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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.'"
Evolution is just a theory. There are other theories as well. Please make sure your kids get taught every possible theory or you will probably wind up in hell... or worse.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
I've known the answer to this problem for as long as I can remember, so did my mother and father. All christians know that that genetic mutation is simply the will of God. For so many years scientists puzzled over how a bee wings were capable of lifting it.. had they known the bee simply floats on the spirit of God, instead they search endless deadends, without hope and the realization of their inevitable damnation to the burning pits of hell.
Evidently Harvard would have us believe that a butterfly that looks like a butterfly, smells like a butterfly, and flies like a butterfly, but has a different colour stipe on its wing....
...has become something other than a butterfly????
Perhaps some day they will begin to utilize the same level of improbability in their research to discover why people care about this article.
Then again, harvard is busy trying to remember the words environmental adaptation and consequence.
When the butterflies start doing math...then send me the article.
Sam
sortof like the unprovable assumption of evolution????? a theory is a theory my friend, unless you have a blog entry from 10,000 BC (sorry...new earth dates) But then again, the sheer numeric improbability of evolution is science. Sorry, I forgot.
Oh, wait, I remember... it takes millions of years, doesn't it? (-:
True. Which is why the labelling of evolution as "science" rather than "creation myth for Atheists" has long puzzled me.The article referred to here is typical: we believe that speciation drives evolution, have done so since we believed that those incredibly intricate sets of interwoven biological factories called cells were just little bags of slime. Just now, after more than a century of holding this as nothing less than an article of faith, we think we might be seeing it happening. Maybe.
I've got news for you: speciation is pretty much inevitable from the perspective of a creationist. Any differentiation due to information loss or separation is, starting from the premise of a fallen, decaying world.
As to your Intelligent Design straw-man, it's easy to disprove. Simply show that all existing structure is practically achievable through random chance, and you're done. That's a lot harder row to hoe than you assume.
Last point: string theory is "safe" to criticise since it's off in the theoretical boonies, and there are other Materialist theories for it to compete with. There are no immediate theological consequences if string theory is proven useless.
The theory of evolution is not "safe" to criticise, since it can be tested in our own back-yard and has immediate theological implications whenever something that's effectively impossible to produce by evolutionary processes is found. And you know what? Each time something like that is noticed, it's written off with a statement along the lines of "we'll eventually find a way of explaining this with evolution, never you mind". That statement is an act of faith. "There's no evidence for it here, but I believe in evolution, brother, how about you?"
If it turns out that these butterflies speciate -- or not -- it will be no more a proof of evolution than the variation in beak shape amongst Darwin's Finches was. If there's honesty in modern science, it's in the follow-up study to that one, which showed that the beaks changed right back when the environment changed right back.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Disclaimer: I am not a creationist.
I do, however have the following problems with evolution, none of which have been properly explained to do this day. I base my decisions on nothing but logic, and logic would dictate that evolutionists have taken natural selection as a theory and blown it into some religion on the theory of life.
Here they are:
1) Chance over probability. This is probably the weakest argument (because we *could* be the 1 in septendecillion instance), but it is a significant one, because many of the same individuals that believe we evolved from single-cell organisms also believe in extraterrestrial life within our own galaxy. You'd think these individuals would actually be ID proponents.
2) Second law of thermodynamics. While another somewhat weak argument in the eyes of many evolution proponents, the significance of a mutation actually increasing the intellectual properties of of an organism would be a major scientific find of unbelievable proportions and would indicate that our analysis of closed systems needs to be rethought. Specifically, I'm talking about DNA and the "information argument". Species don't just get smarter, yet it is clear that we are more intelligent than dogs, for instance. The hard part is determining *why*.
3) Fossilized records. This is one of the more common arguments so I won't focus on it, but where are the fossils of these transitory species? It is believed that many species of frogs and other amphibians which are more likely to experience natural selection have been undergoing this on a regular basis, yet no evidence has been found of such.
4) Dating methods. Another small but significant argument. Rocks that have formed within just the last century are often mis-dated as being formed billions of years previous. There are many documented accounts of this which get poo-pooed by evolutionists.
5) Spontaneous generation. It's never been proven. This is the work of 1400s urban legends about maggots forming when a cow's tail hits water, to see esteemed scientists falling to this level is nothing short of a tragedy.
6) Micro-evolution is observable and falsifiable. Macro-evolution is not falsifiable. If something is not falsiable, like creation for instance, it's considered part of a belief system or religion.
7) Evolution of the eye. We have no indication of how or why the eye evolved. Likewise, we have no indication of why there are creatures that have existed for 50 million years, like bats, and have been blind for the entire period.
8) Evolution of the vertebrae. IMHO, this may be the strongest argument against evolution. We have absolutely no idea why or how the vertebrae came into existance.
Mod parent +1 Funny please, you uptight jerks =P
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...I didn't say anything of the sort... but, since you called it to my attention, I think it's worth pointing out a couple of things.
One of them being that Evolutionism in general (including Darwinism) is very weak as a theory for precisely that reason: because it can be bent and twisted to fit any situation (including contradicting itself) it's about as useful for building a logical structure as wet spaghetti is for building a bridge.
You should also beware of confusing the Modern Synthesis with Darwinism. Charles Darwin (and no doubt his granddaddy Erasmus) believed in "pangenes", a form of Lamarkism. Darwinism per se is genuinely a disproven theory, even by the standards of other serious evolutionists. Which is sad, since there's a good chance that it's actually closer to correct than its successors. (-:
If evolution can't explain something, then the explanations get changed, the stories built around the theory (theories if you want to be pedantic) get wilder and more imaginative. The theory itself, however, is holy and sacrosanct. Few dare seriously commit the heresy of openly questioning it (thank you, for example, Antony Flew), and those who do are rapidly shouted down. Even the late Stephen J Gould, with his "survival of the luckiest" concept and punctuated equilibria, took a lifetime of sacrificial labour to get that viewpoint -- a relatively trivial change compared with what should be happening -- accepted as a kind of niche cult within evolutionism.
Never confuse motion with action.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...a synonym for "impossible".
True story.
It is statistically rigorous to regard odds of 10^50 against as "impossible" and the statistical likelihood of abiogenesis having ever happened anywhere in the universe as we know it, ever, are at least several times as many orders of magnitude less possible than that.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
We need do no such thing. Proving that abiogenesis is probable would be enough.
That's going to be hard. Very hard.
We have some fine ideas about how many quanta of time are available, and how many quanta of matter. Factoring all of those out under the most optimistic of conditions (e.g. that distance doesn't exist and that every particle interacts in every temporal quantum) results in some stupidly big numbers of universes in which life doesn't happen. The odds stand at thousands of orders of magnitude against.
Doing things by degrees makes those numbers much worse.
Invoking a random (i.e. non-ID) anthropic principle (a principle, by the way, which lacks any direct evidence) doesn't help very much, since the vast, vast majority of the vanishingly small number of probability universes in which the way-beyond-impossible happens should all be considerably more hostile to life than the one we observe. If we are here through random anthropocentricity, we are still literally impossibly lucky.
Asserting that life is inevitable given the properties of matter is not only distinctly unobservant, but even if it had a grain of truth in it you would be facing another Pandora's box: why should those physical principles exist as such?
And so on.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
This whole article sounds like propaganda for Kentuckians to marry their sisters.
-THE END-
> Evolution reinforced a "staged" lifecycle.
I agree with you. Where the "staged" lifecycle came from is a gigantic question mark that evolution has not explained.
From TFA (2nd paragraph):
Now, researchers studying a family of butterflies think they have witnessed a subtle process, which could be forcing a wedge between newly formed species.
Can't this be rewritten as 'Scientists finally witnessed (micro)evolution at work'? And doesn't it imply that all those scientists who zealously treat evolution as a 'fact' or 'law' - before the observations described in this article were even observed - are actually being unscientific?
At this stage, I still see evolution as a hypothesis and the evidences and data collected still is very inconclusive to show that that's how the organisms on this planet became diverse.
What's the difference between what's observed in butterflies and in humans? Caucasians predominantly produce children with other Caucasians, African with Africans, Asians with Asians and so on, and for thousands of years... sure, they look very different, but even today and after thousands of years of existence (maybe more), someone from any continent can produce children from anyone of the opposite sex from another continent (and that's with thousands of years, if not more of Geographical isolation). Okay, so maybe we reproduce too slow... so how about cell-level organisms? They reproduce extremely fast... have we observed a single cell become a multi-cell organism? Nope.
Anyway, the theory of evolution is inconclusive and is likely not the sole mechanism for speciation, and thus it should not be treated as the only mechanism in many text books and by those who claim they are scientific.
how's this for size...
/. would mod this into oblivion. And doing such would prove my point further.
you create a planet, all life in plant and animal form, insects and microscopic too and then you can talk.
until you can create on such a fundamental level such as dna, and create entire ecosystems which are still unnumberd on this planet - don't complain and try to prove intelligent design.
a being infinitely superior to you and I created these things and until we become just like him, we can not understand why certian species were made to see better than us, or hear better than us, or feel better than us.
I'd like to venture a guess, but the anti-religous / deity sentiment on
but that's just my 2 pence.
Please, don't lump all "religious people" together under the umbrella of fundamentalists.
All religious people are, by definition, wrong. The very definition of religion is believing in something in which there is no proof whatsoever (hence, faith). I personally have zero respect for any religious person, no matter how moderate the claim to be. Anybody who talks to invisible beings either A. Has a mental disorder or B. willfully chooses to ignore reality. I have no interest at all in having anything to do with such people.