Evolution Opponents Lose Kansas Board Majority

[ArmchairGeneral]

As much as is technologically and budgetarilly, possible it is.

All organizations- and living things- need a supply system.

A species could evolve a more efficient digestion system to make up for the increased energy requirements of more mass which is caused by (for instance) longer arms. In fact, said species could develop that feature just as 'easily' as he could grow larger arms.

Then again, one could opine said species would be so much more succesful a hunter (thereby catching so much more food) that this would be unneccesary.

It is also likely that said species would also evolve to gain stronger bones to carry the increased mass.(heavier arms also means more muscular legs as well, which means you need more structural support to bear all that load).

That would probably make the species an even more powerful leaper and possibly even a better runner as well.

Indeed, all these things could be- and probably would have to be, were the species to be succesful- going on at once.

Just like when you add a capability or increase the size of an army you have to add all the needed support structures simultaneously, so it should probably be in nature as well. IOW changing to longer arms(or a newer tank) means other changes are needed as well, but mother nature proves that endeavour can be highly succesful or no one would've ever developed any change to their basic form and remained viable IMO.

At the beginning of this post, you say "technically and budgetarily possible." That's the point. Evolution is not all powerful. It can only work with what random mutations have given it to work with. And those random mutations can only modify what already exists in the genome. So T-rex was the best possible predator, given the technical constraints. If the right mutation doesn't randomly happen (and the "right mutation" is extremely rare, according to scientific observations) then the process of natural selection will not be able to work to increase the mutation's frequency in the species, and the arms will stay the same.

But let's assume that the right mutation does occur, and a T-rex comes along with bigger arms. Will he necessarily be more successful? No. When a mutation, or any gene, for that matter, exists in a very small population, in this case a population of one, it's far more susceptible to random happenings, like the entire population getting washed away in a flood, or dying in a fire, or disease, or famine, etc. This phenomenon is known as genetic drift.

Also, the mutation might subtly degrade the T-rex's overall "fitness" so that the advantage of the big arms is canceled out. Perhaps it causes the egg incubation period to increase, thus increasing the risk of getting destroyed before hatching. Perhaps it makes the T-rex's too good fighters, increasing the mortality rate from T-rex on T-rex fights. (This is assuming that the mutation doesn't cause any catastrophic changes, like making Mr. Rex infertile, or giving him two heads. )So once you get the mutation, it's not at all clear sailing ahead.

This is all to say that there are a million possibilities for why T-rex didn't develop bigger arms, or developed smaller arms in the first place. On that point, it's far easier to lose a feature than to gain it, as I believe Dale pointed out somewhere. So it's actually even easier to explain why T-rex grew smaller arms in the first place.

A duck should be fully capable of just randomly mutating venom, and since there is no reason it would be detrimental to the duck, there probably ought to be ducks besides the 'platypus'(which of course is not a duck) that have venom.

No. A duck would only be capable of randomly mutation venom if a good candidate for protein modification is already present. If there's no protein in the animal that with one or two changes in its amino acids can become a toxic substance, no mutation on earth will produce venom in a duck.

Or people. Why no major variations at all in people?

No feathers, no wings, no hollow bones, no retractable claws, no water breathers, no eagle-eyed night seers(i've got 20/10- which is practically as good as human sight gets, and even still an eagle would blow me away on the eye chart at the doctors office, lol).

There is exactly one species of people. Based on random mutation and the VAST array of closely related species all throughout the animal kingdom, why is there no cousin to the human being more like us than the chimp?(who while similar, is obviously not a humans peer.)

So is your question why intelligence comparable to human intelligence has not evolved elsewhere in life on earth? Because, if that's what you're asking, we've only been around for a few million years. Human levels of intelligence would appear to be a very difficult thing to evolve, so much so that it took several billion years of random mutations to develop it. No reason to expect that it should develop again anytime soon. If you're asking why Homo sapiens itself hasn't diversified, well, again, we've only been here in our present form something in the tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Not much time to speciate. And the Homo genus has other members, such as Neandertal, which obviously came from the same stock as Homo sapiens (thus their inclusion in our genus).

[bandwagon]

If you're asking why Homo sapiens itself hasn't diversified, well, again, we've only been here in our present form something in the tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Not much time to speciate.

Furthermore, biological evolution in humans has been taken over by cultural evolution: the use of tools, habits and traditions etc. to maintain a supply of resources. This has dulled the selective process on biological diversity.

Culture is a much more rapid and responsive way to adapt to a change in enviroment. That is why mankind has been able to fill every niche with only a minimum of biological evolution.

[Bill]

I question the randomness of current theory.

I also would point out that speciation has had time to create the blue whale since the last ELE, the largest living creature ever, so the argument 'there's not been enough time for more radical humanoid speciation' simply doesn't hold water IMO.

There's been time to make extremely vast difersification in all other major species except humanoids, but not humanoids themselves?

I aint buying it.(fortunately, i dont have to, lol)

[dalem]

I don't care about 'vast majority' of evidence cause the evidence is still not set. All scientists do not agree that evolution is caused by random mutation.

All respectable evolutionary biologists do.

Dude, there have been less than ten t-rex finds in total. Less than ten. ( i think it's seven, but i dont remember for sure).

And seriously....you have no proof that the two armed variant existed for 15 million years. It is merely thought(not proven- thought) that the species lived for about that long.

The MOMENT we find the next T-rex EVERYTHING we believe about them could change....it's happened before with other finds.

a) So what? Anything in any science could change tomorrow. That doesn't mean you don't acknowledge the weight of evidence.

b) If you find a T rex fossil at Time A, and another T rex fossil at Time B 15 million years later, and the skeletons are morphologically similar (which they would HAVE to be in order for them to be Tyrannosuarus rex, then you can safely assume the same beastie existed for roughly 15 million years.

But for fun I will do some research and try to dig up some details on T rex fossil finds. I might have some info in my textbooks in addition to what I might be able to find on the web. Or maybe not.

Snipe - for me personally the real interesting questions in paleontology and evo bio revolve around the convergent evolution I've mentioned before. I find the evidence that there seem to be certain "solutions" for ecologies that are selected for more than others to be interesting. You may find that interesing as well - look to the ichthyosaur - dolphin subject I typed about earlier, and the snake/legless mammal (I forget what it's called) examples. A fun one that had some attention when I was still actively studying (but may have been dropped in the years since) is the pterosaur/pelican convergence, and the pterosaur/vulture one.

Fun stuff.

-dale

[dalem]

I question the randomness of current theory.

I also would point out that speciation has had time to create the blue whale since the last ELE, the largest living creature ever, so the argument 'there's not been enough time for more radical humanoid speciation' simply doesn't hold water IMO.

There's been time to make extremely vast difersification in all other major species except humanoids, but not humanoids themselves?

I aint buying it.(fortunately, i dont have to, lol)

Hominids alone have diversified from small and semi-bipedal to quite large and fully erect with huge brains - that's a pretty good amount of the "diversification" you're looking for. Competition within the same ecological niche generally (but not always) precludes parent species and daughter species from co-existing.

If you expand beyond Hominids to include all of the Primates then we can see, again, a fairly large amount of diversification. None of this really means much of course, because diversification of Family A does not really tell us anything about Family B.

-dale

[highsea]

...Indeed it has been discarded as fantasy by the top theoretical physicists. M theory needs no dark matter to achieve mathematical harmony because the 'extra' gravity is escaping off the brane, which accounts for gravitys weakened state.

New evidence of Dark Matter:

22/08/2006 - 2:44:22 PM

Astronomers offer proof of unseen 'darkmatter'

US astronomers say they have found the best evidence to date for “darkmatter”, the mysterious invisible substance that is believed to account for the bulk of the universe’s mass.

Using a host of telescopes, researchers focused on the collision between two galactic clusters. They found that most of the gravitational pull from the aftermath of the encounter comes from a relatively empty looking patch of sky, a strong suggestion that there is something more there than meets the eye.

“This provides the first direct proof that darkmatter must exist,” said Doug Clowe, a research astronomer at the University of Arizona.

Clowe and his colleagues used Nasa’s Chandra X-ray observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope and several ground-based observatories to examine the “bullet cluster”, a clump of galaxies that formed over the past 100 million years from the violent collision of two smaller galactic clusters. The object gets its name from a bullet-shaped cloud of superhot gas on one of its sides.

Most of the visible mass in the bullet cluster is concentrated in that cloud and another near it. But using a technique known as gravitational lensing, Clowe and his colleagues show that the force of gravity is actually stronger in a part of the cluster that appears to be emptier.

They will publish their results in a future issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“This is really exciting,” said University of Chicago physicist Sean Carroll, adding that the observations demonstrate the existence of darkmatter “beyond a reasonable doubt”. Carroll was not involved in the research.

Astronomers have used darkmatter for 70 years to explain various observations about the universe's behaviour. They have shown that rotating spiral galaxies would fly apart if it were not for the gravitational pull of undetectable matter in addition to their stars. Other observations show that the expansion of the universe is being held back by a force greater than the gravitational pull of visible matter alone.

Though darkmatter clearly provides the best explanation for such observations, Clowe said: “astronomers have long been in the slightly embarrassing position” of having to appeal to some mysterious, unobservable material in order to make things fit together.

Some physicists have even proposed that it is not the amount and type of matter in the universe that needs to be adjusted, it is the law of gravity itself. They have suggested alternative theories that boost the strength of gravity on galactic and intergalactic scales in order to do away with the need for darkmatter.

“It’s always possible that there’s some modification of gravity going on as well,” Carroll said. “No matter what you do you’re going to have darkmatter.”

http://www.irishexaminer.com/breakin...9z8&n=82556006