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Evolution, that's where many scientists and skeptics fail to address the big question. I can't believe that life evolves, in the sense of growing organs to mee

by lelele 16y ago

Evolution, that's where many scientists and skeptics fail to address the big question. I can't believe that life evolves, in the sense of growing organs to meet specific needs. Natural selection does not work like that: if you have organs which don't suit you, they atrophy, that's it; if they suit you, those which have them stronger will survive. That's it. You don't grow wings to fly, lungs to breath air, brains to think. OTOH, believing in a creator just moves the issue elsewhere: who created such creator? Is he/she/it alone? I've grown comfortable with not knowing for sure what the heck we are doing here.

samstokes 16y ago
The key problem with this line of reasoning is a lack of proportion. Evolution takes place over millions of years. Any intuitions you have are probably wrong on this timescale. Nobody claims that a proto-bird one day woke up in a treetop, thought "oh heck, how am I going to get down?", and sprouted wings. Rather, over millions of generations of proto-birds, random variation and natural selection made winged birds more numerous and successful than wingless birds. The point about evolutionary theory isn't that it explains everything, but that it gives us a framework to produce and evaluate explanations (for, potentially, everything). The general pattern is to imagine a series of incremental changes between generations from (say) no-wings to viable wings, where each change could occur by random genetic variation or mutation, and where in order to be selected for, each change must confer a net reproductive advantage on its generation over the previous. From Wikipedia [1] it looks like we don't have a fully satisfactory evolutionary explanation of flight yet (any more than we have a fully satisfactory evolutionary explanation of True Blood), but there are several theories all of which are more plausible than waking up one day with wings. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_avian_flight http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_avian_flight
- maushu 16y ago
  As a side note, wings worked so well for survival that most current insect species have them.
  - CWuestefeld 16y ago
    Dawkins points out that at insect scale, flight isn't particularly interesting: in many environments, tiny organisms would have difficulty not flying. Thus, it may be that wings started as little rudders to control how the wind is blowing you. From that point, it's easy to imagine a gradual evolution to self-powered flight. But I'm afraid this doesn't help us understand avian and mammalian evolution of flight. The example of the flying squirrel (that can't fly, but can direct his glide) may be a little instructive...
avar 16y ago
Why specifically can't you believe that it evolves. And what do you have to back up the assertion that "natural selection does not work like that", when all the evidence and consequently the consensus of the scientific community is that it does. The idea you're advocating has a name, "Irreducible complexity"[1], and has been debunked time and time again as pseudoscience. I won't go into debunking specific assertions you made (such as the impossibility of the evolution of lungs), but I really encourage you to read the current literature of evolutionary theory. Once you see the mountain of evidence for it you'll probably be convinced. 1. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Irreducible_complexity https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Irreducible_c...
- lelele 16y ago
  Thank you very much for letting me know about "Irreducible complexity". I'll investigate the argument. My objections to evolutions do not fall into such a realm. Yes, millions of years make difficult for us to think about things. There are only speculations. > Why specifically can't you believe that it evolves. Because: 1) "natural selection" - as I understand it - narrows down variations, it does not expand them. If one specimen happens to develop a random variation, for such a variation to persist and develop further, that specimen should mate with another specimen sharing such a variation. We have many breed of dogs which are strikingly different, however if the breeders weren't there, we would have ended with a "breed soup" (think about dingoes). 2) I would expect to see more of a continuum of species, instead of such separate animal kingdoms. The argument that each species wins because it takes up an ecological niche does not hold, because there are already different species sharing the same niche. 3) Variations don't need to be exclusive. For instance, being able to breath oxygen from both water and air would be very advantageous. Still, I don't know of any species which does that. 4) Species should be much more inter-breed-able, whilst specimens are very selective on who to mate with. Inter-breed among species is known to get you sterile prole (think tigers mating with lions). I do not advocate intelligent design, but I do not reject it either (albeit as I've said already, intelligent design just moves the question about the origin of everything somewhere else).
  - avar 16y ago

by lelele 16y ago

samstokes 16y ago

The key problem with this line of reasoning is a lack of proportion. Evolution takes place over millions of years. Any intuitions you have are probably wrong on this timescale. Nobody claims that a proto-bird one day woke up in a treetop, thought "oh heck, how am I going to get down?", and sprouted wings. Rather, over millions of generations of proto-birds, random variation and natural selection made winged birds more numerous and successful than wingless birds. The point about evolutionary theory isn't that it explains everything, but that it gives us a framework to produce and evaluate explanations (for, potentially, everything). The general pattern is to imagine a series of incremental changes between generations from (say) no-wings to viable wings, where each change could occur by random genetic variation or mutation, and where in order to be selected for, each change must confer a net reproductive advantage on its generation over the previous. From Wikipedia [1] it looks like we don't have a fully satisfactory evolutionary explanation of flight yet (any more than we have a fully satisfactory evolutionary explanation of True Blood), but there are several theories all of which are more plausible than waking up one day with wings. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_avian_flight http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_avian_flight

maushu 16y ago
As a side note, wings worked so well for survival that most current insect species have them.
- CWuestefeld 16y ago
  Dawkins points out that at insect scale, flight isn't particularly interesting: in many environments, tiny organisms would have difficulty not flying. Thus, it may be that wings started as little rudders to control how the wind is blowing you. From that point, it's easy to imagine a gradual evolution to self-powered flight. But I'm afraid this doesn't help us understand avian and mammalian evolution of flight. The example of the flying squirrel (that can't fly, but can direct his glide) may be a little instructive...

avar 16y ago

Why specifically can't you believe that it evolves. And what do you have to back up the assertion that "natural selection does not work like that", when all the evidence and consequently the consensus of the scientific community is that it does. The idea you're advocating has a name, "Irreducible complexity"[1], and has been debunked time and time again as pseudoscience. I won't go into debunking specific assertions you made (such as the impossibility of the evolution of lungs), but I really encourage you to read the current literature of evolutionary theory. Once you see the mountain of evidence for it you'll probably be convinced. 1. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Irreducible_complexity https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Irreducible_c...

lelele 16y ago
Thank you very much for letting me know about "Irreducible complexity". I'll investigate the argument. My objections to evolutions do not fall into such a realm. Yes, millions of years make difficult for us to think about things. There are only speculations. > Why specifically can't you believe that it evolves. Because: 1) "natural selection" - as I understand it - narrows down variations, it does not expand them. If one specimen happens to develop a random variation, for such a variation to persist and develop further, that specimen should mate with another specimen sharing such a variation. We have many breed of dogs which are strikingly different, however if the breeders weren't there, we would have ended with a "breed soup" (think about dingoes). 2) I would expect to see more of a continuum of species, instead of such separate animal kingdoms. The argument that each species wins because it takes up an ecological niche does not hold, because there are already different species sharing the same niche. 3) Variations don't need to be exclusive. For instance, being able to breath oxygen from both water and air would be very advantageous. Still, I don't know of any species which does that. 4) Species should be much more inter-breed-able, whilst specimens are very selective on who to mate with. Inter-breed among species is known to get you sterile prole (think tigers mating with lions). I do not advocate intelligent design, but I do not reject it either (albeit as I've said already, intelligent design just moves the question about the origin of everything somewhere else).
- avar 16y ago