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Butterfly Unlocks Evolution Secret
Anonymous Coward writes "The BBC has an article about a dramatic discovery in the quest for understanding evolution. From the article: 'Why one species branches into two is a question that has haunted evolutionary biologists since Darwin. Given our planet's rich biodiversity, "speciation" clearly happens regularly, but scientists cannot quite pinpoint the driving forces behind it. Now, researchers studying a family of butterflies think they have witnessed a subtle process, which could be forcing a wedge between newly formed species.'"
Mutations occur, and when they occur in parallel for members of the same species, and those mutations survive into succeeding generations, you achieve speciation. End of story. What am I missing?
Now, if you want to talk about butterflies and evolution, then answer for me how it is that butterflies could have evolved in the first place. You're talking about a two-stage organism here, one stage does nothing but eat, the other stage does nothing but procreate. Which came first?
If it was the caterpillar, how is it that it suddenly figures out how to create a cocoon, lay dormant for a winter, then emerge as a completely different creature? They obviously had the means for procreation on their own, so why bother becoming a butterfly?
If it was the butterfly, why even bother with the caterpillar stage? If you can already fly around and stuff, why bother crawling?
People cite all these other examples trying to bring down evolution, and to me they never succeed, it's obvious to me for instance how eyes evolved. But caterpillars turning into butterflies still boggles my mind.
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Why didn't you know?
I wonder if this has any impact on the view of racism?
Racism is a *very* touchy subject, and I may get flamed just for bringing it up, but doesn't this sound like butterfly racism? If this were, in fact, a provable, natural, biological mechanism, then, wouldn't we, as biological organisms, be falling prety to much the same effect? Isn't racism a social form of speciation?
What impact would this have on the ACLU? Hiring quotas? The civil rights movement in general?
I'm not suggesting that racism is good. But, might these be related?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
In higher order animals, such as Orcas, behavioral differences can bring about the separation into two species. There are two distinct groups of Orcas, those which hunt fish and those which hunt seals. These two behaviors are fairly different, as fish hunting Orcas herd schools of fish to make consuming them easier. Seal hunting orcas are know to "dive" several feet onto ice flows to catch seals. They also thrash seals around in the water to subdue them. These two groups do not mix as their learned behaviors and sub-environs are different. It is easy to imagine that these two groups are slowly diverging, as they engage in different diets, breed within their own groups and engage in different physical activities.
Of course, I am a physicist and a mathematician. All of my bio-knowledge comes from The Discovery Channel.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
Think about it, cats, dogs, chickens, pigeons, cows, all of these exhibit wild variation in marking and coloration when they live with humans. Even humans themselves seem to have more variability when compared to other primates.
It's just because of selective breeding. If you let different dog breeds mate then after a few generations then they tend towards the "basic dog" type.
For a more detailed and accurate description take a look at the Wikipedia article on mixed-breed dogs.
Then you've got tandem sequence repeats... which is a whole 'nother story, but they are very susceptible to DNA copying errors and you can evolve e.g. a very different curve of a dog's snout in a century by selecting for different lengths of tandem repeats.
Yes, all this stuff is on the web. Everything you need to completely and authoritatively refute every argument made by creationists (the "intelligent design" brand or the traditional) is on the web.
(Okay, who's the Slashcode nitwit whose filter cancels the <i> tag when a list is started?)
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Okay, how about this:
Wave two pencils in front of a person, about 30cm apart. Then, have them cover one eye and step away slowly, while looking at one pencil tip, until they can't see other due to their blind spot.
Now, ask a squid to do the same thing.
Guess what? Squids have no blind spot, because the optic nerve and blood vessels connect to the eye without interrupting the potosensitive cells.
An intelligent designer (when hypothesizing that the designer was the same for both) would not have produced a defective eye for humans when they designed it properly the first time (only the day before).
Of course, not only humans have a blind spot; all vertbrates do. Likewise, many creatures other than squids do not suffer from blind spots-encumbered vision.
You can easily disprove intelligent design, because both "intelligent" and "design" (not to mention the other attributes of the particular designer that most folks seem to have in mind) imply certain conditions that their designs would have to exibit relative to other designs by that same author.
You are confusing dogma, spirituality and science.
You see, religion is like a banana. It tastes good and does good. Our western modern society is actually based on this banana. However, in time people have thrown the banana and kept the skin. This has been an awful waste, because the skin is not edible and gives a stomach ache. But this makes people hold on to the skin even more, because now they've lost the banana! They even start arguing what part of the skin is "the best"..
Basically, "the skin" is symbols, traditions, flags, icons, etc. It's just a wrapping paper. You unwrap the package, and then throw away the wrapping, not the other way around.
Spirituality is what this banana consists of. It is based on direct experience. Everybody has some spirituality, even if it's just to accept that they have a daily life where they go to work and party on weekends. You cannot argue against somebody's direct experience..
Science is trying to make everybody agree on the same reality. Sadly however, in the process, science has thrown away much of the banana-core too, confusing it for the skin..
Basically, our whole "modern" society has thrown away the banana. The result is higher rates of depression, cancer, stress, suicides, etc. This is because of lack of spirituality and roots in this world. A feeling of alienation and that we don't belong here.
So you see, I accept both spirituality and science as complentary, thus my world is bigger than if I had just accepted one or the other.
What is needed at this time, is to globalize spirituality. Find a set of human values we all agree on and nurture and cultivate that, and cherish each other's different worldviews. Otherwise, the negative trends will just become worse.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/