Why do you perceive questions as criticism?
New York Evolution Proof
by metatron 28 Replies latest jw friends
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rem
Siegs,
One thing that helps in understanding Evolution is to understand the true "purpose" of living things. Their only purpose is to survive long enough to reproduce. A tree's purpose is not to put oxygen in the air - that's just a waste product of the tree that other living things happen to use to survive. The purpose of the zebra is not to be eaten by the lion and visa versa. Their only purpose is to make more zebras and lions. Any trait that will help this purpose will be taken advantage of by the organism and over generations populations of the organism will be dominated with individuals with the advantageous trait(s).
This leads to "arms races" where the fastest zebras ultimately survive, thus over time populations of zebras run faster. Simultaneously the faster lions will reproduce more since they will be able to catch more zebras. Hence lion populations become faster over time. This works for other traits too such as coloration, teeth, claws, poisons, size, etc. Competition is the catalyst to variation. Natural selection picks out the best genes to pass on to the next generation. So really, there is no reason to believe that there would be "bare necessities". In reality, the animal is "just good enough" to survive to reproductive age, but over generations of natural selection amazing variation is possible.
Now there are also other forces at work that keep zebras and lions from reaching light speed - they only have limited resources to pull from, but the variety available in the genes is amazing. Life fills niches, that's why there is variety - wherever life can get an advantage, it will exploit it.
Think of a glass of water. The water is life and the glass is the environment. Life fits it's environment perfectly and adapts to new environments. It's as if the water fills the cup - even little crevices. The water is not pre-formed into the shape of a cup and then a cup built to the water's form so the water will fit into it.
One thing also is not to confuse Evolution with Abiogenesis (life from nonlife). They are two separate theories. Evolution only deals with life after it was started, so it is not incompatible with a deity. Unclepenn needs to face the facts that there is predation and survival of the fittest in real life, so he will have to deal with the reality of what that means about the personality of the deity he believes created this system.
rem
"We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking." - Mark Twain
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siegswife
Thanks for your answer.
(((Unclepenn needs to face the facts that there is predation and survival of the fittest in real life, so he will have to deal with the reality of what that means about the personality of the deity he believes created this system.)))
This comment kinda leads into my next question. If evolution is a device neccessary for a species to survive, why did some of them remain as they are? Maybe I don't understand what evolution is asserting at this time. Doesn't it teach that man, for example, evolved from apes? If this is so, why are there still apes? If evolution is for purposes of survival, how did the apes that remained apes survive without evolving?
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rem
siegs,
If evolution is a device neccessary for a species to survive, why did some of them remain as they are? Maybe I don't understand what evolution is asserting at this time. Doesn't it teach that man, for example, evolved from apes? If this is so, why are there still apes? If evolution is for purposes of survival, how did the apes that remained apes survive without evolving?
This is a very common question and a common misconception. I have to admit that I had these very same questions before doing some research on this subject.The main misconception is that evolution teaches that man came from apes. This is not true. What we see in the fossil record (and what evolutionary theory predicts) is that humans and apes share a common ancestor. From the fossil record and DNA analysis, we can see that this common ancestor (not an individual, but a population) lived around 5 to 10 million years ago. Modern apes have evolved and are not the same as their ancestor apes millions of years ago. The same way, modern humans are not the same as our ancient ancestors. So really, these animals have been evolving all this time and they continue to evolve just as humans continue to evolve.
Another thing to understand is that evolution is not linear (fish -> lizard -> ape -> human). Evolution is more like a bush with many branches and leaves. If a species evolves, it doesn't necessarily mean the death of the original species - both may live side by side, filling their own niche, or they may be separated geographically. Thus they branch off. This means that related species are more like cousins than father/son. Apes and humans are like cousins - apes did not come from humans and humans did not come from apes. Many related species can live at the same time.
Of course, it is also true that over 99% of all species that have ever lived on the earth have become extinct (over time - not in one event such as a Noah's flood or anything like that). So there are many different species in the human line that have gone extinct, such as Homo Erectus (the same is true in the chimpanzee line). Since extinction is not uncommon, it is not unusual for our immediate ancestors to have gone extinct. They simply couldn't cope with the new environment or competition by emerging species.
There are a couple of ways to easily tell if someone does not understand evolution: If they relate it with the Big Bang, Abiogenesis (how the first reproducing molecules appeared), or some atheistic philosophy. Also if they say that evolution teaches that man came from apes, you know they don't know what they are talking about. The difference is subtle, but important. Also, always think populations. Evolution does not work on individuals, but is a change in populations over generations.
By the way, there is a great FAQ on http://www.talkorigins.org that deals with many questions that newbies to evolutionary theory have. It's a great resource for laymen like us.
I hope that helped! :)
rem
"We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking." - Mark Twain
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Unclepenn1
Jan H wrote- After totally ignoring and sidestepping my arguments, you wrote:
Sorry. Propose them again and I will address them. As for the word 'leaves' being formed by falling leaves from a tree, you did not address that one. Please do so on your next post, because I would really like to hear what you have to say about that.
Jan H wrote > One example: Consider that many plants actually spread by being eaten by animals. The more tasty a plant is, the more likely it is to be eaten. Over generations, natural selection will improve the "taste" of these plants, since the least edible will not procreate as much as the better individuals.
The problem with that assertion is that evolution has no design or purpose. It is blind, deaf and dumb. When you keep using the term 'natural selection' all that is is a fancy term for the word DEATH. Natural selection only means that things die. You use it as a creative agent and act like it has creative abilities. The only thing that is actually doing any creating (according to evolutionists) is mutation. Yet, when we look at the world we do not see mutations being beneficial. Mutations are great for explaining cancer, disease etc. You rely on these mutations for complex systems which is totally and absolutely illogical. Do you really think the visual system came about by a series of accidents? How about the auditory system? R. Dawkins talks about a blind watchmaker when in reality it would be a <B>comatose</B> watchmaker.
Let me give you an example. Let's say that in the prebiotic world there was a worm like creature that evolved. It is blind because eyes have not yet evolved, so its world is dark and mysterious. Let's say for the sake of argument, a baby worm is born with two red spots on its face, early formed retinas. Can the worm now see? No! There is much more to vision that just retinas. What if it was born with full blown eyeballs. (Iris, pupil, retinas, etc) can this worm see? No! It has none of the proper hook ups for vision-the optic nerve, lens, cornea, etc. Now why would this worm be more able to survive better than his brothers? He wouldn't! The mutation has done nothing to improve the survivability of the species and it would die. Most likely without passing along the mysterious red spots on it' s head. Are you following this logic?
Please address these issues :)
Penn
Mohammed- 'My teachings lead to the attainment of truth'
Buddha- 'The truth has been revealed to me'
Jesus- 'I am the truth' -
rem
Unclepenn,
Have you actually read any books by Richard Dawkins? I didn't think so. You are like a teenager who thinks he knows everything and yet knows nothing at all. You seem to revel in your ignorance as if it were something to be proud of. So sad.
But to address your question about the hypothetical worm with retinas on it, yes it has been shown that (what we would call) partial features can be beneficial. Note that natural selection is not trying to make an eye, it just works out after generations and generations. In fact, the eye has been independently evolved many times in many different forms.
An animal with a light sensitive patch (not a fully formed eye) could use it to its advantage. Light hitting the patch can tell the animal which way is up and which way is down. If the animal's food source is up (or down - say in water) then this animal will have an advantage over the others because it will find more food more easily. This feature would be more prominent in the gene pool after numerous generations. There are many other ways in which partial features can be beneficial - that was just a simple example.
Hopefully everyone on this board will see how ignorant fundies like Unclepenn are when it comes to evolution. You are just embarassing yourself, Unclepenn, as we have recommended you do you research many times. But time and time again you come back with no more knowledge than before.
Again, I recommend you read Blind Watchmaker, The Selfish Gene, or Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins. After you read an introduction to evolutionary theory by a real scientist you will understand exactly how Natural Selection works and how it really can create useful organs and great variety.
rem
p.s. Your example about the leaves shows you know nothing about evolution because Natural Selection only works on features that help an organism to reproduce better. Arranging leaves doesn't help anything reproduce better, so what would it have to do with evolution?
"We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking." - Mark Twain
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Unclepenn1
>An animal with a light sensitive patch (not a fully formed eye) could use it to its advantage
Please inform this ignorant and uneducated person on how this mysterious 'light sensitive patch' can come about by mutations. How many of the nerve endings and parts of the eye needed for sight, would this 'light sensitive patched' animal need to see lights and darks? Answer: pretty much all of them. Here is a brief example.
Light from an object enters the eye first through the clear cornea and then through the pupil, the circular opening in the iris. Next, the light is converged by the crystalline lens to a point immediately behind the lens; at that point, the image becomes inverted. The light progresses through the gelatinous vitreous humor and, ideally, back to a clear focus on the retina, the central area of which is the macula. In the retina, light impulses are changed into electrical signals and then sent along the optic nerve and back to the occipital (posterior) lobe of the brain, which interprets these electrical signals as visual images.
Even if the eye has not 'evolved' to this stage, most of all the things I mentioned must be in place for the brain to know what is light and what is dark. You just disregard the complexity needed and disguise your poor arguments with attacks on my character. Ad Hominem remarks saying that I am 'reveling in my ignorance' and 'embarrasing myself'. It's amazing to me that everytime I question the most basic fundamentals of evolutionary theory, my arguments are not dismantled but rather I am attacked as being ignorant or uneducated. Is that all you got REM? Namecalling? I am here to have a respectful conversation and all I am getting in a condescending attitude.
Penn
Mohammed- 'My teachings lead to the attainment of truth'
Buddha- 'The truth has been revealed to me'
Jesus- 'I am the truth' -
rem
Unclepenn,
You are getting a condecending attitude because you are ignorant of Evolutionary theory and you refuse to educate yourself.
But I should do better than that. I apologize for being short with you. It's just that I've spoken with literally scores of fundies who all have the same questions that are easily answered by doing a bit of reading on the subject. These questions are so basic that I feel that I can do a decent job of answering them even though I'm just a layman with no science background other than Highschool and dozens of books I've read.
In regards to your question about the retina, all you did was push the question back one more step instead of aknowledging that a partial feature could be useful. No one is saying that that is really how it happened - it's just a hypothetical explanation.
In the question that you asked about the underlying connection to the brain, (here again hypothetically because this is probably not the way it happened in real life) the worm-like creature already has a simple nervous system (probably not yet a brain) with nerves going to the skin for different useful senses. The light patches would just be a modification of existing nerves - not a creation of new ones. Hence, the connection to the underlying nervous system is already in place. Basically, a few cells change their job from sensing touch to sensing light.
The point of this is not to say that this ever did happen, but to show you the way evolution works from a 30,000 foot perspective. Evolutionists don't claim macro mutations are useful in evolution (evolving a whole or partial eye), but there are many, many steps that rely on the already devoloped underlying system to "progress".
Again, I apologize for being rude to you. I do sincerely ask that you read some books by real evolutionists so you can at least understand the other side of the issue.
rem
"We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking." - Mark Twain
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rem
Uncelpenn,
Regarding your question:
Please inform this ignorant and uneducated person on how this mysterious 'light sensitive patch' can come about by mutations. How many of the nerve endings and parts of the eye needed for sight, would this 'light sensitive patched' animal need to see lights and darks? Answer: pretty much all of them. Here is a brief example.
The animal would not need most of the things mentioned here to just destinguish between light and dark. The many features of human eyes are to aide in focusing light and seeing color. These features (iris, pupil, lense, vitreous humor, etc.) are not needed for a simple creature (with no real brain) to have some type of advantage over others of the same species. A light-sensing patch would not need the light to be focused, it would just need to sense photons. There probably wouldn't even need to be that many cells to do this - the patch may be microscopic. It might even sense different frequencies than we do, such as ultra-violet or infra-red. But that's not the point. The point is that you are trying to force evolution to work in a way that it doesn't - macro mutations don't happen (at least when they do, they aren't usually helpful for the organism). Organs build from simpler tissues, organs, but only if there is some advantage to it. It's a sloooooooooooow process, one feature at a time.Light from an object enters the eye first through the clear cornea and then through the pupil, the circular opening in the iris. Next, the light is converged by the crystalline lens to a point immediately behind the lens; at that point, the image becomes inverted. The light progresses through the gelatinous vitreous humor and, ideally, back to a clear focus on the retina, the central area of which is the macula. In the retina, light impulses are changed into electrical signals and then sent along the optic nerve and back to the occipital (posterior) lobe of the brain, which interprets these electrical signals as visual images.
I hope that helps a bit,
rem
"We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking." - Mark Twain