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darwin? evolution? WTF?

#61 User is offline   Cobnat Icon

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Posted 25 September 2007 - 01:48 PM

(rather then start a new thread I have decided to post my question here, this question has been bothering me for a while)

Question: (following the basic principles of Darwinism) If human beings evolved from apes then how come apes are still around? Shouldn’t they have been wiped out by natural selection?
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#62 User is offline   Jordan Icon

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Posted 25 September 2007 - 01:53 PM

Or why is that all animals appear in the fossil record either the same as they are now or extinct altogether.

Why don't we see fossils with evolultionary steps and changes in them.

The answer to your question cobnat, only a few managed to evolve cause over a course of 100 million years they were seperated or some shit and started to change. The other ones didn't evolve cause they didn't feel it was the right move for them at the time.

It's hilarious, like if I started living in the ocean, 1 million years from now my kin would be fish.

This post has been edited by Jordan: 25 September 2007 - 01:56 PM

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#63 User is offline   Cobnat Icon

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Posted 25 September 2007 - 03:33 PM

QUOTE (Jordan @ Sep 25 2007, 10:53 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
Or why is that all animals appear in the fossil record either the same as they are now or extinct altogether.

Why don't we see fossils with evolultionary steps and changes in them.

The answer to your question cobnat, only a few managed to evolve cause over a course of 100 million years they were seperated or some shit and started to change. The other ones didn't evolve cause they didn't feel it was the right move for them at the time.

It's hilarious, like if I started living in the ocean, 1 million years from now my kin would be fish.


What about crocodiles? They haven’t changed for 100 million years despite the drastic changes in environment. Regardless, I would like to refer you to my original question: why are apes not extinct?
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#64 User is offline   Despondent Icon

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Posted 25 September 2007 - 03:39 PM

I get a laugh out of the people with the darwin fish on their SUV. You don't accept Christ as your savior, fine. So you proclaim Darwin as your salvation? WTF?

Fine, it's an in-your-face jab. CUTE.

Go to Hell, Then!

Get it? It's just as meaningless a statement because the Darwin-clad don't believe in hell. smile.gif

(in other words: I'M NOT LISTENING because I'm so open-minded.)
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#65 User is offline   civilian_number_two Icon

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Posted 25 September 2007 - 03:42 PM

Evolution is a process over time. In about 3000 years you won't be able to ask your question because the other "higher" primates, Chimpanzees, Bonobos and Gorillas, will all be extinct. We have successfully outcompeted them and they are on their way out.

Of course, your question is irrelevant since no one claims that humans evolved froim the species of ape you see in the zoo. The claim is that those apes as well as humans evolved from a common anscestor, which happens now to be extinct. BUT, if it weren't extinct, that wouldn't mean evolution hadn't occured. Older models can coexist with the new ones; there's nothing in the model to suggest otherwise.
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).
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#66 User is offline   reiner Icon

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Posted 25 September 2007 - 03:48 PM

It's plausible. Just because a species doesn't evolve doesn't mean it dies out. It's just no longer adapting. It's in an ecological niche and doesn't NEED to advance, so branches can occur and one species may flourish more than it's partner or parent. If something in the environment changes however, one species may have a distinct advantage (whether it be the originating species or the offshoot) allowing it to flourish while they may also be unable to adapt and die ou. Just because a species is old, does not mean it should die out.

Look at how successful simple organisms are. There's no reason for a simpler oganism to die out unless something adversely affects it. You can think about animals like tools sometimes. It's nice to have an iPod to listen to music, but when it breaks, you can still make noise with sticks.

And we have seen fossils with steps between in them. There are fossils of lizards developing mamillian like pelvic structures 100+ million years ago. We've seen animals withvestigial legs becoming more and more seabourne. We still have snakes with vestigial bones where legs would be. Even recently, we've gotten fossil records of velociraptors with feathers. If you look at fetal development among animals it's almost identical in the early stages.

I guess teh thing to say is that it's not ncessarilly that the environment forces a species to change, the environment encourages certain ones to flourish and certain ones to die off, depending on what chance gave them.
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#67 User is offline   looktothesky Icon

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Posted 25 September 2007 - 03:58 PM

QUOTE (Cobnat @ Sep 25 2007, 02:48 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
Question: (following the basic principles of Darwinism) If human beings evolved from apes then how come apes are still around? Shouldn’t they have been wiped out by natural selection?


They will be, slowly, just wait until we're finished destroying the rainforests!
PRECIOUS VELIUS....
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#68 User is offline   El_Gostro Icon

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Posted 25 September 2007 - 10:33 PM

The really fun thing is that evolution is affected by pure chance,if the environment changes to the point where having deformed arms gives you an advantage then there is a possibility you're the big winner of the coming period and may give birth to the next dominant species,even though members of the same or similar from the one that you evolved from may still exist!

On crocs,well so far their form has proven pretty damn effective,why change what works just fine?

This post has been edited by El_Gostro: 25 September 2007 - 10:35 PM

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#69 User is offline   Jordan Icon

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Posted 26 September 2007 - 11:11 AM

how does your dna know what works fine? Does my DNA know that my dad lived in Canada when he was a boy, since i Have bits of his dna in me? Or does my dna remember the time my mother spend 8 hours in a cold pool of water back in europe when she was a kid? Did my dna remember this and make my skin thicker to wtih stand the cool temperature, how does it know that the cool temperature is a bad thing, is it? I don't know. Will this information be stored over the next million years of dna pass downs?

This post has been edited by Jordan: 26 September 2007 - 11:12 AM

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#70 User is offline   reiner Icon

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Posted 26 September 2007 - 11:41 AM

you're dna doesn't 'know' anything. it's just a blueprint that gets randomly changed hrough chance breeding and mutation. if you die, your dna is lost and you don't progress. if you live, you may get teh chance to pass that on. you're complicating how it works by personifying it.

This post has been edited by reiner: 26 September 2007 - 11:42 AM

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#71 User is offline   Jordan Icon

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Posted 26 September 2007 - 12:19 PM

Ok so if it's a chance breeding mutation, then how does the body know which random change is beneficial for survival. And how does it store this information over 100 million year course. Which information is useful and which is nonsense.

Evolutionists don't call it a mutation. A mutation is evolution over a small period of time. If a body part of yours, like your heart, enlarged or mutated, the rest of your body would have to change with it, in harmony, else you'd die. (cancer, )

It's like a car, you can't change the size of a cylinder with out it affecting everything else in the car engine (cam shaft, piston, fuel intake etc...) All of it has to change together. Evolution claims that your body does, over a really long period.

So obviously these tiny changes have to be very slow over a very long period of time. It has to happen to numerous hosts as well. So the same change is now happening in many life forms (so they can breed). The DNA must have store information and must also have intelligence to determine which change is beneficial for the system and finally it needs to have all knowing power to create the change. ( must have an understanding of light and optics in order to create an eye ball)
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#72 User is offline   Slade Icon

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Posted 27 September 2007 - 06:20 AM

No, the way it works is that ideally, changes that are beneficial are passed on through reproduction, while changes that aren't cause the organism to ideally die before reproduction. The good changes help the organism survive, so it can pass those genes on.

I still have no idea how the hell that explains the platypus.
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#73 User is offline   Cobnat Icon

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Posted 27 September 2007 - 07:12 AM

Another Question: If a human being lives in a place where there is heavy air pollution, would their great grand children (assuming the pollution doesn’t vanish) gain some sort of resistance to the air pollution or will their bodies be more succumbed to it?
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#74 User is offline   reiner Icon

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Posted 27 September 2007 - 09:46 AM

Jordan: breeding and mutation aren't teh same concept here, but they can both play a part in evolution. You're mashing the two concepts together.

Here's the Wiki take on mutation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation
Mutations don't necessarily affect anything on a macro scale such as an entire organ. As an example, let's say there's a mutation in your dna that details how pigments proteins are processed. The pigment develops incorrectly and comes out blue instead of brown/black. The person then has bluish pigmented skin and has a POSSIBILITY of passing that down to offspring (depending on traits in the mates dna and chance). Of course there are teh mutations that can cause someone's heart not to develop and they die before even being born. THereby not passing down that defective trait. Slade summed it up well here.

Also if DNA had some sort of intelligence, which is does not, then we wouldn't have hereditary conditions like autism, cancer, dwarfism, diabetes, etc. These just happened to get passed down by the folks that manage to live long enough to breed (through either endurance, medical care, or luck). There's no god in the dna.

For further reading check up on how dna functions during reproduction in gametes. You literally get two halves of dna, splice them together and see how the pairs match up, and so depending on which parents have what genes in each pairing, the blueprint can change or stay the same. Problems can even occur here that cause change, hence Down's syndrome and it's triple chromosome.

Cobnat: It could be possible that they could randomly develop some sort of tolerance through breeding or mutation. Those who don't develop the tolerance either die or move away and the remaining population with the chance pairing of genes that allows that tolerance begin interbreeding causing that trait to be more likely to develop. The complete opposite could happen too. The trait may develop as a minor trait and be highly unlikely to develop forcing the population to become progressively more ill, die, or vacate.

And before anyone brings up 5 legged frogs, it's caused by a parasite that's being spread due to ecological changes.
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#75 User is offline   civilian_number_two Icon

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Posted 27 September 2007 - 02:34 PM

QUOTE (Cobnat @ Sep 27 2007, 07:12 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
Another Question: If a human being lives in a place where there is heavy air pollution, would their great grand children (assuming the pollution doesn’t vanish) gain some sort of resistance to the air pollution or will their bodies be more succumbed to it?

The air pollution would not cause a physiological change allowing resistance to it. Changes aren't caused directly by the environment; they are either supported or defeated by it. For instance, pre pollution, those with weaker lungs wouldn't even know they had them, but post pollution, they would likely die out before breeding. Consequently, in succeeding generations those with stronger lungs would be more prevalent. That's a nice and simple example, and doesn't cover most evolutionary change. Most changes take numerous generations and can't be traced to any one cause. Studies of generational changes generally involve species with large breeding groups and short life spans, such as bacteria and flies. Humans are harder to study.

Someone mentioned the lack of evidence for everything in the fossil record. On the one hand, fossil study is less than 200 years old. On the other hand, the conditions necessary for making fossils are very precise and rare. So fossils are not our best source of evidence. Most evolutionary research done these days is done at the level of DNA.

In general, let's clear up some common mistranslations of the theory of evolution.

Many say that it is a theory about how the "strongest, smartest, and fastest" survive. It's not. It is about whichever organism can make the best of a particular environment. Fitness can be anything that gives an organism an edge, and sometimes it really is just chance. The confusion comes from analogies to predator and prey relationships, which is not the dynamic for all organisms. Just imagine saying "only the strongest, smartest, and fastest plants survive."

Evolution is also not a ladder, with organisms climbing from Lower to Higher order, perpetually climbing toward greater complexity. This misconception is used often in support of the Intelligent Design movement, and its origin I suspect is the Middle Age notion of a Chain of Being. Since folks like simple descriptions of things, it's one that would sell really easily: there is some Goal of the Process, and organisms increase in complexity until they reach that Goal. Complexity is not the end goal of evolution; there isn't one. Bacteria and viruses, some of the strongest predators on the market, are not increasing in complexity, yet they're evolving like crazy with their short life spans and insanely huge populations.

The idea that man came from apes is a common misconception made by religious people. Humans and gorillas share a common ancestor, but one did not come from the other.

Finally, "evolution is just a theory" is something you'll hear from folks who don't know what the word "theory" means. What they might mean is that evolution is just an hypothosis, using a definition of the word that is so far from the scientific use that it may as well be called colloquial. A theory in this case is a body of knowledge and hypothoses, like the theory of gravity or atomic theory. Scientists are not in doubt about evolution like you might be if you said "I have a theory that the WATCHMEN movie is gonna suck." "Theory" doesn't imply speculation like the folks who try to use it as a refutation may think.

This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 03 October 2007 - 04:48 PM

"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).
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