8 questions for evolutionists?

if they hadn't covered all this by the time you got to 7th grade you should ask for your money back.

1. Where did we come from? Our parents. Before that, their parents. A million parents ago, we were just becoming apes.

2. How did nothing explode? Just because we don't know everything doesn't mean we haven't amassed a massive amount of evidence and knowledge.

3. How did stars and galaxies form? They mostly formed from the gathering of hydrogen which fused into other molecules. There is very little doubt about fusion. We even even have a hydrogen bomb using it.

4. How come all rocks dated with carbon-14 give 'absolute ages' less than 56,000 yrs? Carbon 14 isn't very good for using on old things because it decomposes rapidly and has a short life time. Other radioactive isotopes can be used for longer periods.

5. How do you determine the absolute age of a fossil? As a geologist, I can sometimes count bedding that is formed yearly but typically those beds don't form for millions of years. I have seen numerous formations formed from corals growing on top of each other thousands of feet thick and obviously millions of years to form. We can't get exact dates but we can estimate fairly well.

6. Why hasn't evolution been observed? It has. Research Gypsy moth as one obvious example.

7. How does specific complex coded information in DNA arise by chance? It didn't. It arose after billions of generations.

8. How did life arise from non-living chemicals by random? If you think you aren't chemicals, you don't know the definition of chemicals. Some randomness was involved. Those random changes that were favored for survival were kept due to basic math. If something has a 1 percent better chance to survive, eventually that something will dominate the gene pool.

1."we" as in humans came from other homonids.

2. Not related as that is physics.

3. not related as it's astronomy

4. Because carbon has a half life of 5500years and so it would have all degraded into Carbon 12 and there is no ratio to measure after this point.

5. Firstly look at which other fossils that occur in the same strata as the fossil and then look at when occurred. To know exactly do whichever carbon dating or potassium-argon dating or other methods to confirm if needed.

6. because it has happened in the past and we can't see it occurring today (mostly) as it's too slow. It has been seen in bacteria in an experiment that has been running for about 40 years.

7.mutations.

8. RNA can replicate itself and produce proteins by itself, which by itself is not considered living.

1. this is anthropology, not astronomy and mathematics section.

2. this is anthropology, not astronomy and mathematics section. If you're genuinely curious (which I suspect you're not) there are several theories but until the SKA is up and running we won't know exactly what triggered the inflation and thus the formation of matter as we know it.

3. this is anthropology, not astronomy and mathematics section.

4. because you're talking about carbon dating which is at its limits at about 50,000 years before being unable to perform, which is why it's on the way to becoming obselete in favor of more accurate dating methods for things over 50,000 years old.

5. dating methods and geologic dating. Surely you listened in year 3 (or whatever you call 8 year old school) when they taught this? If not, then pity.

6. It has. There is contemporary evolution which almost everyone can see. Every time you go to a hospital and they say the treatment is no longer effective you've felt the affects of evolution. Go to the Galapogos Islands and observe the wildlife for about 30 years. You'll see evolution, just as so many have. Go to a farmer, animal breeder, flower breeder or horticulturalist. You'll see evolution. Each time a child is born with a birth defect you're seeing evolution at work.

7. It doesn't. Mutations occur when copying out the gene sequences and a mistake or change is made. In a human there are over 3 billion genes, and every now and then one is copied and a less than identical copy is created which gives rise to a change. Once that has occurred it's a matter of survival of the fittest, so to speak. If said change is beneficial and offers some advantage that will be positively selected for as the individual will have a greater chance of survival and a higher reproduction rate. If the mutation gives rise to a change that is not beneficial then it's less likely that individual will survive and reproduce. Over time as generations go past, if the change was beneficial then that will be positively selected for, becoming more popular among their species, and then the norm. Once enough changes have taken place a new species has arisen.

8. look up "organic soup". as in primordial soup. and take it from there. Life has been created from matter in labs many times. Started with viruses, which only comprise of RNA, and then evolution took place and DNA arose, cellular complexity increased, multicellular organisms such as streptococcus took place, and eventually gave rise to complex organisms such as plants, fungi and animals as cells became specialised.

1. the question is too broad. We came from our parents and every generation before them.

2. Has nothing to do with evolution.

3. Nothing to do with evolution.

4. Carbon-14 dating is used to date things of biological origin. its usefulness only extends to about 50,000 years. The reason why all rocks dated with carbon-14 give an age of less than 56,000 years is because you are not dating the rock itself. You are only dating matter that was once alive(on the rock).

5. Radio-Isotope is one kind of dating that they use to find the approximate age. What do you mean by "absolute age"?

6. It has. We have observed organisms changing over time.

7. You may be referring to mutations, which are just copying errors in the DNA. They occur with every generation.

8. Nothing to do with evolution.

1. We evolved from apes. Not modern apes, but ancient apes that are no longer with us. Modern apes evolved from a common ancestor, therefore they are our cousins very distantly removed.

We did not come from a mythical garden, and half of us did not originate from the rib of some guy named Adam.

2. 'Nothing' which is actually something (it's a common mistake) came together over billions of years. As pressure built up, we got the big bang - which created the universe as we know it.

3. It's called the big bang theory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang

4. Well now, that's incorrect. Fossils have been dated to 100,000 years ago (and even further), so I don't know how you got the idea that rocks could be younger than the fossils that are dug up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium%E2%80%93arg...

5. You do so using the correct dating-method for fossils, and you get a rough estimate. There are no absolutes in science. That kind of nonsense is left to religion.

6. Oh boy. It occurs over such a vast period of time, that it cannot be observed within a single human lifetime. It has been observed, if you dare to look at the evidence of our evolution from early hominids to modern humans. If you insist on denying the existence of mountains of evidence, then you will be stuck with this idea that it is unobservable thus not real.

Here are some interesting evolutionary shifts, that have been observed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin's_finches

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teiidae

7. Natural selection and sex selection are not chance.

8. Oy Vey! Nothing was random. You should seriously consult a textbook.

On Yahoo Answers, each question uses 5 points:

http://answers.yahoo.com/info/scoring_system

So you need to post 8 separate questions, which will use up 40 points.

But I'm not sure you really wanted to ask these questions; they're just a cut-n-paste from a creationist website, Creation Ministries International, run by Carl Wieland:

http://castore.creation.com/catalog/reasons-evolut...

Although Wieland trained as a medical doctor, he became an ardent creationist after a traumatic vehicle accident in 1986. He's probably suffering some PTSD-related mental disorder. He distorts information in a very cynical, manipulative way in order to support his creationist arguments; on several occasions he has plainly lied. He is not trustworthy; even other creationists distance themselves from his group; eg he started "Creation Ministries" after falling out with Ken Ham of 'Answers in Genesis' (that's right: Wieland makes even Ken Ham look like a statesman).

Those questions from the CMI site are designed to mislead, and send gullible readers down the wrong track. They are couched in a way that even straightforward, correct answers will seem misguided or biased. For example:

> 2. How did nothing explode?

This is about cosmology and astrophysics, it has nothing to do with evolution which is a theory in biology. Physicists don't say "nothing exploded". The theory of the Big Bang says that the Universe began as a 'singularity' - very very small, but not "nothing". And it didn't "explode", it started expanding. That's not surprising or hard to believe, because the Universe is still expanding today. The expansion of the Universe was first observed visually, through telescopes, in the 1920s by astronomers like Vesto Slifer and Edwin Hubble. If the Universe is expanding, then it must have been smaller in the past. That, in a nutshell, is the "Big Bang" theory.

> 4. How come all rocks dated with carbon-14 give 'absolute ages' less than 56,000 yrs?

No sensible person tries to date rocks using Carbon 14. The whole idea of C14 radiometric dating is that it only measures the age of organic material - stuff that contains carbon. Since most rocks are made up of silicon, oxygen, and other inorganic elements - but not carbon - it is pointless to date rocks with C14. Creationists hate Carbon 14 dating and try to prove it is flawed. In fact C14 dating has been intensively studied by physicists since 1947; today is very reliable and well understood. In fact "radiocarbon dating" is an umbrella term for 2 different dating techniques: C14 beta counting, and C14 AMS. And it's just one of many types of radiometric dating along with Potassium-Argon dating, uranium-lead dating, uranium-thorium dating, rubidium-strontium dating, and many others. Are ALL these different techniques faulty as well?

> 6. Why hasn't evolution been observed?

This question sets you up to assume that every reliable fact must be observed: if you can't see it, then it isn't reliable. That's nonsense. We know lots of things that haven't been directly observed. Have you ever seen a virus? Viruses are so small they can't be seen even with the best optical microscopes. But a large slice of modern medicine is devoted to combating viruses, and even the most passionate creationist goes to the doctor or takes anti-viral medication when a virus makes them unwell. Have you ever observed an atom? An electron? If the police find a man lying dead on the ground with another man standing beside him holding a warm smoking handgun, do they throw up their hands and say "well no-one actually observed him shooting the other guy, so I guess we'll never know what happened. Better let him go"???? Of course not. They draw reasonable inferences based on available evidence, then test those inferences by gathering more information. The dead man owed the man with the gun a million dollars and wouldn't pay it back, something like that ... Nearly ALL of human life is smarter than what we can directly observe; and science in particular has built on our ability to infer things which are not directly observed.

> 8. 8. How did life arise from non-living chemicals by random?

This question assumes that if we can't answer the question definitively today, then it will never be answered. If we can't *prove* how Life arose from inorganic matter, then obviously it is utterly impossible, it didn't happen. That is a false assumption. There are many ideas about how Life arose form inorganic matter. We have found many naturally occurring processes which are not 'Life' in themselves, but very closely resemble the processes of living matter. It is quite possible - even likely - that in another 25 or 50 years, we WILL know how Life arose from non-living matter. For example, see:

http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Clues-Origin-Life-Scie...

http://www.amazon.com/Origins-Life-Freeman-Dyson-e...

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2013/09/life-...

Are you seriously looking for answers to these questions? As the good replies from Jim Z and others show, there are good answers to all of them. Or are you just trying to advocate creationist ideas? It wasn't clear from your question(s).

EDIT: Why do you say all the answers are "false"? What was false in my answer? There is nothing false, or atheistic, in these answers. I think you mean you just don't like them; they're not actually false. And lots of Christians accept evolution and the Big Bang as normal parts of science; these are not "atheistic" theories.