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The case for Evolution.

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13

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    #62
    Sarky
    Closed Accounts Posts: 31,967 ✭✭✭✭Sarky


    Awesome stuff, thanks!


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    #63
    dlofnep
    Closed Accounts Posts: 20,759 ✭✭✭✭dlofnep


    I read that - RE: Functionless chromosome still present and shared today across modern primates. Can't remember where but it's a powerful indication of shared ancestry. Another great post by one of the most accurate names on boards :)


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    #64
    Pace2008
    Closed Accounts Posts: 3,587 ✭✭✭Pace2008


    You've got to realise that when evolution skeptics ask for "proof" they're not looking for mountains of literature, morphological analogies or molecular evidence. They want to see a cat give birth to a dog.


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    #65
    Galvasean
    Registered Users Posts: 30,746 ✭✭✭✭Galvasean


    Pace2008 wrote: »
    You've got to realise that when evolution skeptics ask for "proof" they're not looking for mountains of literature, morphological analogies or molecular evidence. They want to see a cat give birth to a dog.

    The irony being that such would pretty much turn everything we knew about evolution topsy-turvy!
    I recall one such 'skeptic' stating that he would believe in evolution when he saw a butterfly spontaneously turn into a lion!
    But hey, there have been a couple of pretty decent questions asked on this thread with some interesting answers. Let's hope the standard can keep up.


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    #66
    dead one
    Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 1,320 ✭✭✭dead one


    Dades wrote: »
    As alluded to here, undercover-creationists are not welcome. And rest assured they are pretty easy to spot.
    Will try to avoid lockage and just use jackbooted censorship instead.
    Hi Dades, I'm Neither a Creationist Nor an Evolutionist.. What about me?. I am not creationist because i reject YEC, .... I am not evolutionist because i believe God as the Creator.
    Dades wrote: »
    :)
    ;)


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    #67
    Doctor Jimbob
    Registered Users Posts: 7,634 ✭✭✭Doctor Jimbob


    Galvasean wrote: »
    The irony being that such would pretty much turn everything we knew about evolution topsy-turvy!
    I recall one such 'skeptic' stating that he would believe in evolution when he saw a butterfly spontaneously turn into a lion!
    But hey, there have been a couple of pretty decent questions asked on this thread with some interesting answers. Let's hope the standard can keep up.
    dead one wrote: »
    Hi Dades, I'm Neither a Creationist Nor an Evolutionist.. What about me?. I am not creationist because i reject YEC, .... I am not evolutionist because i believe God as the Creator.

    ;)

    That old saying about temping fate comes to mind.


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    #68
    robindch
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 24,401 Mod ✭✭✭✭robindch


    dead one wrote: »
    [...]
    You were warned yesterday about making content-free posts. Your content-free post has been deleted, you have been carded and your next infringement will result in you being banned from the forum.


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    #69
    Galvasean
    Registered Users Posts: 30,746 ✭✭✭✭Galvasean


    dead one wrote: »
    Hi Dades, I'm Neither a Creationist Nor an Evolutionist.. What about me?. I am not creationist because i reject YEC, .... I am not evolutionist because i believe God as the Creator.

    For the record, one can be a theist and still believe in evolution.
    What dead one is doing here is conflating evolution with abiogenesis - a common enough misconception.


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    #70
    dlofnep
    Closed Accounts Posts: 20,759 ✭✭✭✭dlofnep


    On a side note, I'd implore anyone who's looking for a good read on Evolution on a broad range of topics to check out "Why Evolution is true" by Jerry Coyne. I've read a few books on Evolution, including alot of Dawkins work - but I felt that Jerry Coyne's work was absolutely the the best. Easy reading, and broken down very well.


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    #71
    joseph brand
    Registered Users Posts: 4,537 ✭✭✭joseph brand


    dlofnep wrote: »
    On a side note, I'd implore anyone who's looking for a good read on Evolution on a broad range of topics to check out "Why Evolution is true" by Jerry Coyne. I've read a few books on Evolution, including alot of Dawkins work - but I felt that Jerry Coyne's work was absolutely the the best. Easy reading, and broken down very well.

    Thanks for this post. I found a YouTube video where Jerry Coyne explains the proof of evolution. (He reminds me of Egon Spengler) :D

    The Dolphin slides of the embryo's and the photo of the rare dolphin with developed hind limbs is fascinating. (25 mins):

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1m4mATYoig

    WOW, just WOW.


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    #72
    dlofnep
    Closed Accounts Posts: 20,759 ✭✭✭✭dlofnep


    Yes - Jerry Coyne is a brilliant man. I don't see how anyone with an open mind could read his book and not accept Evolution as a fact. It's so compelling.


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    #73
    dlofnep
    Closed Accounts Posts: 20,759 ✭✭✭✭dlofnep


    Ok - I was going to keep this for that other crackpot of a thread to demonstrate why Creationists idea of a 'kind' system as a way to classify animals is not workable.

    Take a glance at this photo.

    AmgQOfrCEAAKQ8O.png

    These guys look similar, right? At first glance - you might consider them to be the same species.. Or maybe, close relatives, right?

    Wrong. The actual reality is, humans are more closely related to the animal on the left, than the animal on the right is. Why is this? Well - One is a mammal (Flying Squirrel), and the other is a marsupial (Sugar Glider). Marsupials have been deemed so different to standard mammals, that they have been allocated their own Infraclass - Marsupialia. They deviated from mammals all the way back during the Cretaceous.

    In fact, to demonstrate how different they really are - have a glance at the scientific taxonomy of each animal.

    Flying Squirrel
    Kingdom: Animalia
    Phylum: Chordata
    Class: Mammalia
    Order: Rodentia
    Family: Sciuridae
    Subfamily: Sciurinae
    Tribe: Pteromyini

    Sugar Glider
    Kingdom: Animalia
    Phylum: Chordata
    Class: Mammalia
    Infraclass: Marsupialia
    Order: Diprotodontia
    Family: Petauridae
    Genus: Petaurus
    Species: P. breviceps

    So how could such a thing happen, where two animals with completely different lineages look almost identical? Well - the real answer is called Convergent evolution.

    Convergent evolution explains exactly how two animals, who are not otherwise related - have faced similar selective pressures and evolved to have similar features. Another simple example would be bats and birds. Both can fly - both neither are of the same taxonomic class.

    But in the case of the sugar glider and the flying squirrel, they look so incredibly similar - that this is where the importance of a real classification system, like the biological species concept comes into play.

    A creationist might class both of these guys as the same 'kind'. But the genetic make-up tells a complete different story. This is why the biblical method of classifying animals has absolutely no purpose in modern biology, and should never be treated with anything but ridicule.


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    #74
    markfla
    Registered Users Posts: 335 ✭✭markfla


    Pace2008 wrote: »
    You've got to realise that when evolution skeptics ask for "proof" they're not looking for mountains of literature, morphological analogies or molecular evidence. They want to see a cat give birth to a dog.

    I wish that wasn't true, I work in arizona and the guys I work with (creationists) asked me why a human can't give birth to a plant if we share a common ancestry. They gave me a creationist dvd to take home....it's cringe worthy stuff. The sad part is the guys are nice and outside of their religion they are smart which is what gets me angry. They keep bringing up the cambrian explosion too and to be honest I struggle to articulate it to them....I explained that evolution or change doesn't occur in a linear timely fashion, it can speed up or slow down based on environment, length of life span or gestation periods....any better ways to explain it to them.
    It's really frustrating. But the most annoying thing is they get a half day on sunday for church!


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    #75
    Galvasean
    Registered Users Posts: 30,746 ✭✭✭✭Galvasean


    markfla wrote: »
    I wish that wasn't true, I work in arizona and the guys I work with (creationists) asked me why a human can't give birth to a plant if we share a common ancestry. They gave me a creationist dvd to take home....it's cringe worthy stuff. The sad part is the guys are nice and outside of their religion they are smart which is what gets me angry. They keep bringing up the cambrian explosion too and to be honest I struggle to articulate it to them....I explained that evolution or change doesn't occur in a linear timely fashion, it can speed up or slow down based on environment, length of life span or gestation periods....any better ways to explain it to them.
    It's really frustrating. But the most annoying thing is they get a half day on sunday for church!

    Re: the Cambrian 'explosion'. Tell them that (As discussed on this thread already) the Cambrian 'explosion' took about 70 million years to occur (compare this to how the giant dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago and since then our ancestors more or less evolved from a mouse to a man), which is a REALLY long time. Many will say that all of the phyla suddenly appeared during this 'explosion'. Of course that is not the case as several phyla have been shown to have existed before said event.
    Creationists like to make the Cambrian 'explosion' out to be this big event where everything sprang from nothing. In reality it took many millions of years and is not even considered to be a period in time where evolution worked faster than normal. many (myself included) hate the term 'explosion' as it implies something that simply did not occur.


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    #76
    Galvasean
    Registered Users Posts: 30,746 ✭✭✭✭Galvasean


    dlofnep wrote: »
    Take a glance at this photo.
    AmgQOfrCEAAKQ8O.png

    These guys look similar, right? At first glance - you might consider them to be the same species.. Or maybe, close relatives, right?

    Wrong. The actual reality is, humans are more closely related to the animal on the left, than the animal on the right is. Why is this? Well - One is a mammal (Flying Squirrel), and the other is a marsupial (Sugar Glider). Marsupials have been deemed so different to standard mammals, that they have been allocated their own Infraclass - Marsupialia. They deviated from mammals all the way back during the Cretaceous.

    And let us not forget Volaticotherium who lived over 150 million years ago and has no living relatives.

    HB1XGOtg_Pxgen_r_Ax354.jpg


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    #77
    sbsquarepants
    Registered Users Posts: 11,812 ✭✭✭✭sbsquarepants


    Galvasean wrote: »
    many (myself included) hate the term 'explosion' as it implies something that simply did not occur.

    There's a lot of us hate the term "creationism" for the very same reason!:D

    As a side note, i'd never seen a sugar glider before - he's a cute little critter isn't he. It's amazing how closely they resemble flying squirrels!
    I remember reading before that ant eaters and aardvarks are not related despite looking and behaving very similarly. (I'm open to correction here, thats just one of those useless "facts" that rattle around in my head!)


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    #78
    MagicMarker
    Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 32,865 ✭✭✭✭MagicMarker


    Oranage2 wrote: »
    I just dont think there's enough evidence to believe we all evolved from the same ancient organisms.

    Holy ****, have you presented these findings to any scientific peer reviewed journals!?

    It's amazing how much of a quick learner you are, going from not realizing that humans didn't evolve from apes to forming the conclusion that there's not enough evidence that ''we all evolved from the same ancient organisms'' in 24 hours is truly remarkable.


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    #79
    sbsquarepants
    Registered Users Posts: 11,812 ✭✭✭✭sbsquarepants


    Oranage2 wrote: »
    I just dont think there's enough evidence to believe we all evolved from the same ancient organisms.

    Have you seen any evidence of our design and manufacture?

    Ask yourself a simple question. If we were designed by an omnipotent being, capable of creating an entire universe - why do so many things go wrong with us? Without even getting into things like aids and cancer and so on, why do so many peoples eyes not focus correctly? They're a very important part of the overall "design" yet they seem very badly "designed" Even the ones that do work perfectly, can't see in the dark for a start!
    I personally had to shell out a lot of my hard earned cash to a nice man with a laser to fix mine for me. How come he was needed, to correct the work of an all powerfull perfect creator? That makes no sense!


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    #80
    Cossax
    Registered Users Posts: 2,055 ✭✭✭Cossax


    Have a bit of an interest in human evolution but it's very much in a 'watch documentaries and occasionally read wiki' vein.

    Is this the first time (well, since the first Human ancestor) that we're the only living species of homo?

    Has evolution in humans slowed down (I suppose it's probably never happened at a constant rate anyway but still) due to advances in medicine and due to the size of the population and thus the slowness of changes propogating through a large chunk of the population?

    Are we becoming more gracile? Did this happen in many/any/all of our pre-HSS ancestors?

    Are we significantly different to our HSS ancestors pre-behavioral modernity? Do we know what caused it?

    Were HSS just the right species in the right places at the right time or are we significantly more adapted/adaptable to the world around us than previous incarnations of homo species?


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    #81
    darjeeling
    Registered Users Posts: 962 ✭✭✭darjeeling


    Cossax wrote: »
    Is this the first time (well, since the first Human ancestor) that we're the only living species of homo?

    Yes, it seems to be the case, though different people disagree over calling some of our extinct relatives species or sub-species of our own (e.g. Neanderthals).

    Anyway, the last peoples who weren't modern humans seem to have died out around the start of the 'holocene' era, around 12,000 years ago. We've evidence that the 'hobbit people' (Homo floresiensis) on the island of Flores in Indonesia survived until then, and - just today - a paper suggesting that people who weren't fully modern humans were living in South-West China around the same time.

    Going back in time, the Neanderthals survived in Europe until perhaps as recently as 24,000 years ago, and the enigmatic Denisovans (distant cousins of Neanderthals) were living in Asia ~40,000 years ago.

    Much earlier fossils from Africa all seem to point towards a bushy family tree with many offshoots, one of which (we don't know exactly which) would go on to give rise to us.

    Edit: I should add that recent genetic work has shown that the wave of modern humans leaving Africa interbred with both the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, so a little of them lives on in some of us today.


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    #82
    muppeteer
    Registered Users Posts: 445 ✭✭muppeteer


    So it seems that there were at least 3 human species living at once fairly recently. Possibly 4. It's fascinating to think of how the different species interacted, obviously well enough interbreed.

    I do wonder how the later "civilised" homo sapiens would have interacted with the others had they survived until more recently though. Our own history with slavery/racism might suggest it would not have gone well.


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    #83
    darjeeling
    Registered Users Posts: 962 ✭✭✭darjeeling


    muppeteer wrote: »
    So it seems that there were at least 3 human species living at once fairly recently. Possibly 4. It's fascinating to think of how the different species interacted, obviously well enough interbreed.

    Yes, that's the picture that's emerging: more different populations of ancient humans than we knew about, branching off at different times and moving to parts of the world we hadn't expected, and also more interbreeding than we knew about.

    Interbreeding may not just have happened after our modern human African ancestors left Africa. There's a strange result from the Siberian 'Denisovan' people that may point to them interbreeding with distant human relatives too.

    Two Denisovan genetic papers were published, the first on the very small maternally-inherited mitochondrial genome, and the second on the much larger nuclear genome. The family trees revealed by the two were very different. The first (mtDNA genome) paper seemed to show that Denisovans were the outliers, and last had a common ancestor with humans and Neanderthals around a million years ago. The second, though, showed Denisovans to be more closely related to Neanderthals than to humans.

    A plausible explanation is that an early Neanderthal-like people moving into Asia met and interbred with a distant relative that had left Africa long before. In this scenario, the descendents' genes come mostly from the Neanderthal-like side, but also include some that come from that distant relative.


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    #84
    sephir0th
    Registered Users Posts: 390 ✭✭sephir0th


    Cossax wrote: »
    Has evolution in humans slowed down (I suppose it's probably never happened at a constant rate anyway but still) due to advances in medicine and due to the size of the population and thus the slowness of changes propogating through a large chunk of the population?

    The same selection pressures aren't there for humans now. We live in societies where a larger brain, for instance, isn't going to lead to greater reproduction for that individual. The only way to analyze the shift of the gene pool is to study which races, or which human characteristics are now reproducing at a higher frequency.


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    #85
    Galvasean
    Registered Users Posts: 30,746 ✭✭✭✭Galvasean


    sephir0th wrote: »
    The same selection pressures aren't there for humans now. We live in societies where a larger brain, for instance, isn't going to lead to greater reproduction for that individual. The only way to analyze the shift of the gene pool is to study which races, or which human characteristics are now reproducing at a higher frequency.

    Don't forget we can use technology to alter our characteristics (outwardly at least). For example, I could get plastic surgery to give myself a mighty man chin, use it to reproduce with many women and pass on my weak boy chin DNA to the next generation - tricking evolution in a sense.
    Re: brains & intelligence, many studies have shown that people of lesser intellect tend to breed at a higher rate (see: Jersey Shore) while those of higher intelligence reproduce less (and are also more prone to depression and suicide). So it would appear natural selection does not really favour intelligence among humans anymore.


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    #86
    Sarky
    Closed Accounts Posts: 31,967 ✭✭✭✭Sarky


    In the coming decades it'll be very interesting to see how things progress. Transhumanism is actually starting to become viable as we gain a better understanding of our own genetics. There are even rudimentary cybernetics in development, like prosthetic eyes, ears and even limbs. Increased life expectancy causes all sorts of problems for a body designed to live for half the time most of us manage these days. The selective pressures affecting most humans these days are generally of our own making. If we can control our own evolution, any speciation that might occur in future will likely be down to ideological differences rather than environmental pressures. That'd be downright strange.


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    #87
    Mark Hamill
    Registered Users Posts: 7,771 ✭✭✭Mark Hamill


    Galvasean wrote: »
    I could get plastic surgery to give myself a mighty man chin, use it to reproduce with many women

    Chicks dig mighty man chins :D.


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    #88
    wench
    Registered Users Posts: 1,633 ✭✭✭wench


    Galvasean wrote: »
    I could get plastic surgery to give myself a mighty man chin, use it to reproduce with many women
    I think you need to read the chapter on reproduction again, thats not quite how it works ;)


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    #89
    seamus
    Registered Users Posts: 68,317 ✭✭✭✭seamus


    I think the most probable natural change at this stage is a natural increase in the body's longevity. As reproductive ages move ever higher, this puts a selective pressure on one's ability to survive (or at least on one's ability to bear children) into your late 20's/early 30's, which means that those who are fertile for longer and less susceptible to age-related disease in their 30's, 40's and 50's, are more likely to procreate successfully.

    Of course, this really only applies in the developed world and would require our current level of peace and affluence to continue for a few thousand years to properly "embed" it.

    However, I wouldn't be surprised if studies in 100 or 200 years started showing that people of European and American ancestry naturally experience menopause and age-related disease at a measurably later age than those of African ancestry.


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    #90
    Galvasean
    Registered Users Posts: 30,746 ✭✭✭✭Galvasean


    wench wrote: »
    I think you need to read the chapter on reproduction again, thats not quite how it works ;)

    I dunno    ... If it walks liek a duck... quacks like a duck...


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    #91
    wench
    Registered Users Posts: 1,633 ✭✭✭wench


    Galvasean wrote: »

    I dunno    ... If it walks liek a duck... quacks like a duck...
    That is an impressive appendage, but I'm still not convinced...


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