Inkling, not being interested in learning about something is just ignorant. I left the witnesses at a young age because my questioning of of things was slowly becoming that of "disfellowship material".
Ok, glad to hear it. I didn't mean to sound insulting,
it's just I hadn't heard enough from you to know what kind
of poster you were... and we get all types here.
I am also not claiming to be any sort of deep wellspring
of knowledge, but I have done a lot of reading on the subject
since my "inactivity" began several years ago.
Mostly books by Dawkins, who IS a wellspring of knowledge
on the subject, and has helped me clear up a much fuzzy
thinking I had about the idea of evolution.
I have never read into evolution fully, I just always imagined that we were made to adapt and change to our surroundings. Our environment and a need will dictate how life will respond.
This is broadly true. The problem is who we are talking about when
we say "we" adapt over time. Obviously my personal body changes
over time, based on my environment and choices. The problem is any
"improvement" (or damage) that happens to my body is not heritible.
Your improved cinder block bashing hands will not be passed onto your
kids. If they want to smash cinder blocks, they have to start from square
one, just like you did.
These sort of changes, good or bad, are lost when you die, because the
only thing that survives to live on in your kid are your genes. Your DNA.
Your environment and choices cannot rewrite your DNA.
Note that it was once thought that this DID happen. This is known
as Lamarckism theory, and turned out to be false, at least regarding
the sort of physical attributes we have been talking about.
So, what Darwin (and all modern evolutionary biologists) are talking
about when they say "we" change over time, is us as a species.
Let's take your cinder block idea and turn it into actual evolution:
Imagine a world where a particular animal lives that, due to some
natural disaster, lost all of its food sources except the nuts from
a particular kind of tree, having a very hard outer shell. Of all the
current generation of animals living in the area, there would be
natural variation in say, hardness of teeth and strength of jaw.
The members of the species who happened to be born with genes
for especially hard teeth and strong jaws would get more food than
thier brothers and sisters, live more energetic lives, and be more
likely to have and raise healthy offspring.
As the generations go by, we would start to see, on average, an
"improvement" in natural inborn nut cracking ability. This type of
physical improvement is NOT lost when an animal dies, because it
is hardwired encoded in their DNA, which survives to be passed on
to its offspring.
When this happens repeatedly over thousands of generations, the
change we see is called evolution.
Or that is, at least, the way I understand it.
[inkling]