Evolution: Science or Philosophy

[cheeseburger]

Agreed, but the amount of energy that has apparently been added by the sun does not seem to account for the drastic decrease in entropy.

I'd like to see your source on this before I respond to it.

Mitochondrial DNA has been traced back to an "Eve" who apparently lived in Africa, but it has not been traced back to anything else.

It's mitochondrial DNA. (In case you don't know what a mitochondrion is, it's the organelle most human (and not so human) cells contain which functions in aerobic respiration; i.e. making ATP or energy).

Where did it come from? According to the secondary endosymbiotic theory, it was originally some single celled bacterium/prokrayote that made it's energy by aerobic respiration (citric acid cycle), and got engulfed by a bigger organism that couldn't digest it.

Point is, it has been traced back to something else.

Maybe Tom is more accurate than I thought in saying that scientists are diluting the definition of a secies. It makes me wonder why.

Scientists are not 'diluting' anything. Over the last decade or so, scientists have gone from a morphological approach to what constitutes a species, to a molecular approach. As a result, some species that 'looked' the same turned out to be unrelated, and some species that didn't look similar were actually related.

Very few different species can mate due to pre-zygotic mating barriers, i.e. you physically cannot mate a whale with a fly. But even if you tried to fertilize a whale egg with sperm from a fly in vitro, you would fail nearly 100% of the time. Mating barriers are generally the first to appear in any speciation event.

You are telling me that evolution is not random chance, yet that is exactly what I was taught in school and college.

This quote indicates you don't even know what evolution is.

Let's take a step back and consider why species even undergo sexual reproduction. It is far 'cheaper' (in terms of energy) to reproduce asexually.

Species reproduce sexually in order to increase variation within the species, because that increases the chances the species will survive. Mutations occur far too infrequently, and are too often detrimental, for it to replace sexual reproduction.

So if species didn't evolve, why bother with the variation within species? If there is no selection, or 'survival of the fittest,' why do practically all species have some mechanism for genetic recombination?

No one's even going to read this. Makes me wonder why I write it...