Korean Job Discussion Forums

[huck]

Physical evolution is something I have no problems with...it seems almost logical. Something is born with a mutated gene, or - more likely - a recessive gene that has become dominant and gives an edge to the individual in terms of surviving and, hence, reproducing. He/she could meet another individual with the same dominating recessive gene, and pass it on to their offspring, which would eventually make it a dominant gene.

But...

I assume (We're going to have to assume here, I think) that the earliest bees and spiders didn't make the perfect webs or hexagonal honeycombs. Maybe they felt a need to build something that would protect them, but it probably wasn't what we see today.

But somewhere down the line, a generation was born with the instinct to build things a certain way that their ancestors didn't build, such as how all garden spiders will build approximately the same kind of web. How and when would this instinct have become hard-wired?

Maybe it's physical evolution like some people are saying because the web that we see today gave the spiders the best chance to survive and reproduce. But if the first spiders didn't instinctively build the web like that - that's the big assumption - then I don't see how its offspring would eventually be born with knowledge that he/she didn't have...

(I actually read RTeacher's posting...I think those guys are like me where they have no clue what happened, but they have theories/thoughts/assumptions, and so they wrote a paper about their thoughts, which supposedly make their theories more legitimate....I disagreed with them, though.)

[csvfa]

[Xerxes]

So...I always wondered why I was so weird and how my genes were evolved that way. This also describes many of us Dave's posters (see "Quotable Quotes from Dave's posters", for example)

I make crass jokes using the least number of profanities (as kinda game), and I've always had drinking buddies but not the wench variety. I actually use a lota profanities too sometimes, but tastefully like: the first thing I recently made a point of asking a long missed bud upon a chance meetin is, "Hey, buddy! So do you still masturbate lefty and farm your ducks like you used ta? [turns around in surprised recognition] Great to see you, man!" But, the devotchka around whiplash-scowl at us.

I mean, my forepeople musta gotten smacked around a lot at first from buds and broads alike until we were almost X-tinct. Then some reproductively viable, proto whack-job in our primordial down days recognized our collective wit as sexy, and this was when we were rescued from natural-selection/potty-mouth censorship.

And, boy, this babe did us all proud by having us multitudes of progeny.

To wit, I too am married with child! What gives? Why do we always have deviant motor mouths among us who do, on occasion, get the girl? How did our first get recognized when only talking it up with half-wit and obnoxious distaste at first? How did we survive the lean years? (A fly with half a wing and behavior passing.) And, to add to the puzzle, we are a recessive trait occurring once in a generation or so, but never quite stomped out. Misunderstood, as it were, were we not?

[huck]

Hmm....here's a behavioral question...

Let's say we have a cage with mice, and if they push a button, they receive food, ala Pavlov. They quickly learn how to do this, and they live fat, happy lives. Their offspring also learn how to do it, either by imitating the other mice or by luckily stumbling upon the "magic food button", and they too live happy lives.

If we had the time to raise a thousand or a million generations of mice, do you think that eventually it would become instinct for mice to push a button for food? If after a thousand/million generations, we took a newly-born mouse litter and put it into a cage with a button, do you think it would now be instinct? (Of course, we'd have to set it up so that they couldn't hit it by random chance and control the other factors, etc. etc.)

[out of context]

To make it more evolution-like, you would probably have to provide only a limited amount of food that rewarded the faster button-pushers and left the slower ones to starve.

The experiment as you describe it doesn't present any survival advantage, so I would guess that in evolutionary terms (all other things being equal), you wouldn't notice any real change.

[Rteacher]

I'll continue to play the role of devil's - er God's - advocate:

"... All too often scientists forcibly assume [albeit incorrectly] that their laboratory experimental evidence can be applied elsewhere under different circumstances. Further, almost all currently accepted theories of Creation and Evolution are unverifiable and often contradicted by reliable evidence. However, when concepts such as consciousness, a creator intelligence and soul are introduced as viable concepts, the scientists demand that they be detectable by experimentation...

...Later, scientists revised Darwin's theory with their "Punctuated Equilibrium" evolutionary theory, supposedly making evolution invisible in the fossil record. Yet this theory is not verifiable in any way. It is indeed strange that scientists speak with absolute conviction of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, when it has been calculated that out of one billion species that have lived since the Cambrian period, that 99.9% of these species left no fossil record, thus leaving scant evidence (some of which is contradictory) to support this theory...

... There are innumerable anomalies in the archeological artifacts, such as: Human remains have been found from the wrong time period in the wrong continent, pollen of flowering plants from the wrong time period, etc —which sharply contradict this theory of evolution. These contradictions are either brushed aside by traditional evolutionists or rejected...

... The modification of species by breeding has been heralded since the time of Darwin as evidence of evolution, yet experiments have shown that there are natural limits to the changes which can be brought about by breeding. Experiments with plums and roses by the eminent biologist Luther Burbank confirmed these limits, "In short, there are limits to the development possible." ...

... A staunch advocate of evolution, Ernst Mayr of Harvard University found similar results in his experiments with fruit flies. Some altered species died out while others reverted to their original state a few years and generations later. These results show a strong anti-evolutionary characteristic in the species examined...

...Domestic animals have not evolved in four to ten thousand years. "Ten thousand years of mutations, crossbreeding, and selection have mixed the inheritance of the canine species in innumerable ways without its losing its chemical cytological [cellular] unity. The same is observed of all domestic animals: the ox [at least 4,000 years old, the fowl (4,000), the sheep (6,000), etc." ...

... It has been found that ancient Egyptian pyramids contain depictions of various species of animals which remain unchanged to this day. Why have the species not evolved?...

... Evolution theory fails miserably to account for complex form. How can small sequential changes over many generations improve the survivability of each generation such that these changes develop? It seems that the intermediate steps would decrease the species fitness rather than increase it. However, this would simply not take place unless each successive stage provided some definite advantage over the previous stage. Otherwise, the changes cannot be attributed to natural selection. A particularly vexing question is that of the evolution of the eye in previously sightless species. Darwin himself admitted this shortcoming of his theory, "To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could nave been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree." ...
http://www.gosai.com/science/failure-of-science.html

[Moldy Rutabaga]

I think that we do believe in evolution, but in a narrower sense of the word; not that we have an emotional investment, but that we accept that something we can't prove is most likely true. I suppose the 'belief' is still different from a religious belief as it has more of a factual basis of evidence rather than spiritual, but I suppose very strictly speaking, we can believe that evolution happened, but we can't know because no one was there to record it.

I brought up a point that I didn't define very well, but so far we've only spoken about genetic changes and not about behavioral changes being handed down. If animals learn by imitating their parents and other animals, then the hamster who pushes a button can also pass it down to his children because they observe their father pushing the button. Thus a behavior could become a part of a species' activities even though it's not ingrained biologically. It is indirectly, because smarter hamsters are capable of learning from their parents, but the adaptation isn't built in. We don't have DNA programming to make fire or write or surf the net, but these are social adaptations we have learned.

Ken:>

[khyber]

I had a post lost to pbhh.
oh well..

huck: not a bad question.
but i think O.O.C answered pretty well. Simply making one fat doesn't provide a survival advantage.

Also, living in a laboratory doesn't allow for natural selection and THAT is hte basis for evolution. A trait has to be proven to be an advantage before it would become part of a species' behaviour pattern (that advantage is proven by survival). That ALSO means that inferior strategies would have deterious effects (like death).
In your eg: choosing "no food" is not really THAT bad of a thing. Because there are only two options....there is no immediate threat to the individual...there are no external pressures of any kind.

I wouldn't say it is a scientifically VIABLE idea to compare the TRUTHS of 1+1=2
to the theory of evolution.
YES, it has so obviously happenned, but that does not mean there are still problems in the theory.

re: two legs:
I had heard somewhere that the two legs came about because it was advantageous in escaping predation (faster i think...).

i'm more appreciative of SJ gould and EO Wilson

[Rteacher]

I think it's not so much "survival of the species" as it is "survival of the theory" ... In the true cheating spirit of myopic so-called scientists, some wannabe evolutionists on this forum choose to safely ignore (after being burnt a little - or finding themselves in an "unknown zone"...) any posts that offer anomalous evidence and reasonable arguments they have no good answer for ...

[out of context]

Yes, I agree. It is thoroughly myopic to demand some substantiation and verifiability for concepts such as consciousness, creator intelligence and soul. My impression (and I admit that I don't know you as a person) is that you are a naturally dogmatic person who can only really understand things in terms of dogma, and projects it upon other people in order to form an understanding of their behavior in terms of your own beliefs.

Science does not offer the ready-made answers that religion does. Scientific discoveries to date represent only the tiniest fraction of what there is to know in the physical universe. I can think of no area of science where definitive and indisputable answers are available for all possible questions. It isn't going to happen in my lifetime, and in all likelihood it isn't going to happen as long as there are humans around to inquire. The theory of evolution does not provide a consistent and 100% verifiable line the way that religion does. If it's security and a grand unified theory of everything that you're looking for, I encourage you to pursue religion, because that's where you're going to find it, not in science.

Scientists are humans and are subject to error and bias. The principles of scientific inquiry represent an ideal to which, in my estimation, exactly no one individual can live up to. No two scientists are going to look at the same piece of evidence in exactly the same way. Fights and egotistical stubbornness are rampant in scientific research. Furthermore, scientists are influenced by the values and beliefs with which they were raised; one may strive to be completely objective, but it's not a battle that can be completely won. And it's completely plausible to accept a scientist's theories while believing that that scientist was a flawed and unreliable person in other respects. In the end, science is not about prophets or about personalities; it's about the theories that answer the most questions based on what we can verify. If you want a person or a figure to look up to, I encourage you to pursue religion, because that's where you're going to find it.

It is absolutely scientific to point out inconsistencies in the interpretation of available evidence. That's a basic function of how science works; theories are always being changed to accommodate more information. What is not scientific is saying, "Look! A contradiction! So you see, my theory with unverifiable, unclearly defined predetermined concepts must be correct."

And in answer to this:

[laogaiguk]

Two words,
pedigree breeding

[Rteacher]

Among the human imperfections that scientists are beset with is the tendency to cheat. Of course, there are vested interests in terms of grant money and prestige that require cover-up and denial of the extent to which cheating (ala Prof. Huang...) is prevalent in the scientific community...

As far as not being "emotionally attached" to their results - that's a bunch of shyte. Ever since indignities suffered by Gallileo et al at the hands of corrupt organized religionists, the scientific community in general has held a grudge against religion and extended it to God (who big atheistic scientists are envious of ...)

Getting back more specifically to the topic of evolution, an example of the kind of biased suppression of evidence that has perpetuated - at least popularly - the weaker parts of Darwinian theory (relating to the origin of man) is William H. Holmes, anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, discrediting of the Caleveras skull and anomalous stool tools discovered in California gold mines:

"If these forms are really of Tertiary origin, we have here one of the greatest marvels yet encountered by science; and perhaps if Professor Whitney had fully appreciated the story of human evolution as it is understood to-day, he would have hesitated to announce the conclusions formulated, notwithstanding the imposing array of testimony with which he was confronted." In other words, if the facts do not fit the favored theory, the facts, even an imposing array of them, must go...
http://www.mcremo.com/door9.htm

For those who dare enter, here's a link to "The Museum of Forbidden Anthropology": http://www.mcremo.com/museum.htm

[csvfa]

[huck]

Ok...I've realized the question I initially meant to ask....and I'm not intentionally being obtuse here...I'm just trying to wrap my brain around a thought I had last weekend.

How do you know that a random mutation is always just a random mutation? What if what scientists sometimes see as a random mutation is really a responsive change in the DNA due to experiences of the host body? For instance, if only one individual experiences a random mutation, then I'll believe that it's just random. But what if several non-related (in the familial sense) individuals experience the same random mutation during a simliar period of time? Then it doesn't appear to be too random anymore.

I know that mutated genes occur, but there's no concrete evidence that it's the only way for evolution to happen, is there?

I could be wrong, but are the mechanics of evolution as clear-cut and documented as some people profess?

[shortskirt_longjacket]