Evolution?Creation? Quran teaches both

[Roshina]

Let's go over this for the umptieth time for the sake of those who for some reason don't understand this very well.

So do you think your ancestors were monkeys?

Ummm...

k, let's read.

I dont know what your logics r but i m not ready to accept that my forfathers were monkies , za kho da shado aulad na yama u want to call urself one carry on

Lol eusuphxai. Don't fret!

All apes, including humans, evolved from a common ancestor. You can consider monkeys, Chimps, Gorillas,Orangutan as evolutionary cousins but not our twins.

It is like X (Common Ancestor) segregated into A (humans)+ B (chimps)+ C (Gorillas)..and not ABC.

More like our siblings or cousins, folks. Not our forefathers.

I can't figure out what's so difficult to fathom in this whole "common ancestor" idea; why are people STILL drowning themselves in the misconception that our forefathers were monkeys? That's sad, really.

[شمله ور خراساني]

Let's go over this for the umptieth time for the sake of those who for some reason don't understand this very well.



Ummm...

k, let's read.





More like our siblings or cousins, folks. Not our forefathers.

I can't figure out what's so difficult to fathom in this whole "common ancestor" idea; why are people STILL drowning themselves in the misconception that our forefathers were monkeys? That's sad, really.

so you are a sibling of monkeys baboons, and urgang utangs?

[Levanaye Zalmaye]

Sangar, we are siblings of not only monkeys, baboons and orangutans but we are also related to snails, whales, iguanas, dog and pigs. This is the beauty of life. It has sprung up from very modest origins and look where it is now with all its diversity. The world is beautiful but the lens you see it through makes it impossible for you to appreciate it.

Moreover, you don't need to be an expert to understand evolution much in the same way that you don't need any expertise to see the world around you and feel for yourself the impact of gravity. But if you do wanna go with this argument then know that all the top biologists of the world don't dispute evolution at all. Zakir Naik doesn't count because he's a holy medicine-man, not a scientist.

Sangar, don't you ever wonder why such a powerful and all-knowing creator, despite His greatness, made living species so similar to one another? Why did He especially make us so similar to chimps and so different from, let's say, bats? You and I, minus the ability to reason, are just the same as the rest of the creatures we share the planet with.

[eusuphxai]

Lol eusuphxai. Don't fret!

All apes, including humans, evolved from a common ancestor. You can consider monkeys, Chimps, Gorillas,Orangutan as evolutionary cousins but not our twins.

It is like X (Common Ancestor) segregated into A (humans)+ B (chimps)+ C (Gorillas)..and not ABC.

da logic hum na manam, common ancestor was human and it stayed this way. ka aulad yee na yam no da tror zway kho yee da sara na yama.

also gulalai explain X :P like sa shay woo , ka lakai yee wa no i am not related to it LOL

[Palwasha]

I'm glad we can clear this up, InshAllah.

And just so we're clear, Que, firstly we're debating evolution in Islam, (rather than creationism versus Darwin's theory), right?

Are you sure it refutes Darwin's theory? Please give references from the Quran or hadiths that refute Darwin's theory of revolution in any way.

Then we'll continue.

Yes I'm sure. I wanted to make sure you were on about Darwin before I went into depth.

Gosh, thanks for the list Que. =P Will do, InshAllah.

Just so I have better understanding, you're an advocate of Darwin's theory, yeh?

[Roshina]

And just so we're clear, Que, firstly we're debating evolution in Islam, (rather than creationism versus Darwin's theory), right?

Just so I have better understanding, you're an advocate of Darwin's theory, yeh?

That depends on what you think Darwin's theory is. So first tell me that, and then I'll answer, guley.

[Palwasha]

That depends on what you think Darwin's theory is. So first tell me that, and then I'll answer, guley.

Well how would you define Darwin's theory?

In a nutshelll.. that man descended from apes.

[شمله ور خراساني]

[JAMALUDEEN]

lol

[Roshina]

Well how would you define Darwin's theory?

In a nutshelll.. that man descended from apes.

Darwin's theory isn't that man descended from apes.

That's the misconception that Gulalai and I trying to clear up here, kana.

Once you look into and study it better, then I'll be happy to answer your questions. 'Cause as of now, if I say "I agree with Darwin's theory," or that I support it, you might take it to mean, "Okay, humans evolved from apes." And that's not what evolution teaches, or what Darwin or his advocates espouse.

[tor_khan]

There's a misconception that life had been steadily evolving to "improve on itself", when in fact, the way adaptation theory really works is for life to fill an exploitable gap. The idea that creatures gradually get better in design leading up to modern humans is perhaps not quite accurate and Charles Darwin did not use the expression of "survival of the fittest" - the term was coined elsewhere and then added to later editions of On the Origins of Species.

I shared some thoughts on this in another thread and continue to seek answers to burning questions to fill the "gaps" in conventional wisdom. Evolution cannot have been a straight line of "improvement" - the passage from single cell organisms to humans is likely to have been full of dead ends ... there have been some complete wipeouts creating space for the domination of certain life forms, e.g. KT event (asteroid colliding into the Earth 65 million years ago) which killed off the dinosaurs. That's one explanation for mass extinction of certain lifeforms but periodically there are still many unexplained triggers for mass extinction.

Consider recent histories. Why did the mammoths die out? Was it because the earth warmed up/cooled down or because Neanderthal's over-hunted? And what about Neanderthals themselves?

I think evolution is a fascinating area of study, but the fossil and other physical evidence always seems to jump forwards from one design to the next leaving out all the stages in between (which of course would take years/eons). The triggers/gaps remain unexplained.

I've just finished reading Bill Bryon's A Short History of Nearly Everything. Great book which begins with 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds after the Big Bang.

I posted some thoughts here and here.

... musings from a distance ...: A Short History ...

[PFgulalai]

There's a misconception that life had been steadily evolving to "improve on itself", when in fact, the way adaptation theory really works is for life to fill an exploitable gap. The idea that creatures gradually get better in design leading up to modern humans is perhaps not quite accurate and Charles Darwin did not use the expression of "survival of the fittest" - the term was coined elsewhere and then added to later editions of On the Origins of Species.

The term "survival of the fittest" was first coined by Herbert Spencer after reading Charles Darwin's On the origin of species to justify his stance that his economic theories and Darwin's evolutionary theory has a parallel relationship by referring to Darwin's "natural selection--the preservation of favored (fittest) races in the struggle of life". Darwin used the term in the 5th or 6th edition mentioning that the preservation of favored biological traits by species is what he termed Natural Selection.He has also mentioned that Spencer has used the term Survival of the Fittest to express the "same" idea. However, the term "survival of the fittest" was used (and is still being used) in different contexts as in Social Darwinism and Biological/evolutionary Darwinism.

Today Scientists consider the "Survival of the fittest" more as tautological term than scientific one due its misuse in popular culture.They prefer to use the term "Natural Selection" due to the difference in the meaning of the term "fitness". In biology, "fitness" of organism does not imply "physical strength" but mostly refers to the "reproductive success" of the organism. For example, in a certain group of population X, there could be 100 different potential mates, however out of these 100 mates, 53 would be able to copulate with their mates; out of 53, 27 would be able to produce babies; out of 27, 5-6 will survive in that generation (F1 generation). Out of these 5-6, only 2 were able to give rise to the next generation (F2) and so on.Hence the first filial generation F1 which produced these 5-6 evolutionary fit and reproductively successful progeny are the fittest ones. It is due to their "fit" natural traits that their species progressed. The mutations and hence the physical traits that they acquired gradually (Biological Gradualism) would help them to be REPRODUCTIVELY FIT in the next generation.

The gist of Biological/Darwinian evolution is (1) Natural Selection + (2) Genetic Drift = Reproductively fit species=Reproductive success. Since only reproductively fit organisms would be able to continue their generation. So in essence, the context in which Darwin accepted the Spencer's Survival of the Fittest term was "the better adaption of those species who are able to continuously bear the harsh and constantly changing environments with their fit genes (Darwin did not know about genes then--he referred to them as characteristics or traits..just like a century later, Gregor Mendal used the term traits to explain the "controlling factors" in his famous pea plants studies).


In contrast to Social Darwinists like Spencer, the term Survival of the Fittest would mean " the survival of those who are better adapted" or "only the fittest human races will prevail due to so and so economic/social theory".

I shared some thoughts on this in another thread and continue to seek answers to burning questions to fill the "gaps" in conventional wisdom. Evolution cannot have been a straight line of "improvement" - the passage from single cell organisms to humans is likely to have been full of dead ends ... there have been some complete wipeouts creating space for the domination of certain life forms, e.g. KT event (asteroid colliding into the Earth 65 million years ago) which killed off the dinosaurs. That's one explanation for mass extinction of certain lifeforms but periodically there are still many unexplained triggers for mass extinction.

Mass extinctions are considered rare events since there have been some five mass extinctions in the history of world. The last four, including the Dinosaurs extinction, occurred in the last 3.6 billions years. Such intermediate mass extinctions are worth consideration in the evolutionary timeline of the organisms but in the context of evolution, they could not be used to explain "dead ends" compared to those which became extinct naturally. This is because the "dead ends" left by the mass extinct forms are not as a result of some "selective force" but rather signify an "event" which wipe out a group of organism and resultantly reducing species diversity in a biologically nonspecific fashion.They are more useful for being the major factor behind adaptive radiation-linked (rapidly reproducing) lineages.

More than a straight line, it is the mechanism of gene transfer (horizontal or vertical) that would play a role in the evolution of species. Even when we talk about X as a common ancestor of the great apes, we should question who was the ancestor of X then..and as we trace back the ancestor on the evolutionary order, we reach to the point where a single primordial cell began synthesis from amino acids, RNA/DNA, and sugar molecules..when there was no oxygen for the great apes to survive on this earth. Today there are many "dead ends" in our evolutionary tree, which in an essence, provide evidence for the plausibility of the evolutionary theory and as being the only successful theory to explain the origin of species---Approximately, 235,740 scientific publications in PUBMED (www.ncbi.nlm.nig.gov), the online repository of medical/bio publications, used the term "evolution". Recently the pharma companies have pumping huge sums of money to fund research for investigating the evolution of Antibiotic resistance as depicted by the resistance to Penicillins, tetracyclines, chloromphenicol etc by Bacteria, which was not the case few decades ago.

Consider recent histories. Why did the mammoths die out? Was it because the earth warmed up/cooled down or because Neanderthal's over-hunted? And what about Neanderthals themselves?.

Recently, multiple labs across the world published the FIRST DRAFT SEQUENCE OF NEANDERTAL GENOME and compared it with the present-day modern humans. The abstract provides an important piece of information relevant to our discussion here:

Neandertals, the closest evolutionary relatives of present-day humans, lived in large parts of Europe and western Asia before disappearing 30,000 years ago. We present a draft sequence of the Neandertal genome composed of more than 4 billion nucleotides from three individuals. Comparisons of the Neandertal genome to the genomes of five present-day humans from different parts of the world identify a number of genomic regions that may have been affected by positive selection in ancestral modern humans, including genes involved in metabolism and in cognitive and skeletal development. We show that Neandertals shared more genetic variants with present-day humans in Eurasia than with present-day humans in sub-Saharan Africa, suggesting that gene flow from Neandertals into the ancestors of non-Africans occurred before the divergence of Eurasian groups from each other.


This is a really important study..an interesting one too! Here is the link..
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5979/710

I think evolution is a fascinating area of study, but the fossil and other physical evidence always seems to jump forwards from one design to the next leaving out all the stages in between (which of course would take years/eons). The triggers/gaps remain unexplained.

I agree we have a millions of things to be resolved, theories to be falsified, and countless gaps to be filled, yet we find ourselves appreciating the Darwinian Evolution as a single, scientifically valid theory to explain the origin and survival of species in this post-genomic era as we progress.

[MeemWawMeemNoon]

Whichever way you slice the cake you cannot separate Allah's involvement in evolution.

[PFgulalai]

It was not the present human that you see..Only Adam and Eve could satisfy your criteria. For others, the most common recent ancestor was Homo and the earliest common ancestor was Plesiadapis--a primate-like mammal...

Here is our bio-ancestral tribal distribution:



If you notice on your extreme left (bottom), Homo (humans) and Pan (Chimp and Bonobo) have been diverged from the common ancestor Hominini. However, as I mentioned before they are not twins, but cousins or siblings as you see two different separate lines segregated from Hominini. If Pan and Homo were rather diverged as ONE STRAIGHT LINE in a clade ,only then would have we called them our twins. For now they are our siblings or cousinsas.So both Chimp and Huamns belong to the same tribe--Hominini

da logic hum na manam, common ancestor was human and it stayed this way. ka aulad yee na yam no da tror zway kho yee da sara na yama.

also gulalai explain X :P like sa shay woo , ka lakai yee wa no i am not related to it LOL

[PFgulalai]

...and that is just another creationist claim without any valid truth to devour!

Whichever way you slice the cake you cannot separate Allah's involvement in evolution.