EDIT:

This could go on forever

Ant
setting aside YEC vs evolution debate, what do yo think the importance of evolution is in our everyday lives and how might you reflect on your life when youre 90 and say "Boy, the theory of evolution really brought meaning to my life"

If you're Neil Shubin, you'd be able to answer that question. The guy's devotion to evolution seems to have given him "fellow feeling" for the rest of the animal kingdom, perhaps increasing respect for life (speculating on that). "Meaning" is a very flexible word, so actually it isn't hard to impute meaning to various things in life.

Me personally? I find some meaning in the evolutionary perspective. Certainly have never been able to find it in the opposite view.

DWill wrote:
If you're Neil Shubin, you'd be able to answer that question. The guy's devotion to evolution seems to have given him "fellow feeling" for the rest of the animal kingdom, perhaps increasing respect for life (speculating on that). "Meaning" is a very flexible word, so actually it isn't hard to impute meaning to various things in life.

Me personally? I find some meaning in the evolutionary perspective. Certainly have never been able to find it in the opposite view.

I can appreciate this.

DWill wrote:Me personally? I find some meaning in the evolutionary perspective. Certainly have never been able to find it in the opposite view.

The way I understand the word "meaning", it is how you interpret abstractions. The process of evolution has no meaning, but a book describing it has meaning.

setting aside YEC vs evolution debate, what do yo think the importance of evolution is in our everyday lives and how might you reflect on your life when youre 90 and say "Boy, the theory of evolution really brought meaning to my life

Understanding our place in the web of life is rather like understanding our place in time. Or in geography.

You can certainly live your whole life without knowing what year it is. Or that there are other societies just over the hill. Indeed without knowing anything at all except the food you find while out foraging for berries.

So extend that question laterally. What importance is there in knowing that you live in the northern hemisphere? Or in the United states? Or what other countries are like, and what ties they have to your own? How about understanding the source of your countries brand of governance? Or how that impacts your local government? How about the struggles and hurdles overcome up to this point?

Understanding evolution is having a history of life, in broad terms. Not a history of individual animals, but of whole sweeps of ages. It gives you an understanding of your own body and those of the creatures around you that would otherwise be a mystery. Why men have nipples, why we share belly buttons with cattle. Why things as diverse as people, dogs, snakes and fish have spines and jelly fish do not.

It is a perspective that informs you and gives you base knowledge from which to understand a variety of other things. Cladistics is the basis of animal classification but it tells us how we can sort through how culture changes over time. It gives us real actionable information about healthcare, from how diseases work, to gene therapy, and tissue transplants.

But for me the primary use in knowing things is in the knowing of things. There is no practical benefit that I will gain from knowing about Shakespeare. I can’t start quoting lines from his plays, or explain the history that led to the second world war, or the thermodynamics of entropy, or what significance the Mississippi river has to the country and get a raise at work. Nor could a recitation of our morphological similarities to a gorilla earn me a promotion.

But knowing where you are, in time, in geography, in culture, and in biology is very worthwhile.

Here is a good article about the lineage of birds.

Check it out!

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com ... explosion/

This helps to illustrate what i think is one of the hardest things to wrap your head around in cladistics.

Every bird that ever was is the descendant of one successful lineage of theropod dinosaurs. So when you hear that birds evolved from dinosaurs it was only one lineage which made that transition and diversified into so many varieties on hand today.

People hear the word dinosaur and start thinking T-rex, triceratops, and brachiosaurus. None of these animals were involved in the most important branchings that lead to birds. Triceratops didn't evolve into a penguin, and stegosaurus didn't evolve into a stork. The really big dinosaurs just flat out died off with the yukatan impact.

Instead, one group of dinosaurs, a sub set of theropods, started to evolve down a path that has eventually led to birds. But along the way that lineage sharded into a bunch of other lineages with animals at different stages sharing some diagnostic traits of birds but not being actual birds. And lots of fossil life forms that look a lot like birds but which had branched off the lineage which led to birds thousands of years before hand.

Evolution thread BUMP!