I support the theory of evolution, and it doesn’t need a god for it to work. Darwin was actually a religious man, and really struggled with his theory of evolution that didn’t seem to leave space for a god (or at least a god that plays a direct part in guiding species along predefined paths).
There’s more about human evolution, and evolution in general, over here.
When you look at the DNA and protein sequences for different genes or proteins in different organisms, which we have been able to do more and more these last 20 years, you can actually ‘see’ the evolutionary process going on. For instance, a lot of the transmission of signal from cell to cell in your nervous system relies on a neurotransmitter molecule called acetylcholine, and the proteins acetylcholine sticks to on target cells (acetylcholine receptors, or AChRs). You can find close ‘relatives’ of this human AChR protein in rats and mice, and distant relatives in insects like flies, and in worms. You can find even more distant relatives in some bacteria, where the protein was doing a different ‘job’ before it evolved to be an ACh receptor). But the structure of the gene and protein still shows they are related. Really the only sensible explanation for that is Darwinian evolution.
Of course, some people – including many scientists who are religious – believe that the ‘conditions’ for all this evolution to occur were set up by God. So evolution being true does not, in itself, say anything about the existence of God. It is just that evolution shows how life as we now see it on earth evolved from the first simple organisms without the need for ‘intervention’.
There are also religious philosophers who argue for a view of evolution being ‘guided’ (what they call ‘intelligent design’), although almost no evolutionary biologists agree with this.
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Austin commented on :
There’s more about human evolution, and evolution in general, over here.
When you look at the DNA and protein sequences for different genes or proteins in different organisms, which we have been able to do more and more these last 20 years, you can actually ‘see’ the evolutionary process going on. For instance, a lot of the transmission of signal from cell to cell in your nervous system relies on a neurotransmitter molecule called acetylcholine, and the proteins acetylcholine sticks to on target cells (acetylcholine receptors, or AChRs). You can find close ‘relatives’ of this human AChR protein in rats and mice, and distant relatives in insects like flies, and in worms. You can find even more distant relatives in some bacteria, where the protein was doing a different ‘job’ before it evolved to be an ACh receptor). But the structure of the gene and protein still shows they are related. Really the only sensible explanation for that is Darwinian evolution.
Of course, some people – including many scientists who are religious – believe that the ‘conditions’ for all this evolution to occur were set up by God. So evolution being true does not, in itself, say anything about the existence of God. It is just that evolution shows how life as we now see it on earth evolved from the first simple organisms without the need for ‘intervention’.
There are also religious philosophers who argue for a view of evolution being ‘guided’ (what they call ‘intelligent design’), although almost no evolutionary biologists agree with this.