How is it not a misconception that many persons think evolution begins & ends with natural section? That’s like thinking that the laws of motion begin & end with “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” In fact it’s worse, given the fact that many persons also think that “survival of the fittest” means “organisms always get bigger, stronger, and meaner over time.”
Note that I said “does seem that”. That’s because I can’t be sure that the previous posters who only made mention of natural selection in their brief summaries really believe that that’s all there is to it. I suspect that most folks get that there’s more to it, but the “more” typically isn’t expounded upon in popular literature, or in basic high school or college-level courses.
If folks do believe that NS is evolution, and evolution is NS, then yes, that’s a misconception.
It’s a mild misconception, but do you really think it’s a pity that not everyone’s a subject matter expert in your field of interest?
Reading the thread, I think people have a decent handle on the basics. I know people who thought the phases of the moon are caused by the Earth’s shadow, so it could be a lot worse.
Relax, it’s a turn of phrase, nothing more. I do not pity anyone in this thread, nor do I find anything about the posters pitiful.
I always figured you pitied me my lack of rhythm. It hurts that you don’t.
CairoCarol, said:
To be fair, he developed the theory over time, and didn’t trust it at first so wanted to gather as much evidence along many different lines as possible. But largely he was cognizant of the religious affect and his own wife’s beliefs.
Really Not All That Bright said:
I would say no, there is something different in the chemistry. It’s like the difference between a car with the engine off and a car with the engine on - they are both cars, but only one can take you somewhere.
tdn said:
That depends. It is possible for the mutation to occur in the sperm creating cell’s DNA, which then affects all sperm it creates. Or it can just be in a sperm cell.
Cesario said:
Technically, I don’t think overpopulation is required. I mean, predators are part of the environment, no? So keeping the population stable by killing off a certain percentage of every generation is still the environment sustaining the population. Right?
The limiting factor is that dangers exist for the population - whether that is a limit on particular resources or external threats like predators or weather and terrain. Those dangers create situations where individuals within the population are in competition with each other.
Darwin’s Finch said:
The question is what Cesario meant by “apes”. I think he meant modern great apes, i.e. gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, or orangutans. His point was valid for that. However, “apes” is a group that is larger than just those modern exemplars, and includes humanity’s common ancestors with each of those other species, as well as the line of humans since.
Posting what I know about the theory of evolution would take quite a while, since I’ve read dozens of books and hundreds of papers on the topic, but for a quick summary I know the following things.
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Evolution is the process by which new physical traits are formed in an organism and, through the method of natural selection (also sexual selection to a lesser extent), certain traits spread while others are eliminated.
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The only method by which new traits can form is by mutations in an organisms DNA during the process of DNA replication. Most DNA mutations cause no results at all, a few cause harm, a very few are beneficial.
The most common type is a point mutation, which can alter only one amino at a time. There are also other types of mutations, in which larger segments of the chromosome change.
In the past, scientists believe that the genome consisted of distinct genes, each responsible for a single trait. In recent years, they’ve discovered that the situation is more complicated. Multiple genes may contribute to one trait, multiple traits may be influenced by one gene, and regions of DNA formerly thought to be useless may play a role in gene expression.
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Natural selection occurs by Darwin’s six steps: organisms over-reproduce, not all organisms survive, variations exist, those variations are inherited, certain variations make an individual more fit, and as a result whole populations become more fit. Sexual selection occurs when a certain trait makes an individual more likely to mate and reproduce.
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From the fossil record, scientists have deduced that organisms tend to go through long periods of relatively little change, interrupted by short periods of rapid change. This is called “punctuated equilibrium”. The biggest period of chance was the Cambrian Explosion roughly 600 million years ago, when all the complex animal phyla appeared.
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Some people believe that evolution cannot account for the presence of complex chemical systems involving tens or hundreds of proteins, wherein the removal of any one protein will make the entire system useless, the argument being that the odds of multiple proteins arising from mutation at the same time or too small. Others respond that such systems can arise one protein at a time, where earlier versions of the system played a different role.
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Evolution is unrelated to questions of the origin of life and the origin of the universe, and despite the grandiose claims of some people, does not provide any evidence against the existence of God.
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There have been many theories designed to justify certain statements about human behavior on evolutionary grounds, ranging from Darwin’s early beliefs that certain races were inferior because they were less fully evolved up to current evolutionary psychology that seeks to explain the origin of current behaviors due to selection pressures in the pleistocene environment. Every single one of these theories has turned out to be false when put to experimental test.
I always imagine your username to go along the lines of the Bob the Builder theme song. 
I left a lot out of my answer since I wanted to be general about it. While modern terrestrial biology does explain the inheritance of traits in terms of DNA sequences re-mixed during mating through meiosis and the like, none of that is inherent to evolution. If we ever encounter alien life forms which show variation in their traits, and reproduce in such a way that the traits of their offspring are correlated with those of their parent(s), then we’ll observe evolution among them, too, even if their genetic information is stored and transmitted in a completely different way than ours.
I’m just swamped with paperwork today, so I’m gonna need you to take vengeance upon yourself. I’m FedExing you the alligators.
Yes, that would be reasonable. Natural consequence of trying to stuff a lifetime of education into a single forum post. These were the steps they explained to me in my earliest biology course, and obviously they were a simplification. I simply assumed that was the phrasing of the original theory due to the way it was presented.
That’s why I added the word “modern” before both humans and apes at the end of that section, since I realized that this might need additional clarification.
Personally, I don’t get what the problem is with stating that Humans evolved from monkeys or apes. Sure the actual monkeys/apes we evolved from are extinct today, but that doesn’t mean that our ancestors weren’t apes.
The only reason for this denial that I can see is that this fact is continuously misrepresented in the anti-evolutionary literature. As far as I can see the proper reaction should be to correct the factual errors, not to confuse matter further.
We are apes, and apes are monkeys. Going back further, matters get more confused, but that is purely due to our poor nomenclature - we’re also mammals etc etc - just like birds appear to be a subset of dinosaurs. It’s just that much of the intermediate groupings are poorly defined and/or don’t actually exist except in our head. The common descent of our species all the way back to fish at least is pretty clear.
The existence of a supreme being, perhaps not. The existence of the God of the Bible? Absolutely.
At the risk of being pedantic: that depends on how literally you take the bible.
Among the things I know about evolution is that this fact is continuously misrepresented in anti-evolutionary literature. That’s why I included it.
TWEEEEEET!
The relationships between theology or religious beliefs and evolutionary theory are also not pertinent to this thread.
Open a new thread to hammer that out, (or hammer each other).
[ /Modding ]
Apes are not monkeys. This is because “monkeys” are not a clade, but a paraphyletic taxon - defined as excluding apes, lemurs and other prosimians.
The best word to substitute there is “simians” - us, the other apes, monkeys, we are all simians.
Except for those silly tarsiers. They don’t get to be in our club! Well, the simian one, anyway. They do get to be in the Haplorrhini club with us, though…
Well, they’re not monkeys, so serves them right. Damn coat-tail-hangers-on, they should go join the prosimians where they belong…
[King Julian from Madagascar] …the sexy, sexy prosimians. [/KJfM]
Cesario said:
ITR champion said:
You appear to be correct. I suppose I quibble over what is meant by “over reproduce”? Create more offspring than the number of parents (i.e. more than one offspring per parent per lifetime)? Creating more offspring than the environmental resources can support if they all survived to adulthood? Creating enough offspring that the population increases even after all limits (e.g. predation) are taken into consideration?
Superfluous Parentheses said:
This is perhaps a layperson vs. specialist thing, but humans are not fish, even though we are descended from fish. So why are birds dinosaurs just because they descended from dinosaurs?