Originally Posted by asking
It does stand up. You ask lots of good questions. But there are answers to all of them if you take the time to listen to the answers and to read. (I recommend "One Long Argument," a book by Ernst Mayr, for example.) But whenever someone answers your question, it seems like you just come up with another one. There are practically an infinite number of questions you can ask about biology. Some of them people don't know the answers to yet. Many of them we do have answers for. But just asking a question doesn't prove evolution wrong. It just means that you have asked a question.
Of course not. No biologist thinks mutations are all good. That would be silly. A mutation is just a change in the information in the DNA. Its effects can be good or bad depending on lots of things, including the environment of the organism. So not only can a mutation be really bad, or really good, it can be bad in one situation but good in another. Some people think they can even be neutral, neither good nor bad. What happens in evolution is that the environment changes and mutations that were slightly bad or neutral suddenly can become useful and spread through a population. Then evolutionary change has occurred. (With lots of change you see species become very different fromone another and actually become different species--especially if they can no longer interbreed.)
Mutations themselves are random. But natural selection, the process that determines whether a mutation spreads through a population or not, is not random. This is an important distinction.
No! Natural selection changes species by acting on both new mutations AND preexisting variants. Furthermore, there is no such thing as "advancing" a species. They change, they adapt. But what's good for one particular environment may not be good in another. There is no progress. This is another important idea that is sometimes hard to grasp if you haven't studied evolutionary biology. (But you ask great questions.)
This isn't a complete sentence, so I don't know what your question is this time. It's not a good idea for me to try to guess. But I will say that humans evolved from ape like ancestors who were the ancestors of both modern apes and modern humans. We share great, great, great, great.......... grandparents. The australopiths who lived 2.8 million years ago were bipedal, they walked on two legs like us. In fact, their descendents, probably evolved to be runners--as their legs got longer and longer, their toes got shorter (they way horses' toes got smaller) and they developed other adaptations to long distancer running (but not sprinting).
Then about 2.5 million years ago ancient humans started using stone tools and butchering scavenged animals that they probably stole from leopards, lions, and hyenas, and saber toothed cats! Then their brains doubled and then tripled in size, and they seem to have gotten smart enough to hunt, even though we have no sharp teeth or claws (like most predators). All the while, they were still eating lots of fruits, nuts, and roots (like yams and carrots). Humans cannot eat more than about 50% meat in our diet because we evolved from fruit eating apes. So too much meat and protein is toxic to us and can make us sick and even kill us.
Just the opposite. All of biology supports the theory of evolution, and specifically also the idea that humans evolved from "lower" animals. Evolution is universally accepted by all practicing biologists. There are some high school teachers who teach creationism and there is one biochemistry college professor (to my knowledge), but all other biologists -- thousands upon thousands of them, and, importantly, ALL of the ones who actually do biology -- all accept evolution. Virtually any scientist who objects to the idea turns out to not be a biologist and hasn't actually ever studied evolution or biology. The "scientists who are creationists" are nearly all engineers, physicists, or chemists who know no more biology than the checker at your local grocery store. They may be good people, but they don't know about biology, let alone evolution.
There is one other person who is a creationist who went to UC Berkeley specifically to get a degree in biology because, he said, he wanted to "destroy evolution." He got a PhD in biology and was apparently a very good student there--I asked his professors! He did not attack evolution itself, but he did attack the way it was being presented in some textbooks--somewhat badly--so now the textbooks are better. So he actually made evolution stronger in the sense of improving the way it's being taught, which I think was a good thing. I don't know what he's up to anymore. He's a very smart guy. But he had no effect on research biology, real evolutionary biologists who study the intricacies of evolution every day in the real world.
By the way, medical researchers often do not understand evolution very well, as they are taught other things in medical school. It depends on the doctor, but don't assume that because they can't answer one of your excellent questions that there isn't an answer. They just may not have studied much evolution, if any.
