Hello all, I have a few questions that i have not been able to find information on and I was hoping you all could aid me in finding the answers:
Heartworm, ring worms etc. In the food chain do they only serve as the thing that kills dogs and other animals that then acts as fertilizer?
How are random number generators on calculators possible? I mean it’s a calculator and it must have some sort of a formula, which would make it non-random…I just dont get it
Why are there so many blood types and is there a recessive blood type?
If poultry is loaded with so many chemicles and steriods to boost thier immune system wouldn’t eating lots of chicken slowly build my own?
Any information abuot the answer of these questions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you
I don’t quite get what you mean by ‘serve’. Organisms evolved to their current form because they can survive best in that form. It’s that simple. Nothing serves any purpose beyond the purpose of reproducing more copies of itself. That’s as true of an elephant as of a roundworm, and Jumbo serves no more or less purpose than the worm.
Any calculator you are likely to own utilises psuedo-random numbers. Basically the calculator has a random number table built in, and it simply reads a number of that list, just as you would do manually with a random number table. It’s for this reason that most calculators are unsuitable if you need true random numbers.
Nobody is entirely sure. Same blood types seem to provide additional immunity to some diseases, but that can only be part of the answer. In reality it is probably simply that the more diverse an organism that harder it is for a parasite to fool its immune system. If all humans had blood cells that were chemically identical then any parasite could hide form our immune system simply by wrapping itself in the same surface coatings. That would be disastrous. But because everybody has different blood cell coating a parasite might be able to fool me but it would be spotted instantly by your immune system and destroyed.
Yes, O.
They aren’t really.
No. No more than eating a spider will give you the ability to climb walls. It doesn’t work that way outside of comic books. When you eat something it gets broken down into its component parts and reassembled to make bits of you. When you eat a chicken or a spider you don’t have bits of chicken and spider floating around inside you. All you get are disassembled molecules that are indistinguishable from the ones inside you already.
There are some minor exception to that rule, but they are very minor, and animal supplements are selected specifically so they don’t fall into that category to any great degree.
Not quite. Typically, your calculator as well as most programming languages uses a pseudorandom generator consisting of any one of several algorithms that uses modular arithmetic; which essentially generates a long, repeating series of numbers. A “seed” number tells the algorithm where in the series to start picking numbers. By selecting a semi-random seed, such as the time it takes a user to press a key, or the system tick counter, you can get an apparently different set of numbers–at least for the short term. After enough repeats, however, you’ll have to repeat the series again.
True, but I’d drop the word “best”. Organisms that are relatively inefficient can still limp along and spread their genes if competition in their region isn’t particularly intense.
Otherwise, nerds would’ve gone extinct decades ago.
Therfore those organsisms are, by defintion, the best form for surviving there. Were they not the best they would not survive, and something better would have replaced then.
Well, the organisms are a good form for surviving in their environment, and if the environment doesn’t happen to be particularly taxing, such organisms can coexist casually with other organisms who might happen to be stronger, faster, smarter, etc.
Further, being the best in your environment can be a major handicap if the environment changes in any significant way (if the environmental shift is slow enough, the organism ends up with a lot of leftover adaptations that although no longer useful, or not enough of a hindrance to disappear entirely). Being good in a variety of environments can be more helpful.
If we’re just using a different definition of “best”, though, the argument is academic.
You are making the common creationist mistake of assuming that ‘best’ or ‘fittest’ refers to some sort of physical porwess. Of course it does not. An elephant is stronger, faster and smarter than a mouse, yet it is not more fit to reproduce or better able to reproduce or to survive.
That’s perfcetly true. And that’s precisely because you exist in a form that is best adpated to an environment that no longer exists. Being best adapted to one environemnt in no way gaurauntees pre-adpation to a novel environment. It is not being bestl adpated that is the problem, the problem is ppurely because the environments you were the best adpated to no longer exist, and hence by definition you are now not the best adapted.
Being good in a variety of environments doesn’t make any sense in this context. An organism’s ebvironemnt is wherever it exists. The environment for a migratory bird may encompass tundra and tropical coral atolls. It may function well in both of those and will be best fit for operating throughout that range, but that range is its environment, they are not separte environments.
There is such a thing as pre-adpataion, where an organism is accidentally suited to novel environments by unrealte dtraits, but that’s pretty rare.
Being positive or desirable in nature; not bad or poor. Having the qualities that are desirable or distinguishing in a particular thing
Not being a creationist, I rather doubt it, but let’s just skip to the end and your working definition of “best”…
…is not the one I was using, in which the “best” organism in an environment has objectively measurable advantages over all others, allowing it to dominate. Your use of “best” is closer to what I was defining as “good”, meaning an organism has sufficient adaptations to succeed, even in the presence of light competition. Actually, your use just suggest that every surviving organism at any given time is “best”. How very… democratic of you. 
Interestingly, though, assuming that humans are “best” given our obvious success overlooks a lot of blatant design flaws we’re stuck with that might have served a purpose once but now are just hassles. Fortunately, not enough of a hassle to push us into extinction, but I’m just waiting for the appendix-erupting retrovirus that will doom us all.
Of course it is best. If it were not best it would still be in the same form as its progenitor. Organisms don’t evolve to become worse adpated. Therefore every organism is at the pinnacle of its adapativity to its current conditions.
Humans are indeed the best at being humans. Were this not the case we would have been suplanted by something that is better. Just as Windows is the best general use operating system in the world. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a lot of blatant design flaws. It simply means that it has more positive features and fewer flaws than any potential competitor. Were it not the best then it would no longer be able to maintin its place.
ring worm isn’t a worm, it’s a fungus. it’s only “purpose” is to continue existing.
I prefer to use the term “survival of the fit enough”.
I’m a bit confused by some of your points.
First, you explicitly argue that “Therfore those organsisms are, by defintion, the best form for surviving there.” Then when somone points out the entirely true fact that a less-capable organism might have been born and still be alive at the hypothetical moment you survey the environment – thus the individual organisms you find might NOT be the “best form for surviving there” – you switch your line of argument to invoke reproduction (“yet it is not more fit to reproduce or better able to reproduce or to survive.”)
There is a pet bird, born in my household, who has splayed (deformed) legs. Are you seriously arguing that because he has adequately survived in our care, he is best adapted to survive? That if his legs were straight, he would be worse off? He is in somewhat more danger overall (potentially being caught on something or squashed if he fails to get out of the way) than our birds with normal legs, but he still survives.
Here we must be looking at a semantic difference in the use of terminology. Organisms, according to Darwin, certainly do change for the worse. Darwin himself, though not knowing about DNA mutation, recognized that changes arise spontaneously. He argued that many, even most, changes do no fit an organism to better survive.
Over the long run of historical time, we’d say the species has evolved. If we JUST limit what we’re talking about to that specific use, I’d agree with “[species] don’t evolve to become worse adapted.” But I think the observation you were responding to was about individuals within a species in a short run of time, and that’s quite different.
Sailboat
I don’t think that’s quite true. It may be better adapted than what came before, but that doesn’t mean something couldn’t evolve later that’s better adapted to those same conditions. Evolution takes time, after all.
Let’s say for instance that there’s a sudden change in the conditions of a certain region. At that point, everything that’s living there won’t be particularly well adapted to the new conditions of their environment. But over time the species that survived the change will evolve to be better suited to those conditions. So surely an organism living there right after the change wasn’t "at the pinnacle of its adaptivity to its current conditions.
Heck, it might not even have been as well adapted to those conditions as one of its own ancestors, if that ancestor lived in a long ago time when the conditions were similar to the new conditions.
Don’t forget the ecosystem. Everyone is focusing on one individual kind. If there were no diseases or death the whole earth would become devoid of life, since everything would over reproduce and eat themselves out of house and home.
It pays to see a bigger picture.
Jeanine