5 ms·

Evolution has always occurred before our eyes, e.g. antibiotic resistant bacteria. I doubt the evolution of Covid changes anyone’s opinion on evolution.

by rp1 5y ago

true_religion 5y ago
People disbelieve macro evolution. Micro evolution on the other hand is hard to disbelieve because the experiments about it can be performed in real time.
- mikeyouse 5y ago
  I worked with a clinical pharmacist who was an ardent young-earth creationist & anti-evolution proponent who during his day job spent his time adjusting medications and dosages for patients as part of our antimicrobial resistance stewardship team. Could never quite make that click for him.
  - kirse 5y ago
    OTOH as engineers who spend a large percentage of life pouring blood and sweat into creating things, it's not a giant leap of inference to ponder that there may be a Creator for the engineering marvel we live in. I struggle with the speciation aspect of Evolution. Not hard to empirically verify in-species adaptations, but I'm still waiting to see coronavirus turn into influenza (etc)
    - cogman10 5y ago
      Where do you think covid came from in the first place? Covid won't change into the flu, that's like assuming a chicken might evolve into it's ancestors species or humans will evolve into apes. Evolution goes forward, not (or rarely) backwards. It's a completely new species that, up until 2019, did not exist in the human population. This sort of evolution happens frequently when people are in close contact with animals. Hence the reason European disease wiped out native populations but not the reverse. Also, a direct example of human evolution.
      - kirse 5y ago
        It's a completely new species I think this is where we differ. That obnoxious spiky little ball we all now know as coronavirus(es) existed in both humans and bats long before making the "jump". Ignoring the possibility that humans are directly responsible for the new host capabilities, it's not like we watched influenza slowly morph into a coronavirus and cause a new form of havoc. All we saw was an existing "species" that had mutations inside the bounds of its genetic code that enabled it to survive elsewhere.
    - op00to 5y ago
      I’m waiting for your post to turn into one that makes sense. We will both be waiting a very long time.
    - dTal 5y ago
      >I struggle with the speciation aspect of Evolution. You might find that pondering the existence of "ring species" proves enlightening. It turns out that "species" isn't even a well defined concept when you look closely enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species (Also, you needn't capitalize "evolution". It's not a god :))
      - esyir 5y ago
        Yep, Phylogenetic boundaries and the clades are entirely arbitrary constructs. Useful, but don't treat them as though they have absolute meaning as they're essentially a discretization of a continuous process with all the limitations henceforth.
  - tzs 5y ago
    If you were trying to make it click by citing the micro evolution you were working with it is not all that surprising it didn't work, because in fact trying to use micro evolution to prove that macro evolution is possible is not a very good approach. In programming terms, evolution is like tweaking a program a few lines at a time, with the requirement that the program has to still run and be useful after each tweak. You can evolve a C program this way to get a faster, or smaller, or more memory efficient, or more featured C program, but you are not going to be able to evolve a C program into an APL or Haskel or LISP program that way. That macro evolution is possible is quite amazing and astounding when you stop and really think about the constraints. It is not at all obvious that micro evolution implies the possibility of macro evolution. It's really something that is best approached from the opposite direction. We see evidence of macro evolution, and then use micro evolution as part of the explanation of how this is happening.
    - mikeyouse 5y ago
      Dude literally thought the world was 6,000 years old and that Adam lived to be 930 likely because "the oxygen content of the air was higher then" -- I wasn't too hung up on walking through the science of evolution with him. He also told me evolution wasn't possible because of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, so.. yeah.
- dkonofalski 5y ago
  I dislike the use of the terms "macro evolution" vs. "micro evolution" because they're not really any different other than timescale. For some reason, though, people who are religious and deny evolution misrepresent "macro evolution" as "one animal changing into another" as opposed to just "micro evolution over a longer period of time".

Evolution has always occurred before our eyes, e.g. antibiotic resistant bacteria. I doubt the evolution of Covid changes anyone’s opinion on evolution.

by rp1 5y ago

Evolution has always occurred before our eyes, e.g. antibiotic resistant bacteria. I doubt the evolution of Covid changes anyone’s opinion on evolution.

true_religion 5y ago

People disbelieve macro evolution. Micro evolution on the other hand is hard to disbelieve because the experiments about it can be performed in real time.

mikeyouse 5y ago
I worked with a clinical pharmacist who was an ardent young-earth creationist & anti-evolution proponent who during his day job spent his time adjusting medications and dosages for patients as part of our antimicrobial resistance stewardship team. Could never quite make that click for him.
- kirse 5y ago
  OTOH as engineers who spend a large percentage of life pouring blood and sweat into creating things, it's not a giant leap of inference to ponder that there may be a Creator for the engineering marvel we live in. I struggle with the speciation aspect of Evolution. Not hard to empirically verify in-species adaptations, but I'm still waiting to see coronavirus turn into influenza (etc)
  - cogman10 5y ago
    Where do you think covid came from in the first place? Covid won't change into the flu, that's like assuming a chicken might evolve into it's ancestors species or humans will evolve into apes. Evolution goes forward, not (or rarely) backwards. It's a completely new species that, up until 2019, did not exist in the human population. This sort of evolution happens frequently when people are in close contact with animals. Hence the reason European disease wiped out native populations but not the reverse. Also, a direct example of human evolution.
    - kirse 5y ago
      It's a completely new species I think this is where we differ. That obnoxious spiky little ball we all now know as coronavirus(es) existed in both humans and bats long before making the "jump". Ignoring the possibility that humans are directly responsible for the new host capabilities, it's not like we watched influenza slowly morph into a coronavirus and cause a new form of havoc. All we saw was an existing "species" that had mutations inside the bounds of its genetic code that enabled it to survive elsewhere.
  - op00to 5y ago
    I’m waiting for your post to turn into one that makes sense. We will both be waiting a very long time.
  - dTal 5y ago
    >I struggle with the speciation aspect of Evolution. You might find that pondering the existence of "ring species" proves enlightening. It turns out that "species" isn't even a well defined concept when you look closely enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species (Also, you needn't capitalize "evolution". It's not a god :))
    - esyir 5y ago
      Yep, Phylogenetic boundaries and the clades are entirely arbitrary constructs. Useful, but don't treat them as though they have absolute meaning as they're essentially a discretization of a continuous process with all the limitations henceforth.
- tzs 5y ago
  If you were trying to make it click by citing the micro evolution you were working with it is not all that surprising it didn't work, because in fact trying to use micro evolution to prove that macro evolution is possible is not a very good approach. In programming terms, evolution is like tweaking a program a few lines at a time, with the requirement that the program has to still run and be useful after each tweak. You can evolve a C program this way to get a faster, or smaller, or more memory efficient, or more featured C program, but you are not going to be able to evolve a C program into an APL or Haskel or LISP program that way. That macro evolution is possible is quite amazing and astounding when you stop and really think about the constraints. It is not at all obvious that micro evolution implies the possibility of macro evolution. It's really something that is best approached from the opposite direction. We see evidence of macro evolution, and then use micro evolution as part of the explanation of how this is happening.
  - mikeyouse 5y ago
    Dude literally thought the world was 6,000 years old and that Adam lived to be 930 likely because "the oxygen content of the air was higher then" -- I wasn't too hung up on walking through the science of evolution with him. He also told me evolution wasn't possible because of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, so.. yeah.
dkonofalski 5y ago
I dislike the use of the terms "macro evolution" vs. "micro evolution" because they're not really any different other than timescale. For some reason, though, people who are religious and deny evolution misrepresent "macro evolution" as "one animal changing into another" as opposed to just "micro evolution over a longer period of time".