Friday, May 23, 2014

So, I read this article on Buzzfeed where they asked users to send in questions they would like to ask Bill Nye during the Bill Nye-Ken Hamm debate.

Because these people thought it was worth their time to write down these questions they believe unanswerable, I figured it would be worth my time to answer them.

I think I can forgive this one because this person does not know the definition of evolutionists/secularists/humanists/non-God believing people. They do not embrace intelligent design because that is literally the basis of their "non-believing." The standard position is that evolutionists do not believe in a supernatural creator and creationists do. Easy enough. If you want to get a bit more technical, evolutionists believe over a period of billions of years the universe took form through a process called abiogenesis where life arose from organic compounds. Single-celled organisms evolved into multi-cellular organisms evolved into complex organisms. This is grossly over-simplified but you get the picture. 

One of the key tenets of science is that it is not law--it changes when new evidence arises and is constantly disproven by perpetual experimentation. Scientists do not mind changing what they thought to be true because they are aware they are not always right. A theory is the opposite of not testable, observable, nor repeatable. Scientific evidence does not come together to constitute a theory until after endless attempts at disproving it through experimentation and further evidence. The issue I personally have with creationism is that it is lazy-- it lazily attempts to measure and confine the universe to something as simple as "because God made it so." It disregards facts and places faith in a book written when it was technically a-okay to stone people. Creationism does not even deserve to be called a theory because any attempts at disproving it are met with hostility and narrow-mindedness. 

There actually is not only one "Lucy" ( pieces of a skeleton belonging to an early ancestor of modern humans found in Ethiopia) but several that have been found including Ardi, Selam, Taung Child, Mrs. Ples (and these only from a cursory search through Google). In fact, Wikipedia has an entire page devoted to the history of hominid fossils found. While it is true that there are definitely gaps in the fossil record, there is no shortage of evidence for human evolution. 
Literally anyone who has ever taken a first-year biology class can tell you that humans did not evolve from monkeys. But, I'm sorry, you probably spent your year of biology protesting your teacher and skipping class so here's a quick (simplified) biology lesson:  all living beings have a common ancestor and at one point this ancestor diverged and evolved into different types of animals due to mutation/environmental stimuli/etc. Modern humans come from the line of primates including chimpanzees and gorillas but divided off between 5.8 and 8 million years ago into their own genus of Homo. Humans are believed to have developed from australopithecine to homo habilis then homo erectus then homo sapiens then homo sapiens sapiens (humans as they exist today). Modern humans are the only animals left with the genus homo because we kind of either killed the other species off or bred with them.  Nonetheless, monkeys do share a common ancestor with humans but humans did not evolve from monkeys.  


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