Topic: The Origin of the Human DNA - page 5. (Read 5635 times)

Birds wouldn't evolve wings if they decreased their ability to survive. Birds (or proto-birds) don't need to "know" anything.

Riddle me this: If wings that couldn't provide flight weren't advantageous, why do we have so many species of flightless birds?

Survival.

Why should there be a purpose?

What is the purpose of Evolution?

Well, thats not a very good example. 1. You bring personal perspective into it, what you understand under chaos and destruction. If you put a burger into the sun it changes due to it water drying out into the air (where it can help new plants grow, thank to suns energy), flies lay their eggs into it and fungus grows in it. I would not call this destruction.

If you instead put the Burger into an isolated place like open vacuum space with no energy source affecting it. It in fact doesn't change at all.

You can use energy to do work, but you still lose some energy, that the entropy. Evolution can be seen as work done. And as whole for on large scale the entropy increases, energy get's used and eventually no more of it can be used.

It seems easier with the dice example, but in reality the organizms are so much more complex and tuned and yet fragile.

How would the bird evolve wings (and probably feathers first) provided that their rudiments would be a burden for those mutated species and would decrease their ability to survive. How would the bird "know" to continue to evolve wings until the point it can actually fly and take advantage of that?

I agree that laws of thermodynamics might not be exactly applicable here, but I used them as an example of the fact that things usually decay and get eventually destroyed if left alone.

I don't see how an energy source would make things different. If you leave some food on the Sun for a day or two it will get rotten and decay eventually, but would not become a better looking hamburger

So it must be something else that drives evolution. Even though you do need an energy source to sustain life, it doesn't seem enough from the above experiment.


Well, if certain species evolve to the point, when they are capable of destroying the whole civilization, then if they actually do destroy themselves, the overall entropy would increase or stay the same. But what if they evolve beyond the point of surviving on a single planet and move to the stars?

Imagine you have a bunch of 6-sided dice, which are your "life" that needs to survive and evolve.

1) What you are describing, involving random mutations and entropy:

You throw the dice, get a bunch of random numbers. They don't actually mean anything, since you can randomly pick any numbers as survivors, and toss any other numbers aside. This isn't how evolution works though.

2) Let's say there is still entropy, but now we add evolution, where the results of the randomness have meaning. In this case, anything that is 4 or above "survives," anything that's 3 or below we throw away. This is similar to 4> being a beneficial mutation that helps the creature survive, and 3< being a bad mutation that kills it (like cancer or a defect).

You throw the dice, get a bunch of random numbers. You throw away all the ones that are less than or equal to 3. Now you have a bunch of survivors of 4+. Pick them up and throw them again, you'll have fewer survivors. Keep repeating, and you'll eventually have none left. This is basically a species that exists in entropy, where it's genetic mutations are guided by its environment (evolution), but there is no outside influence to propagate it, so, as entropy states, it will fall appart into maximum entropy.

3) Now let's use the real world we live in. There is still entropy, and there is still evolution, but now there is an outside source of energy, like the sun, which allows this species to survive and reproduce.

As in 2, you throw the dice, throw away anything that's 3 or below, and keep everything that's 4 or above. Now you can use the outside energy source to "reproduce" the dice. For every die that's still around, add another, basically doubling the amount of survivors. Throw again, and repeat. If you are lucky, this species will keep growing in number. If not, it will die out, and some other luckier dice thrown by someone else will take over.

This is the right way to think about evolution: it has a source of outside energy (sun, geothermal, etc) as opposed to being an issolated system of entropy, and although the genetic mutations are random, they are selected and guided by the outside environment, such as longer hair helping survive in cold climates, and harder skin or faster legs protecting from predators. Yes, eventually, once the sun's energy will run out, this system will fall apart as well, just as our actual sun and solar system will.

With evolution certain parts of system get more ordered, but in total entropy increases?

There is energy spend in evolution, that energy can't be reclaimed and it dissipates.

I meant this. The process of evolution does not happen in an Isolated system. This law in not applicable here.



Earth Environment ≠ the Solar System. I could argue about that but for Evolution it just doesn't matter, unless you want to talk about the creation of the Universe know?



I know it must be hard, because all the Creationist use this as favorite argument, beat science with science. But either they all don't understand this law or they lie to have a good argument, knowing the majority of their viewers / listeners will be more than happy to swallow everything they say as long as it "proofs" their believes.

Emphasis mine.
So, it sounds like if I do bugs when I'm coding some program, it will somehow produce a better version of that program? Or if we go and twiddle some bits in the compiled image of the program, then it will make it better eventually? It doesn't seem too convincing.

The evolutionists' argument is of course that if we spend a lot of time and do it on multiple parallel versions, then eventually we get the one where it seems like things are improving. But we somehow need to consistently choose the version of the experiment, where things are improving and not only succeed once. So we are talking about multiplying very small probabilities here, which makes the probability of the chain of successful experiments (the evolutionary chain) almost improbable.



Once those self-replicating "machines" first occurred they seemed to "want" to get better, more efficient, smarter. That's what I call reducing the entropy. I don't have much problem imagining, that they would occur eventually, but why wouldn't they be destroyed later?

The analogy I hold in my head is this: if you run this "random mutations" theme over your hard drive for a good amount of time, then you might eventually end up with an image of Linux and a bunch of programs that would allow your computer to boot and do some basic stuff. But why running this "random mutations" theme further would produce better versions of programs over time?

Thank you for the correction.
Wasn't a common ancestor of apes and humans also an ape of some sort?
I corrected the first answer anyway...


Just to point out that the term "seeded" I used in the poll doesn't deny the ape heritage, which has in fact been demonstrated by science (if not proven). One evidence comes to mind is that the mechanizm to generate vitamin C is broken exactly the same way in both apes and humans. Most other animals have it working just fine, except maybe guinea pigs where it's broken in a different way.

Seeding means taking an appropriate baseline DNA from Earth (hominid DNA was used as a base for humans) and infusing it with "improvements".



What if we consider Solar System then? Is it isolated enough?
Is having more or less constant source of energy enough to account for decrease in entropy in the evolutionary process?

I put the topic in "Politics and Society" as knowing our true origin might affect the way our society is built in the future. If moderators disagree, they can move to Off-Topic of course.

The best way to tell this is bullshit spewed by narcissists is the emphasis on Homo Sapiens Sapiens.  The question of the origin and structure of DNA is one that applies to all kingdoms of life in Gaia.       

Also one must consider the scale of universe... There is 10^(22-24) stars in universe. And next consider that we even now know 170 systems with exoplanets. From which I consider that there is quite many systems with planets. My understanding that our current discovery method doesn't work quite well for small rocky planets such as Earth. So there is likely large number of suitable planets around in universe.

In scale of Universe the life doesn't seem very unlikely when you combine the size and the lifespan...

Evolution.

Countless variations and permutations amino acids came into being and faded away until one worked: "the shape and interaction of the DNA structure".



Why? There was no time limit. The universe existed for billions of years before life evolved on earth. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that the right combination of circumstances needed for life to develop occurred during within that time frame.

Even if you do believe that ten billion years isn't long enough, consider that this might not be the first incarnation of the universe. Perhaps the universe cycled through several Big Bangs and Big Crunches, existing empty and lifeless before we came along.

As has already been pointed out, all 4 poll options are false.

Human DNA has origins from the earliest cells and RNA replication between 2 and 3 billion years ago. What is really interesting is that fossils of the earliest stages of evolution are within us today. Mitochondria were once a separate single-celled organism which was engulfed by a different cell type and became symbiotic. This happened in the early oceans which were hot water. The moon's orbit was much closer so the continents were swept with hundred meter tides every day. The Earth was a giant washing machine of organic chemicals for a billion years. Human cells have thousands of mitochondria which are essential for energy production. Human nuclear DNA has slowly absorbed most of the mtDNA such that only a dozen proteins are encoded by them now.


Easy. non-life can give rise to life incrementally because there is a vast range in between: viruses. Viruses are half alive, especially the most primitive ones which are complex organic molecules. They replicate but only by using other organic material from the environment.

Evolution is a process that occurs on a species level.  However one of its driving forces is the natural selection of favorable traits of individuals of that species.  Mutations within DNA can arise from many pathways.  Obviously damage is an easy example such as UV light.  Another is a a mistake during replication that is not caught by a repair enzyme.  Finally, there can be major mutations such as duplication of entire segments of DNA.  These are probably the most useful from an evolutionary standpoint.  If a mutation occurs in a duplicated segment, a new product may arise that confers a benefit to the individual.  The kicker is, that this mutation does not damage the initial gene, yielding a loss of function.  In such a case it may pass to subsequent generations.  However, many mutations are deleterious and may result in the death of the mutant individual.  These mutations naturally remove themselves from the gene pool.  Ultimately, mutation as a means of evolution is a shotgun approach.  

At the molecular level the laws of entropy are perfectly applicable to the process of mutation.  The addition of a base is a chemical reaction and heat is lost, increasing general disorder.  However, like I mentioned evolution occurs at a level much higher than molecules.  It is an incorrect to extend the laws of thermodynamics to the process of evolution.  At best you could say it is terribly inefficient because only a small proportion of mutations will be beneficial.  Many deaths for one improvement.  That sounds like a decrease in order to me.    

I believe there is a God and I am perfectly OK if He is made out of String Theory Spaghetti living in the 10th dimension.

Does pure chaos even exist?

We try all kind of Zen meditation to be more in tune with the universe. Why not simply be a rock and never evolve? There is nothing more in tune with the universe than simple elements.

So far we have gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear forces. What is the name of that fundamental force that pushes simple elements into the shape and interaction of the DNA structure?

Loaded answer in the poll.

We didn't evolve from apes. Humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor.