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Morwen Oronor
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Discussion on Evolution
I watched an episode of the History Channel series "Evolve" yesterday, about the evolution of eyes, which quoted a very simple explanation of why the ape family had to learn to see the entire spectrum of colors as opposed to the limited ability of most other species to determine all color.
This is what I told someone on the Biblical Prophecy Board:
The answer is that it was necessary for apes to see red because the new red leaves at the top of the trees are more nutritious than the darker, greener ones. If apes couldn't see the color of the leaves, they wouldn't get the better nutrition. This better feeding eventually led to their brains growing bigger and to accommodate the bigger brain, the eyes had to move to the front of the head. For an animal to be safe while eating, it has to be able to see peripherally, apes and humans can't do that because our brain cavity is too big, so in order to protect themselves and to help with warning about approaching danger, apes (and early humans) travelled in large groups....
So why did we develop the ability to speak? Again, apes are able to vocalise proving that they have voice boxes but because we're a different branch of the ape family, and because our brains developed a lot faster once we discovered fire and thereby ate more protein by eating our meat cooked, rather than exhausting ourselves with raw meat, we learnt to communicate with more complex sounds and language developed.
I should've added to that the theory that living in large groups and having to use the group to protect each other, made it necessary to communicate which is what apes do. I know this from observing the monkeys who visit my garden every day. It's wonderful to see how their noises mean something to them and I'm convinced that the presence of humans providing better food for the monkeys that live around them will eventually cause these monkeys to develop new skills (even if they are only communication ones) and that a more intelligent species of monkey will evolve because of this. But it will take another 100,000 years of course.
The reaction to my story was once again that "it's only a theory". Why is it that men who profess to believe in religious hypotheses believe that they should abuse their children by not allowing them to explore all scientific theory and not only the ones that don't disagree with their own particular religious hypotheses. This particular member is the 16-year-old child of a preacher. He/she (and I suspect it;s a 'she') is an intelligent, questioning person who deserves to be allowed to explore all knowledge that is available instead of being brain-washed into one man's idea of the way the world works.
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The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.William Spencer Churchill
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6/12/2009, 10:39 pm
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Lesigner Girl
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Re: Discussion on Evolution
I think I know who you're talking about, and agree that she(?) seems very intelligent. But because we have evolved to trust our parents more than strangers, she is at a disadvantage by having a father who apparently bases his belief on a literal interpretation of the religious creation story he was taught at some point, most likely when he was growing up.
If we are taught all our lives that 2+2=5, there is a good likelihood that we will believe it. That is, until we start trying to apply that "knowledge" to other equations and simply can't make it fit. Some people will simply give up on those bigger equations and just assume that they are not equipped to figure them out while others are, and go on believing that 2+2=5. Others won't be satisfied with that, and will want to know why the equation doesn't fit; they may eventually realize that 2+2 does not equal 5, and may even go on to discover that it really equals 4.
When we get into creationism and apologetics, believers will often listen to the strawman arguments and realize right away that these arguments are bunk. But that's because they are bunk, and not at all what the actual theories state.
Why don't we see apes giving birth to humans today? Because that's not how it works, and nobody has ever seriously claimed that it does.
Why are there so many gaps in the fossil record? Well, why are there so many gaps in a dot-to-dot? We have enough dots (fossils) that we can connect them, quite often along with the numbers (DNA evidence) to show that we connected the correct dots.
In order to have no gaps in the fossil record, we would need to find somebody's parent, then their parent, then their parent, and so on, through a family tree that goes back billions of years. So, let's pose the same challenge and expect creation "scientists" to prove the creation story by tracing a hundred random people who are alive today, all back to Adam and Eve. In order to do so, they need to dig up at least one fossil from every single direct ancestor of each of these hundred people, until they reach the fossils of Adam and Eve. If they fail to trace even one of these people back to Adam and Eve through an unbroken chain of fossils, their "theory" fails.
By golly, I think I just found a way to scientifically test the creation "theory," according to the same exact standards that evolution deniers expect of scientists when it comes to evolution.
If they want to understand how evolution works, they need only to look at a ring species. In ring species, A might be able to mate with B, C, and D, but not with E or F, while C might be able to mate with all of them. It's because A and F are so distantly related, while C shares enough commonalities with each of them to where they are still compatible.
Ring species are products of evolution, and they are living examples of how evolution works. But when it comes to the relationship between humans and other apes, B, C, D, and E all died a long time ago, leaving our links in the distant past, many of which we have since found in the form of fossils.
On your observation of monkeys, there have been members of various ape species who have been taught sign language by humans, and are thus able to communicate with humans and each other through sign language. I think it's very possible that humans and our future descendents (whatever species they may evolve into) can affect the evolution of monkeys and other ape species, much like we have created various breeds of dogs by selective breeding. However, the apes would still be a matter of natural selection, unless humans started purposely breeding them for their intelligence, which would then be artificial selection like dogs.
It's not hard to understand at all. If you take a bucket of paint that never dries and add a tiny drop of blue to it every 100 years, of course that paint will still be yellow after 100, 200, or even 500 years (5 drops ain't much). Give it enough time, though, and it will eventually be green. But at what point will it be green? After 100 drops? 1000 drops? 1001 drops? Of course, it doesn't suddenly go from yellow to green like there's some dividing line. There are different shades of color from both yellow to green, just like one organism -- whether plant, animal, bacteria, etc -- spawns another organism that may or may not have something about them that is slightly different, and eventually those tiny differences will add up.
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6/13/2009, 8:27 pm
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SKOKEY
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Re: Discussion on Evolution
Some nice deductive reasoning there Lesa! Well said.
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6/13/2009, 8:52 pm
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Morwen Oronor
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Re: Discussion on Evolution
Yes, Lesa I like that reasoning too.
I've also used the alphabet analogy with creationists.
If A & B are the only two people on the planet, their kids will be AB and AB and their descendants will be ABAB and ABAB, and because they would be perpetuating the same genetic material, the species would continue to perpetuate only the characteristics of A & B.
However, if there are two people A & B and other people somewhere else with all the other letters of the alphabet, you get AB mating with another combination say GH thus you get the third generation ABGH and XYWZ and they mate, their offspring's genetic material will contain the genetic material of 8 different people with different genes instead of 8 people with all the same genes thus creating a whole lot of different characteristics. Which explains why our genetic material is a whole string of genes and not just a combination of 2 sets of genes.
They usually brush this aside with Adam and Eve's kids went out into the world and mated with other people. And so did Noah's offspring.
Then ask them where did these other people come from. The answer: god dug up some more soil and made more people!! 
My observations of evolution in my own lifetime leads me to believe that given enough time with the present way people are developing, the idea that there will eventually be more species of humans is a valid one. take for instances societies like North Korea and the Amazon jungle or the deserts of Southern Africa, where people live isolated from the development happening everywhere else in the world. Eventually, and I mean over 100,000 if the situation stays the same, these people are going to be vastly different from the people living away from those areas, possibly becoming (using these 3 examples) 3 species different from everyone else.
Look at this comment
Of course there is a reason for people denying that this could happen, and that is that it validates ideas like racism. I don't think it is at all racist to say that if the people of rural Africa continue to be isolated from the sort of education that urban Africa is receiving, and that situation continues for long enough, you will eventually have two separate types of humans living on the same continent. I'm not saying that one is a 'better' type of human, just that at his point they are similar enough to be able to integrate but what if they don't? Will it reach a point where the genetic difference will be great enough for them not to be able to integrate.
Look at the genetic difference between humans and chimps. It's only about a 10% difference, if not less and we can't interbreed with them. So what happens 100,000 years from now if you have people who aren't going through exactly the same evolutionary changes, like that article says, AIDS will definitely cause some mutations, and we already know that we developed through the search for food away from the trees. But what if a group of people moved back into the shelter of the trees and didn't come out? Would they eventually mutate into a group of humans who live close to or actually in the trees again, while another group of people lives so far away from trees that they don't actually know what a tree is?
Our Apartheid policy did more for proving the theory of evolution than any other policy that humans have devised. It went on over a period of 300 years, i.e. 10 generations. My feeling is that unless we take all the people of Africa and force the same evolutionary processes on them, the differences between urban and rural Africans will become greater over the next 100 generations rather than less. But you're not allowed to say this because it's regarded as being racist, and this is the reason why this theory is not widely publicized.
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The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.William Spencer Churchill
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6/13/2009, 9:43 pm
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Lesigner Girl
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Re: Discussion on Evolution
Thanks, you two. I'm glad you liked it. 
MO, in your AB example, you didn't seem to take mutations into account. I'm sure you know how it works, but I didn't see it explained in your post.
If human populations stay isolated long enough and don't interbreed with those in the outside world, of course they will evolve in a different direction than other humans. That shouldn't even be up for debate, because that is exactly how evolution works.
Likewise, with all the international travel, I would expect various races to merge more and more, and even more merging where multiple races are integrated into a common culture. If, say, whites and blacks in industrialized parts of South Africa were to eventually start sharing a culture, and interbreeding became more and more common, then instead of whites and blacks in addition to the segregated tribes, the whites and blacks could merge into a "gray" race, while the segregated tribes continued down their separate paths.
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6/14/2009, 10:25 pm
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Morwen Oronor
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Re: Discussion on Evolution
That's exactly what is happening in SA. In fact it's been happening since the first white people set foot on South African soil. The only problem is that for 300 years, the people in power denied that the 'coloureds' were a result of the original Dutch settlers and the Khoisan people.
Now with DNA testing we know it's true. But even more of it is happening now because if you consider that about 90% of our population is African, it makes sense that what you say will happen and eventually South Africans will be more and more coffee-colored with crinkly hair.
I didn't mention mutations but yes, if we're going to talk about that. If you look at people who live their lives in an urban environment and who wear shoes and restrictive clothes all the time, and if you could take those people over 100 years and compare them to people who live in a rural environment and hardly ever wear shoes, one mutation that will be very obvious is that the city dwellers have smaller feet and definitely smaller toes.
This is another thing I would like to study, the size of the toenail on the baby toe of newborns. I'm convinced that the nails on newborn urban children is almost non-existent (I know my own babies' were) whereas the nails on newborn rural children is bigger. It's a small thing but nevertheless an evolutionary difference. But as I said, you can say this sort of thing because you get called 'racist'.
I remember commenting on it when the nanny who looked after my kids when they were little had her own babies. They definitely had bigger toenails than my kids did.
There was a story about evolution causing changes in deskbound urban people against open-air living rural people over a long time. The people who were expounding the theory, showed drawings of how the bodies of these two 'species' would mutate. I can't find this on the web. I guess it was regarded as being too something, discriminatory for present day people I suppose, but I wish I could find the hypothesis. Pity I didn't keep it at the time.
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The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.William Spencer Churchill
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6/15/2009, 5:39 am
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Lesigner Girl
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Re: Discussion on Evolution
I don't think even a difference in toenail size would be the result of mere 100 years. In order for such a noticeable change to take hold, there would have to be an evolutionary and/or sexual advantage to big toenails in a culture that wears no shoes. If having smaller toenails doesn't kill them before they can reproduce or cause the opposite sex to choose someone else over them, they will have just as much a chance of reproducing as their bigger-toenailed brothers and sisters.
Last revised by Lesigner Girl, 6/15/2009, 6:21 am
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6/15/2009, 6:17 am
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Morwen Oronor
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Re: Discussion on Evolution
Yes, I agree with you but consider that if you are not using your toes for support for however long Europeans have been wearing shoes, like forever, compare that with the idea that Africans have only been wearing shoes for the past possibly 100 years, and then most of them don't, all the time. Surely there has to be a reason then for the fact that African babies still have fairly large toenails on their baby toes. I told you that this observation sounds like racism. It's not actually it's just a personal observation I made when I saw the feet of newborn African babies compared to my own babies' toenails. In fact when you cut their tiny toenails when they're little, there's almost nothing left.
I don't think it's a matter of survival of the species as much as 'need'. If you don't need the nail, it will eventually disappear, whereas if you do 'need' the protection because in your society you don't wear shoes and never have in your history, doesn't it figure that the people who don't wear shoes need the protection of all their toenails, whereas the ones who have always worn shoes don't need that protection.
As I said, I don't like to discuss this except where I feel comfortable and unjudged, because you can imagine, I'm always called a 'racist' when I mention that the babies in the Amazon probably have fairly large little toes and nails, whereas little babies living in upper-class urban luxury, probably don't.
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The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.William Spencer Churchill
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6/15/2009, 12:18 pm
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Morwen Oronor
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Re: Discussion on Evolution
Hah, eventually my search paid off.
This sounds like nonsense after two years.
But read it anyway.
The comments at the bottom of the page are quite funny.
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The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.William Spencer Churchill
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6/15/2009, 12:29 pm
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Lesigner Girl
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Re: Discussion on Evolution
I don't think it sounds racist at all. I also think I misunderstood how much time you were talking about.
The human race will one day split into two separate species, an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures, according to a top scientist.
While this may seem plausible on the surface, what about physically attractive nitwits and ugly geniuses? You can't predict 4 species when you take them into account either, because you will often find ugly intelligent people (who often make a lot of money) paired up with physically attractive nitwits, as well as ugly and physically attractive people of comparable intelligence, who pair up because they have so many things in common that don't involve looks.
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6/15/2009, 6:23 pm
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