One aspect of evolution that does not make sense.....

by EndofMysteries 153 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  EndofMysteries

  The part that DOES make sense are how bodies adapt over time to surroundings and use. For example because of eating habits changing, our jaws have become smaller and we don't need wisdom teeth. Or the effect of the sun on our skin, etc.

  But how on Earth can defense mechanisms be evolved in animals? '

  For example, how did the ability to camouflage get onto chameleons? What made their DNA or whereever it came from say, "My species is being eaten up by predators, so I better evolve the ability to camouflage." If a chemeleon is eaten up, it can't pass anything that would trigger an evolution. How did an insect at one point turn into the leaf insect? At some point it decided that to look like a leaf would protect it?

  Those things are not a response to their body from the surroundings, it's to avoid just vanishing altogether.

  Let's say that car accidents cause 50% of human deaths by their heads being crushed in the accident. Those who died can't pass anything down, so will somehow humans magically evolve into super hard shell heads to avoid their heads being crushed from an accident?

  This is different then lets say if many people kept loosing a finger and over time the ability to regrow the finger came, because there would be some information on the body passed down. But those that are dead are dead and if the death is due to a one time thing, it doesn't make sense those abilities could come from evolution.
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  prologos

  well your god is the god of the living, so the advantage of camouflage must be a change that happened before the thing procreated, and passed on.

  It sounds far fetched, but here it is. Hard heads not only to escape injury, but the truth about the truth.

  take care.
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  EndofMysteries

  I want to add that saying something along the lines of it evolved to blend in and hide is not an acceptable answer. It's one thing if a species evolves because of a constant parasite attack, etc, but for an evolution to be due to blending in and hiding so it's not eaten, that denotes intelligence. What in their body figured out that if they don't blend in they may be eaten? What in their body determined what blending in actually is? Those things are not a response to something on their body like constant sunlight, parasites, food changes, weather changes, etc. How would the body even know it was at risk of predators and a way to blend in?
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  snare&racket

  These things are long understood, may I humbly suggest a library and not an internet forum for your answers.

  Whilst I am here, you say you understand how evolution can be involved in human traits that we see. I assume you don't know how these traits are produced from your question or your assumption that intelligence is required.

  The DNA is copied millions of times a second inside a living organism. It makes millions of mistakes All the time in copying. Some get through the dna 'spell checker' some dont. Errors made in the DNA can lead to anything from cancer, to being covered in hair, to having 6 fingers to having all the organs in your body on the wrong side of the body. Or indeed a freckle. It can also lead to skin pigmentation changes, patterns etc etc etc.

  These errors in the DNA only offer the traits , it is the enviroment that selects them, hence the term 'natural selection'. There is no intelligence involved at all. Let me explain....

  Let's use a real example : The Peppered Moth.

  Before the industrial revolution moths were prevelantly white in colour. Why? Because that made them camoflauged to the ash trees they sat on, and difficult for the predators to see. The industrial revolution brought smoke and dirt, the white moths sat upon darkened trees were now sticking out like the proverbial thumb of soreness. Black moths now survived and reproduced in larger numbers in an enviroment where smoke made surfaces a lot darker.

  

  So the dna mutations gives us the various colours and patterns in the moth, the enviroment and predatorial behaviour dictates what is advantageous And what is not. Survival of the fittest is the most misunderstoof element to evolution in my experience, it is not the strongest, fastest, most vicious... darwin CLEARLY explained that it was a refferal to the enviroment. Whichever organism fits the enviroment best, will procreate more, it is common sense. These organisms will orevail and so will their genes.

  Try

  not to get hung up on the specifics of this example, it is a real example and very useful for explaining the mechanism of mutation and then natural selection. Use it to understand the role of the genes and the very seperate role of the enviroment. That is all evolution is.

  Do you have anything to ask following this? P.s. a good book is 'The Greatest Show on Earth' by Dawkins, or a great textbook is 'Biology' by campbell and Reece. Dawkins explains it in very simple terms with lots of examples, but has an atheist pov, the textbook is a little more hard work but aimed at a 16yr old so not too bad.
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  Apognophos

  You really need to do yourself a favor and read an introductory book about evolution, so you think about this stuff from the right direction. For instance, this is totally backwards:

  Let's say that car accidents cause 50% of human deaths by their heads being crushed in the accident. Those who died can't pass anything down, so will somehow humans magically evolve into super hard shell heads to avoid their heads being crushed from an accident?

  Why would the ones who die in accidents need to pass on their genes? Genes can't decide to make harder heads, so the experience of an organism getting in an accident and injuring its head cannot lead to any alteration in its genes (well, let's leave epigenetics out of this for simplicity's sake). Among the general population of humans, the ones who naturally have harder heads will survive an accident that the weaker-headed ones will not. It is those survivors who need to pass on their genes. Over time, the selective process (the car accidents coupled with random genetic variation) leads to a race of harder-headed people descended from the ones who survived.

  The same is true of the insects that mimic leaves and twigs and such: their ancestors survived through luck, like any organisms, but also gained a slight advantage from looking slightly like a natural object by chance. This may have only given them a 1% advantage, but we are talking about large numbers of generations and predator attacks, so over time even a tiny advantage, like being colored a bit more brown or green than average, will get passed down.

  The next generation will vary in color too, and the 1% browner/greener children will survive slightly more frequently, and so on. It's an iterative process which gradually refines a design, following a path that was begun by chance but which proved accidentally beneficial. No animal or gene is "deciding" to do anything.

  If everything wasn't constantly getting killed by everything else or starving due to insufficient resources, there wouldn't be any evolution to speak of, so it's the deadliness of our planet that drives this process of painstaking refinement over thousands and millions of years.
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  OnTheWayOut

  Not all the cameleons died, so the ones that blended in with their surroundings slightly better than their cousin survived more often to pass on their genes more often than their cousin. Same with the leaf-looking creature. The original creature that hid in the leaves better got to pass on genes more often.

  If all humans were involved in terrible car crashes that typically led to head trauma, and nothing was done about it, the humans who had the the thickest skulls would probably get to pass on their genes more often than their cousins.

  Death eliminates one from the gene pool.
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  snare&racket

  As for the example of the car crash, you are misunderstood. The only way human skulls could evolve to such an enviroment, IF they were able to in time, would be if car crashes and skull damage were threatening our race, specifically from reproducing. It is not.

  ironically our cranium is substantially strong. It has evolved to be so to survive childhood and procreation in Africa.

  olease don't get into this until you have understood the evolutionary process, you will just get yourself into circles. Don't take offence at this, we all had to learn it before we understood it. Nobody is born with knowledge of evolution, abiogenesis, quantum mechanics or an understanding of the 'offside' rule.

  go read some books is not meant to be offensive, it is said with 100% sincerity and excitment at the idea that one more ex-JW may enjoy the pleasure of learning what was denied to us for so long.

  snare x
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  rebel8

  Natural selection.

  It's easier to understand creation myths because they are designed to explain complex things without requiring actual knowledge about biology, etc.

  There are some really interesting websites and books that explain this stuff to those of us who were deprived of scientific literacy by a young earth creationist cult.
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  Comatose

  Think about an animal living in a climate that changed and became very cold. Evolution doesn't intelligently decide to grow hair and store fat to protect the animal. Instead the animals which have a natural variation of longer or thicker hair and a natural propensity to store fat will live longer. By living longer they can mate more than the ones with thin hair and no fat to shield them who die quickly. By mating more, then more of their genes in turn have time to be passed on through more young, eventually over a lonnnnngggggg time period the gene pool slides toward longer hair and more fat. No intelligence here, just NATURAL SELECTION. :)

  Apply the above example to almost any type of trait you could think of. Insects who blend in with leaves are eaten less and again pass on genes and survive better. It's a magnificent orchestration of a natural outcome.
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  Comatose

  By the way, I'm no scientist, and never got to attend college etc.. But this is how I understand it after reading a few good books on it. Dawkins is good and I found Jerry Coyne's -Why Evolution Is True, very easy to read for a simple average person.