Summary: From the perspective of biological classification: the most important thing to classify different species is to see whether there is reproductive isolation, that is to say, if they cannot produce stable offspring (that is, they can produce pregnant offspring, and the offspring can continue to have children), they are classified into the same category. Looking at this inverse proposition, since humans and apes are different in classification, I don’t think they will produce stable offspring! But whether they produce offspring can be verified, but I don’t know. Who wants to do experiments!
1. The theory of evolution is just a theory. It is neither a fact nor a scientific law.
Many people have learned in elementary school that, in terms of hierarchy, theory is in the middle - it is more certain than a pure hypothesis, but slightly inferior to a law. However, this is not how scientists divide the terms. According to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a scientific theory is “a well-founded explanation of an aspect of nature, which may include facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses.” Laws are generalizations about nature. Sexual description, and no matter how much confirmation a theory receives, it does not make it a law. So when scientists talk about evolution (or, for that matter, about atomic theory or relativity), they don't express any disagreement with the truth of this theory.
In addition to the theory of evolution (the so-called evolution refers to the concept of genetic improvement over one generation), people may also cite examples of evolution. The National Academy of Sciences defines "facts" as "observations that have been proven repeatedly and are actually generally accepted as 'true'". The fossil record and countless other evidence prove that organisms evolved gradually over time. While no one has directly seen these changes, the indirect evidence is clear and unambiguous enough to be convincing.
No matter which science, it is common to rely on indirect evidence to explain problems. Physicists, for example, cannot see subatomic particles directly, so they prove their existence by observing the characteristic trails they leave in cloud chambers. But physicists do not make their conclusions less convincing just because they cannot observe directly.
2. Natural selection falls into a vicious circle of circular argument: the fittest survive, and those who survive are the fittest.
"Survival of the fittest" is a controversial expression of natural selection. In fact, a more professional expression should use the term "differential rate of survival and reproduction" the term. Rather than labeling individual species as adapted or unadapted, this description describes how many offspring each species is likely to leave under given conditions. Place a pair of fast-breeding small-billed finch songbirds and a pair of slow-breeding large-billed finch songbirds on an island with abundant food. Within a few generations, rapidly reproducing songbirds may have commandeered much of the food source. But if large-billed songbirds are more likely to crack open seeds, the advantage may shift to these slower-breeding songbirds. In a groundbreaking study of finch songbirds on the Galapagos Islands, Peter R. Grant of Princeton University observed how populations wax and wane in the wild. [See Grant's article "Natural Selection and Darwin's Songbird" in the February 1992 issue of this magazine. ]
The key is that the adaptability of a species can be defined independently of its ability to survive: a bird's large beak is better suited to cracking open seeds, regardless of whether this trait is enhanced under given conditions The value of survivability.
3. Evolution is unscientific because it can neither be verified nor overturned. The species changes involved in its various assertions cannot be observed and can never be reproduced.
This total denial of evolution ignores several important features that divide evolution into at least two broad categories—microevolution and macroevolution. Microevolution examines changes within species over time, and such changes may be precursors to the formation of new species. Macroevolution studies how taxonomic groups evolve above the species level. Its evidence usually comes from fossil data and DNA comparisons that reconstruct the relationships between various organisms.
Even most creationists today admit that laboratory experiments (such as studies of cells, plants, and fruit flies) and field investigations (such as Grant's study of the Galapagos Examination of the evolution of beak shape in songbirds) have confirmed the existence of microevolution. Natural selection and other mechanisms (including chromosomal changes, reproductive and hybridization, etc.) can promote profound changes in biological populations.
Historical studies of macroevolution involve inferences based on fossils and DNA rather than direct observations. However, for historical sciences (including astronomy, geology, archaeology, and evolutionary biology), scientists can still test hypotheses to see whether they are consistent with physical evidence and whether they can make testable predictions for future scientific discoveries. predict. For example, evolution means that between our earliest ancestors (about 5 million years ago) and the earliest anatomically modern humans (about 100,000 years ago), there should have been a series of other hominids with ape characteristics. There are fewer and fewer, and there are more and more human characteristics, which happens to be completely consistent with the fossil data. But we will not (and indeed do not) find fossils of modern humans in strata from the Jurassic Period (about 65 million years ago). Conventional studies in evolutionary biology make predictions that are much more refined and accurate than this, and researchers are constantly testing these predictions.
Creationists may also refute evolution in other ways. If we could find evidence that even just one complex life form arose spontaneously from inanimate matter, then at least several of the organisms we see in fossils may have evolved in this way. If superintelligent aliens ever appeared and created life on Earth (or even created specific species), then purely evolutionary explanations would be questioned. But so far no such evidence has been presented.
It should be noted that the idea of ??falsifiability as a defining characteristic of science was proposed by the philosopher Karl Popper in the 1930s. Because the narrow interpretation of his ideological principles excluded many genuine branches of scientific research, it was only in recent years that his ideological views were gradually broadened.
4. Scientists are increasingly doubting the reality of evolution.
There is no evidence that supporters of evolution are declining. Open any issue of a professional biology magazine and you will find articles that support and develop evolutionary research or agree that evolution is a fundamental scientific concept.
Contrary to the creationist view, serious scientific magazines have not reported on denying evolution. In the mid-1990s, George W. Gilchrist of the University of Washington in the United States investigated thousands of journals listed in original documents, looking for articles on "divine design" or creation theory. He checked hundreds of thousands of scientific reports and found no report on the theory of creation. Over the past two years, Barbara Forrest of Southeastern Lewis University and Lawrence M. Krauss of Case Western Reserve University independently conducted the same investigation, and the results came back without success.
Creationists retort, claiming that the closed-minded and stubbornly xenophobic scientific community refuses to accept their evidence. Yet editors at Nature, Science and other leading journals say they have seen few submissions opposing evolution. Some authors who oppose evolution have published papers in serious scientific journals. However, these papers rarely directly attack the theory of evolution, and they never explicitly cite the creationist argument. At most they point out that there are some unresolved problems in the theory of evolution (no one objects to this). In short, creationists do not have sufficient reasons for the scientific community to take their claims seriously.
5. Even evolutionary biologists have various disagreements with each other, which shows that the scientific foundation on which the theory of evolution is based is not solid at all.
The topics of heated debate among evolutionary biologists are varied. For example, there are various issues such as how species are formed, the speed of evolution, whether the ancestors of birds and dinosaurs are related by blood, and whether Neanderthals are an independent species different from modern humans. Controversies of one kind or another are inevitable in any discipline, and evolution is no exception.
However, the biological community still unanimously accepts the theory of evolution as a real thing and a guiding principle in the biological world.
Unfortunately, hypocritical creationists often quote scientists out of context to exaggerate and misrepresent their differences. Anyone familiar with the work of Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould knows that in addition to being one of the founders of the "punctuated equilibrium model", Gould is also the most active defender and propagandist of the theory of evolution. (Punctuated equilibrium models suggest that most evolution occurs during relatively brief periods in geological history, thus explaining what we observe in the fossil record. However, brief periods in geological history may also span hundreds of generations. However, creationists always go to great lengths to take quotes out of context from Gould's rich works, making people think that Gould had expressed doubts about the theory of evolution. What's more, some distort the theory of punctuated equilibrium, as if punctuated equilibrium would allow new species to emerge overnight, or allow birds to emerge from reptile eggs.
If readers come across quotes from scientific authorities that question the theory of evolution, they must look at the context to see what this passage actually means. To be sure, so-called scientists’ attacks on evolution turned out to be fabrications.
6. If humans evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys today?
This argument is commonplace and reflects varying degrees of ignorance of the theory of evolution on the part of the questioner. The first mistake is that the theory of evolution does not tell us that humans evolved from monkeys; it only says that humans and monkeys have the same ancestors.
The deeper error this argument makes is the same as asking: "If children are born from adults, why are there adults?" New species are created by diverging from existing species. Evolution occurs when some biological group becomes isolated from the main branch of its family and becomes sufficiently modified to permanently become a new species that is significantly different from the original species. The parent species may survive indefinitely, or it may become extinct.
7. The theory of evolution cannot explain how life first appeared on Earth.
The origin of life remains largely a mystery, but biochemists have figured out how primitive nucleic acids, amino acids and the various other building blocks of life formed and replicated themselves , thus laying the foundation for cellular biochemical processes. Astrochemical analysis shows that this type of compound may have originally formed in large quantities in space and then came to Earth in comets. This theory may explain how these building blocks of life emerged under various conditions when the Earth was young.
Creationists sometimes make a fuss about scientists' current inability to explain the origin of life, trying to deny evolution entirely. In fact, even if life on earth was really born through pathways other than evolution (for example, aliens brought the first cells to the earth billions of years ago), countless microevolutionary and macroevolutionary studies have strongly proved that The evolution of life is a conclusive fact.
8. Mathematical analysis shows that it is inconceivable that something as complex as a protein can be generated randomly, let alone a living cell or even a human being.
Chance plays a role in evolution (for example, species acquire new characteristics through random mutations), but the evolutionary process does not rely on luck to produce organisms, proteins, or other living entities. On the contrary, free selection (the major mechanism of evolution that should be understood) achieves non-random change by retaining "beneficial" (adaptive) traits and eliminating "unhelpful" (non-adaptive) traits. As long as the force of selection remains stable, natural selection can push evolution in one direction, producing complex structures in surprisingly short periods of time.
Let us use this analogy and consider the 13-letter sequence "TOBEORNOTTOBE". Assume that there are 1 million monkeys typing randomly on the keyboard, and each monkey types out an alphabetical sequence as long as the above sequence every second. Then it would take them 78,800 years to type out 2613 sequences of the same length. Find the letter sequence above.
However, in the 1980s, Richard Hardison of Glendale College in the United States wrote a computer program that could randomly generate phrases. The characteristic of this program was that if a single letter happened to be located at a given position in the phrase, then the letter would be there. Stay in one position (in effect, choose a phrase that is closer to what Hamlet said). The program only had to repeat it an average of 336 times to produce the phrase again, which took less than 90 seconds. What's even more amazing is that the program can even reconstruct Shakespeare's entire play in four and a half days.
9. The second law of thermodynamics states that as time goes by, the system must develop in an increasingly disordered direction. Therefore, living cells could not have evolved from inanimate chemicals, and multicellular organisms could not have evolved from protozoa.
This statement is wrong because it misunderstands the second law of thermodynamics. If this argument is valid, then mineral crystals and snowflakes should also be among the impossible substances, because they are also complex structures formed from disordered components.
The second law of thermodynamics actually states that the total entropy of a closed system (that is, a system that does not exchange energy and matter with the outside world) will not decrease over time. Entropy is a physical concept that is often referred to as "disorder." However, this term is still very different from the usual word.
More importantly, the second law of thermodynamics allows the entropy of one part of a system to decrease as long as there is a corresponding increase in the entropy of other parts of the system. Therefore, our Earth as a whole is likely to become increasingly complex because the Sun continues to scatter heat and light to the Earth, and the increase in entropy caused by thermonuclear reactions within the Sun is enough to offset the entropy scattered to the Earth. Simple organisms can evolve toward greater and greater complexity by consuming other life forms as well as nonliving matter.
10. Mutation is essential to evolutionary theory. But mutations can only eliminate characteristics, not create new ones.
On the contrary, biological data have proven that many characteristics are produced through point mutations (the so-called point mutations are changes at precise positions in the DNA of an organism). Bacterial resistance to antibiotics is a good example.
Mutation of the homeobox structural gene (homeobox) that regulates development in animals can also produce complex effects. Hox genes determine where legs, wings, antennae, and body parts should grow. For example, the Antennapedia mutation in Drosophila causes legs to grow where antennae should be. These abnormal limbs serve no purpose, but their existence demonstrates that genetic errors can produce complex structures, and that natural selection can experiment with these structures to see if they are useful.
In addition, molecular biology research has discovered some more advanced genetic change mechanisms than point mutations, which expand the pathways for the emergence of new characteristics of species. Functional molecules within genes can be spliced ??together in a variety of novel ways. Entire genes can also be accidentally duplicated within an organism's DNA, and the duplicated genes can mutate into new genes with complex properties. Comparisons of the DNA of various organisms suggest that the globins in the blood evolved in this way over millions of years.
11. Natural selection may explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and the advanced operating rules of life.
Evolutionary biologists have written extensively about how natural selection produces new species. For example, Ernst Mayr of Harvard University built a model called "allopatry". This model suggests that if a group of organisms is isolated from other groups by geographical boundaries, it may face different selection pressures. Variation factors will gradually accumulate within the isolated group. When these mutation factors accumulate to a very significant level, so that it is impossible (or usually will not) for this differentiated group to mate with the original population to produce offspring, the group will reproduce independently and follow this path. This path continues until it eventually becomes a new species.
Natural selection is the most thoroughly studied evolutionary mechanism, but biologists have also considered various other possible evolutionary mechanisms. Biologists have been evaluating the potential of several unusual genetic mechanisms to cause speciation, or to produce complex properties of organisms. Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and other researchers have convincingly shown that certain organelles, such as energy-producing mitochondria, evolved through the genetic fusion of ancient organisms. The scientific community therefore welcomes research that evolution may be caused by forces other than natural selection. But these forces must originate from nature and cannot be attributed to the divine power of the mysterious creation angel, because the existence of such effects has not been scientifically proven.
12. No one has ever seen the evolution of new species.
Speciation can be quite rare and in some cases can take centuries. Additionally, identifying a new species in its formative stages can be difficult because biologists sometimes disagree on how to define a new species. The most widely used definition currently is the "Biological Special Concept" proposed by Mayr. This law holds that a species is a defined population composed of several independently reproducing groups, that is, several organisms that usually do not or cannot reproduce outside their population. In practice, this definition may be difficult to apply to organisms that are isolated from each other by distance or geography, or to plants (let alone fossils that cannot reproduce). So biologists often use the physical and behavioral properties of organisms as clues to their species affiliation.
However, reports of speciation in plants, insects and worms do exist in the scientific literature. In most of these experiments, researchers subject organisms to a variety of selection conditions (targeting anatomical differences, mating behavior, habitat preferences, and other species characteristics) and find that this produces some A population of organisms that does not reproduce with outside alien species. For example, William R. Rice of the University of New Mexico and George W. Salt of the University of California, Davis, demonstrated that if they selected a group of fruit flies based on their preference for a certain environment and bred them in isolation, Over 35 generations, the end result is that the isolated fruit flies will refuse to mate with flies from a completely different environment.
13. Evolutionists cannot provide any fossil evidence to prove that transitional animals (such as animals that are half reptiles and half birds) appeared.
In fact, paleontologists have long known many detailed examples of intermediate fossils (fossils of species that appear to be between various taxonomic groups). One of the most famous fossils is Archaeopteryx, which has both bird-specific feathers and dinosaur-like bone structure. Researchers have also found numerous fossils of other feathered animals, with varying degrees of resemblance to bird fossils. A series of fossils completely describe the evolution of modern horses from the small Eohippus. The ancestors of whales were four-legged animals that crawled on land, and the transitional animals between them were two amphibians named Ambulocetus and Rodhocetus [see "The Animals That Conquered the Ocean" by Kata Wong, Issue 8, 2002 Mammals" article]. Fossils of marine shells reconstruct the evolution of various molluscs over millions of years. About two dozen hominins, not all of whom are ancestors of humans, fill the gap between Lucy the australopithecine and modern humans.
But creationists turn a blind eye to these fossil research results. They claim that Archaeopteryx is not a transitional species between reptiles and birds, but is simply an extinct bird with certain reptilian characteristics. Creationists want evolutionists to come up with a bizarre, whimsical monster that cannot be classified into any known group of species. Even if creationists accept that a fossil is a transitional organism between two species, they may insist on seeing it and other intermediate fossils between the latter two species.
Such exasperating demands can be made endlessly one after another, and the fossil record is always incomplete and impossible to satisfy.
However, evolutionists can obtain further strong evidence from molecular biology. All organisms share most of the same genes, but evolutionists foresee that the structure of these genes and their products will diverge based on the evolutionary relationships between species. What geneticists call a "molecular clock" will record this time progression. These molecular data also reveal transitional relationships among various organisms during evolution.
14. Organisms have amazingly complex structural characteristics at the anatomical, cellular and molecular levels; even if their complexity is just a little bit less, they will not be able to perform their functions properly, which is detrimental to their health. The only possible conclusion is that living things are the product of divine design rather than evolution.
This so-called "design argument" forms the core of recent attacks on evolution, and was one of the earliest arguments used by creationists. In 1802, theologian William Paley wrote that if someone picked up a watch in the field, the most logical inference would be that someone dropped the watch in the field, rather than being formed by natural forces. Paley claims that it follows that the complex structure of living things must also be the work of direct divine power. Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species to refute Paley. The book explains how the forces of natural selection acting on inherited traits gradually refine the evolutionary process of complex organismal structures.
Generation after generation of creationists have tried to refute Darwin's view by suggesting that the eye is a structure that may have evolved through evolution. They believe that the ability of the eye to produce vision is due to the seamless combination of its components. Therefore, natural selection cannot favor the transitional structure needed in the evolution of the eye (what is the use of half an eye?). Darwin seemed to be prescient about this criticism of creationists. He pointed out that even "incomplete" eyes may have its benefits (such as helping animals turn in the direction of light) and therefore can be inherited for evolution. process to further improve it. Biology confirms Darwin's analysis: researchers have been able to identify primitive eyes and photoreceptors throughout the animal kingdom, and have even mapped out the evolutionary history of the eye through comparative genetic studies. (It is now believed that eyes evolved independently in different families of organisms.)
Today's advocates of divine design are more sophisticated than their predecessors, but their arguments and goals remain the same. Zong. In order to refute the theory of evolution, they attempt to prove that evolution cannot explain life as we know it, and then insist that the only tenable alternative theory is that life was created by an inscrutable divine force.
15. Recent discoveries prove that even at the microscopic level, life possesses a level of complexity that is impossible to produce through evolution.
"Irreducible Complexity" is the slogan put forward by Michael J. Behe ??of Lehigh University, author of "Darwin's Black Box: Biochemical Challenges to Evolution". Behe uses the mousetrap as a popular example of "irreducible complexity." The characteristic of a mousetrap is that as long as any part is missing, it has no function, and its individual parts are valuable only as part of a whole. If this is true of a mousetrap, Behe ??claims, then even more so is the bacterial flagellum (a whip-like organelle that provides propulsion and functions like a ship's outboard engine). The proteins that make up the flagellum are uncannily arranged into parts of an engine, a rudder, and any other structure an engineer might ask for. Behe claimed that the possibility of such a complex and ingenious layout being designed through evolutionary improvements was virtually zero, thus proving that it could only be a stunt performed by divine power. He expressed similar views on coagulation mechanisms and other molecular systems.
However, evolutionary biologists have refuted this view. First of all, some flagella have simpler configurations than those mentioned by Behe, so a flagellum does not necessarily need all the above components to function. The higher-level components of the flagellum that Behe ??mentioned all have precedents elsewhere in nature, and have been described by Kenneth R. Miller of Brown University and other researchers.
In fact, the entire flagellar system is very similar to an organelle called Yersinia pestis, which is used by the plague bacterium to inject toxins into cells.
The key is that although Behe ??claimed that the various component systems of the flagellum have no value other than for propulsion, in fact these systems may have multiple functions, thus benefiting the evolution of the flagellum. So the ultimate evolution of the flagellum may simply be a novel way of reassembling complex components that had evolved for other purposes. Research by Russell F. Doolittle of the University of California, San Diego, shows that the coagulation system appears to have evolved by modifying and perfecting proteins originally used for digestion, much in the same way that flagella evolved. So the "irreducible complexity" Behe ??uses as evidence of divine design is not really irreducible.
Another type of complexity—the so-called "specified complexity"—was proposed by William A. Dembski of Baylor University in his books "Design Reasoning" and "No Free Lunch" The heart of the argument for divine design. His argument was essentially that biological complexity could never be produced by any blind, random process. The only logical conclusion, Dembski claims, is that a superhuman deity created life and influenced its development, echoing Paley's assertion 200 years ago.
Dembski’s argument has several flaws. He suggests that explanations for biological evolution are simply random generation or divine design, which is incorrect. Researchers studying nonlinear systems and cellular automata at the Santa Fe Institute and elsewhere have shown that simple undirected processes can produce extremely complex patterns. Therefore, some of the complexity present in organisms may arise, in part, through natural phenomena that we barely understand yet. However, this does not mean that biological complexity cannot arise naturally.
Conclusion—Unscientific Creation Theory
The very formulation of "Creation Science" is self-contradictory. The core principle of modern science is methodological naturalism, which seeks to explain the universe through observed or testable natural mechanisms. Physics describes atomic nuclei using specific concepts governing matter and energy, and tests these descriptions through experiments. Only when experimental data show that previous descriptions are insufficient to explain observed phenomena do physicists introduce new particles, such as quarks, to enrich their theories. Moreover, the properties of these new particles cannot be defined casually (the definition of new particles is strictly constrained because they must fit into the existing framework of physics).
On the contrary, theorists who advocate divine design bring out all kinds of illusory and unpredictable things and endow them with unlimited abilities at will - in short, whatever can answer the current problem. . Instead of promoting scientific exploration, such an answer will block the path of scientific exploration (for example, how to deny the existence of omnipotent gods?).
Divine design says it cannot solve any problems. For example, when did deities with the power of design intervene in the history of life? How did you get involved? By creating the first DNA, the first cell, or the first human being? Is every species divinely designed? Or were only a few early species divinely designed? Advocates of divine design often avoid these questions. Their opinions about divine design are often varied and disparate, and they don't even bother to communicate with each other to support themselves. They use the process of elimination to make their arguments, that is, they try to belittle evolutionary explanations, dismissing them as far-fetched or incomplete theories, thereby implicitly suggesting that only alternative theorists based on divine design are tenable.
Logically speaking, the advocates of design theory are completely misleading: even if a certain naturalistic explanation is problematic, it does not mean that all such explanations should be killed with a stick. Furthermore, their arguments do not make any one theory of divine design more reasonable than another; in fact, they leave it to the listeners to make their own judgments, and some listeners will no doubt use religious beliefs instead in making such judgments. scientific concept.
Scientific research has proven time and time again that methodological naturalism can overcome ignorance and find increasingly detailed and reasonable answers to mysteries that once seemed unfathomable. This holds true for questions about the nature of light, the origins of disease, and the mechanics of the brain. Now the theory of evolution is doing the same job of solving the mystery of how life formed and developed. Creation theory, no matter what name it is disguised under, will not add anything of value to scientific research in this area.