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Why Do So Many Have Trouble Believing In Evolution?

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lehelvandor
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Re: Why Do So Many Have Trouble Believing In Evolution?

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... and a more graphical illustration would be like this http://www.sciencebrainwaves.com/wp-con ... 00x225.jpg
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Re: Why Do So Many Have Trouble Believing In Evolution?

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I am afraid I don't get the question? i.e. the logic flow was 
a) fusion of Cs happened (lineages split, common ancestor ----> 1. "us", 2. something else that had gone --> 2a) denisovan, 2b) neanderthal) as per genetic evidence;
b) fusion was not one-off rare event, it happens all the time incl. current day (therefore "why" is answered by "it just happens, even in statistically notable quantities),
c) contemporary translocation that is the same type i.e. (further) fusion that doesn't lose information, hence the individual is, in all practical respects, "normal" is (at least) in a Chinese chap. 
Fair enough.

If one offspring was birthed that had a count of 46, im not certain that in itself is why there is genetic variation/differences between humans and their direct descendants.
Isiit? I am no expert

so the fusion "just happened" and it is evidenced now many times. Fine.

If the one with 46 was at that point a different species then it would have had to have mate with a partner with 48, IF it had no mental incapacities that would prevent it from doing so. We know that the chinese chap is normal, but we dont know that in this case.
is that correct?

It's also likely that sterilization would have prevented it from achieving a successful 46 c child.
Or we know that sterility was a non factor and the evidence is simply that we are here now , therefore it just happened not to be an issue. "Logically" of course.

I think you are doing a great job of explaining this all.
Last edited by ant on Wed Nov 26, 2014 2:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Why Do So Many Have Trouble Believing In Evolution?

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Just got in and soon in horizontal position :) for a while - actually, not logically and certainly without double quotes around logic ;), sterility is not a 100% factor in any case.
As per the previous article(s), and in any mating (between N and humans), the mentioned sterility or miscarriage depends on the odds - it is not 100% in either case. Especially e.g. X chromosomes end up where, whether male mates in one lineage with female in other, or viceversa. So putting logic aside as there is no deduction here, just baseline genetics, the "mixture" one ends up with will vary depending on the parents' luck.

The fusion itself is just one translocation that "just" occurs, observed also in animals - logic comes in a bit here, on top of base genetics: since it is not something reserved for particular lineage of human DNA, one can not treat our lineage or the lineage with N. 'special' - we ended up with better cards, on top of the purely genetic factors incl. mutations, them in combination with environment etc.) - even as a mere point of reference, if we were N. descendants genetically as we speak, our point of reference would be a mirrored one.
Sidenote to be precise, the chinese chap is normal in the sense of having preserved the genetic information, but he shall have a bit of "roll the dice" trouble in mating. He could start his own species, as one geneticist said - if he mates with a woman who happened to have similar fusion, then fine, otherwise it will be a probabilistic affair if he mates with "us".

Then going to the sterility and logic, as mentioned sterility is a probabilistic game and only the hybrids would have had raised infertility probability; it is interesting to see that there are big "holes" in our genome where N. lineage is missing completely, this means that the combinations were "bad" like in any hybrid cases among animals, and they were bred out / eliminated therefore very rapidly.
I just add for curiosity, that one gene where there are *zero* N. elements present, happens to be the one that is important for speech (in humans).

(The fact that we are here now is not evidence for sterility being a nonfactor, this would be illogical of course even without any genetics involved. Sterility, as per above, is a probabilistic factor, patterns found of N. elements in our genome are very scattered, this very pattern shows that it was an all over the place roulette, instead of any firm and stable contributions from the other lineage).
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Re: Why Do So Many Have Trouble Believing In Evolution?

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ant wrote:
The "why" is a bit of c'est la vie, we know empirically it is a far from rare phenomenon.
Indeed, as further fusion just happened currently in a Chinese chap. Now he "just" has to find a woman with 22 pairs, otherwise becomes a probability game whether his offsprings inherit the missing/extra bits that result in miscarriage. It would be quite a task for match.com
Is this chinese chap a neanderthal?

The hypothetical games are what's called the assumptions of the theory. those to terms, by definition (theory as in scientific theory, are antithetical to one another.

Neanderthals and humans are different species. Was it determined that neanderthal's genetic makeup is capable of this type of fusion?
I'm not clear on that. Or are you saying this "chinese chap" proves it is?
I may be misunderstanding you, so clarify if you feel like it.

As to why it happened in humans, it's likely related to environmental forces that caused a need for further adaptation.
Would you agree with that statement?

Thanks, L.
I'm just going to put in my two cents on a small little speck of this exchange, for what it's worth.

From my World Civilization class I'm taking this semester, we discussed at the beginning of the class the relationship between Homo Sapiens and Neandethals. From what we discussed, I learned that the two species could actually breed together and form offspring; even today, there exists within the current global population a percentage of people who have Neanderthal DNA within their genetic make-up. I'm not sure what this would mean in terms of the fusion you guys are mentioning, but for me it looks like this means some interesting things for human genomes.
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Re: Why Do So Many Have Trouble Believing In Evolution?

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Exactly. I tried to explain that lifting out a resounding word "infertility" was done with totally losing all the facts around it - as mentioned several times, as in any such case in humans or animals, there are offsprings, they can have further probabilistic problem in having offsprings etc. and this is just basic genetics.
Then with regard to fusion, the so much circularly chased evidence is there, provided the lineages as per the much repeated empirical, testable evidence.
However, it was enjoyable to follow this repeated circle for a while as more and more comes to light from the questions. I at least don't have to be expert in NLP to get the information I was after from the logical (pardon, "logical" :) ) patterns in how facts are brushed aside, reverse (hence entirely incorrect) induction appears, inverse theorems are not only taken as true, but used to infer that a->b is false if b->a is true etc.
Whilst it used my time, it was just done because not only logic was used in an oxymoron together with sentiment-related words, but also because many of the above and their motivations was said to be imagined by some. So be it, then why not trigger and let people demonstrate in their own words that presented facts are not at all integrated, certainly not in the direction of the deductive logic let alone inductive, and generalisations are made from in-isolation convenient-sounding details without even the sentence in which they occur being taken for their full meaning.

Going to your thought, yes indeed, the elements of N. DNA found all over the place is very interesting for human genomes, and not only their pattern (they are so messily scattered instead of stable patterns that one sees where useful DNA, in evolutionary terms, takes hold, plus their total absence can interestingly be seen in genes vital to our advantageous features/abilities) but also their contribution is often not quite to our advantage. And this had nothing to do with logic (again, pardon, "logic"), it is just protein sequences measurable by anyone in a sequencer.
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Re: Why Do So Many Have Trouble Believing In Evolution?

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lehelvandor wrote:Going to your thought, yes indeed, the elements of N. DNA found all over the place is very interesting for human genomes, and not only their pattern (they are so messily scattered instead of stable patterns that one sees where useful DNA, in evolutionary terms, takes hold, plus their total absence can interestingly be seen in genes vital to our advantageous features/abilities) but also their contribution is often not quite to our advantage. And this had nothing to do with logic (again, pardon, "logic"), it is just protein sequences measurable by anyone in a sequencer.
It makes me wonder where in the world can we find the most Neanderthal influence in our human DNA, and to what end does it affect our eventual evolution.
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Re: Why Do So Many Have Trouble Believing In Evolution?

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Indeed (although I start to sound like a character from Stargate :) ) - most of the N. genome-related papers and articles were rubbing their hands to see the outcome of large-scale sequencing to be done in Africa it seems.
Not sure when to expect the outcomes and how they go about it, but since there is extensive mapping across Europe for instance, and it has shown many variations that correlate with various non-genetic factors, it is expected that similarly detailed charting in Africa's current population can produce a lot of interesting data - will the N. bits be scattered differently there, will there be genes that are completely "untouched" in Europe's human genome but have many contributions from N. dna etc.
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Re: Why Do So Many Have Trouble Believing In Evolution?

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lehelvandor wrote:Indeed (although I start to sound like a character from Stargate :) ) - most of the N. genome-related papers and articles were rubbing their hands to see the outcome of large-scale sequencing to be done in Africa it seems.
Not sure when to expect the outcomes and how they go about it, but since there is extensive mapping across Europe for instance, and it has shown many variations that correlate with various non-genetic factors, it is expected that similarly detailed charting in Africa's current population can produce a lot of interesting data - will the N. bits be scattered differently there, will there be genes that are completely "untouched" in Europe's human genome but have many contributions from N. dna etc.
Africa is where humanity started, isn't it? If so, that might be a major area for Neanderthal/Homo Sapien mergers.
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Re: Why Do So Many Have Trouble Believing In Evolution?

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Yep, and due to environmental conditions, it may well be that some parts of the current genome stayed more stable there because wilder variations were rapidly pruned out of the population (one simple example is skin colour, where a gene showed it had, of course, mutations in Africa, too, but there it was "constrained" in its variation much more - just because some variations quite rapidly removed themselves. I believe it's called swipe effect for such drastic case of genetic disadvantage).
We have to be careful not to have what statisticians call availability error - so we currently have a lot of data from non-African regions, therefore I bet some "media" can easily jump to all sorts of conclusions before similarly extensive African data is in.
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Re: Why Do So Many Have Trouble Believing In Evolution?

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lehelvandor wrote:Yep, and due to environmental conditions, it may well be that some parts of the current genome stayed more stable there because wilder variations were rapidly pruned out of the population (one simple example is skin colour, where a gene showed it had, of course, mutations in Africa, too, but there it was "constrained" in its variation much more - just because some variations quite rapidly removed themselves. I believe it's called swipe effect for such drastic case of genetic disadvantage).
We have to be careful not to have what statisticians call availability error - so we currently have a lot of data from non-African regions, therefore I bet some "media" can easily jump to all sorts of conclusions before similarly extensive African data is in.
I would be interested in seeing the numbers when they come in.
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