How Crazy does Evolution Seem?

[Purple Knight]

This is not a question of whether or not evolution is crazy, but how crazy it seems at first glance.

That is, when we discard our experiences and look at claims as if through new eyes, what do we find when we look at evolution? I Believe we can find a great deal of common ground with this question, because when I discard my experience as an animal breeder, when I discard my knowledge, and what I've been taught, I might look at evolution with the same skepticism as someone who has either never been taught anything about it, or someone who has been taught to distrust it.

Personally my mind goes to the keratinised spines on the tongues of cats. Yes, cats have fingernails growing out of their tongues! Gross, right? Well, these particular fingernails have evolved into perfect little brushes for the animal's fur. But I think of that first animal with a horrid growth of keratin on its poor tongue. The poor thing didn't die immediately, and this fits perfectly with what I said about two steps back paying for one forward. This detrimental mutation didn't hurt the animal enough for the hapless thing to die of it, but surely it caused some suffering. And persevering thing that he was, he reproduced despite his disability (probably in a time of plenty that allowed that). But did he have the growths anywhere else? It isn't beyond reason to think of them protruding from the corners of his eyes or caking up more and more on the palms of his hands. Perhaps he had them where his eyelashes were, and it hurt him to even blink. As disturbing as my mental picture is of this scenario, this sad creature isn't even as bad off as this boar, whose tusks grew up and curled until they punctured his brain.





This is a perfect example of a detrimental trait being preserved because it doesn't hurt the animal enough to kill it before it mates. So we don't have to jump right from benefit to benefit. The road to a new beneficial trait might be long, going backwards most of the way, and filled with a lot of stabbed brains and eyelids.

Walking backwards most of the time, uphill both ways, and across caltrops almost the entire trip?

I have to admit, thinking about walking along such a path sounds like, at very least, a very depressing way to get from A to B. I would hope there would be a better way.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to Eloi in post #1254]

And have you ever started to calculate if the total time attributed to the existence of the Universe is enough to produce by chance all these species and genres of animal and plant life that we see today with all its variations?

By pure random chance? Probably not. But that is not how evolution works. Natural selection, environmental changes, etc. factor in to impact the rate of evolutionary change, and the direction it takes. Mutations may be random, but the impact they have on the living entity and how they combine and propogate is not pure random chance. The old "tornado in a junkyard making a 747" does not apply to evolution because that is not at all how it works.

We don't need the entire age of the universe though. We can start with the age of the Earth (4.6 billion years) and the first, single-cell life forms appeared on the scene about 4 billion years ago. It took about 2.5 - 3 billion more years before the first multicellular animals appeared, and another 1 - 1.5 billion years to land at today. If 99+% of all life that has existed on Earth is now extinct, then the overall diversity in life forms since day one is far greater than it is today which makes the situation worse from your angle (ie. not enough time to get just what we have today).

In reality there has been enough time because we can see from the fossil record (including microbial mats) what did actually happen. Evolution is currently the best explanation for it until someone comes along and topples it. So far it has stood the test of time (and scrutiny).

[Eloi]

(...) Indeed and its for that very reason that I remain unconvinced by the various arguments and extrapolations that purportedly show that the fossil record is evidence for evolution, to me they appear as fairy tales. Still one man's fairy tale is another man's truth I suppose.

Imagine... they don't even know the real appearance and figure that the dinosaurs would have had, which apparently is what they have obtained the most remains. I was surprised when I read that the drawings of the dinosaurs are often just artistic creations of how the whole body could have been, obtained by programs (sometimes just the imagination of the artist) that generate the body from a simple bone, or two... They can't even do that. .. but they make you a complete tree of who came from whom.

Pure fairy tales.

[Sherlock Holmes]

It is very easy to draw a whole tree, and say this one goes here, and this one goes here... Do you realize that a drawing how you imagine things came to pass does not say anything about they actually ocurred? How long would that imaginary process have taken? of the conditions that would be necessary for it to actually occur? of the conditions that would be necessary? of the evidence that they have to present to show that it really was like that and not in another way?

They are fairytales, the kind that non-believers like, told by those who want to impress them and make them believe that they have a lot of evidence, which in reality they never have .

Well said. This is one of my objections to the claims about the fossil record too, we have the fossils themselves but the "arrows" connecting them are just human interpretation.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to Jose Fly in post #1258]

Yeah DrNoGods, have you figured out the complete evolutionary history of every species, trait, and genetic sequence that's ever existed?

Working on it in my spare time! I like the purely big-picture analytical approach. We have a planet full of life now, we have enough information to reasonably claim some form of simple, single-celled population appeared in the ballpark of 4 billion years ago, and we have the fossil record and last 50 years of genetics work to paint a pretty good picture of what happened in between. Gaps continue to be filled in.

[Eloi]

[Replying to Eloi in post #1254]

And have you ever started to calculate if the total time attributed to the existence of the Universe is enough to produce by chance all these species and genres of animal and plant life that we see today with all its variations?

By pure random chance? Probably not. But that is not how evolution works. Natural selection, environmental changes, etc. factor in to impact the rate of evolutionary change, and the direction it takes. Mutations may be random, but the impact they have on the living entity and how they combine and propogate is not pure random chance. The old "tornado in a junkyard making a 747" does not apply to evolution because that is not at all how it works.

We don't need the entire age of the universe though. We can start with the age of the Earth (4.6 billion years) and the first, single-cell life forms appeared on the scene about 4 billion years ago. It took about 2.5 - 3 billion more years before the first multicellular animals appeared, and another 1 - 1.5 billion years to land at today. If 99+% of all life that has existed on Earth is now extinct, then the overall diversity in life forms since day one is far greater than it is today which makes the situation worse from your angle (ie. not enough time to get just what we have today).

In reality there has been enough time because we can see from the fossil record (including microbial mats) what did actually happen. Evolution is currently the best explanation for it until someone comes along and topples it. So far it has stood the test of time (and scrutiny).

I won't make the calculation for you, since I do not believe that ever happened ... but you're probably not taking into account that the planet only became habitable many millions of years after the initial origin of the Universe; no life could have arisen before that ... and from that moment, add up every detail of every little animal and plant ... How long did the earth have to gestate all its productions before making them as they are now? which, by the way, we have had like this for how long?

By the way, who impregnated the earth to give life? Or do you forget the main detail?

[William]

[Replying to The Barbarian in post #1209]

The human nervous system looks more like an inverted tree than like a jellyfish. The human nervous system has a central axis from which nerves branch out.

Jellyfish have a ringlike structure with tentacles arranged around the ring:

Just to re-visit this - Trees also have a ring-like structure with branches arranged around the main trunk.

[Diogenes]

[Replying to Diogenes in post #8]
When someone talks about the people and not about the arguments, for some reason it will be...

In a scientific field we rely on experts. Their qualifications are at issue. JW.org does not use qualified scientific experts to support their [pseudo]scientific claims. Neither does the Discovery institute. Virtually the ONLY people opposing the truth of evolution are religiously motivated.

Their educational qualifications are at issue.

Since evolution has virtually complete acceptance in the scientific community, I need not demonstrate the academic resumes of the scientists involved, but I'll mention three, Frances Arnold, Gregory Winter and George Smith, who recently shared a Nobel Prize for their work on ways to speed up and control the evolution of proteins to produce greener technologies and new medicines.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06753-y

In contrast, tho' the Watchtower and pseudoscience organizations like "The Discovery Institute" claim to have scientists on their staffs, they are not accomplished in the field of Biology. Instead, the few that they name have degrees, not in biology, but in mathematics or philosophy, like David Berlinski, who have authored some very strange stuff like, "The Secrets of the Vaulted Sky (2003), aimed to redeem astrology as "rationalistic"; Publishers Weekly described the book as offering "self-consciously literary vignettes ... ostentatious erudition and metaphysical pseudo-profundities"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ber ... mic_career

The Discovery Institute claims he taught biology at Columbia, but he was only a research assistant, and that for less than a year.

But please, give us the names of experts in biology so we can examine their credentials and Nobel Prizes in biology or fields directly related to evolution.

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to Jose Fly in post #1258]

No, that's translocation.

That is not what your article shows.

Look at your one article. Chromosome 4 to Chromosome 20. before and after.
https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Insertion

It takes a section of 4 and moves it to 20.

Yes, it does. The AiG article you linked to claimed that Lenski's experiment did not document any new mutations. I showed where Lenski specifically did.

Reading comprehension is a wonderful thing.

In my calculation, I assumed that all said mutations increased the size of the genome. Which they don't according to the article that you cited.

Also, are you assuming that every single nucleotide requires its own separate mutation?

0.4 nucleotides per year is 9 orders of magnitude over the accepted rate. Besides the FACT that there is no evidence that Lenski's experiment increased the size of the genome in the 30 years, it has been running.

[Jose Fly]

[Replying to Jose Fly in post #1258]

Yeah DrNoGods, have you figured out the complete evolutionary history of every species, trait, and genetic sequence that's ever existed?

Working on it in my spare time! I like the purely big-picture analytical approach. We have a planet full of life now, we have enough information to reasonably claim some form of simple, single-celled population appeared in the ballpark of 4 billion years ago, and we have the fossil record and last 50 years of genetics work to paint a pretty good picture of what happened in between. Gaps continue to be filled in.

I tend to think in big picture terms as well. Applying that to this question, to me it seems fairly straightforward.....every single new trait, ability, genetic sequence, and species we've ever seen arise has done so via evolution. So when we look at the history of life it's reasonable to conclude that the same was true in the past.

Of course creationist will insist that oh no, in the past everything was different and all those things came about via completely different means (basically by magic). The fun always comes when you press them to support that with something other than "The Bible says...".

But then I guess that's to be expected because after all, creationism is not a scientific position; it's entirely religious. That's why the creationists are quite ignorant of the very science they attempt to argue against. If their position really were based in science, you'd think they'd at least be familiar with it!

[Eloi]

Of course, we've never say we are experts, or that the Bible is a book of science, hehehe. That is why we cite references, bibliography, like you do yourself. Look here https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/publication/r1/lp-e/lf for example.

It is you who think so about yourself ... and we all know that what science say now can be a reason to laugh tomorrow.