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What is Evolution?
- Thread starter sayak83
- Start date
Etritonakin
Well-Known Member
Seems to me that changes associated with any interbreeding which is actually possible is evidence of evolution.
This is like saying that anY apple that falls to the ground is evidenice of the theory of gravitation. it is, but only some limited aspects of it. The evidence of detecting gravitational waves of colliding black holes is evidence of a different class all together. Same hierarchy of evidence applies to all scientific theories.
Etritonakin
Well-Known Member
Right -but the fact that a duck and a beaver can't make a platypus basically means the op's point was invalid.
Oooooops -my bad -was not responding to the op, but thought I was -this site changes so often that I do not know what I am doing half the time.
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Monk Of Reason
༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
cobblers!
Survival of the fittest, shared design traits, a general progression towards bigger/better but with some dead ends, regressions, mass extinctions, sudden jumps in the historic record.. large gaps with no intermediates.
Are we talking about the evolution of life?
or these?
I don't know either.
Because the whole theory works equally well for both- arguably even better for cars-
like this- I pulled this paragraph out randomly.
Certain important features of the surviving autos and the junk yard record that the theory of evolution explains:-
Observed pattern of Progression in the junk yard record:-
Progression is defined as the pattern in the junk yard record in which
i) cars from the earliest strata will look very very different from modern running cars
ii) The cars depicted in the most ancient strata of the junk yard record will be continually replaced by new cars in subsequent strata which, while sharing many features of the earlier cars, will also show modifications in some of the features and emergence of some new features. They in turn will be replaced by new cars in a subsequent strata again showing a similar trend of gradual modifications of features, elimination of some older features and emergence of some new features.
iii) Due to this trend, cars in closely spaces strata will look similar to each other and in more distant strata will look more different. This trend cannot be explained by functional needs due to change in habitat alone as often modified models occupy nearly same kinds of habitats as older replaced species (like Lincolns vs Studebakers, Cadillacs v Desotos etc.)
iv) Levels closer to the present will increasingly show cars that look more and more like modern forms (but not the same).
v) When modern cars are categorized in groups based on character, it is found that the broadest and most generalized of features appear in a primitive form in the earliest cars (like possessing a chassis) while more specific features restricted to specialized subgroups (like having 4WD, having tailgates) appear in cars that appear later in the fossil record. More specialized and restricted the feature, the later it appears (like possessing OnStar as in Chevrolets appears later than possessing 4wd as in SUVs in general).
I didn't have to change any substance here, just the names and features
i.e. none of this suggests anything whatsoever about all these design improvements being the result of blind luck, if anything the opposite is implied by the observed evidence
Huh. Didn't know cars reprodused sexually. Or did humans all get created in a factory in China?
Guy Threepwood
Mighty Pirate
When you insult people, the vast majority of humanity in this case, for their beliefs, it only betrays that you cannot possibly look at the evidence objectively. You can never change your mind, no matter the evidence, or you become all the unpleasant things you called others.
I don't think you are stupid for believing in evolution at all, I know and love many intelligent thoughtful people who do. It is a very intuitive, elegant, comprehensive theory for explaining life, just as classical physics was for explaining the universe. But science has come a long way in 150 years. Things are not always as simple, elegant, intuitive as they at first seem superficially.
Not sure what that would prove, but how about a repeatable,observable, measurable experiment where a single cell morphs into a human being, through purely random mutations?
If this is a little difficult to reproduce empirically, that does not make the case for the claim any stronger. No more than 'the dog ate my homework' earns an A+
"[science] such wholesale returns of conjecture, from such a trifling investment of fact" (Mark Twain)
Guy Threepwood
Mighty Pirate
Yes...that would be the point .. they don't. They are intelligently designed, and leave a practically identical historical record
Monk Of Reason
༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
Weird. Humans reproduce sexually though. For your argument to stand one of those two statements would have to be false.
Guy Threepwood
Mighty Pirate
The argument is that the fossil record does not suggest, far less prove, design improvements being driven by a chance process. Since its characteristics fit the auto- record so well also.
jonathan180iq
Well-Known Member
You know how babies are made, right?
You have not responded to my posts showing recent scientific evidence that the number of beneficial mutations is quite large (1%) and my last post reproducing a classical result that shows that even modest advantageous mutations can become dominant in only a 1000 generations.
Monk Of Reason
༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
Except it doesn't. Why? Because cars don't reproduce sexually. Cars don't have genes. Cars don't have allels in which to change over time. Life does. We know how life reproduces and we know how life changes. And it does not change in the same way automobiles do.
Even if you are right then evolution still happens. What you are arguing is that evolutoin is a guided process but a process none the less. However we have no evidence of a guiding hand in evolution.
metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
If God supposedly made all, then how does one explain miscarriages or children borne with serious birth defects?
My point isn't that there cannot be such a God or Gods but how God(s) may create. IMO, a pantheistic/deistic approach seems to be more logical, but I'm not going so far as to say it's right.
My point isn't that there cannot be such a God or Gods but how God(s) may create. IMO, a pantheistic/deistic approach seems to be more logical, but I'm not going so far as to say it's right.
Guy Threepwood
Mighty Pirate
They reproduce, according to design instructions, which are modified over time, the best designs are more likely to survive to be copied and further modified.
which am I talking about now, life or cars? I don't know either.
genes or blueprints, tested and selected by pressures in nature or the market, the algorithm is the same. survival of the fittest.
We know for sure that cars are intelligently designed, and that with out this involvement of ID, randomly corrupted design plans would not produce significantly superior designs to be selected from in the next generation
For life, the jury is still out, we just know that it leaves an almost identical fingerprint in the historical record.
We are covering old ground here, but again, whether we are talking about biological, mechanical, or digital information, the answers lie in the information systems. And that's why modern science is far better equipped to objectively test ideas that seemed so intuitive in the pre-quantum understanding of the world 150 years ago, just like it was able to expose critical inadequacies in classical physics, that though experiments alone never could.
Without a guiding hand, randomly corrupting information is always vastly more likely to produce a set of inferior results to select from, not superior. It comes down to one word
Entropy
We have no evidence of a guiding hand when the gambler plays 4 royal flushes in a row, we have only evidence of a chance mechanism in the card shuffler. But which is the more probable explanation?
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Yes, science has come a long way in 150 years. And 150 years after Darwin, nobody in the sciences is denying the essential veracity of his theory. The only real arguments against evolution are given by people who have not been involved in the study of it, or who have given free rein to religious views to trump however much evidence is produced.
I've been told, you know, that Newton was proved wrong by Einstein, but this is not true. NASA still uses Newton’s laws of motion – and nothing but Newton’s laws – to get men to the moon and back, and to launch probes that after years of travel hit their mark with amazing precision. Someday, if we find ways to move ourselves at relativistic speeds, we will certainly need to modify Newton’s equations using Einstein’s theory, but that will still only be a modification on Newton’s basics.
But no Einstein has yet come along and refuted Darwin. And that is looking at the evidence objectively. I put it to you plainly that there is a single (potential) piece of evidence for special creation, and that is the fact that life exists. And yet, even that doesn’t say “God did it.” That is a mere supposition, made because nobody had anything better to offer.
And the speculation that “God did it” becomes simply incredible in the face of the fossil record: the record which says millions upon millions of species that once existed no longer do, and millions of species that exist now did not exist when those that no longer exist did. That’s “objective evidence” on its own, and anyone who’s going to posit a creation theory has to account for it. They don’t. They pretend the fossil record is – and has always been – misread.
I’d like to help you see how that suggestion demonstrates very clearly that you don’t understand the theory. Even ignoring the fact that it would take as many millions of years as it did the first time for each repetition of the “experiment,” it would also necessitate precisely the same conditions, down to the atomic level, for each run. And that includes the random variations in the genetic code, which would have to happen the same way, in the same place, at the same time, every time. (How do you replicate "random" I wonder?)
Well, Einstein actually didn’t do any such experiments either, except for his “thought experiments.” Einstein never took an elevator ride into space. He never rode a train outside of which a friend watched lightning strike both ends. He never chased a beam of light.
Yet, what he predicted about light being bent by mass was proved true – not by Einstein, mark you.
I wonder if you’ve read “Life on the Mississippi.” Twain was a master of satire, and this is satire at its best.
But in fact, Twain wrote these lines some 8 year earlier than that, for the Atlantic Monthly. ´He wrote it during a period when he was skeptical about science – and especially with regard to paleontology and Darwinism in particular. As with Einstein’s thought experiments, nobody had yet done any real work validating evolution. Still, not long after, Twain had a change of attitude, and if you look, you find that he goes on to embrace science as a weapon against Christian Science and other knowledge-reducing suppositions.
Monk Of Reason
༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
And yet we don't make human beings in a factory. We don't mass produce human beings and rather we see them being born through processes understood in genetics. Geneitics and evolution are inseperably linked.
Damn., Got me there. Jesus is the way. If only there was a process that pruned negative results and replicated positive results then it would have worked.
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Oil prices are high. Now either turkey's lay chiken eggs or someone put a chicken egg under a turkey. See my point? Checkmate.
What are the chances of you existing at all?
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/what-are-the-odds-you-existing-all.html
Don't you think there must be some guiding hand making sure that just your genome came up?
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You are mistaken. The second law and entropy ensures that complex self-organizing and self-perpetuating processes can crop up spontaneously in this universe at all. There is a very specific way in which entropy increases over time. The process starts with uniform order (a very low entropy state) and goes through and extended phase of complex systems involving self-organizing dynamical structures (like galaxies, stars, crystals, life...) that in the very long run eventually dissipate into uniform disorder (the heat death). We are bang in the middle phase of this entropic growth process, seeing complex dynamical structures all around including ourselves.
Low Entropy = Low Complexity or Structure (everything is pure and non-interacting)
Growing Entropy = High Complexity and Structure (various things interpenetrate each other and interact in a 1000 different ways)
High Entropy = Low Complexity and Structure (everything is fully mixed and non-interacting)
Life has been described as an organic entropy maximizing engine.
But there is a "guiding hand," as it were. Inferior results die off and do not get replicated. In life, they do not reproduce. Yes, in non-living, non-evolving things, entropy is the likely end. But in living things, when you have 1,000 failures and 1 success -- all thousand failures are gone and produce no copies of themselves, but the success leaves heirs. The "guiding hand" is simply whether the random change yielded advantage or disadvantage in the environment in which it occurs and competes.