Actually DNA evidence is now key in many cases in courts. So we can actually trace a person’s ancestry using DNA and it’s been proven to work time and time again. If someone is your mother or grandmother or sister or distant cousin, then DNA evidence will prove it. Now if that’s the case, then lets take this to court and test chimp DNA to see if there’s any common ancestry with humans in general. You’d find that they are nearly identical and much closer than any other species out there, so that alone could prove that they are our very very distant cousins. If DNA evidence works for common ancestry in humans, why should it not work for common ancestry for all animals? That’s just part of the proof too. Often in court you also need to provide bones of the deceased. Well again, we have found thousands of fossilized pre-humans, some that look closer to being human while others are closer to being ape-like. These fossils appear at a certain level in sentiments representing millions of years. This can be proven using various dating methods too. Just like with CSI that can be used to find the time of death, they have found many ways of dating fossils. So now you have bones and DNA that both conform to evolutionary theory. If that’s not enough just use simple mathematics and biological chemistry. Everytime a person is born, test how much micro-evolution (what creationists will admit) or in other words mutation has occured and do this in many different people getting an average of how much mutation occurs at each birth. It’s about 0.001%… now times that by 500,000 generations (or roughly the amount over 3 million years) to see how much genetic drift would happen. They’ve done this too and the dates of how much mutation has occured since humans were descended from an ape-like ancestor match the dating of the fossil record. Why do creationists ignore the incredible amount of evidence and then tell people lies that there is none at all? It is YOUR argument that would fail in court because your only evidence would be the bible and trying desperately to poke holes in the evidence provided by the opposition.

After all this said, evolution doesn’t disprove God at all. It disproves the “young Earth” theory, unless as stated before all this evidence is an elaborate hoax by the creator. Then that would make God himself the one who fooled scientists into accepting evolutionary theory because he’s the one who’s left evidence in DNA and fossils. Besides, if God is trully intelligent creator then I’d say evolution would have been the best way of creating us anyway. It allows our biological systems to utilize the environment to its full extent and we’re more robust than any machine that we’ve created to this day. I mean do you think it would make more sense for this giant old man with a white beard to sit down on this planet creating animals and humans from clay like some kid in a sandbox? No if anything, I’d say our creation started at the big bang when the universal laws were put in place that allow evolution to take place in the right environments. Since the origin of the universe’s laws cannot be proven by science, then why not start there as to what God created?

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-4.html#quote81
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-4.html#quote57

Not really. Abiogensis isn’t spontanous generation. The evolution of very simple life form from non living material isn’t the same as the belief that flys’ were created from slabs of rotting meat. Clearly you lack understanding of science.

Yet Evolution has not been proved. Sir Arthur Keith, a famous British evolutionary anthropologist and anatomist, confesses, “Evolution is unproved and unprovable. We believe it only because the only alternative is special creation, and that is unthinkable.” In fact, it seems that the Theory of Evolution is contrary to established science. George Wald, another prominent Evolutionist (a Harvard University biochemist and Nobel Laureate), wrote, “When it comes to the Origin of Life there are only two possibilities: creation or spontaneous generation. There is no third way. Spontaneous generation was disproved one hundred years ago, but that leads us to only one other conclusion, that of supernatural creation. We cannot accept that on philosophical grounds; therefore, we choose to believe the impossible: that life arose spontaneously by chance!” (”The Origin of Life,” Scientific American, 191:48, May 1954).

This quote seems quite reasonable to me.

The whole theory of evolution totally disregards two fundamental principles of science. Namely, scientific knowledge is acquired through the processes of observation and experimentation.

First, let me qualify what I mean by the theory of evolution. Microevolution occurs when changes in the genetic frequencies, etc. of a population occur. Hence antibiotic resistant bacteria survive because the genes which made them resistant were already present in their gene pool. If they did not have the genes they would not survive! The same applies to roaches, finches, etc.

Macroevolution is evolution that assumes a transition from one species to different species (i.e. the theory that supposes that all life originated from one cell that evolved into other living things and those evolved and so on, until humans, etc.)

Macroevolution clearly violates both scientific principles because no one has ever observed one species evolving into another. Nor can they ever because the process can NEVER be replicated. Scientists have never been able to produce a living cell from non-living things (Miller-Urey’s experiment done in the 1950’s was done in a controlled environment instead of a “natural” one and NO CELLS were ever produced).

In addition, fossils cannot be used to provide evidence for evolution. The fossils were discovered out of their natural context and their origins are subject to interpretation. Those interpretations are constantly being changed (as we can see by the recurring news that scientists now claim that such and such a fossil is now 10 million years old instead of the 5 million as originally thought).

All scientific theories, hypotheses and information are supposed to be subject to analysis, reasoned criticism and questions. Evolution should be no different. Put aside the assumption that evolution must be true. Look at the evidence for evolution from several different perspevtives (i.e. a scientist, detective, lawyer, etc). Can it stand up in a court of law? Test the evidence to see if it makes sense and if it meets the criteria for good scientific work. My assessment gives it a failing grade. How about yours? What do you have to lose?

Regards, Sabine

If you can quote the exact phrases in this artilce that show Raup believed that 1) Homo neanderthalensis was an old man with arthritis and 2) that Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) was a “chimpanzee”, I’ll go pull up the article at the library myself to read it over.

I do know that very briefly after the discovery of the first Neandertal fossil, it was believed that it was a modern human that was just an “old man.” But this belief has been put to rest over 100 years ago, and with over 400 specimens today, I don’t think any anthropologist buys into it. There is of course disagreement on how to classify Neandertals. Were they a truly seperate species? Or best considered a subspecies of H. sapiens? As this is not my field, I don’t have any opinion on that myself, though I get the sense that they are classified most often as H. neanderthalensis.

As for the claim that Lucy was just a chimpanzee… This I know to be untrue. The position of the foramen magnum — the large hole on the bottom of the skull through which the spinal cord passes — is directly underneath the skull, entirely consistent with bipedal movement. In chimpanzees, its at a clear angle, because they’re “knuckle walkers.”

In short, I am completely skeptical of your claim that Raup thought Lucy was just a chimpanzee, and I challenge you to prove me wrong.