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Still More Evidence for Evolution
Uche writes: "Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have uncovered the first genetic evidence that explains how large-scale alterations to body plans were accomplished during the early evolution of animals."
Actually, its unlikely humans will evolve much more. Why? Because few people die and the genetically inferior ones still pass their genes to the next generation. This is as good as it gets... :(
Well, you have the good fortune to live in a country where the majority of people are sensible. Those of us who live in the US have to deal with states banning the teaching of evolution in public schools and other nonsense. I don't expect this to cause all the nuts to go away overnight, but hopefully this will speed their departure.
Just happened like a week or two ago.
The creationists mostly lied the whole time.
1) They misaplied the 2nd law of thermodynamics very poorly by treating a race of species as a closed system. A few chemist and myself (a physics major) were very upset at these outright lies.
2) They denied the existence of any transitional fossils, and basically said that scientists were arranging bones and fossils how they wanted to see them.
3) They made false accusations against radioactive dating that haven't applied sense the birth of the field.
4) And finally they had to make up for logical loop holes by stating that early man was far superior to present man, and that in the begining all species existed at once, including the dinosaurs.
5) In all of the debate, they only had one true argument, and it was a bad argument at that. Guess what that argument was? "Positive" mutations haven't been reproduced or observed in the laboratory, therefore they do not exist, therefore evolution is false. And this article is about just that.
Before the debate, I thought it would be interesting to see why someone would believe in creation. Afterwards I was a bit depressed. I had no idea how far a person would go to decieve themself and perpetuate a lie. I felf very sorry for the young teenagers that came with their church group. They were being raised by liars.
One of the debaters agrugment was based on the very results that this article brings up. I know if he saw this now, it would not change his opinion one bit. He has no reason, he creates what ever psuedo reason needed to calm the conflict between his arogant soul and his mind. I bet he doesn't even know that his words are lies.
Any way, I thought I would share this with you people. I don't know what can be learned from this, but anyway, good luck in this sad and ignorant world maya.
I was thinking about this subject yesterday.
.. we just arent thinking of the right kind of evolution.
On the contrary, i believe evolution is happening as we speak. but not on the scale of humans growing tales and fFeathers.
no, i'm thinking more about the sort of evolution on a cellular and microbiological level. the average american can eat all the carcenogens in a mcdonalds burger and coke. a previous human fFrom even a century ago probably wouldnt have the rigid stomach to handle a fFrench fFry.
more, we are presently using chemical fFertilizers to grow our fFood. previously these same chemicals would cause immediate poisoning and mass concers. today we are as a race more immune to these things.
the precedent example is when the europeans came to the new world, and brought malaria, polio and chicken pox -- which wiped out entire native american communities. today however, chicken pox is something or a rite of passage fFor 6-8 all year olds.
evolution hasnt stopped
This particular problem has frequently been pointed out by creationists, but evolutionists have dismissed it as a non-issue. Until now. Now when they have found an answer to the problem, it suddenly makes sense to address the issue.
So a creationist claim that evolutionists cannot answer is irrelevant. A creationist claim that evolutionists can answer is relevant.
Interesting!
Yep, it's pretty simple.
Just because something is irreducably complex *now* does not mean it was irreducably complex at the point at which the crucial beneficial change was made which allows the current behaviour.
Evolution can break down a complex interaction of simple non-necessary "actors" into a simpler interaction of necessary "actors", as easily as it can produce the extra "actors" in the first place.
Evolution is the process of harmonisation of an organism to its natural surroundings, with the additional constraint of fitness. "Fitness" can mean dumping things that aren't necessary because you can do the job easier another way now.
An example, your appendix: At one point it was presumably useful (perhaps even necessary). Now it's an atrophying organ with no discernable purpose, or side-effects when removed.
So, in summary, the author makes the assumption of linear progress in time. This is a false premise, and his argument therefore does not hold. To get from A to B, evolution (remember, this is random chance followed by population migration) could might easily go A,G,F,E,D,C,B.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Scientists try to explain the origin of something using the rules that they can prove and this is impossible. Science does not want to ask the question "why?" and be told the answer is just "because".
Creationists accept the origin itself as "God" and thus have no need to delve deeper into where God came from.
Rewind both theories to the very beginning of the tape and you will eventually reach a given that can't be proven. In the case of science, it is: given a large superdense ball of matter here is how it turned into a universe. In the case of religion, it is: given a superior, supernatural being of some kind here is how he created a universe.
All these so-called "discoveries" are just window dressing. Articles like this one remind me of the magicians using eye-catching attention getters to distract people from the charade they are respresenting as truth.
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Statements like, "Evolution is accepted as fact by scientists and thinking people. It is no more or less a theory than physics or astronomy."
What would you have said when all thinking ppl, said that the earth was flat?
Just because something is supported by the majority does NOT make it fact. Understand this and you'll have a crack at making some real discoveries.
"It's possible we haven't discovered every moon or even every planet in our solar system, but that doesn't mean the sun may actually revolve around the earth after all."
True but the earth revolving around the sun has nothing
to do with your beliefs.
"Creationists (usually) base their conclusion on a religious, rather than scientific conclusion."
Well, the article based its theory on evolution in an
effort to explain macroevolution. So what's your point?
"They misaplied the 2nd law of thermodynamics very poorly by treating a race of species as a closed system. A few chemist and myself (a physics major) were very upset at these outright lies"
Umm..whether or not this is true. William Thomson was the a founding father of thermodynamic and he was a Creationist/Christian. He also created the Kelvin scale for absolute temparatures amongst some other electrical scales and the modern view of energy. His full name was Lord Kelvin William Thomson. He was wrong about some things but who isn't?
"Accepting Creationism means tossing out all of established science. Creationism is the adversary of all science, not just Darwinian evolution."
Why?
As I stated above Kelvin Thomson was a Creationist. As was, James Clerk Maxwell who was the father of modern physics, Edward William Morley who measured the speed of light, Georges Lemaitre who showed that the universe was expanding. This is only a few that I know of. So throw them out and live in the Dark Ages.
Please think. I'm not saying that you should believe this or that but not to just believe what "authorities" say.
Those are the sort of ppl that look like fools in half a century. Everything that is stated as fact does not necessarly hold up against time.
I just wanted to provide a link to the graphic used to illustrate what these scientists claim to have discovered.
. jp g
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/graphics/images/mchox2
Do they purport that this genetic switch creates the numerous organs required to allow flight, including a complete set of wings, as well as creating the numerous changes in the brain to allow flight to be controlled? Does it create the numerous changes to the articulation of nearly every visible limb on the illustrated insect's body? If not, isn't this illustration sophism at it's very worst?
Hey slashdotters! Try looking at this article half as critically as you would a press release from Microsoft.
... so that we can give our kids the needed tools to spot, analyze, and tear apart ALL intellectual fraud and pseudoscience.
:-)
Along those same lines, I would expect to teach:
o) geocentricism, "the moon landings hoax/nasa big lie", "mars face", etc. in astronomy
o) flat earth in geography
o) "free energy", "100mpg carburetor" in physics
o) "breast enlargement pills","penis enlargement pills" in sex ed
o) all the current all-natural/herbal/psychic/magical/religious "cures" in the "health food"/"alternative medicine"/"complimentary medicine" industry.
etc etc etc.
Most of the effort in current teaching methods seems to be emphasis on teaching existing theories, and little to no effort is given on how to dissect and examine "alternative" claims for validity.
I'd present a historical argument against this, if science is still working on the real one.
A few hundred years ago, God was creating organisms. Then, through the magic of vivisection (ugh), we started to understand conception and development and the scientific explanation of how a organism comes to be. So God made the jump to creating species, and Creationism has been in retreat ever since. Did God hand-make species? No, that's natural selection. Species types? Dig some more through the fossil record... and that's still natural selection. Hmm, so what about natural selection itself? Inheritable characterists, surely such a transfer of essence bears the mark of the divine? No again, genetics turns out to be a relatively straightforward molecular process. Ah hah, molecules! God created the complex molecules! And if the response to that is "We'll get back to you, give us a few decades.", well so?
They will get back to you, eventually. And the Creationists, if they wish, can move the bar again. God can keep getting smaller and smaller, that's in His nature, and there will always be a scientific frontier, that's its nature. You can point to it and say "God is there!", and no one will be able to say otherwise. For a few years anyway, until it ceases to be the frontier.
Creationism will never be fully disproven, but how many times does the same basic theory have to be debunked and rewritten before you get the idea?
Its funny you should mention that disease is not caused by sin, because the vatican just released a press release saying that illness was caused by sin, its funny how you'd think we would have moved past ideas like that, anyways here's the link. http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,3-2002063681, 00.html
the early evolution of animals.
animals are the expressions of genes
gene's evolve, animals don't
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
There's the other problem of how the genes affected by Lox evolved without showing any changes in the phenotype at all (since they were repressed by Lox). They must have mutated randomly, since natural selection couldn't have any effect on genes that don't express themselves in the phenotype. I think that this is the real show-stopper for this particular mechanism for evolution. Note: I am not saying that another mechanism could not be theorized that handles this objection quite easily. I'm just saying that the mutation-amplifying gene Lox (and others like it) doesn't come close to solving all the problems.
http://pythonisito.blogspot.com/
I'm not quite sure that's true. For example, there are observations, which I would say are "facts". For example: "This table is brown". Of course, you could get very philosophical and start discussing what it means to be brown, and so forth, but at that point I think you're nitpicking.
Actually, there are some legitimate nitpicks here. Hanson (1958) and Kuhn (1962) argued that empirical observations are 'theory-laden' and that scientists see the world through paradigmatic world views, respectively. Which is to say that one's theory influences what one observes or interprets his or her observations. These philosophers were not just skeptics -- they were influenced by the gestalt and 'new look' psychological theories of visual perception.
Some of the best evidence for the subjectivity of even empirical observations comes from cases where seemingly sober scientists 'saw' things that their theories told them were there but which actually do not exist. Some quotes:
"During the seventeenth century, when their research was guided by one or another effluvium theory, electricians repeatedly saw chaff particles revound from, or fall off, the electrified bodies that had attracted them. At least that is what seventeenth-century observers said they saw, and we have no more reason to doubt their reports of perception than our own." (p. 117, Kuhn, T. S. (1996). The structure of scientific revolutions. (3rd Ed.) Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.)
"In 1903 Rene Blondlot claimed to have discovered a new kind of ray, instances of which were recorded and investigated by a large number of eminent French scientists. Outside France interest in N-rays waned when it was reported by the American physicist R. W. Wood that during a visit to Blondlot's laboratory he surreptitiously removed from the apparatus an essential prism. Despite the secret sabotage of his equipment, Blondlot still reported seeing the effects of the N-rays." (p. 120 of Bird, A. (2000). Thomas Kuhn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.)
"There have been cases in the history of science in which skilled scientists of the highest repute have 'seen' or 'verified', through observation and experiment, the prediction of some hypothesis, even though this prediction subsequently turned out not to correspond to reality and could not be reproduced by other observers. For example, Sir William Herschel (1738-1822), discoverer of the planet Uranus, the father of John Herschel and the most famous astronomer of the eighteenth century, was able with the powerful telescopes he manufactured to resolve into individual stars several nebulae that had previously appeared to be milky luminous patches in the sky. In the mid 1780s, he conjectured that all nebulae were composed of individual stars so that none were made of a luminous fluid. In 1790 he did observe a nebula that he was forced to interpret as a central star surrounded by a cloud of luminous fluid. In the interim period, however, Herschel claimed to resolve into individual stars both the Orion and Andromeda nebulae. In fact, though, Orion is a gaseous cloud containing a continuous distribution of matter, not just individual stars, while Andromeda is a galaxy of stars." (p. 10 of Cushing, J. T. (1997). Philosophical concepts in physics: The historical relation between philosophy and scientific theories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.)
Gould's "Mismeasure of Man" contains similar anecdotes.
How can they know that evolution and geological processes are not just more tools in God's toolbox? They can't know, and they who presume to know how God created the universe or to put limits on the methods God used in creation are both small-minded and arrogant beyond belief!
I would submit that you fall victim to your own reasoning. If, that is you presume to limit God's toolbox to exclusively use evolution and geological processes. Personally, I believe that God created the Universe and everything we see in it. Furthermore I believe that all living things were created such that it's "seed should be in itself, after his kind". Meaning that from protozoa to humans were all created as they are now with no evolution taking place, ever.
Now don't misunderstand me. I am an EE student and my wife teaches AP biology at a public high school. I have attended college level evolution lectures and spoken to several professors on the subject. Yet I remain unconvinced that evolution has actually taken place. However, that is not to say that I want to implant my views with a 2x4 into someone elses skull.
I wonder if Creationists are afraid of the power and knowledge of the God who created evolution and the Big Bang; I wonder if they want to cut Him down to a size they can comprehend?
On the contrary. As a 'creationist' I strive to comprehend all of God's creations while realizing that as a mortal man, I will never achieve this goal. Perhaps you will agree that God is perfect and men and women are not. If so, understand that by sweeping all people who do not believe in evolution into one big "creationist" basket, you are including people who don't as you say, "resort to blatant misinformation". I have my reasons for believing the way I do and they are based in what I term to be fact. If you are interested in them, please e-mail me and I would be happy to explain my views.
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
> Isn't it funny how that bible states that the earth is round? and this was written in the bible when the earth was still considered to be flat. Isn't that interesting? Think about it... Now, how on earth could that get into the bible? And it wasnt by pure chance, unlike the theory of evolution which depends puerly on chance.
There are a few possible answers to this. If I felt contrary, I could say that the "Earth=round" was inserted into the Bible after the fact. Maybe it was a lucky guess. Perhaps it really was divine inspiration. The point is that it's not compelling evidence that it's divine inspiration. Oh, and evolution doesn't rely solely on chance. That's an extreme oversimplification, usually only used when one is trying to "straw-man" the theory.
> People are so gullable these days. Because some scientist somehere says something, everyone believes it, without question.
No argument here, although I'd extend it to anyone with a real or perceived claim to authority or expertise.
> How can you predict what happend some 12 billion years ago? The weather is bearly accurate to more than one day, and yet evolutionists claim they know what was in the earths atmosphere billions of years ago.
You have a skewed idea of the definition of "predict" if you think one needs to predict the past. The reason the weather long ago is better known than the weather tomorrow is that the long ago has already happened. Scientists can tell what the Earth's climate was like long ago by seeing the evidence of its effects. When meteorologists predict the weather, they're merely taking what they have and extrapolating educated guesses.
> When Charles Darwin came up with the theory of Evolution, not only did the world not believe it, but neither did he. As i see it, the theory of evolution was made up to create a substitute belief to creation.
Whether he believed in it or not is irrelevant to whether it's consistent with the evidence. And, as I see it, it was put forward as a theory to explain biological diversity in the Galapagos Islands.
> People dont want to believe that there is a being somwhere in the heavens that is superior to them, a being that created them and the universe. This being is able to create the universe, and all that is in it, from giant starts, to microscopic life in six days.
Based on the fact that 95% of the world believes in said higher power, I'd say that people do want to believe in a higher power.
> People dont understand how this is possible, and so they create a theory, which allows them to deceive themselves into thinking that they are the superior being. They dont want to have to submit to the one and only true God, they want to do their own thing, which is evil.
Apologies, but this is just nonsense. Firstly, nobody who follows the theory of the origin of the species thinks they they are the controlling factor in that origin, so your claims they they're thinking they are the superior being is incorrect. Second, "the one and only true God" is not science, it's religion, so it can't be applied to the theory of origins in any meaningful way.
> I'm not providing much scientific evidence here for creation, but, any critical person, should be able to see that the theory of evolution is only a THEORY.
You seem to imply that because it's a theory, that it's necessarily wrong. The theory of relativity is also considered a theory, but it has stood up to much experimentation. "Theory" means "not yet proven" but should not be extrapolated to mean incorrect. It's more appropriate to say that theories are incomplete.
> How can we, who dont even understand life, who cant create life in a controlled enviroment, claim that life came about by chance?
There are two points here. First, nobody on Earth can explain why gravitation works. Nobody knows the reason why massive bodies attract one another. To say, however, that this means we can't discuss gravitation in a meaningful way is just silly. We discuss gravity by examining its effects on our universe. We discuss evolution the same way.
Second, I don't personally know anybody who claims that life "came about by chance", and this is the classic straw man argument about evolutionary theory. All this statement demonstrates is that you haven't actually read or studied the theory, because your statement demonstrates gross misunderstanding of the mechanisms of evolution. I won't go into the gory details unless you wish me to do so, but suffice it to say you're badly misinterpreting evolutionary theory, and it ruins your argument.
> With all of our intelligence, we have not been able to create life in a lab, and this is with inteligent input. There was no intelligent input in the theory of evolution. Just chance.
Refer to my statements above about incomplete understanding, and about the "evolution=chance" argument. I will add here that not being able to create life in a lab has no bearing to this discussion, because it assumes that because we haven't done it yet, we never will, and because we don't understand it now, we never can. A mere one hundred years ago, nobody could build a heavier-than-air flying machine, or a computer, or a television, or any of a thousand other things. We learn. It's what we do best.
Virg
Maybe God created a World that looks like the result of billions of years of evolution.
Or maybe God created a world that is the result of billions of years of evolution. I'm not particularly religious, but it has always amazed me that so many people apparently believe that a very old Earth/Universe and biological evolution somehow preclude the existence of a higher power. The last time I checked, biology (and the natural sciences in general) was in the business of answering the "how" questions. It makes no attempts to answer the "who" or "why" questions.
Certainly, if a person believes in an all-powerful God, then said person must (by definition) believe that said God would be capable of creating life by employing evolutionary processes. If you were an engineer charged with populating a planet, would you design a species, wipe the drawing board clean, and start from scratch to design another species that is 99% similar to the one you just got done with? I know I wouldn't, and I'm just a lowly code monkey.
I'm an apathetic agnostic, but as far as I can tell, this whole "evolution versus creation" debate is the biggest non-issue in recent history since, by and large, they are the same thing. Oh, I'm aware that there are problems with evolution if you are one of these Biblical literalists who believe that every last word of the Bible is 100% true and that the Universe is 6,000 years old. But I've always been under the impression that these folks constitute a small (but vocal) minority of American evangelicals. Certainly, the Christians that I talk to consider these folks to be a bit of an embarassment.
The "rift" between science and religion (to the extent that there is one) is largely a creation of militant fundamentalists and militant atheists taking pot-shots at each other from opposite sides of a barbed-wire fence. To the rest of us, there is a large middle ground that has more than enough room to hold us comfortably.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
I think that the whole evolution idea is interesting. I see the theory of evolution being two theories in one. I see it as being alleles change over time roughly equating to if the frequency of redheads per capita changing being termed evolution. This is where most of the evidence for evolution comes in. There is a second interpretation (really the first historically) that has to do with speciation and the "Origen of Species" roughly equating to if homo erectus changes over time to homo sapiens being termed evolution. I find one supported by experimental data and one supported by sparse physical data. I find one a matter of science that has no conflict with theology and one a matter of interpretation that has aspects of theology. I think speciation is a religion in itself and that there are two entirely different ideas combined in evolution. I think that there is one theory of evolution that is being applied to the old hypothesis of evolution.
I might think of myself as a creationist, but creation is not really science. I think creationism is more of scientific philosophy. The only place science really comes into play is the interpretation and refutation of already established data. As a science student, I have a problem with creation being taught in school science classes because it doesn't comply with the scientific method. How do you emperically prove that man was created?
Just my $.02 that's likely to get lost in the /. noise:
First, just so everyone knows where I'm comming from, I was raised a creationist. And in the past I've been a devote creationist that would try to "debate" with others to promote my point of view -- thinking that if you believed in evolution you were an atheist. However, as I have matured (a little bit, not much), I can say that my own beliefs have evolved.
I don't understand anymore this animosity that Christians and Evolutionist have between each other -- this fierce compitition. When I read the Genesis account (first few chapters) and get all the imagery out of my head that I was raised with (the presuppositions so to speak) I see a very general story that is not intended to be a science text book. I think details are purposely omitted because the point of the book is not for us to know exactly how everything came into being, but to understand that a supernatural being created it and the relationship that we have to this being.
Christians that are threatened by evolution don't have a true concept of the omnipotence of an all powerfull God (or Yahweh, Jehovah, Cosmic Spirit, or whatever name you attach). Think about it, if you had unlimited processing power and data, you could drop thousands of pieces of paper from a plane at 10K feet and know exactly where each paper would land. Moreover, now assume that you can control all of the variables (wind speed/direction, ordering of papers, turbulance, etc) -- then you would be able to cause each of these papers to land where you wish them to land. Now, back up to the Big Band (or whatever started the Universe). Assuming that all energy and matter that exists in the universe today was involved in the Big Bang (to my knowlege science has not found any exceptions to the law of conservation of energy and matter). Now lets assume there's an all powerful being that causes this Bang and sets up all the variables to Its liking. This being, in theory, could then foreordain the entire universe as we know it today in a single instance at the time of the Big Bang. To the Creationist, all of this appears to be the work of God, Its creation. However, to the Evolutionist, all of this appears to be the work of chance (just a question for thought, but is anything really random? Or do we just label events as random when they become too computationally complex?). Add to this that God is outside of time (exists in all of time at all instances at once) and you realize that there's more the the Genesis account than meets the eye! I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think that science and the Bible are mutually exclusive.
Now, on the flip side, I don't understand why some scientists are so bent on disproving the Bible and slamming Christians -- almost a fear of Judeo-Christian beliefs (well...maybe I do, there have been and still are some pretty crummy people that call themselves Christans). The Bible was written by over 40 authors from 3 continents and from various backgrounds (kings, prophets, common folk, political prisioners, etc) and it was written over a span of 1500 years! What a wealth of knowlege and wisdom it contains. Some claim that it contains a meta-narrative of a God trying to reconcile a relationship with mankind. If nothing else it contains history and 1500 years of culture and living experiance. How you choose to read it is where faith comes into the picture. It's just a shame that there are all of these debates about the Bible and Science, but very few people actually read the Bible (including Christians) even though it is classic literature and a great read once you understand the context/culture/timeline in which it was written.
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