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Top 10 Evolutionary Adaptations
oneill40 writes "The New Scientist has an interesting article up listing the Top 10 most amazing things to have evolved, including sex, death, the eye, language and parasites!" From the article:"Sponges are a key example of multicellular life, an innovation that transformed living things from solitary cells into fantastically complex bodies. It was such a great move, it evolved at least 16 different times. Animals, land plants, fungi and algae all joined in." J adds: Number four, Language, got a careful look from Carl Zimmer a while back. It's Pinker vs. Chomsky, winner take all, pass the popcorn!
Death? Maybe it's just me but I'd consider death an evolutionary failure.
Immortality, now that would be a nice adaptation!
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The use of the dash in "G-d" is a Jewish custom.
AIUI DNA's just a bit more durable than RNA and doesn't really have major advantages over it. You can have a perfectly good organism without any DNA, just use RNA for all the stuff and have polyploidy or something to protect you.
I am trolling
You don't see any of these deficiencies in an octopuses' eye. So God's supposed "crowning creation" has worse vision than the lowly octopus?
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
in bad form replying to my own post, but here's a link to the npr audio on the discovery.
NPR STORY
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Language requires very specific parts of the brain to work correctly. This has been seen in brain damaged people and children with certain birth defects. It may be very difficult if not impossible for them to learn a language, understand or speak it. This indicates that we have language-specific hardware built in. The abilities of the chimps is no surprise here - in fact, it supports the idea that we are evolved to use language, considering chimps are our closest genetic relatives. Other animals can learn human language to some degree too, and do in fact communicate amongst themselves. But really, it's a huge advantage for a group to be able to communicate within its ranks. From the altruistic warning cry to, oh I don't know, mating songs, language has had very good reasons to evolve.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Not quite correct. This simplest bacteria (no nucleus) uses only RNA. The mechanisms of transcription have likely evolved significantly as well.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I've been trying to find the "Last Stop" for an argument for evolution for quite some time. I finally found this amazing article: 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution.
I'm sure many of you (who wanted to know anyways) have come across this but this is the cat's meow for evolutionary arguments. It is designed to be easy to read, but it does not pander to the lowest common denominator (in fact far from it).
If you haven't read it, you WILL learn something new.
Sunny
Be my Friend
"Jehova" which is a pseudo-phonetic translation of the Hebrew present-infinitive of the verb "to be".
The functional value of the name is more important than the sound or string of letters. It's nice in the traditional sense, but looses all meaning outside of the context of the original reader.
Language is better viewed as a co-evolutionary adaptation. Language requires not only a speaker but a listener. The signs/symbols of language are a co-evolutionay process. Gregory Bateson touched upon this in his book Mind & Nature.Adaptation, starvation and poisioning are also players in what we view as the evolutionary game. Of course sexual reproduction leads to the meme of the Selfish Gene as promulgated by R. Dawkins, and leads to viewing us, you and I and everyone of us, as so much packaging shunting genes about. Thinking about the soma as no more than packaging moving genes about via sexual reproduction doesn't seem to take into consideration the generation of negentropy, or, information. The generation and transmission of information via language is the creation of negative entropy and manifests an emergent property that is in a strange way the universe on a course of self discovery.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
I'm only going to respond to part of your post, but I have some small expertise in this area.
The fact that other animals learn language is completely irrelevant. Two different machines can perform the same task, and do it in completely different ways. Animal language appears to be one example of this concept. The animals MAY be proficient with language (my opinion is that they are) but their brains don't have the same mechanisms that humans have. Animals also have problems with syntax, because humans have specific mechanisms in the brain that deal with it.
As to what you buy, that's up to you, but the facts are against you on this one.
Scientists never use "theory" in the sense of 6a. In the language of science, a theory is defined as it is in 5.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
RTFA. The Cambrian Explosion is actually exlplained: The appearance of the eye made a whole new class of life forms possible. Thus, in a relatively short amount of time, a lot of new species developed - you could say the species count exploded.
Original cells were (and are) essentially immortal. Bacteria are a case in point. They primarily replicate via binary fission. One begets two begets four begets eight, etc, etc. There is no clear dividing line between siblings of a split except, perhaps, for one or two DNA base changes as a matter of chance.
Any organism that has as a primary (or exclusive) means of replication binary fission is actually "immortal". There is no clear dividing line between sibling cells (perfect clones, like identical twins - much more so than any laboratory clone). One becomes two (and so on)...which is the original? Its line goes back indefinitely in an unbroken chain. It is immortal.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
This statement is baseless, unless you make certain implications about what a "life form" is. In any case, evolution isn't about life forms it's about replicators and DNA is but the mechanism used by one type of replicator here on earth.
Have a look at Dawkins' Selfish Gene or Blackmore's Meme Machine for some good explanations of replicators and their evolutionary powers.
What bacteria would that be?
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Arceobacteria,Proteobacteria, and Cyanobacteria are the oldest, and all have a nucleoid ( non-membrane region containing one circular DNA molecule -- one circular chromosome).
The membrane is not a defining attribute for DNA use. First DNA developed, then the cell evolved a purse to stash it in.
DNA may or may not be the basal component of what constitues life, but once you get past its presence, things look pretty mechanical, not organic.
Old urban legend.
Also depends on what you define as "people": go back 6,000 years? 10,000? 250,000?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Incorrect. Tonsils and the appendix are both used within the body for development of the immune system. Both are involved in B (and T) cell maturation processes.
They may have backups in other mucal and lymphoidal tissues, but they certainly serve a purpose and there is anecdotal evidence that the immune systems of people with tonsils and appendix removed are more easily compromised.
Considering them vestigial organs is dated thinking (about 20 years out of date), and only persists because a great many doctors (and the public) are woefully behind on modern science.
That's the ten million dollar for biologists these days. Nobody really knows. RNA world, aka, the "naked gene" idea is one idea. It is also thought that something resembling a primative cell membrane can develop out of abiotic chemical processes, just like strands of RNA can.
According to the RNA world idea, early Earth had these strands of RNA floating around that served as self-replicating genes/proteins. But the environment is very hostile to such critters. So they take up squatting in these proto-cell membranes for shelter. Over time, they developed the ability to do some housekeeping, do repairs on the proto-membrane and generally modify it to their own needs. Eventually the naked genes became "owners" instead of "renters".
There's some problems with this idea - the big one being that if there isn't anyway of getting nutrients in and waste out of the proto-cell membrane, these proto-cells would be deadly traps, not shelters. Getting food in and crap out of a membrane is still a big gap to cross, unless the problem can be broken down further. But at least we're better of than "toss a bunch of amino acids into a box, and shake it until a cell comes out".
In short, they're working on it. Intelligent design is a possibility, but it isn't the simplest one, so it gets sliced out by Occam's Razor, unless Occam gets trumped by fresh evidence. The Intelligent Design idea doesn't explain where this designer came from, so it isn't any simpler, it just push the problem further back. The hypothesis doesn't make any predictions that the naturalistic hypothesis doesn't, so, in general, it isn't falsifiable. Maybe specific variants of the intelligent design theory can make falsifiable predictions, but the general theory doesn't. Any the promoters of ID are very careful not to make falsifiable predictions...
Think about it this way - one scenario of intelligent design is that the designer was a time travelling human. We know that humans, who are capable of intelligent design, exist. We can't exactly say the same about God. We aren't very far away from being able to create very primitive life, and from there, evolution would do the rest. The only thing we are missing is time travel, but that could change next week.
Which would you prefer to assume: that life was created by a time travelling human, or that "naked genes" managed to eventually figure out the care and feeding of cell membranes, even if we don't know how they did it quite yet?
Intelligent design is a possibility, but it isn't the simplest one. Until we find evidence suggesting intelligent design - like finding a 2016 US quarter buried in 4 billion year old rock - it best to assume some naturalistic scenario took place, even if we don't know what that scenario is just yet.
Yup evolution is a theory, its the best one at the moment with the data we have, if you have access to a better data set then please enlighten us.
Also words like "Big Bang" or "Cambrian Explosion" are used to describe events, which may or may not be well understood. The "Big Bang" covers the current theory that the universe started smaller than an atom and then exploded into what we have today, hence "Big" and "Bang". The "Cambrian Explosion" on the other hand refers to an "Explosion" in the number of different life forms during a short period in the "Cambrian" era.
I do apologise for treating you like an idiot, but if you are going to deliberatly twist or misconstrue phrases which are well understood then you kind of open your self up to it.