Evolution?

It's very hard to notice evolutions since they take millions of years. If I understand evolution correctly it comes from little mutations during child birth. You always hear about people and animals being born with extra digits on their hands or web toes and stuff like that. Then natural selection is supposed to kill off the organisms with the weak traits and the stronger traits will live on. These days, humans have a system set up that is almost anti-evolution. If it was truly the survival of the fittest, then people who are born blind or deaf would be killed off, but we have ways to help them to survive and actually live a full life.

As for why there aren't millions of fossils, there are many things that happen throughout time that can destroy fossils and they also have to be preserved in some way. There's no possible way we can excavate every single square inch of the Earth. I'm sure there are more fossils we haven't found yet, but that's why paleantologists have the job they do.

 

well in the human race as i read, the evolution process is taking place you just don't know it. Well you are part of that process right now,you just don't know it.

 

I agree, but I just think it has been slowed down due to the ways we help people with negative traits, and I'm not saying that we shouldnt. Postive traits are still passed down and they will ultimately be what makes us evolve.

 

There is evolution taking place now, apparently. Human beings today on average are something like 6 inches taller than they were 100 years ago. Doesn't seem like much, but that's evolution. It doesn't happen overnight.

Also snakes have these bones on their skeleton right about where their back legs would be if they had them. They're just small bones that scientists say show that snakes used to have legs before they no longer needed them.

 

Hmmmm... I've been looking at that post for a while and I'm almost 97% positive that it doesn't make sense, but maybe I'm missing something.

 

Not every living thing becomes a fossel.


"but why don't the original species evolve itself into extinction? I am full of questions today. LOL"
Because the evolved species gave birth and they gave birth and soon there were no original species because there giving birth to evolved species.

 

evolution is not as simple as mutations at birth and the survival of the fitest. although there are mutations that live on to become part of evolution -and this is often how new species are born (although geographic events (?) are possably what causes a split in the evolution of one species to become two)- the main part of evolution comes simply from the diversity of life. have u noticed how not all humans are the same? its like creating powerull hybrid cannabis strains that are more powerfull than its two parent strains. and as a species becomes more complex the evolutionary process slows down because ther are more cells, more DNA to change, life cycles become longer, however the flipside of this is that evolution may even be able to evolve a faster rate of non-mutatory evolution.
this is something i beleive in quite fully. to the point that we ... as humans are on the verge of being able to evolve ourselves within one lifetime, whether it be with genetic engineering of simply through the power of our minds and the manipulation of energy.

it has long been theorised that the next phases of evolution for humanity will be intelectual, and more cranium orientated. this, hopefully will be true to an extent. however with the development of society and technology.... who knows whats in store for humans. But i'll tell you one thing for sure... if we keep going down the path of a capitalist survival of the fitest, we will terminate ourselves in shit creek without a paddle!!!!!!!

 

I don't think evolution works in quite that way. If you're a cat, you can't become a dog. But over millions of years, perhaps a species that is catlike can become slightly more doglike if the enviroment shapes the species that way.

One thing no one has touched on is that evolution might not necessarily be subtle-- for example a species gradually losing its hair or fins or growing wings or whatnot. It only makes sense to me that a species would gain new traits or lose new traits if the environment significantly favoured those traits.

So it seems that it's more likely that evolution occurs through a series of stable periods and catastrophic events. Major changes in the environment very quickly wipe out all individuals with particular traits. Those individuals that survived the catastrophic event continue to pass on their traits. While the environment is stable, diversity will flourish again since small mutations don't cause individuals to be eliminated. When another catastrophe happens, the diversity is "clamped down" and the process repeats.

So you could say that humans aren't preventing evolution from happening (by saving the "weak" through medicine and social structures), we have simply learned to control our environment to the point of being able to increase diversity in our population. This increases our odds of surviving as major changes occur in our environment.

Let's say for example a major epidemic wipes out large portions of the human population, but certain people have a natural immunity. Those people would be the ones to continue on to advance the human race. And maybe the only people to have this immunity would be ugly people, or blind people, or people with foot odor...then all people after this point would be ugly, blind, or smelly. Evolution is fun!

 

evolution does not get applied horizontally or vertically.

that makes no sence.

if anything u could say that it is applied chronologically.

The biggest, and (in my mind) easiest way to understand evolution is Geography. look @ Australia. Australia was seperated from other land masses a long time ago and stayed seperate for long enough for all the reptiles and mamals on that continent to evolve in a completely differant way (giant marceupials for example) yet these genepools would have come from the exact same species as can be seen in Asia and Africa.

that leads me to another example. African Elephant and Indian Elephant. These differances occurred to suit the differences in climate etc from thier different geography. the reason why this occurred was because of of the lesser spoken part of natural selection. Sexual preference. over time the elephants in africa with bigger ears became more popular.
anyway ... i dont want to dwell on the size of elephants ears for the rest of thsi post...

i wanna get onto what ottopilot said...
YAY! what a perfectly beautifull way to look at it. Survival through diversity! And additionally through technology (created through more advanced inteligence) we are not only sparing ourselves from natural selection (which some see as weakening the genepool) we will be able to develop ways to grant everyone a "fitest" (((survival of the))) status... what better diversity could u wish for. everyone as diverse as they are, and even perhaps becoming more so with multicultural society running alongside segrigated society, and every little part of that diversity being kept for future need against other threats against the species. its so perfect (even if i did explain it in a really crap way) and the only thing that can spoil it ... is us. WARS & MURDER! thats really the only two things that are against evolution. even drinking cows milk is fine... just don't f*cking kill anyone or we loose a vital chunk of the evolutionary chain! makes u think twice about poluting the planet (ahem - American Capitalists for example) and killing thousands of people (American gov (christian extremists) and Islamic extremeists)

Nihilism and Athism seem more and more like the ways forward.

and if we are to evolve beyone the confines of this planet (which we WILL have to do to survive) we will need every last little bit of other species we can get our hands on. so in killing other species pointlessly (pollution) we are ensuring our own doom!

it's like bill hicks said. If we took all the money "they" spend on guns and 'defence' each year and spent it on feeding and clothing the poor of the world, not one human being excluded, wich we could do many times over... ... we could explore space TOGETHER!

(and I'd just like to add that the rest of teh money left over should go towards cleaning up the mess we made over the last 150 years)

that sounds like inteligent evolution to me!

Digit

 

diseases evolve faster than humans.

they evolve even faster when we help kill of all the weaker versions leaving only the cells that have imunity to our drugs. western medicine is killing us... either that or getting everyone primed to be forced into genetic manipulation in order to survive these super demon bacteria and viruses and diseases that we all helped to create.

 

I just been re-reading this and...

they have! from all my visits to the Natural history museum and the fossil museum (not more than 6 miles from my house in orkney) you can actually see the process of change!


and everyone knows that famous darwinian image of the hunched ape in differant stages until we see a modern human. ((and if u carry that on i beleive you'd get to the 'greys' like u see in reports of "aliens"))

time travel will be possable, but not for several thousand years of evolution. not until we become little grey, asexual, spacefaring, spindley fingered, cow mutilators!

 

I don't get evolution or the Big Bang Theory.
If we come from another species where did that species come from?There has to be higer being.

 

But then you find your self asking where did that higher being come from. People say, "God always was and always we be." Sounds like a good way to say, "I have no clue where the hell God came from."

This thread is going to end up making someone's brain melt.

 

wrong. there does not HAVE to be a higher being... there are smaller beings... all life evolved from single celled organisms originally. and in the right conditions with all the righ elements present single celled organisms can be created by simple chemistry. no higher being required, no thought process required. it is created by chance. and in the vastness of the universe (or multiverse, or cyclic-universe or whatever current theory u may currently subscribe to) and anything that may be beyond that even the chances of there being (or has been) another plannet with life evolving on it are very, very high. and the bit i like best... who's to say that it will be like us (carbon based bags of mostly water) or any life like we see on our own planet??? at the very extremes of life on this planet we can see silicon based life forms (living on the teeth of deapsea lobsters) so if life can be based upon this why not other more extreme elements. carbon based life springs up on a plannet with these conditions so who is to say that life based on other elements in that group (less likely due to less abundance, or so we have seen in sol system) have not sprung up elsewhere. and even more bizzarly... life based on elements vastly differant... like a transition metal!! or radioactive elements! and we don't really have anyway of gauging what conditions (or even what range of conditions) life of these types would require! hydrocarbon life may be the most common (or maybe not) but i say that is deffinately not where it stops. we have already seen life starting out from silicon, and already much bigger than single celled organisms... so perhaps there has been (or is) already life beggun at a single celled level from other elements on our planet. and we may not have to go far to find life of these weird fantastical varieties... there's plenty of planetary bodies in our solar system to check out. good money is on Io.

woops... went on another rant there. well... just some food for thought.

 

ok.. i thought i explained it. the single celled organism came from base chemicals made up of but a few elements... mostly carbon, hydrogen and oxygen... i imagine there would have been a few metals and/or salts in the mix too. water would have played a big part in the process as the way in which water acts is quite unique due to the equal levels of H and OH making it pH nuetral that make it vital for creating life as we know it. the energy needed to allow this reaction to happen came from the sun most probably as it is the greatest source of power on the planet. that is where the first single celled organism came from. if u want it explained any better go take up a biology class or something.

as for the planet you are sking a very complex question. there aws a lot of matter about before this planet was formed. it would have been created by the gravitational pull of a few clumps of matter that had come together, pulling in other bits of matter, until it ogt bigger and bigger and managed to pull larger and larger bits of matter... and loads of these 'collisions' would have given off matter breaking free from the gravitational pull... this happens with the creation of nearly all planets, so the matter of one clump of matter (a planet) gets scatered about the galaxy, and is sent of to potentially collide with other planets formed or being formed. so the matter on this planet came from outter space. and you know all those meteorites (shooting stars) that come hurtling down to earth all the time but usually burn up in our thick protective atmosphere? same thing. our planet is still getting bigger all the time.

now if u really want me to explain where the matter came from i could go through the process of the creation of matter from energy for you if u really want.

and once i've done that i could explain to you where it came from if u really want, but that one would take a very long time if u do not even grasp the simple concept of planet creation.

phew!
rant paused. ...until i get asked to explain something else.

 

I hate how religious maniacs are always broken records about scientific theorys.