I have had to pick and choose questions here, and will add some more at a later
date. There were several cases where several students asked the same or very
similar questions, so if you don't see yours, look for questions like yours.
Do you believe in evolution and if so is it right?
Just because these animals have similar characteristics,
how does that prove evolution?
At any rate: similar characteristics in different animals, by themselves,
don't necessarily support evolution. BUT. . . biologists use them together
with other lines of evidence (DNA similarities and differences, embryology,
biogeography, fossils, experiments on artificial and natural selection, etc. etc.)
Why is evolution not happening in the world around us?
Perhaps those don't seem like obvious or spectacular examples. Major
evolutionary changes take far too much time to be observed directly, over
one human lifetime. But there's no reason at all to think that the entire
process has conked out.
Is it possible that a God or Gods created the world through evolution?
This is somewhat possible in my mind due to the fact that the Bible itself
says that time is different for God and that he works in mysterious ways.
Why is evolution taught in schools and creationism is not?
That being said: Any healthy field of science is constantly being revised and
updated as new facts come in and old facts get reinterpreted. (A fair chunk
of what I learned in my freshman biology class, back in 1987, was either
wrong or incomplete.) That's just the name of the game: good science is always
open to revision. We only "believe" in theories until something better comes along --
if anyone comes up with something that explains the facts better than evolution
does, or finds something that evolutionary theory genuinely cannot account for,
I'll drop evolution like a hot potato. Religious faith -- at least in traditional
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam -- is not subject to change.
If it was, there would be rewritten versions of the Bible coming out every
year, with new chapters added and old ones dropped. And traditional Christian creationism
is a religious faith -- because it all depends on one particular interpretation of the
first book of the Bible. The strict creationists all tell me that theirs is the only
right way to interpret it, with no room for change. That's out of bounds for science
right there.
Why can't one Creator have made all these things similar,
after all, this is his world?
Another nagging question is: how do you disprove the idea of a Creator?
I sometimes tell people that the world was created yesterday morning at 9:28 AM,
and the Creator gave us all false memories, and planted false newspapers and
books in our libraries, etc. so that we'd think that we existed before 9:28 AM. How
could you ever disprove that? You can't -- which is why it's not science.
Do you think humans are finished evolving, or do you think we would evolve again
in the next million years?
But there's one reason to think that physical human evolution won't go much further:
Evolution happens the fastest in small, isolated populations. If a small group of humans
were somehow completely isolated from the rest of humanity for, say,
100,000 years, they might evolve into a new species. But because of human
migrations, explorations, and especially modern transportation and mobility,
it is very unlikely that any group of humans has ever been, or will ever be, isolated
for that long. Humanity is close to becoming one enormous population -- and evolution
happens extremely slowly in large populations. Humans can also avoid natural selection
in many cases, thanks to our complex culture. (Instead of having to evolve huge teeth
to crack nuts, we just make nutcrackers. . .)
So my best prediction is that we won't physically change much over the next
million or so years. Of course, if human genetic engineering takes off, all predictions
could end up going right out the window. . .
Where is proof for similarities between chimps and people
besides gene sequence and bone structure?
A lot of similarities between chimps and people have turned up in the field
of behavior and psychology. Chimpanzees make simple tools in the wild, organize
hunting strategy, and have been observed engaging in organized aggression -- "war."
Captive chimpanzees have been taught to communicate in a version of American
Sign Language, and have learned up to 240 signs. Their communication is perhaps
not completely "language" as we know it (scientists have debated this an awful
lot), but chimpanzee communication has many features in common with human
language. Chimps teach signs to each other, create new signed expressions for
unfamiliar things, understand the importance of word order, and can conceive
of situations that might happen but haven't happened yet. (Check out
the CHCI website for more. . .)
Chimpanzees can also deceive each other -- which is otherwise a very human trait.
All in all, chimpanzee minds are much more like our own than most people feel
comfortable with. . .