^Wrong thread. This one is about evolution.

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

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






Which there are other examples still today



And things that were just plain weird.


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

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



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




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.



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.



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.

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.

Are any particular evolutionary forces predictable, law-governed laws

Laws like F=MA?
Well that’s an interesting question.

One the one hand, every law that governs the natural world leads to life and evolution. In other words, there are no special forces just for evolution. The forces of evolution are electromagnetism, strong and weak interaction, and gravity. Just like for everything in our universe. Since the forces of nature are all that is needed for life, then if we get our laws accurate enough, we should be able to solve the standard model and have one of the viable outcomes be the modern human.

The standard model of physics explicitly lays out in detail how physics works, which is how chemistry works, and life is chemistry. So, will we ever write an equation that says why people love? We very probably already have in the standard model of particle physics…

But the problem with trying to use the standard model to output love is the same problem we run into when trying to reduce any biological behavior to simple mathematical equations.

A virus interacting with a bacteria is not a very mathematical looking event. The virus floats along and maybe it attaches and maybe it doesn’t. But we can model these events statistically and reveal predictive models about the systems the virus and bacteria use to interact.

In other words, there are no laws really that say, if you follow this lineage of birds around they will end up looking like this at some point. But instead you can say predictive things about the trends of evolution. As another example, I could say to a person, go from point A to point B. There’s a fallen tree between A and B. A healthy young person might jump over the log. An older infirm person might instead walk around the end of the tree. Either could happen with either young or old people. But statistically, we can be pretty confident that more old people will take the path of least resistance, vs. the younger people.

In evolutionary terms, we can’t look at the flu and determine what the next year’s strain will be like. We can’t predict and preemptively create a vaccine to kill the flu virus of 2020. Nor can we calculate what humans ought to look like in a thousand generations. But what we can say with predictive effect is listed in part below.

There is probably a lot more than this. I’m not a professional. If you look around I’m sure you could find more.

Dollo’s law of irreversibility
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollo%27s_ ... ersibility

Punctuated equilibrium and basal adaptability are attributed to Stephen J Gould
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_j_ ... y_progress

Monophyly
Darwin’s second law of common ancestry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monophyly

Multiplication of species
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciation

Evo Devo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_devo

I'm not sure I'm following you here, but it seems you are attempting to reduce the complexities of evolutionary development (yes, we are all amateurs here) into the more clearly defined, concrete laws of, say, Newtonian physics.
And in doing so maybe there's an appearance of Understanding of evolutionary laws and not "just" knowledge of them.

Science aims to achieve understanding as well as knowledge, correct? It's the bridging of the two that gives us the confidence to say "we know how and why this happened, and given the same conditions, it will happen again (prediction)."

The science of classical mechanics has the strength of testability behind it. Doesn't testability allow science to link knowledge and understanding? The explanation behind F=MA contains testable empirical laws that insure scientificity.

If there are no specific testable laws of the evolution of species, can we say the theory of evolutions' explanatory power is equal to that of classical mechanics even if it lacks the same predictive power?
If a theory is not in a position to predict, can it be in a position to explain?

The complexities of evolutionary development are by and large historical unobservables that allow only theoretical narratives that equate to partial explanations, which leads to partial knowledge and understanding. In this sense, Evolutionary Science falls short of the objective of Science - Understanding (with a capital "U").
Is it a "second rate" science when compared to a science like Physics?

<<yawn>>>

<<YAWN>>>

Ah!

I caught it!

I'll respond in a bit, Ant.

in the mean time you could occupy yourself here:

http://www.booktalk.org/post120496.html#p120496

johnson1010 wrote:<<YAWN>>>

Ah!

I caught it!

I'll respond in a bit, Ant.

in the mean time you could occupy yourself here:

http://www.booktalk.org/post120496.html#p120496

cute..
very funny

Do I "hate" science because I bother to examine its methods critically by philosophical consideration, or is that out of bounds here?