Adam and Eve or Evolution? (3 Viewers)

[katie_tully]

whatever man, lets just rock paper scissors it out.

 

[f(sex)]

whatever man, lets just rock paper scissors it out.

the natural selection of rocks are now immune to the so called "intelligent paper"

 

[chicky_pie]

I'm glad to see it's the highest form of your wit

oh why thank you

 

[HalcyonSky]

there are many problems with our understanding of the origins of life and early evolution, it requires an element of blind faith to state conclusively that 'evolutionary optimization' is the primary catalyst in the process of prokaryote organisms evolving into eventual human beings.

Not alot of progress is even being made in the area, simply because its such a small and neglected field thanks to the painfully slow rate at which discoveries and breakthroughs are made

EDIT: i am not discrediting the idea, i believe the current theories are probable, just need more research to back them up.

 

[Slidey]

there are many problems with our understanding of the origins of life and early evolution, it requires an element of blind faith to state conclusively that 'evolutionary optimization' is the primary catalyst in the process of prokaryote organisms evolving into eventual human beings.

You remind me of those people who read Bill Bryson's "A Short History Of Everything" then go around trying to tell scientists why their paper was wrong.

It's called serial endosymbiosis - something that would make sense if you'd done a course in evolutionary biology and knew a bit about real-life bacterial evolutionary mechanisms like horizontal transfer and symbiotic engulfment.

Now stop arguing about how some scientific theory x is flawed without God's guiding hand because you read a wikipedia article on it and felt it was incomplete.

Not alot of progress is even being made in the area, simply because its such a small and neglected field thanks to the painfully slow rate at which discoveries and breakthroughs are made

"It has been nearly thirty years since Lynn Margulis first published a book on the origin of eukaryotic cells. Since that time, biology has undergone extraordinary changes. The most noticeable change is the extensive accumulation of sequence data for both nucleic acids and proteins. The collection of new data will undoubtedly lead to continuous revision of the serial endosymbiosis theory of the origin of the eukaryotic cell. Despite the uncertain future, the crucial foundation has been laid. Symbiosis is now accepted by the scientific community as an important factor in generating evolutionary change. The next steps include the development of more elaborate methods to interpret genetic and molecular sequence data and the undertaking of a fresh look at the fossil record. These tactics might reveal significant information concerning one of the most challenging and fascinating problems in evolutionary biology, the origin of the eukaryotes."

 

[HalcyonSky]

i believe this thread mentioned adam and eve, so i felt compelled to make a purely philosophical statement based on no evidence whatsoever

my post regarding me as "devoid of any knowledge" is justified by this.


and also, Evolution is clearly false, you are of the evil ONE and of google, accept the time cube and stop posting with your brainwashed ideas from ACADEMIA. Acknowledge the 4 corner days within 1 earth rotation and youll see how stupid your nonsense is

 

[Slidey]

Haha. Well I think everybody should read stuff from wikipedia and popular science and stuff, but try and wash it down with a published paper or two is all.

 

[HalcyonSky]

ive attempted to read a few biological papers, but i get lost in the vocabulary as im sure many do, having not done any formal biology study or any in-depth solo study.

Im not at a high enough level to argue with you, someone who clearly knows what theyre talking about, so i resort to TIME CUBE.

 

[katie_tully]

okay so, question of the day.

if you don't understand the science behind certain theories, how can you argue against them? this also applies to argument for, but i'm using you as an example.

Evolution is clearly false, you are of the evil ONE and of google, accept the time cube and stop posting with your brainwashed ideas from ACADEMIA. Acknowledge the 4 corner days within 1 earth rotation and youll see how stupid your nonsense is

ive attempted to read a few biological papers, but i get lost in the vocabulary as im sure many do, having not done any formal biology study or any in-depth solo study.

Whatever man, stfu. I've got a science experiment for you. Jump infront of a train and tell me the end result. five points to the kids who can describe the science behind roadkill.

 

[ConjOB]

I almost fell off my chair in laughter reading some of these creationism comments!!

p.s. "anyone notice all the poeple who believe in creationism are all really unevolved looking?"

 

[HalcyonSky]

okay so, question of the day.

if you don't understand the science behind certain theories, how can you argue against them? this also applies to argument for, but i'm using you as an example.





Whatever man, stfu. I've got a science experiment for you. Jump infront of a train and tell me the end result. five points to the kids who can describe the science behind roadkill.

looks like someone doesnt get jokes.

' You ever noticed how people who believe in Creationism look really unevolved? You ever noticed that? Eyes real close together, eyebrow ridges, big furry hands and feet. "I believe God created me in one day" Yeah, looks liked He rushed it. '
-Bill Hicks

 

[KFunk]

there are many problems with our understanding of the origins of life and early evolution, it requires an element of blind faith to state conclusively that 'evolutionary optimization' is the primary catalyst in the process of prokaryote organisms evolving into eventual human beings.

The term 'optimization' should be taken with a grain of salt for a few reasons:

(1) It's worth distinguishing between local and 'global' optimization. Suppose that the following graph represents, for some organism, some inheritable, variant trait (e.g. height) on the x-axis and evolutionary fitness on the y-axis (ignoring the weird lines on the sides):

If we suppose that individual organisms of this type range in height between 9-11 units you would expect them to start to converge on the little central peaks (since any organism sitting on a peak is more fit than those in the troughs so the population will tend to converge on these values). Thus organisms may be 'optimized' in that they occupy a local maximum with respect to a given trait even though there may exist a global maximum (see the peaks around 4 and 17) value for that trait which would confer greater fitness. This gets even more complex when looking at interacting traits (say, something like height and muscle fibre elasticity) which presents a 'hills and valleys' (sheet in three dimensions) picture of optimization.

(2) The concept of optimization has to be made relative to environment (since fitness depends on the interaction between organism and environment), thus an organism which is well adapted in one environment may find itself to possess maladaptive traits in another environment. Of course, 'environment' is used broadly here and so may involve rising temperatures, the introduction of a new species, improving human technology and even social developments. A personal interest/worry of mine (sparked by Joshua Greene) is whether our moral sensibilities, which developed in small group social settings, might prove maladaptive in the context of an international community. The rate at which entire species (and other humans too) are destroyed by human activities shows how quickly an organism can cease to be 'optimized'.

(3) The concept of optimization can often involve a normative aspect. Properly speaking the term should refer to reproductive fitness. However, some people use the term with regards to how well an organism fulfills certain moral or aesthetic ends. I tend to find such talk rather questionable, but it is worth keeping in mind that it appears every now and then.

 

[HalcyonSky]

A personal interest/worry of mine (sparked by Joshua Greene) is whether our moral sensibilities, which developed in small group social settings, might prove maladaptive in the context of an international community. The rate at which entire species (and other humans too) are destroyed by human activities shows how quickly an organism can cease to be 'optimized'. .

an interesting point, we only have to walk into a bad part of town, turn on the news, or take a quick history lesson of the 40's to realise how maladaptive our morality is when different ethnicities clash.
Do any other groups of primates exhibit this to the extent humans do? I mean, ive seen fights between chimps and what not, but ive never seen one senselessly beat another to death.

Its pretty worrying to see the problems we still have despite our intelligence

 

[Slidey]

The term 'optimization' should be taken with a grain of salt for a few reasons:

(1) It's worth distinguishing between local and 'global' optimization. Suppose that the following graph represents, for some organism, some inheritable, variant trait (e.g. height) on the x-axis and evolutionary fitness on the y-axis (ignoring the weird lines on the sides):

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/Wilkinson_polynomial.png/800px-Wilkinson_polynomial.png

If we suppose that individual organisms of this type range in height between 9-11 units you would expect them to start to converge on the little central peaks (since any organism sitting on a peak is more fit than those in the troughs so the population will tend to converge on these values). Thus organisms may be 'optimized' in that they occupy a local maximum with respect to a given trait even though there may exist a global maximum (see the peaks around 4 and 17) value for that trait which would confer greater fitness. This gets even more complex when looking at interacting traits (say, something like height and muscle fibre elasticity) which presents a 'hills and valleys' (sheet in three dimensions) picture of optimization.

(2) The concept of optimization has to be made relative to environment (since fitness depends on the interaction between organism and environment), thus an organism which is well adapted in one environment may find itself to possess maladaptive traits in another environment. Of course, 'environment' is used broadly here and so may involve rising temperatures, the introduction of a new species, improving human technology and even social developments. A personal interest/worry of mine (sparked by Joshua Greene) is whether our moral sensibilities, which developed in small group social settings, might prove maladaptive in the context of an international community. The rate at which entire species (and other humans too) are destroyed by human activities shows how quickly an organism can cease to be 'optimized'.

(3) The concept of optimization can often involve a normative aspect. Properly speaking the term should refer to reproductive fitness. However, some people use the term with regards to how well an organism fulfills certain moral or aesthetic ends. I tend to find such talk rather questionable, but it is worth keeping in mind that it appears every now and then.

Optimisation with regards to evolution is as broad as evolution itself is. When we speak of evolution, do we mean at a molecular level, a trait level, or a species level? Each answer carries with it a related, but different optimisation problem. Sometimes crossover is used (sexual reproduction), but often times also not, with some other (often poorly understood) mechanisms providing secondary hill-climbing factors alongside mutation (e.g. horizontal transfer in single-celled organisms and viruses).

The notion that optimisation is a poor descriptor for evolution because it doesn't have a discernible global maximum (in part due to the dynamic fitness landscape) and that something like satisficing is more suitable is a weak one. Satisficng may appear a better model, as it actively seeks out minimum points according to a criteria rather than maxima, but this doesn't take into account the hill-climbing factor so obviously present in the form of stochastic mutation. Further, satisficing requires some sort of "guiding hand" to determine a minimum fitness - this could certainly be explained by stochastic mutation if it weren't for the fact that stochastic mutation doesn't stop at some arbitrary fitness level - it continues regardless of how good or bad the current optima is (unless it is global - a trait of the hill-climbing class of optimisation problems such as annealing). As for the global maximum - it's a common concession in optimisation that for NP complete problems one is unlikely to reach the global optimum; nevertheless the attempt should be made as with a properly selected algorithm, one is likely to able to get arbitrarily close to the global optimum. Given the nature of the definition of fitness (it is a function of averages where the idea of a global maxima existing is murky at best), this is obviously a suitable concession to extend to the optimisation problem of "what it the fittest species?". I do not state the problem as "what is the fittest species at some specific point in time" because the fitness is a function of time and any attempt to map fitness to a static landscape is thus impossible.

The concept of biological niches is a very important one and evolutionary optimisation thankful predicts behaviour found as a result of niches: convergent & divergent evolution, parallel evolution, and evolutionary relay. For example in parallel evolution, one species forms a trait which increases fitness in that niche, later (possibly millions of years), another distantly related species forms a similar trait in a similar niche, such as the Smilodon (sabre-tooth) vs the Nimravida - both developed very similar sabre teeth for the purpose of piercing jugulars. This is an example of both species independently locating essentially the same local maxima on essentially the same fitness landscape for that trait. A more extreme example is whales vs sharks, where one never left land, whilst the other came from a small mammal similar to a deer. Because these two animals came to occupy the same niche, evolutionary relay occurred: the deer evolved to a form most suitable for the niche (a local optima, which happened to be very similar to the one the shark occupied long before) - in this case the local optima would be fairly high up with regards to a global optima, considering the stability and consistency of this form and the relatively unchanging fitness landscape in comparison to those on land.

I do concede that this is all from a natural framework - one where humans don't exist. But I disagree that by introducing humans into the equation, evolution ceases (it no longer optimises). An example of this is given by the industrial revolution where a trait normally selected against was given a very positive selective pressure due to smog - the microevolution of the Peppered moth from grey to black due to the change in tree trunk colour (due to soot) making black less visible to predators than grey.

I do not enjoy human encroachment of the environments of animals, but I concede that evolution doesn't stop because man introduces their own selective pressures.

Social Darwinism was never on discussion in this thread, AFAIK, and it has as much relevance to evolution as it does to viewing evolution as an optimisation problem. Id est: none.

Of further interest is that human evolution is not slowing down or unifyinf due to globalisation, societies and technology, but rather speeding up and splitting apart (social groups are diverging genetically): http://www.physorg.com/news116529402.html

 

[Slidey]

an interesting point, we only have to walk into a bad part of town, turn on the news, or take a quick history lesson of the 40's to realise how maladaptive our morality is when different ethnicities clash.
Do any other groups of primates exhibit this to the extent humans do? I mean, ive seen fights between chimps and what not, but ive never seen one senselessly beat another to death.

Its pretty worrying to see the problems we still have despite our intelligence

Low-ranking meerkats will sometimes kill higher-ranking meerkats's offspring in an attempt to elevate the social standing of their own offspring. Meerkats also express altruism (guard duty, sacrificing one's self to protect the young), creativity (standing on shoulders to reach fruit for example) and language (off the top of my head, their warning calls for a bird and snake are different, for example).

 

[Kwayera]

Meerkats are not primates.

And I think the point HalcyonSky was trying to make is that humans are the only creatures that engage in senseless violence (am I right?) - except we aren't.

Chimpanzees, for example, will occasionally kill entire troops of monkeys (even those that are not direct competitors, which one would expect to be the motivation) for no apparent reason.

 

[Slidey]

Meerkats are not primates.

I gathered she was only creating that restriction because she presumed primates the only animals with a level of thought capable of imagining the concept of murder and/or discerning whether or not murder would accomplish something.

Tangential: A recent study has shown traits can be passed on without recourse to DNA: http://physorg.com/news118682296.html

 

[katie_tully]

lions kill their lion cubs
spiders eat their mates
etcetera. lots of animals engage in 'senseless' violence.

solid attack Katie. good use of bold letters and hatred. keep up the good work.

i try my best.

 

[HalcyonSky]

lions kill their lion cubs
spiders eat their mates
etcetera. lots of animals engage in 'senseless' violence.

wow, really? thats why i asked if primates engage in it

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B01E2D8143EF933A25753C1A960958260
looks like a good book

 

[katie_tully]

i didnt read that post, i just got the gist that somebody was asking about senseless violence in animals

edit: yes other primates have been known to beat other primates to death for no apparent reason.