Topic: The Origin of the Human DNA - page 3. (Read 5623 times)

Sure, humans are the only ones who can perceive these things.
But it doesnt mean  these things seize to exist if humans arent there perceiving them.
Maybe I should have said that "nothingness" isnt more legitimate than "somethingness".
Therefore, both have to exisit for the sake of equlibrium.

Pardon a beginners intrusion. I think that nothingness and anythingness only exist for humans, because we have a brain capable of juggling things beyond the basic drives to eat and reproduce, both of which exist in the 'brain' of the cockroach, and the lobster. Heck, in all living things flora or fauna. The  incentive to exist and move forward has nothing to do with a  brain. Those with a brain are partially cursed. To a rat, emptiness and fullness are rated by the gut, and the sinew in the tooth. If he then gets laid, and if he could or wanted to say anything at all, wouldn't it be 'life is sweet'?
Lightness and darkness don't need explaining to most animals. It's a given, we've adapted, I have more success eating at night than I do in the daylight, or whatever my (species) chosen strategy.
I say that nothingness exists except for the dead (who couldn't care), and for (living) humans as an abstraction, simply because we've got that 'capable of juggling things brain'.  When the juggling stops, we're animals again, but worse, we're the cat kicked out of the house  to become feral again or die trying.  Or the flushed turtle.
I ate well tonight, I'm (hopefully) gonna get laid, and when I'm satiated, emptied, and subsequently bored I'll see if I still have any weird phenomenological text books that I once enjoyed trying to understand, and the existential stuff that I tended toward because it suited my adolescent demeanor but still didn't understand. I outgrew itl. I was a sham. My endeavors were shallow and hopeless. I'm going to concentrate on getting laid
I'm glad to see that some people still think about things, but I don't envy you.

So, again, we got rid of the tail instead of growing a bigger one because it made sense, not because it reduced our ability to survive. I bet tails would make an office clerk's life troublesome


It's intentional. It's good sometimes to dumb yourself down and revisit things that might seem obvious, because you might get an argument you didn't expect. That's how I evolve

And, by the way, I love Khan Academy, watched a few videos on biology a few years ago, priceless!

interlagos, sorry, but you lack even the minimum understanding of the laws of nature.

Go on Khan Academy and watch the Evolution videos, search the website I've already pointed you to...

It's pointless we try to explain you why pigs don't have wings when you lack the minimum understanding of how life works.

The animals you pointed are bad examples because they were artificially selected by humans.

Wings evolve separately in several species because it gave an advantage to the animal, and there is not something like a half-wing, it has always a purpose, wings in their earliest form (in some dinosaur) probably were useful for regulating temperature, slowly the animal was able to use those for 1) escaping predators 2) catching pray, and that characteristic was passed to the next generation and so on...

You can see this progression with every characteristic in the animal kingdom, how the eye evolved, how venom evolved, and so on.

We can't explain you everything case by case, but if you understand the fundamental laws of nature, you will understand why snakes do what they do, and why we walk on two feet.

That's because there is not such thing as the first human, every animal or plant is always "between" species...

I believe the answer to this is philosophical.
Why does anything have to exist at all?
Because, I believe, everything must have an opposite. Including "nothingness".
In order for there to be "nothing" there also has to be "something".
Likewise, in order for there to be darkness, there has to be light.
In order for the opposite of nothingness to exist, there has to be a creating intelligence behind it. Which is why intelligent life evolves in the universe.
This intelligence, if it reaches the maximum intelligence possible, will be able to create other universes (big bangs) in which life will evolve in order for the perpetual creation of universes to be sustained.

In other words, DNA comes from a process originating from nothing at all.

I'd like to see a definition of "species" sufficient enough to account for all of life, without exception, before answering this question.

By the way, the best definition I can think of for a human is that "a human has two human parents," but that would be problematic for evolution (i.e. the first human would have to have come from non-human parents).  So...complicated question.

Actually, style of life is the biggest factor in deciding whether a random change in DNA will prove beneficial to the organism or not.  That is precisely what is being asserted; the organisms living today aren't the strongest or the smartest, they're only the most adaptable.  Of course evolution doesn't care about any of that because evolution is not an intelligent higher power.

The coccyx in humans is the rudiment of a tail (most of which has disappeared).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coccyx

As many posters here pointed out the evolution doesn't care about things like "style of life" or try to optimize for something. It just happens. So according to that view horses, cows and pigs had equal chances as dinosaurs to begin evolving wings. Since we have agreed that ostriches don't get any disadvantages of having wings while still being incapable of flight, then we should have seen pigs with rudiments of wings too, but we didn't. Truly random mutations must have produced that. Yet we only see the mutations, where they make sense and eventually lead to an implementation of some higher-order concept.

Answer: there is no such force.  Evolution is a series of accidents and a tiny minority of accidents improve the chance of a critter successfully reproducing. For example, in the North Sea, cod are shrinking because ones that are smaller are more likely to reproduce before being caught by a trawler.  If fishing stopped a few years, the advantage for reproducing would go to bigger cod and the small ones would disappear.  There is no "force" - just the collision of random mutations with the environment in which the critter has to reproduce.

The really interesting question is how did life start?  You'd think that there would have been umpteen examples of life starting in the billions of years the planet has been around but we know that it only happened once.

Evolution and Abiogenesis are NOT the same thing.

And, frankly, any definition of life is highly dependent on scale.

Yes, I meant those. Of course not all Dinosaurs   are you serious? Nobody can't be that hairsplitting.

 Sorry I'm not looking up every exact name.



http://www.livescience.com/1410-rex-related-chickens.html

It not states the closer relation to the Turkey, but look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur#Taxonomy  ( Tyrannosauridae ; Aves ; and Stegosauria)



What better proof could there be than a xkcd about it  

Those are the "million dollar" questions...

It's not enough for you nor for everyone else and there are a lot of people working hard trying to find those answers...

Theory of Evolution explains how life evolves, that's it.


Really?

As to the origins of everything, see Asimov's "The Last Question"

http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm


And as to evolution through natural selection - it's easy to say "Prove it!" when the complexities of understanding a process that exceeds one's own span of existence in time by a magnitude of a great many shitloads is tedious at best. An easier way is by looking at much shorter (time-wise) examples, like the fruit fly study, or how elephants are losing their tusks due to a certain gene and their only predator's affinity for ivory: http://sector9evolution.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-evolution-of-tuskless-elephants-due_22.html

Dawkins is all about the athiesm these days, but everyone should read The Selfish Gene, the book that put him on the map. Genes are the closest thing to immortality this planet has ever seen.

Why not? Why can't mechanics alone explain what is it that I am sensing and describing to myself?

Because their style of life, consumption, and reproduction does not require them to fly? They went the run fast and be big enough to fight things off route, instead of the fly away route. Plus they are not carnivores, and birds evolved from carnivorous dinos that needed to swoop down on top of their prey.

It sounds like you've read up a bit on dinosaurs but have some stuff confused. Birds descended from theropoda, okay. Not all dinosaurs.


I'd love to see some scientific journals or something backing up such a bold claim. Or is that merely your conjecture?

For something to appear self-aware is a completely mechanical notion. But as for you, sitting there in your body, aware of yourself and others, mechanics alone cannot begin to explain what "you" are doing "in there," as opposed your absence (in that you are absent from the experiences of others).

That's the point. The penguins are amazing, the animals in general are cute and beautiful. They all make sense beyond just being able to reproduce. It seems that there is an idea behind each type of species.

Why didn't horses or cows or even pigs start to evolve wings?



Great quotes, thanks!