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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!
AS FAR as humans are concerned, language has got to be the ultimate evolutionary innovation.
:)
really? by reading slashdot, it feels more like devolution to me!
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
How about DNA? It's contains all genetic information that determines how cells are formed and how they behave. It's what allows cells to copy the essence of themselves from one generation to the next, and allows them to continue on the platform from where the last generation left off. If our cells weren't packing around little mini protein 'storage devices', not a whole lot would be happening.
And talk about missing options sheesh! Best evolutionary adaptation? I vote breasts!
The single most amazing evolutionary adaptation is undoubtedly YOU. That a mouth breathing dolt, such as yourself, has been able to survive at all, let alone this long, defies all logic and brings the entire theory of evolution into question.
In fact, if ever there was evidence of an omnipotent diety, YOU are it! Obviously, God exists and in your case, he had a terrible accident!
Without reading one of the supplementary articles...
I am not buying language as an object of biological evolution at all. At best, it seems to be an expressed meme, rather than a genetic advancement, or a trait that can be selected for. Also, I am not buying the facts expressed in the article abotu language. Haven't we taught chimps and apes sign language? Aren't there example of such creatures telling us things spontaneously (the most recent example was when the chimp told some scientists that it had a mildly severe toothache)? It doesn't seem that language is merely confined to humans, but it further seems like a learned trait rather than a biological trait. For instance, even if we had the biological capacity for language, there does not seem to be an inherant argument for the actual expression of language. In other words, an organism may have the capacity to express a meme-like trait, but may never actually express it. Thus, in humans, the capacity to understand language may be selected for, but the language usage itself is a socially learned trait. Also I would wonder if we never began using our capacity for language, then if the capacity may be biologically selected for, but if the utility of that capacity is never expressed, then why is the gene for that capacity being selected for?
"It's true that many species, including insects, lizards and plants, do fine without sex, at least for a while." ... don't forget about Slashdot readers... ZING!
How could they omit the female human breast?
Weird. I would have expected to see an opposable thumb on that list. I mean, isn't that kind of important for us? Or maybe I'm just being too human-centric.
Creationists.
*ducks*
Didn't that happen in the 60's?
"However useful sex may be now that we've got it, that doesn't tell us anything about how it got started"
Are they kidding? I'm sure it was a 'double dog dare' on a Tuesday afternoon in the garden of eden.
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Time for another beer...
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
I really wish one of those researchers would spend some time responding to this guy, the owner of a website called Evolution, a Fairytale for Grownups! A lot of the features mentioned in the article come up on his site, although argued against in an un-proffesional manner (for more adult discussion he also posts debates that he's won.
For all the evidence presented by popular media and through the education system, there seem to be a lot of people, including scientists, who can't accept evolutionary theory, and dismiss it as propaganda.
Considering the recent "Just a theory" textbook-sticker fiasco, there are a lot of big divides going on in America right now. Now, since this is Slashdot, the responses are going to be quite biased, but do you Americans find that a lot of friends, co-workers and family don't accept evolutionary theory?
Photosynthesis is definitely the top for me. It changed the chemistry of the entire planet. Of course the human brain has done the same, but we will soon be extinct and out impact rather small compared to photosynthesis.
"Asleep at the switch? I wasn't asleep, I was drunk!" -- Homer
Death is what allows evolution to occur in the first place. Without death, organisms couldn't be replaced by ever improving versions of themselves.
Sponges are a key example of multicellular life
i s16.html
No, its not called a sponge, its called a falafel thing.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/1013043mackr
-Bill
Top 10 Reasons To Procrastinate
10.
They really should have said programmed cell death, or apoptosis.
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
Somewhat along the same lines, Carl Zimmer also talked about "resurrecting the genome" of a mammalian ancestor from about 80 million years ago. Snippets of the genome are present in all mammals today. By comparing the genomes of various mammals, they were able to come up with a pretty good approximate of the genome. This chart shows how much of the original genome different mammals have. Surprisingly, humans have lost only 25% of the original genome, whereas rats and mice have lost more than twice that. I would have thought otherwise since the earliest mammals were shrewlike... but I'm not a biologist/geneticist/whoever studies these things.
He also wrote this article some time ago that talked about Resurrecting the Genome. Here is another article (by him) on the same topic, that appeared on NY Times.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
The use of the dash in "G-d" is a Jewish custom.
My four favorite things produced by evolution: yeast, barley, hops, and monks.
really? by reading slashdot, it feels more like devolution to me!
OMG u R teh st00p1D!!11!eleventy-leven!!WTFBBQQED!!111!
Gah - how can people actually communicate that way? That sentence alone (such as it was) made me feel icky.
Perhaps Coneasfast is correct...
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
You can post it the second time this article appears on the Slashdot front page.
It's what allows cells to copy the essence of themselves from one generation to the next, and allows them to continue on the platform from where the last generation left off.
And if you don't have DNA, you don't have imperfectly-replicating life forms, which means that you don't have evolution. As such, you cannot use evolution to go from the stage where there is no DNA to where there is, because it involves at least one step where you don't have reproducing life forms.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
I certainly appreciate orgasms, and I hope to have thousands more in my lifetime, but I would score sightedness above orgasms without hesitation.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
I'm not accusing the people who anthropromorphize as being bad scientists - I'm sure that they have the proper understanding of evolution and natural selection and similar concepts within their mind. However, what you have to realize is that your audience may not. Making consistent use of words like innovation and discovery, and general verbs associated with multicellular life makes the article sound more like journalism than science.
I realize that it's probably convenient to not have to worry about portraying modern evolutionary theory in the right manner, but it's also responsible. I wouldn't be bringing this up if I didn't run into it every single day - we anthropromorphize to such a degree that eventually we ourselves begin to believe that evolution really is a deliberate mechanism that acts towards creating the "perfect" life form.
and where would we be with journalists? Probably without the iraq war for once.
"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."--Howard Zinn
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
There is a solar eclipse today, a sure sign that the gods are mocking the Pope and his "one true god". :)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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...without some moron like you coming in, spewing out a completely invalid analogy founded upon faulty premises and a total lack of understanding of the actual theory of evolution and then arrogantly acting as though you've somehow falsified the last 150 years of biological research with the amazing power of your ignorance.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
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.
Why not? Many organisms already survive long enough to compete with their offspring. If the descendants of an organism are "better" than the ancestor, then they will outcompete the ancestor regardless of whether or not the ancestor is genetically programmed to die.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Immortality, now that would be a nice adaptation!
In the short and narrow terms, death seems like a failure but globally and long term, death is necessary for the survival of the species.
On a microscopic level death is vital to keep the whole organism healthy. The article specifically mentions cellular programmed suicide. Most of the time, cells in multicelluar bodies like ourselves commit suicide when they detect abnormalities in themselves. So far researchers have identified the gene (p53) in humans that directs this behavior. Cancer is the result when p53 fails to work correctly.
Macroscopically, death and evolution are mutually intertwined. The creatures with the most desirable traits can direct the path of the species with survival. Less desirable genes are removed from the population by death. In addition to gene and trait selection, death keeps populations healthy by keeping populations in check. Death ensures that limited resources are not depleted.
Imagine if every human that ever died of simple old age was still around today. I don't think the Earth could support that many humans. Because we at the top of the food chain, there are few if any predators that keep our population in check. We could easily deplete all the food, space, water, etc.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Simply put, the Pope had made statements over his life that if not complete endoresments of evolution, were hardely condemnations of it.
Although it's open to interpretation, I'd say that this is a tacit admission that evolution is correct.
Sangloth
I'd appreciate any comment witb a logical basis...it doesn't even have to agree with me.
1. tonsils - create more problems than they're worth. F*cking swelling, soreness and sleep apnea.
2. appendix - that's a winner.
3. coccyx - I had to look this up to spell this useless thing right.
4. funny bone - this has never made me laugh. It has helped with new curse words though.
5. needing sleep - 8 hours-c'mon, can't we evolve down to 2 or so.
6. the knee - there has got to be a better way- stretched ligaments, torn ACL's etc.
7. religion - nuff said.
8. ingrown toenails - trim trim trim
9. ingrown hair - great fun digging them out
10. balding - (or hair migration to the back) what is the point of this "evolutionary advance"?
I'm sure I missed many
Ah, but if an organism that has the potential to live forever has children that will someday be able to compete with and eventually kill it, better to kill it asap instead of waiting for it to get strong. In fact, it's better to not have children at all.
Only organisms that will die no matter what they do have a motivation for helping their children survive. Since organisms that do not die of old age will not evolve, organisms that do not die of old age will eventually be killed by those that do die of old age.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
We could easily deplete all the food, space, water, etc.
Except that, with a little salt and pepper, we are food.
I can accept the eye as a bad day at the office, but what sort of deranged engineer runs a sewer through the playground???
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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
Genetically programmed death implies gradual breakdown of the organism. If there was no genetically programmed death, there probably wouldn't be the gradual breakdown either. The offspring would have a very difficult time competing with older, more experienced, and physically fit ancestors despite the small genetic advantages the offspring might have. Also, the gene pool would be much less dynamic with lots of ancenstors hanging around and continuing to breed.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
In fact, things could be argued from a different approach. It could be possible that programmed cellular death is an adaptation for succesful reproduction. Without death we have the danger of overpopulation, a population crash, and the eventual death of everybody. Without reproduction we have the eventual extintion of the species as the environment changes but the species does not.
A population needs some sort of dependable death mechanism in order to keep it in balance with the environment's resources and it also needs reproduction in order to keep it adapting to changes on said environment. Without this "dependable" death, we would most likely not have ecosystems to begin with.
Given this was published in New Scientist (a magazine about, you know, science) this is probably not particularly contraversal. I suspect the vast majority of their readers have already accepted the theory of evolution.
You actually have to be very fundamentalist to deny evolution. How fundamentalist? Well, the last two Popes both supported the theory of evolution, as will, most likely, all future Popes.
With regards to the first three items on the list, these are best described as "vestigial" stuctures. That is, they're body parts that evolution forgot--they once served a useful purpose, but no longer have any value or function.
The same thing can be said of wisdom teeth, for example. Or paralell ports.
Presumably, as these structures continue to cause problems for some members of the species, while providing no advantages, evolutionary processes would eventually eliminate them.
I recently thought that Virii might be a means for - in place evolution.
In other words - who is to say Virii are anti-evolutionary. Since virii are produced by the living and capable of carrying DNA and implanting it between living orgs.
It seems possible that virii could be used to communicate survival strategies between living orgs in real time rather than over generational time.
By merely surviving and exuding my DNA in the form of Virii, it stands that the population of DNA floating around in the air contains segments of info which belong exclusively to the surviving set, and if I can implement their codes, my chances of surviving are increased - moreover if i can incorporate the codes of my entire tribe into my child, then my offspring will bear the marks of all the living members of my community.
Thus the argument that virii are - hypersexual genetic hints used to inform genetic variation in real time.
AIK
Soon (on an evolutionary scale) to be evolution's obvious #1 achievement: coming up with a brain capable of moving life off-planet.
We're not going to become extinct, and photosynthesis only affected (as far as we know) one planet. We're bringing life to the universe.
Sponges are very cool -- you can put one through a sieve so fine that it's broken down into individual cells, and it will then reassemble itself into a complete sponge, but with every cell rearranged into a new position! Apparently the scientist who first did this (ca. 1900) then tried doing it with two separate sponges of different species at once, and was disappointed when they didn't reassemble into a hyrbid. Shows how little they knew about the microscopic basis of genetics at that time.
Find free books.
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.
- What is [life's] purpose? - To successfully reproduce before you are eaten.
- What is *our* purpose? - See #1.
That's it. That's all there is. Reproduction. Everything else is just strategies to help us reproduce or control reproduction. However, you have a massive brain that bestows upon you language and consciousness. This gives you the ability to do more with your life than simply have kids.The purpose of your life is whatever you decide it will be. If you want a grand purpose then give yourself one. If all you want to do is watch TV until you fall over dead one day, go for it. There is no grand purpose. The universe doesn't give a wet slap what you do or if you live or die.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
with Chomskey arguing that (as I understand it) there is no one gene for language, that many seperate adaptations happened, in many species, each one giving some kind of evolutionary advantage. Only in humanity is the final piece of the language pie added, giving us full blown language. Pinker, OTOH (again, I may be misreading this) argues that there is only one language gene that evolved fully only in humanity.
Chomskey talks about a major factor that seems unique to humans language, recursion. We can merge sounds into words, words into phrases, phrases into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs recursively.
In any case, there are certainly creatures that have a more rudimentary form of language, and even culture, so memes ("use stick to catch termites! wash sand from yams!") were being passed around before full blown language came about. The article doesn't claim that all language is confined to humans, just that language as humans use it/i
is, which is self evident.
As far as being biological, this was Chomskey's major thesis from way back. He showed that all languages are built around identical deep structures. If language were merely learned, and not in some sense inherent, that would not be the case. We would find languages that were constructed in vastly differing ways. Instead, there are certain built in rules that all languages comply with.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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.
I thought I read somewhere that if human could live forever then the average life span would be about 600 years.
Just because you can live-forever does not mean you can avoid the statistics of fatal accidents.
You would get the odd person to live to over a 1000 just like we find people today that live beyond 100 years.
The really bad thing about people living forever is the jobs. How would you like the entry level position for the next 200 years and by the time you could get an advancement your skills would be out of date so some young punk would get the job over you. I doubt anyone would like being a burger flipper for 300 years! I have my doubt that any marriage would last more than 100 years.
My Sig indicates the end of the comment I posted.
Imagine if every human that ever died of simple old age was still around today. I don't think the Earth could support that many humans. Because we at the top of the food chain, there are few if any predators that keep our population in check. We could easily deplete all the food, space, water, etc.
On an interesting note, it has been estimated that there are currently more people living than the number of people that have died in the history of humanity. Greatly moreso if you only count the deaths of those who died of old age. But this is just a reflection of exponential growth and the current situation that we are in, not an indication of permanent, sustainable trends.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Anybody else ever considered regigions as some kind of parasistic idea, living and propagating on the human mind, and subjected to the same kind of natural selection as living beings ?
Imagine that : religions appear and mutate randomly, and only the liveliest branches, the ones most able to hold out against reality and other religions gain followers and thus multiply...
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.
The common practice of creationists citing the eye as a challenge to evolution reveals how abysmally primitive their knowledge of science is. To be sure, in Darwin's time the eye seemed miraculous enough that Darwin felt obliged to devote a special discussion to how it might have evolved by selection.
But we know a lot more today that Darwin knew. In particular, our knowledge of biochemistry is more advanced. We now know that all sorts of biochemical reactions are sensitive to light. It is almost inevitable that in a mostly transparent life form, the activity of some nerve cells would be affected by light. Given the extreme selective advantage to sensing light, evolution of light sensors of increasing sophistication seems almost unavoidable.
Images formed upside down
Why does it matter where the photo-receptors are physically if they can be logically connected in any way?
Uh Oh. What if the octopus is the crown of creation and humans are just here for their amusment. That would explain a lot.
Not forgetting
4. Lost the ability to see in ultra-violet.
From a study of 'opsins', the chemical molecules that convert light into electrons, and enable vision to work, many small animals and insects have the ability see these wavelengths. Humans seem to have lost this ability, due to the increased refraction at short wavelengths caused by larger eyes.
5. To be able to visualize magnetic field lines.
Magnetically sensitive molecules have been found in avian retinas. The theory is that these could appear as some sort of overhead display in the bird's mind (although, nothing more than lines running across the field of view, or maybe a pair of light/dark spots).
6. To be able to visualize polarised light (as used by the octopus). Underwater, light is polarized by the reflection of light reflected off fish scales. Many fish try and camouflage themselves by trying to match the optical intensity of their surroundings. For simple predators this works, but more complex creatures
such as the octopus are not fooled.
Also, polarized light can be used to signal to other members of the species without attracting undue attention.
7. Or having 16 visual pigments like the Stomatopod, which is also known to use polarised light to signal to others of the same species (And which also has stereo vision using one eye).
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Why does it matter where the photo-receptors are physically if they can be logically connected in any way?
First, you quoted a different sentence than the one that stated that the photoreceptors are backwards.
I think that what he means are that the photoreceptors are positioned BEHIND the ganglion and bipolar cells, which seems a very poor choice for cells allegedly 'designed' to receive light coming in from the pupil. It would make more sense to have the photoreceptors right up front, where the light can hit them directly, unobstructed.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
I've always wondered if the reason faith and religion are still so popular today despite the discoveries of science about life, is because people are too scared to consider the truth about existence.
There's that. Some people feel a need for structure, because they feel it excuses them of having to think. But religion would persist, even without that. Priests have wielded vast political power for centuries. From the "Divine Emperors" in Rome to the Divine Right of Kings, (in the past, and even in the modern day), religion has been a powerful tool for social control.
To this day, coins of the British Commonwealth read "D. G. Regina", which was latin for "Dei Gratia Regina": or 'By God's Grace, our Queen'. To this day, coins in the USA read "In God We Trust". Religion still has teeth.
It's been used to terrible effect, even in recent years. My friend in Ethiopia was taught as a boy that his King literally descended from Heaven. People were taught to believe it, and so they did, despite what their King did to them. The King, a selfish bastard, bought up all the food during a food shortage; and deliberately caused a famine. Food prices are higher during a famine, you see. Many people starved to death. No one blamed the King.
Years later, my friend told me his sister came to visit: and he mentioned what a bastard their King had been. By reflex, she objected: "You shouldn't talk about him that way". She'ld been conditioned to believe good things about their King: and she couldn't stop, despite excellent reasons to do so. She couldn't escape her social conditioning. That's what religious indocrination (a form of Christianity, in her case) can do to someone. Be careful out there!
I'm curious how older, non-religious geeks have come to terms with thoughts about death and dying when its impossible for one to believe that there is anything after death.
You mean, where does my "soul" go when I die? Well, my lawnmower is a loud, roaring thing that cuts grass. Where does the "soul" of my lawnmower go, all that "roaringness" and "cuttingness" that somehow "goes away" when the motor "dies"? When the machine breaks down, what happens to the essence of that machine that I've constructed in my mind? Where does the "essential lawnmowerness" go when the engine fails? Where does my "essential soul" go when my body can't be repaired? It's the same trick question, in my mind.
So, I don't let have a religion guide my morality. I have to make do with my reason, and my concience. To me, not having a god to fall back on means I have to hold myself to a higher, not lesser, standard. There's no god to right the wrongs we don't fix. There's no guy in the sky who's going to help out people we don't help; no one to defend people we ourselves don't defend. That doesn't mean we give up; it means we try harder, and take every victory we can. It means we have to try to teach people to be better to each other, not because of a god commanded it, but because that's what makes life better for us all.
It means taking all those old religious virtues, like kindness, and compromise, and common sense, and applying them wisely, not dogmatically. Don't just blindly "Do unto others as you would have them do until you". They may not want what you want. Just try to make each other happy in the time you've got. You've only got one life, kid. Make the most of it.
--
An old atheist AC
You obviously know nothing about Gnosticism.
One or more of the Gnostic cults postulated that the "God" who created this Earth was a "blind, idiot God" and that there was a (female, IRRC) deity above him that would set things right eventually.
I think Angelina Jolie is her.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Of course, the quote by Darwin is taken out of context. Darwin then describes how the eye might evolve by gradual steps. From eye complexity,
1. This is the quintessential example of the argument from incredulity. The source making the claim usually quotes Darwin saying that the evolution of the eye seems "absurd in the highest degree". However, Darwin follows that statement with a three-and-a-half-page proposal of intermediate stages through which eyes might have evolved via gradual steps (Darwin 1872).
* photosensitive cell
* aggregates of pigment cells without a nerve
* an optic nerve surrounded by pigment cells and covered by translucent skin
* pigment cells forming a small depression
* pigment cells forming a deeper depression
* the skin over the depression taking a lens shape
* muscles allowing the lens to adjust
All of these steps are known to be viable because all exist in animals living today. The increments between these steps are slight and may be broken down into even smaller increments. Natural selection should, under many circumstances, favor the increments. Since eyes do not fossilize well, we do not know that the development of the eye followed exactly that path, but we certainly cannot claim that no path exists.
Nilsson and Pelger (1994) calculated that if each step were a 1 percent change, the evolution of the eye would take 1,829 steps, which could happen in 364,000 generations.
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.
...forex, the co-development of neurons and supporting cogitative power to do something useful with this new information (get the flock out of here when a predator arrives, while not making a target of yourself by leaping about every time some flake of debris gets between you and the light) isn't even mentioned, let alone calculated.
Foranotherex, the step from, for example, a skin-covered depression to a genuinely useful lens is a lot more than 1%.
Forathirdex, even ignoring all other genetic factors to do with viability and such-like, the likelihood of 1829 random mutations in a row all producing the "correct" result tending towards an eye are just stupidly low.
It wouldn't take long to stumble over more problems, but the talkorigins crew never seem to trouble themselves with doing that. Can't imagine why.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Not believing in something is not the same as hating it.
It is pretty miraculous, in the way that 66 separate accounts tainted by human influence and church bureaocracy represent the truth of all things. Funny how those in the early church kept all the right writings and threw away all the writings that were incorrect or irrelevant. Of course, no-one had an agenda. Hypothetically, uf there was an account of Jesus saying "Organised religion is inherently evil and misleading", would the early Christian church include it in the bible, or would it be conviniently left to one side?
The bible is not used often by historians. It sometimes contradicts with archelogical evidence, and the records of other civilisations. It is awash with contradictions.
Personally, I've always been confused by Gods seeming lack of morality. Thou shalt not kill, but it's perfectly alright for God to commit genocide, then commit his victims to an eternity of suffering. This does not fit my definition of a loving God.
What about immunity to a particular drug? Viruses and bacteria in particular mutate and share DNA like we share ideas.
If you mean "observed" by "watch it happening right this instant with one's own eyes", then no. Instead, as with sciences such as astronomy and geology, evidence is gathered through finding patterns in past events.
The distinction between 'macroevolution' and 'microevolution' I've never understood. It seems to be that it's a belief that small changes in the short term cannot add up to large changes in the long term. And that's the thing that seems rather odd to me. It's like saying, well, perhaps gravity keeps this solar system together, but how can it possibly keep whole galaxies together?
Not to me. For instance, Hawking Radiation is a theory derived from direct observations about relativity and quantum mechanics. It says that black holes will emit radiation, inversely proportionate to their size. This has never been observed, because the radiation involved would be too small, and our only hope of observing it is to find miniture black holes created at the beginning of the Universe. Yet despite this lack of observable events, it does provide a rational explanation as to why small black-holes would evaporate into thin air, explaining a lack of small black holes. Scientists accept it as probably true, because it combines observable events to predict unobservable pheonomenon.
Then I'm curious about your take on distance of stars. We can see that a particular star or galaxy is so many millions of light-years away, using basic triangulation. We have observed that light travels at a constant rate. Therefore, the light would take millions of years to reach us, implying the the Universe has to be at least this old.
The only explanation to this, if you believe in Creationism and a young Universe, is that God created the light in place, The star may not even be real; God could have created the light without bothering to construct a star -