Take The Evolution Test

[debrand]

missinguniversemuseum.com/Evtest.htm

Students, give this test to your teachers. When they fail it, ask them why they are teaching this nonsense!

Teachers, give this test to your students if you really want them to know the truth about evolution!

1. Which evolved first, male or female?

2. How many millions of years elapsed between the first male and first female?

3. List at least 9 of the false assumptions made with radioactive dating methods.

4. Why hasn't any extinct creature re-evolved after millions of years?

5. Which came first:

...the eye,

...the eyelid,

...the eyebrow,

...the eye sockets,

...the eye muscles,

...the eye lashes,

...the tear ducts,

...the brain's interpretation of light?

6. How many millions of years between each in question 5?

7. If we all evolved from a common ancestor, why can't all the different species mate with one another and produce fertile offspring?

8. List any of the millions of creatures in just five stages of its evolution showing the progression of a new organ of any kind. When you have done this, you can collect the millions of dollars in rewards offered for proof of evolution!

9. Why is it that the very things that would prove Evolution (transitional forms) are still missing?

10. Explain why something as complex as human life could happen by chance, but something as simple as a coin must have a creator. (Show your math solution.)

11. Why aren't any fossils or coal or oil being formed today?

12. List 50 vestigial or useless organs or appendages in the human body.

13. Why hasn't anyone collected the millions of dollars in rewards for proof of evolution?

14. If life began hundreds of millions of years ago, why is the earth still under populated?

15. Why hasn't evolution duplicated all species on all continents

[OnceModestTwiceShy]

I'm not even going to try to pick apart everything that's wrong here...I'll leave that to the scientists. But for all the talk of respecting elders, fundies have no problem with their kids blatantly disrespecting and condescending to their teachers when it comes to evolution. "Give your teacher this test?" Yeah, go back to your desk, kid, and shut up and learn.

[ladidah]

:roll: Wow. Where does one even begin?

It's sad and horrifying to think how thoroughly you'd have to be indoctrinating students for them not to realize how easily accessible the scientific rebuttals to all these questions are. And yet I heard only slightly less clueless versions of each of these questions from creationists back when I was involved with the "teach your kids a Christian worldview" wing of evangelicalism.

[Guest Anonymous]

Wow! This test is equal parts infuriating and dumb. Just so I know, where do anti-evolution folks think that fossil fuels come from? How are coal and oil explained historically? Is there anything beyond 'God put them there'?

[debrand]

I am not a scientist but I can answer several of those questions.

9. Why is it that the very things that would prove Evolution (transitional forms) are still missing?

They aren't missing. Creationist just ignore them.

Here is a site about Human Evolution that is interesting

http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence

[crassy]

I'll bite!

1. WHAT? Clearly whoever wrote this doesn't understand the first thing about evolution. Ridiculous.

2. See above

3. Why 9? Would 8 or fewer or 10 or more make the results different?

4. What does re-evolve mean? Oh...I assume they are meaning that a bird evolving into a horse into a bird? See answer to #1.

5. WHAT? See 1

6. See 1

7. O.o, See 1 and also see the number of chromosomes, its their pairing up on the mitotic plate.

8. See 1

9. They aren't. Everything alive today is a transitional form. Fuck off.

10. See 1. Evolution is not necessarily 'by chance'.

11. They aren't? Oh.

14. Why 50? What does an arbitrary number have to do with anything? See 1.

13. Um...they have. Even if they hadn't, it doesn't make the theory any less factual. Please stop with the appeal to authority.

14. What does this have to do with evolution?

15. See 1

Man, this is some SERIOUS gish galloping!

[crassy]

I am not a scientist but I can answer several of those questions.

They aren't missing. Creationist just ignore them.

They aren't missing because they are walking/crawling/slithering/climbing/flying around today. We are all transitional forms just as animals 1 million years ago were transitional forms. Creationists be dumb.

[slickcat79]

Wow. It's like they can't even understand that some people do actually know the answers to most of those questions, and the answers provide compelling proof for evolution. I don't even understand the premise they're starting with. I know some of the questions look intimidating at the SOTDRT, but it's science, not magic.

[xDreamerx]

I do think some parts of evolution are not accounted for yet, but that doesn't mean they didn't exist. If we have one form and then we find examples of that form with certain features changed in a later period, we can conclude that it did evolve and has a link somewhere, we just haven't found it. The same principle applies to the periodic table, we have elements that have yet to be found or named but we know they exist because the elements that come before and after them have been accounted for.

[Terrie]

Actually, as a teacher, I would love it if a student brought in something like this. What a great starting point to talk about how science works and what evolution really is about.

ETA: And the best part? The creationist parents would have a hard time complaining, since they brought it up. (They'd still complain, but nothing stops that).

[debrand]

Wow. It's like they can't even understand that some people do actually know the answers to most of those questions, and the answers provide compelling proof for evolution. I don't even understand the premise they're starting with. I know some of the questions look intimidating at the SOTDRT, but it's science, not magic.

I think that creationist believe that a monkey suddenly gave birth to a human or that an asexual cell just one day became male.

1. Early life was asexual or hermaphodite so males and females did not evolve seperately.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Question_Evolution

"

Sexual reproduction allows for evolution to occur at a much faster pace than asexual reproduction. Organisms that exchanged DNA were thus able to evolve out of situations that might have killed their asexual counterparts. The variety of life cycles is very great. It is not simply a matter of being sexual or asexual. There are many intermediate stages. A gradual origin, with each step favored by natural selection, is possible.[22] The earliest steps involve single-celled organisms exchanging genetic information; they need not be distinct sexes. Males and females most emphatically would not evolve independently. Sex, by definition, depends on both male and female acting together. As sex evolved, there would have been some incompatibilities causing sterility (just as there are today), but these would affect individuals, not whole populations, and the genes that cause such incompatibility would rapidly be selected against."[23]

edited to add information and to again add why I changed my post

[crassy]

Wow. It's like they can't even understand that some people do actually know the answers to most of those questions, and the answers provide compelling proof for evolution. I don't even understand the premise they're starting with. I know some of the questions look intimidating at the SOTDRT, but it's science, not magic.

It's called begging the question. :D

[Conuly]

That is so incomprehensibly wrong and senseless that it might as well be in Swahili.

(Actually, Swahili makes plenty of logical sense. I just don't happen to speak it.)

[kb2]

Wow. It's like they can't even understand that some people do actually know the answers to most of those questions, and the answers provide compelling proof for evolution. I don't even understand the premise they're starting with. I know some of the questions look intimidating at the SOTDRT, but it's science, not magic.

No one likes confrontation, so they're probably hoping the kids will be too shy to bring the questions up with their science teachers. They don't really want to win over a bunch of science teachers, they want to win over uneducated kids and adults.

[2xx1xy1JD]

#11 - they ARE being formed today!

#12 - the tailbone and appendix easily come to mind.

[Conuly]

#12 - the tailbone and appendix easily come to mind.

Wisdom teeth, our large sinuses, male nipples, pinky toes, Darwin's tubercle, our vomeronasal organ, the plica semilunaris....

Of course, some of these might possibly have functions that we don't understand yet.

[Terrie]

Wisdom teeth, our large sinuses, male nipples, pinky toes, Darwin's tubercle, our vomeronasal organ, the plica semilunaris....

The size of female breasts. There's no functional reason for them to be so large. One theory is that they replaced enlarged buttocks/genitals as a signal of reproductive status.

[darareaksmey]

#11 - they ARE being formed today!

#12 - the tailbone and appendix easily come to mind.

Re: #11-well duh you SOTDRT dropouts. Just because you look someplace today and then again tomorrow doesn't mean that there won't be coal there in another million years. Same with fossils. Could it be that, because there are more people today, animal skeletons are less likely to remain undisturbed?

No one would ever mistake me for a scientist, but even I got that one covered. :lol:

[Minerva]

If anything, wouldn't most of this encourage people to look it up and increase their understanding of evolution? Isn't that bad? Alright, well I'll bite too. I studied this twice in university.

1. & 2.

I can't tell whether the author is referring to the differentiation of male and female gametes, or the differentiation of male and female organisms. I'll explain both, but I'll preface that by saying that both are believed to have happened to different species at different times. Yes, the same type of leap would have happened more than once. And in the case of organisms, we're very sure it happened more than once.

So for gametes, male and female would have had to appear at the same time each time, for obvious reasons. The appearance of gonochoristic (either male or female) organisms would have, in each instance, happened after the differentiation of gametes since the gametes make the sex by this definition.

Gonochoristic species are the (often very ancient) descendants of hermaphroditic species. I'll leave it up to the reader to google the proposed mechanisms (for both kinds of differentiation, actually) since there is a wealth of literature on the subject and I don't have all day. But the bottom line is that one sex probably did appear before the other.

So let's assume the author was referring to differentiated organisms. Which came first and how many years separated the two? Seeing as this would have happened at several points, the answer will be different depending on the gonochoristic species/genus/family/order/class/etc. concerned. Do we know the answer for any gonochoristic group? I doubt it, but again, google.

So what was the point of these questions? I'm guessing it was to demonstrate the fact that science doesn't have precise answers for them. However, this is not in any way a failure of evolutionary theory. Scientific theories don't just cough up precise information. You have to provide the data; all the theory does is link it together. I'd be skeptical if evolution claimed to account for the entire detailed timeline of life on earth.

See, scientists, unlike creationists, admit we don't know everything about the history of life on earth. We have a ton of information, and we have a theory that corresponds with that information. When we find new information, it tends to fit with the theory. Sometimes it doesn't. In that case the theory gets re-worked so that it corresponds with all the information. If that isn't possible, the theory is scrapped and we start again from scratch. That hasn't had to happen with evolutionary theory, and it probably won't given the volume of data it now corresponds with. But unlike what creationists will tell you, the theory of evolution has changed a lot since Darwin figured out natural selection. He was wrong about a lot, and scientists know this. Now I am off to eat my lunch. I might deign to address more questions upon my return.

[debrand]

If anything, wouldn't most of this encourage people to look it up and increase their understanding of evolution? Isn't that bad? Alright, well I'll bite too. I studied this twice in university.

1. & 2.

I can't tell whether the author is referring to the differentiation of male and female gametes, or the differentiation of male and female organisms. I'll explain both, but I'll preface that by saying that both are believed to have happened to different species at different times. Yes, the same type of leap would have happened more than once. And in the case of organisms, we're very sure it happened more than once.

So for gametes, male and female would have had to appear at the same time each time, for obvious reasons. The appearance of gonochoristic (either male or female) organisms would have, in each instance, happened after the differentiation of gametes since the gametes make the sex by this definition.

Gonochoristic species are the (often very ancient) descendants of hermaphroditic species. I'll leave it up to the reader to google the proposed mechanisms (for both kinds of differentiation, actually) since there is a wealth of literature on the subject and I don't have all day. But the bottom line is that one sex probably did appear before the other.

So let's assume the author was referring to differentiated organisms. Which came first and how many years separated the two? Seeing as this would have happened at several points, the answer will be different depending on the gonochoristic species/genus/family/order/class/etc. concerned. Do we know the answer for any gonochoristic group? I doubt it, but again, google.

So what was the point of these questions? I'm guessing it was to demonstrate the fact that science doesn't have precise answers for them. However, this is not in any way a failure of evolutionary theory. Scientific theories don't just cough up precise information. You have to provide the data; all the theory does is link it together. I'd be skeptical if evolution claimed to account for the entire detailed timeline of life on earth.

See, scientists, unlike creationists, admit we don't know everything about the history of life on earth. We have a ton of information, and we have a theory that corresponds with that information. When we find new information, it tends to fit with the theory. Sometimes it doesn't. In that case the theory gets re-worked so that it corresponds with all the information. If that isn't possible, the theory is scrapped and we start again from scratch. That hasn't had to happen with evolutionary theory, and it probably won't given the volume of data it now corresponds with. But unlike what creationists will tell you, the theory of evolution has changed a lot since Darwin figured out natural selection. He was wrong about a lot, and scientists know this. Now I am off to eat my lunch. I might deign to address more questions upon my return.

Thank you minerva. My hope is that a fundamentalist homeschooler will find answers to these questions and realize that Creationism is wrong. They don't have to give up their faith, of course, just realize that the world is bigger and more amazing then they realized.

[holothuroidea]

I would be happy to answer these questions, they are really very easy to answer. I don't know if I would want to waste my time, though, I think the answers would be either ignored or lost on them.

Anyway, is it just me, or do fundies/creationists seem to believe that males and females are different species??? That is just beyond sad.

[debrand]

I would be happy to answer these questions, they are really very easy to answer. I don't know if I would want to waste my time, though, I think the answers would be either ignored or lost on them.

Anyway, is it just me, or do fundies/creationists seem to believe that males and females are different species??? That is just beyond sad.

My hope is that a fundie child will stumble upon the answers and his or her brain will start to work.

Yeah, it does sound like the fundies believe that men and women are different species.

[doggie]

I would be happy to answer these questions, they are really very easy to answer. I don't know if I would want to waste my time, though, I think the answers would be either ignored or lost on them.

Anyway, is it just me, or do fundies/creationists seem to believe that males and females are different species??? That is just beyond sad.

Of course they don't want answers. these questions are supposed to be unanswerable. They have no clue nor want clues.

[holothuroidea]

My hope is that a fundie child will stumble upon the answers and his or her brain will start to work.

Yeah, it does sound like the fundies believe that men and women are different species.

I think that most fundie children's internet access settings would prevent them from viewing FJ. :(

I guess it's worth a shot on the off chance that they end up here.

[Mountain Girl]

I'm surprised my favorite question is not on here: why are there still monkeys? :angry-banghead:

If I had a nickel for every time I've gotten the stink-eye because that question didn't stump me :lol: