Is Evolution Conscious (Some amazing points about evolution)

[Rick O'Shez]

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.

Indeed.

 

[Rick O'Shez]

Well, abiogenesis is somewhat a separate issue, but to address it anyway - life is currently thought to have begun as lipid micelles - these are little bubbles of fat with water inside them, which can form spontaneously in an abiotic environment such as that found on Earth at this time.

I recall there were experiments which tried to recreate early conditions for life on earth. Do you know anything about these?

 

[Laika]

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.

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

I know what you're getting at, as scientific explanations can struggle to explain the complexity and diversity of all phenomena. As humans we don't know everything whereas the the claim to an omniscient god can therefore be comforting in providing answers. Religion is arguably a default setting for human understanding in what we don't understand in material terms we attribute to consciousness.

I have drifted further and further away from the idea that science has a monopoly on knowledge. I was a bit of an anti-religious bigot when I was younger as I was so certain of myself and believed (wrongly) in science claims to absolute knowledge. I've had to do some growing up and learn about how science is dependent on certain philosophical assumptions. I am a Marxist and have found that many problems have arisen as scientific theories do not consistently back up atheism in a dogmatic way. evolution itself explains the "origin of species" but not the "origins of life". I am somewhat similar to creationists in that I accept science has philosophical assumptions, as well as political and ethical implications, even if it is from a "materialist"/atheist point of view. Marxists call it "ideology" and it makes a real mess of the philosophy of science and truth.

I think I can do no more to answer you're question on the eyebrows (and it looks like the scientific consensus is a "don't know"), but reading you're reply raises a few questions that I would be grateful if you could answer them for me.

1. Why is it necessary for evolution to "know" something in order to do it?

You seem to be implying that in order for something to happen, it must necessarily possess knowledge of it's function, that is self-awareness or indeed consciousness of it's own existence. Does the Sun need to "know" where it is going to rise and fall in the sky? (I think this is an animist view).

2. How far do you think evolution is down to luck or chance?

In implying the evolution is the product of luck or chance, you make a good case for saying that why it had to be one way or another- and that some power outside of the process of evolution therefore had to be involved.

3. Why are practical reasons different from scientific reasons?

In practice life rarely adds up to the neatness of scientific theories; complexity, the limits on our knowledge and our uncertainty again feed into the need for an explanation. Do you believe god is a more practical explanation that evolution? Is that why you feel evolution is contrived as an explanation?

4. I would also like to ask how you became a creationist, as that may help me understand how you reached this view. To be honest, I was taught evolution at secondary school and never really questioned it.

 

[Kirran]

I have heard of this nerve, though I find it fascinating in the extreme that it would somehow wander around and just link up in some haphazard way. Don't you? Consciousness is evolving. But I am not discussing that here at the moment.

I do find it fascinating, actually.

What's thought to have happened is that it was originally a shortest-route nerve in a fish, but as morphologies gradually changed it became ever more distant from a straight line.

So it is not, okay?

I didn't say it was. I said that's how it struck me.

No I did not. I just think it is incomplete and accepted to easy. That is why I have question, question which seem are not allowed in this subjecty. I always find this and I have heard others say the same. In that sense, it is also a faith.

I apologise if we have seemed very fundamentalist about this, and reacted so much. But it's only because many of us have had these conversations many times before, and have come to understand the logic of the ToE, so it's hard to debate with somebody who's coming at it relatively fresh, or doesn't understand aspects of its processes.

Honestly, evolutionary theory is actually one of the most fractious of all the areas of science, there are people debating all sorts of permutations r.e. mechanism.

I am, are you?

Yes, I believe I am.

Okay. I lived in Wales for a few years.

Oh cool, whereabouts?

I'm in Manchester now, myself.

I think the answer is #89. The others are just slight advantages to me, but not sufficient in themselves to be the answer.

Interesting. I find the sweat-defence idea to be a suitable explanation, and for others to be secondary to it, and I believe this is generally backed-up by the scientific community.

It is not a case of arguing against it. Anyway, I don't want to get into that. As I keep saying, I want to see an answer at grass root level, a practical level, as to why things are the way they are.

Well, I think that's what we've given you. I'd like you to understand, that from my perspective, and that of my fellow evolutionists here I suspect, all that we've explained is simple logic, almost self-evident, as we've looked into it enough to just get it. So it can be difficult to have somebody reject it.

But if it was needed to do that, how did they survive until it ended up as it is now?

It's not that they wouldn't have survived. It's not life-or-death. It's that it mildly changed their reproductive chances.

I recall there were experiments which tried to recreate early conditions for life on earth. Do you know anything about these?

Yeah, there've been quite a lot of them now, as I understand it. I don't know huge amounts about it, only a few basics to be honest.

Your avatar keeps throwing me off haha

I have drifted further and further away from the idea that science has a monopoly on knowledge. I was a bit of an anti-religious bigot when I was younger as I was so certain of myself and believed (wrongly) in science claims to absolute knowledge.

I've gone through a similar process myself. I'd describe myself as religious now, but this certainly wouldn't have been the case 5 years ago.

I'm more defending the internal consistency of the ToE here than anything else.

 

[Kirran]

I can give you a mathematical proof of evolution in the form of the Hardy-Weinberg equation if you'd like

EDIT: Red Economist - to be fair, the ToE doesn't purport to explain the origin of life.

 

[Rick O'Shez]

to be fair, the ToE doesn't purport to explain the origin of life.

So there's a gap for God!

 

[Robert.Evans]

I know what you're getting at, as scientific explanations can struggle to explain the complexity and diversity of all phenomena. As humans we don't know everything whereas the the claim to an omniscient god can therefore be comforting in providing answers. Religion is arguably a default setting for human understanding in what we don't understand in material terms we attribute to consciousness.

I have drifted further and further away from the idea that science has a monopoly on knowledge. I was a bit of an anti-religious bigot when I was younger as I was so certain of myself and believed (wrongly) in science claims to absolute knowledge. I've had to do some growing up and learn about how science is dependent on certain philosophical assumptions. I am a Marxist and have found that many problems have arisen as scientific theories do not consistently back up atheism in a dogmatic way. evolution itself explains the "origin of species" but not the "origins of life". I am somewhat similar to creationists in that I accept science has philosophical assumptions, as well as political and ethical implications, even if it is from a "materialist"/atheist point of view. Marxists call it "ideology" and it makes a real mess of the philosophy of science and truth.

I think I can do no more to answer you're question on the eyebrows (and it looks like the scientific consensus is a "don't know"), but reading you're reply raises a few questions that I would be grateful if you could answer them for me.

All interesting. Thanks

1. Why is it necessary for evolution to "know" something in order to do it?

It doesn't.

2. How far do you think evolution is down to luck or chance?

I dont have a problem with evolution as a explanation.

.

3. Why are practical reasons different from scientific reasons?

They are not the same. Talking about gene frequency does nothing to explain to me how I have a set of teeth perfectly lined up on hard gums so I can chew, nor that i first had milk teeth.

4. I would also like to ask how you became a creationist, as that may help me understand how you reached this view. To be honest, I was taught evolution at secondary school and never really questioned it.

Interesting that you think I am a Creationists just because I question Evolution, don't you think?
I am not.
I believe in Evolution. Evolution explains things through mechanisms and processes, (way more complicated than I could repeat), which work well in the physical plane that we live in.
But there are simple things like eyebrows, eyelashes, teeth, shape of the face, the protuding shape of the skull over the sunken eyes, the shape of the nose to deflect waters, the shape of the mouth, etc etc.
I just can't imagine for the life of me, how it could have come about from sheer random mutations, most of which are bad, and those that are good are good enough to produce something that looks perfect... perfect in the sense that I use it here. I understand that natural selection takes place, but that is no different than saying a man with eyes guided a blind man through a door. What evolution says is that he went through himself. Sure he had many attempts, but we have to ask, why did he want to go through the door in the first place, and why keep trying, and why the right door? Too many things, too many questions, too much complexity, too much design, too much of everything accept answers.
Speaking of a gene pool or DNA is only explaining things in the physical plane that we live in. Great! It works. But it does not answer the whole package. It does not answer simple things like I've asked, (least not yet), it does not answer grass root level problems. I find that interesting that there is no answer accept the pat answer of evolutionary pressure etc. It is like me saying, God did it! Great answer! Answers nothing, even if it is correct.

What I find amazing is that Creationists etc see the design side, and so say intelligence must be involved; and Evolutionists see the biological side and so think there is no intelligence involved. Somewhere in the middle is the answer. I don't really want to go into exactly what I think. I wanted answers for these questions. I find none, which is sorely disappointing.

I see too many things which have to come together whether all at once or over a long period of time, to just accept that it 'just happened' through random mutations in genes and that the best survived. It is obvious, I think, that the best would survive, but why would they survive to such a remarkably clarified state of existence? I find that mind numbingly baffling!

 

[Robert.Evans]

So there's a gap for God!

God is everything not a gap.

 

[Rick O'Shez]

God is everything not a gap.

I knew God would pop up sooner or later.

 

[Kirran]

So there's a gap for God!

True. Of course, it can't be proved God (in the personal, Abrahamic sense), wasn't involved in guiding evolution anyway, or that evolution is in fact false, and God (again, in that sense) didn't create all species as they are now (even one specific kind of worm which can only survive by burrowing the eyeballs of human children from the back to the front).

Robert, if you accept that giraffes have long necks because their ancestors who had mildly longer necks than their peers could get more food, and so were healthier, and did better in times of famine, and so bred more, then everything else in evolution follows. It's just a matter of timescales.

As for God being everything, I believe that myself. Are you a pantheist?

 

[LuisDantas]

Never quite understood the insistence in seeing God as a miracle worker, personally.

 

[Kirran]

Never quite understood the insistence in seeing God as a miracle worker, personally.

As I understand it, Robert ascribes to a view of God being the universe, and also conscious. Robert (can I call you Rob, or Bob?), I hope you'll correct me if I'm mistaken.

A personal pantheist God.

For general information, I believe in an impersonal pantheist God.

 

[Robert.Evans]

True. Of course, it can't be proved God (in the personal, Abrahamic sense), wasn't involved in guiding evolution anyway, or that evolution is in fact false, and God (again, in that sense) didn't create all species as they are now (even one specific kind of worm which can only survive by burrowing the eyeballs of human children from the back to the front).

Robert, if you accept that giraffes have long necks because their ancestors who had mildly longer necks than their peers could get more food, and so were healthier, and did better in times of famine, and so bred more, then everything else in evolution follows. It's just a matter of timescales.

As for God being everything, I believe that myself. Are you a pantheist?

Pantheism and Platonism would be included I think yes. But if you are saying that is what you are, how come you don't see that everything is evolving consciousness?

And it is not the big things, it is the small things that have to be explained for me. And why have we got the basic body plans that we have? It just seems to contrived if there were no consciousness behind it.

 

[Kirran]

Pantheism and Platonism would be included I think yes. But if you are saying that is what you are, how come you don't see that everything is evolving consciousness?

Because that's not what I believe.

And it is not the big things, it is the small things that have to be explained for me. And why have we got the basic body plans that we have? It just seems to contrived if there were no consciousness behind it.

Why, what other body plan would we have?

 

[Robert.Evans]

As I understand it, Robert ascribes to a view of God being the universe, and also conscious. Robert (can I call you Rob, or Bob?), I hope you'll correct me if I'm mistaken.

A personal pantheist God.

For general information, I believe in an impersonal pantheist God.

That is part of the answer yes.

Call me Rob or Bob? haha.... and you such a young age want to call me Bob! haha. Whatever. I have been called worse.

 

[Rick O'Shez]

Why, what other body plan would we have?

It looks pretty efficient to me. You wouldn't want your eyes on your stomach!

 

[Robert.Evans]

Because that's not what I believe.



Why, what other body plan would we have?

You said God is everything did you not?

Anyway, don't want to change the subject.

Body plan? Why this one?

 

[Robert.Evans]

It looks pretty efficient to me. You wouldn't want your eyes on your stomach!

So how did it know to have them in your head? It didn't, right? So that was luck then? Put it this way, it certainly didn't start in the stomach and move its way up because there was slight advantages.

 

[Kirran]

That is part of the answer yes.

Call me Rob or Bob? haha.... and you such a young age want to call me Bob! haha. Whatever. I have been called worse.

Well, I think it would be easier to type, and I don't know how old you are

Plus, maturity doesn't go hand in hand with age

You said God is everything did you not?

Anyway, don't want to change the subject.

Body plan? Why this one?

I did say that.

Yeah, you said why this body plan. I countered, why not?

 

[savagewind]

Well, abiogenesis is somewhat a separate issue, but to address it anyway - life is currently thought to have begun as lipid micelles - these are little bubbles of fat with water inside them, which can form spontaneously in an abiotic environment such as that found on Earth at this time. Then molecules, such as nucleic acids, became ever-more-commonly lodged inside these lipid micelles, which would grow and divide, and the sizes of the nucleic acids and their composition would impact how quickly the micelles could spread, and eventually they came to encode information. This was RNA, a switch to DNA with RNA intermediaries was undertaken later.

No! You missed a step. I didn't ask what caused life from non life. I asked what caused complex from simple.

Water I suppose is easy because oxygen and hydrogen existed everywhere. But when the simpler material that will become the complex thing is scarce by what mechanism does simple parts reach other simple parts to form complexity. I am not asking about an organism I am asking about the complex parts which make up an organism. So abiogenesis and evolution do not explain it. You are default to we are so stupid not to see evolution. We can see it! OK?

Imagine a house to build. Now picture the parts of it. Got it? Now imagine there is no living thing, no house. OK? Where do the parts come from and how do they get there (to the house)?