Darwin re-visited

[lawcat]

This jellyfish reverts to its polyp state. Is it too scifi to think of incubator clinics for humans? Like, going to an incubator clinic, when you are approaching death, to reach the embryo state again and be reborn in a year or so?

[maikeru]

This jellyfish reverts to its polyp state. Is it too scifi to think of incubator clinics for humans? Like, going to an incubator clinic, when you are approaching death, to reach the embryo state again and be reborn in a year or so?

 

Without an ability to store thoughts, memories, personality, etc. going back and forth essentially creates a new "you" and "me" every time, IMO. In that case, it just might be easier to opt for death through old age and "immortality" through cloning. For a jellyfish, the prospect of losing its memories, experiences, and connections may not be such a dire thought.

[paigetheoracle]

When you combine greed with a gun-toting frontier mentality, and throw in self-righteous indignation along with a penchant for world domination, then it is easy to understand why the American dream is too often a worldwide nightmare.

 

Many philosophers and historians agree that Western capitalism is as Darwinian as you can get, even during these times of nanny state.

 

 

Perhaps then this is the true cause of the great extinctions of the past - dominance into oblivion?

[paigetheoracle]

How many of us would willingly volunteer to revert back to embryos or zygotes? :shrug:

 

This is the problem that stops all progress. It is not just about losing your body and being reborn but your mind inside and society (lifestyle) outside. If we were willing to wipe the slate clean then we'd have the state of mentally being reborn, letting go all our prejudices, all our belief systems - including our positions in society, our wealth, our power. It is the thought of this going back to square one that creates such fear in all of us that have achieved something in society and with our minds and why people fear death (You can't take it with you) and senility (who am I? What am I?). The struggle to build again: The humiliation of being poor, powerless in society, a nobody and mentally being an ignorant child who looks and is a fool in every thought and action (All ego stuff).

[paigetheoracle]

It is very hard to see a better model when looking at any living organism

Dawin's Law of Natural Selection explains so much and is the cornerstone of most biological sciences

 

Perhaps even some physical sciences.I remember vaguely the story of a company that needed a better design for a hose nozzle. All the engineering firms they gave the brief to failed.

They could not design a better nozzle . A new company was asked. They gave ten new nozzles and asked 'Which is best?'. One was a little better so they made that change and gave the firm ten more nossles. One of those was better so on again for about 5 generations until a perfect nozzle was made.

An amazing problem solving strategy.

 

Evolution through natural selection. Is there any problem with this as choice and who makes the choice? The point I tried to make in my thread on evolution is that there must be a mind, a being making that choice or is it all accidental? (Progress is to me somebody trying to bash a door down, then realizing it opens inwards not outwards - that might appear like an accident but to me that is insight, inside and freed movement to explore outside). Is the gene a thinking machine (mind) or just a blueprint and if the latter, who or what carries out the building instructions?

[Pyrotex]

Here is an interesting animal that seems to have evolved into immortanility...

We could be immortal like that jellyfish,

But we would have to be quite sellyfish.

[Pyrotex]

Evolution through natural selection. Is there any problem with this as choice and who makes the choice? The point I tried to make in my thread on evolution is that there must be a mind, a being making that choice or is it all accidental? ... Is the gene a thinking machine (mind) or just a blueprint and if the latter, who or what carries out the building instructions?

Paige,

I think you're trying way too hard to make natural selection (NS) too complicated.

 

Yes, there IS a problem with NS as a "choice". NS is NOT a "choice". There is NO one making a "choice".

 

Natural selection is the most natural thing in the world. It's going on around us all the time, everywhere. Given ANY population of similar plants or animals, there will be genetic variation. That's because all plants and animals (with a tiny few exceptions) reproduce via sex.

 

No matter how identical a herd of gazelle might appear to us, there IS genetic variation in the individuals of that herd. Some will be 1% faster than average; some will be 1% slower than average. Some will have eyesight 1% better (or worse) than average. Some will have their metabolism 1% more (or less) efficient than average.

 

Over the course of many generations, those individuals with even the tiniest advantage will, on average, tend to live a little longer. This makes them ever-so-slightly more likely to mate and pass their genes on to subsequent generations. Individuals with disadvantageous genes will, on average, tend to die a little sooner, and are therefore less likely to pass on their genes.

 

Which means, that over many generations, "good" genes (those that confer advantage) will tend to accumulate in the population, and "bad" genes (those that confer disadvantage) will tend to diminish in the population.

 

That's it! That's all there is to it! That's Natural Selection, the whole kit-and-kaboodle.

 

Not once was a "choice" made.

 

Nothing chose this gazelle or that gazelle. All that happened was that gazelle #28 was just a teensy bit slow and got eaten by a lion and never had a chance to mate; and gazelle #31 was ALMOST caught by a lion, but escaped and became a parent to two baby gazelles.

 

That's it! That's the whole shebang! That's Natural Selection.

 

Do you understand now?

[Pyrotex]

Let's put some numbers to Natural Selection.

 

Let's say that we have a critter that reaches sexual maturity in less than one year. Every spring is mating season, and even 1-year-olds can participate. A "generation" is one year.

 

Let's say that these critters have a gene that can manifest as either brown fur or black fur. That's the only difference, just fur color. Fifty percent of all newborn critters have the brown gene; fifty percent have the black gene.

 

Now, as it turns out, having the brown gene confers a slight advantage to a newborn critter. Very small -- only 1 chance in a million. Symmetrically, the black gene confers an equally small disadvantage -- only 1 chance in a million.

 

What causes this (dis-)advantage? Doesn't matter. Maybe the local predators can see black just a tiny bit easier than they can see brown. Or maybe black fur slows them down by the tiniest amount. But it only makes a difference of 1 in a million.

 

In generation 1, we have a perfect 50/50 split between brown and black genes in the critter gene pool. But it doesn't stay that way. Using simple probability math we have the following percentage of brown fur critters among the total population, after N generations.

 

Genetic difference was 1 part in 1,000,000

 

N %

100 --- 50.005%

1,000 --- 50.050%

10,000 --- 50.500%

100,000 --- 54.983%

500,000 --- 73.106%

1,000,000 --- 88.080%

5,000,000 --- 99.996%

 

So, in five million generations (years), the critters are almost exclusively brown furred.

And that's with a genetic difference of only 1 part in a million!!!

 

What if the genetic difference was 1 part in 5,000?

 

N %

100 --- 51.000%

1,000 --- 59.869%

2,000 --- 68.997%

4,000 --- 83.202%

10,000 --- 98.201%

20,000 --- 99.967%

 

We would have reached the same endpoint in 20,000 generations (years).

THAT's Natural Selection in action!!!

[JMJones0424]

It always strikes me as odd that the majority of people I come across can not fully appreciate the fact that evolution involves changes of populations over generations, not individuals over their lifetimes. Thank you, pyrotex, for providing a mathematical representation of this simple fact.

[maikeru]

Excellent illustration of the power of natural selection, Pyrotex. :naughty:

[CraigD]

Here is an interesting animal that seems to have evolved into immortanility:

The world's only immortal animal | Yahoo! Green

Though a fascinating animal turritopsis nutricula (sometimes translated “immortal jellyfish”, though literally “nurse jellyfish”, because its nymph form buds its mature hydra forms from its larger body), the tiny jellyfish mentioned in the yahoo article, isn’t the only immortal animal, or even the only one in its phylum, the cnidaria. As the wikipedia article notes, all species of the cnidaria genus hydra appear to be immortal – though they have only their single nymph form, not reverting from hydra form like turritopsis nutricula. Another well known phylum of immortal animals anatomically more complex that cnidaria are the tardigrada (“slow walkers”), Tardigrada over 1000 known species of tiny eight-legged aquatic extremophiles occurring nearly everywhere on Earth, and possibly even capable of surviving in space – though not doing much there.

 

Many anatomically simpler animals, such as bacteria – as a rule, nearly all organisms that reproduce by fission/cloning – are biologically immortal.

 

In short (important idea here!) I don’t think it accurate to say that any independent organism evolved immortality. Rather, biological immortality is most common in evolutionarily ancient organism, leading to the conclusion that early in evolutionary history, immortality occurred more frequently than later. Rather than evolving immortality, as a whole across all the biological domains and kingdoms, life appears to have evolved mortality. As it promotes sexual reproduction and the resulting genetic diversity it promotes, mortality is a critical accelerator of biological evolution, immortality a primitive state, and something of a evolutionary dead end.

[lawcat]

I buy that 100%

[lawcat]

Oh, something just popped in my mind. Wouldn't that be consistent with Biblical assertions, barring discussion of duration of evolution, that early people lived much longer?

[Pyrotex]

Oh, something just popped in my mind. Wouldn't that be consistent with Biblical assertions, barring discussion of duration of evolution, that early people lived much longer?

Uh, no. In ancient Israel, a man's age was measured in lunar months, not celestial years.

[lawcat]

If a joke, I did laugh. (pardon my ignorance.) If not, then even if lunar months it is still nature, so what of the change in average age as recorded in the said scripture?

[freeztar]

I don't think he was joking.

 

If anything, I'd guess that overall, humans live longer lives now than at any other time in our history due to advancements in food production, medicine, etc.

 

Life expectancy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Pyrotex]

If a joke, I did laugh. (pardon my ignorance.) If not, then even if lunar months it is still nature, so what of the change in average age as recorded in the said scripture?

I was not joking. If you take all the 'begats' in Genesis, with all the long ages, and divide those ages by 13 (the number of lunar months in a year), you will get ordinary ages in the 40 to 70 year range. Methusulah was indeed long lived for HIS day (a little over 70 years), but nothing out of the ordinary by today's standards.