Evolutionary Debate
POSTED BY: AnthonyT
UPDATED: Tuesday, February 20, 2007 16:16
VIEWED: 20170
PAGE 4 of 20
Quote:
Originally posted by Eric:Quote:
Originally posted by AnthonyT:
But I hear there are bugs whose entire lifecycle is like a couple of days. I'd think a scientist or team of scientists should be able to simulate evolution in such bugs by selective breeding (pretending that their choices are 'natural selection') and manually forcing the hand of hundreds of thousands of generations of bugs.
Don't need a team of scientists- I once did exactly this in elementary school on a science field trip with a plastic vial of fruit flies. It's a classic exhibition activity in kid-oriented scientific institutions.
You created a new evolution of fruit flies?
--Anthony
"Liberty must not be purchased at the cost of Humanity." --Captain Robert Henner
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If you want one bird (or lizard) species X into another bird (or lizard) species y then it's already there.
If you want bird into snake, or bacteria into algae it probably isn't going to happen.
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Well, that other guy said it doesn't count if one moth turns into a different color/shaped moth, so I'm guessing different kinds of lizards or birds or dogs don't count either.
Unless they can't have sex, apparently. If they can't have sex then they count as a new species.
--Anthony
"Liberty must not be purchased at the cost of Humanity." --Captain Robert Henner
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Quote:
Originally posted by AnthonyT:
You created a new evolution of fruit flies?
Well, we tracked mutations across several unnatually selected generations. Fruit flies only have a 24 hour life span, making them very useful for kids with much shorter attention spans
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Quote:
Originally posted by Fletch2:Quote:
Originally posted by MRig:
Yeah, that makes sense. A mutation doesn't have to be positive, it just can't be negative. However, it's hard for me to imagine a mutation that isn't one or the other, because anything that wastes energy is negative. Thus, if a mutation makes some minor, inconsequential change for a small increase in energy cost, it is still negative and detrimental to survival.
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I can give you an example. Sickle Cell anemia is a genetic mutation that can be very painful and before modern medicine highly fatal. These days most folks that have it have an ancestors that come from Africa, where the mutation is quite common. Why is this? Well Sickle Cell gives some protection against the Malaria parasite. Malaria tends to attack the weaker members of societies, principally the very young and the very old where as Sickle Cell tends to become more debilitating the older a person gets.
As a result we have the following situation. Children born without the mutation have an increased chance of dying young because Malaria kills the young and the Sickle Cell mutation offers some protection. This means more kids with the mutation manage to grow up and survive to produce children than kids without it. Of course those survivors with Sickle Cell won't live as long as the survivors without it, but since they live long enough to pass on their genes to the next generation that doesn't matter.
So here we have a mutation that while decreasing the lifespan of the organism actually increases it's chance of breeding successfully. It has both positive and negative effects.
Aha! You seem to understand this better than I. Richard Dawkins talks about a parasite in snails that increases their lifespan, but is harmful to their genes because it prevents them from reproducing.
As for fruit flies, it is pretty easy to breed for certain eye colors and such. I wish I had done those experiments in elementary school myself.
"I have to understand the world, you see."
~Richard Feynman
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AnthonyT - Great question. I can't believe that I read through this whole thing and nothing even resembling a flame war has taken place yet.
I don't believe or disbelieve in evolution or God. It's very possible that either or both or neither was the case. I mentioned this in another thread and was asked, "How can you believe that maybe neither took place?" My answer to that is a resounding OPEN MIND. Maybe we DON'T have ANY of the answers. Anything we've heard about evolution is an educated guess at the very best. Scientists still can't agree if milk from a cow is good or bad for me, so why would I agree with and suffer from blind faith of anything they have to tell me.... particularly when their studies are used so often to sell us pills that we don't need which modify our behavior and others convince people that not only is my cigarette smoke killing them, but it also is a leading contributor to the ozone layer evaporating and a reason babies die of SIDS. Great... I need that on my conscience right? Go to hell with the anti-smoking campaign and their paid-for and manipulated "studies".
Anyhow.... as I was saying, it is very possible that evolution is real, especially in the light you put it in. Your entire question is pretty much the way I think evolution could have come about.
Here's my problem with evolution though. Being that there are still a lot of people who don't buy into the whole evolution thing (not only religious people, btw), I do tend to get annoyed with the arrogance of scientists and so-called enlightened individuals who push evolution on us everyday, just as a priest would push God on us. At least with religion, for the most part, I actually have to make a trip to the church to get a lesson in theology. Scientists have become preachy and pretentious, and they're able to effect our lives and way of thinking everyday through schools, newspapers and particularly the daily News on TV. Personally, I don't believe that evolution has any more a place in school than religion of any kind does. I think, just like a belief in god, evolution should only be taught to those who actively seek it. If for no other reason than the fact that neither one is provable beyond a shadow of a doubt and one is more often than not at odds with the other. No one will ever give me one good reason to believe that it is necessary to make the child of God fearing parents sit through something everyday at school that is so anti-religion (at least the way it is portrayed and taught in school today anyhow).
Quote:
BY MRIG: One of the reasons that's so hard to fathom is that our brains haven't evolved to think in that sort of timeframe or probability. We're "designed" to assess risks like "what are my chances of getting killed by this mastadon I'm about to throw a pointed stick at," and other such risks that are worth worrying about in a human lifetime. Thinking about million-year periods is like thinking in the fifth dimension; we just can't do it.
I think that's an interesting take, but I don't believe it at all. I think there are people who are very outside of the box who can unquestionably think along these terms. Aldus Huxley, George Orwell, Issac Assimov, Phillip K Dick... all certainly among them. I won't argue though that most people I've ever met think the way you describe us... short-sighted, self-serving and tunnel-visioned, but I'm betting that this way of thinking is due more to social engineering, you know.... what people see on TV, read in magazines, hear in music, etc., than any sort of inherant traits. Most often, thinking about the very distant future entails putting how you live your own life into a perspective that you might not want to dwell on for too long, what when you consider the pollution your car puts out, the landfills that are overflowing with your trash, the diminishing ozone layer... etc. No... it's much nicer just to live in the materialistic "here and now".
What you're suggesting here has ties with the evolutionary theory itself and you're going t
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I noticed that people keep talking about the peppered moths. What do people make of the article entitled "Not black or white" in Nature Magazine Nov 5, 1998, which, if I'm remembering right, stated that methodological flaws in that study made the results invalid? Has anyone read this article? I just did a search for it on the internet and couldn't find it -- I obtained a hard copy from my local library. Just curious.
Edit: I found a link for it.
http://bill.srnr.arizona.edu/classes/182/Melanism/Coyne-Nature.pdf
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From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution
There are a number of common misunderstandings about evolution, some of which have hindered its general acceptance and form the basis of various objections to evolution.[47][48][49] Critics of evolution frequently assert that evolution is "just a theory", a misunderstanding of the meaning of theory in a scientific context: whereas in colloquial speech a theory is a conjecture or guess, in science a theory is "a model of the universe, or a restricted part of it, and a set of rules that relate quantities in the model to observations that we make".[50] Critics also state that evolution is not a fact, although from a scientific viewpoint evolution is considered both a theory and a fact.[51][52][53]
Another common misunderstanding is the idea that one species, such as humans, can be more "highly evolved" or "advanced" than another. It is often assumed that evolution must lead to greater complexity, or that devolution ("backwards" evolution) can occur. Scientists consider evolution a non-directional process that does not proceed toward any ultimate goal; advancements are only situational, and organisms' complexity can either increase, decrease, or stay the same, depending on which is advantageous, and thus selected for.[54]
Evolution is also frequently misinterpreted as stating that humans evolved from monkeys; based on this, some critics argue that monkeys should no longer exist. This misunderstands speciation, which frequently involves a subset of a population cladogenetically splitting off before speciating, rather than an entire species simply turning into a new one. Additionally, biologists have never claimed that humans evolved from monkeys—only that humans and monkeys share a common ancestor, as do all organisms.[55]
It is also frequently claimed that speciation has only been inferred, never directly observed. In reality, the evolution of numerous new species has been observed.[56] A similar claim is that only microevolution, not macroevolution, has been observed; however, macroevolution has been observed as well, and modern evolutionary synthesis draws little distinction between the two, considering macroevolution to simply be microevolution on a larger scale.[57]
Whew, I'm glad that's settled.
Next topic?
Sahara
Blackbird fly into the light of the dark, black night.
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Quote:Lol, if only. Now the claim will be that that article in Wikipedia was clearly written by somebody who is pro-evolution and it therefore has no place in an objective debate of the matter.
Originally posted by sahara:
Whew, I'm glad that's settled.
The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.
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