35 replies to this topic

[CatsPajamas]

And I admittedly don't know enough about evolution to argue it. Little aside - still going to church, haven't told anyone I don't believe anymore.

Anyway - this morning in Sunday School, our teacher said that one of the greatest arguments for God creating man and us not evolving is the fact that we can reproduce. Because so much is involved when reproduction occurs, it would be impossible for males and females to have evolved at exactly the same speed to make reproduction possible. He thinks that both had to have been created at the exact same moment for our bodies to be compatible and able to successfully produce offspring.

Can someone clarify/explain this to me a little? Sorry if the question is a little vague. I know what I'm trying to ask, I just can't seem to phrase it correctly.

[Kaiser01]

If you look at the tree of life you will find that organisms that reproduce a-sexually do not have a long time on the tree of life because they have so little available genetic information in order to adapt to the environment which can change quickly. Natural selection favors things that reproduce sexually because it gives more genetic material to work with for faster evolution. The first reproduction more than likely would have been single celled organisms who where in close proximity to each other for long periods of time who would fuse information before replicating, well through natural selection the sexual reproduction would of ecome more and more refined until it was like clock work. As for males and females the process just carried over into complex organisms and well just became more complex as that is how natural selection works. Sex became encoded in the genome as it is essential in survival and highly favored.

[Ouroboros]

How do a person walk from one place to another? One step at a time. Evolution is about the process of many small steps over time.

Well, perhaps it's easier to read the Wiki page: http://en.wikipedia....al_reproduction

[TrueFreedom]

Yep, sexual selection has been a driving factor in the evolution of most species.

[CatsPajamas]

Sorry if I sound like an idiot here, but I'm really trying to understand.

Our teacher was saying that males and females had to be created together in order to reproduce, but really they just had to evolve together, right?

This stuff is all so new to me and I want to make sure I fully understand. Thanks for the patience!

[TrueFreedom]

Wikipedia is your friend: http://en.wikipedia....al_reproduction

[CatsPajamas]

Never mind. I just realized how truly stupid that last post was. I think I'm getting it. Slowly.

[Kaiser01]

Sorry if I sound like an idiot here, but I'm really trying to understand.

Our teacher was saying that males and females had to be created together in order to reproduce, but really they just had to evolve together, right?

This stuff is all so new to me and I want to make sure I fully understand. Thanks for the patience!

original reproduction probably didnt take place first with fully complex organisms but at the celular level since it is favored by natural selection, it simply carried over into more complexity as life got more complex.

Edited by Kaiser01, 03 June 2012 - 10:15 PM.

[CatsPajamas]

Thanks for the replies. As you can probably tell, science has never been my strong suit!

[Gneekly]

Doesn't the Bible have two creation stories? In one of them I think man is created before woman and in the other they are created at the same time. Perhaps pointing that out?

[LivingLife]

Maybe your Sunday school teacher had her first orgasm and this was her way of telling you all in a veiled way.

[3DollarBill]

Cats, think of a different sunday school teacher, who argues that god must have created languages as they are now by saying: "If languages evolved over time, then who did the first English speaker talk to?"

Both statements make no sense for the same reason. Hope this helps you conceptualize the issue. I can tell you intuitively know his argument is bullshit...you should be prepared for more of the same by educating yourself on how evolution actually works. The talkorigins.org site is really helpful. With only a very crude understanding you'll find you can blow most xtian arguments out of the water. It's easier than you think.

[mwc]

God created all the animals in pairs. They happily mated with their own kind. But he just created man. So he waited for man to evolve but it never happened. So he showed man how to evolve by ripping out one of his ribs and telling him to have sex with it so the species of man wouldn't die off. Upon understanding both his choices man rejected evolution and embraced creationism.

mwc

Edited by mwc, 04 June 2012 - 05:29 AM.

[ficino]

Hello CatsPajamas, welcome! Your sunday school teacher's argument is a version of an argument often used by creationists. Another example is the human eye. The human eye is so complex, they say, that if one little part is not there, it doesn't function at all, and the organism that had it would never survive. So humans must have been created with fully developed eyes; the eye could not have evolved because it would not have worked at a less evolved state.

This is a big fallacy. It completely misconceives what happens. This argument imagines that evolution says that species as we know them today evolved from incomplete versions of those modern species. Not true. Every ancestor of a later species was itself a fully functional, complete animal or plant. One little feature changed in one or more members of it (by genetic mutation or whatever), it helped in survival, the offspring that were born with that feature survived better, and eventually all the survivors many generations later had that feature. Multiply this process enough times and you get a new species. But none of the ancestors at the points of change in the past were incomplete animals. Homo erectus, homo habilis, etc. were all complete primates during their lives, AND some day -- if the world survives -- some new species will evolve from us. But we are not incomplete organisms now!

[freeasabird]

^^ And my vision absolutely sucks. I cannot even walk around outside on a sunny day without needing both modern vision correction as well as sunglasses.

[mwc]

Do your eye problems mean you're devolving or being uncreated?

mwc

Edited by mwc, 04 June 2012 - 08:21 AM.

[freeasabird]

Do your eye problems mean you're devolving or being uncreated?

mwc

Something like this?

[mwc]

Do your eye problems mean you're devolving or being uncreated?

mwc

Something like this?

Oh shit. You have Parkinson's?

mwc

[FeelHappy]

I remember sexual selection being a big part of Ridley's book The Red Queen. I'm not sure how much of that book is speculation but it was a fascinating read, you could start there.

Anyways with non sexual reproduction most of the same genes are passed down with an occasional slight modification, this makes change far slower. Sexual reproduction has the benefit of exchanging 50% of your genes with 50% of someone else this allows for far more genetic diversity and more rapid change to combat things like changes in environmental or diseases. As for evolving the ways to sexual reproduce like everything else this was a slow process (I think more than a billion years between the arrival of the organisms and the first sexually reproducing ones).