Once again, Colibri comes to the rescue!
As Gould once commented, this is not now the age of humans, nor was there ever an age of the dinosaurs. It is now, and always has been, the Age of Bacteria.
And today, class, we’re going to disect…A CLOWN!
[sub]sorry[/sub]
Speaking of class. How is it that evolution is so widely taught in schools that are full of christians and muslims and i would assume even members of cults. When did the theory of evolution “evolve” into the fact of evolution? If it is taught as a fact, assuming it is true then wouldnt that be the same as saying that the belief in god/gods or religion in general as being untrue? If religion is not allowed in schools, then how are things that I refer to as being anti-religion be allowed? They are basically telling students to sacrifice whatever beliefs they have for a grade.
No. Theory does not equal “guess”. Gravity is a pretty hard fact (don’t believe me, jump off your house), yet we have a Theory of Gravity. As for your statement about religion, well, even the Pope has stated that evolution is not at all at odds with Christian teachings.
Read the John Mace cite and then think of theories in this manner. Theories are premises which are taken as correct for purposes of further study. The theory directs the way in which the studies should aim in looking for further data. If the further data is in accord with the predictions made using the theory as a guide then the theory is said to be supported by the evidence. However, it could still be incomplete, wrong in certain aspects, or just plain wrong. The latter possibility is highly unlikely for a theory like evolution which has been studied to a fare-thee-well for many years by a lot of highly able scientists.
All scientists know this, accept it and are not at all bothered by seeing a theory modified. In fact, that is what virtually 100% of them want to do; i.e. uncover a new bit of data that will allow them to be remembered as having corrected an existing theory, or if really fortunate, propound one that is wholly new and useful.
In logic this is called a non-sequitur. That is, it does not follow that if evolution is true then “the belief in god/gods or religion in general” is untrue. Many Christians accept evolution as God’s method of creating different species.
As has been pointed out, not all Christians look upon the theory of evolution as being anti-religion. Only the extreme, mainly young-earth creationists are so disposed. Them and the Biblical literalists.
Howver, Speaker for the Dead did mention the idea of complexity, so that’s what he was referring to, and he was correct to point that out. Many people who are ignorant of evolution use the strawman argument that evolution claims that organisms always evolve more and more complexity. It would have been better, though, to avoid using “forward” and “backward” because this confuses people too.
Futile Gesture hit it right on the head. Evolution doesn’t do what is BEST. It does what works. And by works I mean allow one set of parents to sucessfully pass their genes to the next.
Monkeys HAVE evolved. There is a trend among all mammals of increasing brain size, animals 45 million years ago had brains significantly smaller than their modern equivalents of similar ecological niche and body mass. They have been getting better at being monkeys, we have been getting better at being tool-using plains apes.
FTR, let’s get our terminology straight. From the content of this thread it’s fairly clear that it’s apes we’re talking about, not monkeys. AFAIK no actual monkey has ever been observed using tools, unless you count the musical group using their guitars…and even they weren’t really using those :D. But I digress. By the reference to tool use I assume that we’re mainly discussing chimpanzees here.
Jeeze, Badtz, that gets me to wondering what monkeys will be like in a few years considering how much trouble they can be now when they move into towns. They have been held at bay by the nasty (for monkeys) climate in North America but if some retired organ grinder’s monkey tells his friends how much warmer he was in his little cap and coat they’ll raid the children’s department at a Yucatan Walmart and start the long march northward, raiding dumpsters all the way. Soon they’ll be sitting in trees flinging crap at us. (shudder)
(Actually, there are three species of monkey with breeding populations in Florida now. First American monkeys in thousands of years. The part of me that isn’t terrified of monkey diseases and saddened that they might be pushing out native species thinks having monkeys in America is really cool.)
That’s cool about the monkeys in Florida, dropzone. What parts(s) of Florida are they in?
Here’s a page with all the exotic mammals that have established themselves in Florida. Scroll down for a breakdown.
If you stop to think about it, it isn’t really our great big brains that make the trick. The hands is the answer. Dolphins have brains as big and complex as humans, yet the persist in living a life quite similar to chimps or any other brainy animal, i.e. Eating, copulating and raising babies.
Without are very effective hands, we would still be one of the great apes. Not chimps or gorillas, but another species.
Remember that chimps and bonobos tell stories too. They lie to gain advantages over their peers and hide food, which shows a fairly complex way of reasoning around cause and effect.
And as others have said here - just because an animal looks primitiv to us, doesn’t mean it’s primitive in an evolutionary sense. Todays jellyfish is a product of billions of years of evolution and that it thrives clearly means it’s succesful. Remember, it’s the ‘survival of the fittest’ - not fit as in strong, but fit as in best suited.
We often claim that the shark is over 100 million years old and look at it with fear and awe. It hasn’t evolved, because there is no reason, it’s very good at what it does, it’s on the top of the food chain and it has very few enemies. As other have said, evolution isn’t a plan, it’s just what is.
Friedo:
“And today, class, we’re going to disect…A CLOWN!”
Hate to continue the hijack, but what is this from? It is killing me!
This is, of course, an entirely incorrect claim. Sharks, as a group have remained very conservative in terms of overall morphology during their span. However, no shark species alive today has been around for anything close to 100 million years. As such, all extant shark species by definition have evolved relative to their ancestors. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be different species! And, of course, the sharks we see today are quite different from many of those found in the Devonian (~400 million years ago), when sharks arguably had their hayday.
Everything has evolved. Do not mistake conservation of form with “no evolution”.
Sorry. I wasn’t clear. I was going to write something about today’s cockroaches, as compared to ancient cockroaches, but I thought it was reduntant when I got to thinking about the popular myth/factoid, that sharks haven’t evolved, so I know what you mean, DF. My bad. Sometimes my typing and trying to generalize gets in the way of facts. That the journalist in me.
:smack:
Of course, you can also consider creatures like sharks and cockroaches to be “evolving in place”, so to speak. If a cockroach is hatched which is better than its ancestors at surviving in its niche long enough to have baby cockroaches, then that cockroach’s genes are going to be more prevalent in the next generation, and so on, until those genes are common in some population of cockroaches. But a cocroach is already very good at what it does, and it has been for millions of years. So any change from normal roachness is exceedingly unlikely to be an advantage to the roach, so a “different” cockroach will probably die off, or at least have fewer than average offspring. So the most successful roaches will be the ones that most closely resemble the successful roaches of previous generations, and the roaches will be busily evolving to stay just the way they are.
Re Darwin’s Finch’s last point, it’s worth mentioning that primates (including humans) are regarded as one of the more “primitive’” groups of mammals (more properly speaking, more “basal”), in the sense of being relatively less modified from the ancestral condition. After all, we still have five fingers and toes, a relatively unmodified skeletal structure, relatively unspecialized dentition, etc.
Taxonomic works are usually arranged starting from the more “primitive” (less modified) groups, and end with the most “advanced” (most modified). Here is the arrangement of mammalian orders from Walker’s Mammals of the World, the standard reference:
Monotremata - platypus, echidna
Marsupialia - marsupials
Insectivora - shrews, moles, etc.
Macroscelidea - elephant shrews
Dermoptera - flying lemurs
Chiroptera - bats
Scandentia - tree shrews
Primates - monkeys, apes, humans
Xenarthra - anteaters, sloths, armadillos
Pholidota - pangolins
Lagomorpha - rabbits
Rodentia - rodents
Cetacea - whales
Carnivora - carnivores
Pinnipedia - seals
Tubulidentata - aardvarks
Proboscidea - elephants
Hyracoidea - hyraxes
Sirenia - sea cows
Perissodactyla - horse, tapirs, rhinos
Artiodactyla - pigs, camels, deer, sheep, etc.
So you can see we are pretty far down the totem pole as far as evolutionary advancement goes. Perhaps the question should be, why haven’t we evolved into cows, which are much more “advanced” as mammals go.