Topic: The Origin of the Human DNA - page 4. (Read 5635 times)

Consciousness likely evolved in gradual stages as well. To survive, animals have to be aware of their surroundings, of where their own limbs and bodies are, of things happening to and inside of their bodies (pain, illness, etc), and to predict where things will go in the short term, either to catch prey, or to avoid predators. Just from that you have all the basic building blocks of self awareness.

The Hadron Colider doesn't actually create anything. It's a large sensor that senses stuff happening in our universe, or things our universe is composed of. Essentially, "30 years of man made effort, $6 billion in materials and labour, the worlds greatest scientific minds to create" a really damn good microscope, which was able to see things come from nothing.

Did you know black holes form all around us all the time too? We don't notice them, because they are too tiny, burn out too quickly, and exist for too short a period of time for us to notice them (like, tiny fractions of a nanosecond). We could use things like the Hadron Colider to detect them, but that doesn't mean they exist only in its tube. They're everywhere... o.o

But it didn't. It took the Hadron Collider, 30 years of man made effort, $6 billion in materials and labour, the worlds greatest scientific minds to create an atmosphere to prove that you need a Hadron Collider to make something come from nothing?

Just some food for thought...

Multiverse theories are proposed to counter the anthropic principle, suggesting that the reason the universe is so specifically suited to life as we know it is that life as we know it is suited to *this* universe out of many.. An argument against that idea might be that life is extremely unlikely even in this universe, yet came about in a shockingly short time frame, making this also an unlikely multiverse.

Some suggest life as we know it couldn't have evolved even if the universe were filled with primordial soup, yet we see it thriving on a planet that was too cool for life at the time it's been claimed to have begun, thanks to a faint young sun (a problem which "is not yet solved" according to Nature & Nature Geoscience)

Penguins used to have wings, but have evolved them into more like fuzzy flippers instead, since in their environment they get more food by "flying" under water than flying through the air. If you ever get a chance to see them doing that at a zoo, do it. They are quite amazing to watch.




Species evolved through random genetic mutations, which were selected by their environment (viable mutations reproduced, bad mutations died off). Birds, mamals, and reptiles all came from the same fish ancestors. Insects came from crustasians like crabs and trilobytes. Plants came from seaweed, which came from algae. All three of those classes came from complex sponges and from single-celled organisms, some photosynthetic in nature, some predatoreal. Those came from even more basic single-cell life, which came from proto-life consisting of very basic proteins, which was created in gasy bubbly pools of water, mud, geothermal activity (volcanoes), and air. Those things came from planet Earth, which formed when dust clouds from a prior star (or a number of stars) congealed with gravity to form the big round balls we call planets, and the giant ball of gas we call the sun. Of those previous stars, some were formed from the most basic element hydrogen, and some were formed from more complex elements, but their enormous pressure and fusion was what transformed the basic elements and gasses into the more heavier elements, like calcium, carbon, iron, oxygen, sillicon, and other elements that we and our planet are made of. Those stars, in turn, were formed from gravity pulling together very basic elements which originated from the big bang, which until recently was theorized to have come from nothing. When measuring the mass of the universe by observing how things move and gravitate around each other, we discovered that the parts we are able to see only make up half of the universe. The theory was that our universe is composed of matter that we can see (electrons around protons) and anti-mater which we can't (protons around electrons) which nonetheless has gravitational mass, and that our universe is composed of equal parts matter and anti-matter. As such, if you take all of the stuff in universe and put it together, it will all cancel each other out (matter canceling out anti-mater), meaning our universe is still technically a sum of nothing. The theory also claimed that an event that can spontaneously create a bunch of matter and antimater (in exactly equal parts so as to maintain that "energy can not be created or destroyed") could happen randomly, at any time, completely on its own. This theory was completely confirmed with the Large Hadron Colider, when we observed exactly that happening many times on a tiny scale - essentially numerous tiny big bangs creating mater and antimater, popping spontaneously into existance - though they were too tiny to survive in our already existing universe.

So, there's your answer. A big sum of nothing spontaneously popped into existence out of nothing.

Not necessarily the Velociraptor but dinosaurs. And not prove but simplified explain.

The Velociraptor is just the one where good feathered Remains have been found.

Because that's where we are; evolution is studied through how animals came to be in their current forms by running backwards through the timeline, from the concrete, observable now to the increasingly mysterious past.  If you ask anyone to explain the beginning of life, they will only ever give you theories; nobody was around to see it and no records exist of its happening, so all we have is our imagination and reasoning.

Because it's useful? That is like saying that Newtonian physics are not good because we don't know where mass comes from...

Did he just try to prove that modern birds all came from the velociraptor?

Yeah, but those do actually have uses 

On other hand the explanations offered by creationist and such are worse. And don't really answer a the questions either...

You just described the God of the Gaps Fallacy.

And Evolution doesn't try to explain the beginning of life nor the beginning of the Universe.

Check: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

Evolution doesn't have any "optimal" designs that it's aiming for. The only thing that's required for a trait to be passed down to future generations is...future generations.

If a mutant survives long enough to reproduce, it has succeeded, evolutionarily speaking. As long as ostriches continue to have baby ostriches, the ostrich genotype will survive. If a mutant ostrich without any wings somehow manages to utilize its mutation to its advantage and passes it down to its offspring, you may eventually see birds without wings.




Flight doesn't "just happen" one day to one member of one species.

Here's a pretty good read covering just this topic: http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/vertebrates/flight/evolve.html




Species don't mutate, individual members of species do and you do see lots of them. Try googling "five legged dog."

That's also such a Phrase, but Creationists always think new species just pop into existence. That's not how it works.

Let's go with you example of the feathers.

1. Dinosaurs had no skin like we, but scales. Now their where warm bloods, just like mammals. And like mammals have hairs their scales evoved into something to keep them warm. This where the first feathers. We know today that many Dinosaur species had feathers, of course by then they weren't as complex as the birds feathers today more like the feathers of the Ostrich



2. Dinosaurs on two legs (like all birds today are on two legs) where all hunters. They became very fast runners and jump attacked their prey. Like the Velociraptor. We know (from finds in China) that the Velociraptor didn't look like in Jurassic Park but more like this:


see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velociraptor
http://www.sdnhm.org/archive/exhibits/feathered/

3. From there on the Creature evoked to make longer and longer and more precise jump attacks using their feathered arm to navigate the jump. And the feathers evolved with it.

4. Eventually this leads to the point where it was able to make short glides. From there real flight evolved.


Birds evolved from Dinosaurs and are their direct descendants. In Fact a T-Rex is more closely related to a Turkey than to a Stegosaurus.

And males have nipples.

Evolution is not an intentional process, so there is no optimization; we can see this happening because many species have vestigial parts, such as blind mole rats with eyes, women with hymens, whales with hind leg bones.  The only thing animals do is adapt, and those animals which couldn't adapt we don't know about or are now extinct, i.e. dinosaurs and the dodo bird.  So long as that animal has adapted enough to survive in its area, the species thrives and continues to make more of itself, even with the parts it's no longer using.

If we can assume these creatures are placed on earth by God, a more interesting question is why He decided to give these animals parts they weren't going to use.  I don't believe an omnipotent God is so incompetent, nor will we find a valid reason as to why this can somehow be beneficial to the animal, which leads us to believe God has an odd sense of humor or He wasn't behind this at all.  I certainly don't see women cheering over their hymens, anyway, though it is beneficial in other animals who need that extra protection in the wild.

The "defective" and "improved" characteristics are just the way you see it, in nature there is no such thing, there's just random mutation, some changes at some particular point in time and space give an advantage to the animal or plant, and those are the ones who survive and perpetuate that characteristic.

Then why don't we see those flightless birds to eventually get rid of the wings completely in the process of evolution? Why doesn't evolution optimize for that?


I wonder how birds teach their "chicken" to fly?
Consider the first capable-of-flight bird has everything in place for a flight and we can imagine that she learned to fly by an accident. But how do then other birds start to fly? Do they all learn it by accident? Can they pass their knowledge and experience to other generations genetically?

Also why don't we see more random species, that the evolution must have produced, like animals with 5 legs, 2 heads or 3 wings, some really random messy stuff like that? Yes, they would have died out, but nonetheless those "random mutations" must have produced a lot of those things, yet we only see the result of what I would call a "guided mutation".

Creationists love to cite examples of so-called irreducible complexity...until the complexity is reduced by an evolutionary biologist.

I have yet to see an example of "irreducible complexity" that makes any kind of sense.

Thanks for the links!
I'm now reading about the "club-winged manakin bird" and in the article they ask:

"How did such strangeness evolve? What evolutionary pathways led to a bird that moonwalks for its sweetheart? Or that tickles its mate's face with its wiry tail feathers? Or whose wings produce a musical, violin-like sound?".

Lots of things to think about...


I agree that it was a bad example for the reason that the hamburger cannot replicate.

It seems that we only need the energy source (and other resources as building blocks) for the "healthy" organisms to reproduce as many copies of themselves as possible to provide the playground for the changes (either destructive or constructive) to occur. And then the idea is that "defective" new organisms will die out, but those with "improved" characteristics will have an advantage and will eventually dominate. It seems plausible.

But there is still this problem about how complex ideas (like an organism that would fly in the air) are implemented by those little incremental steps. The evolution seems to optimize locally for survival and you need to have so many things to go out of the optimal in order to have everything in place for an organism capable of flight, that it would have died out many times before it reached that stage.

I think it's called "irreducible complexity" if I remember correctly and there are other examples of it.