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Rate of Evolution Metrics Observed
eldavojohn notes an article up at Science Daily on research demonstrating that smaller animals with warmer blood evolve faster than larger, colder animals. From the article: "Across species from fish to mammals, they found that rates of protein evolution showed the same body size and temperature dependence as metabolic rate. Specifically, their mathematical model predicts that a 10-degree increase in temperature across species leads to about a 300 percent increase in the evolutionary rate of proteins, while a tenfold decrease in body size leads to about a 200 percent increase in evolutionary rates."
This does enplane why fat Americans don't seem to change. Loose weight and evolve!
Let me enplane individual organisms do not evolve. Even very very large ones like the average American.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I think you have to factor rate of reproduction into this. Whales and elephants don't breed often; that would retard the propagation of genetic changes. Smaller mammals like mice and rabbits tend to breed very often, allowing them to propagate genetic changes faster and more often, making it easier for them to weather (no pun intended) changes in the environment. I don't know how this would factor to "cold-blooded" animals.
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Except that the evidence has tipped heavily in favor of dinos, or at least a large number of families of them, were, in fact, warm-blooded.
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Dinosaurs weren't reptiles. There's more and more evidence that shows that they were warm-blooded. And dinosaurs didn't really disappear. They just look different now. Step outside and look at all those feathered things flying around. Those are modern dinosaurs.
Could it be that the more cold-blooded animals do not evolve as a species because they evolve as individuals?
Phenotypic variation is not evolution. Most complex animals show some geneomic expression variation through out it's life. In fact your expression of a lot of hormones and cellular products will vary immensely until you are very dead. It's not just a reptilian thing.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
During the extended sunless period after the K-T boundary impact, most any animal that wasn't a scavenger found themselves at an evolutionary dead end.
b) Like many posters, you're forgetting or don't understand how evolution actually works. Humans are not "more evolved" than other animals. Every species that is currently still in existence is the pinnacle of evolution for its particular environmental niche. If that environment changes, the species will either die out or evolve further to survive in the niche.
The main evolutionary advantage humans have is our brains - they have allowed us to become more adaptable without evolution than many animals, and survive and thrive in many environments and through envrionmental changes. In order to have such a complex brain, it has to be of a certain minimum size, and our body has to be of a minimum size to support it. A brain as complex as ours most likely simply could not evolve in a mouse - but we couldn't live in the niches mice do, for a variety of reasons. Opposable thumbs have helped us as well - but would they be an advantage without the other advantages we have? What would a mouse *do* with opposable thumbs, without the brain structures to use them intelligently? Would they be an evolutionary advantage for a mouse at all? Or take a dolphin, who has one of the brains closest to ours in the animal kingdom - what would a dolphin do with opposable thumbs (assuming it evolved some fingers at the same time)? They wouldn't help it swim, which is one thing it has to be really good at to get food and escape predators. In fact, a dolphin with hands instead of fins would probably fare worse than other dolphins, because it couldn't swim as quickly and adeptly. What is an evolutionary advantage to one species can spell doom for another species.
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If we were to assume that evolution had a goal, we would have to conclude that that goal was to produce beetles.
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Why should standing upright or having opposable thumbs be considered more "advanced" or, as the implication here seems to be, a goal of evolution? Why would four-legged (or limbless) animals *need* to be able to walk upright? What survival advantage would opposable thumbs confer on, say, a rabbit? Are they having a hard time without them?
It's very important for students to come to an understanding that there is a difference between the incontrovertible fact that 2 + 2 = 4, and the likelihood that birds are one branch of an evolutionary path from a distinct group of dinosaurs. One is intrinsically true, whereas the other has some exceptionally convincing evidence, but too many alternative possibilities to be solidly provable without a time machine and a very dedicated research team.
There are always alternative possibilities, such as Last Thursdayism, the hypothesis that the universe was suddenly created Last Thursday with fully-grown and mid-development life, all of our memories implanted, light and other radiation travelling between stars/galaxies, etc... anything that would give away that it was recent covered up. How? Magic of course. Can't disprove that... hey, it's magic. It is not based on any confirmed evidence, predicts nothing and is unfalisifiable because all of the evidence was magically covered up or is unavailable, so it fails as a scientific theory, as does YEC/ID, Raelianism, panspermia and everything else.
Here's an example of a scientific theory's use in prediction and falsifiability. Humans have 46 chromosomes in 23 pairs. All great apes including chimpanzees have 48 chromosomes in 24 pairs.
Prediction: A chromosome fusion occurred in the distant past after human ancestors had split off from our common ancestor with chimpanzees, specifically:
1) Two chimpanzee chromosomes would be found that had the same banding fingerprint when laid end-to-end as a human chromosome.
2) The same human chromosome would have two centromeres because it was a fusion of two chromosomes that each had a centromere.
3) The human chromosome would contain a telomere inside it, in addition to the ones on each end.
4) All of these extra bits would be in the same order as they would be if there was a fusion, ie the extra centromere would be closer to the end than the extra telomere.
This is nicely falsifiable. If such a banding-matched chromosome wasn't present, or if didn't contain an extra telomere or centromere inside it, or they were present but in the wrong order, this would have presented a problem for common ancestry. So why were they all found to be as predicted?
Have a Google and read about it. I'm sure you'll find plenty of creationist sites that mention this too with rebuttals that are about as scientific or relevant as "Nuuuuh! Does not!" Not being able to make testable, falsifiable predictions such as this one, they can always throw dung from the sidelines.
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No. Dawkins explains this nicely in his book Climbing Mount Improbable.
You assume that humans are "more advanced" - how anthropocentric of you. That's your mistake. Please define more advanced? We don't hold up to radiation like cockroaches do. We can survive without a head like they can either. We're not immune to the many, many diseases that rats have evolved immunity to. There's so much we cannot do naturally and we assume our over-sized brains make us better. They don't, they just make us smarter - which I do enjoy. It's our technology that gives us an edge, not our evolutionary advancement.
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You, "ConceptJunkie", are a liar.
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until someone actually sees evidence of one species literally and directly leading to another, we still can't say it's a settled "fact"
Knock yourself out.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.