Evolution?

[Crash2510]

The reason their are still other great apes is likely because we both evolved from a common ancestor.

One idea as to how this happened involves the great rift valley in africa, known as the rift valley scenario.

Some believe that a major geologic event seperated groups of our common ancestors by a mountain range. This seperation led to two drastically different environments on either side of the Rift valley. On one side was rainforest where chimps, bonobos, and gorillas evolved. On the other side was Savanna where the aboreal nature of other apes was not advantageous and Modern Humans evolved.

This is widely accepted scientific theory which is backed up with geologic and anthropologic data. Not a guess or opinion just telling what I have been taught

[cwsmith]

IMO, evolution does not necessarily stand in the face of religious belief. I'll take a perspective that "man" or humankind is definitely a "creation" and I am a "believer". So, in an attempt to stay away from the origins of man, let me just say that evolution does have it's place. Whatever stance we might take, perhaps we can agree that evolution doesn't have to wipe out a species, and conceivably a living creature of today could be an evolution of only a small branch of it's ancestory.

Also, evolution isn't something that just happened one time and like, here's the new lifeform. Evolution continues as a species or a small branch of a species adapts to environment stresses. Be it plant or animal, the creator had the wisdom to arrange lifeforms in a manner that would give them the best possible chance for survival, by allowing the species to adapt to the situation.

My humble opinion anyway,

CWS

[Alex Franke]

We took a deep dive into some of this stuff in a physical anthropology class I took in college. One thing that has stuck in my mind is how the prof responded to a question about finding the "missing link." He said, "It's not a link we're after -- we have a few of those -- it's the rest of the chain that's really missing."

So as far as the theory of evolution by natural selection goes, most (evolutionist) scientists will tell you that there's a whole lot more that has gone on than there is even any record of...

[MilDoc]

Simple. If you think you understand evolution, read a book.

[Rand]

I didn't realize this was a political/religious thread. I thought we were talking science here. Of course, it could be argued that anything that has to do with people is political but... nevermind.

Here's an excerpt from an old song called "Swingin on a Star" that's as true as ever.

And all the monkeys aren't in the zoo
Every day you meet quite a few
So you see it's all up to you
You can be better than you are
You could be swingin' on a star

What the heck. Here's the whole thing:


Would you like to swing on a star
Carry moonbeams home in a jar
And be better off than you are
Or would you rather be a mule?

A mule is an animal with long funny ears
Kicks up at anything he hears
His back is brawny but his brain is weak
He's just plain stupid with a stubborn streak
And by the way, if you hate to go to school
You may grow up to be a mule

Or would you like to swing on a star
Carry moonbeams home in a jar
And be better off than you are
Or would you rather be a pig?

A pig is an animal with dirt on his face
His shoes are a terrible disgrace
He has no manners when he eats his food
He's fat and lazy and extremely rude
But if you don't care a feather or a fig
You may grow up to be a pig

Or would you like to swing on a star
Carry moonbeams home in a jar
And be better off than you are
Or would you rather be a fish?

A fish won't do anything, but swim in a brook
He can't write his name or read a book
To fool the people is his only thought
And though he's slippery, he still gets caught
But then if that sort of life is what you wish
You may grow up to be a fish

And all the monkeys aren't in the zoo
Every day you meet quite a few
So you see it's all up to you
You can be better than you are
You could be swingin' on a star

[crokett]

I didn't realize this was a political/religious thread. I thought we were talking science here.

The problem (as you well know) is this particular topic is not just science to an awful lot of people. So, as Hank said, tread lightly please.

[JimD]

I will be happy to discuss evolution from a scientific standpoint.

It is confusing because people confuse things like the breeding of dogs with evolution. They are not the same thing at all. For humans to have come from apes, there has to be a favorable change in the genetic code to give apes things like our ability to speak, our more capable fingers, and our more capable mind. These favorable mutation of genes has not been observed to occur. As has been noted, mutuations that we do see, tend to result in a less capable animal, not a more capable one. Often it results in death for the animal. For humans to have evolved from a single cell organism requires progression through a lot of stages - and in the form of favorable mutuations which we have not seen. Something has to happen many thousands if not millions of times that we have not seen occur once.

Animal breeding produces animals with characteristics that are a combination of the traits of their parents - not new unique capabilities.

There is also a conflict between the second law of thermodynamics and evolution. The second law is called a law because it has been scientifically tested and proven to be true. Evolution is called a theory because it cannot be tested in this manner and it thus not necessarily true. The second law has not been tested and known to apply to biological systems, it has only been tested for thermodynamics. The second law in its simpliest form says that systems which have no outside intervention trend to disorder and not higher order. If you spin a top, it slows down eventually. If you child does not pick up their room, it does not pick itself up. The second law has been tested many times by people who attempt to create perpetual motion machines and it has always been true that the second law held and the test was a failure. IF the second law works for biological systems, evolution cannot be a valid theory. I am not saying that we know the second law works for biology, I am just pointing out that a law that works for natural systems of a somewhat different type is inconsistent with evolution.

Biology is a science but it is a very different science than thermodynamics. A large part of biology is categorization and memorization of the cateogries. Valuable stuff but different from the formation and testing of scientific theories. I think that is part of the reason that evolution is held to so strongly by many biologists. They are somewhat unique as scientists by not having to ability to do scientific testing of their theories in many cases. We can neither prove nor disprove the theory of evolution. In many fields, a theory like that would die away.

(to anybody that noticed, I removed the point about Darwin disagreeing with his own theory by the time of his death - for a couple reasons. First, I researched further and I am not sure it is true - some say yes, some say no. the other reason is it doesn't matter - regardless of what an individual thinks, the theory is either true or false)

If you cannot tell by now, I do not believe in evolution. I do not think it is scientific to believe in evolution.

Jim

[dkerfoot]

And, no, evolution does not have to be immediate. Wings can start small and evolve to functional status if they offer an advantage.

Hmmm, you seem to think you are contradicting me, while agreeing with my point exactly.

The mutation has to offer an immediate advantage. Agreed?

[JimD]

The bigger issue to me on positive mutuations is the fact that we cannot point to many, perhaps any, that have actually occured plus the fact that we need many simultaneously.

How do you "evolve" an eye, for instance. If you do not have a complete system with a lens, muscles to change focus, moistening system to keep the lens and eye flexible, retina to create electrical signals from the light, electrical connection to the brain, portion of the brain to intrepret the signals - the mutuation would be useless at best and probably detrimental to the organism. You need all this to happen at the same time for natural selection to then cause the animal with an eye to proper.

Some talk of micro and macro evolution. Micro evolution is like moths changing color in response to a change in the environment. Or breeding dogs to produce particular traits. There is plenty of evidence that this kind of thing occurs. What this does not produce, however, is significant new capabilities (dogs with cat like claws, or human like fingers).

It is macro evolution - the creation through positive mutation of significant new capabilities - that is doubtful. Without it, however, evolution as as scientific theory fails. We cannot find even baby steps to indicate it exists. We cannot create an experiment in a lab to prove it is possible. That to me is what is unscientific about the theory of evolution. You essentially have to accept it by faith - like religion.

Jim

[sigma147]

JimD,

Prehaps you should refer to the multitude of papers backing up the basis of netural or nearly neutral genetic mutation and mutation accumulation as the key component of phenotypic evolution. Just to start you off, see here:

Nei, M.; "The New Mutation Theory of Phenotypic Evolution" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [Nei PNAS.2007; 0: 0703349104]

Whitehead, A.; Crawford, D.L.; "Neutral and adaptive variation in gene expression" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [Whitehead and Crawford 103 (14): 5425. (2006)] - this article is freely available.

For a bit easier read, please see Dr. John Kimball's pages: http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ult...Evolution.html

Regarding observation of positive mutations, I would point to the following examples by way of illustration:

Mutations have given bacteria the ability to degrade nylon (Prijambada, I. D., S. Negoro, T. Yomo and I. Urabe. 1995. "Emergence of nylon oligomer degradation enzymes in Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO through experimental evolution." Applied and Environmental Microbiology 61(5): 2020-2022).

Plant breeders have used mutation breeding to induce mutations and select the beneficial ones (FAO/IAEA. 1977. Manual on Mutation Breeding, 2nd ed. Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency).

Certain mutations in humans confer resistance to AIDS (Dean, M. et al. 1996. "Genetic restriction of HIV-1 infection and progression to AIDS by a deletion allele of the CKR5 structural gene." Science 273: 1856-1862; Sullivan, Amy D., Janis Wigginton and Denise Kirschner. 2001. "The coreceptor mutation CCR5-delta-32 influences the dynamics of HIV epidemics and is selected for by HIV." Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 98: 10214-10219) or to heart disease (Long, Patricia. 1994. "A town with a golden gene." Health 8(1) (Jan/Feb.): 60-66; Weisgraber K. H., S. C. Rall Jr., T. P. Bersot, R. W. Mahley, G. Franceschini, and C. R. Sirtori. 1983. "Apolipoprotein A-I Milano. Detection of normal A-I in affected subjects and evidence for a cysteine for arginine substitution in the variant A-I." Journal of Biological Chemistry 258: 2508-2513).

A mutation in humans makes bones strong (Boyden, Ann M., Junhao Mao, Joseph Belsky, Lyle Mitzner, Anita Farhi, Mary A. Mitnick, Dianqing Wu, Karl Insogna, and Richard P. Lifton. 2002. "High bone density due to a mutation in LDL-receptor-related protein 5." New England Journal of Medicine 346: 1513-1521, May 16, 2002. http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/346/20/1513).

Transposons are common, especially in plants, and help to provide beneficial diversity (Moffat, Anne S. 2000. "Transposons help sculpt a dynamic genome." Science 289: 1455-1457).

In vitro mutation and selection can be used to evolve substantially improved function of RNA molecules, such as a ribozyme (Wright, M. C. and G. F. Joyce. 1997. "Continuous in vitro evolution of catalytic function." Science 276: 614-617. See also: Ellington, A. D., M. P. Robertson and J. Bull, 1997. "Ribozymes in wonderland." Science 276: 546-547).

Finally, regarding the evolution of the eye, Nilsson and Pelger calculated that if each step were a 1 percent change, the evolution of the eye would take 1,829 steps, which could happen in 364,000 generations: Nilsson, D.-E. and S. Pelger, 1994. "A pessimistic estimate of the time required for an eye to evolve." Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Biological Sciences, 256: 53-58.

Evidence for one step in the evolution of the vertebrate eye comes from comparative anatomy and genetics. The vertebrate ??-crystallin genes, which code for several proteins crucial for the lens, are very similar to the Ciona ??-crystallin gene. Ciona is an urochordate, a distant relative of vertebrates. Ciona's single ??-crystallin gene is expressed in its otolith, a pigmented sister cell of the light-sensing ocellus. The origin of the lens appears to be based on co-optation of previously existing elements in a lensless system. (Shimeld, Sebastian M. et al. 2005. "Urochordate ??-crystallin and the evolutionary origin of the vertebrate eye lens." Current Biology 15: 1684-1689)

I hope this helps with your consideration of evolution. Please feel free to discuss with me any of the points made above that you feel are not grounded in observation and sound scientific theory.

Regards,
Sigma147

[Slik Geek]

Sigma147 - I appreciate the time that you spent providing the various links. Haven't read them yet...

Finally, regarding the evolution of the eye, Nilsson and Pelger calculated that if each step were a 1 percent change, the evolution of the eye would take 1,829 steps, which could happen in 364,000 generations.

Assuming that this is accurate, this doesn't answer the question: Why would useless mutations be perpetuated for hundreds of thousands of generations until the "magic mix" is attained, and the eye is finally useful?

[jseklund]

Preface- this is NOT intended to be a provocation of any sort- just a twist. Mods, please feel free to delete (obviously) without offending me if you find this borderline.

We speak of evolution and religion vs. science- but they are not necessarily too far apart. What's really amazing about all of this is that we have to have genetic mutations that "give us a more capable brain" etc. On the other hand, these mutations must help us to survive. These same mutations that have helped us survive so well, have also made us the most cognizant observers of the universe.

There is a move called the Privileged Planet that talks about the amazing coincidence that the place most suited for life, may also possibly be the place most suitable for viewing the universe. They discuss how you have to be located in a certain proximity to the galaxy, to the solar system, to the star and it has to be a certain type of star, and a certain type of planet. This makes the case that- while there may be other intelligent life out there, we also may be the ONLY intelligent life out there too. Then they talk about how these same factors help us view the universe better than any other place you could think of. Being located on the outer edge of a spiral arm of the galaxy, raised up, allows us to see into the galaxy in a way that we couldn't if we were located closer or lower.

When viewed through this light, I find it amazing- that a lot of the same traits that allow us to survive also allow us to think philosophically. Almost as if the "universe created a way to know itself". It's pretty amazing.

You can view this as a religious topic, but the fact is it can be viewed and worked two ways- "What is the mechanism the universe used to create man?" or "What is the mechanism God used to create man?" It's much more complex than we understand currently, but I think all would agree that it appears as if SOMEONE or SOMETHING wants us to understand.

[germdoc]

OK, when I see a Buick I know that somewhere there is a Buick maker and when I see a Universe I know..........well, enough said.

Hmmmm--when I see a Buick I am reminded that GM is now in second place worldwide, and that natural selection must be real. I won't say that GM is proof that intelligent design doesn't exist, but the Aztek was definitely an evolutionary dead end.

(With apologies to Corvette owners and other diehard GM fanatics.)

[germdoc]

On a serious note, in my field we have evidence on a daily basis of natural selection--broad-spectrum antibiotics select for antibiotic-resistant mutants, hence the rise of MRSA, VRE, drug-resistant TB and the other germs that keep me employed.

On the other hand, the other drug-sensitive germs are still around--perhaps because God likes to throw us docs an easy pitch every now and then...

[cabinetman]

Finally, regarding the evolution of the eye, Nilsson and Pelger calculated that if each step were a 1 percent change, the evolution of the eye would take 1,829 steps, which could happen in 364,000 generations: Nilsson, D.-E. and S. Pelger, 1994. "A pessimistic estimate of the time required for an eye to evolve." Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Biological Sciences, 256: 53-58.

Considering the theory of the evolution of the eye, and all the steps of all the generations and whatever mutations were involved, one would think the eye has really improved. Why then considering my contribution to the evolution, my eyesight gets worse the older I get?