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RE: Is biological evolution a ball rolling up a hill all by itself?

in #evolution7 years ago

I find a lot of evolution deniers don't really understand how evolution works. Animals don't get enough evolution points and evolve like Pokemon. Environmental factors and random genetic mutations cause slight changes in groups of organisms that get passed down to offspring. Then you fast forward ten thousand generations and see what's different. Evolution is simply noticing how things change over time, which shouldn't be hard to believe.

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Exactly, evolution is just adapting to the environment and over the course of centuries, the creatures that adapt the best, pass on their genes. What is very scary is that there are still many people who deny evolution in the first place

Except nearly ALL mutations are detrimental to the well being of the organism and future generations. What we have is a built-in level of adaption that gets called "evolution". Perhaps it is...? Not arguing for or against, just throwing that out there for consideration.

Detrimental mutations are detrimental. That's evolution and natural selection working exactly as expected :D

That's absolutely true, and the part many people don't get about evolution. It isn't a ladder that species climb, it's random chaos. Some changes are good, some are bad, and some don't matter either way. The best possible humans might have died in a famine a thousand years ago and we are the worst case scenario. Evolution has no goal or agenda. It's just recording how things change over time. We breed dogs for certain traits, which is basically us controlling evolution, and we have a lot of useless breeds of dogs to show for it.

Problem seems to be isolationism. Every Tom Dick and Harry gets to evolve on their own. Tom Dick and Harry being species of course. So which came first? The Elephant or the Dung Beetle? Does anyone still really believe that a load of atoms, i.e. electrons, neutrons and mostly space are all jiggling around and somehow out of this species evolve somehow in isolation? As if all these phenomena are somehow separate?

Don't get me wrong. Science is amazing. It is just that even as a young man after discarding religion it did not take me long to suss out that science was the new religion. Religion is just like pole dancing though more useful. Takes all kinds to make a universe.

A lot of people hold science in the same kind of mind as a religion. Science and religion are fundamentally different and not necessarily exclusive. Speaking in terms of the answers they offer, science seeks to understand, religion generally claims to already have the eternal and only answer; this is not always true and both philosophies of thought can and often overlap. You should always be open to a mistake or error, it's why there are so many theories but so few laws. Most people just hear the basic explanation science has to give and accept it without fully understanding or trying to understand the fundamental reasoning behind it; many people believe in evolution but can't accurately explain what it is.


As for how so many isolated and yet similar evolutionary changes could just so happen to occur, I think this video gives an answer to at least one good example. 11:57 for the relevant point, entire video goes over the specific trait a little
more.