Fri, May-12-06, 14:13
|
 |
Senior Member
Posts: 869
|
|
Plan: VLC
Stats: 235/226/180
BF:
Progress: 16%
Location: Orange County, CA
|
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by LilaCotton
You know, you can be a Christian and still look at the world and know that to some degree evolution has been an ongoing process. 
Having said that, yes, I believe evolution has a part in what people can eat and stay healthy. If you look at the disease rates in various ethnic cultures who now eat completely different than they originally did there's no doubt about it. Think of all of the native Americans who've developed diabetes after eating a Western diet. I believe it all stems from 'survival of the fittest'. An example of this is in South America. Many natives of South America eat very spicy food. Hot peppers act as somewhat of a preservative in foods so foods could be prepared and still eaten later. It is theorized those who didn't like the spiciness would end up with food poisoning, thus the survivors would be those who liked the peppers and passed on that gene.
No doubt about it, people do adapt and those who don't die out, which brings to mind Charles Darwin's actual theory of evolution. I can't even remember the name of the book now, but years ago I read either his biography or something else. It was extremely fascinating to learn that what I'd been taught all my life as Darwin's theories were never his own. |
I came across these defintions of which it would be true that a Christian has no problems with the first two.
"selective evolution": This refers to genetic variation that gets selected through successive generations. In short, this is just genetics, and this what natural selection has to do with. Importantly, this kind of evolution involves no mutation. This includes the examples you bring up such as dog breeding and covers the selective breeding of everything from farm animals to plants. This is the type of evolution you're referring to when you talk about "survival of the fittest".
"mutative evolution": This type of evolution involves mutation of existing genetic information. This covers things like color-blindness, bacterial resistance to drugs, sickle-cell anemia, etc.
"creative evolution": This is the kind of evolution that claims to create new features or structures of an organism that didn't exist before, and requires an increase in genetic information. This covers the "goo to you", or "monkey to man" evolution, and includes such things as the evolution of multicellular organisms from single-celled, prokaryote cells from eukaryote, the origin of the cell, and the very creation of life from non-living matter.
Its the 3rd one where the real debates begin. And, as a believer, I do not buy into. Cats have always been cats, fish - fish, dogs - dogs and man - man. I have yet to run across a monkey man although many of my friends are quite hairy.
Jorel |