evolution....but of course I also believe that there may be things that are beyond existance dimensionally (or rather what we precieve as existance)
the problem is that most of humanity need to beleive that a god (whatever it is) needs to be actively involved in humanities activities and outcome. The effect of God's actions are all around us to see, the consequence we can appreciate and could be pretty alarming. The interesting thing for me is that Genesis can be interpreted in scientific terms, you've just got to remember that analogies are in constant use to make it easier for an unscientific mind to interprete. Uncivilised tribes have no problem with accepting that we have evolved from other animals or that we have common ancestry, it's only us who feel the need to raise our status.
I would think that with the millions of experiments on flies that one could easily see evolution creating new species as the amount of generations that would have occurred is many times more than say between A. afarensis and humans yet we see no new species of flies created, though perhaps this indicates that our definition of species is flawed more than anything else. any thoughts?
lots of newspecies of flies are being discovered, we just don't have enough information to state whether these discoveries are new species. Humans have used evolution (selective factors) to breed all of our domesticated animals. A chihuahua could become a new species of wolf (they're physically incompatable at the moment) after a few thousand more generations of mutation and variation- just give it more time, which God has lots of. The fossil record is full of evidence for the creation and extinction of different species. It's just that the time scale over which it works is so huge and the amount of information we can gather so small, that's it's difficult for people to appreciate. Also a new species doesn't spring out of thin air, it's a gradual process, interjected by catastrophic occurrences. variation in a population is a natural phenomena, mutation occurs constantly, for a new species to arise there must be a reinforcing cycle of variation, mutation and isolation to prevent the changes being absorbed back into the population as a whole. Denying evolution is like denying truth. It happens, that's it. Accept it and lets deal with some more fundemental problems
okconor, what I was trying to say was that surely some species of flies would have evolved novel features, but we do not see that. Defining evolution to include our breeding of animals to have certain traits means the definition is far to wide, you may have noticed that dogs are still dogs, they just have lost certain other traits. I am not denying natural selection, variation and speciation, but I do deny that evolution can create novel features.
What's a novel feature? Backbones or no backbones for instance? follow the branch from anemones to tunicates - very similar looking animals but here they split, a new branch carries the forebears of backbones and the other doesn't. Gradually the simple centralised nervous system of the tunicates evolves into a backbone, where as the anemones evolve into organisms without one- jellyfish. Evolution does come up with the same types of features repeatedly like eyes - ours are very similar to squids, but otherwise the same rough template is used again and again because all animals have a common ancestry. You can see this in the developing featus.
So you would say that evolution cannot devise anything anatomically new - like wings on a formerly tree-climbing creature, or legs on an erstwhile fish? We can see that this has happened before, with skeletal and genetic similarities between bats and primates. And some present-day creatures would appear to be currently undergoing such adaptations: the colugos or flying squirrels, whose inter-limb skin wings may be the first step to a fully aerial existence; or the mudskipper, which spends part of its time out of water and might eventually learn to leave the sea permanently. Or the reverse: sea otters and polar bears, land mammals which depend on the sea for food and swim better than most land mammals. Like the ancestors of whales and sirenians, their lifestyles may continue to favour ever more streamlining, subcutaneous fat and limbs shaped more like paddles - leading, eventually, to a fully marine existence.
Who are talking to starthane? A birds wing is not hugely different to my forearm, it's the same limb adapted to do a different job, it's fairly easy to see where limbs come from on a mudskipper or lungfish, or were they have gone on a seal. A new novel feature would be the fly having lens type eyes rather than compound eyes. the flies wings evolving back into legs would not be novel feature.
I don't think this debate will be settled here. Simply saying "Intelligent Design is true" or "Creationism is true", or hell, even "Evolution is true" doesn't make it right. You can spew out all the facts you want, it's a matter of faith. When you look at evolutionary psychology, everything all seems to make sense.
I was talking to Patcho actually. As for Okconnor's defintion of "new novel features," he was making rather absurb examples. Each element in the compund eyes of a fly does have its own lens - just not the focusing apperatus and complex retina of a vertebrate or cephalopod eye. If they did develop these refinements, an insect could indeed function with only a few eyes instead of thousands. A fly's wings did not evolve from legs, so how could they evolve "back into" legs? Some insects have wings adapted for other purposes: like ladybirds, whose outer wings have become a protective shell, and crickets whose wings are used for generating noise (or is it their legs they use?) I don't suppose it's inconceivable that insect wings might become hardened and downward-pointing, enought to act as stilts for walking on; but why would this adaptation be needed, when insects have six well-formed legs already?
exactly, my point with flies is that they have such a short generation time that many many mutations could take place, so a novel feature should evolve, and by novel I mean a feature not currently in its genetic makeup. Similarities in bone structure etc, isn't very good evidence for any origin beliefs, creationists use it to say its points to a single creator - God. Im not saying evolution did not occur, but it does concern me when a scientific theory has no experimental evidence backing it up, thus my obsession with flies Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! . People still believe this??
I thought this was the place to have that debate! My point is that the book of Genesis embraces evolution, you don't have to disregard creation as it is expressed in the bible to except that evolution was the tool of God that put us here. As for examples of "novel" developments, none of starthanes examples are novel, a novel feature is a compound eye as compared to a lensular eye, a ladybirds carapace is not a novel feature. One scientist working for a year would enable 365 generations of fruit fly to come into existence, it would take millions of generations for a novel feature to occur. Faith is blind to truth, it's like believing the story of the nativity and the immaculate conception, which was told by Luke who never met Jesus or heard him speak. People base their fundemental belief on this fact, rather that on his words, and people have died if they don't believe it. Jesus wept. Look a bit more closely, and while you live - learn. It's all there for you to see and, according to the bible, that's the only reason you're here.
Ok, maybe not fruitflies, but some bacteria of some sort, I mean surely, we should see some novel feature evolve, at least in a small way. Experimental evidence is key to a good theory, otherwise you have to have faith that a creature will evolve novel features, and yes I realise the fossil record and such provides circumstatial evidence for ToE but can be interpreted in many ways to fit a persons worldview.
Ok bacteria do. But they're so simple that a novel feature for them is one we would hardly recognise as such. Plague bacteria are perfect evidence for evolution. The bacteria leap the divide from somewhere else (soil water etc) and start a lifecycle within humans. At the point of this leap their interaction with us is crude and kills us. Initially they are spread through contact of saliva (coughing sneezing). As they reproduce so quickly a branch (family) can mutate fast with the novel ability where thier spores can do not need the water held in a droplet to survive. This is natural selection of a mutated variation it allows this branch to reproduce more effectively and they begin to dominate. The desease is now airborne - (the big worry with bird flu and sars) it is now bubonic. It's effects are devastating the human population to such a degree that it begins to have a selective effect on the reproductive capability of the bacteria itself. It's killing all of it's hosts ie removing it's own environment (just like we are doing). This selective pressure begins to yield another branch, a family whose offspring don't kill the host, just gives them a nasty flu. This is beneficial to the population of bacteria because it allows them to spread more rapidely through a population of humans. Kill your host and you stop your spread dead in it's tracks. Eventually, the bacteria might evolve to give something back and the relationship between host and parasite becomes symbiotic, beneficial to both. This is how we have thought chloroplasts, E choli, mitochondria have all developed. Amazing - sorry it's so long winded I've got something on my mind
Don't apologize, mate: some people waffle on many times longer than this, yet have less substantive information content..!
regardless if evolution or creationism or intelligent design what if religion was created by society to save itself? i for one find it hard to believe in a rightous creator that allows so much evil
According to evolution, you don't see D. melanogaster evolving because it is aptly suited to its environment, despite the fact that we slap and zap em. The humans-caused deaths are insignificant when taking into account the entire population of this abundant species. There is no environmental pressure for Drosphila to evolve. Their population is very sustainable, and the majority of them live in the wild. This is consistent with the punctuated equilibrium hypothesis of evolution. On the other hand, there are certain types of bacteria that have substantial populations in humans. The reason why you see supergerms resistant to antibiotics is because we are putting a large, sudden environmental pressure on large swaths of them with antibiotics. Given the rate at which they reproduce, it is very expected that we see evolution on this scale. It will work for fruit flies too, if we concentrate the entire population (trillions and trillions) within the vincinity of barbeques and human communities with the blue lights on. This has been done for TB on a timescale of decades.
