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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.'"
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/25/002420 8&tid=105&tid=159
Nothing for you to see here, move along..
Wait, wtf?
And in a week or two, this submission will evolve only slightly and will reappear, slightly reworded, as another species of submission! Ain't evolution great.
firstposr
Zonk posted it, and I can't find a dupe for it. What the hell's going on here?!
Can someone please find me the dupe? I'm freaking out, man...
Fantasy Football
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.
--
Why didn't you know?
Oh, I remember that! Isn't it on kindergarden, when we throwed colored tint into a piece of paper and folded it on the middle? Then open it again and you've got a butterfly!
Sorry, this sig is beneath your current threshold
I don't remember, do they eat or do they produce butter?
are racist...
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.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
... why a code fork happens.
I am sure that given enough time, scientists can plug holes in the theory of evolution and answer questions that critics throw at it like. Remember, a theory can always be changed and disproved by evidence unlike intelligent design which can't be disproved(and no one seems to have proved it either).
And before someone starts an intelligent design rant, please remember, unprovable assumptions like 'there's a naturally occuring ipod on the dark side of the moon, since you can't disprove it, it exists' have no place in science at all. Also remember, science is self criticizing and self correcting, read up on the criticism on string theory if you have any doubts.
This space for rent.
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.
they've decided to fork?
- passion
FTA
The other mechanism that can theoretically divide a species is "reproductive isolation". This occurs when organisms are not separated physically, but "choose" not to breed with each other thereby causing genetic isolation, which amounts to the same thing.
Does this mean that geeks are soon to speciate and then ultimate fail as the male/female ratio is horrendously out of wack?
Check it out it here :)
v olution.html
http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/features/e
The BBC has an article about a dramatic discovery in the quest for understanding peanut butter. From the article: 'Why one brand branches into two (creamy and extra crunchy) is a question that has haunted consumer researchers since Wells. Given our supermarket's rich selection of brands, "crunchification" clearly happens regularly, but consumers cannot quite pinpoint the driving forces behind it. Now, marketers studying a family of Des Plains, IL think they have witnessed a subtle process, which could be forcing a wedge between newly formed peanut butter manufacturing processes
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Expect really concentrated attacks on this research by the redneck^Wcreationist brigade. "But speciation has never been observed" has been the strongest rallying cry of evolution-deniers for more than a century...
Maybe I'm missing something but doesn't the question just now become, "Why don't the butterflies want to breed with butterflies that look slightly different?" In speciation through geographic separation, the answer is clear: they simply can't so there's no choice to be made. In this case the tendency to make that choice must be the result of evolution as well. This may make sense but it certainly isn't as clear cut as geographic separation. The snake seems to be eating its tail here.
It's said this 'team striping' has happened before with early man and chimps. Early chimps were no more hairy then Italian women, but the disastrous results lead chimpanzees to get as hairy as Turkish women which discouraged human-chimp hybrids.
The article says that the mutations have different wing-markings, and descendents prefer mating with those of the same wing-markings, keeping the two paths separate.
After reading the the article I wonder why dogs, for example, do not fracture into mutliple species? Great Danes for example do not repoduce with say Boston Terriers. Their genetic line are continously reinforced and isolated.
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.
So, what does this study mean?
After reading this article I got the impression that butterflies developed a natual mechanism to discourage inter-breeding with genetically distant butterflies (and to encourage breeding with only closely related butterflies) to promote the retainment of traits beneficial to that particular subgroup of butterflies and to promote forward evolution.
How does this translate to humans? Is this basically saying that race mixing is inheritly deviant to nature or to natural evolution?
It has been well known that butterflies are responsible for all of history for decades. Just
go back and read Bradbury again.
So what's so new about this article anyway?
So is the human race going to evolve into seperate species based on skin colour then?
I feel that this result would be a bad study to quote in a casual argument supporting evolution because of the taboos surrounding perceived sexuality and race in general.
Sam
What is new? Eventually even mankind will evolve into different species.
Oh well, what the hell...
Um, I assumed the answer to the question "why does speciation happen" is "why not"?
Same problem - two stages - but both gets eaten... ;-)
Oh well, what the hell...
Butterflies are specious...
... I guess dictionary word attacks won't work on anti-script word images...)
(Impudent
Maybe software-based image grabbers/readers will defeat these protections, morphing into an allusive, specious attack...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
It is irresponsible for Slashdot to link to nonscientific extremist propoganda sources like the BBC. Where is the journalistic integrity? At the very least check the facts at a scientifically reviewed resource.
It is well known and mathematically proven that the specified complexity of metamorphic triggers of the butterfly is so high it is litterally off the scale. Yet extremist secularists stybbornly refuse the acknowledge the basic math and continue to deny the existence of an intelligent creator. They continue to try to force everyone to believe that which cannot be observed!
I have faith that the Slashdot crowd can see through the smoke and mirrors of the extremist naturalists and see the truth. As for the others, God forgive them for they know not what they do.
Listening to creationists rants over and over without end.
Great Danes for example do not repoduce with say Boston Terriers.
I think you will find that with a little Viagra, duct tape, creative patting, and yes, even a little TLC, you can get most any dog to mate with any other dog.
--
My home videos are all saran-wrapped.
>"But speciation has never been observed" has been the strongest rallying cry of evolution-deniers for more than a century...
And it has been a falsehood for at least half that time. Speciation has been observed in both the field an in the lab... repeatedly. Creationists trumpet the no observed speciation line until they are called on it, and then it becomes, "But they're still [fruit flies, fish, whatever]," The moving goal posts are the hallmark of creationism.Remember, the "scientists" at the Institution for Creation Research have to sign an oath that nothing they "discover" will ever conflict with a litteral interpretation of the Bible.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
I can disprove it: There is no dark side of the moon, thus, there couldn't be an iPod there. :-)
Not only is there an iPod on the dark side of the moon, but the Dark Side of the Moon is on the iPod.
I find all these evolutionary threads amusing. I know for a fact that God exists, but I'm still trying to figure out if evolution does. People do make a good case about evolution.
i wonder how long before the creationists demand the scienctists personal data:
0 2224&tid=158
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/24/0
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.
would be the realization that they were all wrong all along... ;-)
Oh well, what the hell...
sounds like this would definitely encourage reproduction, but speciation?
Hmmm, I somehow thing that's what happens when cooing cocoon politicians become presidents... and, since secretes is my image word, maybe some of their secretions need to be secreted away...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
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.
the inside of the moon is pretty dark!
/me looks at self for stripes that keep the females away
Don't tell the Kansas schoolboard - they have enough on their hands trying to deny all of the other evidence for evolution to have to handle another one.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
...So Fork You.
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
Geez. The mods have no sense of humor. Clearly he was not trolling... Look at his karma history.
...which to cut a long story short is a Catholic carry-over from the Mithraism which preceded it, just like the concept that all of our dear departed are squinting down at us from a kind of celestial balcony seat.
Ain't nothing like an infinitely vengeful diety and a billion watchful relatives to scare the flock's bowels clean and keep them in line. A reasonable deity doesn't suit control freaks so well, and routinely gets shut out.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
This article from the BBC is misleading. I tracked down the original article in Nature.
The researchers didn't actually unlock any major secrets. It is no secret that two species who would not produce viable offspring together will try to avoid mating with each other. There are various mechanisms for doing that - having different wing colors so that species can distinguish their optimal mating partners is one method. If the two species are geographically separated, there is no need to develop other methods of separation, and thus their wing colors can look similar. There is nothing new about this.
Also, the BBC article never explains that the speciation of these butterflies occurred while they were geographically separated (this is called allopatric speciation, and the Nature article specifically states that the butterflies evolved this way). The species only developed different wing markings when they came back into contact with each other. This makes a lot of sense - they were now genetically very different, and offspring between members of different species would not be successful, so they needed ways of telling each other apart.
It's a nice finding, but certainly not the unlocking of a major secret.
Why is it that animals that are "domesticated" or mostly live in close cooperation with human societies, like pigeons, develop highly variegated markings?
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.
Perhaps human ecosystems and breeding have removed other pressures so the marking variations are more likely to express? I dunno. Just an observation. Any geneticists or evolutionary theorist out there have any ideas about this?
A theory, according to the OED, is:
This topic on Gamefaqs.com's "Southeastern U.S. Board" has been thriving for quite some time now. Every time a creationist gets debunked, a new one comes in to make the same argument again. Did you know that Darwin recanted on his deathbed? ;)
I wonder if the Evolve-o-Matic could help your post evolve...
See http://www.jhuger.com/evolve.php
Let me explain evolution... theres specie Geek, the Vi x Emacs force a species split up. Then we've got Vi Geek and Emacs Geek, after couple years they can't even talk to each other anymore, the Vi Geek always trying some cryptic commands and the Emacs Geek mutating more fingers to type even bigger key-chords... it's the same with butterflies I think... RGB Butterfly, CMYK Butterfly...
-- Por mais que eu ande no vale das trevas e da morte, meu PowerMac G4 Não Travará!!!
I suspect the changes to go from fertilized egg, to embryo, to infant are just as dramatic, just compressed in time and confined to the womb.
Here is a good visualization of how man evolved
Would you care to express "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest" in term of physical processes and not in romanticist language?
My skepticism would be greatly reduced.
Evolution is a fact. It has been observed in the fossil record, and observed in the present day.
"Observation" proves anything. For hundreds of years everyone "observed" that a heavy stone falls faster than a feather. The Scientific Method proves things: http://teacher.nsrl.rochester.edu/phy_labs/Appendi xE/AppendixE.html
1. Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.
2. Formulation of an hypothesis to explain the phenomena. In physics, the hypothesis often takes the form of a causal mechanism or a mathematical relation.
3. Use of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict quantitatively the results of new observations.
4. Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters and properly performed experiments.
Observation alone does not satisfy #3 and #4.
How do you think they got Polar bears and Koala's onto the Ark???
Why two by two of course!
The creationists claim that all the biodiversity presently seen comes from speciation of a few animals that were temporarily stored in a wooden Ark. What I remember them hawking was that no new animal types have sprung into being; we've only seen small variations on the old ones.
This is a claim that most evolutionists would easily admit to; the discovery of a new species is usually attributed to it not having been found previously, and only extreme macroevolution could produce a new animal type in the few hundred years since people started categorizing flora and fauna.
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.
That might actually apply to humans as well. I mean take Conservatives and Liberals. They engage in different physiclal activities and (mostly) breed within their own groups. So will the two eventually evolve into seperate species, Homo Conservativis and Homo Liberalis? Probably, however, due to the high population denisty among humans they will also be unable to escape having to interact with each other. So the two resultant species and their behavioral patterns will influence each others evolution won't they? I mean you would for example expect the Homo Conservativis to evolve sophisticated selective hearing in order to avoid hearing anything that Homo Liberals might say that contradicts with their religious ideas while the Homo Liberals will grow thick Neanderthal like skulls due to Homo Conservatives incessantly thumping theim on the head with a Bible.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
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.
but empiricism. Scientists have done it in the past (even if they had to scrap an entire framework or two) and if they use the same methods, it's safe to assume that they will do it in the future too. Kind of like assuming that the gravity will exist tomorrow because it has risen in the past. Unlike religion which is based on blind faith when there is no evidence like John 20:29.
I am half-ashamed, half-impressed to say that this book, actually, although not entirely, converted me to the camp of "Intelligent Design".
Calculating God
Although, naturally, the aliens are pure speculative fiction, the things that the aliens and humans discuss are actually true, and the first half of this book, before the terrorists, is very well-designed, and converted me, an apathetic Deist, to someone who does not dismiss Intelligent Design, and actually argues it with his more "chemical chance" oriented friends.
Good book, highly recommended for ANYONE, even people who won't be swayed.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
That's not faith, it's extrapolation. There's a difference.
Cow Cube
Don't confuse Evolution with Natural Selection. One is theory that change and speciation exists. The other explains how that happens. Evolution was believed long before Darwin, and it was he who came up with Natural Selection. If you read Creationist propaganda, Evolution is used as an umbrella to cover everything that is considered unbiblical - ranging from continental drift to the big bang to the fact that light from stars wasn't created "on the way" to overcome the vast distances. We need to understand the difference between Natural Selection and Evolution so we can easily confront such nonsense as "if we're all constantly progressing according to evolution, why are there still cockroaches?"
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
Damn smart butterfly
They have markings because humans like them to look like that, so we select for animals with markings.
For example, dalmations are often deaf because the same gene for a white coat leads to deafness, but we (humans) keep breeding dalmations anyway. Why? Go ask a human. It's humans doing it.
From an evolutionary perspective: domestic animals with attractive (to humans) markings are better adapted to being allowed to breed by their human overlords, whereas less interesting looking domesticated animals are less adapted to pleasing their human overlords, and therefore being allowed to breed.
our new hyper-evolved butterfly overlords? (been watching too much venture brothers recently)...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
For cogent replies to all his points, check out the Talk.Origins Archive.
Asparagus has many and excellent powers.
disproving" Newtonian mechanics
Not disproving, extending... Newton was right and still is to a first approximation at the speeds we experience as human beings. Einstein merely extended Newton to work for light speeds.
This is reflected in the fact that modern engineering (spaceshots, etc aside) uses Newton, not Einstein, and buildings still stay up, and machines work. The tiny error correction that Einstein brings to Newton is still way below the tolerances that modern engineering works with.
That's a very accurate answer.
The catapillar stage is considered an extended larval stage. Basically a caterpiller is larva that can walk around and eat leaves.
See larva.
It seems possible to me that simpler organisms may be able to cross-breed easier. Perhaps at an early stage of evolution a simple bug which happened to hibernate in a cocoon bred with a simple bug that had wings. Perhaps this is a one in a billion chance, or that the first offspring only had tiny wings or had a short transformation phase, but perhaps over millions of years, through other mutations, butterflies developed as we know them today.
It seems impossible that one single organism could spontaneously develop a cocooning stage and wings at the same through a mutation. I don't see how that organism, over the course of it's very short lifespan could adapt to such a radical change, survive and then procreate successfully.
Demanding the scientist's personal info. Can't have such blasphomy against the bible(tm) getting confirmation! What's this science crap anyway? ...
"...mainstream news source mangles simple science! More at eleven."
Sigh.
You seem to know about as much history as your students.
As someone who took 2.5 years of genetics, speciation is something well understood. At some point breeding between the two populations is physically impossible (due to pysiological/geographic reasons) or does nto result in fertile young (mule). Everythign else is just details.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Disclaimer: I am not a creationist.
Ah. Well, as you are neither a creationist your own beliefs, nor, it would seem, are you interested in discussing the actual article...Logic would dictate that you are merely posting deliberately contentious material to stimulate. You are then, by definition, a troll.
Q.E.D.
Did anybody else misread the word "buttocks" into this headline?
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.
1.This is a logicly flawed argument. For my part I belive that we evolved but don't belive that that there is any form of intelligent extraterestrial life just based on what we've seen so far. I'm sure that there are some people who belive in UFOs and Creationisim. People are free to belive whatever they want, in what ever combination they desire.
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*.
2. Intellingence is not a form of energy or matter, but instead a quality we observe in people and animals, like beauty or charisma. Specificly, inteligince arises from a larger, more complex neural structure. This structure is paid for the animal having to consume more nutrients from its environment, thus satisfieng the Second law.
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.
3. I'll admit that the fossil record is sketchier than I like, however there are many examples of different fossils found that illustrate a species evolution over time. Given the time and geological stresses that these fossils had to endure, it amazes me that there is as much left as is.
"The moment "pride" is lost, "freedom" is also lost." - Ramza.
...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
First two minor points, then I'll get to the real subject, the math of evolution.
theory is a theory my friend
Every field of science is a theory, my friend. Everything from the theory of the atom to the theory of zymosis (that's fermentaion). You may as well try to attack relativity as being "just a theory".
sortof like the unprovable assumption of evolution?????
What unprovable assumption of evolution? Evolution fundamentally says that if if you have heritable variation and mutations and selection pressures on that variation then you will get evolution over generations. This is trivially observable fact. There is no genuine scientific dispute over biological evolution exacly because there is so much evidence that cross checks and cross validates across so many feilds, both current observations and study of prehistorical evidence left behind. Trying to even scratch the surface of this mountain of evidence in this post would be hopeless. If you are questioning the quantity and quality of the evidence, I suggest you either crack open a text book on the subject or at least browse the talkorigins website. It's all well documented if you actually question the issue. If you don't truely question the issue and you instead simply reject the entire subject on non-rational grounds, well obviously you're not going to be swayed by something silly like actual evidence and actual science.
Anyway, the real issue I wanted to address was this one:
the sheer numeric improbability of evolution
Correction, the sheer numeric CERTIANTY. There's powerful mathematics to evolution, powerful effects going on that you don't hear about in the common explanations of evolution. The common idea of evolution is as a sequence of individual beneficial mutations, like climbing a ladder. If that's how evolution actually worked then critics would be right, it would have been mathematically impossible for evolution to produce the incredible complexity we see today.
To show the true mathematical power of evolution I will first abandon that "ladder climbing" of beneficial mutaions. In fact lets assume that every single mutation that occurs is either neutral or harmful. I'll demonstrate that we still get the real and powerful mechanism of evolution, the math of evolution.
A good place to start is with the common complaint of creationists that mutation and evolution "cannot create information". Well in the initial mutation phase they are right. When a mutation occurs it introduces noise, it tends to degrade information. But look what happens the moment that mutation gets passed on to an offspring. That mutation is now no longer random noise, it now carries a small bit on information. It carries a little tag saying "this is a nonfatal mutation". The presence of this mutation in the offspring is new and created information, the discovery and living record of a new nonfatal mutation. Over time the population builds up a LIBRARY of nonfatal mutations. This library is a vast accumulation of new information.
That information actually undergoes even more processing and synthesis. Over generations beneficial mutations would obviously multiply, but we're assuming there are none of those here. However entirely neutral mutations will also tend to accumulate and multiply. Nearly harmless mutations would also accumulate and multiply to a lesser extent. Somewhat harmful mutations will even accumulate, and extremely harmful-but-nonfatal mutations will pop up and disappear at the rarest frequencies. So not only do we build up a library of nonfatal mutations, the mutations get tagged with a tagged with a frequency, the percentage of the population carrying that mutation. Each mutation is tagged with a measurement. Every mutation now carries a cost/benefit information tag at the population level. The best ones have a high percentage representation and the most harmful ones have a near
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Are you calling us all chimps?
Why is it, that everytime evolutionary research hits the media, it is attacked by random fundamentalist christian groups? Im simply amazed that a modern western country, in all seriousness, is teaching 'intelligent design'. Lets play with this mindset alittle:
:)
1) Evolution is true, and god is fiction.
2) God is real, evolution was created by god.
3) God is real, evidence of evolution was put here to confuse us.
If (1) is true, then all religions a like is pointless. There is no right or wrong, only consequences.
If (2) is true - whats the problem?
If (3) is true, god has a bad sense of humor.
Some interviews and articles i read about 'creationists' seem to attack science as something designed purely to corrupt their children and send them all straight to hell. Puh-lease.
The attack on science is also ridiculous, be it research in evolution or global warming, its always the argument 'but its just a theory!'. Well guess what? So is god.
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.
...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
Hrm. I watched Mississippi Burning last night and one thing that struck me dumbfounded was the irrational hatred towards blacks shown by the white protagonists in the film.
That article makes me wonder whether racial hatred is in part inspired by this "team strip" concept in the butterflies. In other words, the white protagonists are acting on their animal instincts to use "reinforcement" (as the article calls it) to encourage speciation.
I'm aware there are countless other factors involved in racial bigotry, including the fact that the white supremacists are a bunch of pathetic losers, but I'm always interested in scientific rationales for seemingly irrational behaviour.
...so what do you believe is the best explanation?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Pickup:/ explore-items/-/0679400036/0/101/1/none/purchase/r ef%3Dpd_sxp_r0/102-3877462-9979321
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/sim-explorer
For an excellent run down on evolution.
Btw... I think this book shows clearly that evolution is _not_ a theory.
One of the more interesting expirements conducted was with tropical fish in South America. More or less there are several species of small river fish. Higher up the mountain the fish are striped, lower down the fish are spotted.
A scientist introduced fish from the bottom (spotted) of one river into the top of another river that had none of these fish. They watched and observed and over time... lo and behold... at the top of the new river there where stripped fish, and at the bottom spotted fish.
The utility of stripe vs spots is attributed to effectiveness of camoflage. At the top of the river, in mountainous terrain, strips work better (overhead foilage is rare). At the bottom of the river spots work better (overhead foilage is common).
There were also some very interest graphs, though without the supporting math, that illustrates a correlation between resource availability (food and water) and speciation (this pertained specifically to finches).
Anyways it was an excellent read (won a pulitzer).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Disproving evolution is pretty do-able. Finding a human sitting inside of a Dino would kill evolutionary theory pretty soundly. Having a new species suddenly appear in mass would also do a good job at killing off evolution, or in the very least cripple it. Hell, aliens could drop down in a UFO and say "We control evolution!" and that would do a damn good job getting scientist to take intelligent design seriously.
Disproving God on the other hand would be impossible. The closest you can ever get to disproving god is to literally understand everything that ever has and will happen in the universe down to the smallest particle and show that nothing (god) is intervening... at which point the exercise is moot as you are pretty much a god yourself. This is why scientist don't even touch it. If you can't use the scientific method on it, it isn't science, and in order to use the scientific method, you need a way to test your theory.
Now as to evolution, it is not nearly as cemented as you might believe. We have the basics of evolution down pretty well. No scientist worth his salt is going to tell argue against evolution. The real question is what the mechanisms of evolution are. We are cursed in the study of evolution with our terribly short existence on this world. The theory of evolution hasn't been around for more then a few hundred years, yet we are trying to study a process that takes thousands and millions of years to really notice a change. In all likely hood there are still gapping holes in our understanding. The evolution of some complex traits are still baffling. Are there intermediate stages that we didn't see? Is there some mechanism to throw together a bunch of worthless traits into something useful all at once? The truth is that we don't have a full grasp on what is going on.
That said, the response to not having a full understanding isn't to throw up our hands and just say "Eh... god did it." You just need to put your head down and keep plugging forward and filling in the gaps. The whole "We don't know, so it must be God" silliness would have meant that after Newton figure out his famous theories we would have thrown up our hands and declared that God must be holding our feet to the other, because we sure as hell don't know what gravity is, only that it exists. Hell, to this day we can't reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity without resorting to outlandish theories that we can't prove - that doesn't mean we throw in the tall and just rack another one up for "God did it!"
For your specific points, these are very common questions / issues from creationists and others (except the bone question), so the Index is useful:
True faith is never blind; it is based on facts and experience. It is not required because of the absence of evidence, but because something can't be seen. Kind of like how we believe that we are made of atoms, though we can't see of feel them. We are persuaded of their existence by scientists we respect. Faith works the same way. So don't be so quick to dismiss ALL religion as blind and ignorant. And don't feel all superior because you call your faith "empiricism" or whatever.
There will always be unexplained phenomena in any scientific field. Call them "holes" if you must, but they are not indicative of a flawed theory (rather, they are indicative of insufficient data.)
...priesthood-of-scientists dogma once again.
Scientists are people, not omniscient robots. "Believe" means exactly the same thing for a scientist and a paddy farmer.
Many of the things that scientists believe are demonstrably false. I know this to be correct from empirical experiment. Yes, even when they're speaking ex cathedra.
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
I have several problems with this whole deal.
First: The only difference between the 'species' of butterflies (or theorized 'pre-specisation'} is colour? What about different coloured humans? There is some tendency among humans to mate with humans of similar colour, (however, Enlightened Minds frown on doing that exclusively) but that hardly makes our different races different species, and God forbid you actually theorize that it is even a precurser to specisation.
Second: I'm not sure how the researchers were able to follow the entire butterfly lifespan from egg-maggot-butterfly reliably enough to be sure what colour who's mommy and daddy were, or if colours change with age, like many other animals (human hair for instance.)
Third: I hate it when scientists sensationalize like this (I guess it's mostly news writers, but still) "I just discovered the secrets of our universe!" NASA did that with the whole comet screwing thing, "We hope to unlock the secrets of the universe!"
Regardless of whether speciaciation indeed happens or not, authors of the article don't make much sense. According to them, new species are being created because of distinctive stripes. Distinctive stripes are good, because they help to fight hybridization.But wait, if all butterflies were the same to begin with, where did hybridization come from? No hybridization - no need for stripes. No need for stripes - no physical distinction. No phyiscal distinction - no speciation. Am I missing something?
The "permanent juvenile" characteristic is known as neoteny. It's also been suggested that homo-sapiens is a form of simian neoteny. This is discussed quite extensively in writings by Steven Jay Gould for example.
Oh... Wait, I get it -- this wasn't a computer-related article, right?
While we see plenty of beauty and elegance, we also see large numbers of botches: mistakes no intelligent designer would ever make. Examples include the human back, which is flawed enough to keep chiropractors in business because we descend from four-legged creatures and the back isn't really optimized for walking on two legs. But there are bigger ones: the nerve that connects the larynx to the brain goes through the heart, both in the human and the giraffe. We have a blind spot in our eyes because of the way the optic nerve is connected, though it isn't hard to come up with a design that lacks this flaw.
Evolution will get rid of botches that interfere with survival and reproduction, but it's neutral with respect to botches that are just annoying. And that's what we see.
Our racial traits likely evolved because of a near-extinction (to humans) event 70,000 years ago: the Tobu supervolcano eruption. During that time, humanity went down to about 1,000 individuals and random evolutionary neutral traits (like eye-folds or hair shape) became more common in the then widely separated groups. But for all of our history before and after that event, humans have been moving around constantly, never allowing an isolated population to exist for that long.
Positive "racial" mutations like skin color changes (actually we all have the same skin color, its just that we have diffent saturation) or malarial resistance (sickle-cell isn't just a "black" disease) happened to any group of people who moved to significantly different areas. Race doesn't correlate with race, in other words.
I'll go ahead and say it: I'm a creationist.
That said, I think it is ridiculous to assume that evolution does not exist. Here's an example why.
The Bible never mentions bacteria, but it most definitely does exist. Why no mention? Because people had not discovered germs yet. Anyway, bacteria is the reason why undercooked pork will make you sick. Instead of confusing people by trying to describe bacteria, something they had absolutely no concept of, and how it can be bad for you, God said "Don't eat pork," and that was that.
Similarly, people in early OT time had no concept of the number one million. IIRC, the Greeks were the first civilization with a word for "million." Combine that with the fact that genetics research was just a few thousand years away, trying to describe evolution as a way of creation would have been impossible. He said "I made it all in 6 days," and that was that, because either way the important part is that God was responsible for it. Heck, people these days have a hard time conceiving millions of years, and it's a few thousand years after the Greeks.
Expecting science to conform to religion, especially one particular religion, is madness. Science by its nature is a-religious and deals only with what can be directly observed, and for the most part the supernatural cannot be directly observed. It is up to religious leaders to interpret scientific findings in the context of their religion.
I don't expect biologists to be theologians, nor theologians to be biologists. That's reasonable, right?
...the person who submitted the article made an interesting statement by saying the speciation happens regularly. I tend to agree, and so does a lot of what scientists find. So... it stand to reason that there is a lot of speciation going on within the human population. I'm not talking about races. I'm talking about actual differences between humans that result in completely different traits, abilities, etc... Why is it that this live of thought tends to eventually degenerate into some form of "superiority" when one group wants to subjugate another? Why can't we just accept that some differences are genetic and can't be overcome. (Why in the hell didn't this get submitted on Tuesday!!?)
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
This whole article sounds like propaganda for Kentuckians to marry their sisters.
-THE END-
A significant number of people in West Africa have a particular susceptability to sickle-cell anemia; the same group of people, at the same time, seem more resistant to malaria. This seems to be the way evolution is supposed to work.
Someone tries to discredit evolution by saying it's just a theory ought to get a nuclear weapon dropped on them. Special relativity is a theory too. Doesn't mean it doesn't work for what we've been able to experimentally see.
In 2101 war was beginning.
Main screen turn on.
It's You!
All your base are belong to us.
In the late 20th and early 21st century, several startling scientific breakthroughs were made. Most notably, the human race (as it was known back then) discovered cloning and they also discovered that humans were acutally comprise of 500 different groups with homosexuals being the most genetically pure of the entire species. Once this was revealed, the gay and lesbian faction of all the world's military set out on a power play to dominate the world. They had discovered the secret to converting all heterosexuals into homosexuals through the use of Oxytocin. Just a simple change in the way that the brain deciphers the chemical emission and all men became gay and all women lesbian. Utopia had finally arrived. This happened in 2025 and was an important day in human history.
It's been 76 years since that day and the Earth is a very different place. Wars have stopped worldwide. Religion has finally been rightfully expunged. World hunger has been eradicated. The bizarre and dangerous practice of heterosexuality has been completely eliminated and engineered out of the gene pool. And more importantly, the Earth's population is finally shrinking since reproduction is now completely optional and not a function of sex in any way. Reproduction is now solely achieved through cloning and the United World Gene Bank keeps a very strict world census to make certain that we lower the population from the all time high in 2010 of 14 billion people to the eventual goal of 500,000 people world wide. So far plans have progressed beautifully. We are currently at the 1990s world population level of 11.2 billion people.
We've also been moving a lot of people offworld to the various colonies spreading out of Sol. One thing we've learned is that as the population shrinks, there is more to go around. The heterosexuals of the 20th century had exceeded Earth's carrying capacity and drastically reduced the human race's chance of survival due to overpopulation. But fortunately, with the conversion to gay and lesbian lifestyles for every man, woman and child on the planet, we've increased the liklihood of humanity's survival for at least another thousand years. As sad as it sounds, we were lucky to have had the (Nixon Administration designed virus to kill black people) AIDS virus to thin out some of the world population. To bad it wasn't more effective on heteros. But now that we've found a cure since we now know that it goes after the gene that determines sexual preference, it's a non issue. It is kind of ironic that the Republican party with all it's anti-Gay and anti-Lesbian rhetoric actually knew in secret that people are born this way and not made.
The only conflagration we've had in the past 15 years are the great shampoo and conditioner wars of 2014. These were sparked by a vicious disagreement on hair care products between the Carson party and the Jackson party. Fortunately, the Carson party won the war and we all have nice feathered blond hair with nice tans. The world is much healthier now.
w3.org?
I was under the impression that the HTML specs don't let you put block level elements (eg lists) inside inline elements (eg italics). Corrections welcome of course.
Maybe you should try using blockquote elements instead?
Once humans stop natural selection and start applying our own standards of selection, camoflauge becomes a neutral trait: we, not camoflauge, protect the flock or the field.
Just a couple extra to add to your list: bacteria passing around plasmids and viral insertions. I bet there are several functional genes that were given to us by virii, long ago. I know it would be a little tricky to pass on viral DNA, but if a virus were able to infect a fetus, it might make its way into germ cells. Hell, add phagocytosis to your list, because mitochondria and chloroplasts had to get inside cells somehow.
Additionally, one of the most variable parts of the genome deals with the immune system and pathogen recognition. I bet we have a fair amount of bacterial and viral DNA in our genomes, so our immune systems can better recognize infectious agents.
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.
The problem with many creationist arguments is that they are untestable, and therefore unrefutable. But what is refutable is that the assertion that there is anything scientific about "Intelligent Design." It's an entirely different type of belief, based on faith rather than fact, so has no place in the classroom.
My favorite of all the idiotic arguments counter to evolution is the one based on the second law of thermodynamics: they say that because life has less entropy than inanimate material, then life cannot be explained by physics, and must be explained by God. Of course, their argument is based on a misunderstanding of the second law--the entropy of the universe (i.e., a global scale) is always increasing, but on a local scale, entropy can decrease. If entropy everywhere were always increasing, it would be impossible to make water into ice. Or to put a bunch of spilled marbles in a bag, for that matter.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Please go to drdino.com and order a set of DVD/Video Cassettes - when you recieve them in the mail copy them onto your computer or onto another video cassette / dvd disc, then return it for a full refund.
IF YOU CANT DO THIS YOU ARE AN IGNORANT PERSON AND DO NOT WANT TO LOOK AT BOTH SIDES OF THE ARGUEMENT FAIRLY. -_-
This reminds when scientists in Nebraska were searching for remnants of ancient humans. What they found was a single tooth and they claimed it was the missing link for evolution. Later it was discovered that the tooth belonged to a dead hog. I think this one of those things where not much proof is taken in before they call it a "missing link". Just my $0.02
Fallout 3 will suck.
Some creationist claims like "there was a global flood" are falsifiable, and they've been falsified. "Creationist theory" could be falsifiable if creationists would actually provide a theory (other than "evolution can't be true").
has "News for NERDS. And STUFF that matters." rang truer!
In unrelated news: Tennessee bans butteflies.
You need to install an RTFM interface.
Morality evolved.
Some people like to claim that it was created by Kablooie the Space Lizard, because they aren't too clear on the ideas behind evolution and they really like feeling like the favored flock of Kablooie.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Dude, you rock.
"I refuse to worship a god that claims to be all-loving, but threatens us with eternal torture if we don't do what he says." That's the ultimate religious smackdown. It's the elephant in the cathedral that no one wants to acknowledge. The Christian god is a tyrant that is no more deserving of worship than Saddam Hussein.
If, at Saddam's trial, he claimed, "I didn't shoot all those people and dump their bodies in mass graves, they shot *themselves* by not doing what I said!" you would laugh at the absurdity of it. And yet, that's Jehovah's claim.
If anything, the god of Abraham makes Saddam look like Mr. Rogers. There have been approximately 100 billion human beings on this planet, and about 75% or so have been non-Christian. Therefore, Hell would consist of the majority of all human beings -- approximately 75 billion souls -- sentenced to suffer for all eternity.
At least Saddam thought he was putting them out of their misery. And Christians actually want to worship this thing? Ugh.
Thanks again for pointing out the grotesquerie of worshipping a God who would condemn people to Hell. It can't be done often enough, in my opinion.
Now it is such a bizarrely improbably coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful [as the Babel fish] could have evolved by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing." "But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
But what if they adopt?
I meant zoologists are the last stand on race, not anthropologists.
The later is the group required to parrot PC doctrine about races only being skin deep (if they want grant money, etc).
My favorite refutation of the bogus Second Law criticism is a seed in some soil in a terrarium. You add nothing but maximally-entropic hydrogen and oxygen in the form of water, maximally-entropic carbon and oxygen in the form of CO2, and sunlight. The seed will sprout and proceed to reduce the entropy of those raw materials in its own growth. The fundies who assert the 2nd Law don't realize that the system creates huge amounts of entropy; it's just leaving in the form of the ~300K waste heat that was once the 5700K solar blackbody spectrum.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
genetically speaking, it's meaningless. There is no "white race" or "black race" or "asian race", or any of the rest. Humans do appear to have instincts towards forming social hierarchies, and distinguishing between "in my tribe" and "not in my tribe", but the concept of "race" has no real basis in biology or genetics.
Sorry to disappoint you, but your prejudices will need to find some other foundation upon which to rest.
wants to be the first monkey to touch the monolith
The niches natural selection forces the raw goo of speciation into are sometimes formed by the predilection of the participants. In other words, big antlers get bigger because females prefer them. There is something similar in human linguistics; that is, regional dialects emerge because high-status women speak that way. The same cause may easily select for race -- a trivial variation, genetically speaking, with major importance for those who play the game.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Sometimes this process isn't perfect, and a DNA strand pair gets part of the other's chromosome or loses a chunk.
Just to be abrasive, this isn't exactly true.
DNA replication is almost perfect. Of course we may not be here if it was perfect everytime, but it's pretty close. A (professionally published) 350-page book is more likely to have 5 spelling errors than the chance of mutation due to DNA coding errors. (Even though a "Harry Potter" maybe edited at length by computers and people).
You can never underestimate the fact that outright mutation is very, very, very rare in animals. Certainly seems to give a case to "Intelligent Design" but to me 'nature' seems that much more awe inspiring.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Evolutionary Biologists have long known some of the mechanisms of speciation. And any freshman in any college intro to Population Biology class knows these quite well...
For instance, one of these mechanisms is spatial segregation, in which some members of a single population become physically separated from another group of that population, by some phenomenon (think changing tidal patterns/river flow paths). This physical separation causes reproductive segregation/separation that leads to speciation by non-shared mutation.
Another is behavioral segregation, which has been mentioned in this thread (orcas hunting fish vs hunting mammals), which leads to social exclusion and, again, reproductive segregation.
Finally, there is selective segregation, which refers to segregation of members of a population due to proficiency at some task necessary for survival. For instance, the Darwin Finches of the Galapagos Islands are under quite strong selective pressure surrounding the size and shape of their beaks. Some finches with long and thin beaks are able to feed on fruit that has small holes in the fruit body, while other members of the same species have larger and stronger beaks that they may use to crack open other kinds of seeds. When food is plentiful, both phenotypes are able to get along just fine on seeds and fruits that lie inbetween these extremes, but when selective pressure is applied (in the form of a famine, perhaps), this small phenotypic difference in beak size/shape results in survival for these two, now more genetically distinct, genotypes, while those finches that fall inbetween the two extremes tend to not survive. If such a selective pressure (famine) lasts for long enough, the two resultant populations may achieve speciation. All of these mechanisms have something in common, they all require reproductive segregation of some sort. This research is all at least 10 years old, and this article is just scientific fluff.
For an extremely interesting and pertinent read, try The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner.
This is not evolution but purely an adaption of the same kind of animal. I can gaurentee that in one billion years from now, they all will still be butterflies :)
Need an ISP in South Africa?
No, really... It took them this long to figure this out? Seems kinda obvious. ummmm, like I knew this already even, as if I learned it in a book in biology in the early 80's.
I thought this article was going to be about an easter egg in Evolution, the email client!
because no one suspects the butterfly.
Accept any challenge, No matter the odds.
It gets dismissed out-of-hand nowadays mostly because it has been refuted over and over for almost two centuries (evolution is an old body of theory). For driving evolution, only natural selection is necessary. There is no randomness involved beyond that which comes from chaotic processes (and perhaps beyond that which comes from quantum fluctuations) which, as a modeling variable, is called chance but is not.
There is overwhelming evidence, however, for the fact that those insisting in intelligent design badly want and need to believe in god. They just are unable to accept any alternative explanation, as that would leave them stranded in an ocean of insecurity, guilt, and despair.
Moreover, the religious discourse of those who insist in intelligent design keeps repeating the ages old axiom that truth requires you believe, and that disbelieving certain facts is a sin that will be punished. People who hold that axiom (and that include phicisits who believe in god) will always be dubious scientists, twisting facts here and there in the name of "god".
Beyond that, I find it funny that when confronted with evolution, which is a simple and understandable mechanism which can be watched in action even in a computer, proponents of ID say "this is hard to believe". Instead, the bible with all its miracles and baroque medievalisms is for them the most plausible thing of all.
Always want 'proof' of evolution? I mean, doesn't their theory rely on a 'blind faith'? Don't get me wrong, if talking to a big, invisible friend in the sky helps... whatever gets you through the night.
lalalalala
Waiiii!!!!!! I have bad karma!
I can only imagine an old fart whom totally wasted his life coming up with theories that are worshipped by other farts and/or fart wannbes. "We can't really tell you shit about the human body or how it works, we have no idea how to cure diseases that have been around for a few thousand years, we have these little papers with little lines coming out from a machine that maps your DNA but we can't really tell you what it is that you are looking at. We have a few million people dying from AIDS and cancer every year but this is not something that we should really look into because we are very busy with this theory about everything. The theory is just genius shit, we figured out that we all come from aminoacids and chaos. We can't prove shit and when things don't match we make them up but the important thing is that we have this brilliant theory. We should give someone the Noble prise about this shit because it's just fantastic shit."
What are the chances for life to live on this earth? If it were too cool, or too warm, all species would be extinct. A little closer- or farther from the sun, *poof*. A little more of this gas, or that, or different weights in the forces. This goes all through the atmosphere, ozone layer, green house effect, water-bed streams down to the tiniest organisms like bacteria, molecules, atomic-forces, quantuum states whisking in- and out of existance.. It is GRAND and then we haven't even begun to look towards the stars, bending of space-time and gravity yet!
Everything is playing a role in a big play. Intelligent design? I don't know anything about that, I just know that there is a Big Mind behind it all. I don't pretend to know how it functions or expect certain things out of it. Especially: it's not just human, so how can we expect to understand it.. Then what's the point arguing about it? Like ants arguing about the demi-god roaming around the garden making large craters.. In fact, I know NOTHING about it, but I know it's there.
Existence is a fact, but LIVING is an Art.
Life is beautiful this way!
"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest-a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty."
- Albert Einstein
If you go searching for diversity, you'll never run out of it in this universe. Likewise, if you search for unity, everything is in concerted unity. This is a mysterious place..
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Oh. I see that even the BBC now uses "regularly" to mean "frequently". Morons.
ROFLMAO! I never heard that one before.
Your experiments are not really valid...
Assuming that there is a God, and evolution is the mechanism by which he designed the earth, then it is perfectly feasible that he designed humans to have a blind spot, because perhaps without our inferior eyesight, we would not have evolved some other important part of our genome.
Evolution is such a tricky thing because there is no way you can look at an organisms feature set now, and deduce what circumstances caused it to evolve over a billion years.
Those who say a scientific theory is "just a theory" generally do so because they don't actually know what a theory is. They understand a theory to be a guess or a hunch (that's a hypothesis not a theory).
In science, a theory isn't a guess or a hunch - it's something a great deal stronger than that. A scientific theory makes testable predictions that can be verified by observation.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Man goes on to prove black is white, and is killed at the next zebra crossing.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
Again I ask, what are the physical underpinnings of this philosophy called evolution? If your hand is empty, please quit preaching its authority.
Not "physical underpinnings" - mathematical underpinnings. Given two populations, one of which reproduces at a greater rate than the other, that one will flourish (especially if they're vying for the same resources). This is pretty obvious, and can be proven mathematically.
Once you throw in the concept of random mutations, you can once again mathematically prove that organisms get more complex in a complex environment.
That's the principle of evolution, and is supported by the most tool of science - mathematics.
Last post!
same DNA. Think about it.
great article.. i think its definitely a step in the right direction as far as figuring out the secret(s) of evolution.. i don't see why anyone would "waste" their time bitching about the people who are actually finding answers to the questions we've been asking for thousands of years... quit jerkin off and something with your life..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
"Bottocks underlys evolution secret".
(I know it's written wrong; maybe there is dislexy with automatic spelling correction...)
This could be said for almost every issue. It's always the vocal minority that seems to influence policy. I'm not sure what the reasons are behind this phenomena; maybe because the moderates either don't have good enough arguments, or more likely, really don't care either way. In issues such as creation vs evolution it really doesn't matter, but this silent majority phenomena has devastating effects when it comes to issues like civil rights and liberties.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Under those false assumptions, one could say that "The automobile has clearly evolved through evolution, and nobody actually designs them, because they do not come out perfect."
Intelligent Design != Perfection, Intelligent Design just means that something intelligent created life. It didn't say it created it perfectly, or even with any purpose, or anything else. The basic fundamental hypothesis of intelligent design is simple creation, not inferring intent or purpose of the intelligence.
And the mistake here is assuming that any intelligent designer would ONLY create perfection. All you proved was that life is imperfect, not that it wasn't the result of an intelligent designer.
If you are going to tout science, then by all means, actually use it. A first year journalism student could disprove the arguments here without knowing any science at all.
This is similar to the famous joke, "If God is love, and love is blind, is Ray Charles God?" You're jumping very far outside the evidence to a conclusion. That's called faith, not science.
I am a believer that both theories can be correct, and that evolution is a tool of an intelligent designer. I consider it the same as those programmers out there that create virtual life and virii on their desktops via evolution software, and that life is not perfect. This is what demonstrates, to me, the plausibility of Intelligent Evolution. But, I would never confuse that as scientific evidence.
I8-D
If the subject of evolution (human or otherwise) interests you, check out Stephen Baxter's aptly-titled book, "Evolution."
It's sci-fi, not fact, btw.
According to the bible, Jesus is God (if i understand this 'trinity' thing correctly).
God destroyed Sodom because its inhabitants practiced homosexualuality. Correct?
Therefore, as Jesus is God, he must hate gay people as he wiped a city of them off the face of the earth.
Why use the word 'know' when the word 'believe' would work? You do not have knowledge of this Big Mind, hence you do not 'know' that it exists. Did you chose to use the word 'know' because you feel that it is more emphatic or well respected than the word 'believe'? You are free to hold a belief stronger than you hold a piece of knowledge.
;-)
:-) But to move somewhere, you need faith, not blind faith, indoctrination or dogma, but just faith enough to put energy into it.
;-)
;-) that more and more of the mystic wisdom will be directly proven. For example, take the entangled particles that are sent to the "edges" of the universe. This correlates directly with mystics claims of the entire universe being connected. Everything is inter-connected, yet up until Einstein and Bohr, people mostly believed in the Clock Work universe.
;*)
You have a mind, yes? It is real to you. It makes you observe, act, reflect and regret
How about your cells, do they have a mind? In a way, they must have, because without them you have no body. 0+0 would always equal 0 in any other case.
What makes up your body-mind is thus the cells of your body AND their organisation.
Likewise, it is with the entire universe. With an organisation on this scale, anything else is really absurd. It is maybe a different mind than we're used to relate to on a human scale. However, I believe this because it is both logical and can unify the universe in one big swoop. There are tons of information in this area for those who are interested.
This Big Mind, is not an old man with beard sitting on a cloud..
However, for one who have no faith in this, it is impossible to even get into it, because this is a world-view. There's no point in arguing about definitions.
For somebody who has studied what has been recorded in the ancient Vedas of India, it makes perfect sense
You see, when I stop discussing this here. You have two choices: Disregarding this entire thing, or investigate for yourself, not accepting MY words for this.. I'm here just to point the direction, not put concepts into minds or convince anyone. If I do that, I have failed. What use is teaching anybody, if they don't investigate and think for themselves?
A classical book about this is "The Tao of Physics" by Fridtjof Cappa. This book from many decades highlights the similarities between quotes from quantum physics and eastern mystics, and is still astounding, for those who still has capacity to become astounded
As science progress, I believe
Well, I hope I have inspired for some investigation. Just be wary of shady internet-sites and New Agers flying up in the sky waiting to be taken up by UFOs
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
The real wonder here is that the puddle woke up. I think it is the same with us humans. Never stop wondering about it.
If you don't believe anybody or anything, how can you believe your own words.. Then there is no progress, for you cannot progress without any faith. No hard-core sceptic has ever invented anything.
I put faith in what makes me happy.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Supermodels and the like have quite different facial structures from average.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
I find your faith refreshing...
An important observation. But it is faith in the scientific method, which has been extremely successful in the past explaining and discovering things we didn't know.
That makes it rather different than faith in God/religion. Such faith has a terrible track record predicting things we didn't know or providing theories that are testable and have survived empirical tests.
Tor
And loud voices have a tendency to attempt to frame the debate in their terms. Additionally, most extremists (on any issue) tend to be very polarizing and dualistic - with us/against us type of attitudes.
This tends to push the moderates to one side or the other; normally it's the side that's less noisy and idiotic.
I don't think it's ever a matter of weaker arguments, but what the arguments are trying to accomplish - a moderate's argument will normally be based on rational thought and logical progression to reach a conclusion that attempts to solve the whole problem. That's why they're moderates; they look at all the merits of a case and decide upon their position. Extremists normally argue poorly - emotionally based arguments that are designed to trigger response, not invoke thought.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
But how in Earth do I ask a squid to do that and get the squid to communicate the results?
Do squids use Blackberry? Or morse code?
I can easily disprove intelligent testing because this tought experiment seems non-feasible.
A well thought out post, and I agree with Aeternal's analsysis . . . this is very true with, say, bacterium or insects (with a massive reproduction rate allowing a huge amount of "tests") but when you're getting to larger life forms, where the amount of offspring dramatically lowers, there aren't as many tests that are performed in one species, correct?
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Anyone got directions to Sabina? ;)
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
I know people who think exactly like you, and a sense of humor is the one thing I wouldn't credit them with. . . ;)
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Border collies are bred for intelligence and not looks. Smarter dogs are better herders (able to respond independently to commands, etc.), which is why there is so much resistance to the AKC trying to categorize the 'typical' border collie--the physical attributes are mostly meaningless in the face of herding ability.
Another thing I found interesting is that police dogs used for drug and bomb sniffing work can be nearly any breed (in fact they're often mutts) and are chosen through a rigorous training and selection process based on ability and intelligence alone. It seems that that sort of talent is difficult to breed for, so police departments will hit the local pound for recruits.
steampunk web design
You would realize that the struggle, the relgion, the culture, and everything else you describe as "living life" is irrelevant. The only
"purpose" to life is to create more life.
So get out there and procreate!
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
This is what monotheism has sunk to?
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You guys don't still believe that evolution crap do you?
There are at least two examples in which metamorphosis presents useful options for a species. In the first, you will note that many immature forms use a different food source than their mature parents. This lets the young feed without competing with the adults. Kind of like you getting your own Play Station, so you don't have to wait until the kids are done using theirs.
The second is a separation of environments. Mosquito larvae, dragonfly nymphs, etc. live under water. The adults are terrestrial/aerial. Not only do they no longer compete for food, they also don't compete for space (or share the same dangers). Kind of like you getting your own room to play your Play Station in, because the kids' room is full of Beanie Babies and stuff.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
What's so amazing about how eyes evoloved? Any organism that out of freak chance develops even the most primitive of eyes still has an advantage over no eye, and then the next generation develops a slightly better eye and so on.
If a blind man fights a man with really bad eyesight it's pretty obvious who will win... unless one's a ninja, then all bets are off
Why would the chattering bother the seals, if they know it is from fish eating orcas? Now REAL evolution would occur if the seal hunting orcas started chattering amongst themselves so that the seals would THINK that they are fish eating orcas. Why does this sound very Gary Larsonish? :)
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Unfortunately the internet is also good for spreading lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Remember white supremicists, media outlets, terrorists, and kids from Indonesia all use the web on a relatively equal footing. If the web is this shining beacon of truth and information and anyone can make a web page how do we get the kid in Indonesia to see the right version(s) of the *truth* and not some sick twisted uber "Bush loves the little children" or uber "America is evil, we 9/11'd ourseleves" story?
Being able to gauge the quality of information so that Sally, Vishnu, and every other kid in the world knows that someone is full of crap... dude that would be "the killer app".
I have to say that there clearly is a misunderstanding of evolution by either the reporter or the scientists; most likely the reporter. Species are not defined by their inability to reproduce. That is a creationist myth that somehow got accepted as being connected with evolution. Darwin saw it differently. First, start with variations in animals. Variations like long ears and short ears are defined as animals living today where "steps" linking the two animals can be found still living. Between the short ear and the long ear can be found not so short eared, medium length eared, and not so long eared, etc. That is variation. Species are linked not by "steps" living today but by "steps" in the fossil record. Today you would only find long eared and short eared and nothing in between. Only when you dig into the fossil records do have a hope of finding the lost "steps". Remember that only a small insignificant amount of creatures get fossilized and are found by us. The rest are lost to us. So once again variation is separated by space and species are separated by time. Whether the long eared and the short eared can mate together is also a matter of a gradient from full fertility to zero fertility of individual animals; not a cliff like separation. Every once in a while (every seventy years or so) you hear stories about a mule that gives birth. Can a giraffe and a fish mate? No, because the divergence of the two in time is so great that their reproductive systems are incompatible. Can a zebra and a horse mate? Yes, but with extreme difficulty and is dependent on finding two individual animals that can mate; i.e. less variations between the two in the reproductive area. Can coyotes and wolves mate? Yes, and it seems to be happening more and more to the point where the grey wolf will be replaced entirely by a new type of animal that is a mixture of wolf and coyote.
http://www.users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html
For a creationist, "believe" means "I have faith that this is so, not because of any empirical evidence, but because it's what I've been told by 'good people' who assure me they're telling the Truth."
There is also quite a difference between articles of faith. I for one believe "Faith in God" litterly means God has spoken to you and has specifically said "do this". Weather you saw a demon with hell fire wings while smoking the pipe light night circa 5,000 BC has yet to be seen.
Faith in God does not even mean faith in say the Bible since it's possible to believe the Bible to be fallible (although we don't have many of those people these days because they were all put to death... Remember the Cathars in France?)
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Anyway, bacteria is the reason why undercooked pork will make you sick. Instead of confusing people by trying to describe bacteria, something they had absolutely no concept of, and how it can be bad for you, God said "Don't eat pork," and that was that.
It's not because of bacteria, it is because The Lord Your God considers creatures who do not graze the fields to be unclean (why He created them dirty is not specified... for kicks and giggles, maybe).
And of those that graze, only the ones with legs that end in a cleft hoof with two points are ok to eat, the others are also icky. So, no rabbit stew for the faithfull.
Also, polyblend fiber cloth is an abobination unto the Lord Thy God, so all of you with 50% cotton shirts: See you in hell!
I don't like the whole "ID" scam where they are selling useless textbooks to schools, but there is a grain of reasonableness in this movement. Historically, the teaching of evolution has been slanted towards saying, "mutations, genetics, and the struggle to survive are sufficient to explain the origin of species, so all the life we see around us today is the result of dumb luck and thus there is no god". Darwin himself was particularly anti-religious in his writings, and unfortunately that seems to have influenced this debate for a long time.
The *only* thought behind Intelligent Design that I can see is the notion that there is no such thing as dumb luck. If an animal survives and procreates, or if a species gets wiped out by a meteor, or if John Doe wins the lottery, it's because it was part of God's plan. This isn't science, but neither is the opposite viewpoint.
I would have no problem with rewording textbooks to be more neutral about this, so long as it doesn't explicitly teach any religious viewpoint. For example, they could emphasize the huge number of small-scale events which have lead to the diversity we see around us today, and lay off of the "there's nothing but chance" language. On the other hand, I think it's outrageous to teach from a specifically Christian textbook in a science class. What's next, history textbooks that say that we won the Cold War because God was on our side?
Well, I sort of meant Christians who believe the Bible is fallible or least partly untrue (which are rare moreso these days than they were in the middle ages), but yes there are plenty of non-Christians who believe the bible is fallible. ;)
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
It still seems like you're saying "race" isn't inheritable. Here's the counter view. At one time, homo-sapiens were more genetically homogenous (less diverse) than today. Because of geographic separation, isolated groups (clusters) started to diverge genetically (passing on mutated genes to their offspring). Please provide more information as to why this is an incorrect notion. Maybe you're using your own definition of "race"? Let's try and solve that problem by using the simple minded test: differentiate the races by measuring the amount of melanin present in the skin. That method might not be capture 100% of what everyone thinks of "race", but I think it should correlate close enough to get your point across.
Even if life is very improbable, it's a very, very big universe out there, so even very improbable things happen occasionally.
And even if conditions suitable for life are very, very rare, it will necessarily be the case that every living observer will discover the it is living in a place where it is possible for life to survive.
This is from the second article:
So, the situation is more complicated than I thought, but my basic point, that the observed genetic clustering of humans is not well-correlated with popular notions of "race", remains solid.
In other words, if you took genetic samples of a bunch of people, ran clustering software that grouped the genes of those people into groups of genetic similarity, the groupings you'd get wouldn't match up with the groupings you'd get if you were asked to group them according to "race."
wants to be the first monkey to touch the monolith
XYY males are typically taller than normal and are more statistically likely to end up in prison. The plot of Alien 3 revolves around a prison colony full of them.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
"Nonsense. There are plenty of examples in Nature where simple situations give rise to complex results without a designer or without intelligence" (Decaff -42676) @ 9:38... The more we learn about the universe the less random things become... My point, I thought, was quiet clear: Did you see a "recognizable pattern" i.e. did you see The Mona Lisa (Not a reflection), or perhaps the word 'Hi' The overall point is as a previosly stated:"Fluid + Heat...basic Chemical Reaction - The Complexity already exists" ID = New Created Complex, existence. i.e The Mona Lisa... or Bill Clintons face.. Sorry for not being specific enough
"1. This argument centers on belief in life outside our solar system. Your response has given me no indication you think to contrary of *many* evolutionists. If the majority of evolutionists believe in life outside our solar system, is it really any surprise that Intelligent Design has worked its way into public debate?"
Here is what you originally said:
"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."
Your statements appear illogical to me. So far, we have a grand total of one planet with life from which to draw conclusions. Assuming that physics and chemistry work the same on other planets, and assuming that life arose on our planet without the help of some Intelligence, it is reasonable to assume, given the size of the galaxy (let alone the universe) that life arose elsewhere. How you get ID proponents from this line of reasoning escapes me. The probablility arguments used against the likelihood of life arising without an Intelligence are beyond specious. This article, "Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Abiogenesis Calculations," discusses some of the issues involved.
"2. The earth is a closed system. Let me repeat, the earth is a closed system. Our environment allows energy and not mass to pass into the system."
You can repeat it all you like... it's still incorrect. The Earth is closed to neither mass nor energy. Plenty of material appears to have impacted the Earth during the solar system's early history, and, to a lesser degree, continues to do so today.
"Thus, the argument has to be that energy-cause mutations can increase information."
Google "Kolmogorov-Chaitin Complexity" for a discussion of information and information increase. Your seeming complaint against "energy-cause mutations" is best seen in this light.
"In such mutations, the organism cannot reproduce or at least, cannot reproduce with those of the same species."
Eh? How do you go from "energy-cause mutations" to this?
So, tell me: how do you think life came to arise on this planet, and how do your ideas as to how life changes over time differ from those expressed in modern evolutionary theory?
wants to be the first monkey to touch the monolith
"Natural selection" refers to convergent stochastic probabilities; "survival of the fittest" is an obvious tautology.
Anything that is survives is deemed "fit": hence, the maxim reduces to "survival of that which survives". It's hard to argue with tautology, really.
The "fittest" can sometimes just mean the luckiest, like group of weak, stupid outcasts from whom an entire species may be derived, because they weren't in the wrong place when a natural disaster struck.
There's nothing romantic about evolution: it's all based on three fairly obvious premises:
a) dead things don't breed (part of the definition of "dead"),
b) you get your genes from your parents (we've got a lot of evidence to support this), and
c) mutations may be rare, but they do happen (again, we've seen them happen)
Put together, if you get a mutation that improves your odds of survival, odds are your kids may inherit it. If they do, they're more likely to survive (by definition of the mutation) than people without the gene. Odds are that gene will continue to be passed on until it becomes a hindrance rather than a help.
That's it. Just basic convergent probability. It's like pulling coloured balls at random out of a bag. Suppose you start by pulling them out randomly, but every time you pull a red ball out, you put two red balls back in the bag. Every time you pull out any other colour, you throw it away. After a few thousand iterations, the bag will be mostly full of red balls, despite the initial randomness involved in the selection process.
--
AC
I wrote an obscenely detailed explanation to Aeternal over here. The implicit parallelism is within each individual.
Bacteria do NOT have this enormous multiplier because they generally do not sexually recombine their genes. For the first few hundred millions of years life on earth plodded along with nothing but bacteria and little noticable change. It is beleived that sexual recombination and this implicit parallelism effect was one of the primary driving forces in the first big explosion of diversity.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
P.S.
I wanted to clarify that the Schemata Theorem is a mathematical proof that all of these parallel schema contributions and measurements blended in a single individual through the number of offspring really do contribute to the genetic distribution in the next generation in this manner. Schemata are basically building blocks. The contribution of each individual schema twords the offspring success of an individual may be tiny, but just as many tiny raindrops can acumulate to form a river these contributions accumulate form the makeup of the next generation, and as and a river can carve the grand canyon, the the population preforms vasty more powerful evolution because of it. The key is in the sexual mixing in creating new offspring. You amplify the good, and then in the mixing you generate a vastly different set of schemata to test in the child. Mixing the building bloks. The schemata you test in the next generation are statistically related to the distribution in the previous generation in the right way, but children are a well randomised mix of those schemata to test an entirely new range of patterns and to continue to independantly reinforce or diminish each pattern and subpattern.
I also completely neglected more sophisticated types of mutations. They doesn't directly fit in with the implicit parallelism, but they are interesting additions to the evolutionary bag of tricks. Clusters of genes form useful schemata, and even portions of genes are useful schemata. Clusters of genes that control other genes and regulation to formation of a leg can be turned to double duty to regulate the formation of arms, or even dumliated wholesale to regulate the formation of arms and then mutate independantly. Genes for enzymes and other protiens often do double and triple duty in interation with other components in different organs of the body, and such genes are often duplicated and then independantly mutate to different tasks. Even portions of genes can be mixed and matched... a mutation may cross over one gene in the middle of another gene, or insert part of one gene in the middle of another. Each portion of each of the genes is a useful schema building block producing some portion of a protein or enzyme. When different peices of genes are mismatch in this way there is a fair chance that they will stich together two functional halves of two protines or enzymes into a new and useful protein or enzyme. If genes or portions of genes controlling the growth and structure of one body part or organ get mismatched into the regulatory system of a different body part or organ then the coherent schema will probably have some coherent operation in the new context. One regulatory sequence substuted for another regulatory sequence. The result will likely still be a deformed and malfunctioning bodypart or organ, but the chances of getting a useful result are vastly higher than a blind random mutation.
Schema building blocks that often get duplicated and put to new use. When crossover missmatches do happen it is usually because the surrounding DNA was similar, and one sort of building block is being substituted for a similar sort of building block somewhere else. Accidentally stuffing the right type of building block into the wrong place is infinitely more likely to produce a functional and maybe useful result than attempting to stuff a large chunk of random garbage into that slot. Half of one hormone plus half of another hormone has a good shot of functioning somehow.
I've gotten kinda tired and need sleep, I hope I havent lost clarity in writing this post. If I did, well that's why. Chuckle.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
What's "Darwin Award" then?
That's evolution in action for you and you can _see_ it.
Which brings us to an even more interesting question: how is selective breeding and modern medicine degenerating the human gene pool? Are we going to be muscle-less blobs that can't survive without robots? Are we going to be so stupid that we need computers to run our lives?
Survival-neutral genes may drift through a population, but they don't take over as long as other genes are survival-beneficial.
Or is that only going to be the Slashdot population, and the 'beautiful' people will become more cosmetically disfigured by gigangic breasts and other such desired features? Is that how human women got such big titties in the first place, at least in certain lineages?
Sexual selection could certainly be a factor, but other reasons may be involved. Perhaps larger breasts provide better insulation in cold climates, or perhaps they act as storage for energy-rich fat to help the bearer last through droughts and famines.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
There's no such thing as in-laws for a slashdotter.
We need louder moderates.
The problem is that they tend by nature also to be moderate in volume.
All too true. As they say, all things in moderation...