rocky mountain wrote:that is not evolution. its called genetics.
mutations do not prove evolution. they are just mutations. plus, the odds that two organisms that have the exact same, beneficial mutations mate and reproduce and start a whole new species are pretty slim. mutations are not part of evolution.
But the odds of those two organisms surviving to pass on those "beneficial" genes are slightly higher. You are correct that mutations are not part of evolution, but the weeding out of "bad" characteristics and the spreading of "good" ones is the essential idea behind natural selection. Few people argue against that, so I think we can continue...
rocky mountain wrote:again, is not evolution, but adaptation.
how come we don't see beneficial mutations anymore? all of our mutations nowadays are harmful. if it could happen then, why can't it happen now?
We see beneficial traits everywhere. Intelligence, strength, hardiness, they all would give a theoretical advantage in the wild. The thing is that we aren't in the wild any more. There are fewer and fewer types of things that will genuinely make someone less likely to reproduce. We have separated ourselves so far from nature that evolution (something already outrageously slow) has essentially stopped.
rocky mountain wrote:extinction is not evolution. humans have driven many animals into extinction, and you don't say they became extinct because of evolution. the dinosaurs did not become extinct because of evolution either. i say it was a flood, you say it was an asteroid, either way, it was sudden, and does not prove evolution.
Extinction has little to do with evolution, other than the whole species being removed from the gene pool bit. Evolution involves things that live, the branching off of one currently existing species into multiple separate ones. While on this note though, did you know that there have been a total of six mass extinctions since life came into being? The mass extinction of the dinosaurs was merely one of them.
wiki wrote:All organisms on Earth are descended from a common ancestor or ancestral gene pool.
so what was that common ancestor. or is that the "missing link?"
the picture beside it is the "homonoids." who cares if we look like them. humans have more similar DNA to a chicken and E. Coli.[/quote]
The common ancestor would be the first single celled organism that ever existed. From there everything branches off. There's no ancestor in the sense that we would think, like a fish or a lizard or something.
A quick disclaimer before we get into this: I'm not a biologist. Far from it. I'm talking about evolution the way I understand it, but much like, say, calculus, I don't understand it in its entirety. If my explanations are gross misrepresentations of current evolutionary theory I apologize.