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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.'"
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.
Mutations occur, and when they occur in parallel for members of the same species, and those mutations survive into succeeding generations, you achieve speciation. End of story. What am I missing?
Now, if you want to talk about butterflies and evolution, then answer for me how it is that butterflies could have evolved in the first place. You're talking about a two-stage organism here, one stage does nothing but eat, the other stage does nothing but procreate. Which came first?
If it was the caterpillar, how is it that it suddenly figures out how to create a cocoon, lay dormant for a winter, then emerge as a completely different creature? They obviously had the means for procreation on their own, so why bother becoming a butterfly?
If it was the butterfly, why even bother with the caterpillar stage? If you can already fly around and stuff, why bother crawling?
People cite all these other examples trying to bring down evolution, and to me they never succeed, it's obvious to me for instance how eyes evolved. But caterpillars turning into butterflies still boggles my mind.
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Why didn't you know?
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
are racist...
Zonk has evolved. Duh.
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.
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
It is one thing to teach that theories aren't solid. But it is quite another to teach that every theory is equally valid. There is an extensive fossil record, etc. for evolution. Does this mean that God couldn't have just planted it there to trick us? No. But at the same time if there is a "God" that would do that, then he could also reverse all of the laws of physics tomorrow. Does this mean that we should discredit them? No. We should simply teach that based on past observation, this is how the think x works. We aren't sure, but we have a lot more backing it up than we do for every other theory about x.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
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.
Not that I believe in it, but what's worse than hell?
Evolution isn't a "theory" in that sense of the word, any more than the theory of gravity is "just a theory". Both are fact as far as the scientific community is concerned. And what could be worse than hell? Could it be ignorance?
Read the sig, read the sig, ziggy ziggy ziggy zig!
Please make sure your kids get taught every possible theory or you will probably wind up in hell... or worse.
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.
Zonk can still mate with Zonk and is still classified as Zonk but as we can tell he is beginning the split into a new species which won't maintain compatibility for long (people will have higher expectations of him).
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
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.
My mother-in-law's house?
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
There is no evolution going on in dogs any more. Breeding is (generally) very controlled. Dogs are simply genetic toys that people like to play with. Hell, chihuahuas should not even exist. They cannot be born naturally... a cesarian section is required because the dogs' heads are too big for the birth canal. Dogs are genetic toys, and since breeders aren't geneticists, [purebred] dogs are getting sicker with each passing generation. Mutts, on the other hand, are a different story.
Hold on here. I'm not going to in any way turn anti-Christian here but there are some misconceptions I'd like to clear up, not with your post but in general since you brought up the topic. First of all, evolution exists. Every year humans slowly but surely get taller. It happens. Evolution is a varifiable fact. Second, it's exactly like you said. There's no reason religion and science need to clash with eachother. If you view genetic mutation as the will of God, everything works out just fine.
I don't mean to seem condesending but I taught a class for my chruch's bible school this summer. I was teaching 6th and 7th graders. The material I was supposed to present to them would have easily been disproven by any 4th grade science textbook (well maybe not one from Kentucky). The worst part was that the kids were clueless. I asked how long ago they thought Jesus died. One of them in all seriousness thought Jesus died 30 years ago. Yeah that's right, we love Jesus because he stopped Hitler!!! I told them Jesus was a Jew and they didn't believe me till I got a Bible to show them. I'm sorry. I don't know if it's bad parenting or what but if we're to have an open discussion on evolution or any other subject that's touchy for the chruch we need to have some basic understanding about religion itself.
We were created, man. Get used to it.
No we weren't. Get used to it. And Grow Up.
Dog aren't doing the selection of a mate, the humans are. If given the chance, the dogs would breed themselves into mutts and given the time and lack of human pressure, might breed themselves into a more wolf-like state. I think dogs also show that, for them, visual layout must not be very important for mate selection. Radically different visual breeds will eagerly mate with each other. It must be sounds and smells that matter for them, and humans aren't doing much selection to change those traits.
>"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 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.
Different races probably would have eventually evolved into different species if they'd been and remained isolated for another million years or so (unlikely), but the amount of "intermingling" is now dramatically on the rise, and seemingly set only to increase, so it seems unlikely that it will ever happen now. But no races have ever really been truly isolated anyway ... global trade and travel etc. have been going on all the time for thousands of years.
"Why don't the butterflies want to breed with butterflies that look slightly different?"
Quoted from TFA:
"The reason evolution favours the emergence of a "team strip" in related species, or sub species, living side-by-side is that hybridisation is not usually a desirable thing.
Although many of the Agrodiaetus species are close enough genetically to breed, their hybrid offspring tend to be rather weedy and less likely to thrive. "
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.
I agree. The BBC report seems confusing and explains the after effect of speciation (distinct wing markings) as the cause of speciation and as being useful because it prevents hybridisation.
But prior to divergence it wouldn't be hybridisation.
I suspect it's just poor wording on the reporter's part and the full story is something like:
There are butterflies of different species present in the same area. In order to prevent hybridisation they select mates on the basis of wing pattern. Some members of a species develop an abnormal wing-pattern. Although they _could_ breed with other members of the species, the inbuilt preference for mating with similarly-striped partners means they only mate with each other. This isolation of their genetic pool leads to an accumulation of mutations which make it impossible to breed with their ex-species. Now they are a new species.
(Also, I though hybridisation could be useful when there wasn't enough genetic variability in the parent populations.)
There is no genetic diversity once a 'breed' is established, I would imagine. They are bred to have the same physical and mental attributes each and every generation. They are bred to be the same as they have been established, which means no more diverging from the main K-9 line.
On a side note, this sort of in-breeding and gene stagnation has negative evolutionary consequences. Although the dog might be 'fit' to reproduce now since humans do the selecting and breeding, it is less and less fit to survive. For example, bull dogs are starting to have heads that are too large for them to even lift. Daschunds have extremely long backs that easily have problems. Cocker spaniels have ear infections because of their long ears. Most major breeds have bad allergy problems as well. Mutts are usually healthier animals since there is more genetic diversity, but nobody wants a mutt.
I forgot what the evolutionary term is, but there is a certain point when a limited population becomes extremely dangerous for the survival of a species. Apparently the cheetahs just got by after we pruned off most of them. You need a fairly large gene pool to get a new species. This in-breeding thing is pretty dangerous.
The same thing is happening with all of our domesticated fruits and vegetables. Bananas are more and more susceptable to fungi and other pests. I read an article a few years ago about how bananas as we know them will eventually become extinct.
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? 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?
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
*Note the parallels with gravitation: gravitational attraction between objects is a fact. Theories of gravitation seek to explain how that attraction works, thus allowing us to make predictions about how systems under the influence of gravity will evolve over time.
/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
What, a hundred and fifty years isn't enough?
Newton published his laws of motion in, I belive, 1679. Einstien published his special relativity paper in 1905, "disproving" Newtonian mechanics.
And we're still of course not sure Einstien has the last word. In fact, it's almost certain he doesn't.
No, 150 years isn't enough time.
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?
Are we going to be muscle-less blobs that can't survive without robots?
You mean the amorphous mounds that I see driving around in SUVs aren't already precisely that?
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!!!
Over millions of cycles things change, if they happen to be better, then we tend to keep them, if they are worse we dump them. Evolution is just a method to take 'intelligence' out of that selection, so you can think of ourselves as our creators.
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
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.
Even though this may be a troll, I want to respond anyway.
I cringe every time I hear someone say evolution is just a theory. They don't understand what it takes to get to the next step beyond theory (law). Let me go back a hundred years... This guy named Einstein proposed that Newton's Laws of Motion may be incomplete when the numbers get reallllllllly big. Turns out he was right. Well, the scientific community felt a great amount of embarassment that something they had accepted as law was flawed. Since then, pretty much nothing has become a law, just in case it gets proved wrong.
So, evolution is a theory because that's pretty much as far up the ladder as things go these days!!! Not because the scientific community isn't quite sure. What most people think of as a theory (a conjecture that hasn't been thoroughly tested yet) is really called a hypothesis in the scientific community.
Read here rof a second opinion http://wilstar.com/theories.htm
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
Einstein did not disprove Newtonian mechanics. He showed they work only in a limited (but very broad) range of physical situations, and showed how to extend physics beyond that case.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
As the AC pointed out, height increases are due to improvements in nutrition (mostly increases in protein) and have nothing to do with genetics. This is an easily verified fact; many immigrant families have children much larger than their parents, and children don't grow as big in countries where famines occur.
There have been several published papers which document this.
On the other hand, for a scientist "believe" means "I think that this is true because it's a logical conclusion drawn from occurances which I or someone else have directly observed. Additionally, if presented with compelling evidence (i.e. direct observation) that refutes this conclusion, I will cease to believe it."
That's the key here: evolution is the best explanation (so far) for what we observe without relying on "because somebody said so." That's why it's a theory: It's a conjecture derived from observable facts through logic. Moreover, this also explains why creationism isn't a theory: it relys on assumptions that cannot be derived from observable facts (at least, so far).If you apply what I said about scientists' use of "believe" you should now understand why this isn't the "act of faith" you think it is. The scientists aren't saying they disregard the facts in front of them; they're saying that those facts aren't enough to disprove evolution and that they also don't have any scientific explanation that fits the facts better than evolution. Creationism is right out from the beginning because, as I've said already, it isn't a rigorous, logically-deduced argument to begin with.
If you can think of an explanation that fits all observed facts better than evolution and doesn't rely on Faith, then you can start complaining about some kind of conspiracy among scientists to reject anything that's not evolution.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Damn smart butterfly
(And, as awful as it is for many that subscribe to other faiths or no faith at all, millions may perish one day soon).
Yea... Millions... Except, more.
There are, roughly, 1 billion Christian/Protestants in the world. Ther are, roughly 1 billion Christian/Catholics in the world. Now because of their tradition and some more unique views (Catholics believe in 'good works', etc vs modern protestants believe more in a pure faith.. And mormons, that have added significantly to the base religions(a whole new testament))... we can roughly say that 2 billion "Christians" exist, but in reality, 1 prostetant's more techincal faith contradict with anothers. The way Catholics believe they get to heaven is not the same as other denominations, though the core belief is generally the same.
Ok, so yada yada, 2 billion christians.
Now, there are 6.3 (and growing) people in the world. Assuming that every "christian" is saved, that they have a clean slate, are not liars or "sunday christians" and are on the up-and-up with regards to Christ, that leaves 2 out of every 3 people not even having a CHANCE at salvation.
2 out of 3. Just one of the many things to think about.
PS: During the end days, 7 year tribulation, etc, there are likely to be converts (if the way I have heard the book of revelations is remotely accurate, given how metaphorically it was written). So this number could surely increase, but only by so much.
Many billions of people will like be sent to hell, not just millions.
Demanding the scientist's personal info. Can't have such blasphomy against the bible(tm) getting confirmation! What's this science crap anyway? ...
IMO, the true scientist witholds judgement until the experiments have been done and the data is in front of them.
OK, bring on the experiments. Describe an experiment that can be used to disprove design in a given organism. If you are unable to do this, then -- at the most fundamental level -- ID is not amenable to the scientific method, and is not worth any further scientific enquiry.
So, name the experiment. Go on, I'm all ears.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
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.
I get frustrated with evolution being called "just a theory" as ID people try to play semantics. Here's a question - According to the (OT) bible, how many people has god murdered - answer maybe as many as 5 million. How many has satan killed - answer zero (Job's wife and family was killed by satan, but under instruction of god) Wake up all of you - this religion thing is a farse!
Two things:
First, hence the quotes around "disproved".
Second, the AC that also responded to you is right. Newton is never 100% right. However, with the speeds, forces, etc. we experience on a regular basis, Newton is so absurdly close to being correct that it works just as well as Einstien, and the errors that simplification introduces are more or nothing compared to measurement errors.
People who dismiss concepts like 'intelligent design' out of hand may often like to refer to themselves as scientific, but in fact dismissing something like that out of hand is the very reverse of scientific.
Your confusing dismissing after evaluating and dismissing out of hand. Havign 0 predictive power, 100% made up rationalization, and lacking any evidence it's very scientific to reject that theory.
Perhaps a redefinition of science is in order, something closer to the definition of religion... 'Thou shalt not challenge the orthodoxy.'
A common logical fallacy used by pro-ID people. How ever using the exact same criteria you use to evaluate all scientific theory, ID fails very very badly. The scientific community is not like the libral literary community, everybody is out to "revolutionize" the community with a new idea. It might be contriversial but if it passes the tests placed on it, it will eventually be accepted.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
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 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*.
Numerous issues with this one. First it is wrong to think of evolution of lifeforms as increasingly getting "smarter" or "better". If an attribute provides a survival or propagation advantage it will be selected and maintained. If being dumber presents a survival advantage then this quality will be selected.
As far as the second law arguement, as is noted in various places, life on planet earth is not a closed system. Life just inserts itself within the chain of energy conversion path (Solar to Low Level Heat) and constantly generates entropy while doing so.
Consider a thought experiment. Say you have a Bingo style box with several different shaped balls being batted around by an air stream. If you cut in the top of the box a hole that conforms to one of the balls, say a triangle shape, you would constantly decrease in entropy in the state of the balls since you would be filtering out the triangle shaped balls and increasing order within the system. However if you consider the complete system including the power to drive the balls you have a total increase in the entropy by converting high quality electral energy into low quality heat. In the above, example the hole in the top of the box is akin to natural selection as it is a filter that differentially selects a quality combine replication and well you know...
Another examples exists of unclosed systems becoming increasingly ordered (lower entropy) such as different size rock on the beach with wave action.
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.
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*.
Simple, energy is being put into the system by the sun. The total system to be considered is the whole of the local solar system. There, entropy is increasing, but because there is a flow of energy to the earth, there is a mechanism that can allow the local entropy on the earth to decrease. There is no conflict here, you just need to consider a bigger system than just the planet.
5) Spontaneous generation. It's never been proven
That's because it doesn't happen, and has never happened. Life on earth doesn't depend on SG, it depends on a very slow process that went from inorganic to organic chemistry to some form of self-replicating system (not DNA, that is a much later evolution of whatever came first). There is probably no evidence to be found for this because as a process it took place an incredibly long time ago on a very different earth - all traces wil lhave been long obliterated. And besides, the emergence of life after the formation of the earth took a mind-bogglingly long time, which indicates that whatever this process was, it was either very slow or very chancy. Odds are this will always remain a mystery - we have to accept that there are some things that can never be known, only speculated about
because we *could* be the 1 in septendecillion instance
This is the "weak anthropic principle". We could be the only life in the universe. Why us? Because we are here to observe it, so nothing else could observe it. It's a definite possibility.
Evolution of the eye. We have no indication of how or why the eye evolved
Oh, that old chestnut. The eye has evolved separately numerous times, and is actually pretty obvious! Read Dawkins. The eye is so obviously useful for a creature's survival that its evolution is more or less guaranteed. More difficult to answer would be subtler thing such as sexual reproduction, etc. Evolution of the vertebrae
Not sure why this one should be tricky. The vertebra is easy to undertand from the point of view of mechanical efficiency when propelling oneself through water. Tiny creatures experience water as a viscous medium but as they grow larger then simple propulsion methods such as cilia or flagellae become very inefficient. Hence muscle will tend to evolve from the motility cells, but muscle will work best when it has a framework to work with and so that will co-evolve - this has happened twice at least - insects evolved exoskeletons and animals evolved endoskeletons. The endo- route proved more suitable for even larger creatures and a simple way for a creature to get larger is to replicate parts of its existing structures - it's easy to imagine how a gene for building a vertebra could mutate and get expressed twice and so there were then two vertebrae, and so on. I don't see how any particular body part every "disproves" evolution. Usually their very ad-hoc-ness tends to show that a natural process is at work. If bodies had been designed there are many things that could be drastically simplified for no loss of function. Macro-evolution is not falsifiable. If something is not falsiable, like creation for instance, it's considered part of a belief system or religion.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by macro-evolution not being falsifiable. It has not been observed taking place yet - speciation at any rate. But macro-evolution is observable - it's all around us in every different living creature. The key
Your problem is that you're trying to make analogies out of these situations, and are failing at it. Theromdynamics... closed system? Sorry, doesn't work. That link you gave about the dating has nothing to do with the problems of cessium dating, just some greedy scientist.
/. a while back.
where are the fossils of these transitory species? Start diggin. The chances of finding a fossil are very small since the chances of a good fossil of a species forming tiny by itself. Yet look at everything we've found so far.
Micro-evolution is observable and falsifiable. Macro-evolution is not falsifiable. What the hell do you mean by that? To prove that it is true, we simply need to observe it enough times to show that it *can happen*. There are infinitely many logical arguments that are proven this way... there's no falacy in it.
We have no indication of how or why the eye evolved. Yes we do. This was even posted here on
Evolution of the vertebrae. IMHO, this may be the strongest argument against evolution. How so? A small hardening of the organs that surround vital nervous systems that gradually gets stronger as the organisms evolve sound unreasonable? You don't think the guy with the stronger back will win out in a fight?
Your arguments are not logical. Sorry, but they're not. You say that "we have absolutely no idea why or how...", but this can easily be disproven (and in your case, it is. Go talk to an actual biologist to find out, or hit up google for 5 minutes and avoid the creationist websites).
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.
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.
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).
For your specific points, these are very common questions / issues from creationists and others (except the bone question), so the Index is useful:
"Unfortunately, many people (many of them calling themselves scientists) would argue that 'its a waste of time' because 'obviously intelligent design is just wrong'. Not very scientific eh."
You are obviously very unfamiliar with the arguments to keep Intelligent Design out of science classes. "Right" and "wrong," as concepts, are topics for religion, not science. Science is about "supported" and "unsupported" by evidence. I haven't heard scientists say it's "just wrong", I've heard them say its unscientific. Even if Intelligent Design is 100% correct, it would STILL be unscientific-- it would just show that science is unable to explain everything.
There are no "facts" in science, only observations and conclusions. Every testable explanation is a "theory", so saying something is "only a theory" is the scientific equivalent of saying something is "only an explanation that can be tested". Casting intentional doubt on science for the sole purpose of promoting religion is really hurting this country, I think.
The bottom line is that Intelligent Design is not "falsifiable"-- there is no experiment you can use to discredit it, since any result of any experiment can be explained by saying "God/Aliens wanted it that way." You say that the "true scientist withholds judgement until the experiments have been done," which is a good sentiment. However, now that vast numbers of experiments/observations HAVE been done, many scientists are justified in defending evolution. And if anyone ever comes up with an experiment that can be done to support/discredit Intelligent Design, it would be a boon to science to perform the experiment, and I'm sure it would make headlines on Slashdot.
E pluribus unum
Ah well - i realize now its worded wrong. But i mean, religions are pointless in that nobody is either going to heaven or hell (The #1 selling point of religions). There is only the earthly consequences of actions.
My personal theory about religion is that it served as an early attempt to control the masses, so that it held society together around a set of principles, which prevented the early civilisations from decending into total anarchy. Now that most of us have constitutions and quite extensive legal systems to prevent this, i dont see why religion still has any importance to society. Especially not when it seems to harm progress, rather than promote it*
*This comment only reserved to fundamentalist groups who frowns upon science.
"Macro" evolution is nothing but a large number of "micro" evolution steps piled together.
Most creationist will agree that this butterfly "anomaly" when the butterfly becomes a bird
Standard rediculous creationist claim. Under evolution nothing can become anything other than a variation of what it already was. For example cats: house cats, lions, tigers, pathers, lynx, cheetah, jaguar, puma, they are all cats. Across the entire cat family they are clearly separated by nothing but a bunch of "micro" evolutions. Lions and tigers are seperated by different hair patterns and a handful of other trivial differences. In fact lions and tigers can even interbreed. A house cat is seperated from the cheetah merely by a larger number of "micro" evolutions. They are simply a diverging branching tree from some original cat. The entire existing cat tree converges on a single ancestor roughtly 10 million years ago. A cat cannot become a dog. Working backwards over a far longer time span, the cat family and dog family and bear family and raccoon family are all branches from a common carnovour ancestor around 40 or 50 million years ago. There are merely four or five times as many "micro" evolutions between cats and dogs as there are between house cats and cheetahs. Again woring backwards cats and cows and dolphins and humans are all mammals. They are simply a diverging branching tree from some original mammal roughly 220 million years ago.
A butterfly cannot become a bird any more than a dolphin can become a fish. However dolphins are a perfect examply of just how far one one thing (a mammal) can diverge into something that "completely different" and look a lot like a fish after 220 million years of "micro" evolutions. Given 220 million years worth of "micro" evolution, yes some butterfly will become something extremely "macro" different, it might even resemble a bird in the way a dolphin resembles a fish, but it will never be a bird.
Macro evolution is just a meaningless creationist term to wave away the mountain of scientific evidence that they can no longer deny. It's like attacking the theory of gravity because we have not yet seen Pluto make a full orbit. We first discovered pluto in 1930, and we will not see it complete an orbit until the year 2278. We will not see the Milky Way galaxy complete an orbit for about 228 million years. None of this weakens the theory of gravity.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Okay, how about this:
Wave two pencils in front of a person, about 30cm apart. Then, have them cover one eye and step away slowly, while looking at one pencil tip, until they can't see other due to their blind spot.
Now, ask a squid to do the same thing.
Guess what? Squids have no blind spot, because the optic nerve and blood vessels connect to the eye without interrupting the potosensitive cells.
An intelligent designer (when hypothesizing that the designer was the same for both) would not have produced a defective eye for humans when they designed it properly the first time (only the day before).
Of course, not only humans have a blind spot; all vertbrates do. Likewise, many creatures other than squids do not suffer from blind spots-encumbered vision.
You can easily disprove intelligent design, because both "intelligent" and "design" (not to mention the other attributes of the particular designer that most folks seem to have in mind) imply certain conditions that their designs would have to exibit relative to other designs by that same author.
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.
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.
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?
And if a theory about leprechauns originating all life for the sole purpose of having someone to withhold their lucky charms from was proposed as something to be taught in a science class, it would be opposed in the same way that ID is now opposed.
I'm not certain how your example does anything to dismiss the parents' point. Are you trying to say that just because something cannot be disproved via experiment it is worthy of scientific inquiry. Are leprechauns worthy of serious scientific inquiry now?
When somebody makes an assertion, it is not the responsibility of the person who is being skeptical to disprove anything. I don't have to prove anything with a "not" in it.
You have misunderstood my post. I was asking that proponents of ID demonstrate how ID can be falsified. As I'm sure you know, falsifiability is one of the general prerequisites of any scientific hypothesis.
I'm not claiming that supporters of evolution must falsify ID; I'm asserting that supporters of ID must show how their own claims might be falsified by evidence from the natural world. If they cannot furnish a hypothetical situation in which there claims can conclusively be falsified, then their claims cannot be evaluated within a scientific framework.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
- precisely defines what "intelligent design" is,
including a thorough description of
how "intelligent designing" works, and
- describes a set of experimental measurements
that
says "if these values are found, then
intelligent design is real, but if they are
not found, intelligent design is not real"
then ID might have something to do with science. Otherwise, it is pure theology.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.
This is just one of those arguments that have absolutely no basis in science or common sense, yet keeps getting repeated because no one has bothered to stop and think about it. Basic light sensativity (the kind that exists in single-celled organisms) is better than none at all. Color sensativity is better than basic light sensativity. Color sensativity with a very crude lense (only partially focused) is better than no lense at all. And an entire, perfectly focused eye is better than a half-focused eye. If you doubt these things, just think about how much very basic information an eye supplies--the time of day, the movement of a predator, the color of a poisonous plant, etc. There is no mystery, only a basic origin (a light sensative cell) and a chain of cumulative improvements.
Some animals (though not bats) are blind, probably for brainpower reasons. Visual processing takes a lot of energy, energy that could be redirected into other endevors, such as sound/smell processing or greater intelligence. If little is to be gained by sight, for instance if a creature spends its entire life underground or in deep ocean, then there really isn't a strong evolutionary incentive to keep (or develop) those eyeballs.
Your other arguments are fairly moot, too, but this one is a pet peeve of mine. For all the logic it contains, you might as well say that the ocean is conclusive proof that lakes don't exist.
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.
In unrelated news: Tennessee bans butteflies.
You need to install an RTFM interface.
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.
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.
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_
Having been a biotechnology student for many a year, I can't honestly say that I believe speciation occurs within the human race.
I believe this because of the size of our population, the structure of our society, and the fact that there seem to be no more completely isolated groups of human beings.
Human beings have really made things their own way. We have a system that sort of throws nature out the window, and it messes up a lot of natural processes. Do you even see a need for biological change? Our population is growing at an alarming rate, and it doesn't follow normal mammal cycles or anything. I'm pretty sure whatever conditions that tend towards the evolutionary process we've broken out of a long time ago.
That's just my opinion, though. For all we know speciation is occurring as we speak. It takes a VERY long time, though. But, honestly, what two groups can it arise between? I think HG Wells offers the only plausible theory when he takes into account social class. It's a good bone for both marxists and non-marxists alike: the social class. Will it become a biological divider too? Unlikely, I say, but a fascinating concept.
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 :)
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You have no idea what you're talking about re: mutations. They are very, very numerous and common.
http://www.iscr.ed.ac.uk/mecp2/mutations.php (random result of web search. First one I looked at.)
And, how does one underestimate a fact? More like, never underestimate people's ignorance about biology.
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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.
No No No... god INTENDED for us to have a blind spot, um... so that we can cast aside our gaze from the devil without actually having to turn our heads. Yeah, cause otherwise he might tempt us into things like drugs and HOMOSEXUALITY!!!! Those who are tempted simply don't have the faith to use their divinely granted blind spot!
I mean, there are some lines of reasoning you just can't argue against. I'm not saying they're correct, just that you can't productively form an argument that they'll listen to.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Arguments against "intelligent" design:
1. Balls on the outside
"I just know that there is a Big Mind behind it all"
Ahh, the incontrovertible "I just know" argument.
Ahh, the incontrovertible "I just know" argument.
The very process
of proving beauty
is ugly.
You're entitled to your own opinion and world-view, just as you are entitled to deny everything that is not proven. Personally I think you're missing out, but that's your choice of consciousness..
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
a being infinitely superior to you and I created these things
Unless you can provide evidence for this assertion, it's nothing but hot air.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
"The two different designs have different purposes for different conditions.
:)
A squids eye would perform very poorly under the conditions humans live in, and vice versa."
So, basically, they -evolved according to their circumstances and environmental needs-?
Come hear me sing!
"OK. But religions certainly don't say that man is perfect."
:)
;)
No, but religion DOES state, matter-of-factly, that God -is- perfect, and incapable of making a mistake. That includes creating anything that is less than perfect because, by definition, that would be an imperfection on His part.
"God can be perfect and create something imperfect."
See part A., above.
"I'm not a proponent of ID, but it seems you're too eager to dismiss it that you can't see your own fairly obvious logical fallacy."
I have no desire to turn this article's discussion into an anti-religion debate, but if you want to talk "obvious logical fallacies," may I direct your attention to the fact that "The Bible is God's own Word, because the Bible says it is," as well as that "The Bible is true, because the Bible says the Bible is true."
From everything I've seen and/or read, proponents of Evolutionary Theory do not use circular-arguments to 'prove' what they say is true.
Come hear me sing!
I think this is called the Anthropocentric Principle. It is definitely not proof of a "Big Mind behind it all". Of course the existence of such a thing can hardly be disproved.
If you prove or disprove something, you stop wondering about it. Your progress is halted. The trick is to keep wondering and go further.
Suppose we prove God's existence here and now, by a simple scientific method nobody can dispute and everybody test for themselves. Then what? What has that amounted to? It won't help this world one iota. The arguing and bombings will continue as before, maybe even worse.
You can live life based on God's existence, and in the very process you will create God within yourself. Wether you believe God is a bearded man up in the sky or a universal principle, doesn't matter. Arguing is only for people who cannot tolerate other opinions. In the process, you miss the other perspective and lose respect for others. Arguing about God, you make him a Thing. That misses the point entirely!
What matters is how you live life. Is it a struggle, or is it something beautiful and simple? The human values are the same for every religion and culture. We should nurture and cultivate them, in order to solve our differences and generally be more happy. It is really very simple knowledge, which the world is in need for at this time.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
I'm the designer.
That's a know bug
Send me a patch and I will merge it.
Ploum.net.
Actually, no we don't know that. We assume that we can, but until we've actually done so, we don't know it for a fact.
A clarification: I'm assuming we're talking about designing and building organisms from scratch (nonliving material), not simply breeding dogs or the like. Selective breeding is certainly something we can do, and in fact have done, for thousands of years.
Anyway, our assumption of being able to create life is based on the assumption that life is nothing more than matter arranged in a complex pattern. This may be true, but we don't know it for sure; for all we know, there might very well be a nonmaterial component - life force, mana, soul, whatever - that's needed to make a hunk of matter alive. So, until some sanity-challenged scientist actually shouts "It's alive !", our presumed potential ability to create life is just speculation.
Sorry for the rant, we now return you to your regularly scheduled religion-bashing.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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
Cause, you know, the fact that the people the argument is directed against are being overly stiff in their belief completely excuses the fact that the 'squids have better eyes' example is rather dumb argument based on twisting the definition of 'better' to suit a premade conclusion.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
Science starts from the standpoint that everything that can be observed can be explained. Religion starts from the standpoint that some things cannot be explained. The two are reconcilable only to the extent that ideas can be accepted without need of explanation -- in other words, Not Very Far At All.
:) It is of course possible that life on other planets could be wholly or predominantly left-handed.}
The problem I have with the idea of "intelligent design" is that it breaks several important rules, not the least of which is the KISS principle. The need for an Intelligent Designer rests on the notion of Irreducible Complexity. But there is no irreducible complexity in nature. On the contrary, an Intelligent Designer would introduce irreducible complexity.
The Universe embodies the principle that simplicity is beauty. {Why does the pressure in a fluid act equally in all directions? Because it was simpler than favouring a particular direction. Why does light travel in straight lines? Because it was simpler that way. Why do men have nipples? Because it was too complicated for them not to.} If we take that logic to the extreme, it is simpler for the universe to have created itself somehow {and here I am making no assumptions about the process by which this might happen}, than for a creator to have been created as an intermediate step. My assertion is: There is no process that could have created a creator, that could not instead -- and more simply -- have created a fully-formed universe.
{The predominance of D- over L- enantiomers in nature is not evidence for Intelligent Design. It can be shown by analysis of potential reaction mechanisms that right-handed would favour right-handed and vice versa. It is probable that the primordial soup was close to racemic, but somehow more D- than L- proto-organisms survived and eventually L- forms became extinct. It ought to be possible to synthesise and culture the opposite enantiomer of an existing DNA sample, resulting in a "left handed clone". Pending the perfection of the necessary equipment, this must be left as an exercise for the reader
The argument against life being created by random chance ignores the obvious fact that the improbable event has already happened. In fact, given the sheer magnitude of the universe, it was close to inevitable that life would develop somewhere. Remember that the many necessary attempts were taking place in parallel, not in series {if you throw six dice at a time, the odds favour at least one of them being a six}. And not everything in the process is truly random: certain chemical elements are predisposed to bond in certain ways.
Remember also that radioactive decay events, which we know today trigger genetic mutation, would have been more common the further back in time we travel. We cannot know for certain {though we might infer from decay products} whether or not some especially radioactive isotope existed in the past but has become completely exhausted today.
{I realise that there are quite a few dangling "somehows" in this essay. It is not my intension to offer explanations for them here. These are "closing" rather than "opening" questions, which is to say that the answers will not in and of themselves raise further questions.}
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Hey, it's still evolution. The pressure is now just in the direction we put it. The fact that the natural force driving the evolution of dogs is the design of humans doesn't make it any less of a natural force. Last I checked, i was a biological organism.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
"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."
;-)
Logical fallacy.
If conditions were even slightly different at any point in the history of the universe, all current species would be extinct. You can't say our current ecosystem contains all possible species for every possible set of environmental conditions and physical laws, so you can't say that no life would exist, merely that our current form(s) of life wouldn't.
We evolved in these conditions - it's no surprise that we're extraordinarily tightly bound to them. You're confusing cause and effect.
For another example, riffle through a pack of cards and pick one. Put it back and do it again. You pick the four of clubs, followed by the ace of hearts. So what?
So what? At this point, the four of clubs is looking around and thinking "Wow, what are the odds, eh? The chances of me and Ace here existing are 1 in two thousand and four!. Yeah, but the chance of "two cards being picked" is pretty much 1:1 (leaving aside the possibilities of spontaneous combustion or weird quantum tunneling effects half-way through
You're looking around, assuming this is the only way "life" could possibly ever evolve, and positing the fluke was down to an intelligent creator.
First off, we still don't have a complete understanding of what even constitutes "life", so you can't claim a definite conclusion of any kind. All you can do is construct theories, using rational, logical inference and falsifiable hypotheses.
Secondly, it could well be that "life" is merely an emergent property of a sufficiently complex organisation of matter left for a long enough time, in which case the chances of life appearing in the universe would be about 1:1.
Short answer: Science teaches us to adopt the leading falsifiable hypothesis only until a better one comes along. In other words, keep investigating, and don't ever assume you know the complete answer.
Religion teaches us unsubstantiated irrational heresay from thousands of years before the scientific method, and expects us to treat it as the final answer. In other words, shut up, sit down and stop asking awkward questions.
"I just know that there is a Big Mind behind it all."
No, you think there's a Big Mind behind it all. This is the central point of ID/creationism/religious zealotry of all types - a complete inability to differentiate between "know", "believe, based on the preponderance of evidence" and "believe, with no evidence whatsoever to support your conclusion".
I have no problem with someone believing whatever they like - it's when they mistake that for "knowing" and attempt to force their own irrational beliefs on others that I feel compelled to stand up.
"Then what's the point arguing about it? Like ants arguing about the demi-god roaming around the garden making large craters.."
Amen to that - it's essentially unknowable, so it's not science, but philosophy. If Creationists/ID-proponents wanted religion discussed in Philosophy I'd have no problem.
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
I am not suggesting that your beliefs are wrong or invalid. I suggest that we speaking about them, that you delineate belief from knowledge, without implying that one is inferior to the other. In fact, one can say that knowledge is inferior because it is composed of possibly flawed conclusions drawn from a limited number of observations, whereas beliefs (and Faith) are pure, perfect, universal, and irrefutable. So keep your superior beliefs out of inferior Science (and vice versa). This point is especially valid when discussing ID, because Christian Fundamentalists want their beliefs taught as knowledge in Science classes.
Science is about knowledge, not Truth or Belief or Answers. The state of Science at any given moment is basically: these are the few things that we know, and here are the observations (direct or indirect) that cause us to know them. And BTW, please show us that the conclusions that we have drawn from these observation are incorrect, because that is the means by which our knowledge grows in both quantity and quality.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
You are confusing dogma, spirituality and science.
You see, religion is like a banana. It tastes good and does good. Our western modern society is actually based on this banana. However, in time people have thrown the banana and kept the skin. This has been an awful waste, because the skin is not edible and gives a stomach ache. But this makes people hold on to the skin even more, because now they've lost the banana! They even start arguing what part of the skin is "the best"..
Basically, "the skin" is symbols, traditions, flags, icons, etc. It's just a wrapping paper. You unwrap the package, and then throw away the wrapping, not the other way around.
Spirituality is what this banana consists of. It is based on direct experience. Everybody has some spirituality, even if it's just to accept that they have a daily life where they go to work and party on weekends. You cannot argue against somebody's direct experience..
Science is trying to make everybody agree on the same reality. Sadly however, in the process, science has thrown away much of the banana-core too, confusing it for the skin..
Basically, our whole "modern" society has thrown away the banana. The result is higher rates of depression, cancer, stress, suicides, etc. This is because of lack of spirituality and roots in this world. A feeling of alienation and that we don't belong here.
So you see, I accept both spirituality and science as complentary, thus my world is bigger than if I had just accepted one or the other.
What is needed at this time, is to globalize spirituality. Find a set of human values we all agree on and nurture and cultivate that, and cherish each other's different worldviews. Otherwise, the negative trends will just become worse.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
I have no problem with spirituality - in fact, believe it or not, I consider myself somewhat spiritual. I have no problem with the idea that (for example), God created the entire universe X billion years ago, and "created" all living beings through evolution.
;-)
The problem I have is with fundamentalists who believe Science is opposed to Religion, then try to dress up Religion in Science's clothing in order to depose it.
I'm happy to let Science handle the "how" and the "when", and let Religion handle the "why".
Unfortunately, while scientists by and large are careful with their assertions and strive to stay in their niche, religious fundamentalists often play fast and loose with semantics, logic and reason, and seem intent on invading and conquering science, depriving us of our most useful tool in our (physical) arsenal.
FWIW, I believe you're correct in your assertion that modern life is entirely too materialistic, and that we lose a great deal (including, studies indicate, mental stability) by focusing on stressful living and material acquisition rather than what truly makes us happy.
That said, I'd lay the blame for that more on economics, fashion and advertising (all avowedly non-scientific) than on science.
Science just gives us the tools - it's up to us whether we use them to promote a comfortable utopian equality for all, or to plaster the freeway with high-pressure paranoia-inducing adverts telling you no-one will have sex with you if you don't replace your car every 18 months...
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
Is there any way to falsify the evolution theory?
many, many ways
The 'wrong wiring' acts as a filter, which among other things lets humans see under much brighter conditions than a squid, which lives in the water (where there is less light).
This is dumb. We have an adjustable pupil in our eye as well as photoreceptors that adapt to light. The tiny bit of light absorbed by the layer of cells at the back of the retina does not help at all. All it does is scatter the light a bit and reduce visual acuity.
It also acts as a UV-filter, which squids living under water, don't need.
Wrong again. Those cells are virtually transparent to UV and provide no appreciable protection. As a matter of fact, birds, who have the same eye design as we do, can see UV. Besides, those cells are neurons that are required to see. They are the cells that need to be protected from UV. So having them absorb UV would be exactly the wrong thing to do if you were trying to design an eye.
Furthermore, the blind spot costs us nothing, since we have two eyes(=most of the time the blind spots don't overlap), and (unless we focus them) they are moving constantly, so nothing can hide in the blind spots.
But why have a blind spot at all? Yes, we've adapted so that they are only rarely a problem. But an object coming at you rapidly from your blind spot could put out your eye because you wouldn't see it coming to blink. And if you lose one eye, which is not that uncommon an injury in the wild, you will be even more vulnerable. It provides no conceivable advantage; no intelligently designed light sensor runs the wiring in front of the sensors.
in contrast to the claims of Dawkins et al., no evidence exists to support the claim that even the most advanced verted eye is superior to the inverted eye.
... an unexplained mystery. No evidence exists of any transitional forms, and all known animals have either verted or inverted eyes.
Nor does any evidence exist to the contrary. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. They are obviously superior in one way--they have no blind spot.
How the eye evolved from the primitive verted type common to invertebrates into the inverted eye of vertebrates is
This is another stupid "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" argument. Do you really expect to find fossil eyes? And in fact, many plausible explanations of the evolution of the eye have been provided. The hard thing is figuring out which of the many possible ways an eye could have evolved is the right one. Indeed, based upon modern knowledge of photochemistry, evolution of vision seems virtually inevitable, and it is not surprising that eyes seem to have evolved multiple times.
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.
Arguing that because the eye has a blind spot therefore it wasn't designed is like saying that my watch isn't designed because it has an analog display and not a digital one.
A better analogy would be to imagine that for some reason, your watch was unable to display any time between 12:00 and 1:00, even though between all other hours it displays minutes and seconds, and even though other watches from the same manufacturer are able to display times like 12:30 just fine.
Crap, can't we get onto the original topic of the Butterflies? I agree with an earlier post that said; "Cue long series of clueless ID discussions."
I'm all for the philosophy and meaning, but there is a lot of junk here that has been disproved many times over. There are clear theories for how complex systems that seem to need to function "whole cloth" can actually evolve -- usually by re-purposing complex systems used for something else-- like the mitochondria in DNA being first parasite, then symbiote, and finally a part of most cells.
And let's let the whole "better eye" discussion rest. I'm not perfect and I can tell from looking at people that they are at best an interim design-- a "hodge-podge". Human eyes are mostly inferior to birds eyes -- even if you try to throw in arguments towards different uses or "economy of design" -- these are all Evolutionary arguments anyway. We could talk about the poor design of the foot. Or, how come we have a bunch of delicate bones and a tail on our spine? As a designer, I would have piped the nerves through another series of bones like the legs and had two maybe three large joints --tops! People could have more flexibility and strength and less damage to a large-boned three jointed back. Human bodies make sense if you look at environment and circumstances forcing an animal out of one habitat into another. We could have come out of the trees into mangrove swamps, for a few millennia, then been forced to walk upright as the water dried to desert. Throwing rocks becomes a technique for defense and hunting that allows humans to be weaker per pound than almost all other animals. My personal theory is that hominids beat out neanderthals by being weaker, so as to preserve energy and better survive the food shortages of the ice ages. All these ideas are up for debate -- but they make more sense than a human built from scratch to live just as a human does today.
And why are there so many bones in the hands and feet? I could go on. The human body is a sacrifices functionality for brain power in a lot of places. We are weaker and slower and have poorer senses than many other animals. Was that because we have big brains or in order to have big brains? I don't know, but, we'll fix all that through genetic engineering. Religious groups will bitch about that plenty enough -- I can assure you.
ID is about theocratic power. Those in the pulpit who want to think for others need explanations. When discovering that evolution was helping too many people understand things, the pseudo-science of ID "evolved" from a more primitive form called "creationism". This is a discussion about evolution from those interested in science. Don't get religion in the argument unless you want me to show up at your church and talk about the Gospel according to Mary Magdalen. Which is tempting, really tempting. But, as I've matured, I've realized that having THE WHOLE TRUTH is kind of impossible -- so fighting about who has the better truth is extremely wasteful. The best we've managed so far is the scientific method. It is a process by which theories can compete and be proved or disproved. That was a pretty good accomplishment for flawed humans--leave it be!
Also, I'm too late for this post to make much impact--but I hope that future societies who excavate the internet stores will look kindly on this post.
Did any of this cover the speciation and diversity discovery? No. Distraction has been achieved.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Actually, given the age of the universe(latest estimate), and the time at which it takes evolution to work(proven evolution, not spontaneous mutation, a.k.a., magic), it is a mathematical impossibility that humans could have evolved into the advanced state at which they exist given this time frame. There simply isn't enough time for evolution to work.
Saying 'there isn't enough time for evolution to work' given the fossil record which clearly proves in great detail that it certainly has worked is about as crazy as seeing a large building, then stating that it could not have been built, after someone has shown you all the photos of its construction.
What about the evolution of the eye?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Your point about lions and tigers being the same except for trivial differences, and even the opportunity to interbreed them is close to the mark. What you neglected to point out is that when they are bred together, the offspring is infertile.
The only reason there are different breeds of cats and dogs and pigeons, etc, is that humans have looked for specific traits, and then selectively mated only parents who had those traits, over and over again. However, if you stuck 15 different dog breeds together for a few generations, you would see, not continued exclusivity in breeding, but a return to the basic dog.
Macro evolution is just a meaningless creationist term to wave away the mountain of scientific evidence that they can no longer deny.
Your point dies here. There is no mountain of evidence supporting macro evolution. If anything, the mountain supports creation by a supreme being. Too many simultaneous changes must happen in multiple specimens that then decide to interbreed in order to achieve evolution.
Every true species (and German Shepherds are not a different species from Chihuahuas) has unique aspects to it that do not line up with other species, even though overall they share similar traits. An extreme example is the similarities between hummingbirds and emus. They're both birds. But hummingbirds are a definite, separate species. Getting an emu and a hummingbirds out of the same original bird doesn't make any sense. Just like getting housecats and lions out of the same original cat is irrational.
And what about all the animals out there that serve no purpose, like the hippopotamus? Hippopotami eat vegetation, the males fight for control of the pod, and a few parasitic animals live off of them. But they serve no purpose in life. Certain fish glom on and eat the dead skin off their hides, and others follow them to consume their dung. Another example is the rhinocerous. Rhinos are in the business of eating and making new rhino babies. Occasionally they fight some other animal away from their territory, but they serve no purpose beyond that. They're not food for anything but the eventual carion eaters like buzzards and hyenas.
There are far too many holes in the naturalistic philosophy of evolution to believe without tubs of faith poured in. There are no holes in creationism. While we can't determine why the hippo exists, we know an intelligent being put it there.
antipaucity