I hate doing these forum quote things. They suck!
Anyhows, I wasn't being literal about the cardinal and the blue jay. But OK then, look how long it took for both the blue jay and the cardinal developed from the same common ancestor. I don't think they are as many generations apart as say the common ancestor of a horse and a horseshoe crab.
This part is what concerns me though:
It's not dumb luck. It's a process.
I get so tired of hearing that. It IS dumb luck. Sure for a successful noticeable change to occur it is a process that takes time and generations, but that's as far as that goes. For a mutation to be a successful adaptation it has to be in the right place at the right time.
And the change doesn't make itself "fit" the situation. It just happens. Yes I know outside stimuli, like environmental factors, are the driving force behind change, but that's just change, not adaptation. Whether or not it sinks or swims is up to chance.
Polarbears.
Say this mamma bear has two cubs. One is normal, the other is hairless. In a normal circumstance, the hairless one will freeze to death. right?
now say some massive climate changing event somehow happens and the North Pole is now a balmy 25° C. The normal furry bear overheats and dies while the hairless bear thrives and passes on it's bald assed genes. A lone surviving female bear escaped an air conditioned zoo or something... But Pretty damned lucky, don't you think? The Mother bear didn't know there was going to be this permanent heatwave and made the baby bear develop like that, did she? LOL The DNA strands didn't look at each other and ask, "Is it getting hot in here to you guys?" And then just customize the chromosones did they?
Besides a process implies order. Order implies design and design implies intelligence. Unless you're implying that possible evolutionary outcomes don't occur unless it's determined by Divine will. If that's the case, then that's a whole different subject.
Speaking of whole different subjects, Is it getting warm enough up there for you to ride yet? Man. Winter SUCKS this year.
Actually I got this story from a book from a long time ago. Mysteries of the unexplained or some such title. It had chapters on ghosts, Bigfoot, UFOs the Loch Ness monster. And Reincarnation was one of the chapters. It didn't have the questions of if there was a hidden meaning behind the kid being made Dahli lama. I just added it in cause Racer X loves conspiracies.
The book itself was one of those tabloid level descriptions and written with the slant to make you believe everything that was written in it as true or very possible.
And what is it with all you foreign kids from third world countries like Europe and Ohio that makes you throw shots at America? You know that dollar a day I give to Sally Struthers can be stopped. When I want my grass cut, I don't HAVE to go to Home Depot and hire your cousin either. i can get a homeless veteran instead.
I think you're contradicting yourself here... You say that you know there are outside stimuli but somehow you don't accept that as adaption but as just a change? That my friend is adaption, you do that yourself in a daily basis, imagine there's a step you need to walk by everyday, one day the step is lower and you almost fall to the ground because you were used to its height, your brain then will *adapt* to the change and in the next day you will remember that the step is lower, or it might take you 2 or 3 days.
Would you care to explain what is adaption then?
That would just be an isolated and lucky mutation, he would probably die soon though, other animals from his habitat would die as well. But this example is what you claim to be just dumb luck, probably my kid is born hairy as hell and tomorrow starts being as cold as it gets, I'm sure I'm going to die but it doesn't necessarily mean that when he conceives a child he's going to be hairy as well. You see? Random errors in the genes are not evolutionary steps.
The number of current species is a tiny fraction of the number that have become extinct. There is no order to what we have currently except that they were successful, the changes to the environment of their ancestors allowed their survival through adaptation (or simply by spreading far enough to survive those changes). It's pretty obvious that very few species can survive a very dramatic change in a very short time, because so few do.
There's an interesting study on how birds are becoming more able to avoid being hit by cars because certain tiny wing shape variations allow that better than others, and how certain Finches are losing their variations of beak because of bird feeders. Little things.
I have no idea if anyone is 'right'. If you can produce firm scientific evidence that proves reincarnation incorrect, please produce this.
Remember, I don't need proof for my ideas, you however, require proof to show I'm incorrect. And, as I don't care what anyone else believes, nor do I ( or any Bhuddist ) try to convince anyone that we have the only 'right' idea, what does it matter. We'll all find out when we die.
If you are going to make a claim it is your job to prove it. Your own belief in reincarnation is nothing else than blind faith regardless of proof that shows 100% non-existence of the thing you happen to believe in. Reincarnation is essentially a very simple idea cavemen came up with to explain something they had no idea what it was. Just like religion or ufos. Can't explain where humans come from, can't explain that blurry dot in the photo. Imagine your own explanation and believe in it.
I thought I couldn't be more clear. When I said aliens I meant flying saucers, abductions and all that stuff. Not life in universe...
Ah the typical "I'll get the last word because I'm true believer"
I am no scientist and you are right … I can't prove my statement to an extent, where you would accept it as a truth.
We have freedom of mind and as I am sure of reincarnation as you meant it is not possible, you can of course believe in reincarnation and I have to accept that.
But it is wrong to question science to explain reincarnation. First you have to prove that there is reincarnation, so it is an accepted fact.
Further if you let out any higher being and look at facts of how a brain works it is fairly logical that reincarnation is not possible.
This was the idea behind my question "What proof do you need".
Is this the satisfaction you need ?
I understand this thread as an discussion, maybe get some new ideas or different views on things. I will not blame you for your believes.
There's an interesting study on how birds are becoming more able to avoid being hit by cars because certain tiny wing shape variations allow that better than others, and how certain Finches are losing their variations of beak because of bird feeders. Little things.
Yeah, the Polar Bear analogy sucked. The finches.
There we'll use Sinbad's finches if that's OK.
Dumb Luck Development
I'm not quite sure of all the variations of beaks on finches so if it's OK, I'll limit it to just two. Darwins Bird Feeders, Inc. sells finch bird feeders everywhere. They are the only people allowed to do so as they own the global patents on it. There are two sub groups of finches. The fat beaks and the skinny beaks.
Are we on the same page so far kids? OK here comes the outside stimuli that affects development. In order for Mr. Darwin to stay a deacon of his church, he needs to raise more cash. What he does (and this is important) is decide to reduce the cost of labor an materials by re designing his patented Finch feeder®. The redesign reduced the width of the access hole just enough to keep the fat beaks out. Now here's where LUCK comes in. Under normal circumstances the skinny beaks would've starved out because the fat beaks would eat all the seeds at a faster rate than what the skinny beaks could.
Now the skinny beaks have the upper hand. If that ain't luck, then what else is it?
Here... From Forbin's link.(God that was as boring as reading the phone book and didn't do a thing to support his own argument against random chance.)
Another conclusion to be drawn is that there is no set goal to selection. Variants arise naturally in all populations. Each population has its traits spread out over a distribution curve. While quadrupeds generally do not give birth to viable three legged individuals, legs can be longer or shorter, and whichever trait confers advantage at the time is the one which will be more widely reproduced. Given that resources are limited (or scarce, in Darwin's terminology) if for example longer legs give an advantage in survival over shorter legs, then the mean length of legs in that population will increase, and eventually take over ("go to fixation") in the absence of any other changes of environment. This does not happen because longer legs are in any eternal way more "perfect", but rather because they are more adequate for the tasks at hand of simply making a living long enough to reproduce. "Survival of the fittest" should be rephrased as "survival of the more adequate".
.... The longer legged animal was LUCKY that the environmental factors fell into his favor that made his survival more "adequate" over the the shorter legged one.
Factors could've just as easily played out to where the short legged one had the advantage and dominated.
Random Chance.... I like to gamble here and there. I know a little bit about random chance and its effects when it comes into play. It's very essence of why I like to gamble. Its the success of predicting an outcome out of a series of possible outcomes. Even though there are a finite set of outcomes, picking the right one always boils to chance no matter what "system" someone uses.
What I don't know is why so many people are in denial about it. Random chance is everywhere, from taking a road trip and the random chance of getting a tire blow out to the random chance of ordering a three piece chicken meal at KFC and the three pieces being from the same chicken.
Why isn't random chance allowed in divergent evolution?
Forbin, I re read the linked article. You know for such a smart guy, he really doesn't have a clue. It's not about whether the traits of species development is random. If that was the case we would have bald polar bears with bat wings that gave off oxygen or something that changed each generation, regardless of heredity or natural selection or anything. The Luck isn't about that. It's about the determination itself and of whether or not those traits and development lead to success or failure of the species.
Does that make sense?
If Mr. Darwin's old products were to remain and they would only introduce a new and only product, then the change would be slower, and the finches would have time to evolve for it.
You're introducing a 100% negative change, it's like if you were trapped in your house and you couldn't get out to buy food, you would starve to dead but your free peers would be lucky, that's luck, not evolution.
Yupp, second that. Somehow, people arguing against evolution tend to antropomorphize the concept and think that it, or nature, has some sort of goal that it's trying to achieve.
But there isn't a goal for evolution, and it's not an "active" process. It's not like there's some sort of entity (which, by definition would have to be a god) that says: "Well those finches need smaller beaks for survival, so let's iterate on them so they'll be better at surviving".
It's the other way round, it's a passive process! A Finch develops a smaller beak by random chance due to DNA mutation, an only then, it turns out he now has an advantage over the other bigger beaked finches. Thus, he can reproduce more often, which, in turn causes more smaller beaked finches to be born, and might even change the behaviour of it's fellow finches into looking for smaller beakes when chosing a partner.
Kicking up a dead thread.
Wasps.... As far as I know, Wasps are supposed to be the simplest of the social insects (bees, ants and termites) Researchers recently noticed that a red wasp species is capable of doing something very advanced. They are capable of facial recognition. Not just each others' faces in the nest but people's faces as well.
I try to keep red wasps around as I've noticed over the years that if you don't mess with them, they won't bother you and they have a blind hatred towards yellow jackets.
I allowed them to build a nest on my back porch for just that reason.
One day, my son got a broom and whacked one of the wasps. It didn't kill the wasp. It sort of flew around in a circle and went back to it's nest. no of the other wasps moved. I thought my son was going to get nailed, but nothing happened. Later that evening when we were retuning from somewhere and piling up on the porch to get into the house, a single wasp left the nest and stung the crap out of my kid. Then it calmly flew back to its place on the nest. It was the same wasp he whacked with the broom. It was the weirdest thing.
It was as if the wasp knew who to go after....revenge?
If wasps can facially recognize people and can calculate like that, maybe we ought to rethink the social order of social insects?
I wonder how far that facial recognition goes? Can it tell expressions? Read body language? Can one be trained to do so?
Yeah, that's a tall order, but so is facial recognition. That's learned behavior. Sure a wasp instinctively knows it's a wasp and the other bugs in the nest are other wasps, but to be able to identify them on individual levels? Not just other wasps but surrounding species like People and dogs and cats?
No, it's not. It's random mutation tempered by natural selection, or in other words, the natural conditions. It it were truly random we would be a mess, genetically and physiologically.
There is also artificial selection, like what we do to dog and horses and corn.
You simply cannot have an effective species without some kind of evolutionary pressure that encourages a decent amount of the population to have a skill or ability to improve the fitness* of the individuals, group, tribe, or even the entire species. See long-necked animals arising once trees entered the picture (trees entered the flora population somewhat late). Animals acquired their longer necks by chance, but the environmental pressure that encouraged the genes to populate the rest of the species was not random. The ability to eat food that no other creature can is a very powerful one, and removes you from a whole host of potential famine situations.
Of course the environment is not conscious, it's not actively planning the evolutions of species, but it does have organism-ish characteristics because it is by and large run by and made up of organisms (algae and mosses and bacteria and such make it possible for us to live, for instance).
* Actually fitness refers to a technical term in biology. "Fitness" is the entity's aptitude to reach reproduction age and to then subsequently reproduce *successfully*. Fitness can be quantified for the species by the statistics of death before reproduction age, and by the reproduction rate. If the offspring is stillborn then one or both of the mating pair were unfit.
Well all the species are direct result of the environment so saying the environment is random from the pov of species is kinda strange thing to say. There is definite set of foot steps leading to this moment and if it was random there would be no clear chain of events just like there is no chain of events leading to the specific random lottery numbers we get every week. In true central limit theorem situation the number of species would decrease over time when in fact it is the exact opposite that is happening.
It would make sense more if you said the environment was random for the genes because eventually that is what the evolution is all about. Survival of genes. To me it makes more sense to say evolution (or abiogenesis) is just one part of the whole process that started with nucleosynthesis and depending from pov is just one part of that whole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_formation which "just adds complexity to the universe". I'd guess there is a scientific term for it but I can't remember it. It is not really random or it is just as random that we got the chemical elements we have in our universe randomly.
Hahaha, your denial is kind of cute. I explained where it comes from and what it means, and you say I didn't. Reminds me of Bill O'Reilly.
It does have a little to do with strength, as that can help get an organism laid. Anything that helps the organism reproduce is related to fitness. Intelligence and social prowess are also on the list.
theres millions and billions of indipendent influences actors and other factors creating the environment a species and its genes live in
the sum of all that is essentially random fron in internal pov
it is random thats why you end up with the ridiculous argument that evolution is impossible if you calculate the probability of this planet ending up in exactly the state its in right now assuming that this is the only way it could have gone
If it were random we could not predict what would happen next. We CAN predict what will happen next, therefore it is NOT random. Our reality is probabilistic, not random.
The probability argument is ridiculous. It falls into anthropic reasoning, because there must be the conditions for life in order for life to observe that there are the conditions for life (and to figure that they are rare)! The universe is **** huge. Every configuration of matter that is possible does exist, somewhere, somehow. That includes life. It is not surprising that one of the quintillion planets in the cosmos looks like earth. We KNOW we are rare, but given the size and scope of the universe, we are almost a certainty at some point, somewhere. Our atoms are very lucky, sure, but remember, without that luck we wouldn't even be around to observe it, so it's a moot point.
You are misunderstanding the difference between "random" and "complex".
Coincidences are rare but happen all the time.
In probability theory, the central limit theorem (CLT) states that, given certain conditions, the arithmetic mean of a sufficiently large number of iterates of independent random variables, each with a well-defined expected value and well-defined variance, will be approximately normally distributed.[1] That is, suppose that a sample is obtained containing a large number of observations, each observation being randomly generated in a way that does not depend on the values of the other observations, and that the arithmetic average of the observed values is computed. If this procedure is performed many times, the central limit theorem says that the computed values of the average will be distributed according to the normal distribution (commonly known as a "bell curve" ).
So why in evolution we go from simple systems towards more complex system if clt suggests it should go the other way (less peaks, towards the average)? Clt doesn't even work if you look at one species living in one place on earth. Mutations start as rare but become more common over time (if the gene survives). If clt approach was correct then the mutations would not lead anywhere because their effect to the average are meaningless. Instead of one peak the mutations lead to new peaks meaning that your clt should be called multiple limit theorem.
thats comepltely the wrong way of looking at the world
youre misinterpreting what i said
a) species do approach a gaussian distribution - see anything you can measure on humans
b) the main point was that any large sum of random experiments (ie what nature does every single moment anythign happens) approaches a gaussian distribution and thus a state of maximum information
So.... Can we talk about wasps now? No I don't mean white folk, I mean the real wasps with six legs and this phenomenon of facial recognition. Y'all would be lucky if a predetermined random event sort of happened and mutate us all.
Still trying to find this article where they discovered that wasps not only know their own kind but surrounding animals as well by ...sight?
I'm thinking Guard wasps.
Here's something that skims it. http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/12/why-some-wasps-cant-recognize-faces.ars
Apparently the researchers think that because the order of wasps that have this skill also have multiple queens made them evolve with a more complex social order system than say honey bees.
There's all sorts of relatively immediate (±500 years) evolutionary possibilities with these wasps. like advances in communication, tool use?
Quickly, I'll hold his hands, someone kick him in the nuts.
No:
The way the article is written those wasps can only distinguish two different queens from one another using the facial features that are very visible for that species of wasps (antennae and facial construction). Human facial construction is very different from waps and they also tested pattern recognition and memorization and the wasps did not do well at all:
Like I said... the article skimmed the issue. It's title and subject were actually two different things the more I think about it. But the argument of multiple queens causing a complex social mess as being a trigger for this ability. Which is a strange argument because paper wasps, well the red paper wasps don't really build massive nests to begin with. The biggest red wasp nest I've seen only had about 15-20 wasps max.
And these researchers seemed to be focused on other varieties of the paper wasps.
I think I shouldn't have posted this link
What I read was a report from Texas A&M University. They're an over-priced, nationally recognized university known for a bon-fire disaster and Johnny Football. I stumbled on it by accident and I recently heard something else about it... not much, just "facial recognition". So it set me off on the concept again.
Man, it sucks to be half asleep googling something, mistyping and stumbling into something else.
Was actually looking up "chiggers". Real nasty bugs.
Quote from Racer Y :
Y'all would be lucky if a predetermined random event sort of happened and mutate us all.
Quickly, I'll hold his hands, someone kick him in the nuts.
