Nitefly's Guide to Evolution

SunaseIPs said:
I actually wonder if women selecting men eg dark hair etc and darker skin is to do with global climate change and thus some evolutionary aspect? (maybe though I don't fully understand it all) of us is coming into play by selecting darker skin for our genes to survive as darker skin is stronger against the sun and its rays etc.

I probably am not making myself clear but I did try.
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AFAIK dark skinned people are just as likely to get skin cancer et al - I remember mentioning the "dark skin = better in sun" to a Nigerian mate who lolled and said "it's our best kept secret"

Tbh you sound like a blonde pastie looking for an excuse ;)
 
Excellent post. There's a typo in #2 that needs correcting
Nitefly said:
Take the word BIOCHEMISTRY. If we were to type any 12 letters to try and match this, the chance we would obtain this in one go is 1 in 2612.
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Should be 1 in 26^12.
 
Moses99p said:
the bigger taller part, you talking about how people are bigger now than in victorian times etc? Well thats down to diet.
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Perhaps, but in the future it is possible that humans on average will be taller since height is a factor involved in sexual selection, for males at least. However, the extent of this is debatable. It would be interesting to look back in several tens of thousand of years and make an average height comparison, asuming diet has not dramatically changed.

Thank you to those who have given possitive comments :)

I was very worried this would sink off the front page within a few minutes!
 
Just out of curiousity, in terms of religion etc, what are your beliefs, if any?

I fully agree that science and religion need to be kept apart when it comes to this topic. The great flaw of ID and Creationism is assuming that God and evolution are mutally exclusive.
 
Woody__ said:
Just out of curiousity, in terms of religion etc, what are your beliefs, if any?

I fully agree that science and religion need to be kept apart when it comes to this topic. The great flaw of ID and Creationism is assuming that God and evolution are mutally exclusive.
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I have no beliefs as such. I think all religions have major flaws that in todays society are fairly illogical. I also think people should use religion and a guide book as how to live their lives, rather than take everything literally. You can discover a lot on how to be a good person from religion.

To quote one of my favourite films, Dogma, I think its better to have ideas than beliefs. People die for beliefs. You can simple change an idea.

Do I think there is any god? In the sense that is described in religions, this is unlikely but in terms of 'making sense' of the world in which we live in, God is the remainder of the unsolvable equation which is life. As a scientist I can not have faith in anything without evidence and have learnt to never, ever assume. Saying that, I am always open to exploring what new evidence may bring. I have absolutely no way of knowing if a higher power exists or not, and I doubt we ever will.

I guess that makes me agnostic :)
 
Duff-Man said:
Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity are two (mutually incompatible) quantitative scientific theories. They describe *explicitly* the fundamental relationships that govern the universe we live in. They are (like Newtonian mechanics before them) merely approximations to a larger underlying principle. No physicist will argue with this.

However, evolution is not a quantitative scientific theory - it provides a qualitative explanation to the development we see around us. I take your point that it will always be an "incomplete" theory which will become better understoof with time, further experimental study (and most importantly in my view, large scale computer simulations of molecular and physiological evolution). However, comparing it to QM and GR is really comparing apples and oranges. They are about as far apart on the scientific scale as it is possible to be.
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That's a good point you raise. If I understand you correctly you're saying that evolution belongs in a different class to more `physical' theories, as it doesn't make predictions about the future: it makes predictions about the past (for example, Nitefly said that the theory of evolution predicts that we should find reptile-bird intermediaries, but not mammal-bird intermediaries). I think that I agree with you.

It's often said that you can tell how developed a science is by how mathematical it has become. It's definitely true that we're starting to see more and more applications of mathematics to biology (e.g. the computer simulations that you mentioned, as well as detailed theories as to neuronal activity, fluid flow in cells, game theory in an evolutionary context...) and I wonder if this trend will continue. Is it possible that one day, biology will be advanced enough as a science to be able to make concrete, quantitative predictions about how some complex biological system will behave, and if so, could we use this to design more complex biological systems?

--

Coming back from that wild tangent, what I think I was getting at with my post is that there are some things now that we just can't explain with evolution. I'm no expert, but I remember reading a couple of years back that evolution couldn't fully explain human development - particularly the surprising ferocity which which we've developed our intellects. I could be wrong about this though, and if I am then I'd be really interested to see the resolution.
 
Duff-Man said:
Evolution, on the other hand, is describing the development of a massively complex, nonlinear, chaotic system. We can use it to explain qualitatively how organisms evolved from simple bacteria to the creatures we see today. However, we cannot use it to predict the exact form a creature will take in the future. Even if we knew all the evolutionary pressures that would be placed on a species we would still not be able to accurately asses it's future evolution, any more than we could predict the final shape of a ********* from knowing the conditions in which it develops. This fact will not change, no matter how well developed evolutionary theory becomes.

Anyway my point is really that this isn't a failing of the theory, just an unavoidable consequence of dealing with chaotic systems. For the most part, theoretical physicists don't have to deal with this problem when constructing their theories :)
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Good post, definitely worth re-iterating. Theoretical physicists deal with the easy part of science. ;)
 
Duff-Man said:
As for the human evolution issue: I've always thought that sentience and the formation of communities somehow 'breaks' evolution, removing the vast majority of traditional evolutionary pressures. However, in a way we now intelligently direct our own evolution - for example creating drugs to combat disease rather than waiting thousands of years for a natural immunity to develop through random processes.

In my eyes, the formation of sentience is kind of like a new plateu for evolution - I feel that we are 'evolving' much more rapidly than any previous species, albeit in a very different way.
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I've been reading about transhumanism recently, and finding it very interesting. If even a small fraction of their ideas contain some elements of truth, then it could very well be called the next stage of human evolution. Let me know what you think about it.
 
Arcade Fire said:
That's a good point you raise. If I understand you correctly you're saying that evolution belongs in a different class to more `physical' theories, as it doesn't make predictions about the future: it makes predictions about the past (for example, Nitefly said that the theory of evolution predicts that we should find reptile-bird intermediaries, but not mammal-bird intermediaries). I think that I agree with you.

It's often said that you can tell how developed a science is by how mathematical it has become. It's definitely true that we're starting to see more and more applications of mathematics to biology (e.g. the computer simulations that you mentioned, as well as detailed theories as to neuronal activity, fluid flow in cells, game theory in an evolutionary context...) and I wonder if this trend will continue. Is it possible that one day, biology will be advanced enough as a science to be able to make concrete, quantitative predictions about how some complex biological system will behave, and if so, could we use this to design more complex biological systems?
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There is a fairly recent field of biology called systems biology, which is basically making computer simulations and predicting outcomes, then using results to fine tune models. Still in its infancy, it is by computer simulation that we are expected to take biology to the next level and is very exciting to consider its possibilities. However, industry has been doing this secretly many years before acadaemia caught drift, which just goes to show how much of a shame that so much science must be kept tip top secret.

Complexity science is similar, which tries to figure out what other factors we have no even considered when creating models to explain biological, chemical and physical function.

Coming back from that wild tangent, what I think I was getting at with my post is that there are some things now that we just can't explain with evolution. I'm no expert, but I remember reading a couple of years back that evolution couldn't fully explain human development - particularly the surprising ferocity which which we've developed our intellects. I could be wrong about this though, and if I am then I'd be really interested to see the resolution.
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You are not wrong, I very purposely left out some information on the subject because this information could be very misleading, we just don't know. Perhaps I should have included this originally, but I only thought it was worth mentioning if it turned up in conversation. There was enough information as it was for anyone to read in the OP(s). Anyway here is the most significant arguement against evolution that I have heard:

Whilst we have been able to predict intermediates for complex organs such as the eye, the human knee is something of a puzzle. All top engineers around the world can not design a functional or intermediate structure of the human knee. It appears (as so) that it is impossible to create such an intermediate. So how did it come about? Was it designed?

I went to a talk on creationism from the head of engineering from the University of Bristol, who pointed this out. Keep in mind this man has helped design space rockets amongst other things. It was fairly convincing, but from a scientific perspective it is still inconclusive.

An intermediate structure may exist but it hasn't taken into acount unknown factors, or perhaps it evolved in one go as a 'hopeful monster'. The latter seems particularly unlikely.

So what does this show? Nothing really, it doesn't change anything we already know about evolution, but it is something which is very puzzling and intriging all the same. My lecturer on evolution mentioned breifly that this was backwards way of looking at evolution and wasn't credible.

I hope that was helpful :)
 
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Nice topic, nothing I didn't know already but spreading the work in such a brilliant manner is never abad thing :)
 
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