Before anyone comes for me, I grew up southern baptist – went to a private christian school & was homeschooled for a few years. The extent of my “science” education when it came to evolution & the origin of the universe was “if we came from monkeys why do monkeys still exist?” and “look at this galaxy that’s shaped like a cross, isn’t god amazing!!” I’m an atheist now and would like to have some sort of understanding of how our world came to be, but trying to figure it out as an adult with no real foundation has been incredibly difficult, and none of it’s making sense. I also know I’m asking a lot as all 3 of those subjects are pretty extensive, so if you know any good videos or books I’d love some recommendations!
In: Biology
The most important thing to take away with evolution is understanding Deep Time. The city-state of Ur is considered the oldest human civilization, and it was founded around 4,000BC (6,000 years ago). This compared to the age of our planet, the age of our star, the age of our galaxy is hardly blink of the eye. The comparison often made is, if you lay the universe out on a calendar, so the Big Bang (14 billion years ago) happened at the first second of January 1st – all of written human history is the last second before midnight on December 31st.
That is all to say, there is an enormous amount of time that passed before we could even write, so much it’s hard for the brain to process (much like the enormity of space itself). Human history is told in thousands of years, evolution unfolds over millions of years. That’s why you won’t see chicken lay an egg one day, and the baby that hatches out is a newly evolved species. It doesn’t happen on time spans we live in. Nor is it so dramatic or instant. Its very tiny changes happening over incredibly long stretches of time.
To specifically answer the “if we evolved from monkeys, why do monkeys still exist?” claim. We didn’t. Both us, monkeys, and chimps evolved seperately from a common ancestor species. Humans evolved differently, because Africa was losing it’s jungles at the time. Our ancestors evolved better survive on the ground, instead of in the trees. Meanwhile monkey ancestors, living in areas that still had bountiful trees, had no reason to evolve better suited to the ground – and in fact evolved to be more suited to the trees.
As for the Big Bang, and Abiogensis; we haven’t come up with conclusive answers. We just have theories.
One idea for the Big Bang, assumes multiverse theory is correct. When two other universes collided, the Big Bang happened at the point of impact and birthed our universe.
The most recent idea I heard for Abiogenesis is it happened at deep ocean vents. There’s a lot of heat energy to be had at these vents, and they are also rich in organic matter spewing out from underground. The rock of these vents is very porous, like a sponge. Those tiny pores create a round scaffold on which proteins could build a cell wall. We feel the cell wall is one of the most critical steps for life to exist, as it separates the lifeform from the environment.
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