[Cougar]

Illuyankas, on Sep 3 2009, 09:21 PM, said:

@Cougar: I didn't call him a fuckwit, I said he was using a fuckwit's argument when he wasn't a fuckwit. I don't think he was even offended.

Yeah but saying he has the ideas or the arguments of a fuckwit is tantamount to calling him a fuckwit and it's only his Christian patience that stopped him having the Jesus raptor burn down every KFC within a 10 mile radius of you.

[Cougar]

Mutzy, on Sep 3 2009, 09:17 PM, said:

So we should be seeing a Planet of the Apes, in around a million of years or so?

You live there now, what did you just type the mesage with, your fins?

[Bent]

But...but....I AM a fuckwit, and no, I dont get offended so much, but I certainly appreciate the comments Cougar. NOW STAY ON TOPIC!!!

That still doesn't explain how there isnt a group of talking ape-like figures still walking around and talking. Evolution by definition doesn't just shut off. I mean, single celled organisms still evolve into fish (its called birth now), and fish evolve into land animals (amphibians) and land animals evolve still into walking upright (gila monster) and so on. But somewher there is a gap in the evolutionary chain (not the missing link, thats different) but where is the in between that still looks like an ape and talks?

Better yet, if evolution is real, and it took MILLIONS OF YEARS to evolve into what we are today, how is it that we seem to be growing in knowledge SO FAST now? Why not the slow steady pace from before? I mean, if fire was learned millions of years ago by cavemen, how is it possible that in one hundred years we went from horse and buggy to walking on the moon? The timeline matters!!

[Cougar]

Bent, on Sep 3 2009, 09:37 PM, said:

That still doesn't explain how there isnt a group of talking ape-like figures still walking around and talking.

Have you looked in the mirror lately? Not you personally obviously.

[Illuyankas]

Bent, on Sep 3 2009, 09:37 PM, said:

Better yet, if evolution is real, and it took MILLIONS OF YEARS to evolve into what we are today, how is it that we seem to be growing in knowledge SO FAST now? Why not the slow steady pace from before? I mean, if fire was learned millions of years ago by cavemen, how is it possible that in one hundred years we went from horse and buggy to walking on the moon? The timeline matters!!

Simple answer to that one is both the increasing size/complexity of our brain and our ability to store knowledge past one lifetime via recording it. Delicious exponential rates are delicious. Also there were other groups of communicating primates around - like Neanderthals and whatnot - they just couldn't survive against us as competitors for the same food sources.

[Bent]

You know, its kinda funny to me that everyone gets annoyed with my faith based explanations, yet the THEORY of evolution is pretty much the same thing. You take on faith, that the scientific explanation is the correct one. Wheres proof? Im not being facetious here, I have sincerly never heard of documented evidence, proving, beyond a shadow of the doubt, that evolution happened.

[Illuyankas]

There's a link further back that shows a population of one species of bacteria in isolation becoming able to digest a food molecule they couldn't before. The experiment lasted for 20 something years with hundreds of thousands of generations being observed. Bacteria have really short generations, so the chances of them exhibiting changes within our own lifetime is very very high, and in this case has already happened. They even took previous frozen samples of the group that evolved this ability to metabolise whatever the substance was, unfroze them and continued with them, and the most recent generations were able to do the same, and this is the important part, at different numbers of generations after the start. They didn't just have a trigger that went 'you can eat food B now', they changed naturally.

[stone monkey]

Ah yes. But the reply you'll get is "That's micro not macro evolution." Admittedly it's a dumb reply, as the results are the equivalent of watching a species of lions evolve into one that can digest grass. Which would mean that they wouldn't really be lions any more. But that's the level of discourse that you can expect.

[Epiph]

Bent, on Sep 3 2009, 02:57 PM, said:

Someone explain to me how it is more feasible that I am a monkey and yet evolution stopped at a point, because there are no talking monkey? There back on topic.

Evolution has never stopped. The reason there are no other sentient ape species is either because they couldn't compete against us and went extinct, or there's some evidence that we may have actively exterminated them. But as has been noted, chimpanzees are pretty emotionally and socially sophisticated, comparatively speaking, and there's no reason to think that, given hundreds of thousands of years, they couldn't evolve to a similar level of sentience, given the right environmental selectors. And there's some evidence for sentience in cetaceans, though nothing concrete that I know of.

[Mutzy]

I was more thinking along the lines, "when do these bacteria become a fish?" Since I do know that the difference between micro and macro is only at what size the evolution takes place and it is a series of micros which causes the larger change. And yes, I have studied parts of evolution, sometime ago.

[stone monkey]

Species boundaries are rather arbitrary things. A species is generally defined as an interbreeding population of individuals who cannot breed with another population. We, as humans define them. Fish itself is a pretty nebulous term. There are fish (hagfish, for instance) that are pretty unlike all the other fish. The short answer is that a population of evolving organisms have become fish when it meets our criteria for what a fish is...

[Mutzy]

Lets simplify it, when does the bacteria become an animal with scales, fins, and gills?

[Bent]

Illuyankas, on Sep 3 2009, 04:59 PM, said:

There's a link further back that shows a population of one species of bacteria in isolation becoming able to digest a food molecule they couldn't before. The experiment lasted for 20 something years with hundreds of thousands of generations being observed. Bacteria have really short generations, so the chances of them exhibiting changes within our own lifetime is very very high, and in this case has already happened. They even took previous frozen samples of the group that evolved this ability to metabolise whatever the substance was, unfroze them and continued with them, and the most recent generations were able to do the same, and this is the important part, at different numbers of generations after the start. They didn't just have a trigger that went 'you can eat food B now', they changed naturally.

I would respond with, isn't that adaptation, and not evolution....it gets cold in the winter, I put on a coat...I havent evolved a fur lining, I adapted and put on a coat.

[Illuyankas]

As stone monkey said, this is far more the case of lions giving birth to cubs that can eat grass. And are able to eat it beyond that point, wherever and whenever.

[Cougar]

I have the most entertaining image of trillions of bacteria putting on tiny coats now.

[Cold Iron]

Cougar, on Sep 3 2009, 06:26 PM, said:

I just have a hard time believing the idea that the church or any other religious organisation shied away from trying to teach the true nature of religion through metaphor because they didn't think people would get it. Whilst I fully understand your logic, I can't say it any plainer than: I think you are wrong. It's convenient revisionism and nothing I can think of historically points to an idea that the Bible, Qu'ran or Torah were ever written as anything but the absolute unassailable truth. It's plausible that it was all written as metaphor and over time the idiots and power hungry clergy got it all wrong, I'm just saying I don't believe it.

Ok fair enough if you miss the metaphors all through the NT, lots of people do, but you're citing the Torah as an argument? I'm not sure if I understand, you surely would not be so insistent on an argument if you truly have as little knowledge as you seem to be displaying here. No metaphor in the Torah? Nothing but the absolute unassailable truth? I don't know what to say.

Bent, on Sep 4 2009, 04:24 AM, said:

Put simply I dont believe in coincidence, if I do something that I KNOW is wrong (smoking weed for me is an example, because this was a major issue with me when I was younger) I get punished. Maybe my car breaks down, maybe I lose a 100 dollar bill, maybe I get a kidney stone, etc.

No better argument than a true believer demonstrating my point - what bent is clearly doing is associating bad events in his life with bad choices he has made, regardless of his complete awareness of their apparent disconnection. This is cause by his choosing to follow a path he knew to be wrong, he went against his sense of what he should do, or in other words, he went against god. So until he has forgiven himself for this transgression, all the subsequent bad things that happen to him he will associate with a punishment from god. To varying extents this is the way the human mind works regardless of religious belief. Just because it is irrational does not mean we cannot attempt to control it. Indeed the development of self control is paramount to the success of our species, we demonstrate it better than all others, and it is precisely this kind of subconscious manipulation that enables us to do it.

This post has been edited by Cold Iron: 04 September 2009 - 03:33 AM

[stone monkey]

Mutzy, on Sep 3 2009, 11:31 PM, said:

Lets simplify it, when does the bacteria become an animal with scales, fins, and gills?

At the risk of sounding teleological (which isn't the case; evolution isn't directed to a certain endpoint, it's more a reaction to the various selection pressures), the population of what were once bacteria become fish when their eventual descendants have evolved the various things that fit our criteria for defining what fish are: i.e. and not necessarily in this order; they have gained an aerobic metabolism (if they didn't have one already), they have gained the endosymbionts (mitochondria and possibly some of the other organelles) that make them eukaryotes, they have collected in groups for mutual survival and become metazoans, they have differentiated so that cells perform particular jobs throughout their bodies, they've started reproducing sexually (possibly so that they can more rapidly reshuffle their genetic material each generation to fight off parasites or maybe to increase genetic diversity allowing their descendants to take advantage of new environments more quickly), they,ve gained a one way gut and nervous system, they've gained an internal skeleton (of bone and/or cartilage) and circulatory system, developed limbs, fins, scales, gills etc... Et voila, fish.

It's believed the progression (which is not quite the best thing to call it, but what can you do?) from simple anaerobic bacterium to swimming fishy metazoan took the best part of 3 billion years. So it's not as if it's a speedy process. And given the presumably short generational times of the organisms involved, there's a lot of mutation and selection (that is, sex [more accurately, reproduction] and death) that's gone on.

While all this is going on lineages are splitting off that eventually end up as protists, plants, fungi, worms, arthropods etc. and loads of others that simply died out. Statistically speaking, after all, 99.9% (and probably a few more 9s after that) of all the species that have ever lived are extinct. Evolution has been compared to the Red Queen from Alice In Wonderland; that is "You have to run as fast as you can to stay where you are." A good(ish) analogy being that if you came second in a race and the next time the race is run everyone in it is twice as fast as they were, you're still going to come second. But if you haven't improved and your opponents have you'll end up last.

This post has been edited by stone monkey: 04 September 2009 - 01:15 AM

[Bent]

stone monkey, on Sep 3 2009, 09:00 PM, said:

And given the presumably short generational times of the organisms involved, there's a lot of mutation and selection (that is, sex [more accurately, reproduction] and death) that's gone on.

I get this, however, why did all evolving species suddenly stop evolving, no fish bacteria...no frog fish....no lizard monkeys....no monkey men...its as if, it stopped for everything, and now we say that because we learn things quickly we are still evolving, however, I have not noticed any humans walking around with super human atributes...such as thicker skin, or any other genetically physical changes that means we are still evolving. I am not being difficult, well, maybe a little, however, in the example above....was the bacteria tested introduced to a food source A? you know, the regular food source. Sounds like they were put in a dish with food B, and told eat that or die...eventually one of the buggers will try it, survive, and the colony will follow its example in order to survive, this again is adaptation, not evolution....evolution would be if one of the bacteria, turned into a duck and then flew away, to go eat food C.

[Silencer]

No people with super human attributes? What do you call the constantly improving records for the 100m sprint?

It just SEEMS like it's stopped. Don't forget, Bent, we are talking 3 BILLION years. How long have you been alive for? Take that as a fraction of 3 BILLION, and see how much evolution it's likely for you to have witnessed.

[Bent]

Silencer, on Sep 3 2009, 09:26 PM, said:

No people with super human attributes? What do you call the constantly improving records for the 100m sprint?

It just SEEMS like it's stopped. Don't forget, Bent, we are talking 3 BILLION years. How long have you been alive for? Take that as a fraction of 3 BILLION, and see how much evolution it's likely for you to have witnessed.

Like I said before, its sped up in your words....in 20 years people have "evolved' to faster and stronger species....by your count in 100 million years we will be flying telekinetic turds. So say the world is 6000 years old, guess what, the level of evolution that is going on now is the same as before, no magic, we just learn as we live. And its not evolution that does it, its knowledge retention. We didn't evolve webbed feet to swim better in the Olymics, we learned how better to prepare and train to improve our times, that my friend is not evolution.