Debate: DO YOU SUPPORT PRESIDENT OBAMAS DECISION TO BUILD A MOSQUE AT GROUND ZERO
Side: No

So if someone asked you 'why is it that it is clear that it can only be this way thru common ancestry', what would be your semi-detailed explaination?Mendel showed us that units of traits (what we call genes) are inherited in patterns but always from parents to offspring. Traits do not appear suddenly, they are always linked to the previous generation in some way. This is crucial for it tells us that one generation must follow from the previous one.Knowing this we look at the shape of organisms: the symmetry, the way the bones are organised, the way the skin tissues are organised, the organs, etc. and we begin to see a pattern where, in the same way two parents will produce a child who has the father's face and mother's legs (or grandparents' traits for these), an ape has our fingers (and fingernails), our chest (two mammary glands), our eyes (stereoscopic with colour vision), our dentition, and even shares our genitalia (which is rare, as many mammals have a bone in the penis for example). As you go further back you still see that shared skeleton, but with modifications suited to arboreal life, and quadrupedalism. The point is that morphology shows a distribution of traits that looks like a lineage, in the same way that parents can only give their traits to their children, a branch on the tree can only bestow its traits onto its descendants. So this comparative anatomy is part of what suggests common ancestry but it isn't perfect. We need more evidence.Looking into the fossil record we see the development of cetaceans, primates, land-walkers, and so-on. This isn't perfect but is very revealing, for example when we see:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cetaceans Which shows us how the bodies changed so much.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primate#Evolution Shows us the many changes that occurred, that we know about.But what is really amazing is the genetic and molecular evidence. For example when we sequenced the human genome and found a pair of chromosomes from primates were fused together to form one of our own chromosomes, thus why primates have 48 chromosomes and we have 46.Phylogeny and cladistics show us maps like these:http://pin.primate.wisc.edu/scripts/external.php?link=7264 In other words genetics is showing us that even if the fossil record were nonexistent and morphology were ambiguous, common ancestry comes through in comparing gene sequences amongst other molecular data, and if we accept heredity, then the diagrams follow which look like the tree of life.In other words, heredity shows us that parents pass their traits to offspring, and putting the evidence in context of this knowledge it easily makes sense of all genetics and fossils.And by common ancestry you do mean that we all go back to one 'first' life form right?No. First off, if there is a life form, then there is a large population of it. It will also be very simple.I'm pretty sure you don't believe that there were say 1,000 original life forms completely unlinked to each other and they all evolved into 10,000,000 life forms.The earliest life would have been simple, so simple that heredity was more about horizontal gene flow and asexual reproduction. Therefore it would be infeasible to expect those life forms to be entirely unlinked.That's what I believe, I don't believe we all can call the ameba our great ancestor, if you believe that then that is the explaination i would like to hear from you (and I'll research your response because I don't like to run away from view points that disagree with mine).We wouldn't. The amoeba, for starters is really complicated. It's a eukaryote, meaning it has organelles and chromosomes. PLUS it has all the extra machinery.The simplest bacterium is complicated.No, the first "life" forms would be self-replicating molecules slowly acquiring something like a cellular wall, and growing from there. They would be in a grey-area not properly deemed life, but eventually would qualify.So they asked the one guy for his thoughts and he said 'The woman saw him do it! That to me is IMMOVABLE evidence.' With evolution the lack of transitional fossils has always been immovable evidence for me, i just can't get around it.http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional/part1a.html#fish http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional/part1b.html http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional/part2a.html http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional/part2b.html http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional/part2c.html It's all there, you need only look.Every now and then they will come out with such and such a fossil that is the 'missing link' between A and B but it just makes me shake my head because the amount of transitionally minute changes a species would have to go thru to go from A to B is a lot, not one link!There are usually may other fossils as part of the series, and if you look where it belongs you'll see those other ones.