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Topic: On Evolution (Read 5984 times) previous topic - next topic
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On Evolution

Hey spase,  I like the way you think...Your starting to take me back to my day's in the 60's - 70's When I was tripping and asking these same questions
:naughty:
What if the Hokey Pokey....is What it's all about?

On Evolution

Reply #1
Quote
Originally posted by smg
Hey spase,  I like the way you think...Your starting to take me back to my day's in the 60's - 70's When I was tripping and asking these same questions
:naughty:


*LOL*    me too, exept that tripping was 3 weeks ago
[span style=\'font-family:Arial\'][span style=\'color:red\']Life Sucks Deeply[/span][/span]

On Evolution

Reply #2
Quote
Originally posted by Jospoortvliet
*LOL*    me too, exept that tripping was 3 weeks ago


Gotta love living in the Netherlands.

On Evolution

Reply #3
Amen to that rjamorim.  But frankly, evolution as we know it exsists only as a result of selective death, with those more capable of surviving outliving those who are less capable, and producing offspring with those same traits.  If anything, hearing should only get better, not worse.  Also, the culture that we live in now actually keeps the weaker members of our species alive, unlike a natural environment, in which they'd die off as predators and sickness overcame them.  Either way, I don't see humanity as a race changing any time soon.  If anything, our technological advancements are keeping us exactly the same, for longer periods of time.  But hey, I'm no expert on the subject, I could be wrong.

On Evolution

Reply #4
Quote
Originally posted by silver_cpu
Either way, I don't see humanity as a race changing any time soon.


Well, I don't see humanity changing naturally, that's for sure.

I don't want to sound neurothic, but these latest scientific discoveries are kinda unnerving. Cloning, genoma... some crazy scientist, somewhere, might want to artificially envolve human race (Something like "The Island of Dr. Moreau"). The means are available, if you have lots and lots of money.

There are lots of moral, religious and ethic issues involved when dealing with these dangerous subjects. People don't want to hinder scientific development, but at the same time are afraid of what might come from it.

Scary...

On Evolution

Reply #5
cloning, eh?

it worked for boba fett, didn't it?


later
mike

On Evolution

Reply #6
A few things:

1. It is indeed quite cool living in the netherlands, with legal coffeeshops (got some has in my pocket now, and I'm still legal  )

2. as silver cpu said, there is no evolution for the human race now... there isn't any 'survival of the fittest' anymore. btw cool: I see dumb people hehe 

3. And cloning has not much to do with all this, because its a technique to copy exact (not as exact as EAC, but it comes close  ). Part of the technique can/must be used when creating 'super-humans' but cloning itself isnt usefull for enhancing, because its copying. It whould indeed be great if a good program gets better when you copy it a 1000th times, but sadly there has to be some programming instead...

4. and to make someone feel a bit better (I hope) dont be afraid: our knowledge is so far away from what we need to make a simple bacteria - that it will take more time than we all will live to enhance mankind... (I'm studying psychology. but if genetic engineers know 1 bilion times more from the genome than psychologists from the brain, then I'm sure it'll take them century's to create a better man...)

and... a nice day to ya all!!!
[span style=\'font-family:Arial\'][span style=\'color:red\']Life Sucks Deeply[/span][/span]

On Evolution

Reply #7
not that i know what i'm talking about, but it seems to me that the forces of evolution must still be at work with the human race, it's just that the effects are not quite so evident anymore. true, social welfare works to lessen the "survival of the fittest" thing, but what that means is that the effects of evolution are just subtler.

for instance, (and i am guilty of thinking too much as well) consider that before the profusion of written language everything had to be transmitted via spoken word. "book-keepers" had to keep tract of all those transactions, all those connections, inside of their heads. no paper to write things down on. i can't remember things quite so well, but that's why i've got a pda.

so what am i saying? just that technology _does_ push us in different directions. i don't think that compressed music is going to make a difference at all, but you can never really tell what will matter and what won't except in retrospect.

on another note, i was wondering why nocturnal predators do not see in the infrared (if they do, i'm sorry; i haven't really researched it at all...), since most prey emit in the infrared and not the visible. maybe the gains are not tangible enough...

anyway, maybe i'm on crack, but that's just what i was thinking (as a lay person, of course)

On Evolution

Reply #8
:eyebrow: :eyebrow: :eyebrow: :eyebrow: :eyebrow: :eyebrow: :eyebrow:

Did you know that no matter how high a bird flies you can always break a window with a hammer.

Must be the mushrooms!!!
What if the Hokey Pokey....is What it's all about?

On Evolution

Reply #9
The human race evoluates, it has become taller during the last centuries.

On Evolution

Reply #10
 
I think the fact that man today is taller than a few centuries ago is not caused by evolution, i.e. genetic variation and selection.

Just better fodder...

On Evolution

Reply #11

On Evolution

Reply #12
Quote
Originally posted by Pio2001
The human race evoluates, it has become taller during the last centuries.


That's no evolution, that's just the effect of better nutrition. Evolution works over at least tens, and regularly over hundreds of generations, not just 3 or 4....

And about 'there is still evolution' - maybe, but it will be:
-not strong
-diffuse
-which makes it even less strong, because we get mixed up by all the migration... I think there is in fact more DEvolution, because of this mixing up. (I know this is nt the proper use of devolution - devolution is just the loss of genes, which isnt happening really. but the outcome looks quite the same - if you mix up different populations of an species (races in humanity) you get something more primitive - closer to the 'first man'. This principle is used to get some animals, which where 'lost', back. I only know the dutch name: oer-rund. It means something like the 'primitive ox' (Is that the good word for that animal?))

hum hum, lost my way in this message - I always talk too much.

whatever....

Nice day!

J
[span style=\'font-family:Arial\'][span style=\'color:red\']Life Sucks Deeply[/span][/span]

On Evolution

Reply #13
True. Wonder why that is?  We didn't have any need to get taller, did we?

On Evolution

Reply #14
Yes we need !

When we are three meters high, it has been calculated that the heights of the tables we will eat on will be enough so that the slices of bread falling from the edge will make a complete revolution before hitting the ground.

Therefore the bread will no longer fall on the butter side, but on the bread side.

On Evolution

Reply #15
Quote
Originally posted by Pio2001
Yes we need !

When we are three meters high, it has been calculated that the heights of the tables we will eat on will be enough so that the slices of bread falling from the edge will make a complete revolution before hitting the ground.

Therefore the bread will no longer fall on the butter side, but on the bread side.


:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:
What if the Hokey Pokey....is What it's all about?

On Evolution

Reply #16
Quote
Originally posted by Jospoortvliet
And about 'there is still evolution' - maybe, but it will be:
-not strong
-diffuse
-which makes it even less strong, because we get mixed up by all the migration... I think there is in fact more DEvolution, because of this mixing up.
Perhaps mixing everyone in a big pot wipes out genetic diversity, much like mixing a palette full of colors gives a mucky brown.

If my Scientific American-induced pseudoknowledge serves me correctly, though, it actually works the other way around; by getting rid of the "survival of the fittest" stuff (honestly, how many of us here could survive if we had to hunt someplace other than the supermarket?), we let all possible evolutionary paths get followed. Mixing everyone up just means we get many new gene combinations. If some especially deadly human disease came around, there would be a better chance that some group of people had developed a genetic resistance to it.

Look at a population of nearly-extinct animals that biologists are trying to re-introduce to the wild; at one time, only 15 of a certain bird species were in existence, and now there's 150, but they're all inbred so they'll probably die off anyway (I'm not sure what the exact species is).

You can extend this to people who obsessively listen to compressed audio for artifacts; if some especially irritating artifact was developed by the RIAA (or by Frank Klemm, to teach us all a lesson for being so stoopid) and propagated into MPC, all the obsessed listeners would go crazy and stop listening to compressed audio, and then we'd be back with Xing. The lesson here is that open-source audio codecs just sound better.

:insane:

On Evolution

Reply #17
Evolution is a silly concept.

1. Evolution invalidates thought itself.
If life is ultimately the result of random processes or chance, then so is thought. Your thoughts--including what you are think now--would, in the final analysis, be a consequence of a long series of accidents. Therefore, your thoughts would have no validity, including the thought that life is a result of chance, or natural, processes. By destroying the validity of ideas, evolution undercuts even the idea of evolution.  We have all heard it said that humans use only a small fraction of their mental abilities. If this is true how could such unused abilities
have evolved? Certainly not by natural selection, since those capabilities are not used.

2. Life was never simple.
Many bacteria, such as Salmonella, Escherichia coli, and some Streptococci, propel themselves with a type of miniature motor. Speeds of up to 15 body-lengths per second are achieved. These extremely efficient, reliable motors rotate up to 100,000 revolutions per minute. Each shaft rotates a bundle of whip like flagella that act as a propeller. The motors, having rotors and starters, are similar in many aspects to electrical motors. The electrical charges come from a flow of protons. Several million dollars per year are being spent primarily in Japan, trying to lean how these motors work. Since bacteria can stop, start, and change directions and speeds, they probably have sophisticated sensors, switches and control mechanisms. All of this is highly miniaturized. Eight million of these bacterial motors would fit in the cross-sectional area of an average human hair. Evolutionary theory teaches bacteria were one of the first forms of life to evolve, and therefore, they are simple.  While bacteria are small, they are not simple.

3. Sexual Reproduction
If sexual reproduction in plants, animals, and humans is a result of evolutionary sequences, and absolutely unbelievable series of chain events must have occurred at each sate.
(a) The amazingly complex, radically different, yet complementary reproductive systems of the male and female must have COMPLETELY and INDEPENDENTLY evolved at each stage at about the SAM TIME AND PLACE. Just a slight incompleteness in only one of the two would make both reductive systems useless, and the organism would become extinct.
(b) The physical, chemical and emotional systems of the male and female would also need to be compatible.
© The millions of complex products of the male reproductive system (pollen or sperm) mush have an affinity for and a mechanical, chemical, and electrical compatibility with the eggs of the female reproductive system.
(d) The many intricate processes occurring at the molecular level inside the fertilized egg would have to work with fantastic precision--processes that scientist can only describe in a general sense.
(f) This remarkable string of accidents must have been spread throughout millions of species.

4. Conflicting Dates?
Petrified trees in the petrified forest of Arizona contain fossilized nests of bees and cocoons of wasps. The petrified forests are supposedly 220 million years old, while bees (and flowering plants which bees require) supposedly evolved 140 million years later. Evolutionists and textbooks systematically ignore discoveries which conflict with the evolutionary time scale.

5. Am I complete? Or do I have a long way to go?
All species appear completely developed, not partially developed. There are no examples of half-developed feathers, eyes, skin, tubes (arteries, veins, intestines, Etc.), or any of thousands of other vial organs. Tubes that are not 100% complete are a liability; so are partially developed organs. For example, if a leg of a reptile were to evolve into a wing of a bird, it would become a bad leg long before it became a good wing.

6. Got Change?
Of course you do. We have witnessed change since the beginning of recorded time. This attributed to natural selection. But natural selection produces far different results than Evolution. Let me explain. There are two types of Evolution. MACROEVOLUTION and MICROEVOLUTION.
Macroevolution is where naturally occurring beneficial change that produces increasing and inheritable complexity. Increased complexity would be shown if the offspring of the one form of life had a different and improved set of vial organs. Microevolution only involves minor chemical alterations or changes in size, shape, or color. Microevolution can be described as a horizontal change where as macroevolution (if it were ever observed) would involve an "upward" and beneficial change in complexity.
Example Dog Versatility
By progressively breeding for certain traits, dogs can be different and distinctive. It’s a common example of microevolution--differences in size, shape, color, and chemistry. It is not macroevolution--the upward progression in complexity from bacteria to man. Macroevolution has never been observed in any breeding experiment.

So there you have the fact that species change to their environment and that humans change over the centuries is absolutely not proof of or a component of Evolution. The facts that were taller do not show us to be anymore complex or sophisticated than Neanderthal man.



[/end post]
Turn to the light
Don\'t be frightened of the shadow it creates
Turn to the light
Turning away would be a terrible mistake

On Evolution

Reply #18
Sorry for my brief answers, I have not much time right now:

Quote
Originally posted by Mayhem Inc.
Evolution is a silly concept.

1. Evolution invalidates thought itself. 
If life is ultimately the result of random processes or chance, then so is thought. Your thoughts--including what you are think now--would, in the final analysis, be a consequence of a long series of accidents. Therefore, your thoughts would have no validity, including the thought that life is a result of chance, or natural, processes. By destroying the validity of ideas, evolution undercuts even the idea of evolution.  We have all heard it said that humans use only a small fraction of their mental abilities. If this is true how could such unused abilities 
have evolved? Certainly not by natural selection, since those capabilities are not used.
Why so? If random mutation created an individual who has the ability to define validity (and nothing more can be said about this term, lest it is inspiration of a higher truth), i.e. to draw correct (according to the right application of the following) conclusions from a defined axiom-system using defined methods, we would call him intelligent. What more could we say else? We cannot decide, whether chaos (randomness) led to cosmos (order) (if only locally), or higher reason created what we call reasonable.
Therefore evolution can do nothing for or against validity of thought.

Quote
2. Life was never simple.
Many bacteria, such as Salmonella, Escherichia coli, and some Streptococci, propel themselves with a type of miniature motor. Speeds of up to 15 body-lengths per second are achieved. These extremely efficient, reliable motors rotate up to 100,000 revolutions per minute. Each shaft rotates a bundle of whip like flagella that act as a propeller. The motors, having rotors and starters, are similar in many aspects to electrical motors. The electrical charges come from a flow of protons. Several million dollars per year are being spent primarily in Japan, trying to lean how these motors work. Since bacteria can stop, start, and change directions and speeds, they probably have sophisticated sensors, switches and control mechanisms. All of this is highly miniaturized. Eight million of these bacterial motors would fit in the cross-sectional area of an average human hair. Evolutionary theory teaches bacteria were one of the first forms of life to evolve, and therefore, they are simple.  While bacteria are small, they are not simple.
Compared to "higher" lifeforms they are. Compared to machines (computers, robots) they are not. Maybe it's presumptuous, but my "humanity" forbids me to think bacteria my equal.

Quote
3. Sexual Reproduction
If sexual reproduction in plants, animals, and humans is a result of evolutionary sequences, and absolutely unbelievable series of chain events must have occurred at each sate.
(a) The amazingly complex, radically different, yet complementary reproductive systems of the male and female must have COMPLETELY and INDEPENDENTLY evolved at each stage at about the SAM TIME AND PLACE. Just a slight incompleteness in only one of the two would make both reductive systems useless, and the organism would become extinct. 
(b) The physical, chemical and emotional systems of the male and female would also need to be compatible.
Not necessarily. The tolerance (compatibility) is not that low.

Quote
© The millions of complex products of the male reproductive system (pollen or sperm) mush have an affinity for and a mechanical, chemical, and electrical compatibility with the eggs of the female reproductive system.
(d) The many intricate processes occurring at the molecular level inside the fertilized egg would have to work with fantastic precision--processes that scientist can only describe in a general sense.
(f) This remarkable string of accidents must have been spread throughout millions of species.
This is evolution: The best (fittest) method survives.

Quote
4. Conflicting Dates?
Petrified trees in the petrified forest of Arizona contain fossilized nests of bees and cocoons of wasps. The petrified forests are supposedly 220 million years old, while bees (and flowering plants which bees require) supposedly evolved 140 million years later. Evolutionists and textbooks systematically ignore discoveries which conflict with the evolutionary time scale.
I haven't heard of that, but it is sure that many "scientists" take the current evolution theory as granted. I agree with you that this theory has an unfitting claim of correctness attached to it, but nevertheless, it is best suited for describing the observed effects.

Quote
5. Am I complete? Or do I have a long way to go?
All species appear completely developed, not partially developed. There are no examples of half-developed feathers, eyes, skin, tubes (arteries, veins, intestines, Etc.), or any of thousands of other vial organs. Tubes that are not 100% complete are a liability; so are partially developed organs. For example, if a leg of a reptile were to evolve into a wing of a bird, it would become a bad leg long before it became a good wing.
A very interesting thought -- but no contraction to evolution theory: the process of mutation, recombination, selection is so slow (compared to man's life time, or to manipulations done in cattle-breeding), that it would be a surprise to notice anything changing.

Quote
6. Got Change?
Of course you do. We have witnessed change since the beginning of recorded time. This attributed to natural selection. But natural selection produces far different results than Evolution. Let me explain. There are two types of Evolution. MACROEVOLUTION and MICROEVOLUTION. 
Macroevolution is where naturally occurring beneficial change that produces increasing and inheritable complexity. Increased complexity would be shown if the offspring of the one form of life had a different and improved set of vial organs. Microevolution only involves minor chemical alterations or changes in size, shape, or color. Microevolution can be described as a horizontal change where as macroevolution (if it were ever observed) would involve an "upward" and beneficial change in complexity.
Example Dog Versatility
By progressively breeding for certain traits, dogs can be different and distinctive. It’s a common example of microevolution--differences in size, shape, color, and chemistry. It is not macroevolution--the upward progression in complexity from bacteria to man. Macroevolution has never been observed in any breeding experiment.

So there you have the fact that species change to their environment and that humans change over the centuries is absolutely not proof of or a component of Evolution. The facts that were taller do not show us to be anymore complex or sophisticated than Neanderthal man.

[/end post]
Agreed. The "taller"-issue is not connected to evolution. (I take it you mean "sophisticated" only physically)

I hope I made my points clear, if not the failure is in the architect.


On Evolution

Reply #20
Mayhem inc introduced some very good points.

I dont believe in evolution, and make the same micro/macro distinction he does. I dont believe something so very complex could evolve by chance.
More detailed, as he already said - alot things must have evolved via in-between stadia (which are never found, see the 'missing link' search). such in-between steps have actually (most of the cases) negative consequenses - so the they whould not survive in the struggle of life!!!!

look at the eye: every part of our modern eye is, of course, useless - without the other parts. how could it have gradually evolved? it couldnt... so it must have evolved in 1 step, theefor a few hunderd genes must have developed in the exact right way, in 1 individual, in 1 time. who believes that this happened, is crazy... (no offense  )

Sometimeswarior gives a possible solution, although I dunno wheter it is (matematically) enough to solve the discrepancy between the time in which we should have evolved according evolution theory, and the time needed, according some 'alternative' mathematics on chances...
His solution: sometimes there is no 'struggle for life' because life is easy, sometimes, isnt it?? and it can be so, for generations. then the 'genepool' is becoming more diffuse. and then times got harder, and.... just the fittest survives, probably with some real 'new features'.

And believe me, any bacteria is 1.000.000 times more complex than the most complex machine, if not we whould not have to study them for so many years (and still dont understand them) isnt it...

And it is a fact that there are a lot 'mystery's' (in fact most of them simply burn important parts of the evolution-theory down)

hehe

cool subject on hydrogenaudio


J
[span style=\'font-family:Arial\'][span style=\'color:red\']Life Sucks Deeply[/span][/span]

On Evolution

Reply #21
Quote
Originally posted by Jospoortvliet
cool subject on hydrogenaudio


WTF is going on here?

Edit: Oh, well. Thread split and moved.

On Evolution

Reply #22
Quote
Originally posted by Mayhem Inc.
Evolution is a silly concept.


So ?

Are you saying that God created all living beings at once, or that humans have lived on earth since eternity ?

On Evolution

Reply #23
Ahhahahaha!!

"Evolution's too complicated for me to comprehend, so it couldn't possibly be true!"

I can't figure out MDCT's, but that doesn't mean MP3's are nonexistent.

Personally, I always thought God created all the aliens, and then the aliens got together in a big bioengineering ho-down and figured out how to make human pets. I guess that means Earth is just a big overcrowded breeding pen, which is probably why it always smells so bad.

On Evolution

Reply #24
Time for some facts.

On 'likely' and 'unlikely':

Our intuition doesn't equip us to make judgements on what is likely or unlikely over a period of 4 *billion* years. Even over this period, some of the things which happened to us are still unlikely - but they only had to happen once!

For example, I'm currently working with a German biologist who is examining the complicated symbiosis which exists in every cell of our bodies. Sometime about 2.7 billion years ago, a cell swallowed another, which instead of being eaten, started cooperating with the larger (to the extent that now, 2.7 billion years later, many of the genes in the larger cell's DNA are there for the benefit of the plasmid, having moved there from the plasmid DNA, which has correspondingly reduced in size significantly). A very unlikely thing to happen, but happen it did.

On intermediate steps:

Quote
look at the eye: every part of our modern eye is, of course, useless - without the other parts. how could it have gradually evolved? it couldnt


If you're seriously going to argue against evolution, then at least read the first four chapters of 'The Blind Watchmaker' by Richard Dawkins, and then get back to me. The evolution of the eye has been a famous rhetorical tool since Paley - and is comprehensively discussed in chapter 4.

Something less than a full eye will not be as good an eye as the one we have, obviously - but it will not be useless. For example (from page 85):

Quote
Some single-celled animals have a light-sensitive spot with a little pigment screen behind it. The screen shields it from the light coming in from one direction, which gives it some 'idea' of where the light is coming from. Among many-celled animals, various types of worm and some shellfish have a similar arrangement, but the pigment-backed light-sensitive cells are set in a little cup. This gives slightly better direction-finding capability, since each cell is selectively shielded from light rays coming into the cup from its own side. In a continuous series from flat sheet, through shallow cup to deep cup, each step in the series... would be an optical improvement.


If you want to keep using rhetorical examples, then you might pick mimickry (stick insect, chameleon, etc.), but those examples have also been throughly examined -- they'll win you bonus points at your next creationist chapter meeting, though.

(side note: I'm also involved in a study for resistance to antibiotics. the smaller the thing you study, the more likely that you will have to consider 'horizontal gene transfer' - the wholesale movement of gene complexes from one creature to an unrelated one. This is the mechanism by which antibiotic resistance could, for example, jump from species to species. The more complicated cells have mechanisms which try to prevent this mixing (which is why we don't tend to pass our genes on to others by touching them . This is just another mechanism whereby a complex feature (such as the ability to express a protein) can pass through a population. Incidentally - this is the reason to be worried about GM foods (where we initiate horizonal gene transfer in the lab): the genes will *not* respect species boundaries.)