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
When you get a chance, take a basic biology class at a community college (or just on youtube, they’re free), it will help
How the world came to be, we don’t fully understand. The “big bang” is our best guess so far, that’s more about physics and you can definitely take those clases on youtube or at a community college.
The secret to understanding evolution is to answer the question “why is <X> the way it is” with the answer “because every X that wasn’t that way got eaten before it could have babies.”
That’s a little simplistic, but it clears some of the confusing bracken out of the way so you can think about it.
Evolution is difficult to understand and easy to attack precisely because it takes SOOO LOONG under natural circumstances. However, an easier way to examine it is with fruit flies (that’s how we do experiments) and in a more easily accessible venue, dogs, because we have been deliberately evolving dogs and we went from 1 wolf species to THOUSANDS of dog breeds. They’re not separate species yet (all dogs can breed with all others) but they’re certainly pretty far along towards it.
The thing that’s hard about abiogenesis is also time – the process of genesis probably took .8 billion (800 million) years. THAT IS A LONG TIME. And that amount of time is difficult for us to picture, and the number of chemical changes taking place to create biology is also enormous but in that amount of time they’re relatively reasonable to expect they would happen.
I try to picture it with a carton of eggs and one pool ball – i can easily understand that if you randmly drop the pool ball and it’s forced into the carton, after 100 drops it’s pretty likely it’s going to have landed in each egg cup at least once, and it would take a couple hours. Now imagine billions of pool balls and trillions of cups. Over hundreds of millions of years you might be able to see how the pool ball egg cup thing scales up.
You have a journey ahead of you, it’s much more fascinating than made up religious stories, i wish you luck.
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