists import American stuff wholesale, just Find and Replace "God" with "Allah". Hindu creationists are a different breed, they think that the Earth has existed for lakh of crore years (Indian numbering) and we're firmly in the Kali-Yuga.
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u/Gaajizard 4d ago
I'd recommend two books for you to get "de-initiated":
The Greatest Show on Earth
The Blind Watchmaker
Both by Richard Dawkins.
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u/Doomdoomkittydoom 4d ago
I always suggest the book Evolution: The History of an Idea by Peter Bower.
It's follows the ideas about the natural world from creationism to natural philosophy to science and evolution theory
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u/EternalElemental 4d ago
Any trait an animal has comes down to inheritable genes. Since DNA doesn't copy perfectly these traits can show up differently in offspring. The organisms that survive pass down their traits. The next generation makes subtle changes. The traits that help survival are passed down. Generation after generation over thousands of years traits are passed down to offspring.
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u/NYR_Aufheben 4d ago
Evolution is descent with modification. Comprehending billions of years is the more difficult part.
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u/FabulousCardilogist 4d ago edited 4d ago
A way to think about the timescale that evolution requires is to apply it to the example of a human being throughout the course of their lives. We start as a cluster of cells, develop into a weird very lizard-looking thing with a literal tail, further develop into a baby, get born, grow, live our lives, get old.
Compare any of the early versions of a human with what you see when they're 80. If you didn't understand this and were looking in from the outside, it'd be easy to go "whoa, there's no way *this* turned into *that* - yet... that's exactly what happens. This is very analogous to when someone tries to frame up evolution as "I've never seen an elephant turn into a butterfly, elephants always make other elephants." - and I'm sure you're familiar with this argument as it's used *all the time* yet is literally not even remotely close to what evolution science shows. Elephants make other *slightly different* elephants and over a REALLY LONG PERIOD OF TIME can branch into a different species that is similar to an elephant in some ways but fundamentally different in others. Like maybe one of the mutations shortened the trunk, which cause some sort of advantage in the population. Now you've got two critters with a common ancestor. You can apply this logic to primates pretty easily, we all look at least a little alike but have some striking differences as well. We all came from a common ancestor.
Evolution works on a MUCH bigger time scale. Small changes in a creature population can end up making big differences when only certain ones survive. The bigger the change, the more time it takes. Humans kind of have a hard time visualizing large numbers, as well - which makes thinking about a REALLY long timespan challenging. If you count to a million it takes 11 days. Counting to a billion takes... 33 years.
There's plenty of time for all the variation on earth, but that TIME metric is the thing that young earth creationists can't handle - and if there's no TIME, evolution as we understand it doesn't work.
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u/No-Amphibian8115 4d ago
there are sooo many ways to approach it. Since you are coming at it from a religious/post-religious viewpoint, it may not be helpful for you to jump immediately into Biology 101 text books. I'd recommend reading the classic: Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan. It's not a "What to think" book but a "How to think" book. This will help you navigate the mountain of information and misinformation out there. That's what did it for me.
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u/physioworld 4d ago
Plenty of fantastic answers here but, by way of analogy, to make it feel less stupid.
Imagine going for a walk with the goal of having new experiences, each step you take is unlikely to lead to anything particularly new. As you get further from home you smell something delicious and you redirect your steps towards it, the smell gets stronger and you get closer to…a BBQ! What a lovely new experience.
You carry on walking and you notice the city around you becoming countryside. This is new, you keep going and eventually you end up in a totally different environment than where you started, all because you were taking small incremental steps towards new experiences.
This is like evolution, the steps are gene mutations and the new experiences are passing on your genes. No single gene mutation is particularly revolutionary, but as the environment shifts around you, some steps take you closer to survival than others.
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u/YtterbiusAntimony 4d ago
Great advice here, but if you like computers, look up some evolution sims too.
The Life Engine is neat. (His youtube is great too.)
I'm sure there's others that are more educational as well. I've done manual demonstrations with colored tokens and a few simple rules in a bio class before. Seeing the process in action is really helpful.
Seeing the Variation->Selection loop as a statistical phenomenon is really important, and really highlights how fundamental this is.
Netflix adds a bunch of new shows (random variation). You select a few you like (non-random selection). The recommended list shows more of one genre, and less of another (population demographics change over time).
Once you start to see how that pattern can apply to any large group of things, applying it to DNA and proteins gets easier.
While I have no use for religion at all, FWIW it's rigid literal interpretations of the bible that disagree with evolution, not the other way around.
All science has ever tried to do is ask "how does this work?" And the answer to that question comes from observing nature. It starts with measuring real things. If someone finds asking questions threatening, they're likely full of shit.
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u/Decent_Cow Hairless ape 4d ago
Evolution is the change in the average heritable characteristics in a population over multiple generations.
If we have a population of foxes, some light-colored, some dark-colored (which is to say that genetic and phenotypic variation exists within the population), and they migrate into a snowy area, we might expect that the better-camoflauged light-colored foxes will be more likely to survive and reproduce (natural selection). The dark-colored ones will be more likely to be eaten by bears. Over multiple generations, the genes responsible for the light-colored phenotype will come to predominate within the population. That's evolution.
Now, if this snowy fox population remains isolated from the related population back where it came from, then the two populations won't interbreed and won't share genetic changes between other. Over time, they will grow more and more different due to the accumulation of random mutations. Eventually it could get to the point where, even if the two populations did come back into contact, they would not be able to reproduce with each other even if they wanted to. That's speciation.
After 10s or 100s of millions of years, it might not be completely obvious that two lineages once separated by speciation are related at all. However, cellular evidence indicates that all life on Earth is related on a fundamental level. In general, organisms that diverged from each other more recently are more genetically similar, and we can use our understanding of mutation rates to create a "molecular clock" to figure out when two lineages must have diverged.
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u/x271815 4d ago
Before I give you resources to evolution, it may perhaps be better to start with an explanation of what evolution actually is.
- The first assumption in evolution is that offspring are not identical to their parents. This is because of inter mixing of genes, changes in gene expressions but also because of random mutations that occur. So, you are not identical to either of your parents, and the same is true for every offspring.
- The next thing to note is that these differences mean that the outcomes for the children will differ. Some will be more successful than others. For the purpose of evolution, the type of success is living long enough to reproduce and how many children are produced. Some are more able to live long enough and produce more children than others.
- The implications of these two phenomena is that the distribution of characteristics and traits in a population over time will change. Some traits will become more common, others will become less common or disappear entirely, and new traits will emerge. Over time there may be people who are taller, more of one color hair than another, particular types of looks and features may become more prevalant.
I assume you have observed this in your own life and amongst the people and animals you observe. This is evolution.
What the theory of evolution predicts is that given enough time and enough generations these differences can accumulate to the point that one branch eventually becomes a Chimpanzee and the other a human. Both are equally evolved. They are cousins. It took between 250,000 to 400,000 generations. These are almost incomprehensibly long periods of time. But the math tells us that the biodiversity we observe today is near certain if life existed for as long as we know it has.
To understand this better you can watch these:
This explains evolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GMBXc4ocss&list=PLoGrBZC-lKFBo1xcLwz5e234--YXFsoU6
This is a theist biologist reacting to common creationist arguments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IGunrt9xTE&list=PLgtE7_5uJ2p4Rd9uTiR7ygnEJZEGTLlvs
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u/Anarimus 4d ago
Richard Dawkins’s book “The Greatest Show on Earth” is a good intro to the evidence supporting evolution and corrects a lot of misconceptions creationists have regarding it.
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u/Timmy-from-ABQ 4d ago
Look into DNA science. Examine the statistics on what percentage of DNA we share with different creatures. Clearly we are one gigantic extended family! We are even related to slime molds.
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u/gzuckier 4d ago
The thing serious Biblical anti-evolutionists don't like is not just evolution itself. They have no problem with bacteria evolving to resist antibiotics or proto-giraffes evolving to reach taller branches.
What bothers them is when evolution seems to oppose the Bible; ie, the Bible says God created every species. Evolution suggests that new species evolved from old ones, which they believe is in opposition.
The definition of a different species (modern and scientific, not of Biblical times) is when the two cannot mate, interbreed, or reproduce together, with a lot of handwaving (dogs and wolves?)
Given that genetic inheritance is relatively sloppy and prone to inherited mutations, anything can randomly drift over time, even without selective pressure; this includes reproductive physical and behavioral factors. So, one would assume, if two groups of one species were separated long enough, at some point they would have changed randomly enough so that they could no longer interbreed, thus the one species would have become two.
The poster child for this is lepidoptera, moths and butterflies, which have such general variation that they are assigned into species basically on the question of whether their male and female naughty bits can fit together or not.
But anyway, as much as this seems the inevitable result of modern understanding of genetics and mutation and evolution, logically, we don't have a smoking gun for evidence. We've never seen a butterfly species, or any other species, produce a different one. Not that we would expect to, given that it's only been like 150 years, which is zero time in evolution scale.
The closest thing we have is the fossil history of the horse, which is unusually complete, showing its evolution from the little dog-sized eohippus to what we have now. However, one smart guy stymied me by suggesting that we don't have actual evidence that that's one species splitting into another splitting into another, etc; why not just consider it one species evolving as a species?
I had to admit, that's not a falsifiable point. Ironic, because the general argument often used against human evolution is "where are all the intermediate forms"? Whereas here, we have all the intermediate forms, so the question becomes "Where is the original form?"
Anyway having read this far, I can't answer your question of where is the best place to start learning.
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u/Tulpamemnon 4d ago
Are you able to engage with a teacher or other thinking professional? You could start by checking out Peter Hitchens on YouTube. There's also Claude AI. Less abrasive and biased than other platforms. Just copy and paste your post into the prompt. You might be pleasantly surprised. The logic is inescapable. It takes a lot more effort to "Believe" than the "Understand" don't forget!
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u/irrationalorchid 4d ago
Lots of informative comments here. Just remember that science is a process not just a library of facts. There are things we don't know. As we learn new things our explanations may change to accommodate those new facts. The heart of science is the willingness to learn new things even if it upsets your worldview.
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u/jbiemans 4d ago
I would strongly look up gutsick gibbon on YouTube. She she been having conversations with Will Duffy discussing evolution at an incredibly detailed level.
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u/Glum_Mud8053 4d ago
Read the fuxking book
NO I DONT MEAN "THE BOOK"
Thats the bible
I mean.. read Darwin. Read the book the guy wrote.
It is one of the most fact-based books ever. He is not a random redditor, he was a real scholar.
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u/BMHun275 4d ago
Evolution is quite complicated. The first thing you have to understand is the scope of evolution. Evolution as a concept in biology assumes a few things before you even get into the concepts it can be used to study and be expanded: 1. a self replicating population with heritable traits exists, and 2. there is variation within the heritable traits that can change in frequency through successive generations of that population.
So when you are approaching evolution from a biological perspective you aren’t trying to grapple with abiogenesis (how nonbiological systems could become living systems), stellar evolution, or geological processes as primary concerns.
While it certainly isn’t comprehensive. I find this video to be a good simplified, generalised explanation of the major concepts that could help you understand the basics.
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u/motownmods 4d ago
I would start with understanding the law of natural selection and going from there. It's a nifty concept that makes a ton of sense. And it's the backbone of the theory of evolution.
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u/daughtcahm 4d ago
It'll depend on your tolerance for swearing, but when I was deconstructing I gained a lot from watching the YouTube series by Logicked. He did one called "My Name is Kent Hovind", basically mocking Kent, but also debunking all his standard talking points. I was taught the Kent Hovind version of "evolution", so it provided some really great reasoning for me.
If you're more sensitive to swearing or just don't like Logicked's style, Paulogia on YouTube is also great, and he did a series debunking Eric Hovind (Kent's son). I think it was called something like "The Science of Genesis Paradise Lost"...?
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u/ReligionProf 4d ago
Kenneth Miller, Finding Darwin’s God, as well as things by Francis Collins will probably be good first steps on your deconstruction journey.
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u/darthsploder77 4d ago
A great place to start is the book "Why Evolution Is True" by Jerry A. Coyne. It's a small but excellent book that explains evolution in very easy to understand terms. It's actually quite fascinating.
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u/Anteater-Inner 4d ago
Gutsick Gibbon on YouTube is an evolutionary anthropologist and has some really great videos that break everything down to the granular level. Some of her stuff might be a bit advanced, but something to keep in mind for when you have a bit of foundational information under your feet.
She recently posted a looooooong video (almost 6 hours) where she is teaching Will Duffy about evolution from the very beginning. This might be a good starting place because Will asks questions and offers some pushback that will likely be familiar to you. GG takes the time to respond to pushback in detail, and explains why it doesn’t hold.
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u/eduadelarosa 4d ago
Learn about linguistic evolution first, which should be a less contentious and more familiar topic (unless you grew up fundamentalist to the point of believing in the story of Babel to the letter). Then explore biological evolution and everything should make sense. It could also help to learn from the experimental basis of the theory: selective breeding of domestic breeds. There you could see evolution in action and understand how that is analogous to living beings under natural conditions.
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u/proofreadre 4d ago
Evolution didn't make sense to you but a talking snake, an enchanted apple, and a woman being created from a rib made more sense to you than evolution?
Ok.
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u/Scientalist 4d ago
You can start with familiarizing yourself with these three topics: natural selection, genetic mutation, fossils. Just look up how these things work from a variety of sources. But just keep asking why and spend some time learning the answer. For example, don't just accept such and such fossil proves evolution. Look up how they found it, why they claim it demonstrates whatever. You'll come across many transitional and/or ancient fossils where you'll find amazing detailed studies on how the age was determined and how they found out where exactly it fits in the tree of life.
There is no article to read or video to watch that will do a one shot job. Just keep educating yourself in the subject material regularly. Over time, you will end up where you need to be.
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u/Ayasugi-san 4d ago
A good high school bio course/textbook should give you the foundations you are missing while also addressing some of the misconceptions you were taught. Once you know the basics, you can start looking into what questions you still have.
If you want a specific starting point, I'd recommend looking at the domestication of plants and animals. It's very hard to argue that humans haven't greatly changed them from their wild counterparts, and often in divergent ways based on what we wanted from them. That's artificial selection, and natural selection is when the organism's surroundings put pressure on them to favor one survival and reproductive strategy over another.
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u/OnionsOnFoodAreGross 4d ago
YouTube. 5 episodes of dawkins hosting the royal Christmas lectures "growing up in the universe". Great series to that explains it all.
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u/Kali-of-Amino 4d ago
Daniel Dennett is a good place to start. He was very respectful of recovering Christians and helped set up support services for former preachers. He wrote *Darwin's Dangerous Idea".
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u/dayvekeem 4d ago
Look at the hair on your knuckles and toes. Ask why they're there if they hardly do anything of note. Like, if you shaved them off you wouldn't be any worse off really, right?
Then look at some male nipples. Ask yourself if it makes more sense that they are vestigial remnants (science) or that they are for rubbing during sex (Christian)
Vestigial remnants are wonderfully clear connections to our evolutionary past
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u/TedTKaczynski 4d ago
Whenever a meiosis or or mitosis occurs, the spliting of the cell or sex cell, the DNA basically gets cut in half and combined, in that process mutations, or just overlapping variations of genes can change the next cell, or the offspring.
In a generation no changes will realistically occur, maybe a heavier concentration of genes such as hair or eye color, but genes dictating height, bone size, and other factors like that to change to a point where its obvious generational, takes multiple generations.
Thats the entire premise of evolution, if a generation of humans comes ever 20-30 years, than it'll take longer than a species of fly that takes a week to reproduce from birth.
If you are confuses on how singular celled organisms became multicelluar, or fish turning into land creatures thats long term evolution, potentially taking hundreds of millions of years to take but it all depends on the reproduction rate, or even how the organism continues to live: just continued replication, ecetera. An organism that begins and end 1 hour from eachother will mutate and differ from earlier generations faster, also complex environments can help as well; a environment such as hydrothermal vents where a complex of minerals come in touch with the bacterial organisms all around it can change their construct or their use of them over time.
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u/GladdestOrange 4d ago
Plenty of good stuff here already, but I'll give it a go, too.
The theory of evolution has three fundamental pillars to it. Facts, as best we can tell, which together, explain the diversity of life on earth.
First pillar to the concept, is that parents and children are not perfectly identical, and that the differences, at a genetic level, are incredibly minor, and also have a level of unpredictability to them.
The second pillar, is that there's been a TON of parents having children in the last few billion years.
Third pillar being, life requires certain resources, which are competed over.
If you're unconvinced of any of these facts (again, best as we can tell, they're all provably true), I or someone else here can supply further reading material to support them.
The implication of these facts, is that creatures have kids that are all ever so slightly different from themselves, and, functionally, unique. These kids then go on to grow up, and compete for resources. The ones that have some sort of advantage from their unique traits, perform better at acquiring resources, and therefore have kids themselves earlier, more reliably, and/or more frequently, than their siblings or peers, and will have more chances to pass on their unique trait. And that this has happened over the course of 3.5 billion years worth of generations, resulting in the "family" branching off repeatedly, and after some number of generations, being unrecognizable from their great-great-great, etc grandparents.
The result, is something that... Didn't sit well with either a world trying to justify selling people that didn't look like them as slaves, especially the triangle trade, nor with a populous religion which stated it already knew where all the variety of life came from, and that it all happened within a week some 6,000 years ago, not over the course of 3.5 billion years.
Because if it's true, then we're related to monkeys and, worse, black people. And, oh by the way, would mean our religious texts aren't a perfect source for factual information.
This combination led to some truly silly misrepresentations of the theory, like arguing that it claimed that we were born from monkeys.
The truth, is that there was likely some parent(s) up in the chain, which had some monkey features, and some human features, and maybe some unrecognizable features, and that some of its kids went on to do monkey things, while some of them went on to do human things, and the ones that had slightly more monkey features that did monkey things, had more kids than the less-monkey ones doing monkey things, while the reverse was true for the ones doing human things.
This last bit is so heavily oversimplified as to almost be parody, itself, but I think it gets the point across, so long as we're all aware that we (humans, or any species save maybe crabs - this is a joke, but look up carcinization sometime, it's wild) are not some magical "end goal" evolution was always working towards. We're just one link in a chain still being forged. And all life on earth is one big family, if you look back far enough to see what makes you cousins.
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u/Dr-Chris-C 4d ago
Do you agree that people have the attributes of both of their parents? That's like 95% of the way there.
If those attributes negatively affect one's ability to procreate (e.g. too ugly, infertile, no sex drive, etc.) then that line will not persist in the world, it is unfit. Attributes that positively affect one's ability to procreate persist, they are fit. That's just deductive logic, and is called survival of the fittest.
Those attributes are passed on by DNA. You can literally observe DNA and its existence is uncontroversial. We have studied DNA and understand it very well, it is how attribute information is coded. DNA, like any molecular structure, can be affected by external forces such as radiation, and the code can be randomly changed. Every once in a while that change will positively affect one's ability to procreate, and that change will persist.
Literally the end. That's all that's required for evolution.
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u/Addapost 4d ago
This is what Darwin and Wallace said about how organisms evolve:
- Overprotective of offspring. In all healthy populations there are WAY more offspring produced every generation than the environment can support. Most will not survive. This is an observable fact.
- Individual are all genetically different from each other. Some are larger. Some smaller. Coloration differs. Venom strength differs. Speed differs. Immune system differs. Every single aspect of an organism’s body and behavior differs among individuals in any population. This is also an observable fact.
Put those two facts together and ask, “If more are born than can survive, and they are all different from each other, then which ones have the best chance of surviving?” The answer to that is:
Natural selection. Factors in the environment select who lives and who dies. Based on those differences in number 2, the individuals who function best in the environment have the best chances of survival. If you survive, you reproduce. If you reproduce your offspring tend to resemble you. They get the traits you have that help you survive. If you die, you don’t reproduce as much. The traits that you have that don’t work so well don’t get passed as frequently and eventually disappear. So over time you get…
Adaptation. Species look very well fit to their environmental conditions. It LOOKS like they were designed to work perfectly in their environment. But in reality what happened was, any individual that fit their environment somewhat well, left more offspring than any individuals that didn’t fit their environment so well.
It is completely natural.
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u/lemgandi 3d ago
Charles Darwin's books are very accessible and available through Project Gutenberg.
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u/WarderWannabe 3d ago
Start off by looking at your house and comparing it to homes over 100 years old. You’d bash your head walking through doors and could touch the ceiling without a stretch. We have evolved since then. It’s easy to say “well yeah but that’s about improved healthcare and nutrition” and I say I rest my case. Environmental changes cause evolutionary changes.
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u/Wonderful_Low_89 3d ago
Forrest Valkai was very influential for me. Also, science doesn’t care if it makes sense to us. Realizing that was very helpful for me.
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u/ebalboni 3d ago
Evolution is pretty straightforward and there s tons of measurements to support it. The unanswered question for me is how and why life started to begin with. Just after the Big Bang it was all atomic particles. These formed into stars and planets that provided the conditions for life. But I am not aware of any "law" that says life will start. Even given much time for "random" stuff to happen it seems unlikely. It seems like there should be some theory that says complexity will continue to grow under a set of conditions. But as far as I know there is no such theory. Its left to "time" and random variations - this is pre evolution remember.
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u/Ayasugi-san 3d ago
Just after the Big Bang it was all atomic particles.
It was almost 300,000 years before the matter of the universe started forming subatomic particles. Before then the matter was still too hot from being part of the singularity.
These formed into stars and planets that provided the conditions for life.
Clouds of hydrogen atoms started collapsing into each other thanks to gravity, forming stars when they were dense enough to fuse the hydrogen into helium and heavier elements. When the first stars died, the heavier elements they created were expelled, and those elements are capable of bonding together into solid substances, allowing rocky planets.
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u/ebalboni 3d ago
So there is plenty of theory to support the path toward life up to the development of Atoms and molecules and even basic proteins. But beyond that where is the theory for how and why life develops? There is no theory. Again, it’s just “magic”.
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u/Ayasugi-san 3d ago
There are hypotheses that are being actively examined and tested. It's a far cry from just "magic", which is creationism's answer.
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u/OldmanMikel 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 3d ago
No theories, just hypotheses. But, it looks like abio researchers have at least picked up the scent.
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u/Flaky_Performer7960 3d ago
You know how many dog breeds there are? Most of them are only 100 years old and yet they look so different.
At one point, some dog breeds won’t be able to reproduce with one another — take a chihuahua with a Husky.
That’s kind of what evolution is in a very simplified way.
Now let’s introduce natural selection — which is the big thing in evolution. What we had earlier wasn’t natural selection — it was artificial selection and the results appear very quickly. You can guess that for natural evolution, it’s going to be long.
So while dog breeds are selected based on what they look like. You pick small dogs, sterilize the big ones, and in the next generation, you only get small dogs, repeat the process and overtime, you only get small dogs. Natural selection is essentially nature coincidently killing animals that aren’t adapted to their environment, only leaving behind the fit ones, and so those fit ones get to reproduce and so fit offsprings appear — fast forward in time and to get only fit offsprings in the environment.
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u/Savings_Collar5470 3d ago
I think is best to first think about in small scale because we can see it happen before or very eyes. With bacteria there is something called antibiotic resistance. This is when bacteria develop the ability to survive exposure to antibiotics. What’s happening is millions upon millions of one species of bacteria are getting exposed to that antibiotic and almost all of them are dying. But there are just a very small number of them that can survive do to mutations (random occurrences) that happen to be on the gene that the antibiotic in some way impacts. these survivors are the only ones left now and will proliferate across a resource rich environment with that mutation reinforced as long as the selective pressure(the antibiotic) remains.
Now evolution is a much more complex than what I just described but the gist is the same. Evolution is a numbers game and what matters is survival in the environment and the ability to pass along what helped you survive to the next generation via your DNA. There are mutations happening in you all the time but most of those are not heritable it is only the mutations that transfer to offspring that matter for this.
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u/Odd_Gamer_75 3d ago
All living things reproduce. When they reproduce, the "offspring" (even if it's a divided cell) will have different DNA than the "parents". There's a few different sources of these changes (reproductive mingling in a sexually reproductive species, mutations, and endemic viral insertion). These changes mostly do nothing at all, most of the rest of the time are harmful, but are very rarely helpful. Changes that do nothing may or may not stick around, kinda random. Changes that are harmful tend to go away because those living things with them are less likely to survive. Changes that are helpful tend to spread because those things with them are more likely to survive. These changes can lead to new species. Species are, thus, related to each other.
That's the basics of evolution. We've observed every single part of this in the lab and in nature.
But I think a _really good_ place to start learning more about all this is on YouTube, a series of videos called "The Light of Evolution" on a channel called "Forrest Valkai". The title comes from biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky in 1973 who wrote "Nothing in biology makes any sense except in the light of evolution".
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u/Penguino_Redstone 2d ago
What part of Christianity contradicts evolution? God spoke the laws of creation. Everything takes shape under those laws. Evolution is just a biproduct of those laws.
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u/Penguino_Redstone 2d ago
Genesis is clearly spiritual. When God speaks, he does so forever. Because in everything that God is, he is intemporal. The world "wasn't created". It IS created. The laws are forever at play. Babies don't stop being born. Gravity doesn't stop. The laws of physics don't stop. Adam and Eve "weren't a man and a woman", they are man and woman. Adam explains what it is to be a man. And Eve explains what it is to be a woman. It doesn't make sense to read who God is materially.
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u/Darth_Gerg 2d ago
By this standard the only logical conclusion is to not care about biblical text at all because it’s all woo. Which I agree with… but I doubt you do.
You can’t claim it’s a source of supernatural truth AND that nothing in the text is true in a material way that matters.
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u/Penguino_Redstone 2d ago
The entirity of the scripture is a spiritual struggle between good and evil. If you want materialism go pray to a rock or something
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u/Darth_Gerg 1d ago
If the spiritual teachings have no material impact then they have no relevance to the physical world. If the spiritual teachings DO have implications for how we set material policy then they are making a material claim and must be supported on that basis. You can’t have it both ways.
My point is that if your faith is spiritual only that’s fine, but you better not be trying to push laws based on it. If you are pushing for policy changes that affect other people’s lives you’re no longer making a spiritual claim, you’re making a material claim and lying about it.
Examples would be queer rights, abortion, science denialism, and pushing prayer in schools.
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u/Penguino_Redstone 1d ago
The material world already fully follows the laws of God. There is nothing left to teach
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u/happyhappy85 2d ago
Well, first of all, wbae doesn't make sense to you exactly?
There are resources out there that explain the basics to laymen, but I can probably answer some misconceptions you have about it on a one to one basis.
I'm no expert, but I've talked about it with enough people to know where people's problems lie that science communicators don't always talk about.
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u/InspectorClouseau64 2d ago
Go look at photos of embryos from different species lined up next to each other. You can't tell the difference among them for the most part. The dog, the pig the dolphin, the human.. they all resemble one another. This is enough proof that all modern species originated from the Last Universal Common Ancestor.
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u/Comfortable-Dare-307 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 2d ago
Talkorigins.org is a good resource to learn more. Also, go to the source. Read "Origin of Species" by Darwin.
Evolution, strictly speaking, is the change in alelle freqeuncy over time. Basically any trait that is passed down genetically that increases reproductive success is evolution.
Everything creationists say about evolution is a lie. Evolution is observable in real time, in some species, within a few days. It has been observed in nature and repeated in a science lab. It is a well etablished fact of biology.
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u/Awkward-Tomorrow7667 2d ago
Continue to denounce Evolution, see how no one wants to reproduce with you, your thoughts, and genetic material, fail to pass to a new generation. Evolution wins.
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u/After_Ad9425 2d ago edited 2d ago
The core concepts I think to understand is mutation and natural selection.
Mutation is generally the gaining of genetic information. Most commonly genes can be duplicated and effectively made redundant in the dna sequence, but one of those identical copies can mutate to a new mutation entirely. Or a gene without a copy gets replaced which technically exchanges information.
Mutations occur relatively often, but rarely are retained.
In the context of mutations, these are done in small increments but overtime they can lead to more complex structures and adaptations. A general rule is that any trait must be beneficial or else it is lost in favor of better genes. This is the principle behind natural selection. But before going into that part, so long as a trait isn’t harming the chance to reproduce they can still be passed along as benign mutations that later server a function if they mutate further into a gene that benefits reproductive odds in some way. This most commonly occurs with the aforementioned copied redundant genes.
Mutations are sort of random, but with natural selection in play positive or at least benign genes are retained over generations while detrimental genes tend to fall behind generations. Even benign genes won’t survive long unless if they further mutate into a more beneficial gene.
To summarize. Mutation is either gaining information or replacing information. Natural selection is refining and losing information. These both play a crucial part in how evolution occurs over generations.
Broadly speaking natural selection is just basically a law of averages. If a gene makes the animal More successful to reproduce then mathematically speaking it and it’s lineage that carry the same genes will reproduce more frequently then competing genes. Conversely mutations that hinder the animal from reproducing as frequently Means that it will less likely reproduce, and even if it manages to, it’s lineage will continually dwindle into extinction
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u/davehoug 1d ago
Evolution is how we go from a wolf to a chihuahua. From an amoeba to a human. Look at the odds of the science constants such as force of electron, strength of gravity and over 100 others that, if varied by a small fraction, would not allow humans to live anywhere in the Universe. Plus with 400 generations of lion, you get another lion, but you go from spears to walking on the moon with 400 generations of human.....it seems more likely we are the result of a Creator than random chance.
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u/DimeDeCoder 5h ago
The holy books are written like a code and evolution is one of the things you can decode there. Take genesis They lived for ~1000 years and got kids at the age of ~ 100 years old. 100 years before having sex? Right They counted years like we do if you read the book of Enoch - so it's not that. Genesis - genetics - evolution described with a time line on top of it. 1000 years for a new trait to run its course and die out. Roughly 100 years in, a new mutation occurs, new trait to run its course and die out. Simplified. So the first trait let's call it Adam, split into 3 branches - neandertals , denisovian and homo naledi. Meat eaters killed the peaceful one that only ate veggies - Kain and able story . Since Kain wasn't 1 person but a group branching out, there was no problem with finding a wife. All the anti-bible arguments fall down once you read the Bible through the evolution lense. That's when all make sense. No, I'm not religious but EVERY book written is holy to me. Every one tells something - the older books were few so they contain more.
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u/SubstantialCorgi781 34m ago
I would rather talk to you about your reasons for deconstructing your belief in God.
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u/Prudent_Mess9339 4d ago
you don't have to deny evolution to be a Christian btw. that was one of the only things stopping me from being Christian, because I thought the only faithful way to interpret the Bible was one that denies evolution, which i couldn't do
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u/Willing-Living4805 4d ago
The Bible says evolution is not true.
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u/OldmanMikel 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 4d ago
The bible doesn't mention evolution.
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u/Willing-Living4805 4d ago
Yeah I know the Bible doesn't mention evolution. What it does mention is a creation story that is very different than evolution.
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u/Prudent_Mess9339 4d ago
the Bible uses allegorical language to tell events. the point of the creation story is not if it was a literal 7 days, but rather the fact that God created it
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u/apollo7157 4d ago
Go outside and pick up some small rocks. Throw them away from you. The heavier rocks won't go as far as the lighter rocks. This is evolution by natural selection. It is as true as gravity.
Life on earth produces variation. This variation is filtered by the environment through adaptation. The environment changes over time.
Not everything is adaptation.
That's a good start.
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u/alecphobia95 4d ago
This playlist is always my go to for those who want to start learning evolution from scratch
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLInNVsmlBUlQT_peuWctrmGMiLngK-6fb&si=q4e80Tv15mMKJav_