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Johnny B

Complex Islamic response to evolution emerges

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That's rite johnny, we should let threads moving in classic respectful manner,so more people contribute ; haven't had much spare time lately but love read more about this subject.

Like to know ,for anyone care give some knowledge if evolution still on the move, & r we yet gona turn to anotha new species or regress ,i.e, to ape , fish stage,etc.Ofc creationists r welcome & have say but please refrain pulling sword upfront.Like u said we do appreciate both.

thnx all.

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Coofle   

"Ignorance kills"----- Being extremist in our views is a gene of somalis, we were not harnessed to be Flexible "Geel-jire culture".

 

Anyway full understanding of Evolution is required before judging, Even Sheikhs are required to study and to have a complete idea of an issue before releasing a Fatwa about it.

 

Evolution is the change that happens to one or more of our inherited genetic traits over course of time. There is a difference between the Theoretical Evolution pointed by Darwin and the Scientific evolution that is used today.

Scientifically evolution is very apparent and exists in our real lives, Every scientist believes in it whether Muslim or Non-Muslim.

A very easy example is the Swine flu; Influenza virus or the Flu virus goes through a series of changes from time to time, these changes are not usually significant to cause clinical dilemma, but those changes add up to form a new strand "sub-Type" of the virus that is strange to us and causes a different clinical scenario. This change is Expressed as "Genetic Drift" Which is a mechanism of Evolution.

 

This is a proof That evolution is existent, Other examples include ; Cancer cells that undergo mutation by acquiring new genes in order to resist chemotherapy, Bacteria always reform itself and gain new genes to resist antibiotics.

All this examples are present in our life, No healthcare professional or a scientist could deny, Even Media is a witness to the SARS outbreak and Chloroquine-Resistant Malaria.

 

As a Muslim I Believe that Humanity started From Adam and Xaawa, Not believing so is breaking one of the "Arkaanul Iimaan", But since Darwin have no evidence proved by contemporary science, on the contrary Darwin was disproved by many other archaeologists and scientists. I am not obliged to believe him But that doesn't mean all his work is false.

 

Remember Louis Pasteur who proposed the Germ theory of Disease, Who invented the Anthrax vaccine, The savior of the French chicken and Silk industry And Even the the First person to Produce and Administer the Rabies vaccine. He literally used The word Vaccine at first with its current meaning, His theories gave rise to the Idea of Washing hands before and after dealing with patients, He disproved the Spontaneous generation theory and even he has a complete process called after him "Pasteurization" .

This significant scientist once in a hall full of Doctors and Sceintist claimed he invented The Treatment of Tuberculosis he was harshly disproved and his work was in vain.

 

"To err is human and Perfection is divine"- same goes for Darwin and Louis Pasteur.

 

As a Muslim you should have the Wise judgment to know what is wrong from what is right, Not believe every word that comes from the mouth of ignorant ones, Just Like believing In Alshabaab Waxay yidhaahdeen markii Ardaydii qalinjabinaysay la qarxiyay "Maxay baranayeen!, Sida gooryaanka loo walaaqo ayaa la barayaye"

 

We are Muslims, The First Word to be revealed of Quran To our Prophet (Naxariis iyo Nabad galyo korkiisa ha ahaatee) was IQRA'A "Read". We the the IQRA'A nation, A nation that will only prosper through knowledge and reading. The fact that our Prophet (Salaa Alaahu Calayhi wa salam) was illiterate Have A message that his Ummah Should not be Illiterate and he marks the End of Illiteracy .

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it's always dilemma to reconcile religion & science.I'm sure there was resistance atleast to most technological advances in last 2 centuries,but later accepted cos it was tangible; you can see.One example...landing on the moon;recall as a child that muslim clerks were saying it was anotha kaffir thing not mentioned in holly quran,but you don't hear that nowadays..kind o real!

Now, since all scientists agree on evolution, is it possible that infact ,it too ,is Gods work & adam & eve just happened to be the first humans who came from that evolutionary process,hence coexistance for both.

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nyone who seeks an answer to the question of how living things,

including himself, came into existence, will encounter two distinct

explanations. The first is "creation," the idea that all living things

came into existence as a consequence of an intelligent design. The

second explanation is the theory of "evolution," which asserts that living

things are not the products of an intelligent design, but of coincidental

causes and natural processes.

For a century and a half now, the theory of evolution has received

extensive support from the scientific community. The science of biology is

defined in terms of evolutionist concepts. That is why, between the two

explanations of creation and evolution, the majority of people assume the

evolutionist explanation to be scientific. Accordingly, they believe

evolution to be a theory supported by the observational findings of

science, while creation is thought to be a belief based on faith. As a matter

of fact, however, scientific findings do not support the theory of evolution.

Findings from the last two decades in particular openly contradict the

basic assumptions of this theory. Many branches of science, such as

paleontology, biochemistry, population genetics, comparative anatomy

and biophysics, indicate that natural processes and coincidental effects

cannot explain life, as the theory of evolution proposes.

In this book, we will analyze this scientific crisis faced by the theory

of evolution. This work rests solely upon scientific findings. Those

advocating the theory of evolution on behalf of scientific truth should

confront these findings and question the presumptions they have so far

held. Refusal to do this would mean openly accepting that their adherence

to the theory of evolution is dogmatic rather than scientific.

11

FOREWORD

A

12

espite having its roots in ancient Greece, the theory of evolution was

first brought to the attention of the scientific world in the nineteenth

century. The most thoroughly considered view of evolution was

expressed by the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, in his

Zoological Philosophy (1809). Lamarck thought that all living things

were endowed with a vital force that drove them to evolve toward greater

complexity. He also thought that organisms could pass on to their offspring

traits acquired during their lifetimes. As an example of this line of

reasoning, Lamarck suggested that the long neck of the giraffe evolved

when a short-necked ancestor took to browsing on the leaves of trees

instead of on grass.

This evolutionary model of Lamarck's was invalidated by the

discovery of the laws of genetic inheritance. In the middle of the twentieth

century, the discovery of the structure of DNA revealed that the nuclei of

the cells of living organisms possess very special genetic information, and

that this information could not be altered by "acquired traits." In other

words, during its lifetime, even though a giraffe managed to make its neck

a few centimeters longer by extending its neck to upper

branches, this trait would not pass to its offspring. In brief, the

Lamarckian view was simply refuted by scientific findings, and

went down in history as a flawed assumption.

However, the evolutionary theory formulated by another

natural scientist who lived a couple of generations after

Lamarck proved to be more influential. This natural scientist

was Charles Robert Darwin, and the theory he formulated is

known as "Darwinism."

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The Birth of Darwinism

Charles Darwin based his theory on various observations he made as

a young naturalist on board the H.M.S Beagle, which sailed in late 1831 on

a five-year official voyage around the world. Young Darwin was heavily

influenced by the diversity of species he observed, especially of the

different Galapagos Island finches. The differences in the beaks of these

birds, Darwin thought, were a result of their adaptation to their different

environments.

After this voyage, Darwin started to visit animal markets in England.

He observed that breeders produced new breeds of cow by mating

animals with different characteristics. This experience, together with the

different finch species he observed in the Galapagos Islands, contributed

to the formulation of his theory. In 1859, he published his views in his book

The Origin of Species. In this book, he postulated that all species had

descended from a single ancestor, evolving from one another over time by

slight variations.

What made Darwin's theory different from Lamarck's was his

emphasis on "natural selection." Darwin theorized that there is a struggle

for survival in nature, and that natural selection is the survival of strong

species, which can adapt to their environment. Darwin adopted the

following line of reasoning:

Within a particular species, there are natural and coincidental

variations. For instance some cows are bigger than others, while some

have darker colors. Natural selection selects the favorable traits. The

process of natural selection thus causes an increase of favorable genes

within a population, which results in the features of that population being

better adapted to local conditions. Over time these changes may be significant enough to cause a new species to arise.

However, this "theory of evolution by natural selection" gave rise to

doubts from the very first:

1- What were the "natural and coincidental variations" referred to by

Darwin? It was true that some cows were bigger than others, while some

had darker colors, yet how could these variations provide an explanation

for the diversity in animal and plant species?

2- Darwin asserted that "Living beings evolved gradually." In this

case, there should have lived millions of "transitional forms." Yet there was

no trace of these theoretical creatures in the fossil record. Darwin gave

considerable thought to this problem, and eventually arrived at the

conclusion that "further research would provide these fossils."

3- How could natural selection explain complex organs, such as eyes,

ears or wings? How can it be advocated that these organs evolved

gradually, bearing in mind that they would fail to function if they had even

a single part missing?

4- Before considering these questions, consider the following: How

did the first organism, the so-called ancestor of all species according to

Darwin, come into existence? Could natural processes give life to

something which was originally inanimate?

Darwin was, at least, aware of some these questions, as can be seen

from the chapter "Difficulties of the Theory." However, the answers he

provided had no scientific validity. H.S. Lipson, a British physicist, makes

the following comments about these "difficulties" of Darwin's:

On reading The Origin of Species, I found that Darwin was much less sure

himself than he is often represented to be; the chapter entitled "Difficulties of

the Theory" for example, shows considerable self-doubt. As a physicist, I was

particularly intrigued by his comments on how the eye would have arisen.1

Darwin invested all his hopes in advanced scientific research, which

he expected to dispel the "difficulties of the theory." However, contrary to

his expectations, more recent scientific findings have merely increased

these difficulties.

The Problem of the Origin of Life

In his book, Darwin never mentioned the origin of life. The primitive

understanding of science in his time rested on the assumption that living

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things had very simple structures. Since mediaeval

times, spontaneous generation, the theory that nonliving

matter could come together to form living

organisms, had been widely accepted. It was believed

that insects came into existence from leftover bits of

food. It was further imagined that mice came into

being from wheat. Interesting experiments were

conducted to prove this theory. Some wheat was

placed on a dirty piece of cloth, and it was believed

that mice would emerge in due course.

Similarly, the fact that maggots appeared in

meat was believed to be evidence for spontaneous

generation. However, it was only realized some time

later that maggots did not appear in meat

spontaneously, but were carried by flies in the form of larvae, invisible to

the naked eye.

Even in the period when Darwin's Origin of Species was written, the

belief that bacteria could come into existence from inanimate matter was

widespread.

However, five years after the publication of Darwin's book, Louis

Pasteur announced his results after long studies and experiments, which

disproved spontaneous generation, a cornerstone of Darwin's theory. In

his triumphal lecture at the Sorbonne in 1864, Pasteur said, "Never will the

doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow struck

by this simple experiment."2

Advocates of the theory of evolution refused to accept Pasteur's

findings for a long time. However, as scientific progress revealed the

complex structure of the cell, the idea that life could come into being

coincidentally faced an even greater impasse. We shall consider this

subject in some detail in this book.

The Problem of Genetics

Another subject that posed a quandary for Darwin's theory was

inheritance. At the time when Darwin developed his theory, the question

of how living beings transmitted their traits to other generations—that is,

how inheritance took place—was not completely understood. That is why

the naive belief that inheritance was transmitted through blood was

commonly accepted.

Vague beliefs about inheritance led Darwin to base his theory on

completely false grounds. Darwin assumed that natural selection was the

"mechanism of evolution." Yet one question remained unanswered: How

would these "useful traits" be selected and transmitted from one generation

to the next? At this point, Darwin embraced the Lamarckian theory, that is,

"the inheritance of acquired traits." In his book The Great Evolution Mystery,

Gordon R. Taylor, a researcher advocating the theory of evolution, expresses

the view that Darwin was heavily influenced by Lamarck:

Lamarckism... is known as the inheritance of acquired characteristics...

Darwin himself, as a matter of fact, was inclined to believe that such

inheritance occurred and cited the reported case of a man who had lost his

fingers and bred sons without fingers... [Darwin] had not, he said, gained a

single idea from Lamarck. This was doubly ironical, for Darwin repeatedly

toyed with the idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics and, if it is

so dreadful, it is Darwin who should be denigrated rather than Lamarck... In

the 1859 edition of his work, Darwin refers to 'changes of external conditions'

causing variation but subsequently these conditions are described as

directing variation and cooperating with natural selection in directing it...

Every year he attributed more and more to the agency of use or disuse... By

1868 when he published Varieties of Animals and Plants under Domestication he

gave a whole series of examples of supposed Lamarckian inheritance: such

as a man losing part of his little finger and all his sons being born with

deformed little fingers, and boys born with foreskins much reduced in length

as a result of generations of circumcision.3

However, Lamarck's thesis, as we have seen above, was disproved by

the laws of genetic inheritance discovered by the Austrian monk and

botanist, Gregor Mendel. The concept of "useful traits" was therefore left

unsupported. Genetic laws showed that acquired traits are not passed on,

and that genetic inheritance takes place according to certain unchanging

laws. These laws supported the view that species remain unchanged. No

matter how much the cows that Darwin saw in England's animal fairs bred,

the species itself would never change: cows would always remain cows.

Gregor Mendel announced the laws of genetic inheritance that he

discovered as a result of long experiment and observation in a scientific paper published in 1865. But this paper only attracted

the attention of the scientific world towards the end

of the century. By the beginning of the twentieth

century, the truth of these laws had been accepted by

the whole scientific community. This was a serious

dead-end for Darwin's theory, which tried to base the

concept of "useful traits" on Lamarck.

Here we must correct a general

misapprehension: Mendel opposed not only

Lamarck's model of evolution, but also Darwin's. As

the article "Mendel's Opposition to Evolution and to

Darwin," published in the Journal of Heredity, makes

clear, "he [Mendel] was familiar with The Origin of Species ...and he was

opposed to Darwin's theory; Darwin was arguing for descent with

modification through natural selection, Mendel was in favor of the

orthodox doctrine of special creation."4

The laws discovered by Mendel put Darwinism in a very difficult

position. For these reasons, scientists who supported Darwinism tried to

develop a different model of evolution in the first quarter of the twentieth

century. Thus was born "neo-Darwinism."

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The Efforts of Neo-Darwinism

A group of scientists who were determined to reconcile Darwinism

with the science of genetics, in one way or another, came together at a

meeting organized by the Geological Society of America in 1941. After

long discussion, they agreed on ways to create a new interpretation of

Darwinism and over the next few years, specialists produced a synthesis

of their fields into a revised theory of evolution.

The scientists who participated in establishing the new theory

included the geneticists G. Ledyard Stebbins and Theodosius Dobzhansky,

the zoologists Ernst Mayr and Julian Huxley, the paleontologists George

Gaylord Simpson and Glenn L. Jepsen, and the mathematical geneticists

Sir Ronald A. Fisher and Sewall Wright.5

To counter the fact of "genetic stability" (genetic homeostasis), this

group of scientists employed the concept of "mutation," which had been

proposed by the Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries at the beginning of the 20th century. Mutations were defects that occurred, for unknown reasons, in

the inheritance mechanism of living things. Organisms undergoing

mutation developed some unusual structures, which deviated from the

genetic information they inherited from their parents. The concept of

"random mutation" was supposed to provide the answer to the question

of the origin of the advantageous variations which caused living

organisms to evolve according to Darwin's theory—a phenomenon that

Darwin himself was unable to explain, but simply tried to side-step by

referring to Lamarck. The Geological Society of America group named this

new theory, which was formulated by adding the concept of mutation to

Darwin's natural selection thesis, the "synthetic theory of evolution" or

the "modern synthesis." In a short time, this theory came to be known as

"neo-Darwinism" and its supporters as "neo-Darwinists."

Yet there was a serious problem: It was true that mutations changed

the genetic data of living organisms, yet this change always occurred to

the detriment of the living thing concerned. All observed mutations ended

up with disfigured, weak, or diseased individuals and, sometimes, led to

the death of the organism. Hence, in an attempt to find examples of "useful

mutations" which improve the genetic data in living organisms, neo-

Darwinists conducted many experiments and observations. For decades,

they conducted mutation experiments on fruit flies and various other

species. However, in none of these experiments could a mutation which

improved the genetic data in a living being be seen.

Today the issue of mutation is still a great impasse for Darwinism.

Despite the fact that the theory of natural selection considers mutations to

be the unique source of "useful changes," no mutations of any kind have

been observed that are actually useful (that is, that improve the genetic

information). In the following chapter, we will consider this issue in detail.

Another impasse for neo-Darwinists came from the fossil record.

Even in Darwin's time, fossils were already posing an important obstacle

to the theory. While Darwin himself accepted the lack of fossils of

"intermediate species," he also predicted that further research would

provide evidence of these lost transitional forms. However, despite all the

paleontologists' efforts, the fossil record continued to remain a serious

obstacle to the theory. One by one, concepts such as "vestigial organs,"

"embryological recapitulation" and "homology" lost all significance in the

light of new scientific findings. All these issues are dealt with more fully in

the remaining chapters of this book.

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Coofle   

I guess there should be a rule against Copy and Paste....It kills debate and creativity.......Read what ur fellow nomads think, it is a rare commodity those days...

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Johnny B   

Coofle;738149 wrote:
I guess there should be a rule against Copy and Paste....It kills debate and creativity.......Read what ur fellow nomads think, it is a rare commodity those days...

Very true indeed, one'd think that mr Pauper has decided to bomb this thread down with the rubbish of Harun yahya and likes, but that would be a mistake and it dosen't grant him a platform,so let us keep on with the normal engagement of the subject matter.

 

wonder what the given Mr, would say if one had bombed Islamic threads or any other thread with 4 or 5 topics of irrelevant subjects whenever one posts.

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"Observe always that everything is the result of a change,

and get used to thinking that there is nothing nature loves

so well as to change existing forms & to make new ones

like them."

Marcus Aurelius.

 

When scientists say"evolution is a fact",they r using one of 2 meanings of the word "fact".One meaning is empirical:

Evolution can be observed thru changes in allele frequencies or traits of a population ova successive generations.

Anotha way "fact" is used is to refer to a certain kind of theory,one that has been so powerful & productive for such a long time that it's universally accepted by scientists.When scientists say evolution is a fact in this case,they mean it's a fact that all living organisms have descended from a common ancestor(or ancestral gene pool).

This implies more tangibly that it's a fact that humans share a common ancestor with all living organisms.

Religion tells us about Adam/Eve,but doesn't eva point where lions,cats,girafes & all otha living things come from.I'm still waiting a religious lab to explain why apes & humans r same molecule for molecule or why physics,chemistry,biology & all technology we see infront of our eyes is not available in one of these great faith books!!!!

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Johnny B;738251 wrote:
Very true indeed, one'd think that mr Pauper has decided to bomb this thread down with the rubbish of Harun yahya and likes, but that would be a mistake and it dosen't grant him a platform,so let us keep on with the normal engagement of the subject matter.

 

wonder what the given Mr, would say if one had bombed Islamic threads or any other thread with 4 or 5 topics of irrelevant subjects whenever one posts.

I feel you.You see wat they doing on cyber! imagine wat people under shabab back home r going thru. I deeply feel very sorry for thm.

Shortwhile ago I was reading how they said"Tacsi" is haram & 2 people in the gathering were killed in Balcad.We need some kind o filtering; political correctness shouldn't work.Imagine if u do same one of their threads...they come thru the wire & cut ur head.

Attntion seekers..Ignore thm or have we?

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the gentleman/women complaining about copy paste, should realize that, this thread started with such a pattern. I mean copy paste. Where does the creativity you are talking about come in??

 

Jb, apart from what u copy pasted, any other stuff? Just waving a petty flag of denial and baseless blames.

 

Burahadeer, horta this fellow doesn't know even what he/she is talking about. Jaqjaqleen un sidii dumarka camal.

Note: empty vessels make the most noise.

 

P.s. The brain that accepts inspirron14 as a laptop made by dell and concludes that the universe has not been made, never fails to be the hub for irrationality and to say it precisely, logical disability.

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