Is Evolution Conscious (Some amazing points about evolution)

[Rick O'Shez]

This thread's very existence is a sad testimonial of the failure of our educational systems.

Yes, I'd have to agree. And religious re-interpretations like intelligent design have muddied the water considerably.

 

[Kirran]

I think that even direction is a bit of stretch to be honest. Many organisms simplify at times.

For example, the bacterial species Mycoplasma leprae is currently in the process of losing about half of its genome.

 

[FearGod]

Some amazing things in evolution. Got any others?

Milk is made from blood, in short; proteins etc; are taken out of the blood to make milk. It is possible that blood is found in the milk.
Women can keep their milk up as long as it is needed. This might be why there is such a fascination with breasts by men and women alike; it might have been a survival tactic many years ago. In other words it was noticed that the young suckled on them, so adults started to also when they were short of food or water. It would seem to make sense why there is such a fascination with them in the first place, and especially they are bigger.

But how on earth it evolved is anybodies guess.

Interesting how it is made out of blood however, considering it is the blood of the Saviour that saves us.

Even the sound of a baby crying can start the milk flowing. Again, how that would occur without any intelligence in evolution is beyond sense. Saying it is beneficial is one thing, and saying because of that it would be selected is another, but to say that it even occurred in the first place, considering it is so advantagous, just seems plain stupid.

I shall add to the list the form of the face. Why, someone asked on TV, is the face the way it is. That answer by a sceintist was that there was a very good reason why it was that way. And that is: when we lift food to our mouth, we see the food, and then smell the food, BEFORE it goes into our mouth.
Makes sense when you think of it. But how would this occur by sheer chance? Again, it is not a surprise that it had some advantage so was selected, but that it should happen in the first place so that it could be selected. That is the fascinating thing about it. It is akin to saying that it is of no surprise that someone had to win the race, after all, someone has to be first, right? But the surprise is that, without intelligence, they all end up at the venue on the right day, right time, right event, trained and ready to race. Now that is amazing!

What else is strange?

How about eyebrows?
They say that eyebrows are there to stop sweat going into your eyes. So how did those who had no eyebrows go on? Did they die because they could not see? It would hardly seem like much of an answer. So what then ?

The shape of the nose seems to sweep away water from the mouth, just as the shape of the lips sweeps away anything coming out of the nose. The lips tend to protude which also tends to keep things out. They eyes are sunk in so that if you bang your face you do not hit the eye. It might be easy to see that those who had protuding eyes-- like some animals-- died, but to say that there were others waiting there with sunken eyes seems a little rich to say the least.

Intelligence thrown into the equation answers it all straight away though. With intelligence we have an evolving conscious nature. Now there seems to be some sense in why these things do what they do. But without it, how do we accept that the runners all turn up at the right venue, right day, right time, right event? Is that not luck without intelligence?

Now some will say it is a process or mechanism. Fine. But how does that come about? Without intelligence it is still luck. So now we have an automatic bus system that picks everybody up. That would seem to work. All the athletes arrive at the right time. But who organises the bus? Does that not require intelligence. ......

got any others?

Of course there should be a designer for all these amazing things.

Randomness, coincidences and chances can never be a rational answer for it, as you said that such amazing things existed before being naturally selected but to explain its existence due to randomness is very hard to believe if not even impossible.

 

[Kirran]

Of course there should be a designer for all these amazing things.

Randomness, coincidences and chances can never be a rational answer for it, as you said that such amazing things existed before being naturally selected but to explain its existence due to randomness is very hard to believe if not even impossible.

This of course depends on one's worldview. For me, it's perfectly rational. For you, it is not. Therefore, for me evolution is true, for you it is not. And that's OK.

 

[FearGod]

This of course depends on one's worldview. For me, it's perfectly rational. For you, it is not. Therefore, for me evolution is true, for you it is not. And that's OK.

Did i say evolution wasn't true ?

 

[Kirran]

Did i say evolution wasn't true ?

I apologise, I misrepresented you.

Is it Guided Evolution you believe in?

 

[FearGod]

I apologise, I misrepresented you.

Is it Guided Evolution you believe in?

No problem

 

[Robert.Evans]

for the record, I don't know what the scientific explanation for why humans have eyebrows is. Science is always a growing body of knowledge and therefore cannot necessarily explai everything at the moment; it is as fallible and as limited as the human beings that practice it. Whereas religion, especially if it has a god that cliams omniscience, does.

I don't think it is as direct or as instant that someone who does not have eye brows will die. [if you have evidence to the contrary, let me know]. The process of natural selection means that those who are best adapted to their environment survive this can include both individual survival and survival by co-operation.
it could be something to do with sexual selection in so far as eye brows are a way to communicate emotions, (i.e. those without them are therefore less attractive?) but that would be a complete guess. Science does allow for accidents as things can happen without necessarily being related to evolutionary struggle for survival- but that leaves a puzzle as to why we would have them in the first place. so I remain stuck if I am honest.

This was not specifically for you, but you gave an honest answer that engaged with my thinking, so here goes:

_____
So,

if the hair fell out off of our bodies, and some remained, why would it stop with eyebrows? As evolution does not know what it is doing, it couldn't. So that is not the answer.
The only way it seems to work is to say some lost the hair off their head, but not their eyebrows, and some the opposite. Then those with hair on their heads and those with eyebrows mated and we have something close to what we see now in the modern human.

I can't see that it is much of an advantage to keep sweat out, even though it does for a time, as you could just as easy wipe it away. Anyway, it is doubtful that it would be that much of a problem anyway.

This means that mutations, by sheer luck, happened, and I would say through a reproductory attraction to one look or another, we have what we have now-- hair and eyebrows.

This sounds rather contrived though I must say.

Nor does it answer why the hair on our head's keeps growing and yet eyebrows did not. How did know that that is what it had to do? It didn't. So now we have to imagine that someone that was included in the above thesis, or, worse still, they mated again with others that had eyebrows that stopped growing and hair on the head that did not.

None of which answers why eyebrow hair would stop growing, nor be as thin as it is.

But this does not even take us to the miracle of the eyelid which keeps blinking to keep the eye moist in the first place. On top of that, we see that there are eyelashes on the end of the eyelids! There is surely another miracle. How one could imagine that I really don't know. Are we saying that there was hair like eyelashes all of the face and it fell off to where it is now? Hardly I would have thought. So what then? It is different hair, slightly curled, and just in the right place to help protect the eyes.
Yes we can say that is an advantage, but do we really think that we would not have survived without eyelashes?

Above the eyes the brow is slightly prominent which also helps deflects water and sweat and protect the sunken eyes. Again, how would this happen? Sure we can imagine that it might have been an advantage, but how? Hard to imagine that it was of any real help to our primordial ancestors. If it was purely an attraction to the opposite gender, then this it seems even worse, as now it is sheer luck that we have an advantage, coming from something that started as an attraction.

I find it puzzling. I find it puzzling when one gets down to the practicalities of it all, not the science. That is all well and good explaining the mechanisms that bring it all about; but how does it work at a ground floor level.

The shape of the nose also deflects water. And why two nostrils that go down to the two lungs through one airway?

All of this has to be explained in basic terms as to how it develops without and consciousness involved; it has to do it through processes and mechanisms, which in themselves, have had to evolve from something else in order to form the guiding factor to select from the random mutations in the first place. All of this sounds so contrived to me. Anybody got any answers? Please don't start talking about the science of it, I am looking for basic reasons why, practical reason why.

 

[Robert.Evans]

..

This seems a good answer:

Eyebrows as eyespots[edit]
Joseph Jordania suggested that the primary evolutionary function of clearly visible eyebrows was safety from predators during the vulnerable nighttime sleep, when early hominid groups started sleeping on the ground, away from the trees. Stealth predators (like big cats) as a rule stop hunting if they notice that prey animals are watching them. Cheap plastic masks, placed on the back of the head, saved many human lives in India and Bangladesh, where man-eating tigers claimed many victims in Sundarbans national park.[citation needed] Many predators (particularly big cats) are very sensitive to eyespots, and all the big cats have eyespots on the back of their own ears. According to Jordania, at night, when hominid eyes were closed, the eyebrows, arched upwards, and eyelashes, arched downwards, formed clearly definable oval eyespots on a ‘sleeping’ human face, creating an illusion that the eyes were still open and watching (and therefore could deter predators from attacking sleeping hominids).[2]
_____

Of course it does not really answer why some did not have their eyebrows fall out. But it answers why some without clearly defined eyes, might have been killed at night by animals.
Again we just have to accept that evolution has the answer somewhere just waiting to be expressed, which to me, sounds too contrived.. especially when you consider how many times over this has to happen to get to where we are now.
Eyebrow - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Robert.Evans]

No, I'm sorry, you don't seem to grasp the mechanisms involved.

Those individuals with hair over their eyes which was thin enough to allow sweat to flow into their eyes would have been marginally obstructed in hunting and in escaping predators, due to the fact they'd temporarily have their vision obstructed and have to use their hands to clear the sweat away often, resulting in further reduction of vision as well as reducing running efficiency. Therefore, their chances at catching food and at escaping predators would be lower, and so they'd on average produce less offspring than those with full eyebrows, meaning full eyebrows became the most common in later generations, as generations went by.

EDIT: To clarify: nobody need not have had eyebrows at any point here.

Don't buy that. I have answered it to red. It was on the link you gave.

 

[Kirran]

Thankyou for the long and thought-out post.

On the eyebrows, I feel I answered and explained all of your questions previously.

I have stated the basic reasons, the practical reasons. It is about likelihoods of reproductive success, based on attractiveness, survival etc.

I'm not going to go into those other examples right now, because if you reject the explanations I made previously, you won't accept these ones either. And if you don't accept these explanations, then that's that. No amount of explaining is going to dislodge the ideas which you're determined to keep.

 

[Kirran]

Don't buy that. I have answered it to red. It was on the link you gave.

Don't buy it? Why?

 

[Robert.Evans]

Yes, could be. I'm not an expert by any means but I think I understand the basic principles. Perhaps what a lot of people struggle to grasp is the geological time scales involved in evolution. Two billion years is a long time, with plenty of scope for trial and error, missed opportunities, gradual adaptation and so on. Changes which happen slowly and incrementally over thousands or millions of generations. And so on.

I understand the time period involved; i am not-- contrary to popular belief--dragging my knuckles on the floor.
Whether we have a long time or not is not relevant. What is fascinating is that it changes in the first place and that some of the changes are in fact an advantage. That is amazing.

 

[Robert.Evans]

It is sad that well over a hundred years past we still have not collectively quite grasped the basics of the ToE.

This thread's very existence is a sad testimonial of the failure of our educational systems.

Partly, or perhaps you not grasping what I am asking in the first place.

 

[Kirran]

I understand the time period involved; i am not-- contrary to popular belief--dragging my knuckles on the floor.
Whether we have a long time or not is not relevant. What is fascinating is that it changes in the first place and that some of the changes are in fact an advantage. That is amazing.

It's worth noting that very few are in fact an advantage. It's just that the ones which aren't tend not to stick around.

 

[Robert.Evans]

Don't buy it? Why?

Read the post to Red from your link. I think that is the better answer.

 

[Robert.Evans]

Sweat is not kept fully out of our eyes, otherwise some tennis players would not wear sweat bands.

 

[Kirran]

Read the post to Red from your link. I think that is the better answer.

Do you mean #89? I'd appreciate it if you'd just go over the points of my explanation one by one, if you wouldn't mind.

Sweat is not kept fully out of our eyes, otherwise some tennis players would not wear sweat bands.

No. It is not perfect. If consciousness were involved, I imagine it would be.

Were you educated in the UK? I seem to recall we did evolution at GCSE.

 

[Robert.Evans]

It's worth noting that very few are in fact an advantage. It's just that the ones which aren't tend not to stick around.

Sure, but still interesting that there would be any of any SERIOUS advantage. i mean we can see animals with added appendages, like a leg on a cow I have seen. It did not appear to be jointed, as it swung around like an empty sleeve. But why is there not more things like that about? If it can happen, why not more? I mean, you are saying that no intelligence is involved; so I would have expected it to be more haphazard like the cow, and that now, with the wonders of modern science, we have them removed.

Seems to perfect, too contrived.

The problem I see with you and @Spiny Norman is that you seem to hold by faith, evolution, and don't fully engage with the conversation. Sorry, that is how I see it. I wish I could find someone who could see the problems I see. @Red Economist seems the closest so far.

 

[Rick O'Shez]

Sweat is not kept fully out of our eyes, otherwise some tennis players would not wear sweat bands.

Not fully, but eyebrows do make a difference. Again, remember we are talking about small incremental adaptations over thousands of generations.