In my opinion evolution is a faith and will be till everything has been solved. It is called a theory for a reason. There are holes that need to be filled. If you believe in evolution you must have faith that it is true, because not all evidence is there to prove as fact yet. Just my thoughts.

Not entirely sure what you're trying to say..... But I believe we humans don't evolve,... we adapt.

I'm in the 'don't know' group.... coz if I knew, I'd be God, wouldn't I.

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Yeah, read my post again and found I wasn't as clear as I thought.

Let me out is this way. I think evolution is a belief, to stretch it would be religion, because it has not yet been proven to be true one hundred percent. It's something you must has faith in that it's true.

Evolution is real. Look at the avian bird flu...

Macro evolution, however... It's anyones guess, but I think it's real.

Well,... then my answer is somewhat the same, I guess.

Isn't religion/belief/faith a form of adapting. You could call it spiritual evolution, or evolution of thought.... not really physical evolution. We can condition ourselves with fitness training and martial arts, but throughout our history, we've not been able to grow wings to fly or anything like other animals. Yeah, some say we descended from apes, but that isn't proven either. We probably haven't been around long enough in the Earth's history to have conclusive proof.

Perhaps you're right, afterall.... maybe our ability to change the way we think through belief, makes us unique, unlike animals who evolve through physical experiences/hardship/environmental changes

Aargh!!! I give up, man!! ...I'm starting to contradict myself.

Sorry, I'm not really good with deep stuff. I pray to the Gods of Speed.... and my only 'beliefs' are my lap-times and average speed.

Cheers.

Last edited by gan17 at 11:41 am, Jun 29 2008

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Erm, it is proven.

Evolution is both a fact and a theory. *Too lazy to explain* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_as_theory_and_fact

Buuuut, everyone's free to believe what they want.

Truly speaking, if knowledge equals truth, then we have no knowledge.
Evolution theory is a theory, just as you said, it uses some facts as premises, but does some interpretation as well.
Faith maybe will be too much, but, yes, it's one way of viewing reality.
Just because it is in a scientifical stand doesn't make it right. Science has been proven wrong, and it has advanced overcoming error. But well, all of this is just what I think as well.

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The thing about scientific theories is that you need absolute proof. For instance that cells are the smallest component to living things is still a theory, since it can still be found that they may be smaller components. But just to put it out for debate cells just like evolution are not debated in the scientific community, only in the general population. I'm not saying that evolution won't somehow evolve itself into a different theory eventually but right now I think it's a pretty good bet on how things happened.

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i think it is a fact. well it is still considered as a theory mostly because religions. You know it is totally different from what the religion says. (i dont know bible but i know what the quran says.) So of course most of people choose not to believe the evidences of evolution. It is not a believe or not believe thi actually. I mean if u look objectively u can see the undeniable evidences.

It is theory and it does require some faith to support it. However there is also a lot of actual, tangible, empirical evidence that, at the very least, suggests support for it. It requires far less blind faith than competing theories would ask of you.

In the end though, I really don't care. Whether we came from apes or from the invisible man in the sky doesn't really change much about daily life either way.

A fact cannot be a theory. (And wiki doesn't count as a source)

Evolution is conjecture with a large amount of evidence, making it a theory. The evidence is not empirically defined as fact, so it cannot be a scientific law, but it is strong enough to put real weight on the theory.

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That only goes for classes (do we really need scientific journal sources here?), I picked that one 'casue it summarized it concisely...

Erm, from what most of my profs had said, it is. As I said, you can believe what you want.

Evolution is the most reasonable theory of how humans came to be. And if it was a religion, it would be the most scientifically supported one.

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I think that the fact that these kind of polemics happen so often and are so popular is because the strict line between theory and fact is often not taken into consideration. So we grow up thinking Evolution is a 100% proven law of nature while it isn't. All the useful and relevant stuff people have posted in this thread (i.e. the simple explanation from Wiki) should be printed in the 6th grade schoolbooks on biology. That would make things waaay more simple. Evolution wouldn't be taken half as seriously as it often is and any kind of faith in it wouldn't be needed at all. It would be just the "most feasible theory at this time", and nothing more.

Basically, I mean that believing (having "faith") in it equals not understanding it's true nature as a theory.

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I have an inclination to believe in evolution as a factish. It has more scientific backing than anything else. Also evolution is pretty much true, we're not talking about origin of life here, we're just talking about a species changing over time to adapt to it's environment which is reasonable and supported by scientific evidence. I would say it's fact. I don't believe in evolution, I can see it in certain animals therefore I can see it as something that would in fact exist.