fightorace : Because misinterpreting that part would make the Bible look inconsistent as a whole. It does not go along with the genealogies and the time difference; it misrepresents the nature of God; it messes with the idea of creation; it is inconsistent with how to interpret the Bible when literal and symbolic verses are misinterpreted; and it destroys the purpose of sin, death, and God's redemptive work. If you think about it, misrepresenting this part would make Jesus a liar: (Matthew 19:4-5), which as Christians, we know that is not true.

Since this is not the Christian forum, my main focus is not on Evolution and the Bible. (that thread is in the Christian forum). My main focus is on whether Evolution is a scientific fact, on whether it is a representation of reality. So maybe you can explain why you think dinosaurs and the formation of the earth are considered proofs for evolution.

I'm still waiting for a more specific piece of evidence.

play4fun : yea, ok

play4fun : I was joking. Comparing men to hairy, messy, loud monkeys. Ya dig?

JigSaw : That picture looks more like we're devolving..... :/

"To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

Evolution is a fact. Now right away people are going to argue with me but continue reading.
Evolution is the change in the inherited traits of a population of organisms through successive generations.
Are animals different now to what they were in the past? Yes, they are.
There are breeds of wild chickens for example in certain jungles that are genetic forebears to the common domesticated chicken.
There are breeds of dog that have an ancestory in wolves or in one species case a bear (I kid you not).
People have changed to suit the changing enviroment, for example men during the ice ages had alot more hair as a survival method.
I am not saying "mankind evolved from apes" I'm saying look at the definition of evolution.
And maybe men did evolve from an ape like being, doesnt mean they were an ape, just ape like.

DH - actually.... nothing you have said I disagree with. The problem isn't an older type of chicken evolving into what you see today.

The problem is not getting a bird from a bird... but getting a totally new life form from an existing animal. Mutations (as far as we've ever observed them) harm the current life form, not help. That's the problem.

geeogree : Just being a technical smart ass and adressing the topic at hand

But to further expand, from our friend wikipedia-
"Contrary to this belief among the anti-evolution movement proponents, evolution of life forms beyond the species level ("macroevolution", i.e. speciation in a specific case) has indeed been observed multiple times under both controlled laboratory conditions and in nature"

Another thing to take into consideration is "The terms macroevolution and microevolution relate to the same processes operating at different scales, but creationist claims misuse the terms in a vaguely defined way which does not accurately reflect scientific usage, acknowledging well observed evolution as "microevolution" and denying that "macroevolution" takes place"

So my examples are still valid really
Seriously, most of the best proof is found right in the books listed in the notes section of this wikipedia page- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macroevolution

DarkHyren : Wikipedia? Seriously? Anyone can put anything in there, and it might not get changed to reflect the truth for a while. Anything that comes from a Wiki site must be taken with a grain of salt.
Besides, what you are talking about is still not the same as the topic. You've completely ignored geeo's point. The Wikipedia article defines Macro-Evolution as pretty much what micro-evolution is. Species-to-species change is not the discussion. These so-called "proofs" and "evidence" are merely changes within the genus, same as creating a new dog breed. The topic at hand is Darwin's theory of how life evolved from non-life... or in other words how "evolutionists" think we got here. Which I might add is not even a theory, there have been so many experiments and discoveries disproving it that it ought to be called the "flawed hypothesis of evolution" rather than the "theory of evolution".
But debate away, I'm not in the thread's target audience.

DarkHyren : At least list out a piece of evidence that shows "an evolutionary miracle from non-life to life, or from a type of animal to another type of animal.

Sir Arthur Keith said, "Evolution is unproven and unprovable. We believe it because the alternative is special creation, which is unthinkable."

bigNATE : The topic at hand is "If you are a believer of the theory of Evolution (Macro-evolution, not micro-evolution), I would like to know, what is your FAVORITE proof for evolution?"
Notice, Macro-evolution. And just so you know, alot of the science articles on wikipedia are writen be final year science students as well as scientists, just because articles like "Pokemon" might be written by teens doesnt mean that the science ones are not written by people that know what they are talking about and it doesnt mean they are not the truth.

Oh, and evolution can go hand in hand with alot of religions.
Macro-evolution does not mean that men evolved from apes and were not created by some magic being, it just states that there is a process called evolution and that it does happen and that animals can become other species.
It does not specifically claim this is how humans came to be, just that this is how alot of things can and do come into being.
Evolutionary theorists that theorise on the creation of humans just use Macroevolution as a good basis for an arguement.

play4fun : Umm, I said, go read the science books and articles mentioned in the notes section.
But it doesnt matter as it seems most of you will just say they are either lies or they dont know what they are talking about anyway

I don't see the point in this debate if the Christian side is going to bash anything scientific. You want a proof that young-earth creationists are wrong? Try the age of the earth? How many times do they need to date the universe or the earth itself before you'll believe it is more than 6,000 years old?

geeogree : I don't see your point there. Exactly how are these people going to date the earth? By counting layers? It ain't as simple as counting tree rings here. Excuse my ignorance, but I was unaware people had found reliable ways to date the Earth. Much of the "evidence" for billions of years of earth is flawed and points more towards a Global Flood and a young earth: things like whales fossilized within several different strata, fossils of fish in the middle of eating (Like they both coincidentally just died at the same time and were fossilized? Highly unlikely). I've seen nothing that supposedly points towards billions of years of existence that doesn't fit just as well, or even better, with a global flood and young earth theory.

wow... what do you say to that?

Ever heard of radio-isotope dating? Where they take an element like uranium which has a half-life of billions of years and they use it to measure the age of something? Take a blood SCIENCE class for once and stop listening to Dr. Dino the criminal.

geeogree : Er... I haven't actually ever heard of the guy .
Radioactive dating is sketchy ground. I won't say it's as bad as carbon dating, but there's the fact that we haven't lived through the entire time period and don't know conditions throughout the entire time dated.

really? Dr. Kent Hovind? You've never heard of him.... cause you sound like you're quoting him.

As for the dating.... half-lives are pretty much set in stone. It isn't sketchy unless you go outside of the half-life of the element.

DarkHyren : No one is going to bash anything that is scientific. As a Physics major, I look at the evidence and the continuation of experimentation to support a theory. So, if this is a scientific fact, there should be something, (just one convincing piece of evidence) to show that it is true. The model of a nucleus is supported through Rutherford's experiment; light acting as a wave is supported by Einstein and Broglie's experiments with photoelectric effect and mathematic; the relation between Pressure, temperature and Volume through Boyle and Hooke's study of thermodynamics, etc. All of these studies have their experimentation and observation to support their study. I'm saying that Macroevolution does not have that scientific support, and I want to see if there is someone who can tell me a scientific support for it, instead of saying "it's written in science textbooks" or "they taught me in school." If it is that obvious, someone can just explain how the process of micro-evolution can be used in a macroscopic level, between species to species. We know that science is not infallible, but it is one of the ways humans can explain the world, and for people to claim marco-evolution is science, there should be support.

geeogree : Are you talking about Carbon-dating? Mathematically, Carbon dating is amazing, just by this equation, N(t)=N(0)e^(-kt), one can see how much has been decayed, which would tell us how many years the substance has decayed.

[N(t) is how much after certain years]
[N(0) is how much it initially has]
[k is the rate of decay]
[t is time in years]

However, if we put it in real life, it is not likely to follow it, because scientist will need to make 3 assumptions:

1. the initial amount (since they were not there to measure it)
2. the rate of decay (it may not be a consistent decay)
3. the addition or subtraction of carbon from other sources (causes that are not from the decay)

So if we look at the equation again, this is what scientist have to work with:

N(t) = N(0) [assumed] e^(-k [assumed] t) +/- C [assumed]

With three variables being assumptions or educated guesses, there can easily be flaws in the outcome, and since it is a exponential equation, one small miscalculation can be a difference of millions of years.

Carbon-dating is not reliable. (Even Times Magazine reported that it isn't.)

carbon-dating isn't good to measure the age of the earth.... it's half-life is too short. I already know this. We're not talking about substances that are overly common. If you have some uranium in an area... you're not likely going to get more of it randomly appearing there.

play4fun : my word, I gave the link to the page that lists the text books all you had to do is go and get some of them to see whatever scientific models you wanted.
But since you are being so bloody stubborn minded...

Rice, W.R.; Hostert (1993). "Laboratory experiments on speciation: what have we learned in 40 years". Evolution 47 (6): 1637–1653.
Jiggins CD, Bridle JR (2004). "Speciation in the apple maggot fly: a blend of vintages?". Trends Ecol. Evol. (Amst.) 19 (3): 111–4.
Weinberg JR, Starczak VR, Jorg, D (1992). "Evidence for Rapid Speciation Following a Founder Event in the Laboratory". Evolution 46 (4): 1214–20.
Kirkpatrick, Mark; Virginie Ravigné (2002-03). "Speciation by Natural and Sexual Selection: Models and Experiments". The American Naturalist 159 (3): S22-S35.

DarkHyren : Wait a minute...have you actually read these articles...or at least know what these articles are talking about? or are you just listing them because they are linked on wikipedia?

geeogree : It still holds to those assumptions with that formula when using half-life. An addition to that for uranium dating is that there is a limit of how old these methods can measure, so if the item exceeds the range of what the method can measure, it would cause errors.

Anyways, we can talk about age of the earth in another thread (that topic is a greater dispute). Right now, back to marco-evolution.