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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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Clearly, stubbing your toe when you need to run, or having watery eyes when you need to see, are obstacles to survival. The difference between your examples and mine, are that yours are situational, whereas mine are all encompassing. If two people are running from a lion, and one stubs their toe, luck wasn't on his side, but the species continues. But if a mutation arises that gives all your descendants blurry vision due to watery eyes, now your whole lineage is in peril.
John, you wrote, “But if a mutation arises that gives all your descendants blurry vision due to watery eyes, now your whole lineage is in peril.”
Actually, it does not necessitate peril. It just means watery eyes!
Why would you respond to such nonsense? Have you literally lost yourself in your own ego? Are you seriously that far up on the spectrum? Did you not take your meds today? (TAKING A CRAP IS NOT CIRCUMSTANTIAL) It is every bit as regular as taking a pee. Please respond to this post too. I feel like I am discussing serious stuff with the Big Boys now.
Being killed by a predator because of when and where you defecated is circumstantial, irrespective of the regularity with which you do it.
How is it circumstantial when it happened every day for hundreds of millions of years? Little ape like humanoids being eaten to death by roaming hordes of dinosaurs. Are you trying to say people did not live with dinosaurs? Blasphemous Heretic! Not only do you not understand evolution, "CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVENTS, but you have no idea at all what CREATIONISM IS./
You are the blasphemous spawn of Satan spreading lies to steal the souls of all true believers and turn them from God's true path. You will burn in hell when you die. The Bible is clear on this. Repent! Repent! Repent or perish!!! Save your eternal soul. You need Jesus in your life.
John,
I think the knife edge oversimplifies. Organisms, central nervous systems and sensory organs tend to have redundancy and plasticity that provide resilience. People with the CCR5 Delta 32 mutation in their immune systems survive because other components pick up the slack. The systems are analog and not digital. There is room for compromise in function that does not compromise survival.
Do you have a more specific example of what you mean then? My observation is that the ability to compromise in function, generally speaking, doesn't come free with the territory; it requires systems that are often just as sophisticated as the sensory systems themselves to exist.
Take for example redundancy in the nervous system, again I don't know what specific example you have in mind, but I do know babies are born with a redundancy in their synaptic connections. There are mechanisms in place that prune away such redundancy, in order to increase efficiency. So, you have this trade-off between redundancy and efficiency, and we just happen to be born with the mechanism that allows us to overshoot at birth and then prune back the excess, as opposed to a system that begins with a shortage and then tries hard to make up for it. That mechanism sometimes fail, pruning doesn't occur, and the redundancy remains. The results of that failure, are correlated with autism.
Plasticity works the same way, most of the time it works as it should, and stops when it should. But tip the balance and things such as phantom limb syndrome emerge, and the plasticity can cross over into sensory regions where it shouldn't.
My point is, explaining how these functions that allow for compromise to occur are just as complex as the problem we are trying to solve, and they come with their own issues at hand.
" explaining how these functions that allow for compromise to occur are just as complex as the problem we are trying to solve,"
That's a god of the gaps argument if ever there was one. The lack of an explanation (if this is the case) doesn't in any way falsify evolution, and it certainly doesn't evidence any creation myths.
@john 61X Breezy:
You seem to be suggesting that eyes could not have developed through evolution. What conclusion are you drawing from that claim?
That if a single feature couldn't have emerged through the mechanisms of evolution, the whole organism couldn't have evolved.
Such organism have evolved again and again, in exactly the way you're claiming they can't. So this is something of a stumbling block for your creationist propaganda, and of course coupled with the fact that is wild unevidenced conjecture based on nothing more than your religious beliefs it's hard to see what you expect the atheists here to take from it.
As of course you have been told before, but prefer to resort to petty ad hominem fallacies.
What objective evidence can you demonstrate that anything is 'created', or that any deity exists?
I don't care about your denials of scientific facts, this has no relevance to their validity. Science has strict principles of validation, and falsification, evolution has been validated and keeps being validated by all the evidence, your objections are nothing new at all. It;s a dishonest rehash of the utterly debunked creationist propaganda called irreducible complexity, combined with an argument from ignorance fallacy.
@john 61X Breezy: the whole organism couldn't have evolved
But organisms with eyes exist.So if they didn't evolve, how did they get here? What alternative mechanism are you proposing?
I'm more interested in tearing down sandcastles than building them up. In fact, that's the ultimate question I want the forum to answer. Do you modify the theory of evolution to better explain these things, if so, how; or do you develop a new theory, is so what?
@ʝօɦn 6IX ɮʀɛɛʐy
Scientist are modifying the evolution theory, (in small ways,) all the time. Constantly improving upon it as new things are learned. That is what is so great about this form of discovery, it does not have to get it 100% right from the get go, but everyone can use the advancements as they come along. And they can build on it. Just be aware that evolutionary theory is a very VERY strong theory at this point, it is right up there with the earth is a globe.
Scientific findings have gotten so complex and advanced at this point, that is how advancement works, tiny bits of new information being found all the time slowly building up on each other, no one person can know all there is to know or take something as large as evolution and completely change it's course or falsify (with evidence) all of it.
You can easily find plenty of quirks in the evolutionary process that evolution does not fully explain, but it is more like: finding an errant brush stroke on the painting of a hull of the ship, sure you will find flaws, but does it mean that the ship is no longer a ship? Of course not!
"You seem to be suggesting that eyes could not have developed through evolution. What conclusion are you drawing from that claim?"
What's he reading the screen with? Eyes one assumes, attached to his brain. I think I'm seeing a flaw in his creationist propaganda.
@john 61X Breezy: or do you develop a new theory
What alternative theories are there, in your opinion?
You can bring back a modified version of Lamarckism; the intentionality behind that idea solves a host of problems.
"You can bring back a modified version of Lamarckism"
I think science requires more than subjective opinions in a chatroom, before it abandons or amends valid scientific theories.
@John 61X Breezy: modified version of Lamarckism
Lamarckism! What evidence is there to support it? Why not Lysenkoism?
What do you mean by intentionality? Whose intentions?
The keyword is modified; all theories, even bad ones, can be brought back to life with the right modifications. Within Lamarckism, intentionality lies in the part of the organism. They are in control of their evolution, through use and disuse. Lamarckism obviously lacks the genetic mechanisms, but it solves the balancing issue. It's the classing Hebb's law in action: things that fire together wire together. So it allows for brains and the visual system to change and evolve in sync. Darwinism may have a better genetic mechanism under its belt, but all progress is explained through the biological equivalence of crossing your fingers.
@John 61X Breezy: They are in control of their evolution, through use and disuse.
How are organisms even aware of their evolution, let alone able to control it?
Can you give a specific example of a change in an organism that can't be explained through the processes of mutation and natural selection over very long periods of time?
They're not aware of their evolution, they're aware of what behaviors are needed to achieve a goal. Lamarckism suggests that by attempting to reach that goal, changes occur that facilitate its obtainment. Thus, a giraffe that needs to reach leaf that's too high, will, through the attempt at reaching it, elongate its neck. It fails at the genetic level, but explains everything far better than chance.
Darwinism plays the probability game, and the issue with that, is that all things are theoretically possible no matter how improbable. As long as there is a one before the colon (1:100) it doesn't matter how infinitely large the number after is. With the OP, the most I can do is decrease the probability. Instead of throwing a single die and getting a six (the eye evolving), now you have to throw two dice and get six in both (brain and eye evolving simultaneously).
At some point the theory becomes a worse bet than playing the lottery and you winning, but you still can't say its impossible.
Another factor that helps decrease the probably is time and trials. You and others keep mentioning that it takes a very long time, the issue is that you don't have an infinite amount of time. All this has to occur within the window of 3.5 billions years, and with a set number of generations available to implement a change.
That would be the correct way to model it; if your bullshit creationist claim about both having to happen to give advantage was true; but of course it is not. So as usual you have set an artificially high bar for evolution, the complain when it can't reach it. It's the same old creationist bullshit that the crackpots love to try; and you are defiantly a crackpot Breezy.
Some people like to play the lottery and are perfectly content spending their life doing so. Others, such as myself, don't and prefer to allocate my money elsewhere. If the improbably high bars of evolution are your cup of tea, then drink it.
Its a very simple concept: eyes that mislead produces animals that misbehave. Put on a pair of drunk-goggles and you'll trip, fall, and reach for objects that aren't there. Receive bilateral damage to the parietal cortex and you'll get visual ataxia, and experience inaccuracies in visually guided movements; you'll reach for a cup far out to the side and continue reaching there because that's where you see it.
Yet, you think its perfectly reasonable for evolution to produce organisms with visual ataxia, that reach for their prey too far out to the left, and cannot connect their motor movements with their visual environment, due to an under-evolved parietal lobe, on the basis that visual ataxia is better than no vision at all.
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Yes, absolutely; you summed up my position quite well.
If only we lived in a world where missing the ledge by an inch is better than missing it by a mile; unfortunately, in both situations the jumper falls to his death.
There are no participation trophies in the game of survival. Either you meet the requirements or you don't; coming close doesn't matter.
But it isn't as simple as that. Even a slight advantage will lead to concentrations of that advantage. Your cartoon version of evolution is showing.
How is it cartoonish, when a jumping animal missing a ledge is what happens during visual ataxia? Where is the advantage?
Here's a final point to drive your argument out the park: When patients with visual ataxia are asked to close their eyes, they can touch regions of their body just fine; but when asked to do so with their eyes open, they miss.
Slogan of the week: No information is better than misleading information.
So uh, how many animals just miss a jump (to their death) before they can reproduce? You will have to say 100% of them. Which I hope even you can agree is silly.
In a short life cycle animal that can rapidly reproduce, extinction can only occur if 100% of them die before reproduction. Take plankton, where there is sun and resources for them that can drift by, they can literally reproduce to the trillions in a matter of days. Even though a blue whale may eat billions of them in each massive gulp.
Sure the rare visual ataxia patient may have trouble with seeing and are given false visual information, but they still frequently survive long enough to reproduce. But yeah, humans have mostly pulled themselves out of normal evolutionary constraints. A person can be born blind and deaf and still live a long age and reproduce with the help of other humans. Not true for most every other animal in the animal kingdom when 2 of their primary, most used senses do not work from birth.
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Its not silly, that's how extinctions happen, an imbalance between the environment and the organism, that kills 100% before reproduction. They don't have to die all at once, but if the deaths outnumber the births, and the misses outnumber the hits, number will dwindle.
Things like visual ataxia can be rare in a species like us, that are generally born with fully functional parietal lobes. But when you're dealing with the evolution of species from pretty much scratch, then visual ataxia is what emerges when the visual system progresses beyond the capabilities of the brain.
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