• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Evolution: the Facts.

apathetic medic said:
... He is unable to accept for example, without evidence or at least a plausible pathway, that the superior oblique muscle and trochanter of the human eye could evolve through natural processes. ...QUOTE]

I think before you try to explain the evolution of the trochanter of the human eye, you check that it exists.

As to the superior oblique, perhaps you could clarify what particular aspect of this causes him a problem, is there an agreed "initial stage" to evolve from? Otherwise the explanation could continue back to the primordial ooze.
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UnrepentantSinner said:
Aron Ra, who I know from Christianforums, has produced a number of videos regarding the fundamental errors of Creationism. I've only watched two so far, but they're excellent from what I can see. Here's a link to the one regarding cladistics and you can find the others from there:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=5MXTBGcyNuc
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Jees, I'm going to have to rerun that about 30 times. That's dense. Wonderfully dense.
 
As some of you may know, I own and manage the web server on which SketicWiki and Skepchick are hosted, along with many other sites.

Recently I noticed a huge spike in traffic that was intermittently causing certain processes to time out. I discovered that there was a major increase in traffic to SkepticWki, with at times over 100 simultaneous threads. Looking at the nature of the requests being made to the server, it appeared to be simply a large number of human users and not some sort of an attack. Puzzled, I were.

Thanks to the assistance of a forum member who is currently unable to post here, I've learned that The Amazing Randi recently linked to "Bananas, the Atheist's Worst Nightmare" on SkepticWiki in his weekly commentary, and as a result that page has had over 30,000 hits. This no doubt explains the spike in traffic, SkepticWiki was. as they say, slashdotted in a very mild way.

I'm glad to see SkepticWiki getting more attention, as I consider it a very useful resource.

We now return you to discussions of Creationism and herbaceous plants of the genus Musa.
 
I'd just like to say thanks, DoubtingStephen, for hosting the sites. I've had several occasions recently to link to skepticwiki. You're doing a good service for the community.
 
Dr Adequate said:
[swiki]Eye Evolution[/swiki]
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Good to see you back in stride!

There seem to be an incomplete sentence in the section "Grades of vision in molluscs" The first bullet says
Simplest of all we have the mere eyespot, as sported by the limpet Patella: a flat collection of pigmented cells and nerves with nerve fibers leading to whatever Patella has resembling a brain. This allows sufficient
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Also glad to read you again.

We can see just how straightforward such an evolutionary development would be by observing that there are many grades of vision in nature, from mere light-sensitivity to the fully-fledged "camera eye" of humans,
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This just appears a little humanocentric, aren't certain birds eyes better able to see into the uv and far farther in distance than ours, and as for the enormous squid with its exquisite sensitivity to light.
 
shadron said:
Jees, I'm going to have to rerun that about 30 times. That's dense. Wonderfully dense.
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Well not 30 times but not being a native in englisch and not being a scientist I certainly have to go back a few times.
I like it anyhow.
 
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Acleron said:
This just appears a little humanocentric, aren't certain birds eyes better able to see into the uv and far farther in distance than ours, and as for the enormous squid with its exquisite sensitivity to light.
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not to mention pit vipers in the IR;
and didn't trilobites experiment with alternate types of lens?
 
apathetic medic said:
While all of the recent information is great, we all know the mental gymnastics employed by believers tends largely to be greater. Their cognitive dissonance and abilities to rationalize and hold opposing ideas simultaneously are realy quite remarkable.

My colleague, however, has conceeded a weakness. He has, as I said, agreed in writing to alter his thinking if presented with evidence that I think is very likely available. I need only to find it!

I think this is important as he is (usually) a very intelligent fellow who will one day be a Doctor. His education level is well above mine in anatomy and debating him in this area is a challenge even though my critical thinking skills are superior. I hope to improve his medical skills and knowledge by clearing some cobwebs from his mentation and improving his critical thinking.

I have not been able to find any information online on the evolution of this particular structure so again I need some help to find where to look or whom to ask.

superior oblique muscle and trochanter
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Did you received any information yet?

There's overall information here:

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB301.html
 
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Eos of the Eons said:
I had to download the Opera browser to watch it though. I find if I use Explorer anymore, most videos won't play
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Any reason to abandon Interweb Exploiter is a good reason :)

Eos of the Eons said:
and YouTube just diplays "We're sorry, this video is no longer availble". Oyyy.
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That is quite possibly because the settings in the top-right corner are as follows:
Embed:
Embedding disabled by request​
in contrast with
Embed:
<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/... etc etc etc​
 
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six7s said:
Any reason to abandon Interweb Exploiter is a good reason :)

That is quite possibly because the settings in the top-right corner are as follows:

Embed:
​
Embedding disabled by request
​
in contrast with

Embed:
​
<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/... etc etc etc
​
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Say what??? I don't see anything that says that in the upper right corner.

:confused:


Rather, the problem is with Explorer:
http://blog.case.edu/webdev/2007/04/19/activex.html
due to a lawsuit between Microsoft and Eolas, Internet Explorer no longer processes <object>, <embed> or <applet> in the way that it used to. Now instead of using <object> to embed a Flash file, you (the person with the originating website) need to use javascript in order for Internet Explorer users to load the content automatically. While this isn't a particularly new problem—it's been around for about a year—it's the kind of thing you might not notice unless you use Internet Explorer on a regular basis.
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apathetic medic said:
He is unable to accept for example, without evidence or at least a plausible pathway, that the superior oblique muscle and trochanter of the human eye could evolve through natural processes.
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Is he aware that, when the basic arrangement of the bones and muscles was first developed, it was in creatures whose eyes pointed out to the sides (and possibly also upward) rather than forward, and whose "frontal" bones (which the trochlea attaches to) were roughly horizontal and located between and behind the eyes rather than above? In this image, to see where things were back then, you have to picture the eye rotated "clockwise", the muscle's insertion point on the eye swung around "left" and "up" (more medial and anterior) with that rotation, and the trochlea "lower" (more posterior). That takes out the U-turn.

Another way to look at it is in this one, in which you have to picture the eye rotating on an axis that's vertical within the picture so the side nearest you (including points 5 and 11 and the superior rectus's insertion point) goes "left" (back) and the other side (the one you can't see) goes "right" (forward). That would also move the superior oblique's insertion point farther from you as the viewer of the image (medially) and then "right" (forward), passing "behind" (medial to) the superior rectus's insertion point, while the frontal bone leans over to the "left" (back), taking the trochlea "down and left" (down and back). It's another angle from which to see the same thing: the U-turn is naturally taken out by the changes in the shape of the head as you visualize starting with a human head and making it more like our ancestors'.

Of course, this is the reverse of the actual flow of time. What it really means is that if you start with a flat-headed ancestor that has outward-pointing eyes and no U-turns a few hundred million years ago, then crank its eyes around to point forward and shove the top of its head up to make a forehead, the superior oblique's insertion point on the eye moves back and out (laterally) while the trochlea holds on to the middle of it on its way up and forward, thus creating a U-turn in what had been a perfectly ordinary linear muscle before.

I think the annulus of Zinn would also have been farther forward back then than it is now, which, if that is the case, would also contribute to the same effect as it migrated back.

It's pretty much the same deal as the biceps brachii being wrapped around from one side of the limb to another because the original orientation of our arms was like pointing our elbows out, back, and up, with the palm inferior and the thumb medial... or the sternocleidomastoid crossing over from front of the chest/neck to the back of the neck/head because both ends were closer together back before we tilted our heads roughly 90° off from the original orientation.

I just went through all of that because, in my experience, people who ask about an individual structure like that are usually trying to picture how it arose from nothing in an otherwise identical critter, rather than thinking in terms how that structure fits in the big picture and how the whole context around it was changing at the same time. Of course, if he's already thinking in terms of how the whole head and the orientation of the eyes changed together, then he already knows the muscle was straighter originally, so I don't know what the mystery is. Is it just why one of the muscles originating at the annulus of Zinn would have been snagged by a piece of cartilage while the others weren't?

Maybe back when the muscle was still mostly in-line but the changes around it were just beginning, a slight adjustment of that muscle's angle of action was selected for while the difference was still incremental. Or maybe they all went through the trochlea originally and the others came out of it but that one didn't make it. Or maybe the trochlea was left over from having served some other purpose originally. But that seems to be a minor trifle to me; I'm thinking the U-turn shape is the issue here, and that's not hard to see coming from an original straighter shape as I described above. In fact, given what we know about the changes in the skull since our earliest tetrapod ancestors, the fact that the superior oblique was once straighter is pretty much inescapable anyway.
 
Dr Adequate said:
So, does anyone want to write an article on eye evolution?
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No! But on the thread about improving humans, I was interested to hear that myopia could easily have evolved after the split from the ape common ancestor. I had never thought of that before.

ETA #397 I don't understand a lot - well, most - of that, but how very interesting it is to read.
 
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For people ouside the UK, part 2 of:
The Genius of Charles Darwin
Once, people thought God had created the world and every living thing, each with a purpose, in an ordered universe over which our creator presided, rewarding good deeds and punishing sin. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection blew a hole in this comfortable explanation of life and faced us with a blindingly obvious, yet disturbing truth. Humans don't have dominion over animals. We are animals. We're the fifth ape.
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http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/259769
 
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