Eugene Shubert
Valued Senior Member
I understood the idea and provided additional details: http://everythingimportant.org/genome.pdf
Eugene questions Dawkins
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Eugene Shubert
Valued Senior Member
It takes just a low level of scientific literacy to figure that out. If you goggle the phrase "literacy in science", you'll find 402,000 hits.
Eugene Shubert
Valued Senior Member
Richard Dawkins, in The Blind Watchmaker, explains the evolution of winged creatures:
What use is half a wing? How did wings get their start? Many animals leap from bough to bough, and sometimes fall to the ground. Especially in a small animal, the whole body surface catches the air and assists the leap, or breaks the fall, by acting as a crude aerofoil. Any tendency to increase the ratio of surface area to weight would help, for example flaps of skin growing out in the angles of joints. From here, there is a continuous series of gradations to gliding wings, and hence to flapping wings. Obviously there are distances that could not have been jumped by the earliest animals with proto-wings. Equally obviously, for any degree of smallness or crudeness of ancestral air-catching surfaces, there must be some distance, however short, which can be jumped with the flap and which cannot be jumped without the flap.
Or, if prototype wingflaps worked to break the animal's fall, you cannot say 'Below a certain size the flaps would have been of no use at all'. Once again, it doesn't matter how small and un-winglike the first wingflaps were. There must be some height, call it h, such that an animal would just break its neck if it fell from that height, but would just survive if it fell from a slightly lower height. In this critical zone, any improvement in the body surface's ability to catch the air and break the fall, however slight that improvement, can make the difference between life and death. Natural selection will then favour slight, prototype wingflaps. When these small wingflaps have become the norm, the critical height A will become slightly greater. Now a slight further increase in the wingflaps will make the difference between life and death. And so on, until we have proper wings. -- Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, pp. 89-90.
Here is irrefutable proof of the existence of kamikaze snakes, which, by Dawkins' argument, based on the principle of natural selection, must inevitably evolve into flying serpents:
What use is half a wing? How did wings get their start? Many animals leap from bough to bough, and sometimes fall to the ground. Especially in a small animal, the whole body surface catches the air and assists the leap, or breaks the fall, by acting as a crude aerofoil. Any tendency to increase the ratio of surface area to weight would help, for example flaps of skin growing out in the angles of joints. From here, there is a continuous series of gradations to gliding wings, and hence to flapping wings. Obviously there are distances that could not have been jumped by the earliest animals with proto-wings. Equally obviously, for any degree of smallness or crudeness of ancestral air-catching surfaces, there must be some distance, however short, which can be jumped with the flap and which cannot be jumped without the flap.
Or, if prototype wingflaps worked to break the animal's fall, you cannot say 'Below a certain size the flaps would have been of no use at all'. Once again, it doesn't matter how small and un-winglike the first wingflaps were. There must be some height, call it h, such that an animal would just break its neck if it fell from that height, but would just survive if it fell from a slightly lower height. In this critical zone, any improvement in the body surface's ability to catch the air and break the fall, however slight that improvement, can make the difference between life and death. Natural selection will then favour slight, prototype wingflaps. When these small wingflaps have become the norm, the critical height A will become slightly greater. Now a slight further increase in the wingflaps will make the difference between life and death. And so on, until we have proper wings. -- Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, pp. 89-90.
Here is irrefutable proof of the existence of kamikaze snakes, which, by Dawkins' argument, based on the principle of natural selection, must inevitably evolve into flying serpents:
Eugene Shubert
Valued Senior Member
Eugene Shubert
Valued Senior Member
Mathematicians are very godlike. We bring things into existence by merely specifying proper definitions. Would you like to see the proper definition?
Not much.
I'm not sure.
I do not believe there was ever such a time. All animals down to the simplest bacteria have a level of consciousness. If the organism reacts to the environment then it is clearly conscious at some level.
Ah, so it was just a meaningless slur.
From what I have read of your scholarship, he was far more literate than you are.
That is correct, and is unrelated to your claims.
From fins. If you ever go to Australia and see a mudskipper you may start to understand how they got their start.
No, Dawkins does not argue that.
You seem to think Darwin started with a conclusion. He didn't. He based his conclusion on meticulous observation. If he had been observing a different subject, like a library, he would undoubtedly have arrived at a different conclusion.
What use is half a brain...
Eugene Shubert
Valued Senior Member
Yes. It invariably follows.
sideshowbob - exchemist
Personally I just put Eugene on iggy - your never going to get sense out of a Seventh day Aventis Quantum something or other
Eugene Shubert
Valued Senior Member
Then you believe that motion detection devices have consciousness?
Gawdzilla Sama
Valued Senior Member
Amazing. Everything you said there is wrong.
You do know there are already flying snakes, right?
Consciousness is a threat detection and reaction mechanism. It's utility to a moving hunted organism should be obvious.
There you go again, ruining perfectly good woo with some boring facts.