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Asked by bigbellychimp to Laura, Lily, Mark, Paul, Sarah on 16 Jun 2010 in Categories: About. This question was also asked by xxwaisuetxx.
Question: do you agree with darwins evolution theroy? if yes or no why?
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Paul Roche answered on 15 Jun 2010:
Well, I’m not a biologist but I am a scientist, and I believe in things that we have good evidence to support. So I do believe in evolution, even if I don’t fully understand the theory, as there seems to be lots of evidence to support it. But if someone comes along with an even better theory, that explains everything we see in evolution but helps address any “problems”, then I’m happy to go along with that – scientists have to be very good at ditching old theories when a new, better one comes along. For hundreds of years, our ideas about gravity were dominated by Newton, but then Einstein came along and improved on that theory, so now we use his ideas. I’m sure someone will come along one day and have an even better theory than Einstein, and we’ll happily start using that instead.
Maybe some day a biologist will come up with an even better version of evolution that replaces Darwin, but from what I know, Darwin got most things right…but then I’m an astronomer, so I could be horribly wrong here?!
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Laura Maliszewski answered on 15 Jun 2010:
Yes! I’ve seen it in action. We can use microorganism and see them evolve in response to a particular change in their environment. For instance, if you have a plate of bacteria and you add an antibiotic like penicillin, most of the bacteria will die but a few will be resistant. Those will grow and reproduce and the others wont. So you can really see the population selected for an advantageous trait.
Regarding the religious implications, myself and most of the scientist I chat with about those things are open to believing that god (in whatever form you believe in) is totally capable of having created/designed evolution, that evolution and creation are not necessarily exclusive.
Maybe all the complexity we find was created to give us something to work on!
There’s a book, The Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan, that’s a bunch of his seminars from Cambridge that talks about this. It’s pretty dense, but interesting too.
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Mark Roberts answered on 15 Jun 2010:
Yes.
The theory explains a lot about how the world and nature works. You can also see evolution happen to bacteria in a test tube as if you apply a ‘selection pressure’ but changing the media then the bacteria will adapt and alter themselves – you also see it in the outside world for example the problem of bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics.
We can observe this in bacteria because they replicate faster so go through many generations!
but yes I do agree with it
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Lily Asquith answered on 15 Jun 2010:
Yes.
For a long time I didn’t really understand what the theory meant. I thought evolution meant that our great-great-great-great*100 grandparents were chimps.
Actually it doesn’t mean that. It means that both humans and modern chimps used to belong to the same family of chimpish, humanish apes, and then the family got split up somehow, and one lot changed into humans and the other lot changed into chimps.
There is masses of evidence supporting Darwin’s theory, plus it is just common sense. Those of us who are fitter are more likely to survive.
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Sarah Bardsley answered on 16 Jun 2010:
At college and university I studied biology. One of the central principals of this subject is that over time life changes, new species develop and traits are inherited as a result of evolution. This explains why we have such diverse life on this planet, with species matched to their surroundings all originating from less complex life forms that lived millions of years ago Scientific proof exists that supports this. Fossil records and genetic analysis all contribute to the weight of evidence that indicated that evolution is a scientific truth. So yep, I am a believer!
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