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Yes. Evolution.

Engage in discussions encompassing themes like cosmology, human evolution, genetic engineering, earth science, climate change, artificial intelligence, psychology, and beyond in this forum.
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geo

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Re: Yes. Evolution.

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You mean this question?
ant wrote:Why did evolution "develop" a complex (meaning, Consciousness) mechanism that is biologically pointless?
The question seems to rest on the assumption that consciousness is biologically pointless? Obviously consciousness is not pointless, so I'm not sure what you're trying to ask here. Can you be more specific?
Last edited by geo on Wed Apr 10, 2013 8:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Vishnu
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Re: Yes. Evolution.

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ant wrote:3 for 3!

No one here understands the question, huh?


That itself is actually more interesting than the question I asked.

WOW!

Okay, guys. Thanks
3 for 3 times now you've had the opportunity to rephrase/clarify/expound on your question, yet you keep stalling to do so. Not even an editing of the original post. Nothing.

Are you really seeking an answer to it?
Last edited by Vishnu on Wed Apr 10, 2013 8:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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johnson1010
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Re: Yes. Evolution.

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Viscious dinosaur terrorizing defenseless mammal.

http://www.wimp.com/toughestgoose/
In the absence of God, I found Man.
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Are you pushing your own short comings on us and safely hating them from a distance?

Is this the virtue of faith? To never change your mind: especially when you should?

Young Earth Creationists take offense at the idea that we have a common heritage with other animals. Why is being the descendant of a mud golem any better?
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Chris OConnor

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Re: Yes. Evolution.

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Ant, if nobody understands your question isn't it more likely that the problem is with the question?
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bionov
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Re: Yes. Evolution.

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There are so many replies to read. Even if this has already been brought up, I still feel it needs to be emphasized.

Thomas Aquinas, "The Argument from Efficient Cause"

1. There is an efficient cause for everything; nothing can be the efficient cause of itself.
2. It is not possible to regress to infinity in efficient causes.
3. To take away the cause is to take away the effect.
4. If there be no first cause then there will be no others.
5. Therefore, a First Cause exists (and this is God).
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Vishnu
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Re: Yes. Evolution.

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^Wrong thread. This one is about evolution.
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Vishnu
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Re: Yes. Evolution.

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Hey johnson, saw this on Facebook just now and thought you might get a kick out of it-

Image
Last edited by Vishnu on Mon Apr 15, 2013 9:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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johnson1010
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Re: Yes. Evolution.

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KJEster:
True randomness has no format. But look at life. Almost all humans are symmetric. The left side looks almost identical to the right side. Most all animals are the same. If it was true randomness, we would have arms coming out of our heads, backs or stomachs and have eyes anywhere on the body.
Randomness is over emphasized when discussing evolution. It is true that the changes made to organisms through mutation are random, but their selection for survival is not. There are definite criteria which determine whether a change will proceed to the next generation, and so proliferate, or fail in the current generation.

Mutations have effects on the organism, to one degree or another. Some mutations are problematic and hinder the organism from successfully gathering food, mating, traveling, or using resources efficiently. These randomly generated mutations are then filtered by the environment which guides the organism. If the only food available is in tough nuts and you are a bird with a mutation with a tiny adjustment of the muscles around the beak which allow for better leverage, statistically, you are better at cracking nuts than your non-mutated brethren, or the birds which have gained a mutation which gives poor leverage.

The mutation is random. Its effect on the life of the animal is NOT random. This effect has been called “natural selection”. Natural selection was Darwin’s real contribution to evolution. Evolution had been thought of before, but nobody could think of how exactly it would work. Just like there were Greeks who had thought of the concept of an atom before. Just thinking of tiny lumps of matter is different than understanding electrons and nuclei.

Anyway, the mutations which stick do so because they work. So the accumulation of traits which work is not random at all. The options that are chosen from, weak beaks, strong beaks, and regular beaks, are random. But the fact that strong beaks win is not.

This has implications for our body designs as well. If you do some research you will see that body plans all fit within nested “folders” of animal groups.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetry_in_biology

We are bilaterally symmetrical animals and we share that trait with many species. The species we share this trait with are not random. You characterize them as having that non-random structure due to a guiding intelligence, but it is easy to see how this trait has been passed down through genealogy.

For instance, besides bilateral symmetry, there is also radial symmetry. There are some animals with radial symmetry, but you will not find one with a spinal cord. Spinal cords originated after the differentiation between radiata and bilateria. Which means that any offspring of an organism with a spinal cord will be bilaterally symmetrical.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion

There was a period called the Cambrian explosion, about 350 million years ago, when there was a huge increase in the number of body plans, which we call phyla. In that time there were some pretty strange body designs that diverge pretty wildly from what we are familiar with. Including things with eyes on their tails,

eyes made out of hard minerals,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilobite

Multiple sets of teeth, like the alien in the movies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiwaxia

Animals that essentially had hands coming out of their heads
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalocaridid

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Which there are other examples still today
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And things that were just plain weird.
Image

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marrella

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ediacara_biota

Image

And there are still creatures with eyes coming out in strange places.

Image
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Which can be explained through evolutionary processes which group these organisms in what amounts to a species flip-book from single celled organisms all the way up to their current incarnations with only small variations from generation to generation that accumulate to bridge the gap.

What basically happened here is that starting from some basal species all kinds of different mutations occurred that lead in every direction. Some of these mutations led to body designs that were well suited to their environment, and were efficient with resources. Some of these body types were less well-suited. Symmetry is a very economic way to make things. It isn’t a mystery why space is filled with spherical objects. Spheres are the most symmetrical things you can find in nature.

A similar thing happened when man first started to learn how to fly.

Before we really understood powered flight all kinds of strange and interesting designs were crafted all trying to set the standard of what an airplane should be. Some performed obviously better than others to the point that there was no point in trying to refine a bad idea, when a better, simpler idea was already performing so much better.

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http://www.unmuseum.org/flystrange.htm

Early ideas failed when pitted against reality so they were discarded, ultimately leading us to what we use now.

Image

Airplanes don’t breed and had to be built by man, but the same principal of iterative random “guesswork” design being shaped by the selective pressures of reality was at work.

In nature the random “guesswork” design is done through the mutation of genetics, and the shaping is done by the statistical success of those designs in survival and natural reproduction.
In the absence of God, I found Man.
-Guillermo Del Torro

Are you pushing your own short comings on us and safely hating them from a distance?

Is this the virtue of faith? To never change your mind: especially when you should?

Young Earth Creationists take offense at the idea that we have a common heritage with other animals. Why is being the descendant of a mud golem any better?
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johnson1010
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Re: Yes. Evolution.

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Symmetry is evidence of design.
Symmetry is not evidence of design. A sphere is a sphere because it is the best way to pack any volume of material. The smallest most economical shape.

Snow flakes are symmetrical and structured because of the molecular properties of H2O. The places on that molecule which allow other molecules to line up create a crystal structure with six sides. Understanding the molecular and atomic properties of this tiny structure allows you to understand the behavior of ice bergs. Not the other way around.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01kjs16

If you have some time, take a listen to Brian Cox’s podcast “the infinite monkey cage”. In the above link they have specialists on speaking to this point exactly.
The way nature depends on so many factors to work speaks of design. Plants need to polinate, and there are birds and bees that will do the job. Without spiders and birds and bats and reptiles, the mosquito population would be out of control.
What you are talking about here is the fact of co-evolution. Not all plants pollinate the same way. Did you know that there were no flowers in the age of the dinosaurs? Flowers are new. Polinators are new (in geologic time scales). These things evolved simultaneously. Plants with slightly sticky pollen were able to have their germ cells passed to other plants on the bodies of foraging insects. Plants with sticky pollen and easily accessed sugary secretions performed better still.

Insects which could identify the plants with sugary secretions benefitted from visiting those plants, and were statistically more viable.

The bees evolve to exploit the plants, and the plants evolve to exploit the bees.

And there’s a lot more than just spiders and birds and bats being intertwined with mosquitos. Grass suffers when there are no grazing herds… because grass evolved mechanisms to deal with grazing herds. When there is no herd to eat the grass, the coping mechanisms the grass has evolved are operating without their counter-balance. Grass has grown up ready to resist trampling, grazing and fire. Without those things the corrective mechanisms choke the grass to death.

This is not a result of careful orchestration by an omnipotent being, but the continual co-existence of evolving organisms which take advantage of eachother’s presence and become inter-twined over time.

These interconnections are showing you that the earth is old.
In the absence of God, I found Man.
-Guillermo Del Torro

Are you pushing your own short comings on us and safely hating them from a distance?

Is this the virtue of faith? To never change your mind: especially when you should?

Young Earth Creationists take offense at the idea that we have a common heritage with other animals. Why is being the descendant of a mud golem any better?
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ant

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Re: Yes. Evolution.

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Are any particular evolutionary forces predictable, law-governed laws :?:
Last edited by ant on Wed Aug 21, 2013 2:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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