Quote:
Originally posted by djmcmath
There are actually legions of scientists who think the whole evolution theory is a sham.
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That's completely wrong. "Evolution" is simply the alteration of a population over time secondary to changes in genetic material.
Consider this simple example;
If we want to examine the effects of change in a human population, it would take a long time as our generation time averages more than 20 years. So let's look at a healthy strain of unmolested E. Coli with a generation time of less than 30 minutes. We can study genetic changes that occur over 50 generations in a single day!
We'll start with a population of a few billion bacterium. We'll add a stress to our healthy population, say, Penicillin. The Penicillin kills 99.999% of our population, but after a few days, the colony is as robust as ever! When we sequence the DNA of our new population and compare it to the original, the new bacteria all share a series of mutations that allow penicillin resistance. If we do this experiment 100 times, we get similar results, but the mutations are generally
different.
The point is that the genetic strategy a population uses in order to survive
is random. You can't apply any type of environmental stress to a lizard and expect to get a bird. Evolution is non-directional and not likely to be genetically repeatable.
The idea than man evolved from apes is a theory, but genetic evolution
is a demonstrable fact.