Heck, yeah. Anything's possible.... ;)
The vast majority of animals don't depend on us. Those that do are those species we have domesticated. Whether they look up to us as gods is unanswerable. I've no idea what goes through my dog's head when she looks at me. It could be "man, you are so...
Hi Android.
Perhaps we got off on the wrong foot earlier...! No harm done, I hope.
I notice you are a biologist. What's your area of study? I'm an ecologist by training, and now teach biology in high school. There are a few biologists here, Painted Wolf being the most notable.
Hope you stick around.
I'm not disagreeing with that. Natural selection is a mechanism for evolutionary change. I merely gave a definition of evolution: the change in allele frequency within a population.
"Biological evolution may be slight or substantial; it embraces everything from slight changes in the proportion...
Yep, and I was talking about the allele frequencies within a population. An individual with a mutation within that population will cause the frequencies to change within the gene pool.
Regarding your second point, natural selection doesn't determine if the mutation is passed on to a population...
I thought the same! Perhaps an option should be "in your mind".
That's not me being facetious, folks. I do think gods are a product of our imagination.
I live a couple of hundred miles away from my partner and daughter, so I can spend as much time as I want here. When we are together for a few weeks in the year, then I don't visit RF at all.
And this is one reason why your religion doesn't gain respect. Religion should be a private affair, and perhaps you don't realise how intrusive it is having to endure being stopped in the street by people asking if you have been 'saved' yet. Having to endure being labelled a 'sinner', as 'evil'...
I'm not sure. New Scientist online allows some articles to be read in full for free but to read others, you have to be a subscriber. Just have to wait and see next week.
Is the magazine available in Oz?
In next week's New Scientist, there will be a feature on "Our strong bonds with animals - It's what has driven human evolution." Could be relevant to the OP.