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Merged Icebear's Evolution Thread

I Ratant said:
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What environmental factor would drive the fruit fly's evolution?
The introduction of GMO fruit?
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I don't think GMO fruit would have much of an influence. I'm not sure I'd want to eat fruit that not even a fruit fly would eat.
What would drive evolution to something different is changes in the environment they thrive in. Seeing how fermenting fruit is probably going to be around in spades as long as humans are around, there's not much pressure to adapt.
 
Evolution and sex

http://www.trueorigin.org/sex01.asp

http://kgov.com/The-Origin-of-Sexual-Reproduction

Quote:
ReMine Quotes Dawkins: "Sexual reproduction is analogous to a roulette game in which the player throws away half his chips at each spin. ...the existence of sexual reproduction really is a huge paradox."


What is the purpose of sex (as opposed to the asexual reproduction which we see in simple creatures)? Sex DOUBLES the cost of maintaining populations. In other words, amongst asexual creatures, each creatures needs to have one offspring to keep population size together; the cost is basically one. For creatures which use sexual reproduction, each creature needs to be involved in procreating TWO like creatures, i.e. the cost is DOUBLED!!

The mathematics behind evolutionism says that increasing this genetic cost just a few percentage points will doom a species.....

The question is, what benefit could there possibly be to sexual reproduction that it would ever have evolved (if you believe in evolution ) or, equivalently for the more enlightened, why would a creator have created such a thing?

Most of the material I see claims that there is no clear answer to this one. I claim that there is and that it should be fairly obvious. Worst case on the planet is Saudi Arabia:

https://www.google.com/search?clien...tic+diseases&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

or you could do a Google image search on "Spanish Hapsburgs" for what the same thing did to European royalty a few centuries ago. They all look sort of like the Frankenstein monster.

That's just from large numbers of people marrying cousins. Imagine how bad it would be if the absolute same genetic profile simply kept on reproducing ITSELF???

As I see it, the purpose of sex is to prevent genetic mutations from driving complex species to extinction within a few generations. This is why there seems to be all the trouble with bacteria mutating willy-nilly; doesn't seem to be a problem for bacteria but it would destroy a complex species.

But, WAIT!! Aren't mutations supposed to be the driving mechanism of evolution itself?? What's wrong with this picture and with a theory which tries to explain our entire biosphere with mutations??

Again, the standard statement of the theory of evolution is that mutations create new kinds of creatures and then natural selection weeds out the unfit from the new kinds. Natural selection itself is a destructive process and an agency of stasis and does not CREATE anything.
 
I think you need to read a book about evolution. Today's a quiet day. Start reading now.

First of all, it's clear that sexual reproduction works for humans. There are more people alive today than yesterday and that's been true for a very long time. So, no matter what the cost, it is clearly a cost we can afford.

Second, it's clear that sexual reproduction is compatible with evolution and changing environments. All but the simplest creatures reproduce sexually and they have been doing that for something like a billion years. Just amount every creature large enough for you to see has evolved by means of sexual reproduction.

So, what exactly are you talking about?
 
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I've read this and it is clear that you have no idea what you're talking about.
 
A couple of random thoughts on this somewhat busy day:

Without sexual reproduction we are left with clones. If you want to know what the problem can be with clones, read up about the history of bananas.

Natural selection does not create anything? Only if you disqualify results.
 
icebear said:
Replying to a post before you've had time to read it....
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Given your demonstrated lack of comprehension of basic facts on this topic, we don't really need to. "icebear" and "evolution" mean that this thread is going to misrepresent pretty much everything.

icebear said:
The mathematics behind evolutionism says that increasing this genetic cost just a few percentage points will doom a species.....
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Take this for example. This is nonsense. It won't doom a species, and "genetic cost" isn't a thing. The reality is that MOST OF THE TIME shifts in fitness space that put you into a lower region will cause the population to evolve to a local high. This can be very bad for a population, or it can be very good. It depends on the fitness space. No one ever argues that organisms can't ENTER lower regions of fitness space; they just can't stay there for very long.
 
bruto said:
A couple of random thoughts on this somewhat busy day:

Natural selection does not create anything? Only if you disqualify results.
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Go back and read the OP again and try to understand it. NOBODY who understands this stuff claims that natural selection ever creates anything. You could no more create a new species of animal with natural selection than you could construct a building with a wrecking ball.

The standard claim is that mutations create new kinds of creatures, and then selection pares the collection of new kinds down to the "fit" amongst them, i.e. weeds out the unfit.
 
icebear said:
The question is, what benefit could there possibly be to sexual reproduction that it would ever have evolved (if you believe in evolution )
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Simple. Heterogeneity of a population. Heterogeneous populations are much more robust than homogeneous ones.
 
So back to worlds in collision, adam, and the wildly imaginative drawing of a neanderthal ape, and this bit of oddity caught my eye:

There is a general belief that humans evolved from hominids. Nonetheless Neanderthal DNA has been shown to be roughly halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee, neatly eliminating the Neanderthal as a plausible human ancestor. Most scholars who believe in evolution have taken to claiming that we and the Neanderthal are "cousins", i.e. that we had a common ancestor, usually taken to be Heidelbergensis, around 500,000 years back. The obvious problem is that "too genetically remote to be ancestral to" is a transitive relationship; that's like saying that foxes could not be descended from wolves due to the genetic gap and must, therefore, be descended directly from fish.
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I respectfully suggest that the idea of what common ancestry means and does not mean is not entirely clear here, and that further study would be helpful.

Bats and mice are said to have a common shrew-like ancestor. Genetic variation occurs in all branches after a branching. It would be pretty stupid, I think, to disavow the possibility of a common ancestor because mice never had wings.
 
icebear said:
Go back and read the OP again and try to understand it. NOBODY who understands this stuff claims that natural selection ever creates anything. You could no more create a new species of animal with natural selection than you could construct a building with a wrecking ball.

The standard claim is that mutations create new kinds of creatures, and then selection pares the collection of new kinds down to the "fit" amongst them, i.e. weeds out the unfit.
Click to expand...

you do not understand this stuff. not at all. you are totally ignoranr about this topic, yet you are so arrogant to believe that you know it better than all those scientists around the world. you know it better than all those universities around the world.
hillarious.
 
icebear said:
Go back and read the OP again and try to understand it. NOBODY who understands this stuff claims that natural selection ever creates anything. You could no more create a new species of animal with natural selection than you could construct a building with a wrecking ball.

The standard claim is that mutations create new kinds of creatures, and then selection pares the collection of new kinds down to the "fit" amongst them, i.e. weeds out the unfit.
Click to expand...

Your source of "nobody who understands this stuff" appears to be limited to people who don't understand that stuff.
 
Read beyond the creationist pamphlets you found at your churches xmas eve's service last night.
you are completely clueless on this topic, so if you are interested in the truth, you know, like the bible says you should be, you should be willing to educate your self, come back and let us know how that went.
 
icebear said:
NOBODY who understands this stuff claims that natural selection ever creates anything.
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True. Natural selection is the culling process. EVOLUTION, however, creates new stuff all the time. Forgetting that there's a difference is a common error, one you've certainly committed (in your case it's called equivocation; in the case of others it's merely sloppy usage of the terms).

Baylor said:
Simple. Heterogeneity of a population.
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Also much quicker response time to shifts in selection pressure. Asexual reproduction is very slow, because all new traits arise via mutations. Recombination, however, allows for novelty to arise much more rapidly. Shifts in response time are an under-appreciated aspect of evolution.
 
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