This is a very interesting guest post at Remote Central:
All species vary through time and space. You don't necessarily look the same as any one of your ancestors. Therefore "like begets like" but each individual can be a bit different. It is impossible for a sperm whale to evolve from a bowl of petunias, or a duck from a dandelion, as some creationist and Intelligent Design supporters accuse evolutionists of believing. But over time it is possible for a cow to evolve from something like a camel, or a human to evolve from something like an ape. Evolution doesn't proceed in a straight line though, especially not a straight line with a human at the end.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
The Intelligent Design Creationists are always getting annoyed at the third word in that label -- they're not creationists, they insist, but something completely different. They're scientists, they think. They're just scientists who favor a different explanation for the diversity of life on Earth…
My brother Ben is now a respectable consultant for the Oxford English Dictionary, but when he was a kid, he was a puzzle freak, pure and simple. In fourth grade he'd spend hours paging through a big unabridged Webster's, looking for obscure words that he could use to create a fiendish rebus. Little…
I had mentioned in a previous post that I was skipping William Gibbons' claims on human evolution for the time being because I was hoping that Jim Foley would weigh in with his thoughts. He has done so now and I will post it below. Jim chose not to do a line by line response, but instead to focus…
My friend Razib, who is one of my
fellow ScienceBloggers sent me
href="http://blog.beliefnet.com/cityofbrass/2009/01/is-evolution-sufficient.html">a
link to an interest attempt by creationist at arguing why evolution can't
possibly work.
I say interesting, because it's at least a little bit…
News to me that female ducks have Y chromosomes. Did a little looking online in the literature and could find no mention of a Y chromosome in mallards.
The XX = female XY = male is mammalian. Birds have something that could be referred to as XX = male, XY = female.
Actually, for any given species, there is a straight line back through its ancestry. That doesn't give the complete picture of evolution, however, and that's what's important.