Quote:
|
Originally Posted by nanotech
Q1) I watched documentaries many years ago. As far as I remember, the giraffes' necks all have the same number of bones but natural selection chose the taller bones.
This is very important because that means that evolution was a result of natural selection. The giraffes' with longer neck bones managed to reproduce and gave birth to giraffes' with longer neck bones. This is normal reproduction > evolution > adaptation.
Now if and only if the tallness of the giraffe came because the number of neck bones increased, then it would be a totally different story! This means that a new bone object was written in the DNA and fitted in the write manner to be in the neck. This would have meant that evolution was able to create. But its scientifically impossible for new information to be created on its own (in the DNA).
|
I missed this the first time round - but it is interesting because it shows up something important about the way evolution appears to have shaped the world around us.
Specifically, the structure of the animals.
Have you ever noticed how everything with a backbone, from the smallest tree-frog, through to the largest whale, has analogous skeletal structures?
We all have spines, arms and legs (or at least, the vestiges of them as evidenced in snakes), a skull etc. Comparing the bones of a horse and the bones of a man is possible and while there may not be exactly the same number of bones, there is a distinct similarity in apparent structure and arrangement.
What does this tell us about evolution, creationism or adaption?
It tells us that either there was one population of animals (likely an early amphibious creature) from which lizards, snakes, elephants, mice, man and dinosaurs are all decended from; Or, that God had some form of general prototype, from which he copied and pasted into each species, tweaking at the edges in order to create different variations on the theme.
One thing that seems interesting is the role of the mammals that live in the seas; dolphins, whales etc. They have the bone structure of the (mostly land-based) animals, yet live their whole lives in the water like fish (with their entirely different skeletal structures) Why would God go through the whole process of bending all those bones out of shape, if he already had a perfectly working prototype for a sea-based life in the fish? If nothing else, it certainly shows poor design practice. More likely (to my mind), it displays a vivid example of the random, blind and accidental nature of evolution. Why? Because here, in the whale, we see evidence of an ancestry that started in the seas, drawing oxygen from the water around it, before evolving into a land-walking, air-breathing beast, before once again returning to the seas and re-evolving back again into an aquatic form. What a completely stupid way to evolve! No-one would seriously go about creating a creature this way on purpose.