What are some scientific alternatives to the theory of evolution?

[Itoero]

What are some scientific alternatives to the theory of evolution?

 

Also, could the theory of evolution be proven wrong one day?

 

I'm not talking about creationism or intelligent design because these theories are not scientific and also they don't make any useful predictions.

There is atm a nearly countless amount of evidence that points to evolution...in order to disprove the theory of evolution, you have to disprove all the evidence, which is impossible.

People constantly find new facts/evidence to fill in gaps.

 

The fact that some aspects are often disproven or changed, doesn't mean the theory is disproven...

[Daecon]

Even if evolution was somehow "disproven", that still doesn't mean Christian creationism wins by default. You still need to prove that Christian creationism is the "correct" one.

[seriously disabled]

Even if evolution was somehow "disproven", that still doesn't mean Christian creationism wins by default. You still need to prove that Christian creationism is the "correct" one.

True.

 

There are too many things that science can't explain when it comes to humans experiences.

 

For example:

 

We don't even know why different people feel pain differently for example or how life on Earth got started.

 

We don't even know how the brain produces consciousness and pain or what pain really is and why some people feel pain differently than others.

Edited July 9, 2017 by seriously disabled

[mistermack]

People often say "the theory of evolution" when they actually mean the theory of evolution by natural selection.

The theory of evolution by natural selection is the almost universally accepted explanation for the origin of all species.

But evolution was known about and widely accepted long before Darwin's work.

It just means that species gradually change from one form to another. Many people had argued in favour of that process, but nobody had offered a convincing argument for why it should happen.

 

Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace independently worked out that it was natural selection that was the driving mechanism, with the popular simplification of "survival of the fittest" as the central idea behind it.

 

While nothing is ever a hundred percent certain, evolution by natural selection has so much evidence supporting it, and so little against it, that it's considered a fact for all practical purposes, and to believe otherwise, you have to be able to close your eyes to a vast quantity of virtually undeniable evidence.

 

Darwin was actually extremely bothered by doubts, because he couldn't understand why different characteristics could persist in a population, rather than fading out to a universal "blend" of characteristics, where all individuals became the same due to cross breeding. (like if you keep mixing paints with each other, eventually you end up with just one colour, a blend of all of your starting colours).

 

The answer, which Darwin never found out, was genes. A Bohemian monk, Gregor Mendel, was working on the laws of inheritance in the time of Darwin, but Darwin never heard of his work. It completely removes the problems that caused Darwin to have reservations, and the combination of natural selection and genetics being the explanation for the existence of life as we know it is as close to accepted fact as science gets.

 

So what most people refer to as the "theory of evolution" is actually a combination of evolution, natural selection, and genetics.

[Baron d'Holbach]

Evolution is 99.99% correct. It is impossible to disprove it.

There is no alternative facts or theories beside evolution!

Okay now lets have some fun.......

 

If there was any way to disprove it, it is by this practical example I will lay forth. And pretty much this is the only way to disprove it. The possibilities for this is 00.01%

I am going to use an example to illustrate how it can be disproven but this has never been done and there is no evidence for it! And most likely nothing will ever arise.

 

Example,

Lets pick a rabbit as the example in disproving evolution.

Lets say that primitive rabbits evolved into modern rabbits 10,000 years ago. And from 10,000 years onward to present time rabbits at that early state is still the same modern rabbit we know them now. Right. Modern rabbit from 10,000 years ago is the same cute rabbit as we know them now

Throughout the 10,000 years we have dig fossils after fossil and with the help of radiometric dating and such we realize that each ancient rabbit we dig up, lets say 5,000 years ago or 750 years ago it is the same modern rabbit that we estimated to be that evolved 10,000 years ago. Noting surprising at all here right.

Next we kept on digging and digging and we found rabbits 35,000 years ago and 15,000 years ago and we came to a collective agreement these are primitive rabbits that still didn't evolved into modern rabbits yet. This proves that everything is correct and evolution of rabbits follows the path to modernization couple of thousands years later.

hope you following along.

 

Now what if one day we dig a rabbit that was modern but was dated 75,000 years ago! We double check and re-did the radiometric dating and such and it kept on saying this modern rabbit is in fact 75,000 years old. This will pretty much dismantle evolution.

 

This type of discovery disproves evolution. Not as a whole but takes the 99.99% fact to about 60% to even lower.

 

This automatically debunk the evolution process, the genetic line, the data genes, linage line, almost disrupts everything..

 

Cheers

 

Where's my prize now!  

 

Edited July 24, 2017 by Baron d'Holbach

[mistermack]

10 hours ago, Baron d'Holbach said:

 

Where's my prize now!  

 

No prizes, you're not the first to suggest it.  

Of course, the LACK of fossils outside of the known evolutionary sequences is good evidence FOR evolution.

If your rabbit scenario happened, the first question would be, 'do we know the full history of rabbit evolution?'

This new rabbit might be just adding to our knowledge, although it looks out of place at the moment. If we have a complete sequence of rabbit fossils, going from primitive to modern, over 50,000 years, and then you find this modern one dated at 75,000 years, you would want to look very closely, to see if there are any differences, because it might be a case of parallel evolution, producing a very similar rabbit to the modern one, going back more than 75,000 years, and then going extinct. Not very likely, but an expert should be able to tell.

Another possibility is that someone has doctored a later fossil with carbon isotopes, to make it give a false age reading.

Another possibility is that the dating system is at fault, rather than the theory of evolution. None of it is very likely though, so it would certainly cause a stir.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Baron d'Holbach]

6 hours ago, mistermack said:

No prizes, you're not the first to suggest it.  

Of course, the LACK of fossils outside of the known evolutionary sequences is good evidence FOR evolution.

If your rabbit scenario happened, the first question would be, 'do we know the full history of rabbit evolution?'

This new rabbit might be just adding to our knowledge, although it looks out of place at the moment. If we have a complete sequence of rabbit fossils, going from primitive to modern, over 50,000 years, and then you find this modern one dated at 75,000 years, you would want to look very closely, to see if there are any differences, because it might be a case of parallel evolution, producing a very similar rabbit to the modern one, going back more than 75,000 years, and then going extinct. Not very likely, but an expert should be able to tell.

Another possibility is that someone has doctored a later fossil with carbon isotopes, to make it give a false age reading.

Another possibility is that the dating system is at fault, rather than the theory of evolution. None of it is very likely though, so it would certainly cause a stir.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sad to hear about the lack of a prize. 

But to continue. I should of put in that we do know the full history of rabbits as the full example. And it is a shame that some might doctored a false fact to prove a point. 

So yes I can only see this as the ultimate stir for evolution. 

 

[Sensei]

Majority of living organisms after death are eaten by other living organisms.

Their atoms, molecules, muscles, fat and even bones, are becoming part of other living organisms.

 

Only organisms that died in quite abnormal way, f.e. drowned in swamp, frozen (f.e. mammoth), are becoming fossils.

Soil, swamps, coal, are "fossils". Remains of long time dead plants.

Calcium carbonate rock is fossil. Remains of long time dead sea living organisms with shells.

They are no longer easily recognizable.

 

[seriously disabled]

Lets face it. Humans are just too stupid to figure everything out.

We can't even figure out on how life on Earth began or why some people feel pain way differently than others?

We don't even know what pain really is and how it is related to life and consciousness.

We don't even know what consciousness is and how it related to life and biology.

Edited July 30, 2017 by seriously disabled

[mistermack]

26 minutes ago, seriously disabled said:

Lets face it. Humans are just too stupid to figure everything out.

We can't even figure out on how life on Earth began or why some people feel pain way differently than others?

We don't even know what pain really is and how it is related to life and consciousness.

We don't even know what consciousness is and how it related to life and biology.

Stupid compared to what?

You have unrealistically high expectations of creatures whose brains evolved without any design, just by discarding the one's who couldn't survive long enough to breed successfully. I think, considering how and why we got here, we are punching way above our weight, and are freakishly intelligent, for an ape.

[John Cuthber]

50 minutes ago, seriously disabled said:

Lets face it. Humans are just too stupid to figure everything out.

We can't even figure out on how life on Earth began or why some people feel pain way differently than others?

We don't even know what pain really is and how it is related to life and consciousness.

We don't even know what consciousness is and how it related to life and biology.

So what?
We figured out how to get to the moon and we figured out (most of) evolution.

[Damateur]

On 6/25/2017 at 9:42 PM, Sensei said:

Exercise for true XXI century school: give students rock, and their aim is to calculate age of rock using radioactive isotope of Rubidium-87..

   This would be very cool. Unfortunately, here in the USA, I don't see that happening any decade soon since there would be parental concern about the radioactivity as well as (unreasonable) religious concerns.

*

   The discussion reminds me of a point I read once that if Darwin had been wrong, the discovery of DNA and how it works would have destroyed his theory and we would have been seeking an alternate mechanism. Instead the discovery of DNA lead to a refinement of Darwin's theory into the even more robust Evolutionary Theory.

   It is humbling to think of how Darwin, through observation and deduction, derived the process of natural selection and developed his theory and that we have only needed to refine it a bit in spite of more than a century of amazing discoveries.

 

   I used to believe in evolution but I no longer do after studying it – now I understand and accept it. I also now see three groups: those who believe in evolution, those who don't believe in evolution – but neither of those groups understand it – and those who understand and accept evolution. I have never met someone who understands evolution but doesn't accept it – all who claim to be such people show that they don't actually understand evolution and really they just don't believe in evolution.

 

[Area54]

16 hours ago, Damateur said:

   This would be very cool. Unfortunately, here in the USA, I don't see that happening any decade soon since there would be parental concern about the radioactivity as well as (unreasonable) religious concerns.

*

   The discussion reminds me of a point I read once that if Darwin had been wrong, the discovery of DNA and how it works would have destroyed his theory and we would have been seeking an alternate mechanism. Instead the discovery of DNA lead to a refinement of Darwin's theory into the even more robust Evolutionary Theory.

   It is humbling to think of how Darwin, through observation and deduction, derived the process of natural selection and developed his theory and that we have only needed to refine it a bit in spite of more than a century of amazing discoveries.

 

   I used to believe in evolution but I no longer do after studying it – now I understand and accept it. I also now see three groups: those who believe in evolution, those who don't believe in evolution – but neither of those groups understand it – and those who understand and accept evolution. I have never met someone who understands evolution but doesn't accept it – all who claim to be such people show that they don't actually understand evolution and really they just don't believe in evolution.

 

There is probably more radioactive material inside an individual than there is radioactive rubidium inside a rock sample. That is a parental objection that should be easy to handle.

I am confused by your statement about the discovery of DNA leading to "even more robust evolutionary theory". DNA was discovered (I prefer identified) in the same decade that Origin of Species was published, long before the Modern Synthesis was developed. It's structure was determined in 1953, a decade or two after the Modern Synthesis was developed.

Your point about acceptance versus belief is an excellent one.

 

[J.C.MacSwell]

On 7/24/2017 at 2:47 PM, Baron d'Holbach said:

Sad to hear about the lack of a prize. 

But to continue. I should of put in that we do know the full history of rabbits as the full example. And it is a shame that some might doctored a false fact to prove a point. 

So yes I can only see this as the ultimate stir for evolution. 

 

Well...at most you have demonstrated Evolution might be off by just a hare...

[swansont]

28 minutes ago, Area54 said:

There is probably more radioactive material inside an individual than there is radioactive rubidium inside a rock sample. That is a parental objection that should be easy to handle.

 

No doubt. I had to answer a safety survey for our lab. We use 1g ampoules of Rb, which is ~25% Rb-87. Half-life of almost 50 billion years. So that's ~1.5 x 10^18 seconds, and ~10^21 atoms. Gives you around 1000 decays per second. The humans body is more radioactive than that be a factor of several, owing to the C-14 and K-40 (whose half-life is "only" a billion years). https://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/faqs/faqradbods.html

You'd need a lot of rock to have a gram of Rb

[Area54]

1 minute ago, swansont said:

No doubt. I had to answer a safety survey for our lab. We use 1g ampoules of Rb, which is ~25% Rb-87. Half-life of almost 50 billion years. So that's ~1.5 x 10^18 seconds, and ~10^21 atoms. Gives you around 1000 decays per second. The humans body is more radioactive than that be a factor of several, owing to the C-14 and K-40 (whose half-life is "only" a billion years). https://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/faqs/faqradbods.html

You'd need a lot of rock to have a gram of Rb

Excellent. I confess I was too wrapped up in investigating the peculiarities of Przybylski's Star, highlighted by Moontanman in another thread, to take the time to confirm my suspicion. I hadn't even thought about C-14, but only the potassium. Of course the same parents who doubt evolution would also likely automatically suspect anything with the word radioactive in it. IIRC MRI devices use nuclear magnetic resonance, but the nuclear was dropped from the name in order not to scare the ill informed. (Or is NMR a different thing?)

[Damateur]

6 hours ago, Area54 said:

There is probably more radioactive material inside an individual than there is radioactive rubidium inside a rock sample. That is a parental objection that should be easy to handle.

I am confused by your statement about the discovery of DNA leading to "even more robust evolutionary theory". DNA was discovered (I prefer identified) in the same decade that Origin of Species was published, long before the Modern Synthesis was developed. It's structure was determined in 1953, a decade or two after the Modern Synthesis was developed.

Your point about acceptance versus belief is an excellent one.

 

   I can be too subtle at times - an unstated idea was that the kids' trip to school or something else in the school would probably expose the students to more radioactivity than the rock samples but that parents would not understand and object anyway. I know we have radioactive materials inside us but I didn't think it would be more than in a small rock although we do tend to be larger than small rocks.

   And sometimes I make mistakes.
   Biology is one of my weaker areas. Checking with Wikipedia for a quick and easy (if not always accurate) reference, On the Origin of Species was published in 1859 and in 1869 Friedrich Miescher discovered what he called nuclein. I did not recall that the components of DNA were being discovered that early. But it has been a long time since I was in school.
   A bit of info on the Wikipedia DNA page reminder me of a documentary I saw a while ago about the research into DNA, from the first X-ray diffraction through to Crick & Watson's work. I think it was actually in this doc that they mentioned that if Darwin's theory was wrong, discoveries about DNA would have forced us to figure out something else.
   (Not sure why but) I thought the Modern Synthesis was finished after the structure of DNA was determined rather than being based on Darwin and Mendel's work.