To look at them in the zoo, of course. George W. Bush's terms as president wouldn't have been as much fun without monkeys.
Evolution
(74 posts) (23 voices)-
Ty
ModeratorMy personal favorite (stupid) argument is the one that assumes that the homo sapien path (intelligence, tool use, language, etc) is the RIGHT one. And the fact that other things aren't turning into humans shows that evolution isn't true.
I made someone's head explode once by trying to explain to them that chimps are exactly as highly evolved as humans are. So are slugs.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Yoav
Member@Jeremiah
A mutation will initially get diluted if there isn't a selective advantage in it. At any point there are probably millions of such mutations, some will disappear completely, some will stay at a very low frequency. If a mutation give's some competitive advantage to the individual that carry it then it's frequency will increase until at some point it may be present in the entire population. Your point about a small population is a very important one, that's why islands tend to have high frequency of endemic species who are usually descend from a relatively small initial population that have very little opportunity for genetic exchange with the parent population.Posted 2 years ago # -
flyz4free
MemberRegarding the mention of former President GW Bush here is a fine quote:
"No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."
Regarding education I believe Bush was in charge of the No Child Left Informed program.But on to evolution from my corner of the world. (fyi I just turned 60) In high school my biology class was taught by a wonderful woman who had us collect and classify 100 different wild flowers. She also stated sex was for procreation and otherwise it was a sin. Many more delicate questions often went unanswered or were theologically explained. I had a good biology class in college in which I did not apply myself so I am trying to make up for that now.
Of late I have been trying to educate myself on these matters as I have several creationist friends and relatives that I want to converse with intelligently...and by that I mean be able to actually explain the terms they throw around with impunity such as 'irreducible complexity' and why the eye, woodpecker tongue and bacterial flagellum are not irreducibly complex in terms they (and I) can understand. My friend Chuck did ask me why, if we are descended from chimpanzees there still are chimpanzees? I told him one does not derive from the other but that we both had a common ancestor from which we branched off separately several million years ago. I also had to tell him evolution makes no statements about the beginning of life, just how life evolved into present forms. (raised eyebrows to both statements) I want to become more familiar with DNA, chromosomes, genome mapping and how they support the evolutionary trail of various species. Having read The Greatest Show on Earth I should have a better understanding but I have little opportunity to converse on these topics and my retention is abysmal. So I will contribute when I can and will look forward to the discourse. I certainly appreciate the input of such educated folks who take the time to contribute.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Mark the Pilgrim
MemberIn general I try to moderate my generalisations and opinions of mass groups of people, but with the evolution debate, I have finally come around to the point whereby I think that if you don't believe in evolution in the 21st Century, then you're either uneducated in that area or simply a wilful idiot.
If someone doesn't believe in evolution because they haven't been exposed to the theories, then I suppose I can't really fault them. I would give them a book to read about it or show them a site about it, but I wouldn't consider them stupid. But in terms of the latter, who learns about evolution; hears about the mountain of evidence supporting it; is shown how illogical the intelligent design position seems; and sees the application of evolutionary theory in modern science, but yet turns around and says "it's just a theory - God must have done it all like in the story of Genesis" - then that person is being wilfully blind. If you cling to a stupid belief in spite of the evidence against it, then you must want to be ignorant. And that's not a good thing.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Listening is good advice for all of us. But please don't shut up (sorry if you thought I was telling you to). I am enjoying your contributions.
Continue to speak your mind. I will continue to speak mine. If you say something I think is wrong, I will attempt to improve your information (while keeping in mind that you might see something I don't). Just trying to be helpful.
And if you see me say something you think is wrong (a possibility that increases rapidly as the conversation moves from religion to biology) I hope you will try to help me in this same way.
This is the only way our information gets better.
Posted 2 years ago # -
UrsaMinor
Member@flyz4free:
There's a good article on Wikipedia about the evolution of the eye starting from a flat patch of photosensitive cells on the skin and going on through the fully enclosed organ with a lens at the front and a retina at the back. The eye is an easy enough structure to create that it has evolved independently several times (i.e., vertebrates and cephalopods). If anyone challenges you and says that we've never seen any living animal with in eye in one of the theoretical intermediate steps of evolution, you can point at the pit organs in snakes. They sense infrared light (a.k.a. heat, such as body heat from a prey animal) and represent stage b, where the photoreceptors line a recessed hollow which allows a limited estimation of the light source's direction.
The molecular subunits of the bacterial flagellum have homologous structures in other species, all of which do functional work without the other parts of the flagellum. But interestingly, most of these functions have nothing to do with motility (e.g., the little needlelike structures of the type III protein secretory system in pathogenic bacteria are homologous to the basal body of the flagellum, but they are involved in secreting proteins and not propelling the cell). They explode the argument that all the parts of the flagellar machinery must be present in order for any of them to be of use to the organism.
The woodpecker tongue I can't help you with. Never heard of that trotted out as an example of irreducible complexity, so I've never looked into it.
The argument "if humans evolved from chimps, why are there still chimps?" is a common one, and easy to dismiss. It makes two big mistakes: no biologist is claiming or has ever claimed that humans are evolved from any living ape species (they're siblings or cousins, not ancestors), and even more fundamentally, it ignores or denies the process of speciation. So the first part of the argument is a straw man invented by creationists, and the second part is a non sequitur. I won't get into specific speciation processes right now, but it is sufficient to note that the evolution of a new species does not automatically spell the end of the parent species, and in fact it is the exception. New species normally split off, leaving the parent species to go on its merry way.
Hope some of this is useful to you.
Posted 2 years ago # -
flyz4free
Member@Nox
Never fear...while my sense of humor may be somewhat self-deprecating, rest assured my ego is essentially out of control. And if I ever find an error you make, and I can beat everyone else to pointing it out (as I bet that all here would consider that a rare feather to place in their cap), I shall be inordinately pleased with myself. However, like dreaming what I'd do if I won the lottery, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.Posted 2 years ago # -
flyz4free
Member@Mark the Pilgrim
Willful ignorance is a huge problem in this country and relgious folks (at school board levels for example)just exacerbate it with attempted revisions of science, math, history and such in a creationist direction....(how many court battles do you have to win?!)...frustrating indeed.Posted 2 years ago # -
flyz4free
Member@UrsaMinor
I am cutting and pasting that whole thing to my own set of reference Word documents. I will refresh myself on speciation tho I read about it in Dawkins book and others.
As for the woodpecker tongue it is something my creationist cousin presented to me. She was SURE she could prove god existed to me so we debated (ended with me not willing to do the leap of faith thing of course)...176 word pages of large-ish type in the end. Here is the site she referenced regarding the irreducible complexity of a woodpecker tongue... http://www.creationism.org/heinze/Woodpecker.htm ...give it about 2.5 seconds of consideration for your amusement.
As an aside she also touted one Kent Hovind as her guru and creationist guide. Look him up for a laugh. I told her she could pry do better than a convicted felon con man as the leader of her spiritual world.Posted 2 years ago # -
UrsaMinor
Member@flyz4free:
I gave the creationist site more than 2.5 seconds of consideration. The arguments are not put forth very well, and their description of woodpecker anatomy is murky at best. Since I am not familiar with woodpecker anatomy to begin with, I can't spot any specific flaws. What I do see here looks a lot like argument from incredulity: "I'm not personally able to see how this could work, so it must be false".
It's sad, rather than amusing.
Posted 2 years ago # -
flyz4free
Member@UrsaMinor..
Yes...I should not be so dismissive , especially in my ignorance... it's just that they haven't even come close on any of their other IC arguments and making a sincere effort to wade thru their points of debate gets more arduous with each new claim...my impatience I suppose.Posted 2 years ago # -
Yoav
Member@flyz4free
The Talkorigins page on the woodpacker tongue gives a good description of the issue including pictures showing how the structure the creationist site claim are unique are just elongated version of structures present in the tongues of all birds. They also provide list of primary sources that you can read if you want to verify their claims, something creationist sites never do.
Unfortunately I did had the misfortune to hear of Kent Hovind (AKA drdino) before, I really wish there was a way to erase the recollection of that flood of stupid from my mind.Posted 2 years ago # -
Paul
MemberFound this little game/program that is a good illustration of how evolution.
http://megaswf.com/serve/102223/
Each generation the program spits out twenty cars, the farther a car goes, the more likely it will pass on its traits (if it hits the value in the parenthesis then it is very likely to have its traits passed on). Without going for too many generations on a low mutation, you can see speciation.
Posted 2 years ago # -
UrsaMinor
MemberThe car evolution program is neat, but the interface is, ahem, lacking. There's the totally unexplained number in parentheses after the score, the barely readable unlabeled graph of (I presume) high score and average score for each generation, and the fact that you can't select winners for breeding and never know who the parents of the next generation are. It's a nice start on the basic concept, though.
Posted 2 years ago # -
CoffeeJedi
Member@UrsaMinor:
The car program is much better explained at it's home site. That site was just one that rips games from other sites.
http://boxcar2d.com/
There you can actually view an explanation of how it works, AND use a more advanced version that allows for selective pressure, wheel-gene expression frequency, and mutations.Basically it uses a genetic algorithm to generate the next batch of cars based on the most successful traits of the parents. The number in parenthesis is double the distance of the most successful car of the previous generation. If a child car hits that distance, it's declared a success and the next car is generated. At the beginning of the game, that helps get your first generations going without too much waiting, and after a few generations, the progress is so incremental that the "double distance" marker isn't really needed any more.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Yoav
MemberA nice visual aid to explain the micro/macro evolution and why we don't expect a crocoduck posted by the atheist rabbi.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Len
MemberUrsaMinor said:
The definition of evolution that biologists use is simple:
Evolution is the change in gene frequencies in a population over time.
And that is all.
(Wow, that might actually make a good sound bite.)
Unless you spell it out, it'll sound more like an advert for Levi's
Posted 2 years ago #
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