Advertisement
If you have a new account but are having problems posting or verifying your account, please email us on hello@boards.ie for help. Thanks :)
Hello all! Please ensure that you are posting a new thread or question in the appropriate forum. The Feedback forum is overwhelmed with questions that are having to be moved elsewhere. If you need help to verify your account contact hello@boards.ie
Hi all! We have been experiencing an issue on site where threads have been missing the latest postings. The platform host Vanilla are working on this issue. A workaround that has been used by some is to navigate back from 1 to 10+ pages to re-sync the thread and this will then show the latest posts. Thanks, Mike.
Hi there,
There is an issue with role permissions that is being worked on at the moment.
If you are having trouble with access or permissions on regional forums please post here to get access: https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058365403/you-do-not-have-permission-for-that#latest
There is an issue with role permissions that is being worked on at the moment.
If you are having trouble with access or permissions on regional forums please post here to get access: https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058365403/you-do-not-have-permission-for-that#latest
Why did God design and create Viruses
-
18-02-2008 3:00pmRabies , the comon cold , Aids , influenza, hepatitis , SARS, Ebola etc etc
the list goes on and on, so why did God create them as they cause so much suffering and don't have any good points ?
sorry if this has been asked before, I did search.0
Comments
-
It's difficult to hold a dogmatic view on this since we are not expressly told, but I can think of several possible reasons and factors.
1. Creation as we view it now is not creation as it was intended. When man sinned he messed up the entire created order.
2. Once death entered the world then it becomes necessary that we die of something. Fatal diseases are one way in which overpopulation, both among humans and other species, is prevented. The big question, and one I think is much harder to answer, is why certain diseases have to be quite so painful.
3. Some viruses may exist in one species and only cause harm when transmitted to another. I am not a scientist, so I may going out on a limb with this line of speculation, but does smallpox, for example, actually cause any pain or suffering in cattle? I can certainly envisage a situation where a virus could be carried by one species in a non-harmful (or even beneficial) way - but when transmitted to humans causes death and suffering.0 -
-
Maybe he/she/it enjoys watching people suffer.
Ezekiel 18:23
Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign LORD. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?
Ezekiel 18:32
For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign LORD. Repent and live!
Ezekiel 33:11
Say to them, 'As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, O house of Israel?'0 -
Rabies , the comon cold , Aids , influenza, hepatitis , SARS, Ebola etc etc
the list goes on and on, so why did God create them as they cause so much suffering and don't have any good points ?
sorry if this has been asked before, I did search.
Same reason He gave pain in childbirth to women. God said for sin comes death. Adam opened the door God told Him not to open and what we have now are the consequences. We suffer the consequences for one man's sin but we are also beneficiaries of one man's sacrifice for those sins. God laid on Christ all our sins and sickness. Through one man came death and also through one man came eternal life. The word “salvation” (in the Greek is σωτήριον in English letters “Soterion”) doesn’t’ just mean to be saved, it means lots of other things including health and well being. When we trust in Him, God's promise is to forgive us our sins and to heal us from our sicknesses. But it can only be appropriated by continued faith in the promise.0 -
Soul Winner wrote: »Same reason He gave pain in childbirth to women. God said for sin comes death.
Would that imply that viruses and bacteria didn't exit before the Fall (we was that actually)? Or that they did but didn't interact with us as they do now? I ask because I would wonder how seriously you actually take the idea0 -
Advertisement
-
Soul Winner wrote: »Same reason He gave pain in childbirth to women.
When we evolved to walk upright, our pelvis got in the way of the birth canal.
It had nothing do do with any punishment from God.0 -
Would that imply that viruses and bacteria didn't exit before the Fall (we was that actually)? Or that they did but didn't interact with us as they do now? I ask because I would wonder how seriously you actually take the idea
Personally I don't know. Maybe viruses did exist before the fall and they could only affect Adam when He was stripped of God's protective life source. But don't viruses need a host in order to thrive? The Bible teaches that there was no death until Adam sinned. He brought death on everything on earth.
When was the fall? I also don't know. Who knows how long they were in the garden before they fell? Could have been eons for all we know.0 -
you?Childbirth is painful for human women because of evolution
When we evolved to walk upright, our pelvis got in the way of the birth canal.
It had nothing do do with any punishment from God.
So current apes who don't walk upright don't feel pain in giving birth? Why couldn't we just evolve a better pelvis to deal with this problem? We've evolved better everything else? Or is that has yet to come in the evolutionary process?0 -
Soul Winner wrote: »you?
So current apes who don't walk upright don't feel pain in giving birth? Why couldn't we just evolve a better pelvis to deal with this problem? We've evolved better everything else? Or is that has yet to come in the evolutionary process?
We cant just 'evolve a better pelvis'. It doesn't work that way. We are a remarkably successful animal but by no means perfect. Evolution is about trade offs. It was so beneficial for us to have larger brains and to walk upright that it overpowered the negative effects of a very dangerous and painful birthing process. The advantage of bipedalism and intelligence are so good that they have allowed us to overcome most of the problems of birth through human ingenuity (tools, drugs and medical procedures) We won't evolve a more birth friendly pelvis because the pain in human birth is no longer an impediment to the success of our species.0 -
Soul Winner wrote: »So current apes who don't walk upright don't feel pain in giving birth?
If painful child birth was punishment to humans it would seem puzzling that God would make some animals have painful child birth and others not. And that he would related it to a natural cause based on how upright an animal is.Soul Winner wrote: »Why couldn't we just evolve a better pelvis to deal with this problem?0 -
Advertisement
-
We probably are at the moment, but because a non-painful child birth wouldn't exactly increase our survival rate, its most likely a very slow process. Give it a few more hundred thousand years.
Wouldn't a quick painless birth process make it much easier for mothers and babies to survive?
I would have thought spending hours immobilised in labour would make it more likely that they'd get eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger or trodden on by a mammoth.0 -
Soul Winner wrote: »Personally I don't know. Maybe viruses did exist before the fall and they could only affect Adam when He was stripped of God's protective life source. But don't viruses need a host in order to thrive? The Bible teaches that there was no death until Adam sinned. He brought death on everything on earth.
That doesn't make a whole lot of sense, if there was no death our bodies would be consumed by bacteria (the healthy kind, that we need to function) within a few minutes. Plus we would have a lot of trouble eating anything, as our bodies take in sustenances through dead organic material, while killing other organisms in the process.Soul Winner wrote: »Could have been eons for all we know.
Where does that fit in with the established chronological time line of the Earth?0 -
Wouldn't a quick painless birth process make it much easier for mothers and babies to survive?
But the evolutionary advantage to functioning up right in humans off set the disadvantage of having slow painful child birth. Basically painful child birth was not bad enough to stop the evolution to bipedal mammals.I would have thought spending hours immobilised in labour would make it more likely that they'd get eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger or trodden on by a mammoth.
We only developed it when dangers like that could be prevented other ways, when climbing away from danger was more important than running away.0 -
Wouldn't a quick painless birth process make it much easier for mothers and babies to survive?
I would have thought spending hours immobilised in labour would make it more likely that they'd get eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger or trodden on by a mammoth.
Trade off. Dangerous and painful child birth probably led to an increase in child mortality and woman dying in labour, but the benefits of walking upright and larger brains meant that the children that did survive to adulthood lived longer and had more children themselves.
The fact that human and primate babies are so vulnerable for the first few years is also a key reason why humans evolved as such social creatures. and as social creatures, we would have protected and helped the mother during the birthing process thereby reducing some of the dangers of a long drawn out delivery.0 -
Maybe he/she/it enjoys watching people suffer.Soul Winner wrote: »Why couldn't we just evolve a better pelvis to deal with this problem?We probably are at the moment, but because a non-painful child birth wouldn't exactly increase our survival rate, its most likely a very slow process. Give it a few more hundred thousand years.0
-
You can't start questioning viruses in isolation. Might as well ask why God created death or pain at all and why we aren't all already living in paradise. We are told that we sinned and that that is the reason for all imperfection in the universe we currently lived in, so it doesn't make any sense to pick on individual parts of it and go "Why is this nasty?" Ultimately, it's ALL nasty, and you're going to die, and that's just how it is here. Whether God made it that way, or it just accidentally got that way, is irrelevant - mortality is our situation.0
-
death1234567 wrote: »Got to take this one, Sorry Wicknight but the Homo spaiens are no longer evolving as we no longer conform to surivival of the fittest. Unfortunately any old joker can breed these days not just the ones with the best genes and hence our evolution has stopped. We are the pinnacle of evolution.
This is complete nonsense. The genetic evidence actually points to humans evolving faster and faster in recent history.0 -
death1234567 wrote: »Got to take this one, Sorry Wicknight but the Homo spaiens are no longer evolving as we no longer conform to surivival of the fittest0
-
CaptainNemo wrote: »You can't start questioning viruses in isolation. Might as well ask why God created death or pain at all and why we aren't all already living in paradise. We are told that we sinned and that that is the reason for all imperfection in the universe we currently lived in, so it doesn't make any sense to pick on individual parts of it and go "Why is this nasty?" Ultimately, it's ALL nasty, and you're going to die, and that's just how it is here. Whether God made it that way, or it just accidentally got that way, is irrelevant - mortality is our situation.
Well I think the point that is being made about the viruses is that it isn't actually "nasty"
The assumption made by religious people is that viruses exist to kill us, they are a method introduced by God to enact "death", a response to Adam's sin.
That would fit with an ancient view of the world, where people didn't understand concepts like disease properly, and they would view the most immediate action of the disease (the death of the human) as naturally the purpose.
But using modern understanding of disease we see that it doesn't really work like that. Bacteria and viruses are simply biological organisms attempting to survive as much as we are. They kill us not to kill us, but to survive themselves.0 -
Well I think the point that is being made about the viruses is that it isn't actually "nasty"
The assumption made by religious people is that viruses exist to kill us, they are a method introduced by God to enact "death", a response to Adam's sin.
That would fit with an ancient view of the world, where people didn't understand concepts like disease properly, and they would view the most immediate action of the disease (the death of the human) as naturally the purpose.
But using modern understanding of disease we see that it doesn't really work like that. Bacteria and viruses are simply biological organisms attempting to survive as much as we are. They kill us not to kill us, but to survive themselves.
I do agree with you here, I think I was responding to the original post really rather than the later responses from more scientific minds!0 -
Advertisement
-
It's difficult to hold a dogmatic view on this since we are not expressly told, but I can think of several possible reasons and factors.
1. Creation as we view it now is not creation as it was intended. When man sinned he messed up the entire created order.
2. Once death entered the world then it becomes necessary that we die of something. Fatal diseases are one way in which overpopulation, both among humans and other species, is prevented. The big question, and one I think is much harder to answer, is why certain diseases have to be quite so painful.
3. Some viruses may exist in one species and only cause harm when transmitted to another. I am not a scientist, so I may going out on a limb with this line of speculation, but does smallpox, for example, actually cause any pain or suffering in cattle? I can certainly envisage a situation where a virus could be carried by one species in a non-harmful (or even beneficial) way - but when transmitted to humans causes death and suffering.
When diseases jump species, they do tend to go haywire. Most major human epidemic killer diseases are thought to have crossed to us from animals, the majority from our livestock following the dawn of agriculture.
Now, it's not in the interest of a bug to kill its host, especially before it gets to pass itself on. In human prehistory, with small populations, if a bug wiped out the people in the area, it had nowhere to go. Consequently, less virulent strains tend to be selected. Hosts also evolve to cope with the more nasty things bugs do in order to transmit themselves. Over time, you expect bugs to adapt from killing their hosts rapidly to causing chronic and less symptomatic infections. Until, of course, they jump to a new species without that coevolutionary history, whereon they go on the rampage once more.
Archaeology shows early farmers to have been more diseased and dying younger than their hunter gatherer contemporaries. The parallel with the Greek 'Golden Age' myth and the Genesis Eden story has often been noted, with some suggesting that the stories are rooted in a 'folk memory' of the neolithic transition.Soul Winner wrote: »Same reason He gave pain in childbirth to women.
Well, our big brains have to go in big heads and that makes for difficult childbirth. So if you like, it is indeed down to our species having acquired too much knowledge. [Edit] Actually, I'll go with bipedalism, though.0 -
Pain in child birth is related to how bipedal an animal is. Mammals that function on all fours don't tend to suffer painful child birth. The more upright they are, the more painful child birth is.
If painful child birth was punishment to humans it would seem puzzling that God would make some animals have painful child birth and others not. And that he would related it to a natural cause based on how upright an animal is.
Yes I agree that is puzzling.
But Pandas don't walk upright and they suffer great stress in baring their cubs.
From the Enchanted Learning website
LOCOMOTION
"Giant pandas have a rolling gait. Like people and other bears, giant pandas are flat-footed (plantigrade - that is, both heel and toe touch the ground when walking).
Pandas are good tree climbers, using their short claws to grab onto the bark. Sometimes they take afternoon naps high in the trees.
Unlike many other bears, pandas cannot walk on their hind legs."We probably are at the moment, but because a non-painful child birth wouldn't exactly increase our survival rate, its most likely a very slow process. Give it a few more hundred thousand years.
So you wouldn't go long with Akrasia that: "We cant just 'evolve a better pelvis'. It doesn't work that way. We are a remarkably successful animal but by no means perfect. Evolution is about trade offs. It was so beneficial for us to have larger brains and to walk upright that it overpowered the negative effects of a very dangerous and painful birthing process. The advantage of bipedalism and intelligence are so good that they have allowed us to overcome most of the problems of birth through human ingenuity (tools, drugs and medical procedures) We won't evolve a more birth friendly pelvis because the pain in human birth is no longer an impediment to the success of our species." ???
Giving that child birth is a very important process in human reproduction don’t you think that the gamble evolution took for us to walk upright was very risky indeed? Given the time needed to transition from an ape like gait to an upright gait would be very long and has no evolutionary advantage in survival situations? Unless of course we are sure that our brains did in fact get bigger the more upright we got and therefore would balance out the negatives in the transition of the various gaits.
Do you think that the use of drugs to reduce pain in childbirth might have an adverse affect on how we evolve in the future or even drug use in medicine in general?0 -
That doesn't make a whole lot of sense, if there was no death our bodies would be consumed by bacteria (the healthy kind, that we need to function) within a few minutes. Plus we would have a lot of trouble eating anything, as our bodies take in sustenances through dead organic material, while killing other organisms in the process.
From a scientific point of view what is death and do scientist have theories on how it came into being? If life appeared at random then how did death apear? What is death? Has it ever being studied scientifically?Where does that fit in with the established chronological time line of the Earth?
The literal of Genesis1:1 and 1:2
"In the beginning Gods (Elohim plural for El which is God) created the Heavens and the Earth. And the Earth became a waste and a desolation."
Nobody knows how much time elapsed before God re-created the Earth not a waste and a desolation. That is what Genesis describes, a re-creation process. Why would God tell Adam and Eve to "re-plenish" the Earth as apposed to just "plenish" it? To say re-plenish suggests it had already been plenished at an earlier time. Who knows how much time elapsed? Jeremiah describes seeing the Earth not a waste and desolation in a vision where he described it as having cities (literally meeting places of intelligent beings) but that there was no man? Who were these beings? I don't know? Mere speculation but maybe angels before they fell? Maybe other man like (in structure at least) creatures destroyed in an earlier un-recorded calamity that struck the Earth. Who knows?0 -
Soul Winner wrote: »Yes I agree that is puzzling.
But Pandas don't walk upright and they suffer great stress in baring their cubs.
From the Enchanted Learning website
I think the obvious question here is, Why does god hate pandas?
obviously nobody is suggesting that humans are the only species that experience a painful childbirth. The point of this side conversation, is that painful childbirth is a feature of anatomy and evolution, and has absolutely nothing at all, to do with any kind of punishment from god.Giving that child birth is a very important process in human reproduction don’t you think that the gamble evolution took for us to walk upright was very risky indeed?
In the course of reproduction small mutations occur in the offspring. If those mutations are beneficial, they prosper, if they are damaging, they are rejected. Over hundreds of thousands of years, primates evolved where standing upright was more of a benefit than a hindrance. Standing upright has loads of advantages. It allows tool use, it allows access to low hanging fruit, it makes animals appear bigger than they really are...... (male gorillas stand upright to intimidate potential rivals.... the dominant males bred more... the offspring of those males would be good at standing upright)Given the time needed to transition from an ape like gait to an upright gait would be very long and has no evolutionary advantage in survival situations?Unless of course we are sure that our brains did in fact get bigger the more upright we got and therefore would balance out the negatives in the transition of the various gaits.Do you think that the use of drugs to reduce pain in childbirth might have an adverse affect on how we evolve in the future or even drug use in medicine in general?0 -
Soul Winner wrote: »From a scientific point of view what is death and do scientist have theories on how it came into being? If life appeared at random then how did death apear? What is death? Has it ever being studied scientifically?
Some species of life have evolved to live for hundreds of years, but they are outnumbered by about a gazillion to one, by the species that live for a short period of time and reproduce in great numbers.The literal of Genesis1:1 and 1:2
"In the beginning Gods (Elohim plural for El which is God) created the Heavens and the Earth. And the Earth became a waste and a desolation."
Nobody knows how much time elapsed before God re-created the Earth not a waste and a desolation. That is what Genesis describes, a re-creation process. Why would God tell Adam and Eve to "re-plenish" the Earth as apposed to just "plenish" it? To say re-plenish suggests it had already been plenished at an earlier time.Who knows how much time elapsed? Jeremiah describes seeing the Earth not a waste and desolation in a vision where he described it as having cities (literally meeting places of intelligent beings) but that there was no man? Who were these beings? I don't know? Mere speculation but maybe angels before they fell? Maybe other man like (in structure at least) creatures destroyed in an earlier un-recorded calamity that struck the Earth. Who knows?0 -
I think the obvious question here is, Why does god hate pandas?
Does He?obviously nobody is suggesting that humans are the only species that experience a painful childbirth. The point of this side conversation, is that painful childbirth is a feature of anatomy and evolution, and has absolutely nothing at all, to do with any kind of punishment from god.
So what is the evolutionary benefit for pain in child birth? Why can’t it be a pleasurable one like sex or defecation? Why is there pain?don't mean to be rude, but you clearly don't understand evolution at all. Natural selection is not a conscious process, there is no design, there is no master plan, and there is no gamble.
Ok I’ll pull you up on this in a sec. And you were not being rude. I get that a lot when talking about Christianity to people who ask stupid (from my expert position) questions about it, that by their questions they reveal how little they know or understand it.In the course of reproduction small mutations occur in the offspring. If those mutations are beneficial, they prosper, if they are damaging, they are rejected. Over hundreds of thousands of years, primates evolved where standing upright was more of a benefit than a hindrance. Standing upright has loads of advantages. It allows tool use, it allows access to low hanging fruit, it makes animals appear bigger than they really are...... (male gorillas stand upright to intimidate potential rivals.... the dominant males bred more... the offspring of those males would be good at standing upright)
Ok I’m pulling you up. Rejected by what and why? What does the rejecting? Who or what decides what is beneficial and what’s not? Why does the process of natural selection strive for goals? Obtaining the low hanging fruit for instance? Why not just eat roots like other animals or grass?It had loads of evolutionary advantages. In a dense jungle environment, the ability to raise your head above the scrub would be very useful for hunting and protection.
A dense jungle environment would require a very tall person to have the ability to raise its head above the scrub wouldn’t you agree? And how would it be useful for protecting?Bipedal animals could wade through deeper water giving them a larger territory.
So can crocodiles.Bipeds can reach high speeds and can travel long distances efficiently,
But they wouldn’t have anyway near the stamina of what they were hunting would they?but tool use was probably the most important advantage that bipeds have over quadrupeds. Having 2 limbs free to manipulate the environment is what facilitated our evolution from jungle mammals, to the overlords of the planet that we are today.
I thought dolphins were more intelligent that humans? Why don’t they rule? Why haven’t they evolved the limbs that we have? Or are they overloads of the sea?Our brains got bigger when we started to make tools and communicate with each other.
I thought we communicated with each other because we had bigger brains? Why do we only use 10% of its capacity? Why evolve a brain that we do not use?the ability to make better tools and communicate better was a huge advantage and natural selection favoured the best toolmakers and the best communicators.
Selected them for what? Why do we still have morons and useless gits then?There are no adverse effects in evolution. Its all about favouring the features that are best adapted to their particular environment. conditions shape evolution. If humans are evolving in a 'negative' way, it is because we are creating conditions that reward that negativity.
So what about natural disasters that wipe out whole species of animals? I’d say evolution finds that very annoying when that happens. After all that evolving and all.
Look I know I’m trying to be a smart arse but that is the kind of attitude that us religious folks have to contend with. You must admit some of the stuff you guys believe in is even more OTT that the belief that a creator created it and designed it. The fact that the creator of what is created cannot be studied by the empirical scientific methods employed today also means that His existence cannot be disproved by it. I love science and I love that people test theories and do experiments to substantiate and or refute theories but lets have an even playing field when it comes to the put downs shall we. A bit of humility on both sides is what’s needed.0 -
Soul Winner wrote: »Does He?So what is the evolutionary benefit for pain in child birth? Why can’t it be a pleasurable one like sex or defecation? Why is there pain?
Evolution didn't 'choose' to make child birth painful, it just happened as a side effect of the other evolutionary changes that occured.Ok I’ll pull you up on this in a sec. And you were not being rude. I get that a lot when talking about Christianity to people who ask stupid (from my expert position) questions about it, that by their questions they reveal how little they know or understand it.
Ok I’m pulling you up. Rejected by what and why? What does the rejecting? Who or what decides what is beneficial and what’s not? Why does the process of natural selection strive for goals? Obtaining the low hanging fruit for instance? Why not just eat roots like other animals or grass?A dense jungle environment would require a very tall person to have the ability to raise its head above the scrub wouldn’t you agree? And how would it be useful for protecting?
So can crocodiles.But they wouldn’t have anyway near the stamina of what they were hunting would they?I thought dolphins were more intelligent that humans? Why don’t they rule? Why haven’t they evolved the limbs that we have? Or are they overloads of the sea?I thought we communicated with each other because we had bigger brains? Why do we only use 10% of its capacity? Why evolve a brain that we do not use?Selected them for what? Why do we still have morons and useless gits then?So what about natural disasters that wipe out whole species of animals? I’d say evolution finds that very annoying when that happens. After all that evolving and all.Look I know I’m trying to be a smart arse but that is the kind of attitude that us religious folks have to contend with. You must admit some of the stuff you guys believe in is even more OTT that the belief that a creator created it and designed it.The fact that the creator of what is created cannot be studied by the empirical scientific methods employed today also means that His existence cannot be disproved by it. I love science and I love that people test theories and do experiments to substantiate and or refute theories but lets have an even playing field when it comes to the put downs shall we. A bit of humility on both sides is what’s needed.0 -
Soul Winner wrote: »But Pandas don't walk upright and they suffer great stress in baring their cubs.
Well as your quote stated, they are good tree climbers, and bears, most of which can walk on hind legs. They walk on all fours, but have developed two different functions for their front "feet" (hands) and their back feet. They eat using their front feet, and climbing using them. This has evolved a more upright position, similar to other bears.
You would never see a dog or a cat positioned like that.
The evolution of "uprightedness" (sure there is a more scientific term than that ) is related to how much separate use as species develops between the back and front feet. If a species uses its front feet for complicated functions (eg preparing food) it will develop a more upright position so it can rest and steady itself while freeing its two front hands to perform what ever function is required (ie stripping bark from food)Soul Winner wrote: »So you wouldn't go long with Akrasia that: "We cant just 'evolve a better pelvis'Soul Winner wrote: »Giving that child birth is a very important process in human reproduction don’t you think that the gamble evolution took for us to walk upright was very risky indeed?Soul Winner wrote: »Given the time needed to transition from an ape like gait to an upright gait would be very long and has no evolutionary advantage in survival situations?Soul Winner wrote: »Do you think that the use of drugs to reduce pain in childbirth might have an adverse affect on how we evolve in the future or even drug use in medicine in general?
Depends on what you mean by "adverse" All medicine certainly effects how humans as a species would evolve compared to if we didn't have the medicine, but there is no such thing as a good or bad way to evolve. Evolution works simply on adaptation, it is neutral in terms of concepts like "good" or "bad". To me what is important is helping people0 -
Soul Winner wrote: »Ok I’m pulling you up. Rejected by what and why? What does the rejecting? Who or what decides what is beneficial and what’s not?
Of course while this is happening in your ancestors with this specific mutation it is also happening with other mutations in your ancestors, and other mutations in the ancestors of all the others.
It is very difficult to visualize this. People either pick one mutation in one animal and try and see how that would effect the animals child or grand child. That is far too small a sample to see any major effect (but it is why Creationists who don't understand evolution "challange" evolution to produce a cat that gives birth to a dog). Or they try and visualize millions upon millions mutations across a whole species being passed on for thousands of years through the species. That is too big for the human brain to visualize (and can make your brain leak out your ears).
One of the best ways to look at mutation is through computer models. It is relatively easy to design a simple simulation of simple replicating units in a specific environment and then run this simulation for a like a million of them replicating over a simulated period of a few million years. You can take snap shot and see how they evolved. The results are often fascinating, particularly when this simulated evolution takes a dead end and you end up with a million dead computer people.Soul Winner wrote: »I thought dolphins were more intelligent that humans? Why don’t they rule? Why haven’t they evolved the limbs that we have?Soul Winner wrote: »I thought we communicated with each other because we had bigger brains?
It is a very slow process, but over hundreds of thousands of years, and literally trillions of small changes produced by mutations that were kept in the species by natural selection, we developed the brains we have today. And in fact our brains are still evolving.Soul Winner wrote: »Why do we only use 10% of its capacity?
http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/10percent.aspSoul Winner wrote: »Selected them for what? Why do we still have morons and useless gits then?
What you won't find is that many people who are infertile.Soul Winner wrote: »So what about natural disasters that wipe out whole species of animals? I’d say evolution finds that very annoying when that happens. After all that evolving and all.Soul Winner wrote: »You must admit some of the stuff you guys believe in is even more OTT that the belief that a creator created it and designed it.Soul Winner wrote: »The fact that the creator of what is created cannot be studied by the empirical scientific methods employed today also means that His existence cannot be disproved by it.
As is often said on the Creationist thread, the universe look like it wasn't created, at least not created to any creation myth humans have. There are two explanations to that. One is that is wasn't created by an intelligence with purpose. Two it was created by an intelligence with purpose, but made to look like it wasn't
To get a creator into the model you have to make a heck of a lot of excuses for why he would make a universe that looks like he didn't make it. It is just easier to think it looks like he didn't create it because he didn't created than because of some convoluted guess as to why he would do this.
Of course you can believe the opposite, that it was created but created to look like it wasn't created. Science can't, by definition, tell you that you are wrong.
But you have to ask yourself why would you believe that in the first place?0 -
Advertisement
-
Does anyone know what the ratio of beneficial mutations to adverse mutations are, I assume adverse mutations lead to illness and birth defects0
-
Does anyone know what the ratio of beneficial mutations to adverse mutations are, I assume adverse mutations lead to illness and birth defects
How "beneficial" it is depends on the phenotype (the actual physical structures build from the blueprint that is your DNA) produced by the new genetic material, and the environment that the organism is in. A mutation that produces genetic material that produces one certain phenotype may be beneficial in one environment yet not in another. It may be beneficial in one way but detrimental in another (eg. standing up right leading to painful child birth).
The vast majority of mutations appear to do very little, but this is very difficult to measure since it is often hard to detect exactly what a gene does or what exactly a mutation to a gene has changed what it does.
You are carrying around on average 66 mutations from your parents DNA. What exactly those mutations have done depends on the individual case.0 -
Mutations are totally random and natural selection has risen to us evolving, but being totally random there must be more adverse mutations than positive ones and there is a huge line of sickness and still births going back through the ages right ? Here we are this wonder of evolution but it can't have been as easy as evolution makes it appear to be, we just can't see all the failures because they are all dead, only the successfull are here now.0
-
Mutations are totally random and natural selection has risen to us evolving, but being totally random there must be more adverse mutations than positive ones and there is a huge line of sickness and still births going back through the ages right ?
One way of looking at it is that the number of mutations that lead to an beneficial adaptation of a species to its current environment is a tiny percentage of the over all number of mutations that take place.
This is something I don't think people who misunderstand evolution realize. They thing a mutation will either produce a new leg or kill you. In fact mutations are happening all the time in every new baby born, in ever species. Every single human on Earth has mutated from his/her parents DNA.Here we are this wonder of evolution but it can't have been as easy as evolution makes it appear to be
Again this is something people seem to forget, that evolution has taken 3.5 billion years to get to this point. Most people have little concept of what that amount of time actually is, as we think in decades and centuries.we just can't see all the failures because they are all dead, only the successfull are here now.
Again, as I said in my previous post, one way of actually seeing this is with computer models, models that can record the virtual organisms that are replaced by more adapted evolved versions.0
This discussion has been closed.
Advertisement