Evolution of man

[spiritualsri]

I have not been following this site for quite a few months. But suddenly me & my friend had an arguement about the origin of life & the origin of Man. Is it explained anywhere in the vedas? I have seen a few websites where the Darwinian theory has been disproved. Since it is a Christian who have disproved it, just by saying that it has to be false just because it has not been successfully proved. It appears that they just want to impart to everyone that whatever is written in the bible - that GOD created Adam & Eve is the way in which all forms including man was created is the only Truth.

 

I would like some opinions and some other evidences for or against the Darwinian theory.

 

Sri

[Gauracandra]

I would suggest you go and purchase the book "Darwin's Black Box". Its very readable. If I had to summarize his main point it would be as follows:

 

In order for a single trait to occur it requires an exact sequence of events to happen on the molecular level. Now evolutionary theory holds that changes occur slowly over thousands of years until you get a beneficial evolutionary trait. Now suppose it required a molecular sequence of ABCDE in order for blood to clot. If the body "evolved" the sequence A in the first 1000 years and then C in the next 1000 years, it would be useless. Why? Because the blood clotting sequence requires an entire sequence ABCDE in order to work. It is ALL or NOTHING.

 

Now according to the rules of evolution itself, if the body is engaging in inefficient activities, those activities, for energy conservation, will evolve away. In other words, if my body is producing A & C, and this has no benefit, I can't very well tell my body "Now hold on one second, just wait another 8,000 years and I will then have the sequence for B, D, & E and man wait until your blood can clot, it will be really useful." No. The body would select out these useless sequences, and I'd be left with nothing.

 

Now it gets even more complex. Because if there is a slight incorrect mistake your blood will either turn into a solid block of gunk, or remain thin. There are a million ways to do something wrong, and only a few ways to do something right. So most mutation is actually not useful. You get things like Sickle Cell Anemia, Cancer, etc.... The sequence has to be perfect in order to work.

 

Another level then to look at is how many things we have. Its not just that we have the ability to clot blood. How did eye sight evolve? What would be the point of evolving eye sight over millions of years, if during that whole time you couldn't see anything. If you were to take all the functions of the body, each and every one had to have "evolved". Each one had to have gone through the same problem of having the right ABCDE sequence. And yet we find them all in one package.

 

Lately, the scientific community has been quietly changing their tune because of this significant problem. Instead of gradual evolution, they now speak of giant leaps in evolution that occur every few thousand years. You don't hear much about this, because they want to pretend its been their view all along. Now instead of slowly evolving sequence ABCDE, they say one morning you have no sequence to clot blood, the next day by a "leap of evolution", voila you have ABCDE and you now have a genetically superior advantage, which then keeps going.

 

Anyways, check out the book. It gives lots of examples.

[spiritualsri]

Yeah i understood, but nothing has been proved as yet?

[theist]

How did sight evolve indeed? How long it must have taken? And how could the eyeball evolve without the presence of the optic nerve? And why would the optic nerve evolve if there was no eyeball?

 

In the book Who Are You? by Chris Butler (aka Siddhasvarupananda)he brings out this interesting point. He notes that many molecular evolutionists believe that there is no real self and what we experience as the self is an illusion of the self supposedly created by some as yet unknown electrochemical activities in the brain. These electro/chemical activities are in the form of a chain of reactions that arise through the organs of sense perception to the brain via the neurons.

 

So he nicely brings up the question of why would any organs of perception develop at all unless there was a perceiver present? What would be the evolutionary need for such development?

 

Check mate on the materialists who deny the self.

[Guruvani]

If evolution is a constant rule of nature, then why is it that crocodiles have not evolved at all in the last 250,000,000 years? Why is it that some species evolve and some don't. Darwinian evolution says that all forms of life have evolved from a single organism, yet science tells us today that crocodiles have not evolved at all in the last 250,000,000 million years? How can crocodiles be exempt from the law of evolution?

Darwinian evolution is such a pathetic theory that it does not deserve any recognition in the world of science. According to Darwin, white man evolved from the black man who evolved from the neanderthal. His theory is a very racist concept that proposes that the black man is less evolved than the white man and is more closely related to the neanderthal. Is that what schools should be teaching today that Black people as less evolved than white people and are only a few generations removed from the neanderthal?

 

There is some form of adaptation and evolution in all species of life, but that is not an evolution of one species to another. It is just a natural adaptation to the evironment, but it is not an evolution to another species. That has not at all been proven by science. Darwinian evolution is a non-scientific theory proposed by a man who noticed that some species evolve different features according to their environment. The evolution of species is a quantum leap from the evolution by species and there is no scientific evidence to suggest the evolution of species.

[Guest guest]

Everyone has faith, but proof is for the qualified observer.

 

Two wonderful replies here. This is empirical evidence and reasoning.

 

Why are these processes science when scientists use them but speculation when their theories are challenged.

 

Guess Guest

[Gauracandra]

About the Neanderthal. That WAS the theory, that man evolved from the Neanderthal. But lately, with DNA evidence, they are saying that the Neanderthal was a separate species, that lived beside man and then died out. There was no breeding. So all those years in school where we had to memorize the stages of the evolution of man, I was learning what they now say is false. Man did not evolve from the Neanderthal. Now not only are they missing the missing link, they are missing the link before the missing link. Pretty soon the whole chain is gonna fall apart.

[Guest guest]

What preposterous ideas in the name "science" ---- June,11,2003 Oldest human skulls found

 

By Jonathan Amos

BBC News Online science staff

 

 

Three fossilised skulls unearthed in Ethiopia are said by scientists to be among the most important discoveries ever made in the search for the origin of humans.

 

 

 

The crania of two adults and a child, all dated to be around 160,000 years old, were pulled out of sediments near a village called Herto in the Afar region in the east of the country.

 

They are described as the oldest known fossils of modern humans, or Homo sapiens.

 

What excites scientists so much is that the specimens fit neatly with the genetic studies that have suggested this time and part of Africa for the emergence of mankind.

 

"All the genetics have pointed to a geologically recent origin for humans in Africa - and now we have the fossils," said Professor Tim White, one of the co-leaders on the research team that found the skulls.

 

"These specimens are critical because they bridge the gap between the earlier more archaic forms in Africa and the fully modern humans that we see 100,000 years ago," the University of California at Berkeley, US, paleoanthropologist told BBC News Online.

 

Out of Africa

 

The skulls are not an exact match to those of people living today; they are slightly larger, longer and have more pronounced brow ridges.

 

These minor but important differences have prompted the US/Ethiopian research team to assign the skulls to a new subspecies of humans called Homo sapiens idaltu (idaltu means "elder" in the local Afar language).

 

 

The Herto discoveries were hailed on Wednesday by those researchers who have championed the idea that all humans living today come from a population that emerged from Africa within the last 200,000 years.

 

The proponents of the so-called Out of Africa hypothesis think this late migration of humans supplanted all other human-like species alive around the world at the time - such as the Neanderthals in Europe.

 

If modern features already existed in Africa 160,000 years ago, they argued, we could not have descended from species like Neanderthals.

 

"These skulls are fantastic evidence in support of the Out of Africa idea," Professor Chris Stringer, from London's Natural History Museum, told BBC News Online.

 

"These people were living in the right place and at the right time to be possibly the ancestors of all of us."

 

Sophisticated behaviour

 

The skulls were found in fragments, at a fossil-rich site first identified in 1997, in a dry and dusty valley.

 

Stone tools and the fossil skull of a butchered hippo were the first artefacts to be picked up. Buffalo fossils were later recovered indicating the ancient humans had a meat-rich diet.

 

The most complete of the adult skulls was seen protruding from the ancient sediment; it had been exposed by heavy rains and partially trampled by herds of cows.

 

SEARCH FOR HUMAN ORIGINS

 

The Herto skulls represent a confirmation of the genetic studies

 

 

 

Read more

The skull of the child - probably aged six or seven - had been shattered into more than 200 pieces and had to be painstakingly reconstructed.

 

All the skulls had cut marks indicating they had been de-fleshed in some kind of mortuary practice. The polishing on the skulls, however, suggests this was not simple cannibalism but more probably some kind of ritualistic behaviour.

 

This type of practice has been recorded in more modern societies, including some in New Guinea, in which the skulls of ancestors are preserved and worshipped.

 

The Herto skulls may therefore mark the earliest known example of conceptual thinking - the sophisticated behaviour that sets us apart from all other animals.

 

"This is very possibly the case," Professor White said.

 

The Ethiopian discoveries are reported in the journal Nature.

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

http://www.arn.org/

 

also

 

 

In 1997 two scientists, John Walker of the UK and Paul Boyer of the USA, won a joint Nobel Prize for the discovery of a tiny motor whirring away in every cell of all plants and animals. The motor is found in the enzyme ATP-synthase and rotates at a speed of about one hundred revolutions per second (6,000 rpm.) This tiny motor is 200,000 times smaller than a pinhead. Every cell in your body, and those of all living things, has hundreds if not thousands of these motors. A human body is estimated to contain over 10,000,000,000,000,000 of them (that's ten quadrillion.)

 

The ATP-synthase motor's job is making energy for living cells. It does so by making the molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP) from adenosine diphosphate (ADP) and phosphoric acid, a synthesis which requires an input of energy. The ATP produced breaks down to ADP again, giving up the energy by coupling itself to another chemical process within the cell which requires the energy in order to react. Energy is directed and all the products of the process are then recycled. ATP supplies the energy for the functioning of the brain, the beating of the heart and contraction of all muscles.

Dr. Walker say, "We require our body weight in ATP every day. We are turning over that amount of ATP to keep ourselves thinking and walking around." On a lazy day we might use only half our body weight, but during hard work up to a ton of ATP could be recycled in a day. It was Dr. Walker who in 1994 provided the first detailed picture of how the motor works. He used X-rays and an electron microscope to take an ‘atomic snapshot'. In 1997, M. Yoshida attached a tiny fluorescent filament so that the motor can be seen spinning under the microscope.

 

Every cell contains power packs known as mitochondria (chloroplasts in plant cells). Embedded in the membrane of each mitochondrion are the rotating disks of the ATP-synthase enzymes. The disk (think of it as the armature of the motor) consists of so-called C protein sub-units, the exact atomic structure of which are yet to be resolved - this may take another decade of research. Projecting from the armature or disk and rotating with it is a bent shaft called the gamma protein sub-unit. The free end of the shaft engages with a "hat" - a ring of six protein sub-units - three alpha and three beta units, which do not rotate but are attached to the membrane. The motor disk is driven by the flow of hydrogen ions through the membrane of the mitochondrion.

 

An ADP molecule and a phosphate ion enter each of the beta sub-units of the ‘hat' (which is shaped to facilitate the combination.) The bent axle turns eccentrically, squeezing each beta sub-unit in turn, expelling the newly formed ATP molecules. Three ATP molecules are formed with each revolution of the motor. At about 100 revolutions per second these motors recycle roughly ones body weight daily, however as demand for energy increases, the flow of hydrogen ions through the mitochondrial membrane increases the speed of the motor to meet the demand for more energy. All this to keep our bodies and brains functioning, thus making life possible - no wonder ATP-synthase is called ‘the motor of life'. As Dr. Walker comments, "It is incredible to think of these motors of life spinning around in our bodies!" Of course, the same amazing, ultra-miniature motors are spinning away in all living things, including plants, fungi and bacteria.

 

Did this motor evolve? The fact that the enzyme is the same in single-celled bacteria and in man, as well as all other forms of life, indicates that it was in perfect working order from the beginning of life on Earth. The ATP-synthase motor is very complex. Could natural selection have perfected this enzyme in the first ‘proto-cells', as evolutionists must believe? Either the motor works or it doesn't work. (Its malfunction is the cause of one form of heart disease, where the motor runs in reverse and breaks down ATP.) If the motor does not work, ATP is not made, and there is no source of energy for the cell.

 

The motor could not have gradually grown. It is composed of many proteins that are precisely shaped and with chemically active sites exactly where they have to be. Take away just one protein and the motor is useless, it had to be perfect from the outset. The membrane of the mitochondrion that holds the motors had to as well be perfectly formed to house the motors, otherwise the cell could not live.

 

So who designed this motor? Chance processes stumbling along making billions of little motors that failed repeatedly along the path of blind natural selection, or an intelligent being? Information Theory tells us that information is corrupted by chance processes. Information only derives from an intelligent source. The plan for this irreducibly complex motor is coded for by information on genes. The genetic information is translated and the motor is manufactured and assembled by a series of mechanisms which are, in total, even more irreducibly complex than the motor itself.

 

-----------------------

 

some christian scientists, interesting science

 

http://evolution-facts.org/Cruncher%20TOC.htm

 

-----------------

 

another good book is

 

http://www.geraldschroeder.com/new.html

 

this guy writes great books,

although his bang bang theory

is outdated, his other stuff is great.

 

Gerald Schroeder earned his BSc, MSc and PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His doctorate is in the Earth Sciences and Nuclear Physics. Dr. Schroeder's yeshiva studies were guided by Rabbi Chaim Brovender at ITRI, and before that by the late Rabbi Herman Pollack. He is the author of Genesis and the Big Bang, the Discovery of Harmony between Modern Science and the Torah, published by Bantam Doubleday (now in six languages). His second book, The Science of G-d, published by Free Press of Simon & Schuster, was on the Barnes & Noble bestseller list for three months. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife (the author Barbara Sofer) and their five children. Professor Schroeder served in the IDF, as do his two sons, who are officers.

--------------------------

 

here is a sample on the topic of this thread

 

Evolution: Rationality vs. Randomness

 

At the basis of the theory of neo-Darwinian evolution lie two basic assumptions: That changes in morphologies are induced by random mutations on the genome; and, that these changes in the morphology of plant or animal make the life form either more or less successful in the competition to survive. It is by the aspect of nature's selection that evolutionists claim to remove the theory of evolution from that of a random process. The selection is in no way random. It is a function of the environment. The randomness however remains as the basic driving force that produces the varied morphologies behind the selection.

Can random mutations produce the evolution of life? That is the question addressed herein.

 

Because evolution is primarily a study of the history of life, statistical analyses of evolution are plagued by having to assume the many conditions that were extant during those long gone eras. Rates of mutations, the contents of the "original DNA, " the environmental conditions, all effect the rate and direction of the changes in morphology and are all unknowns. One must never ask what the likelihood is that a specific set of mutations will occur to produce a specific animal. This would imply a direction to evolution and basic to all Darwinian theories of evolution is the assumption that evolution has no direction. The induced changes, and hence the new morphologies, are totally random, regardless of the challenges presented by the environment.

 

With this background, let's look at the process of evolution. Life is in essence a symbiotic combination of proteins (and other structures, but here I'll discuss only the proteins). The history of life teaches us that not all combinations of proteins are viable. At the Cambrian explosion of animal life, 530 million years ago, some 50 phyla (basic body plans) appeared suddenly in the fossil record. Only 30 to 34 survived. The rest perished. Since then no new phyla have evolved. It is no wonder that Scientific American asked whether the mechanism of evolution has changed in a way that prohibits all other body phyla. It is not that the mechanism of evolution has changed. It is our understanding of how evolution functions that must change, change to fit the data presented by the fossil record. To use the word of Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould, it appears that the flow of life is "channeled" along these 34 basic directions.

 

Let's look at this channeling and decide whether or not it can be the result of random processes.

 

Humans and all mammals have some 50,000 genes. That implies we have, as an order of magnitude estimate, some 50,000 proteins. It is estimated that there are some 30 million species of animal life on Earth. If the genomes of all animals produced 50,000 proteins, and no proteins were common among any of the species (a fact we know to be false, but an assumption that makes our calculations favor the random evolutionary assumption), there would be (30 million x 50,000) 1.5 trillion (1.5 x10 to power of 12) proteins in all life. (The actual number is vastly lower). Now let's consider the likelihood of these viable combinations of proteins forming by chance, recalling that, as the events following the Cambrian explosion taught us, not all combinations of proteins are viable.

 

Proteins are coils of several hundred amino acids. Take a typical protein to be a chain of 300 amino acids. There are 20 commonly occurring amino acids in life. This means that the number of possible combinations of the amino acids in our model protein is 20 to the power of 300 (that is 20 multiplied by itself 300 times) or in the more usual ten-based system of numbers, 10 to the power of 390 ( Ten multipled by itself 390 times or more simply said a one with 390 zeroes after it!!!!!) . Nature has the option of choosing among the possible 10 to the power of 390 proteins, the the 1.5 x (10 to power of 12) proteins of which all viable life is composed. Can this have happened by random mutations of the genome? Not if our understanding of statistics is correct. It would be as if nature reached into a grab bag containing a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion proteins and pulled out the one that worked and then repeated this trick a million million times.

 

But this impossibility of randomness producing order is not different from the attempt to produce Shakespeare or any meaningful string of letters more than a few words in length by a random letter generator. Gibberish is always the result. This is simply because the number of meaningless letter combinations vastly exceeds the number of meaningful combinations. With life it was and is lethal gibberish.

 

Nature, molecular biology and the Cambrian explosion of animal life have given us the opportunity to study rigorously the potential for randomness as a source of development in evolution. If the fossil record is an accurate description of the flow of life, then the34 basic body plans that burst into being at the Cambrian, 530 million years ago, comprise all of animal life till today. The tree of life which envisioned a gradual progression of phyla from simple forms such as sponges, on to more complex life such as worms and then on to shelled creatures such as mollusks has been replaced by the bush of life in which sponges and worms and mollusks and all the other of the 34 phyla appeared simultaneously. Each of these bush lines then developed (evolved) a myriad of variations, but the variations always remained within the basic body plan.

 

Among the structures that appeared in the Cambrian were limbs, claws, eyes with optically perfect lenses, intestines. These exploded into being with no underlying hint in the fossil record that they were coming. Below them in the rock strata (i.e., older than them) are fossils of one-celled bacteria, algae, protozoans, and clumps known as the essentially structureless Ediacaran fossils of uncertain identity. How such complexities could form suddenly by random processes is an unanswered question. It is no wonder that Darwin himself, at seven locations in The Origin of Species, urged the reader to ignore the fossil record if he or she wanted to believe his theory. Abrupt morphological changes are contrary to Darwin's oft repeated statement that nature does not make jumps. Darwin based his theory on animal husbandry rather than fossils. If in a few generations of selective breeding a farmer could produce a robust sheep from a skinny one, then, Darwin reasoned, in a few million or billion generations a sponge might evolve into an ape. The fossil record did not then nor does it now support this theory.

 

The abrupt appearance in the fossil record of new species is so common that the journal Science, the bastion of pure scientific thinking, featured the title, "Did Darwin get it all right?" And answered the question: no. The appearance of wings is a classic example. There is no hint in the fossil record that wings are about to come into existence. And they do, fully formed. We may have to change our concept of evolution to accommodate a reality that the development of life has within it something exotic at work, some process totally unexpected that produces these sudden developments. The change in paradigm would be similar to the era in physics when classical logical Newtonian physics was modified by the totally illogical (illogical by human standards of logic) phenomena observed in quantum physics, including the quantized, stepwise changes in the emission of radiation by a body even as the temperature of the body increases smoothly.

 

With the advent of molecular biology's ability to discern the structure of proteins and genes, statistical comparison of the similarity of these structures among animals has become possible. The gene that controls the development of the eye is the same in all mammals. That is not surprising. The fossil record implies a common branch for all mammals. But what is surprising, even astounding, is the similarity of the mammal gene the gene that controls the development of eyes in mollusks and the visual systems in worms. The same can be said for the gene that controls the expression of limbs in insects and in humans. In fact so similar is this gene, that pieces of the mammalian gene, when spliced into a fruit fly, will cause a wing to appear on the fly. This would make sense if life's development were described as a tree. But the bush of life means that just above the level of one-celled life, insects and mammals and worms and mollusks separated.

 

The eye gene has 130 sites. That means there are 20 to the power of 130 possible combinations of amino acids along those 130 sites. Somehow nature has selected the same combination of amino acids for all visual systems in all animals. That fidelity could not have happened by chance. It must have been pre-programmed in lower forms of life. But those lower forms of life, one-celled, did not have eyes. These data have confounded the classic theory of random, independent evolution producing these convergent structures. So totally unsuspected by classical theories of evolution is this similarity that the most prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal in the Untied States, Science, reported: "The hypothesis that the eye of the cephalopod [mollusk] has evolved by convergence with vertebrate [human] eye is challenged by our recent findings of the Pax-6 [gene] ... The concept that the eyes of invertebrates have evolved completely independently from the vertebrate eye has to be reexamined."

 

The significance of this statement must not be lost. We are being asked to reexamine the idea that evolution is a free agent. The convergence, the similarity of these genes, is so great that it could not, it did not, happen by chance random reactions.

 

The British Natural History Museum in London has an entire wing devoted to the evolution of species. And what evolution do they demonstrate? Pink daisies evolving into blue daisies; small dogs evolving into big dogs; a few species of cichlid fish evolving in a mere few thousand years into a dozen species of cichlid fish. Very impressive. Until you realize that the daisies remained daisies, the dogs remained dogs and the cichlid fish remained cichlid. It is called micro-evolution. This magnificent museum, with all its resources, could not produce a single example of one phylum evolving into another. It is the mechanisms of macro-evolution, the change of one phylum or class of animal into another that has been called into question by these data.

 

The reality of this explosion of life was discovered long before it was revealed. In 1909, Charles D. Walcott, while searching for fossils in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, came upon a strata of shale near the Burgess Pass, rich in that for which he had been seeking., fossils from the era known as the Cambrian. Over the following four years Walcott collected between 60,000 and 80,000 fossils from the Burgess Shale. These fossils contained representatives from every phylum except one of the phyla that exist today. Walcott recorded his findings meticulously in his notebooks. No new phyla ever evolved after the Cambrian explosion. These fossils could have changed the entire concept of evolution from a tree of life to a bush of life. And they did, but not in 1909. Walcott knew he had discovered something very important. That is why he collected the vast number of samples. But he could not believe that evolution could have occurred in such a burst of life forms, "simultaneously" to use the words of Scientific American. This was totally against the theory of Darwin in which he and his colleagues were steeped. And so Walcott reburied the fossils, all 60,000 of them, this time in the drawers of his laboratory. Walcott was the director of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. It was not until 1985 that they were rediscovered (in the draws of the Smithsonian). Had Walcott wanted, he could have hired a phalanx of graduate students to work on the fossils. But he chose not to rock the boat of evolution. Today fossil representatives of the Cambrian era have been found in China, Africa, the British Isles, Sweden, Greenland. The explosion was worldwide. But before it became proper to discuss the extraordinary nature of the explosion, the data were simply not reported. It is a classic example of cognitive dissonance, but an example for which we have all paid a severe price.

 

At this point we must ask the question, what has produced the wonders of life that surround us? The answer may be implied by those very surroundings. In that case the medium would be the message!

 

 

[Guest guest]

Thanks Shiva

 

Guess Guest

[Narayanidd]

My dear spirit souls,

A great book that really tosses a wrench in the theory of evolution is Forbbiden Archeology. It has tons of evidence that man as we are today has existed far longer than is the popular scientific belief.

 

Check out this site.

 

http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~ghi/fa.html

 

Your servant,

Narayani

[Guest guest]

Yes we must stand and preach against this vile and insidious propagand that lashes out to defy God and His creation. All glories to Lord Sri Krishna ,The Supreme Personality of Godhead and His Most Wonderful Devotees who spill gallons of spiritual blood to save the fallen conditioned jivas like myself from this mayic philosophy that dictates that we suddenly evolved from apes,yours in service, jiva

[Guest guest]

My God Sri Krishna,This is a wonderful post Thak you Shiva for your compilation on this matter. yours in sevice ,jiva