It isnt t going to happen. That’s what people thought back in the 60s.
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Does evolutionary biology have a track record of predicting things in the future, or is mostly about positing theories about why certain outcomes today are the way they are?
Or, as Mark Twain more eloquently put it,
The trouble with the world is not that people know too little; it’s that they know so many things that just aren’t so.
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I don’t believe evolutionary biology predicts anything. Note that the famous finches of Darwin’s observations back in the 1800’s have been revisited. And they’ve all returned to their normal beaks.
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I share this belief and I am willing to change my mind if evidence to the contrary can be presented.
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“ I share this belief and I am willing to change my mind if evidence to the contrary can be presented.”
Sure. But present the evidence. So far I’ve seen nada. The ”newly discovered” microbiology of the single cell makes creation from the proverbial “soup” pretty much impossible.
If you’re interested, Stephen C. Meyer has a new book out called Return of the God Hypothesis that tackles just this question. Plus there are two or three Uncommon Knowledge discussions including Meyer, on this subject.
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I agree with this. Here is my “real world” evidence: small animals killed in roads. We have had fast moving vehicles for well over half a century. We have had paved roadways for well over half a century. And small animals have been run over by cars on those roadways for well over half a century. At some point, if evolutionary biology (and maybe I am thinking of something else here) were a thing, wouldn’t these animals have evolved to connect the types of surfaces they are encountering with extreme danger? I mean after 50 freaking years, wouldn’t the older squirrels be telling the younger squirrels that the solid, black earth is where giant metal beasts roam at high rates of speed and to avoid trying to cross the roads?
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Also wasn’t it Bill Buckley who said that he found it highly improbable that the writer of Hamlet would have the same evolutionary background as a ham sandwich? I find that to be the shortest and yet most powerful refutation of evolution as an explanation for origins of life that has yet to come down the pike. And of course he is correct. What are the probabilities that people like Aquinas, Jefferson, and/or Churchill would eventually have the same biological heritage of a grasshopper? That just doesn’t add up to me.
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There is no question that under severe artificial selection pressure, species evolve quite rapidly. Almost all domestic animal breeding is exactly this. Dog breeding, in particular, is a great example since it shows how big a gap in breed can be obtained in a relatively short period of time. Most of the outcomes are robust and if propagated at scale, they can maintain the sought after characteristics over time.
Another example is rat/mouse breeding for various biomedical experimentation. Under pressure from artificial selection, widely disparate outcomes are possible, again in the span of relatively few generations.
When you look for examples of evolution in response to natural selection pressures, the situation is more complicated. The only example I am aware of is antibiotic resistance. I thought there had been examples of natural evolution with fruit flies, but I could only come across examples attributed to 1950s Soviet scientists.
When it comes to roadkill, is it that the lack of adaptation indicating evolution under natural selection pressures is due to insufficiently large samples? Too few animals in any population coming in contact with cars at a frequent enough rate? Or selection pressures leading to behavioral changes (don’t cross the road anymore) that do not affect the animal’s genome?
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The famous example is the English moths which went from light-colored to dark colored as pollution increased in England. The interpretation was that a dark moth was less obvious when sitting on pollution-darkened English trees & other surfaces, and thus less likely to get eaten & more likely to breed successfully.
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An excellent example of evolution by natural selection is lactase persistence in humans which I discussed in comment 19 above. Human populations who adopted dairy farming as a lifestyle saw the spread of a rare recessive allele which causes the ability to metabolise lactose in milk to persist into adulthood. In ancestral human populations, lactose metabolism ceases in childhood after the age of weaning. But once dairy farming becomes a significant food source, those who carry the gene that allows adults to extract the energy in milk have more children and, before long, that gene will become dominant (more than 90% in northwestern European populations), while it remains rare among those who never domesticated milk-producing animals.
This is a case of natural selection driven evolution having occurred in historical times among human populations.
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It doesn’t matter who said it, or how clever it is, it’s wrong. Genes are the template which specifies the proteins from which all organisms on Earth are assembled, and there is a high degree of commonality among the genes of all organisms, notwithstanding their large differences in form. Humans share 98% of their genes with pigs, so the difference between the author of Hamlet and the insides of the ham sandwich is, from the standpoint of evolutionary biology, just 2%. Humans share 80% of their genes with cows, 65% with chickens, 61% with fruit flies, and 60% with bananas. There is 26% genetic commonality between humans and brewer’s yeast, and hundreds of yeast genes are nearly identical to those of humans and if a human gene is spliced in to replace one of the yeast, it works just fine. The last common ancestor of yeast and humans is estimated as having lived around a billion years ago.
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Is it possible that some humans, with all that gene similarity with other organisms, also have the same mental capacity? Think Maxine Waters. Now as you say, she shares 61% of her genes with a fruit fly, but do you think she might also share similarities in intelligence? Something to ponder…
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On a serious note John. I will not attempt to wade into a serious debate of evolution on the merits because I would be woefully inept and provide nothing to the conversation. All I can say is that, despite all of these seemingly rock solid physical similarities between organisms, that I will never conclude that the whole of humanity (even in its current state of stupidity and debauchery) deviates by a mere degree or two from fruit flies or bananas. To think that an individual such as yourself, one who I find to be very, very intelligent, is physically, if the blocks are rearranged a certain way, nothing different from a piece of fruit, is not only dehumanizing of you but also depressing in general terms.
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I don’t see why this should be depressing. Well below the level of genetics, all living things are mostly made (almost 97% by mass) of four elements: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, which are among the eight most abundant elements in the universe. As a software guy, I believe it’s not the hardware but the information—the software, if you like—that makes the difference between things. Just because two organisms are made of the same parts, whether chemical elements or mostly common genes, doesn’t mean they are equivalent, as it’s the way they’re arranged that makes all the difference.
Given the overwhelming evidence that all existing life on Earth is descended from a last universal common ancestor it would be a great surprise to discover there weren’t large similarities among the fundamental components of organisms descended from that progenitor.
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That is a great point. Though the materials be the same, there is a great amount of difference between a 1962 Corvette and a 1978 Grimlin.
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Perhaps this is semantics, but so far all I see is adaption, not evolution. When Doberman bred his Pincher, it was a new breed not a new species. So far tthere isn’t any real evidence of species evolution, just adaption to local conditions, and even that shows signs of regression.
Let’s understand something. We “understand” only something less than 10% of the at least human genome. The remainder appears to be instructions on how to create things — like a liver, vascular system, etc. We have barely even scratched that area, and let’s face it - Watson & Crick did their work some 60 years ago. Think of the technological advances we’ve made since the 60’s - yet we still know precious little about most of the genome.
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Yes, indeed. Way back when I was in med school (late ‘70’s) we were taught that much of the DNA was ‘junk DNA’. This did not sit well with me, even then. Biology (“nature”, if you like) is parsimonious or at least not wasteful. To pack the blueprints of an organism - on which the individual’s and the species’ survival depend - with useless, highly-specific information seems, not only wasteful, but creates some likelihood of occasionally transcribing harmful products.
Until I read Stephen C.Meyer, I was very ignorant about supposed evolution of body form. He shows the surprising (to me at the time) lack of evidence for evolution of new body forms. Beyond the absence of evidence, he persuaded me beyond a reasonable doubt, that random mutation and natural selection cannot result in new species. As you say, adaptation - yes. Evolution of new species/body form - nope.
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What? Human beings are carbon-based? Has anyone told Greta? Will Biden’s carbon taxes apply to us?
Now I think about it, there is an impressively logical case for a post-mortem carbon pollution tax – dust to dust, ashes to ashes, etc. Coming soon to a jurisdiction near you.
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I respect the theory of evolution and do believe there is some truth in it because it explains so many biological phenomena including (but certainly not limited to) antimicrobial resistance, the similarity of cellular structures and metabolic processes among different organisms, progressive changes observed in the fossil record, and, as John mentioned, that some species share genes with other species.
Nevertheless, I have grown skeptical of the theory I was taught in a government school and have come to believe, contrary to the Copernican principle, that human beings are indeed special, possessing attributes such as free will and the capacity to reason, that categorically separate us from other organisms. I am also persuaded by (but not firmly committed to, due to my lack of expertise) some intelligent-design arguments. For example, if evolution occurs in small steps due to random mutations, how would large, complex structures, i.e. “organs of extreme perfection”, form? For example, how would the human eye form bit by bit if it would not benefit an organism to have an incomplete eye? Darwin acknowledges this weakness of his theory and offers (in my opinion) an unsatisfying answer in On The Origin of Species:
To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.
Another challenge for the theory of evolution is the Cambrian explosion. Can Darwinian mechanisms alone account for the incredible biodiversity we observe in the time frame that it emerged? I believe Stephen C. Meyer, whom CW mentioned above, argues it is mathematically impossible, but I have not read his work.
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It is hard to keep up with the research – and even harder to separate valid research from politically correct grant-grubbing. One thing humans do know is that selective breeding works – that is how our ancestors over centuries & millenia gave us today’s corn & apples, cattle & pigs. Since we know that human-driven selective breeding works within species (which Darwin should have known), it is not much of a stretch to suggest that natural selection would also occur, within species.
But if natural selection can turn a mouse into an elephant, surely the fossil record should be full of transitional species. Instead, as best I understand it, what the fossil record shows is “punctuated equilibria”. The implication is that Darwin’s theory is incomplete – not wrong, but only part of the story. As to what the rest of the story is, that remains to be discovered.
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