For what it’s worth, I actually think you’re doing a very good job of this here. You’re asking the right questions and plenty of books have been recommended for you to read should you be so inclined. The fact is though that an awful lot of people believe something along the same lines as you but just don’t care. And why should they? It’s just not something that impacts on most peoples’ lives in any way. That’s why it doesn’t bother me too much when we hear things like “60% of people don’t believe in evolution”.
The US is widely ridiculed for its widespread creationism but even there, when it comes to important things like setting policy, it seems like the voice of reason tends to win out.
Not really. After lots and lots of fighting about it, the “voice of reason” generally manages to pull off a draw. While creationism isn’t usually taught in classrooms, evolution largely isn’t taught either. And belief in creationism is widespread. The voices of ignorance and madness is at least as powerful in America as the voice of reason.
I love how the anti-evolution reasoning pretty much always boils down to, “If it isn’t intuitive to me and my eighth grade science education it just has to be a load of crap.”
As per the OP, you presumably came to this thread as a conservative to defend some of the things Palin has said. I also think you are doing a good job of posing questions that stir the debate, but it’s Palin who has suggested to “Teach the Controversy” in schools. You’re getting ‘attacked’ for defending that stance…and it seems to me that you aren’t defending it at all, but defending yourself.
It doesn’t look like posters are after you as much as they are after someone to defend Palin.
Palin blames everybody else for what has happened. She accepted a chance to become VP and maybe president. I don’t know how she could. How she thought she was prepared is a mystery .She walked into an ongoing political machine that was running a presidential campaign for 2 years. Yet she is surprised that they wanted to do things their way. When a person is elected president, they have experts who tell them how to dress and how to great foreign dignitaries. That is what she ran into. The campaign wanted to present her in as good a light as was possible. The speech writers just wanted to keep her from being embarrassing. They wanted to dress her. Every city they went to was not the same. The points they were stressing are very often local. She had no way of knowing that.
She claims the campaign wanted her to pay for the vetting. They deny it and it is absurd to think that they would charge her . She feels offended that they knew her daughter was preggers. They were doing their jobs, not infringing on her rights.
First, necessity has nothing whatsoever to do with evolution.
Second, you seem to labor under the false impression that there are only two states for any given character: on and off. “Eyeballs” or “no eyeballs”. “teeth” or “no teeth”. The fact is, there are several gradients for almost every character one can imagine. There are a lot of intermediate states between “completely eyeless” and “fully-functional eyeball with retinas and lenses and muscles and all that”. See here for a summary.
Such is the case with just about any complex trait you can pick that creationists claim “couldn’t have arisen from nothing”.
Exactly. Most people are far too busy with their romantic relationships, their families, shopping and running errands, taking care of the house and getting their kids homeworked, bathed and off to bed to be delving deeply into the finer points of evolutionary theory and micro-biology. To most people the idea that all of this could just develop from out of nowhere, no matter how long the process, stretches credulity pretty much to the breaking point. So belief in God seems to be the more likely answer, and at the very least it appears no less credulous than evolution, which appears to be more adaptive than creative anyway.
Still, I think that most people believe in evolution up to a point, and that when 60% of the population says they don’t believe in it what they are really saying is that they don’t believe evolution is responsible for the creation of life itself, nor solely responsible for life as we know it today. In other words, I think most people can accept that such things as non-functioning eyes in deep sea creatures or stubs of appendages in fish are vestigal remnants of generations long ago, but they don’t believe that things such as eyes, teeth, the way muscle and bone function together, the complex chemical workings of organs, and sophisticated two-sex (or even single-sex) reproductive systems were created over the eons by evolution. As for myself, I’m taking a more wait-and-see approach but I do have to admit that I find evolution alone as an explanation for all this to strain credulity as much if not more than belief in God. (And then there’s also the possibility that evolution, to whatever degree it exists, is God’s creation also. :p)
I think so too. I also think that belief in creationism, or at least the Adam & Eve version, really isn’t all that widely accepted. Most of the Christians I’ve known in my life know better. They also don’t think the world is 4,000 years old or that Jesus’ body rose into the clouds.
I guess I’m not doing a very good job of explaining myself here. Yes, I’m aware that the theory goes that the physiological aspects of living creatures are said to have evolved bit by tiny bit over the eons. What I have trouble accepting is number one, how did whatever first living organism come into being in the first place; and secondly, how did it come to be able to reproduce without dying out before it could somehow grow the ability to do so; thirdly, how did it develop the ability to do so; and how did things like eyes, digestive systems with teeth conveniently situated at the beginning, and two-sex reproductive systems ever come into being in the first place? Especially since there was no apparent need for them to do so as the creatures they supposedly evolved from were somehow finding nourishment and reproducing already.
You say necessity has nothing to do with evolution, but how can that be. Everything I’ve ever heard or read about evolution contradicts that. Why did eyes develop without the need to see? How did teeth develop with the need to chew? How did reproduction develop without the need to reproduce? See what I mean? All these things are said by evolution’s proponents to have evolved because for whatever reason it was advantageous to the life form in question to do so. To me this equates to necessity, at least to a certain degree, although not in the sense that it was a conscious need on the part of the creatures of that time. The same also holds true in reverse: why do deep sea fish have unseeing vestigal eyes if the need for seeing eyes no longer exists? It was that lack of evolutionary need that has resulted in their no longer being able to see now.
Your questions have already been answered. Yiou don’t have to “wait and see.” All you’re doing is showing that you don’t actually have any interest in knowing the answers., You’re holding your ears overyou hands and saying “La la la, I can’t hear you.”
And for the last time, Evolution has NOTHING to do with the origin of life.
And you obviously haven’t read a single answer to your uneducated questions about abiogensis since you still have a completely erroneous notion that it has something to do with a cell mysteriously forming out of nothing. It doesn’t. There are a number of prebiotic steps before you ever get to a cell. You are not asking questions which scientists think are stumpers. Just because you, personally can’t understand something doesn’t mean nobody else does.
It is utterly irrelevant, incidentally, whether a majority of people are willing to accept evolution or not. It’s a proven fact either way. It’s not an open question. The jury is not still out. I’m amazed that someone who’s been a Doper as long as you have would actually think there’s anything unresolved about it.
No it doesn’t. I guarantee you’ve read nothing scientific that claims “necessity” has anything to do wit it.
I’ll walk you through it. It starts with mutation. Mutation occurs only in individuals. An individual is born with an extra nipple, or slightly longer arms or webbed toes, or something similar. Most of the time, these mutations have no effect on the individual. Sometimes they have a negative effect, and sometimes, they confer a very slight survival advantage over the individuals it’s competing with. Those individuals have a slightly better chance of reproducing and passing on that mutation to its offspring.
For example, let’s say there’s a forest with a population of tree squirrels in it. One particular squirrel is born with a random mutaion that gives it a small webbing of skin in its armpits. This allows the squirrel to catch as little air and glide slightly as it jumps from tree to tree. It’s only a little bit further, not a lot, but it gives the squirrel a slight advantage in avoiding predators and getting to new food sources.
It then passes this mutation down to its offspring. It’s offspring then have the same slight advantage over other squirrels and are able to procreate more squirrels with the same advantage. Over a period of hundreds or thousands of generations, the squirrels with the webbings are able to reproduce more squirrels than squirrles without the webbing, and eventually, the only squirrels left are those with the webbing. This is natural selection. Over more times, some squirrels will have bigger webbings which allows them to fly even further, and those squirrels will out reproduce the squirrels with the smaller webbing, and the next thing you know, you have flying squirrels.
Necessity has nothing to do with it. Random muatations sometimes confers completely incidental survival advantages. Natural selection does the rest. It’s all just incidental. Evolution is not goal directed. It has no purpose in it.
Religious people in general have a very difficult time accepting the purposelessness of nature, or understanding what it implies or how it works. They’re too indoctrinated into thinking that the whole planet started out as a special garden just for us.
Really? Then what is all this talk about thousands and thousands of quasi cells forming incrementally before they finally become cells? And then thousands and thousands of mutations resulting in living creatures or whatever it is we’re talking about?
Here we go again with more bullshit. I never said anything about cells suddenly springing up out of nothing. I even reiterated that I didn’t think so in the post you’re frothing about.
No, but the things I don’t understand can go a long way toward explaining the thinking of the 60% of the population that doesn’t believe in “evolution,” which was my point in bringing all this up to begin with.
Again, most people are too wrapped up in living and/or dealing with their own lives to be delving into the finer points of evolution, especially considering that, by your own admission, it does’t speak to the creation of life in the first place.
What I think is unresolved about it is what nobody here so far has been able to answer, i.e: How did life begin? How did living creatures develop separate sexes with complex and sophisticated reproductive processes? And so on and so forth.
Even eyes haven’t been answered to my satisfaction. I looked at the link above which explains what is thought to be the physical process, but where it breaks down for me is what caused that process to begin and proceed in the first place? After all, the world isn’t populated by organisms with all sorts of bizarre outgrowths in the process of random creation of features that may be of use someday. Everything – eyes, ears, liver, etc. – has a function. Thus they had to be evolved or created or developed for that purpose, and my question is how did that purpose come to trigger development in the first place? I can think of a jillion things that would be useful or beneficial to survival for human beings to posess, and yet nothing seems to be triggering their growth. So why have the things that have developed happened to do so to begin with, starting from complete non-existence and leading up to whatever rudimentary and identifiable developments occur that we can then begin to recognize as having function of some sort?
As far as what I’ve taken the time to learn vs. what I haven’t, I’m just like most other people: I simply haven’t taken the time. And I’m not particularly driven to do so since most of my most fundamental questions remain unanswered. Again, and I’ve said this at least three times now, I do believe in/recognize evolution…up to a point. Where it breaks down for me, and where I’ve heard and read no definitive answer, is what happens beyond that point?
If you and so many of the other people around here who love to point and laugh at people for being what you regard as stupid were really as smart as you like to think you are, you would realize that the country is populated by millions of people whose life experiences are different than yours. Some dropped out of school prematurely. Others have no interest. Others yet might be interested but don’t have the time to invest in educating themselves. And still others (in the many millions, btw) are decades out of school and unaware of things that have been discovered or proven since then.
Put all these people together and you have an electorate. And what they know or believe ain’t gonna change no matter how much people like you declare that they’re stupid and ought to know better. They aren’t stupid, they are just people living and thinking what they do based on their life’s experience…and if you and certain others I could name around here were really as smart as you like to think you are, you would be cognizant of this. What you seem to be angry about is that it isn’t a perfect world and everybody doesn’t know what you know or think like you do or in the way you think they should…and that doesn’t sound very smart to me.
How people with cleft lips, extra toes, extra limbs, no limbs, albinism, hair all over their body, super strength, dwarfism, webbed toes and fingers, XXY hermaphrodism, sickle cell anemia, thalassemia, and many more that are so rare they don’t have names. Those are just human examples. Look at the mutations in fruit flies sometime. You really, really don’t know what you are talking about.
Not to mention the mutations that allowed these people born before 1859 to be alive today.
Natural selection is a population-level phenomenon. There is no “patient zero” (so to speak) - a “first organism” which exhibits a trait. Natural selection acts upon variations of existing traits. There is almost always some variation around a mean for any given trait in a population (some traits, of course, are more conservative than others, and thus vary less from individual to individual; others can vary widely). Natural selection is simply the process that occurs when some of those variations render an individual more likely to pass on their genes in the population, thus increasing the overall frequency of that variant in the population.
In the case of eyes, for example, photoreceptors evolved relatively early on, and can be found in single-celled organisms. Once organisms became multi-cellular and tissues began segregating into specific functions, certain of those tissues remained photosensitive, and formed the “core”, so to speak, of a visual system.
It’s more complex than that, of course, and the gory details can be researched if you are interested, but the overall point is this: the “first organism” was actually a “first population”, and individuals within that population varied only slightly from their neighbors, but enough that they had an advantage in getting resources (including mates), which made them more likely to pass on their genes, etc.
There was no “need” for any of this to happen, of course. It’s the result of a less-than-perfect replication system for DNA / RNA. Because the transcription is imperfect, errors - mutations - occur, and occasionally, these mutations are such that a trait is modified in a beneficial manner.
Again, though it’s not about “need”. It didn’t have to happen that eyes evolved in the first place. What did happen is that those organism which could sense light were able to outcompete their neighbors which couldn’t. Those who were able to sense light a little bit better than their neighbors were able to outcompete those neighbors, and so on.
Now, that sort of explanation is really a simplistic version of how it all works. A good deal of evolution occurs during development, wherein a small change can have a dramatic effect. This is how the whole eyeless fish thing happens (I’ve discussed the particulars elsewhere in GQ a couple times).
But, again, none of it needs to happen. But it does, and organisms which are able to capitalize on those changes are the ones which “win”.
Not everything has a purpose, some things are there for no reason at all, some are traits that are associated with separate traits that do have an evolutionary advantage.
Mutations are random. They occur all the time. They do not occur in response to some “need”. Most mutations have no effect, or a negative effect that cause an organism to die. Some mutations confer an evolutionary advantage and they may be passed on under the right circumstances. This is most likely to happen in small, isolated groups of organisms. For example, a glacier cuts off one group of bears from another, For the bears that live farther north and live in ice and snow, a mutation that makes fur lack color may confer an advantage in camouflage and that trait will be selected for. That same mutation is just as likely to happen to the other population of bears, but it might make then more visible to their prey so that trait will not be selected for.
All of this has been understood for over 150 years. The details are very complex, but the basics can be understood by any school child.
Both of those are events which have not yet been completely sorted out. There are various working hypotheses, of course, but there is no definitive answer as yet.
Ah, not so! What you are missing is the concept of exaptation - the co-option of a trait for a new function that it did not previously fulfill.
These are merely genetic aberrations related to already established physical features. They aren’t even close to what I was talking about, but I think you already know that.
I’m talking about things like the genetic opposite of sightless eyes. Where is half-formed anything, not already part of some creature’s established feature set, which is on the way toward becoming some previously non-existent feature that is beneficial to its survivability?
And Darwin’s Finch, thanks for taking the time to write that post. You might be gratified to know that thanks to your insightful explanation, at least a couple of scales have fallen from my eyes.
I don’t have time right now to respond in detail, but a few things have either become clearer to me now, and others have become interesting food for thought. Thanks.
ETA: Darwin’s Finch and DanBlather, your most recent posts came in while I was composing the above. You both might be interested to know that one of the scales which have fallen has to do with the POV that need or necessity has been a driving force in evolutionary adaptation. Again, thanks.
