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Bringing you atheist articles and building active godless communities takes hundreds of hours and resources each month. If you find any joy or stimulation at Atheist Republic, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.
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Probably because the only thing you know how to spot is when people use adjectives and adverbs like 'very' 'much' 'high' 'large' and so on. I've never actually seen you have real discussions with original thoughts on here. You only have one approach, find a word you don't like, and latch unto it as literally as possible. Then when that fails you bring up old conversations, and misrepresent your opponent.
See attachment from my psycholinguistics textbook. Information processing is supposed to be a subconscious and automatic behavior. But instead of putting work to understand, you put in work to misunderstand. You don't care that in my OP I said my definitions "aren’t perfect, but get the point across." Because to attempt to understand what I meant, means you have to have an actual conversation, and you're not ready for that.
You haven't had to formally study language like me. Perhaps I should be the one dismissing your arguments until you get educated.
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@ John, I too have seen this action, which is very frustrating. Freud somewhat coined the term free association, whichever free thought comes to mind, is the original subconscious thought. However, this can be refuted. I do agree with you here based off my observations on these posts.
I would ask are you american? Because it's possible your text books may be miss leading, I have family in Oklahoma who I visit and have some wonderful ones that on face value look legitemate but are intellectual dishonest and subtly try to keep a bias to it's proponents beliefs.
You don't get that in Europe really, it's far more brutal and on point.
Arguing that no one has read more then you in a particular field is fallacious as well as ridiculous, how could you possibly know that? And from your replies I would refute that.
I've also provided ample evidence you have yet to refute, considering how much you claim to know I'm not impressed to be honest.
But still thanks for the post.
What? Its not fallacious lol, its my field of study. Every one of those textbooks I mentioned has an accompanying class I've had to take. I'm currently enrolled in Sensation & Perception.
As to your ample evidence. Last thing I remember you writing was about a gene that may cause myopia. That sounds like evidence for my point, since there's loss of function.
What is the step before we evolved our eyes?
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I would ask are you american? Because it's possible your text books may be miss leading, I have family in Oklahoma who I visit and have some wonderful ones that on face value look legitemate but are intellectual dishonest and subtly try to keep a bias to it's proponents beliefs.
You don't get that in Europe really, it's far more brutal and on point.
Arguing that no one has read more then you in a particular field is fallacious as well as ridiculous, how could you possibly know that? And from your replies I would refute that.
I've also provided ample evidence you have yet to refute, considering how much you claim to know I'm not impressed to be honest.
But still thanks for the post.
@Angiebot:
"P.S. In case anyone is too lazy to watch it: the answer is that the eye was the result of mutations of the first bacterias on Earth, that the process went on and on, improving and improving over millions of years."
This is probably swerved away a bit from the OP.
In that video it says the starting bacterias were blind - until - few hundred millions year after that, there was a revolution, revolution to see the light. If that is the case shouldn't it happen to all at once and no more blind bacteria today? And your own word above also state the same.
Not to mention bacteria are the fastest multiplying species on earth, and they don't have to worry about impressing a mate, they just multiply. Even more impressive, they pass mutations and genes horizontally. The fact that we even have bacterias around, and they haven't evolved into anything else yet, makes one wonder. And if modern bacteria are already highly evolved, then I assume phototropic bacteria are highly evolved as well, and are by no means representative of early single-celled organisms.
But none of that matters. Dawkins says so. I believe it. That settles it.
Hi, Zwalja.
Well, I'm not a scientist (as you have noticed from my posts in this subject), and the topic was "Evolution of eyes". If you pay attention, you can see that mine was the 2nd answer to the thread (most of the extended and expert answers became later) and I was just trying to be helpful to people, like me, who didn't know how the eye evolved, something I was ignorant of, until I listen to Dawkins explaining it and, also, I really like that episode in Cosmos because of the visual representation.
I'm really sorry if I didn't get (therefore express) the idea properly. It's been 25 years since my last Biology class in high-school...
Now that I re-read it, I think that you're 100% right. Thanks for the clarification.
Please don't take this as the typical negative way asserted by non believers John,
but do you have any peer review paper links that conclude other opinions other than the evolution of the eye by random mutation.
I would be keen to learn, It is not my specific field but it is beautiful fascinating.
I have read ones on random mutation being the cause and of myopia cause by protein genes.
But I am always interested to see different perspectives.
Right, but why do I feel like you don't know what you are asking when you want peer-reviewed papers?
There are several types of journal articles. The most original ones are those conducting empirical studies, which test clear hypothesis, and produce clear results. But there are other types of peer-reviewed papers, such as theoretical articles and methodological articles. What you gave me in Nilsson and Pelger's paper qualifies more as a theoretical article than anything else.
That doesn't detract from its importance, but you're treating it as if it were an empirical study. You're treating journal articles the way Christians treat the Bible.
I think you are reading into something that is not there my dear, I would happily read anything as long as its peer reviewed and from credible sources, if you have a theoretical paper that is peer reviewed I would not dismiss this, surely we can agree that all science starts with theory.
Although I can understand your hesitancy, Providing you feel it is a reliable source that is independent (not bias for an agenda, the cornerstone for a good paper) then I will happily read it.
This is why, yes I would read a paper by Lawrence Krauss on particle physics, but I don't watch his videos because his brand of 'atheism' glosses over the science, and it is science I care about.
Well, some hypothesis are theory-driven others are data-driven. But yes I agree with your general point.
The problem isn't the references, I'll gladly cite references for anything I've mentioned already, from all the diseases and disorders that happen when anything in the eye is changed, to the way phototropic bacteria move their flagellum in response to light. But I'm trying to make an argument with all those facts, and I feel like my arguments are being ignored, or being treated as invalid. Open any journal article and you'll see them doing what I'm doing, using previous knowledge to argue a new claim. Its actually required, you're not allowed to publish unless you've done a literature review, and written an introduction where you explain how your claims fit into the conversation. Science is a conversation.
But you want a reference for something else entirely. Something I haven't said. I don't care to suggest an alternate method. I care to call into question the current one.
In fact my OP is such that if someone claims the eye evolved as a functionless organ until it one day became functional, then I have no argument against it.
I am a Doctoral student where more emphasis is confounded on references than original thought, yet they limit you to 10 years of past reference. Its a joke in my humble opinion. Lack of education does not make you obtuse, nor profound educational learning makes one intelligent. It is subjective and largely dependent on common sense, but original thought is not valid these days as all scholars state that there was an original thought before you. So much for inventive or artistic thought. LOL
I'm far from being a doctoral student. Yet the closer I get and the more I learn, the more I realize the people behind peer-reviewed articles are no different than me. Prone to procrastination, mistakes, biases and omissions. I've also noticed people enjoy doing research far more than they enjoy having to write the paper, having to worry about meeting APA guidelines, ethical guidelines. Having to worry if their work will be published. Having to wait.
And those who are asked to peer review, don't like it any more than we like jury duty.
Exactly, and yay!!! agreed ground lol!
Yes I am obviously aware of the stages one has to go through in that regard.
Well I for one am not ignoring your points, I have no basis to do so and it would be ignorant.
I have a basic concept from the papers I have read so far but we have to remain open to conversation and ideas.
Most recently I read an article in the journal for clinical investigation about 'mutations cause myopia and deafness in humans and mice' as well as 'pessimistic estimate of the time required for an eye to evolve'.
And I think if you read back through this entire thread I have never treated your points as invalid, I did offer a peer reviewed paper for you to possibly look at if you like but that was it.
My apologies, its easy to lump everyone together, but I try not to.
If I may, I'd like to simplify my argument. The visual system is such, that if changes occur, whether its by diseases or disorders, even injury, it will loose functionality. I feel like that's a reasonable claim. You change something in our anatomy, you can expect physiological short-comings, such as myopia.
Great, given that this is the case. What was the most recent mutation to have occurred in our visual history? In other words, what was our last evolutionary addition that gave us the modern eye? What do we have now, that we didn't have before? I doubt evolutionists have a definitive answer, so I'm open for theoretical ones.
That is ok, it is understandable to some degree.
Of course, but you could also argue that the body will the adapt to survive, for instance:
someone blind may develop heightened hearing abilities
someone who is deaf visual abilities improve as they adapt for the loss of that particular sense and so on.
I cannot answer that to be honest, as i said it is not my field of expertise and would be ignorant to do so.
What i would say is that through the scientific method we have learnt that the best explaination produced so far
is evolution via random mutation and natural selection. But i will look through the journals i have at some point, it would make
for wonderful conversation.
I would also say that the finding and analysis of the ardipithecus ramidus in 1994 is quite telling and usportive of this particular contention, that of evolutionary changes through natural selection and mutations (i think that is roughly the right year).
I think it was tested to be over 4m years old and was definitely a hominid and predates my lovely Lucy lol grrrr...
There was a paper i will try to find when i have more free time that said analysis of the hip bones and limbs show that
it was bipedal when on the ground but quadrupedal in trees as oppose to the bipedal Lucy, this shows wonderful evolutionary stages.
Well that's an interesting suggestion. But if in the absence of one sense we expected improvements in others. Then at any point in our evolutionary past when our eyes weren't as good as they are now, evolution ought to have favoured improvements in other senses more than the eye.
My only comment on this subject is that there are over a thousand various species in and out of water that are blind and thrive. If one sense doesnt exist, the other takes over. All species find a way to survive or they simply dont.
I prefer to get scientific explanations from scientists. Not preachers or politicians. Some things are best left to professionals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwew5gHoh3E
Its funny how Dawkins uses an advanced television camera behind the screen to collect the information and present it to the audience. Similar to the way we have an extensive connection of neurons behind our eyes that collect the information, travels to various parts of the brain, and finally presents it before consciousness (our audience).
As I said elsewhere in the forum. A light-sensitive anything is useless if it has no means of presenting that information to the species, and the species has no way of responding to that information behaviorally.
But sure, lets just leave the most important parts out of the presentation. That's what magicians do, they show you one thing, so you ignore everything else.
What did he leave out that would point to irreducible complexity. What he points out re: the evolution of the eye pertains to brain evolution also. Notice he did not say he could turn water into wine by magic.
Consider a plant, it responds via chemicals and hormones to water and light, and this is far more complex then a single cell that humans may have evolved from.
We could consider that this is a similar way to how we evolved the eye, from cells responding chemically and hormonely to light and other things... becoming more complex as all parts evolved over time.
Lucy pointed out a good paper by Nilsson.D & Pelger.S - titled A pessimistic estimate of the time required for an eye to evolve... with plausible steps as well.
Great, I see a lot of estimations, theorizing, plausibilities, and considerations. Where's the evidence?
How is their method any different from MJ's "Black or White" music video? It doesn't take much creativity to see how anything can slowly change into anything else. How do you anchor that to reality?
Do we know how the eye of Homo erectus differed from ours? Austrolopithecus? Is there anything in our evolutionary past for which you have evidence when it comes to the visual system? Or are we just "educated" guessing here?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZHtL7CirJA
Well as the person studying this I would imagine that you would have the evidence at hand to support your view or to refute another proposal.
But theorizing is part of the scientific method, so that is solid foundation for what we are considering.
I do not know what the actual answer is, I can only conceive in my mind because this is not something I have ever studied, However I would say that in my mind it does not seem a difficult process for the eye to evolve.
We see this in an unborn child, consider:
- at 4 weeks it is a ball of cells, with no brain, heart, organs or eyes but is an embryo and is smaller then a seed
- at 5 weeks circulatory system begins to form including a primitive heart
- at 6 weeks ears, nose and mouth take shape with brain starting to develop
- at 7 weeks hands and feet which look like paddles on an oar and still has a tail
- at 8 weeks nerve cells begin to branch out and breathing tubes develop
and so on, you can easily follow this and easily see how we evolve.
if that level of complexity can take place over nine months, then I could not even imagine the levels of evolution of 4 million years.
maybe this is just me, but it seem academic.
Perhaps a wise decision is to find the development of an unborn childs eye and see how it develops over the 9 months till birth and perhaps how it continues to develop after birth as adaptation takes part.
Lucy, this is the eye's evolution thread... are you sure that this is the right thread? Maybe this was supposed to be written to the 'abortion', wasn't it?
No it was indeed meant for this thread Angiebot, What I was trying to get across it you can see the development of all parts of a human within the unborn child. Consider that at 4 weeks an unborn baby in womb has no organs, including brain and no sensory perception such as the eye.
Slowly these all develop, the fetus grows from something that looks like a tadpole to a human within a few months.
I suppose my point is that if this can happen in 9 months, that an eye can come from almost nothing.
then it doesn't take much to imagine what developments can take place over 4 million years of hominid evolution.
and that eye at 4 weeks will not be the finished article and will have the perceptions that an adult human will have.
vision is the last sense to develop and is why a babies vision is 'fuzzy' as a newborn, its a marvel of evolving and adapting.
does this make sense? lol sorry if my point is not coming across well.
Ok, thanks for the explanation. My mistake ;)
(Everytime I write on this thread I look like a complete idiot. I should have already stopped)
oh no please don't feel that way, i have too! lol
your posts are good, and you have a nice way of getting point across.
I enjoy both of you ladies' comments more than the rest who tell me I'm wrong and don't bother explaining why lol.
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