What makes you doubt your faith...in evolution?

I know that life evolved…David Attenborough tells me so, and I listen to whatever David says…indeed.

Plus I find the whole notion of an all-poweful creator just pure crazyass…especially as a substitute for wrapping one’s mind around evolution. "Wow…too amazing that over hundreds of millions of years things could evolve…WAY easier to buy into Magic Man in the sky (whose origins we can just skip…)

But dammit, there are things in this world that just make me go right into Seth and Amy REALLY??? Mode… and the top of the list might easily be camouflage.

You are a very smart creature, especially for something that lacks a backbone, but you don’t KNOW what the goddamn rock looks like…HOW DID YOU DO THAT???

And here’s a 10 minute video of all kinds of camouflage.

And here we have a clam that has LIPS that look like a FISH…REALLY? What sequence of accidents led to that degree of perfect mimicry built in your genes, eh, buddy? REALLY???

And while we’re at it, care to explain what sequence of accidents repeating over time led to this butterfly looking EXACTLY like a dead leaf? Not a little, not kinda, not sorta…EXACTLY???

So…what makes you doubt evolution, even though you know better?

(If anyone can explain this stuff in a way that makes sense, please do…because I’m a huge fan of natural science, at least in a pop-culture kinda way, and I watch the documentaries and I read the articles and I understand evolution, I really do. But this stuff just seems impossibly perfect to have happened accidentally, over time. And the whole octopus thing… my brain hurts.)

I don’t see the hangups about any of those things.

There’s a group of longtongued slothpigs chilling in a forest. As everyone knows, longtongued slothpigs have brown skin. One day a slothpig is born with a mutation- he’s got some green spots on his ass. Because of those green spots on his ass he’s got a .01% higher chance of blending in at a crucial moment in his life and living when he otherwise might have died. Fast forward to hundreds of thousands or millions of years later and now the herd of slothpigs all have green, brown and tan spots all over their bodies that they use as camo. In fact, the US Army gets its camo design from longtongued slothpigs (you can look it up).

I don’t have a specific chain of events in mind that’d explain your shapeshifting octopus but it’s not hard to imagine whatever reflex they use gradually appearing in a species. The octopuses didn’t evolve the shapeshifting ability all at once over night. They evolved parts of it, bit by bit, over a long ass time.

I think the biggest reason some people have trouble wrapping their heads around certain evolutionary ideas is because of how short our frames of reference are. We live for what, seventy years? It’s just hard to comprehend how long millions of years is.

Life on Earth relies on osmosis for a lot of its mechanisms. Osmosis. The natural law I would never expect.

Add to that the frickin’ complexity of the carbon cycle.

Sexual reproduction. I can sort of accept self-fertile hermaphroditism devolving into non-self-fertile hermaphroditism, then either devolving into two-sexed reproduction. But why meiosis in the first place if no designer?

Yeah, I have no confidence in an uncreated world. And that’s…okay.

Stoid, you know how evolution works, right? An animal has to live to sexual maturity before it can have and raise offspring, passing its genetic traits on to the next generation. An animal that’s harder to spot is more likely to escape predators and live long enough to have and raise offspring.

So, once upon a time, due to a mistake or mutation in the genetic code, there was a moth that looked a teeny tiny bit like a rock. Predators came along and grabbed the other moths but didn’t notice that one. That animal lived long enough to have and raise offspring, while its less rocky neighbours didn’t. And that offspring inherited the looking-a-bit-like-a-rock trait. The same repeated for millennia, and each generation the moths that looked the most like rocks were more likely to live and have kids and pass that looking-even-more-like-a-rock trait on.

There’s no need for the moth to know what a rock looks like at all.

I’m afraid I don’t understand the question. What is about meiosis that particularly requires a creator? What’s odd about osmosis?

I don’t have faith in evolution. I have knowledge about evolution.

Alabama.

While I dont’ generally put any faith in per se, I often stop myself from just saying “Evolution.” The problem is that we as humans are cutely cunning little buggers, and it is often very easy for us to assign definite causes to things which may be a might, well, random.

That is to say, given a certain situation, we can come up with a very plausible sequence of causes and effects which lked to it. But we can just as easily come up with other if the answer, but none of the intermediary steps, were different. It’s the old mathematician/physicist joke.

I am 100% clear on this.

BUT BUT BUT… where I :dubious::dubious::dubious::dubious: is at the idea that of all the moths, the ONE moth with this mutation outlived ALL the other moths…because, after all, he is the mutated offspring of NON-mutated moths that lived long enough to birth him and his mutation, right?

So what’s up with that, especially since it has to happen over and over and over, a little bit more every time. The non mutants are doing ok, because they are birthing mutants.

It just seems a little strange that it would refine to such a degree, when other similar critters lacking the refinement are doing ok.

No, but there is for that freaky goddamn octopus! HOW???

Evolution does not rely on faith. I can’t doubt a faith that doesn’t exist in the first place. Evolution is a fact, not a belief. Anything that may seem incredulous about it at first glance, just shows a gap in personal knowledge.

No, not all other moths. It’s not like that. It’s just that those with the inherited mutation will have a slightly better chance, statistically, of living long enough to reproduce than those without the mutation. Not all with the mutation will make, it, and not all those without it will not. Over time, though, and thousands of generations, those with the mutation will outnumber those without it, and that disparity of numbers will increase until they’re the only ones left.

No, the mutants are birthing mutants. The next mutation is bulit on the population that already has the first mutation. Nothing happens “over and over again,” everything only happens once, then gets locked into place, and the following adpatations and refinements are built on top of the preceeding ones.

They are adapted to their own niches, and have their own advantages.

What octopus?

The one that predicts World Cup matches? How does evolution explain that, Mr. Smarty Pants?

(No, I don’t know what octopus either.)

I know octopuses and cuttlefish have extensive brain control over their coloration, to the extent that I’ve seen a cuttlefish attempt to make itself checked to hide on a checkerboard. Perhaps that’s what the OP refers to?

(I won’t eat octopus for this reason. I suspect they might be smarter than I am. Oh, and gross. But I’ll claim it’s the smart part that dissuades me.)

When describing natural selection it’s simple to imagine the “right” genes surviving and the “wrong” genes being culled.
This is just a model, we know that reality is more complicated, and it’s really a matter of probabilities.

Consider a species that has dozens or even hundreds of offspring, with the vast majority of that offspring not surviving long enough to reproduce. In that situation it’s easy to see how a gene that only increases survival chance by 0.01% will gradually, and inevitably, be heavily represented across the population. (Even though in specific cases individuals with good genes may die, and individuals with bad genes may survive and reproduce).

Also the idea that all individuals look nothing like a rock until one day there’s a mutation is simplistic.

Since all individuals look different (with caveats), so at any given time there are a bunch of individuals that look ever so slightly rock-like, and it is not necessarily the same set of genes that is responsible for that. IOW a similar phenotype can be caused by a different genotype.
With strong selection for rockness, it wouldn’t take many generations at all before individuals are born that have several of the rock-ness genes together.
This is a picture of rockness evolving (part-way) without any mutations that weren’t already in the gene pool.

Fibonacci number are present in nature. Huh? How does that work?

You see these complex mathematical patterns in shells, flower petals, pineapples, etc. How can that happen through evolution???

It’s not that difficult to envisage how such patterns come about, given how the fibonacci sequence is defined (summing the previous two instances). The example of the idealised bee population on wikiis quite telling.

The real mystery is how evolution calculated pi! I mean, there are circles, cylinders and spheres in nature…when did nature do the maths?!

(Given earlier posts, it’s actually necessary for me to say I’m kidding with the last point)

Just to provide a serious post to offset my frivolous one:

Steven Jay Gould discusses the clam with lure that looks like a fish in the book Ever Since Darwin, Chapter 12, “The Problem of Perfection, or How Can a Clam Mount a Fish on Its Rear End?” I don’t have time right now to re-read the chapter for Gould’s explanation.

Follow the very first link to see video of a freakin’ AMAZING octopus. And I wanna know how that damn octopus does what it does! What evolutionary boo boo for one, and what is the mechanism at all for two.

Wings. I understand how looking a little like a leaf is an advantage. I have even read how eyes evolved - however unlikely - and that makes sense. But wings had to go through a looooong series of steps to produce flight. Bearing in mind that after wings were good enough for flight/soaring, birds then had to evolve hollow bones and not loose wings in the process. Not that one doesn’t exist, but I have yet to read a good explanation of what good a half wing is.

I do believe firmly believe in evolution and realize there was a point to half wings but really, WTF was it?

Gliding.

Ok, I get that, I guess I should have said 1/8 wing. Or 1/16th.