Evolution
 

I fuckin' god-damned love the concept of evolution, man. I love this shit hard. On top of the fact that the science behind evolutionary theory and evolutionary biology is interesting as fuck, an added factor of interest is that so many people don't understand it, therefore they don't believe it, despite it being a verifiable fact of life. This has driven me to memorize as much as I can about the subject because while i've seen many people argue over opinions, i've never seen so many people so staunchly opposed to a fact.

I had a pretty solid secular education, despite my parent's best attempts otherwise, as well as being in a northern extension of the Bible belt. So I had accepted evolution as a fact without truly understanding it up until sometime in 2006, when DJ FC publicly shamed my ignorance on this very board somewhere and I started looking further into the matter. Since then i've become familiarized with it enough the point of seriously considering going back to get another Undergrad in evolutionary biology, but that's another story.

Anyways this thread is about evolution. I am constantly reading up about it as it gives me the biggest science boner out of the entire field of science, so i'll try to update here often. Feel free to do the same.

If you're looking for some reading on the subject, I highly recommend these two books:

http://www.nubblies.net/forums/Photopost/data/2/124.jpg http://www.nubblies.net/forums/Photo...w_on_Earth.jpg

I just started The Origin of Species as well.

Humorous Icebreaker:


Srs Business:




Decent History channel segment on the descent of man: Ape to Man

The Top Ten Daily Consequences of Having Evolved | Science & Nature | Smithsonian Magazine

New mathematics research proves there's plenty of time for evolution

Hey asshole, are you saying my grandfather was a monkey? ARE YOU? SOMEBODY GET CLARENCE DARROW ON THIS GODLESS HEATHEN!

Why are you black? If so, then yeah, your grand father was probably a monkey.

What do you get when you cross a monkey with a black guy? Retarded monkey.

What's the difference between tires and black people?

Tires don't sing when you put chains on them

A classic. In 1960

What's white on top and black on the bottom?



Society.

What's black on the outside and white on the inside?

An oreo.

a better example.

Why do niggers stink?


So blind people can hate them too.

What do you call a black man with a Harvard education?

A nigger

I've always thought a lot about the correlation of human loss of body hair and clothing. Found the following excerpts really interesting.

Study of lice DNA shows humans first wore clothes 170,000 years ago

Why do tigers in Africa go around licking each others ass holes?

To get the taste of nigger out of their mouths.

All that time in Africa would explain the black race. I'm assuming the whites were from being around Israel and maybe wearing clothes?

I hope that's a joke

CorpWatch*:*World: Bananas are a Dying Breed

Let me downplay it a little first. I don't put too much importance on my opinion on the subject, as it doesn't really affect anyone else. And as I said, it's the best explanation we have. But I wouldn't give a book saying gravity doesn't exist the time of day. Gravity is a daily observable, testable phenomenon. Darwin's theory is an interpretation of left over evidences. I still pick up books for and against Darwin's theory and I still find both viewpoints really interesting.

I think the main things that will need to be addressed in the future are whether or not there are limits to what natural selection can produce. There's some question about information actually being added through mutation. (The only real counter argument to that is that opponents aren't being specific enough as to what "information" actually is). I already mentioned irreducible complexity. And (this extends a little past Darwin's theory) a somewhat decent explanation for how life began. There really isn't a viable theory out there.

The more of those that get answered, the more solid my confidence in the theory will become. The attacks are really a good thing in my mind anyway. At the very least, it's just going to chisel and refine the theory into something better.

While definitely far from conclusive, the Miller-Urey experiment offers some fantastic grounds for a possible origin of life, and a much more feasible one than involving a deity:


In regard to your information inquiry, Dawkins covered that at length here: The Information Challenge | Australian Skeptics

"Attacks" are only good when they are based on healthy scientific debate, not just clambering for any Biblical excuse possible with practically no evidence whatsoever to support it. I like the quote from this article:

Good stuff.

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." -- Arthur Schopenhauer

I think there's definitely a stigma attached to looking at alternatives to evolution. Someone had better have a slam dunk evidence that crushes the theory in one fell swoop to receive the acclaim they're saying. Anything less, they'll look like they have an agenda. In Ben Stein's little documentary there were people that said they had their grants taken away for even mentioning certain possibilities. People that supposedly weren't religious at all. Do I buy that there's a huge conspiracy? Not at all. Avoiding a professor with an agenda is probably smart. But I think it does squash some honest inquiry before it gets started.

I agree with this to an extent, except the only real "challenge" to evolution is creationism...which came first.

Its definitely good to be skeptical and to be open to new theories concerning evolution.

I'd actually argue that the theory of relativity and the theory of evolution are comparable. There are actually legitimate alternatives to the theory of relativity, but that's besides the point. You cannot see gravity, you can only see its effects. Similarly you can see the effects of evolution in the fossil record and in biology. Evolution is also testable, laboratory reproductions of mutations and natty selection support the theory.

I know I'm splitting hairs here a bit but I just wanted to mention that evolution is more than just an interpretation of left over evidence, it is observable and testable just like the theory of relativity.

I kept saying "Darwin's theory" instead of evolution because I agree evolution is testable. I meant specifically the theory of the origin of species. It's an interpretation, albeit it a pretty solid one.

Gravity is the word that describes the effects. That's not debatable, as you're not defining something that would be seen. The existence of gravity particles, or whatever the hell they're looking for, would be the debatable part.

... also splitting hairs

You mean the origin of life as a whole? It's generally accepted all life on Earth stemmed from a common ancestor, and many people believe that to be some sort of self replicating molecule. Are you more likely to lean towards divine intervention or panspermia? Remember, the latter still doesn't answer the question about the origin of life.

You are correct, of course, that these are (currently) merely modern scientific interpretations and hypotheses. We have a plethora of evidence for natural, sexual, competition, etc. -- all of which is generally associated with evolution as a whole. The only people who claim to know 100% where life came from are the religious. As I said before, it's currently a matter of likelihood:

1: A self replicating molecule developed from the building blocks of life and over the course of 4 billion years evolved into all the life we see on Earth today.

2: An omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent deity created the origins of life (very likely a similar being to the above self-replicating molecule) and used evolution over a 4 billion year period to create all the life we see on Earth today.

LOL YOUR FAMILY DOESN'T LOVE YOU

Can someone please put THE THEORY OF in this thread title?

Admins?!

I'm reading Origin of Species right now and it has just prompted me to address some of the things heuris mentioned before That last part has been likened to being a detective coming on the scene of a crime with a copious amount of evidence pointing to what actually happened. Regardless, you're kind of asking for an (almost) impossible test: To see evolution happening when it takes thousands or hundreds of thousands of generations to make any significant, observable changes. Humans have only really been closely observing/classifying plants and animals for a few hundred years. While your line of skeptical thought is definitely more cerebral, it's directly related to "why don't we see monkeys evolving into humans today?"

In any case, it is testable to some degree:

E. coli long-term evolution experiment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And Natural Selection, given enough time, makes perfect sense in light of our domestication of plants and animals:

Also it should be noted that Darwin writes the longest sentences i've ever read. Average 10-12 line paragraph, with enough commas, dashes, and semicolons, comes out to about two sentences.


Natural selection doesn't "produce" anything -- copying errors in DNA structure produce the mutations. At the heart of it, that comes down to genetics, not evolutionary theory.

I was mostly arguing against comparing it to gravity right there.

Saw this article online today. I thought it was pretty crazy.

Racist Monkeys

I guess this is good a place as any to post this.

Newly Crowned Miss USA Was One Of Only Two Contestants Who Believe In Evolution | ThinkProgress

I was ready to be shocked that only 2 of the contestants believe in evolution, but frankly they're only women.

"Campanella affirmed that evolution should indeed be taught in schools because she believes in evolution of humans throughout time."

No, what you believe, as in what your personal opinion is, has nothing to do with whether or not we should teach something in schools. Evolution is taught, rightfully so, in school because of the mountains of evidence supporting it as scientific fact.

For female actors, I was very impressed with this acting.




What they're parodying here:

The videos above posted by Blonde were worth the time I spent watching them.

Ms. Montana was hilarious.

I watched like half of the first one in disbelief at how hideous some of the pageant contestants are before realizing it was actors in a spoof lol.

Who Knew? Orangutans Plan Trips | LiveScience
Do non-human animals always live in the here and now?

I watched the second video thinking it was the parody and only later realized the first video was the spoof.

Yeah.

Atmospheric Oxygen is pain?
http://i.imgur.com/5IkmdW8.jpg

1. When do you think suffering in the living world originated, and why do you think it originated? DP: When?
Shortly before the Cambrian explosion over half a billion years ago. The most rudimentary aversive experience may well be more ancient, maybe in the ancestors of choanoflagellates: free-living unicellular and colonial flagellate eukaryotes, which are the closest living relatives to animals. Choanoflagellates display key constituents of neurons, notably the same sodium channels. Nonsense mutations in our SCN9A gene, which encodes the Nav1.7 sodium ion channel, lead to congenital insensitivity to pain.
Clearly the exact date of the world’s first aversive experience, the first “micro-pinprick” so to speak, is a matter of conjecture. Yet dating the earliest forms of suffering is hard too. The experience of pain, I think, only amounts to full-blown suffering in multicellular creatures. Any distinction between mere pain and full-blown suffering is conventional; but it’s not arbitrary. Why don't vertebrates with central nervous systems - and likewise organisms in other phyla with complex cephalic ganglia - undergo not mere discrete neuronal “pinpricks”, but instead, on occasion, a unitary, ghastly experience of severe “physical” or emotional pain? Agony or despair can seem to consume one’s whole being, penetrating the very recesses of one’s soul. This is one aspect of the so-called “binding problem”, more commonly discussed in the context of the unity of perception.

Interview with David Pearce about the abolitionist project

1.5-2 million years ago untill 12-10,000 years ago the agricultural revolution

People started hunting large ungulates, or hoofed mammals. They were very dedicated to hunting, and it was an important part of their subsistence. You cannot have alpha males if you are going to have a hunting team that shares the meat fairly even-handedly, so that the entire team stays nourished. In order to get meat divided, you have to stomp on hierarchy and get it out of the way.

Selection pressure against alpha-males huge for 2 million years, then it flipped 10,000 years ago? Heard something about this on the (zomg socialist BBC) radio the other day but can't find what it was.

8,000 Years Ago, 17 Women Reproduced for Every One Man
An analysis of modern DNA uncovers a rough dating scene after the advent of agriculture.

http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-tech...uctive-success