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Evolution

Tanngrisnir said:
To put things biblically, throwing pearls before swine never really turns out well.
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"By God, you gotta have a swine to show you where the truffles are!"
-- Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1961)

 
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KevinKohler said:
Evolution is obvious to see. Look at dogs.
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Dogs are the result of selective & non-selective breeding from a wolf or wolf-like mammal.
 
sKiTzo said:
How is it physically possible for the first human baby to be born without a mother? When the first baby comes into existence through evolution, what do you visualize taking place?
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So you think the ancestor right before humans did not have mothers and babies? You are either incredibly uneducated, young (uneducated), or trolling. The first two can be resolved if you educated yourself at about a high school level of biology.
 
One obvious proof of evolution derives from what I call the 'top down' approach. Instead of trying to figure out how a given creature evolved, look at all the things that living creatures have in common. All (or most) living things share the same library of 20 or so amino acids, the same DNA/RNA genetic code & system & the same metabolic functions involved in a living thing. All (or most) living things are all descended (evolved) from a common ancestor with a common set of control genes for determining body structure, eye structure & function, embryonic development, etc. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_genes & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeobox
 
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sKiTzo said:
Nice article but it dodges the real question by saying that the first chicken egg must have come from a bird that was not quite a chicken. Okay, but where did that bird come from? I understand well that aspect of the theory. The claim is that all living things came into existence through evolution, but every explanation of the model has lesser evolved animals already existing. Do you see the flaw?
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Who claimed "all living things came into existence through evolution"? No one did.

You seem to be mixing your terms up. The origins of life itself is called Abiogenesis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

See the right side picture that shows a timeline? You're talking at one time about the very top of that chart, Human origins, then you casually mention the very bottom of the chart, Earliest Life. It's as though you are trying to match those two ends together and wondering why they don't match, when you're cutting out essentially "the entire remainder of the chart".

Life did not go from molecules to a baby. It went from molecules, to some sort of organized molecules, over and over...eventually resulting in some almost self-replicating earliest form that we consider "life". But it would still be some microscopic bacteria-like life, almost indistinguishable from the complex molecules it originated from. It would have to continue to change over billions of years to end up in the variety of life we know on earth. How did that first bacteria-like life come into being without other life replicating into it? I think that's what you're asking?
Because chemical reactions, molecular replication, etc., can occur in non-living matter, and it was such complex chemical interactions that occurred in just the right way that resulted in a set of molecules that were distinct from it's progenitors. Imagine two molecules interacting chemically and creating a new molecule. Is this birth? No, and yet it's similar, and perhaps that's what you're missing.
While features of self-organization and self-replication are often considered the hallmark of living systems, there are many instances of abiotic molecules exhibiting such characteristics under proper conditions.
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Keep in mind that even the transition from elements into these complex organic precursors to life, was incredibly, ridiculously complex, and is it's own are of study you could spend a literal lifetime on, easily, and only chip away at it.
 
Angel said:
Have you no faith in science, Mach? I'm surprised to hear this.
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Faith - requires no evidence
Reason - requires evidence.

I use reason to accept science, not faith. Most religious must rely on faith to support belief in things for which there can be no evidence (the supernatural). You'd think after all those posts, you'd know this.
 
Mach said:
Remember you're rolling these dice over a billion years * the number of individual organisms...it's a big number. Maybe on the order of let's just guess, 10^20.
Remember your Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy? The Infinite Improbability Drive?
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The above was a guess to answer KevinKohler, but apparently it's got some advocates in reality:

The MWO [Ed.: "many worlds in one"] version of the cosmological model of eternal inflation could suggest a way out of this conundrum because, in an infinite multiverse with a finite number of distinct macroscopic histories (each repeated an infinite number of times), emergence of even highly complex systems by chance is not just possible but inevitable."[188]
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I have to say, if that were the case, again, truth is stranger than fiction. A god waving a magic wand to create life...OK...but infinite improbability become inevitable...that's hardcore cool.
 
sKiTzo said:
Look at the text below...what physically happens in full detail between mutations? When an organism decides it needs to better itself as a species, what process takes place that leads to the final product of the next mutation? There can't ever be a plausible answer to this so, by default, evolution is easily debunked.

Are we supposed to think that the previous one just ****s out the next more complex one? Did the first chicken egg not require a chicken to lay the egg? Did the first human baby not require an adult female human to birth it? Let's say it didn't. If no one fed it and clothed it it would just die after a short time. It would have to be a female that can self-fertilize in order to have more humans...
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No organism ever "decides it needs to better itself as a species". there is no decision about it. Do you deny that genetic mutation or deviation exists? If not, then you already know the mechanism which allows evolution to exist.
 
sKiTzo said:
I'm not trolling. You're not getting the problem. You haven't addressed the question. That's probably why I keep reposting it. The question of the very first human baby - now I'm talking about visualizing the process in practice, not just saying it changed from one to the next. How is it physically possible for the first human baby to be born without a mother? When the first baby comes into existence through evolution, what do you visualize taking place?
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I always found this a good way to explain evolution
greyscale.jpg

Bottom left is white bottom right is black.
I am sure we can agree white is not black but where exactly do you consider the white to have become black?
Evolution is the same gradual changes until eventually you have something that doesn't resemble the original
 
sKiTzo asked the question:

The part I don't understand is where it says that evolution is how all living things came into existence.
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Okay. All living things on Earth are really just self-propelled (if mobile) and self-contained chemistry. All living things are complex combinations of simple chemical elements organized into complex organic molecules. These molecules are capable of doing things which most other chemical molecules can't do or can't do well. These organic molecules are good at exchanging chemicals with the environment around them. Water helps in the exchange so these organic chemical processes or "pathways" developed in the primordial seas of Earth, far from the lethal light of the sun. These chemical swaps with the environment allow complex organic molecules to transfer and transform energy from the chemicals and energy sources around them. This ability to transfer and transform energy allows these organic chemicals to keep themselves organized and protected in a chemically reactive and therefore hostile world. The energy transfer also allows these chemicals to do something really special. They can duplicate themselves.

At some point before 3.8 billion years ago these organic chemicals won the lottery of life and by chance organized themselves in such a way that they formed protective membranes around themselves and became bags of self-contained organic chemistry which we humans now call proto-cells. The proto-cells duplicated their component chemicals and membranes for a long period of time before another big win in the lottery of life occurred. That next big win in the lottery of life was the accidental development of a chemical archive to store information about how to make and reproduce all those organic chemicals and membrane chemicals found in a proto-cell in a coherent and organized way. That archive chemical was similar to what we humans today called Ribonucleic Acid or RNA. It was a long chain of simpler chemical units in a single strand. The proto-RNA was able to copy itself in a clumsy fashion but it was prone to making errors in such copying because of its single strand structure. Then the third big win of the lottery occurred when the single-strand proto-RNA through accumulated copying errors became a double stranded archive chemical where each opposite strand spell-checked the other strand for sequencing errors of the simpler chemical components which made up the archive chemical. This new double-stranded genetic archive is what we now call DNA. It made difficult and unreliable proto-cell reproduction into a reliable process. It cut down errors but still allowed for enough mutations so that life could slowly evolve. The self-contained bags of chemicals didn't know it at the time but in retrospect we humans have recognized that this created the first true cells and life was now a fully developed process on the planet Earth. This change occurred about 3.8 million years ago.

Continued next post.
 
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The cells now had reliable and coherent reproduction pathways to copy themselves, efficiently and dependably, making reliable metabolic pathways (to transfer and transform energy for the cells to use) and good membranes to protect the cell's internal chemistry from the chaos of the outside environment. The cells reproduced and grew in numbers and complexity. At some point about 2.5 billion years ago the cells made a quantum jump in organisation and developed specialised biological machines within themselves wrapped in protective membranes to boost their efficiency. We call these little machines organelles now. These more complex cells quickly began to spread and adapt to new and challenging environments. Some of them developed the capability to work together to improve their mutual chances for survival. Some got so good at working together that they could no longer live apart and the first multicellular organisms emerged onto the stage of life on planet Earth. Also during this long interval of time spanning almost two billion years cells adapted and developed new ways to swap DNA and mix up possibilities for variation in future generations. Sexual reproduction was born! Woo-hoo!

The next big win in the lottery of live occurred about 545 million years ago when the multicellular organisms underwent a rapid and comprehensive burst of divergent evolution to form much more complex and adaptable multicellular organisms in many new body shapes. Also a new and powerful sense was likely developed at this time. Light detection and Sight/Vision revolutionized these organisms' ability to sense, react to and exploit their environment. But despite the variety of shapes and the emergence of new senses, all these organisms were still just self-contained and self-propelled (if they could move) bags of organic chemicals swapping chemicals and energy with their environment and doing chemistry to survive and reproduce. From that point, through behavioural adaptation, genetic adaptation, divergent evolution, extinction, luck, chemical changes in the environment, etc. life became more complex and more specialised to better exploit its environment and to reproduce.

Fast forward 545 million years to recent times and we have a four-limbed, single-headed, two-eyed, nimble-fingered, upright-standing bag of chemicals which has left the sea and now calls itself sKiTzo. Around sKiTso are about 7 billion organisms which look roughly the same and which by convention we have decided to call human or more specifically Homo Sapiens Sapiens. sKitzo was born of a mother who was not like him. She was born of a mother who was not like her. This chain of slight differences goes back about 300,000 years until the first Homo Sapiens Sapiens appeared. We modern humans have looked over the fossil remains of all the Homo Sapiens Sapiens and noticed they are different in some ways from other types of humans which we have found and so we have retroactively classified them together in one category - Homo Sapiens Sapiens. The other human groups we have classified in other groups with different names. Things like humans but not quite the same as humans we also classified into other groups called hominids, because they are close to how humans are built and function. The next wider category is Great Apes, then wider are the Apes, then the Primates, etc. This retroactive classification spreads to other mammals, to other animals, to plants, to fungi, to protozoans (small microscopic near animals) and to bacteria.

These categories are artificial divisions which we modern humans have imposed on a much more continuous and seamless progression of life which still remains just self-contained bags of organic chemicals doing the chemistry of life. AND THIS IS THE KEY POINT. The not-humans who mated with other not-humans were close enough to what we define as human that over time their slightly different offspring became human looking and we changed their categorization. They were still just bags of self-contained chemicals doing chemistry to stay alive and reproduce but they looked human and so we today classify them as such. They themselves and their parents had no idea that they were making the change to what we today recognize as human. In the same manner the proto-chickens produced slightly different looking offspring so that today modern biologists have decided they are now seen to be in a different group from their parents. We call these new versions "chickens". But neither the proto-chickens nor their chicken-descendents cared one iota what a bunch of nerdy primates would label them as, millions of years later. They just clucked and f***ed to make new and better chickens in various exciting and different forms.

Continued on next post.
 
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Speciation, while a real process, is also a human arrogance which we impose upon other organisms through taxonomy (the classification of living things). It is done in hindsight and has no meaning to the organisms whom we have classified long after they were born, lived, reproduced and died. What matters is that we are all just bags of organic chemicals with a genetic archive called DNA and a will to live and reproduce in order to pass on that DNA in slightly modified forms over each generation. It's Evolution Baby!

Cheers.
Evilroddy
 
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ttwtt78640 said:
Nope, the carriers of the "taste bad" gene just have to survive getting fatally chewed on at a higher rate than those lacking the "taste bad" gene.
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There may also be identifiable traits that the individuals who have the taste bad gene tend to have, which may alert predators that "this isn't the one I'm looking for". Like a particular scent, or maybe they are a tab bit larger or smaller or darker or lighter than the others of their species.
 
Mach said:
Faith - requires no evidence
Reason - requires evidence.

I use reason to accept science, not faith. Most religious must rely on faith to support belief in things for which there can be no evidence (the supernatural). You'd think after all those posts, you'd know this.
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So the answer is yes, you have no faith in science?
Or no, you have no faith in science?
Yes or no, you have no faith in science. Wow.

Do you have faith in your family, in your life-partner (assuming you have one), in your best friend? And is your faith in these cases not based on evidence?
 
imagep said:
No organism ever "decides it needs to better itself as a species". there is no decision about it. Do you deny that genetic mutation or deviation exists? If not, then you already know the mechanism which allows evolution to exist.
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Well some humans have had the idea to try and better ourselves as a species
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics
And of course there is/was/will be Khan (Is Star Trek an old show or a documentary of things that havent happened yet?)
Khan1.jpg
 
Cisero said:
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The global population is getting taller. 15 cm increase in only 170 years ! Can you imagine what kind of changes would occur in 20 million years ? ...
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It's debatable if that is due to evolution, or better nutrition. Maybe a tad bit of both, especially since being tall is usually found to be an attractive trait by female homosapians.
 
sKiTzo said:
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When you try to picture the process of the very first human baby, for instance, coming into existence - what do you see? I see that it's just not possible for obvious reasons. The very first chicken had to come from an egg....where did the egg come from? Webbed hands and feet over millennia may be plausible. Nothing to a human baby or a chicken egg is impossible unless somebody can explain the physical process by which that happened in full detail.
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Being "human" or being a "chicken" is a matter of degree. the earliest humans weren't exactly like modern day humans, neither were the earliest chickens. These things didn't just magically spring into existence (God didn't create them), they very sowly evolved over millions of years. I suppose the animal that laid the first true chicken egg was very much like a chicken, and the animal that laid that animals first egg also wasn't exactly identical to the one that laid the first chicken egg.

Something gives me the feeling that you already understand this stuff. You are just seeking a justification for not believing it.
 
Threegoofs said:
The fact that it may not be explainable in full detail does not mean it isn’t true.
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Sure, but in the case of his examples, they are fully explainable.
 
sKiTzo said:
It kind of does. Even supposing that the very first human baby just appeared out of thin air, it would just lay there naked until it died.
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but the very first human baby still had parents.

It almost sounds to me that you are describing some mythical god creating all life forms, not evolution. Yea, if God created the first human baby out of thin air, it would just lay there naked until it died. That's part of the reason that I don't believe in the creation story of the bible.
 
sKiTzo said:
Nice article but it dodges the real question by saying that the first chicken egg must have come from a bird that was not quite a chicken. Okay, but where did that bird come from?
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From it's parents, who were not identical to it, just like you aren't identical to your parents.

I understand well that aspect of the theory. The claim is that all living things came into existence through evolution, but every explanation of the model has lesser evolved animals already existing. Do you see the flaw?
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No, I see no flaw. That's the way it works. All life can be trace backed to single cell critters. And they can be trace back to life that isn't even cellular in nature (such as viruses), which can be trace back to DNA. So where did the first DNA come from? I dunno, where did the first of any chemical compound come from. Most likely, the building blocks of dna happened to be located next to each other, and then some sort of catalyst (lightening strike, or maybe simply rain) set off the chemical reaction which resulted in all naturally occuring chemicals.
 
sKiTzo said:
You ignored the red text that I highlighted because that is the question that has no answer nor any possible answer. Random genetic mutations can't produce the first prototype of any complex living creature such as a human baby unless somebody can shed the light...
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Sure they can.
 
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