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
The Bible, Creationism, and Prophecy (part 2)
Comments
-
-
-
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
-
-
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
-
-
Adaptive pressure and natural selection. Flight developed in animals where it was advantageous for them to go from gliding to full flight.
Could you give me a hypothetical scenario as to how this would happen in a human? Doesn't matter if its completely far fetched, I'm just getting my head around the process of it occurring. Would it be like, if mankind decided to live in trees and transport themselves by jumping from tree to tree, but the trees for some reason got further apart so that we couldn't jump anymore, we'd develop gliding capabilities or some such (Yes I know, we'd simply use our noggins for an artificial means, but its just a completely hypothetical question
) 0 -
Could you give me a hypothetical scenario as to how this would happen in a human? Doesn't matter if its completely far fetched, I'm just getting my head around the process of it occurring. Would it be like, if mankind decided to live in trees and transport themselves by jumping from tree to tree, but the trees for some reason got further apart so that we couldn't jump anymore, we'd develop gliding capabilities or some such (Yes I know, we'd simply use our noggins for an artificial means, but its just a thought experiment )
So imagine that a child is born with webbed hands. Happens from time to time. For some reason, say we are as you say jumping from trees, these webbed hands gives this child a control advantage, they can use the small webs between the hands to slow down momentum.
This advantage is passed on through the generations. Small mutations will alter the web hands, say a few generations after this initial webbed fingered child one of his descendents (who all have webbed hands) is born with slightly longer fingers. So now this child has webbed hands and longer fingers, this provides even more advantage.
Over thousands of years mutations that build upon the advantage accumulate because natural selection (which just means these humans do slightly better and thus reproduce slightly more) selects them.
In a million years you have gone from normal length fingers with some extra skin between the fingers, to creatures with long long fingers with sheets of skin between the fingers. Mutations that shrink the arms and lengthen the fingers would be selected (assuming this gave advantage), so you now have humans, or the descents of humans, who basically have wings.
You can see this in the bat, who's "fingers" are actually longer than its arm
The important point is that at the start the reason this webbing between the figures is selected by evolution would not be because it gives flight. Flight is something that would come hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years later. At some point the creatures leaping between trees realize that they can now glide between trees, and then at some point later they can flight.
A whole host of things have to develop in parallel, which would be rare mutations. But then you have hundreds of thousands of humans being born each day, all of them with approx 60 new mutations from their parents. Life is a massively parallel system.
Hope that helps clarify.0 -
-
So imagine that a child is born with webbed hands. Happens from time to time. For some reason, say we are as you say jumping from trees, these webbed hands gives this child a control advantage, they can use the small webs between the hands to slow down momentum.
This advantage is passed on through the generations. Small mutations will alter the web hands, say a few generations after this initial webbed fingered child one of his descendents (who all have webbed hands) is born with slightly longer fingers. So now this child has webbed hands and longer fingers, this provides even more advantage.
Over thousands of years mutations that build upon the advantage accumulate because natural selection (which just means these humans do slightly better and thus reproduce slightly more) selects them.
In a million years you have gone from normal length fingers with some extra skin between the fingers, to creatures with long long fingers with sheets of skin between the fingers. Mutations that shrink the arms and lengthen the fingers would be selected (assuming this gave advantage), so you now have humans, or the descents of humans, who basically have wings.
You can see this in the bat, who's "fingers" are actually longer than its arm
The important point is that at the start the reason this webbing between the figures is selected by evolution would not be because it gives flight. Flight is something that would come hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years later. At some point the creatures leaping between trees realize that they can now glide between trees, and then at some point later they can flight.
A whole host of things have to develop in parallel, which would be rare mutations. But then you have hundreds of thousands of humans being born each day, all of them with approx 60 new mutations from their parents. Life is a massively parallel system.
Hope that helps clarify.
I would also add that 'webbed fingers' might be something of a turnoff as far as selection is concerned in the human world as we know it but if environmental pressures forced us into the trees, then webbed fingers might become an attractive trait which would increase the chances of that genetic information being reproduced.0 -
-
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
'Gallows Humour' ... for Evolution?doctoremma wrote: »Are we allowed to 'lol' here? I cannot stop laughing at this.
0 -
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
Advertisement