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FAIL: My friend said "why we still got monkeys?"
- Thread starter Mr.Squirrel
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Xdrive05
Member
jhenedo said:
We are pointing out that, based on the content of your posts in this thread, you have no idea what evolution is, as understood by the scientists who study it for a living and publish on it year round. There are no "mistakes" in evolution because that's not how evolution works.
The point is: a grade-school understanding of the material would inform you of that much. I'm sorry, but there's just no nice way to put it. You don't know anything about evolution. It may not be your fault. Perhaps your educators have failed you, or you've fallen victim to some systematic science denial. I don't know your story, but rest assured your education has been wronged at some point in your life.
Now at the same time I have provided you with several resources to take advantage of, which will give you a fundamental understanding of evolutionary science. So you have no excuse. I suggest, for your own sake, that you learn a thing or two about evolution before waving your ignorance around like a holocaust denier. You're going to regret this line of denial before it's over. Just a fair warning from one homo sapien to another.
Rapstah said:
Well thats what it read like. A single ancestor from whom we all evolved. Like adam and eve amirite? lol Am kidding man. Anyway, my issue with evolution doesn't only stem from the outward microappearance. Also from the minute details like our biological pathways and how intricate they are all the way to the mechanism of the prokaryotic flagella.
You say mistake as if there were some ideal being or target that evolution is achieving. There isn't.jhenedo said:
Besides, I'd say humans contain tons of 'mistakes'. We've evolved to walk upright because it afford a lot of advantages, but that doesn't mean it's 'right'. We pay the consequences of it - spines weren't really designed (ha!) to be positioned vertically with so much weight and leads to a lot of complications. Not so intelligent after all.
jhenedo said:
Evolution is an extremely slow process, if you want to witness the apparition of extremely new and distinct features. Fossils from a few millenia ago wouldn't look any different from what we have no. I mean, there still are living organisms right now that have barely changed for millions of years.
Wickerbasket
Member
I'm pretty sure a quick search in Google would answer most of your questions. Wikipedia can also be a good source.jhenedo said:
mrkgoo said:
The target is me and you. The target is a human with a functional brain that communicates intricately with his limbs. The target is an almost perfectly crafted system that monitors slight increases in hormone, electrolyte or stimulus changes. The target is an information storage system that transpots nitrogenous bases in an amazing fashion to code for proteins that are vital to our daily needs. The target is you.
Atramental
Banned
Wickerbasket
Member
Evolution doesn't have a target. Are you a creationist?jhenedo said:
I want to believe this is a brilliant troll attempt.
KO Traveling Hobo
Member
I'm going to try to summarize this thread:
OP: Lol, so my friend said something really stupid, I tried to explain it to him but he didn't care. Pretty funny huh?
One half of GAF: WTF are you still friends with that retard for??? Damn fundies corrupting humanity with their willful ignorance!!!
Other half: OMFG your friend said something funny that gets brought up on GAF a lot, why would you post about that??? Do you hate him!?? Some friend you are!!!
KO Hobo: ::smug_face::
OP: Lol, so my friend said something really stupid, I tried to explain it to him but he didn't care. Pretty funny huh?
One half of GAF: WTF are you still friends with that retard for??? Damn fundies corrupting humanity with their willful ignorance!!!
Other half: OMFG your friend said something funny that gets brought up on GAF a lot, why would you post about that??? Do you hate him!?? Some friend you are!!!
KO Hobo: ::smug_face::
Xdrive05
Member
Wickerbasket said:
Exactly. The poor guy just doesn't understand the subject he's trying to debate. The sad part is he doesn't understand that he doesn't understand. He's using language like "target" and "mistake", and he apparently thinks that just asking question is good enough, regardless of whether his questions have any relevance or mean anything.
9/11 Truthers are also "just asking questions", right?
Wickerbasket
Member
So what you're asking for you've already rejected?jhenedo said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synapsid
If you scroll down, it'll show you the branching trees where it finally splits off to mammals.
Glad I could be of help.
Say hello to your common ancestor with birds
Doesn't look anything like a bird or a human? Well no shit, it's 350millions years old.
Doesn't look anything like a bird or a human? Well no shit, it's 350millions years old.
Atramental
Banned
jhenedo said:
...
Wickerbasket
Member
English might not be his first language.Atramental said:
Atramental
Banned
Rapstah said:
Very well. But I'm not taking him seriously until he confirms that he has viewed the learning materials we've provided him.
Wickerbasket
Member
That's why it's stupid to insult someones spelling/grammar on the internet. They could know 10 more languages than you.jhenedo said:Its not. Its swahili, same structure as spanish. Good deduction ability.
Wickerbasket
Member
No! We designed it.Blair said:
Beer Monkey
Member
Wickerbasket said:
Well, not intelligently.
Barberetti
Member
jhenedo said:
After reading your posts, I'm not entirely sure that you understand your own questions, let alone the answers the others have given you.
Kai Dracon
Writing a dinosaur space opera symphony
The best layman's term analogy I've heard for explaining the anthropic principle and fallacious thinking regarding evolution, is this:
Sand poured into a vase will assume the shape of the vase. Take the vase away, and the hardened sand remains. If someone walks along and sees this hard sand, they will say "by what magic has this sand leapt up from the ground and into the shape of a vase?"
But we are the sand, and nature is the vase. Our forms were not perfectly put together. They exist as they do because that's the only shape the parts could have assumed. We're the sand poured into the vase. The circumstances of our survival, that shaped our development, are the walls of the vase.
This also works for people who say "Well, Earth is special because only it has the suspiciously perfect environment to support our life. Surely it must be impossible that anything else so perfect could exist anywhere else by chance."
That's also an anthropic illusion. Earth is not "perfect" for us. We were forced to be perfect *for it*, in order to survive. But, that flawed reasoning is also why people can't understand with so much matter, chemicals, stars, and bodies in the universe, it is indeed probable - not just possible - that there is life and then complex life somewhere else.
Remember: when a lot of people saw Avatar, they had to ask why the humans needed to wear filtration masks to breath. A lot of people don't even realize that an atmosphere precisely like Earth's is not required for life to exist, and in fact, there probably won't be any atmosphere precisely like Earth anywhere else. (In that sense, Avatar's Pandora is a very lucky find. It's atmosphere is so close that only a bit of filtration is required for humans to breath it.)
Sand poured into a vase will assume the shape of the vase. Take the vase away, and the hardened sand remains. If someone walks along and sees this hard sand, they will say "by what magic has this sand leapt up from the ground and into the shape of a vase?"
But we are the sand, and nature is the vase. Our forms were not perfectly put together. They exist as they do because that's the only shape the parts could have assumed. We're the sand poured into the vase. The circumstances of our survival, that shaped our development, are the walls of the vase.
This also works for people who say "Well, Earth is special because only it has the suspiciously perfect environment to support our life. Surely it must be impossible that anything else so perfect could exist anywhere else by chance."
That's also an anthropic illusion. Earth is not "perfect" for us. We were forced to be perfect *for it*, in order to survive. But, that flawed reasoning is also why people can't understand with so much matter, chemicals, stars, and bodies in the universe, it is indeed probable - not just possible - that there is life and then complex life somewhere else.
Remember: when a lot of people saw Avatar, they had to ask why the humans needed to wear filtration masks to breath. A lot of people don't even realize that an atmosphere precisely like Earth's is not required for life to exist, and in fact, there probably won't be any atmosphere precisely like Earth anywhere else. (In that sense, Avatar's Pandora is a very lucky find. It's atmosphere is so close that only a bit of filtration is required for humans to breath it.)
Mgoblue201
Won't stop picking the right nation
As someone who himself grew up in a religious household and once was misled on evolution, I can say that there are many things that you still need to learn.jhenedo said:
First off, most people think of evolutionary changes in larger terms like the spontaneous growth of an eye. Sure, a random duplication event might double the number of eyes, but the actual genetic coding for an eye might take millions of years to develop. Most changes at the genetic level, in fact, are neutral. The human genome has something like 4 billion base pairs, but each human only undergoes something like 120 mutations. Because a single amino acid change is unlikely to effect the working of the larger protein that it is constructed from, change obviously is gonna have to occur over millions of years of time.
For instance, you can read about mammal evolution here. Some of the original ancestors, like synapsids, broke away from reptiles hundreds of millions of years ago. True mammals didn't begin appearing until about 125 million years ago. Some modern mammals, like the echidna, still bear marks from this evolutionary branch. Primates emerged approximately 65 million years ago and probably looked like a tree shrew. Human ancestors continued with Northarctus, a kind of proto-lemur, old world monkeys like Proconsul and Afropithecus, then Australopithecus, and then early Homo species. These are just a few of the genuses, which themselves include many species, which include a ton of variety. Now imagine the millions upon millions of changes that would need to occur at the genetic level to get from species and genuses and the tens of millions of years that it took.
So no, there wouldn't be mistakes that you would think of, certainly not ones that would show up in fossils. If a deleterious mutation does occur, it probably will lead to some kind of disease.
The flagellum argument is a creationist talking point, and it's also not a very good one. Most of the parts that comprise the flagellum also exist somewhere else within the cell. This Youtube video explains how they could have come to form the actual flagellum. And if the eye is so intricate, for instance, then why are there millions of variations of it within nature? You could argue that you can't get from one eye to the other, but there have been countless studies done on the evolution of specific systems, and yes, there are ways to change systems without destroying them. We've witnessed it in the lab. There is Lenski's bacteria experiment, in which the bacteria suddenly gained the ability to transport citrate for a food source.
jhenedo said:
Nobody's called you an idiot. They've simply said that you seem to have a mistaken understanding of what evolution actually is, so you're asking questions that don't make sense.
Several people have given you helpful links to help you correct these misunderstandings, and you seem to have taken this as an insult.
whatsinaname
Member
Soka said:
Seeing as no one replied to this (I think), there is one guy who tries to quantify something similar.
It's called the Drake equation and estimates the number of extraterrestrial civilisation in our galaxy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
There is no scientific method to arriving at it of course. :lol
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