Evolution

[halogenesis]

Not only are the mutations random, but the apes are much more adapted to their environments then humans are. The different adaptations that roberto mentioned are basically the traits (both geno and phenotype) that the apes have allowing them to become a more dominant species in their particular environment -- natural selection.

[Tormod]

"My karma ran over your dogma. "

 

LOL.

 

Tormod

[halogenesis]

heh

It's a quote I hold dearly to for its comical and sometimes factual nature.

[wavelength?]

Evolution is simply something adadpting to an environmental change. Example: The ice age made many life forms adapt to the environmental changes; the comet that made the dinosaurs go extinct brought on many environmental changes, and the remaining life forms had to change along with the enviroment; the elephant tusk or lack of them is caused due to a very recent change to the environment, humans.

 

Humans have changed and are continually changing the environment at a very fast pace in the last 300 years due to urban sprawl, deforestation, pollution, hunting, farming, and extensive fishing of our oceans and freshwater lakes and rivers. All of this forces other life forms to evolve accordingly to there environmental changes around them.

 

I recently read about our poles flipping every few hundred thousand years. To me this would seem to cause many environmental and climatic changes. It would also probably increase the radiation on earth from the sun during the time it took to flip since the manetic field shields us from much of the suns radiation, this may cause mutations and may actually cause a life form to evolve more rapidly.

 

Something to think about; What if all life forms on earth is just one big intermingled colony (which it basically is) that can think on its own as one organism(the earth) sort of like an ant colony or a bee hive. Then is it possible that the earth helped to create an intellegent being(humans) to be the earths protector from things like comets or metiorites which has the potential to completely destroy the earth and all life forms on it?????????

[lindagarrette]

Nothing forces evolution. Species survive or don't as a result of their ability to adapt when conditions change.

[special j]

well, either evolving or dying is something i would indeed call forced evolution.

 

i didn't read through this whole thread so i apologize if this has been pointed out but evolution is very evident today. You need look no further than genetic abnormalities to see this. Evolution is nature's guess-and-test, sometimes mutations go right, usually they go wrong. Moreover, our own instinctual form of evolution is very prevalent -- whether you subscribe to circular evolution or not, the fact (a word i will now wield like a baseball bat..) is that the mingling of racial attributes in modern humans have created stronger, faster, more intelligent people. in a few centuries we'll have probably bred most racial divides out of our species -- isn't this evolution? of course.. social evolution, cultural evolution and physical evolution.

[bluebanana]

Why do humans have tailbones and not tails???

[TINNY]

I think you guys would want to check this out. It's a PDF file about Darwinism that you wont find anywhere else

 

 

 

Really long malformed link editted by C1ay.

[Tormod]

Originally posted by: bluebanana

Why <i>do</i> humans have tailbones and not tails???

 

Indeed. Or why do we have hair but no fur? And why do we choose to wear clothes? And where did television come from?

 

Evolution is an incredibly exiting explanation for the development of life on Earth. It is neither a dangerous theory nor an anti-religious idea which so many people seem to think. Even Darwin was a devout Christian. There is nothing much to be confused about if one reads a bit about Darwin or even how evolutionary theory has developed even before his day. (His grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was actually ahead of him with an interesting variety of evolutionary theory).

 

Tormod

[TINNY]

how can such a complex organism organize itself by chance? it seems everything around us is created perfectly, and purposely for humans to live. I mean, look at the climate, water, day and night, etc..

evolution seems to deny the existence of a creator.

[deamonstar]

nothing around us is "perfect" and nothing is created specifically for the sole benefit of humans. we as a race have been around for but the tinniest moment of time and occupy even less space as you consider the vastness of the age and volume of the universe. it's as if the human race (or any life on earth for that matter) is just a quirk in this universe... easily overlooked and insignificant compared to the enormity of the universe.

if evolution were not the method of a Creators creation... it would seem to be a long, boring, waste of time and energy if we could not look forward to becoming more perfect physically, mentally or spiritually.

[Tormod]

Originally posted by: TINNY

how can such a complex organism organize itself by chance? it seems everything around us is created perfectly, and purposely for humans to live. I mean, look at the climate, water, day and night, etc..

evolution seems to deny the existence of a creator.

 

This discussion will probably never die...except it we find life on Mars.

 

A complex organism does not spontaneously organize itself. The only people who use that argument seem to be those who do not believe in evolution.

 

Those who accept evolution realize that life begins not by random selection but by initial deposits of organic chemicals (carbon, silicon, oxygen) which can combine into simple molecules which at some level takes on properties which make them hard to distinguish from living beings.

 

These chemicals are found in the comets which buzz around our solar system - and is most likely the reason why there is water on Mars (it arrived there just like on earth - via comets).

 

There were days and nights and climate on earth for 4,6 billion years (and water a bit later than that) before human beings turned up. There has been life of some kind on this planet for about 3,8 billion years. If there is a creator he surely has spent a lot of time getting to the point...(not to mention the 9 billion years which passed before the earth was born).

 

Consider that the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago - while the first modern human beings can be traced some 140,000 years back. The Earth has not changed remarkably in those 140,000 years, apart from a couple of ice ages and a bit of continental drift, some volcanoes, earthquakes, storms and erosion. Yet 65 million years ago our planet looked very different than it does today.

 

James Hutton found out that the Earth had to be ancient about 50 years before Charles Darwin traveled to Galapagos on the Beagle. So the concept of vast amounts of past history came before a notion of evolution.

 

It is fully legal to stand up and say evolution never happens. But one would require better arguments than "surely it cannot be so".

 

Ah, I wonder why I bother - I must have posted this same argument 10 times in these forums now...

 

Tormod

[TINNY]

It's true that you cannot deny the link between everything, and the evolution process, and the time it takes to develop what we see today. That's all i can say. I'm no match for Professor Guldvog.

But, the direction of where the evolution process is heading seems to be guided. GOD's will?

[paultrr]

I doub't even finding life on Mars will totally settle this argument. The only argument it might begin to settle, and one that at least the religious raise a lot, is earth special in the universe. Knew some chaps in the Christian church who tended to believe UFO's existed and also thought they were of the Devil at the same time. Seems some of them have no problem with life out there and still manage to try and remake everything into their worldview.

[TeleMad]

I have not read through the whole thread so someone may have already addressed these. Sorry if I duplicate information.

 

Random Mutations, can they really account for the development of a human from a single celled organism?

 

Not alone. But throw in the other mechanisms of evolution - natural selection being a key one - and nearly all biologists agree that the changes are not beyond evolution's ability.

 

Lord Henry Wotton: Does this not involve the addition and not merely the alteration of DNA? Has it ever been observed that a mutation add DNA?(not to the best of my knowledge)

 

Yes. A major way this happens is through gene duplications. The human genome is loaded with them. After a duplication event occurs, functional constraint is usually absent on one of the copies because the other one is enough to maintain function. So mutations accumulate in one of the versions. If the mutated one does nothing but lose function then its called a pseudogene: basically nature's failed attempt at generating a new functional gene. Our genome has many pseudogenes (and we even share several with chimps!). Sometimes the mutating one will be able to gain a new, even if only slightly different, function.

 

For example, our hemoglobin consists of 2 alpha and 2 beta chains. The alphas are identical and the betas are too. The thing is, the alpha sequence and the beta sequence share a good bit of similarity in amino acid sequence, suggesting that there was once only an alpha sequence (or only a beta sequence) and it duplicated, afterwhich one of the two diverged slightly. This duplicate-and-diverge method is thought to be important in evolution.

[TeleMad]

"By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional. ... Since natural selection can only choose systems that are already working, then if a biological system cannot be produced gradually it would have to arise as an integrated unit, in one fell swoop, for natural selection to have anything to act on. " Michael J. Behe in Darwin's Black Box

 

The bolded parts are "inconsistent". The first specifically deals with DIRECT evolution of a system that performs the SAME FUNCTION by the SAME MECHANISM. But the latter one glosses over those criteria and makes a blanket statement that doesn't follow from the first part.

 

The problem is that an IC system could evolve if the precursors performed a DIFFERENT function. For example, a subset of the parts of the bacterial flagellum has been found in the Type III Secretory System (TTSS). So because a subset of the IC flagellum can be part of a DIFFERENT system that performs a DIFFERENT function, that subset could be retained by natural selection, even in the absence of a bacterial flagellum. Therefore, the whole system doesn't have arise as a single integrated unit, in one fell swoop. Parts of it could evolve for different functions, then be co-opted to form the final IC system.

[Apes Anonymous]

Hi everybody, great forum! :)

I got here after doing a search in google about a question that's been preoccupying me about evolution. I am no scientist as you'll soon guess, but as most people find evolution to be one of the most fascinating subjects.

I know that Evolution experts agree that mutations are the product of pure chance and that although it might look like "mother nature" has a plan to keep us alive that is not the case. Nature, we are told, has no favorites and merely supports the fittest.

This is a hard concept to swallow for the common man who sees that nature, in fact, rewards all our survival instincts, and it sure looks like we are being forced to survive and procreate. We are, for instance, rewarded by pleasure every time we eat, or engage in sexual intercourse , and are punished by pain or fear when our life is threatened.

Now science tells us That it only looks that way because we are mixing cause and effect, and that we should say: "I'm still alive because nature gave me the instinct of fear." and not the other way around: "Nature gave me the instinct of fear in me in order to keep me alive". The second statement is dead wrong because nature doesn't give a damn if we live or die.

I accept the the theory of evolution as a valid explanation for life, but the hard part for me is to understand how so much incentive to procreate can be given to living beings without any intention on the part of nature. For example, how come the sensation of pleasure is concentrated on the genitals? It is hard to keep the cause-effect order in mind if you know what genitals are for. The first thing that comes to mind is that animals are therefore encouraged to procreate.

I think that when people who believe in Intelligent Design it has more to do with the feeling that nature has an intention than what we are told by religion.

I think that maybe if I understood a bit better how Evolution operates, it might clear my confusion, so I guess my question to the knowledgeable members of this forum is: "How can you explain the development of sensations such as pleasure or pain in evolution and what are the mechanisms that associate them to the survival of a species?" I'll be grateful for any links you can point me to.