Cofty, is there any chance you could you put your series into a PDF and upload it somewhere? It would be really useful to have it as a single document. - Splash
Interesting idea. I will look into that.
Posts by cofty
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340Calling Cofty and others regarding evolution
by dubstepped inso i have started down the path of trying to understand evolution, and to get the linear lies that the jws planted in my head out of it.
i bought an audiobook called "evolution: what the fossils say and why it matters" by donald prothero.
i heard it recommended on an atheist podcast that i listened to.
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cofty
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48
Evolution doesn't happen today...WRONG...
by HowTheBibleWasCreated inlast year i had a brother tell me that one proof evolution is false is that he doesn't see it happening today... i was going to bring of viruses evolving so fast that new vaccines must be developed each year but felt he was too closed minded to receive it.
today i was listening to the audio book of 'an ancestors tale- richard dawkins' and noted oe point that shined through.. here is evolution happening>>>.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/05/2/l_052_05.html.
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cofty
Anthony Flew was senile. William Dembski and Jonathan Wells have no such excuse.
Stop cherry-picking out of context quotes from the internet and read some actual books.
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340
Calling Cofty and others regarding evolution
by dubstepped inso i have started down the path of trying to understand evolution, and to get the linear lies that the jws planted in my head out of it.
i bought an audiobook called "evolution: what the fossils say and why it matters" by donald prothero.
i heard it recommended on an atheist podcast that i listened to.
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cofty
Fisherman - That is one of those dumb things that creationists keep telling each other but none of them ever check to see if it's true.
It isn't.
We have an embarrassment of riches of transitional forms.
I have even described some of them to you in the Evolution is a Fact series but you are too lazy/prejudiced/arrogant/ to bother to read it.
#11 Tiktaalik
An amazing fossil discovery illustrates the transition of life from sea to land.#16 Aquatic Mammals
An excellent sequence of fossils illustrates the evolutionary journey of whales from land to sea.#18 Fish Fingers
The evolution of limbs is mapped out in an amazing sequence of ancient fish fossils.#20 Lucy in the Sky...
An exceptional fossil of a 3 million year old hominid.#21 Footprints in the Sand...
Footprints at Laetoli show our Australopithecus afarensis ancestors were bipedal 3.6 million years ago.#23 Faunal Succession...
The consistent sequence of fossils found in the rocks can only be explained by evolution.#24 The Origin of Your Inner Ear...
How the bones that reptiles eat with became the bones that we hear with.So then what evidence do you have for your ill-informed assertions?
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340
Calling Cofty and others regarding evolution
by dubstepped inso i have started down the path of trying to understand evolution, and to get the linear lies that the jws planted in my head out of it.
i bought an audiobook called "evolution: what the fossils say and why it matters" by donald prothero.
i heard it recommended on an atheist podcast that i listened to.
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cofty
The concept of the 'selfish gene' is a very useful way of understanding evolution. Bodies - whether that is a human, fish, insect or oak tree - are vehicles by which genes travel through time.
Combinations of genes that build bodies that are better at leaving copies of those same genes, by definition leave more copies.
Sexual reproduction shuffles the pack allowing favourable combinations to travel together and freeing them from less effective genes.
The vast majority of our genome consists of code that contributes nothing to the phenotype but hitches a free ride alongside the much smaller percentage of code that does the real work.
Keep in mind that the phrase 'selfish gene' is a metaphor. There is no agency or teleology. Genes that build bodies that are unselfish and cooperative members of social species are successful 'selfish genes'.
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340
Calling Cofty and others regarding evolution
by dubstepped inso i have started down the path of trying to understand evolution, and to get the linear lies that the jws planted in my head out of it.
i bought an audiobook called "evolution: what the fossils say and why it matters" by donald prothero.
i heard it recommended on an atheist podcast that i listened to.
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cofty
In Prothero's book he mentioned some birds and an island where the food source changed to nuts. So then, the birds that had beaks that could break open the nuts for sustenance already existed on the island, it isn't like over time they developed, but they now had an advantage? I could swear that I've read about animals that adapted to different climates and such. So that was incorrect?
Yes it's misleading to talk about animals 'adapting' to their environment. Species adapt individuals don't.
This is well illustrated in the following study of feral pigeons - Something Darwin didn't say...
Imagine a population of finches where one or a few have a slightly stronger beak. In normal times it offers no advantage but if the environment changes so that seeds are less plentiful these individuals will get more food and even if it is by a small percentage leave more offspring. Big strong beaks don't happen suddenly but by numerous incremental changes.
Edited to add - You will find the sort of 'adaptation' language in some biological texts. It's a sort of shorthand as is talk about 'design' which refers to a correlation between form and function. It's important to recognise these or they cause confusion. Sometimes the author is just ill-informed especially in the popular press.
Oh, so we didn't evolve from chimps. Right, that's linear and not accurate. As the tree branches grew on this tree of life there was a limb that was common to us, but the branches off of that limb were different, gradually so of course and over time.
Yes that's right. Life is a tree not a ladder. Most of the branches were dead-ends. More than 99% of species that ever lived went extinct before humans appeared.
in some ways, evolution does kind of end with us, barring some strong change in environment.
There is probably some truth in that although it is controversial. The human species will go on changing insofar as there will be changes in the frequency of alleles in the human gene-pool. However our mastery of our environment has probably reduced the selective pressure that was faced by our ancestors. Evolution also shapes us from the neck up. I wonder if that is where we might see more rapid change.
So these illnesses come out because we can no longer procreate? With men still being able to procreate and women not being able to after a certain age, are there higher percentages of genetic illnesses found in the female population? Or am I missing this point altogether?
Not quite. The point is that individuals who have genetic defects that result in death or incapacity at an age before they leave offspring don't get passed on and tend to get removed from the gene-pool. Illnesses that tend not to appear until after we have produced copies of our genes are unseen by natural selection and tend to accumulate. There is a related reason why you shouldn't marry your cousin. Harmful recessive genes accumulate with impunity because we usually have another good copy. Close relatives are more likely to share the same defects resulting in all sorts of issues for offspring. This is becoming a real worry in some insular religious communities.
Oh, and are we related to the plants too? If I have to throw them in the mix my brain my break, lol
Yes absolutely!
For billions of years only 'simple' prokaryotic organisms existed like bacteria and archaea. An amazing event of endosymbiosis led to the advent of more complex eukaryotic cells. This made multicellular life possible. The problem of energy production was overcome by the mitochondria that were once free-living bacteria existing inside every cell. Bacteria produce energy across their surface membrane but the bigger a blob gets the surface gets relatively smaller compared to the volume. Cells began to specialise and build large complex bodies where the job of replication was assigned to just the sex cells. [Cancer is an illness where a cell has gone native and reverted to individual uncontrolled reproduction]
The origin of complex cells...
Multicellular life includes plants and animals although in fact it is not so simple to differentiate. If you look for 'cladograms' on google images you will see examples of how the tree of life develops.
Here is an interactive tree you can play with...
Dawkins book "The Ancestors Tale" covers this in detail
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340
Calling Cofty and others regarding evolution
by dubstepped inso i have started down the path of trying to understand evolution, and to get the linear lies that the jws planted in my head out of it.
i bought an audiobook called "evolution: what the fossils say and why it matters" by donald prothero.
i heard it recommended on an atheist podcast that i listened to.
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cofty
I am a creationist and a staunch evolutionist. I see nothing about one that precludes the other. - Searill
I'm interested in how you reconcile the two. Do you resort to supernatural solutions to difficult design challenges or do you adhere carefully to methodological naturalism?
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48
Evolution doesn't happen today...WRONG...
by HowTheBibleWasCreated inlast year i had a brother tell me that one proof evolution is false is that he doesn't see it happening today... i was going to bring of viruses evolving so fast that new vaccines must be developed each year but felt he was too closed minded to receive it.
today i was listening to the audio book of 'an ancestors tale- richard dawkins' and noted oe point that shined through.. here is evolution happening>>>.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/05/2/l_052_05.html.
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cofty
Could you specify what misinformation creationists like to use in their "debates"? - Saename
The explanation is a bit technical but here is the explanation by Jerry Coyne.
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340
Calling Cofty and others regarding evolution
by dubstepped inso i have started down the path of trying to understand evolution, and to get the linear lies that the jws planted in my head out of it.
i bought an audiobook called "evolution: what the fossils say and why it matters" by donald prothero.
i heard it recommended on an atheist podcast that i listened to.
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cofty
Hi dubstepped. Sorry if I am repeating stuff that has already been covered above.
Prothero very much focuses on the evidence for evolution from paleontology. He begins by defending his field from the false accusations made by creationists regarding the geological column and dating methods. It is full of great information - he has released a new volume recently - but for an introduction to biological evolution it's not a great choice.
The book list suggested by Anders is excellent but I would add "The Blind Watchmaker" by Dawkins.
I thought he was supposed to go into the primordial soup but he never even mentioned it.
Very few books on evolution also deal with the origin of life. Abiogenesis is a distinct field of study. There is some really good work being done at UCL (London) by Nick Lane and his team that is approaching the problem via bioenergetics. In other words where did the energy come from to fuel the transition from geochemistry to biochemistry? "Organic soup" is not a likely candidate. Creationists are not wrong when they say that you can spark a can of soup as long as you like but you will never get life. If you want to look further into this topic Nick Lane's "The Vital Question" is extremely interesting. Alternatively you could get "Life Arising" by the same author where you will get one chapter on this topic and nine on other fascinating aspects of evolution.
What I gather is that there are two types of evolution, micro and macro
These are not really phrases that would be used by most biologists. Changes in the frequency of particular versions of genes -alleles - accumulate over time. Deciding when micro becomes macro is very subjective. Obviously when a population has changed sufficiently that they can no longer interbreed with the parent species then an important line has been crossed. That can be a subtle as the difference between Herring Gulls and Lesser Black-backed Gulls or as startling as the gap between chimps and humans. It's all the same mechanisms at play.
Such evolution occurs due to environmental pressures or maybe some part of dna changing through reproduction. It is more likely to occur somewhere like on an island that is more isolated and where a change in one progeny is less likely to breed out due to a large population.
Yes. The key thing to remember is that nothing ever adapts to its environment. Rather a variety of genetic variation exists within a gene-pool. When changes happen in an environment in an isolated breeding group then some of those variations will confer a slight advantage. The frequency of that mutation will then become more common - or even ubiquitous - in that population.
Unlike the linear way that evolution was presented to us where an amphibian turns into a mammal that turns into a monkey and eventually a human (I butchered that), there were slight changes over time in chimps over time that led to us. There is only a small difference in dna between us and a chimp.
Just to clarify we and chimps both evolved from a common ancestor about 6 million years ago. Both lineages have been changing since then. The genetic difference is now about 1.5% but that means that our genome has only changed by about half that amount in that time.
I just can't seem to grasp how those different species evolved in the first place. I see that birds can evolve to have different characteristics, but are birds still evolving in a macro way into something as different as a dolphin is from a bird? Or if such a small genetic change as there is between a chip and a human creates such different creatures (we are quite different than a chimp even with 99% similarity in DNA), then why don't we see other large changes like that more?
Three things to sort out here. One is that a change of just a few percent in a genome is still an awful lot of changes. We have three billion base pairs in our genome. Most mutations happen in the non-coding region and has a neutral effect.
The other thing is to think about the genome more like a chemical formula or a recipe than a blueprint. A small change in a blueprint results in a small change in the building. A tiny change in chemical formula can have a radical change in the end result - be that a chemical compound or a sponge cake. Genes that build amino acids - that join up to build proteins - are unlikely to change much or often. There are lots of ways to make proteins that don't work but not so easy to make alternative ways to make ones that work better. However a significant part of genome are more like switches that turn on and off the production of proteins. A change in these parts of our genome can produce novel innovations. Think of it like the instructions for producing origami models. One change in the routine can make a real difference. In the nine months we were forming in the womb, cascades of genetic switches were turning on and off sculpting the embryo. This area of evolution is referred to as evolutionary developmental biology or 'evo-devo'. The most accessible books on this are by Sean B. Carroll (the biologist not the physicist by the same name) For example "Endless Forms Most Beautiful" and "The Making of thE Fittest".
The third point I want to make is about selective pressure. Life has evolved over millions of years to fill every possible niche on the planet. Having refined their design by natural selection there just isn't a strong pressure on most species to change. Some species look identical in the fossil record as their extant descendants. Remember evolution only cares about passing on genes. If our design is good enough to leave behind viable offspring its job is done. We might want to evolve the ability to run like a cheetah but evolution can't do it unless that increases our ability to find a mate and breed. That is also why we get so many genetic illnesses in old age. There is no evolutionary pressure to eradicate those from the gene-pool.
I hope that helps a little. Please feel free to ask more questions. It's really refreshing to see sincere questions about evolution for a change.
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48
Evolution doesn't happen today...WRONG...
by HowTheBibleWasCreated inlast year i had a brother tell me that one proof evolution is false is that he doesn't see it happening today... i was going to bring of viruses evolving so fast that new vaccines must be developed each year but felt he was too closed minded to receive it.
today i was listening to the audio book of 'an ancestors tale- richard dawkins' and noted oe point that shined through.. here is evolution happening>>>.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/05/2/l_052_05.html.
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cofty
At the core of evolutionists and atheists is the hatred of irreligiousness and irrationality of religions. - Venus
Well that's nonsense. The vast majority of theists accept the fact of biological evolution with no problem.
You can have evolution with or without god.
Typical example is modern day atheism High Priest Richard Dwakin's God Delusion. Book speaks more on religious irrationality than the process of evolution.
Dawkins has written many books on biological evolution that say nothing at all about religion. I can think of 6 or 7 titles off the top of my head. His book "The god Delusion" speaks more about religion than it does about evolution because it is about religion and not about evolution.
You will find that most atheists are not huge fans of Dawkins anti-god rants. He is nobodies "High Priest".
even though theory cannot explain too great things such as origin of universe, origin of life, origin of consciousness
That is like complaining that your umbrella can't predict when it is going to rain.
Once again we see another member of your BK cult team posting on your account. One minute you have perfect English and the next it is back to broken English. Nobody is interested in your stupid cult.
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340
Calling Cofty and others regarding evolution
by dubstepped inso i have started down the path of trying to understand evolution, and to get the linear lies that the jws planted in my head out of it.
i bought an audiobook called "evolution: what the fossils say and why it matters" by donald prothero.
i heard it recommended on an atheist podcast that i listened to.
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cofty
Hi dusptepped - marking for later .Will get back to you this evening UK time.