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Jono
Toucan
Joined: Jul 11, 2008
Age: 29
Posts: 280
Location: Johannesburg, South Africa
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 Posted: Thu Oct 08, 2009 11:31 am Post subject: |
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| 0hanrahan wrote: | Origins via evolution has not been sufficiently proven not to mention the immense Cambrian explosion.
All that has been proven thanks to Mendel and geneticists is micro-evolution. It is generational alterations in genetic coding. Recombination and mutations produce evolutionary changes.
Macroevolution, or evolution that explains the origins of the first multicellular life forms cannot be proven. The About.com Atheist article plays semantics games by claiming that this criticism is invalid since the two terms have interchangeable meanings. It works as a diversion but changes one problem for another. As far as I am concerned, no one has a corner on cosmology or origins. |
Incorrect. First of all, evolution is not about how life started. It only explains how life evolves and adapts to its environment. Theories about the origin of life are called abiogenesis. Microevolution is not qualitatively different from macroevolution. To say it is, is a misuse of the term. Microevolution involves small scale changes due to mutations within a species. Given enough of these changes, and over a long enough period of time, speciation can occur, i.e. a new species can appear. So the only difference between microevolution and macroevolution is that microevolution happens over only a few generations whereas macroevolution is due the accumulation of mutations over many, possible thousands, of generations over a long period of time. Also, emperical evidence overwhelmingly supports macroevolution while there is nothing that supports creation. See the following:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ |
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Bataar
Phoenix
Joined: Sep 19, 2008
Age: 30
Posts: 790
Location: Seattle, WA
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| Posted: Thu Oct 08, 2009 8:18 pm Post subject: |
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Whenever I see a documentary of marine biology talking about the hammerhead shark, they always point out how its head evolved to make it a better hunter. I've always wondered why, if that's the cast, not all sharks have hammer shaped heads.
I definitely believe in what you might call, micro evolution. |
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ruveyn
Phoenix
Joined: Sep 22, 2008
Age: 73
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Location: New Jersey
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| Posted: Thu Oct 08, 2009 8:46 pm Post subject: |
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| Bataar wrote: | | Whenever I see a documentary of marine biology talking about the hammerhead shark, they always point out how its head evolved to make it a better hunter. I've always wondered why, if that's the cast, not all sharks have hammer shaped heads. |
There are different environments in which different kinds of sharks live. A variation in one environment may give a reproductive advantage but not in another environment. Ultimately the only variations which count are the ones the make for reproductive success.
ruveyn |
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Awesomelyglorious
Destroyer of worlds, reaver of souls
Joined: Dec 18, 2005
Posts: 8446
Location: Omnipresent
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| Posted: Thu Oct 08, 2009 11:54 pm Post subject: |
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| ruveyn wrote: |
There are different environments in which different kinds of sharks live. A variation in one environment may give a reproductive advantage but not in another environment. Ultimately the only variations which count are the ones the make for reproductive success.
ruveyn |
Not only that, but there are different strategies. To look at this from a business perspective pumping out cheap crap is a good strategy for Wal-Mart, one that gives it financial success, however, Neiman-Marcus and other similar businesses don't use that strategy, instead they sell on prestige and that strategy gives these companies financial success. We don't have to point to different environments necessarily, simply because changes are random and different animals will find different niches, somewhat like different businesses find different niches.
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0hanrahan
Raven
Joined: Jan 03, 2008
Posts: 109
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| Posted: Fri Oct 09, 2009 12:43 pm Post subject: |
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Can someone show a statistical chart that measures the number of known species with the amount of evolutionary intermediates?
I don't doubt Punctuated jumps to macroevolution, but I question the amount of evidence on which we build these grand schemas. I am with genetics, microevolution and the occassional speciation.
Also can someone show me an intermediate from single celled simple prokaryotes developing into the more complex eukaryote that is the building block of all known large organisms. |
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Orwell
Outer Party Member
Joined: Aug 09, 2007
Age: 20
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Location: Room 101
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| Posted: Fri Oct 09, 2009 12:55 pm Post subject: |
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| 0hanrahan wrote: | | Can someone show a statistical chart that measures the number of known species with the amount of evolutionary intermediates? |
The fossil record is incomplete, but we're finding new intermediate forms all the time.
| Quote: | | Also can someone show me an intermediate from single celled simple prokaryotes developing into the more complex eukaryote that is the building block of all known large organisms. |
The endosymbiont hypothesis is the most commonly accepted. I'm not sure what fossil evidence we have behind it, but it is very strongly supported by genetics and cellular physiology.
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Gromit
Phoenix
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Joined: May 20, 2006
Posts: 828
Location: In Cognito
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| Posted: Fri Oct 09, 2009 1:40 pm Post subject: |
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| anna-banana wrote: | | maybe females who had the erogenous zones closer to the reproductive organs were more likely to have sex more often and thus have more progeny? |
Reproduction is not the only function of sex. The bonobos that Jono mentioned are a good example, but humans work about as well. If reproduction was the only function of sex, females would advertise the fertile part of their cycle, like female chimps do. But bonobos and humans have concealed ovulation, and have sex (and sexual desire) when there is no chance of conception.
| anna-banana wrote: | | and anyway, human males are relatively non-agressive |
Depends on your baseline. True if humans are compared to chimps, not when compared to bonobos. There is a general trend that if males can control a resource crucial to reproduction, they don't need to be nice to females. For some seals, like sea elephants, the resource might be the beaches where the females give birth and nurse their pups. In other species the resource might be the social group. Where there is no such resource, sometimes males still have the option of just grabbing the female. The more control females have over mate choice, the more the males have to offer what the females want. There are many strategies for females to increase control over reproduction, both behavioural and physiological.
| anna-banana wrote: | | there must have been some mechanism that favoured female consent for sex. otherwise human males would have evolved to be far more agressive than they are :p |
Anna, have your encounters with human males been biased towards the relatively more enlightened lot? Historically, and even today in a good many cultures, male control over female reproduction is strict, backed up by very credible threats of violence, and sometimes fairly routine violence.
Coming back to the original topics, the patterns of violence conform to what you would expect from an evolutionary analysis. Rival theories (from the social sciences, I don't think creationists have even tried to tackle the subject) don't fit the data so well. That doesn't stop a good number of social scientists from arguing strenuously against evolutionary explanations, usually because the social scientists consider evolutionary theories an affront to human dignity. The perceived insult seems to be based on missconstruals of evolution.
| Ohanrahan wrote: | | Origins via evolution has not been sufficiently proven not to mention the immense Cambrian explosion. |
Orwell put you right on the question of origins. Would you mind explaining what your question or argument is about the Cambrian explosion? I have to guess that you think there is no evidence for precursors to the species found in Cambrian deposits. That would be wrong, but it might not be what you mean. |
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ThatRedHairedGrrl
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Joined: May 11, 2008
Posts: 798
Location: Walking through a shopping mall listening to Half Japanese on headphones
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| Posted: Sun Oct 11, 2009 6:56 am Post subject: |
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| Gromit wrote: | | anna-banana wrote: | | and anyway, human males are relatively non-agressive |
Depends on your baseline. True if humans are compared to chimps, not when compared to bonobos. There is a general trend that if males can control a resource crucial to reproduction, they don't need to be nice to females...Where there is no such resource, sometimes males still have the option of just grabbing the female. The more control females have over mate choice, the more the males have to offer what the females want. There are many strategies for females to increase control over reproduction, both behavioural and physiological.
| anna-banana wrote: | | there must have been some mechanism that favoured female consent for sex. otherwise human males would have evolved to be far more agressive than they are :p |
Anna, have your encounters with human males been biased towards the relatively more enlightened lot? Historically, and even today in a good many cultures, male control over female reproduction is strict, backed up by very credible threats of violence, and sometimes fairly routine violence. |
Good points. (Jono, I have since been reading up on some stuff about bonobos and a bunch of other species, BTW, and I'm happy to admit that maybe we are more certain than I thought about non-human species practising recreational sex...my point would be that since we don't really know what's going on in animals' heads or whether they're experiencing the kind of feelings we do, we are limited to what we observe of them. From observation, bonobos look like they must be having a fun time.  But anyway...)
The point that strikes me about female sexual pleasure is that even if you argue it's got some reproductive significance, it's nowhere near as reliable as the male response, so even if it was selected for that purpose, can't have been selected for as specifically or for as long.
It is, though, possible that the female response would, under 'natural' conditions, be a lot more reliable, and that the haphazard, or in some cases barely existent, sexual response of perhaps the majority of human females today is culturally conditioned. In most of the West, for much of our history, female sexual response has been denied, ignored or suppressed - mostly by men, although women have colluded with that, sometimes to survive but at least to be accepted in their society.
That's one facet of the male control you mention. The other main ones are reproductive, social and financial. In the West, those are rapidly being eroded, and while have doubts about some aspects of evolutionary psychology, the terror that feminism inspires in some men does seem to be coming from somewhere rather primitive...
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anna-banana
indifferent peapod
Joined: Aug 31, 2008
Age: 26
Posts: 5370
Location: Europe
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| Posted: Sun Oct 11, 2009 4:42 pm Post subject: |
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| Gromit wrote: |
Anna, have your encounters with human males been biased towards the relatively more enlightened lot? Historically, and even today in a good many cultures, male control over female reproduction is strict, backed up by very credible threats of violence, and sometimes fairly routine violence.
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hmm. I'm not sure what you mean by violence. you mean like in Saudi Arabia? Afghanistan? that's not the majority you know. and not really my manor.
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AnonymousAnonymous
Unemployed Student
Joined: Nov 24, 2006
Age: 19
Posts: 8388
Location: Portland, Oregon
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| Posted: Mon Oct 12, 2009 5:15 pm Post subject: |
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I find both Creationism and the Theory of Evolution fascinating.
Richard Dawkins was in Portland on Saturday
with a new book. The Greatest Show on Earth
I want to read his books but don't have the time to do so.
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techstepgenr8tion
that chatty American
Joined: Feb 07, 2005
Age: 30
Posts: 7167
Location: The fine world of insomnia and coffee
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| Posted: Mon Oct 12, 2009 6:44 pm Post subject: |
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| AnonymousAnonymous wrote: | I find both Creationism and the Theory of Evolution fascinating.
Richard Dawkins was in Portland on Saturday
with a new book. The Greatest Show on Earth
I want to read his books but don't have the time to do so. |
I'd have to say, he may be ok as a biologist, but what he gets his fame for - his ardent fusion of science and metaphysical claims - are very Michael Moore'ish. If there is a poster boy for Dunning-Kruger syndrome he's it. |
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Jono
Toucan
Joined: Jul 11, 2008
Age: 29
Posts: 280
Location: Johannesburg, South Africa
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| Posted: Mon Oct 12, 2009 7:03 pm Post subject: |
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| techstepgenr8tion wrote: |
I'd have to say, he may be ok as a biologist, but what he gets his fame for - his ardent fusion of science and metaphysical claims - are very Michael Moore'ish. If there is a poster boy for Dunning-Kruger syndrome he's it. |
Richard Dawkins fuses science and metaphysical claims? Since when does Richard Dawkins believe in metaphysics? I thought he was an atheist. |
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DeaconBlues
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide - call me...
Joined: Apr 22, 2007
Posts: 2263
Location: Earth, mostly
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| Posted: Mon Oct 12, 2009 7:11 pm Post subject: |
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| Jono wrote: | | techstepgenr8tion wrote: |
I'd have to say, he may be ok as a biologist, but what he gets his fame for - his ardent fusion of science and metaphysical claims - are very Michael Moore'ish. If there is a poster boy for Dunning-Kruger syndrome he's it. |
Richard Dawkins fuses science and metaphysical claims? Since when does Richard Dawkins believe in metaphysics? I thought he was an atheist. |
He's a fundamentalist atheist, not admitting even the vaguest possibility that he might be wrong. His degree of atheism actually seems to rise to a level of faith that there is no God, complete with an evangelical "need" to convince everyone else that he's right (and a tendency toward treating anyone of differing faith as a heretic, worthy of punishment).
It's possible to be atheistic without completely despising the faithful - unless, of course, you're Richard Dawkins, or one of his disciples...
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0hanrahan
Raven
Joined: Jan 03, 2008
Posts: 109
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| Posted: Tue Oct 13, 2009 10:44 am Post subject: |
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| Jono wrote: | | 0hanrahan wrote: | Origins via evolution has not been sufficiently proven not to mention the immense Cambrian explosion.
All that has been proven thanks to Mendel and geneticists is micro-evolution. It is generational alterations in genetic coding. Recombination and mutations produce evolutionary changes.
Macroevolution, or evolution that explains the origins of the first multicellular life forms cannot be proven. The About.com Atheist article plays semantics games by claiming that this criticism is invalid since the two terms have interchangeable meanings. It works as a diversion but changes one problem for another. As far as I am concerned, no one has a corner on cosmology or origins. |
Incorrect. First of all, evolution is not about how life started. It only explains how life evolves and adapts to its environment. Theories about the origin of life are called abiogenesis. Microevolution is not qualitatively different from macroevolution. To say it is, is a misuse of the term. Microevolution involves small scale changes due to mutations within a species. Given enough of these changes, and over a long enough period of time, speciation can occur, i.e. a new species can appear. So the only difference between microevolution and macroevolution is that microevolution happens over only a few generations whereas macroevolution is due the accumulation of mutations over many, possible thousands, of generations over a long period of time. Also, emperical evidence overwhelmingly supports macroevolution while there is nothing that supports creation. See the following:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ |
You are incorrect in your assumptions and portrayal of my statements.
You, I, and the late Pope JP2 all agree. Evolution is a valid theory but it does not explain origins.
The fact that we can delineate between Micro and macro is proof that they are both qualitatively and quantitatively different. This is not saying that Macro is not dependent on Micro.
I will be away for a few days, so don't take my lack of a response as having nothing to say  |
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0_equals_true
Genuine Charlatan
Joined: Apr 06, 2007
Age: 27
Posts: 6992
Location: London
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| Posted: Tue Oct 13, 2009 11:08 am Post subject: |
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| 0hanrahan wrote: | | The fact that we can delineate between Micro and macro is proof that they are both qualitatively and quantitatively different. This is not saying that Macro is not dependent on Micro. |
Actaully you can't. Evolution is something that happens in the present. There is no conciousness or plan. 'Microevolution' is a term the ID proponants have used to try tie into the evidence toward evolution, in order to have thier cake and eat it.
The start of life is another matter altogether. The primordial soup theroy is one posibility for the start of life on earth, though defninately not the only one.
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