How long does it take to evolve?

Neural networks like we find in jellyfish, light sensors and the neural net allow the jellyfish to sense daylight and rise to the surface to feed and then during the dark night to sink away from predators.So we have a protein that reacts to light.We have single cell organisms that sense light and alter behavior.We have primitive multicellular organisms with neural nets that sense light and alter behavior.Thus the foundation for making eyes and their neural connections is well laid out. Each stage builds on what went before -- the jellyfish adapts the sensory asparagus of single cell organisms to be specialized cells for sensing light and it adds a neural net that triggers muscles to control the behavior based on sensory stimulus.So the next stages are:(1) formation of a retinal patch in lieu of single sensor cells, and
(2) formation of brain stem for signals to be switched on and off to control behavior.Enjoy

I think the point was is that it isn't a hard-wired program, but more like general directions\specifications. A pinch of this a scoop of that, mix and repeat.Curiously I don't think there is a single analogy that fits all the ways DNA functions, and so we have to be careful in using analogies to specify how far we take them.The airline fuselage repetition of segments is another, as there are strength issues as the fuselage gets longer that an engineer would consider. Evolutionary processes would have to go through some trial and error, with a happy mutation providing extra strength that then allows the further extension, for instance.Enjoy

And if it were beneficial to increase length, then a mutation that offered sufficient structural strength would mean it was pre-adapted to develop multiple sections by repeating the segment recipe.EnjoyEdited by RAZD, : No reason given.

Yeah, that's the basic problem. I want to be able to write the attempts and the counts and how close they're getting at particular places in the terminal display. Without that ability, it would just be scrolling like crazy and the user couldn't see a thing. He'd have to stop the run to see where it is and that would stop the run, self defeating. Plus I want it to be responsive to keystrokes instead of using standard C input functions that require you to hit Enter as well, which I'm sure is legacy behavior from the 1970's line-oriented teletypes being used as terminals.The problem is that the ability to handle the console (terminal screen and keyboard) like that is not standard and is OS-dependent. It's done differently in MS-DOS than in Windows than on Linux than on a Mac (I'm sure). Windows has character-oriented console I/O (which is how this version of conio is implemented). Linux would require something like raw-mode terminal code or ncurses (which I understand encapsulates raw-mode terminal operations). And a Mac would just stare at you dumbfounded that you aren't trying to make this a GUI app. And if I did it as a GUI app, then it would be even less portable.Reminds me of a comedian I heard the other night. He has a BlackBerry but its syncing software only runs on a PC and he has a Mac. He calls technical support and she's no help. So buy a PC. Not an option. Find a friend who has a PC. All his friends have Macs. Use a PC in the public library. Yeah, so that all the people can stare at the idiot who is tech savvy enough to own a BlackBerry, but doesn't own a computer.

Don't macs have a command line with an OS that is pretty unix like? I know that is the case for the IOS. You might be able to get ncurses to run on the command line. And back in the old days there were versions of ncurses that run on MS-DOS. I don't know if that stuff would work on modern version of windows at the command line, but if so, then maybe using ncurses would be a multi-platform solution.ABE:Mac OSX can definitely support ncurses and it may be already installed. A compatible library, pdcurses is available on windows and runs on XP at least, and of course ncurses is available on linux.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

A decade ago I helped my brother-in-law with printer problems on his Mac (it ran OSX and he loaded the OS9 drivers that came with his printer). As I understand it, OSX was built on top of BSD UNIX and I made very good use of UNIX to network my Windows laptop to it in order to transfer the printer drivers into his Mac.While I was there, I did a little exploring. Actually, I was wanting to test-compile some sockets programs I had written, but the Mac required a special tools CD to install the compiler and apparently that had to be special-ordered. But I was able to find the terminal app, though as I recall it was buried rather deep and was hard to find. Though the text editor was even harder to find than the terminal -- my brother-in-law is buried deeply into a Mac mentality, so when I shared my discovery with him he couldn't begin to comprehend why anyone would ever want to create a text file.I do have pdcurses and the O'Reilly ncurses book, but haven't had the time to play with it in order to learn it. I could tackle that task in my "copious spare time", so you might see something by 2025.Or, since you've got the C source code now, you or somebody else who already knows ncurses could get the job done a lot sooner.Edited by dwise1, : Mac mentality gripe

Right, you don't object to the DNA-is-code metaphor, in fact you're using the capabilities of code to refute Lamden's assertions. What I'm saying is that we've become so used to characterizing DNA as computer code that we only pay lip service to the weakness of the analogy.I agree with your claim that life is complex and messy. But as a software engineer, you're in thrall to the machine fantasy of DNA as a program that somehow instructs the cells. Lewontin sees this as an ideological bias, just another way we privilege the planners over the doers. Writers like Dawkins have a tech-savvy audience that responds to oversimplifications like this, because they make evolution seem like a straightforward process that's easy enough to be understood by the amateur and blunt enough to be wielded against creationists.If it's complex, let's treat it that way.

iohiohoiklEdited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Just wondering, are ANY of these creatures considered to be in the evolutionary line to human beings? In fact are the "primitive multicellular organisms" in the evolutionary line to jellyfish? Are those single-celled organisms in the line to the primitive multicellular organisms? SInce you don't say, I would guess they are not, that their visual capacities developed entirely separately, and in fact even uniquely in just a few organisms out of what, thousands or more? within their own genetic families.And yet they form a "foundation" for the whole evolutionary apparatus (as opposed to "asparagus") which is assumed to have followed the purely imagined track from the one to the other all the way to the human eye, without one shred of actual evidence. It's astonishing how ready you guys are to turn a collection of completely different visual capacities into a totally unevidenced purely imagined sequence from primitive to complex. If they are merely completely independent individual designs that you are imagining into stages of development you'll never know it. The whole ToE edifice is built on such purely imaginary stuff, yet you call it fact, you call it science.Same thing that's done on that thread about reptile to mammal ear evolution. The genetic connection is assumed and the evolutionary pathway completely imagined: well in order to get to such and such we have to imagine that this structure changed into that one, and so on and so forth. You get it all imagined as if it really did occur and declare it fact. That's a fallacy called reification, and the entire ToE is built out of such stuff.Meanwhile there is every reason to believe the genome of any species can only vary according to the possibilities inherent within that genome and that evolution from one species to another is quite simply genetically impossible, a purely imaginary notion.Cheers.ABE: Yes this was to answer Lamden's claim that a brain would be necessary for any of these visual capacities to exist, and that's been proved wrong, but of course in the process of proving that you state the usual evolutionist silliness that assumes these completely different and genetically unrelated forms are some kind of proof that they COULDA evolved one stage from another.And yes I just wanted to say this in the middle of this ridiculous evolutionist attack on Lamden although it isn't his argument.And of course I could go on to include my other most favorite argument about how you can't get from one species to another genetically (what you are calling stages of eye development in this case, without the slightest warrant), because the processes that bring about phenotypic change, otherwise known as evolution, eventually use up all the genetic possibilities in the genome.I don't really have any reason to pursue these arguments here beyond this statement.Cheers.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Hi Faith,I'm not moderating this thread, but I'm responding as moderator because you're trying to turn it into a discussion of your favorite topic, that evolution has no evidence and is imagined. You could discuss this in some new thread that you might propose over at Proposed New Topics, or you could even discuss it over in your other thread (Evolution Requires Reduction in Genetic Diversity) that you were suspended from for threatening to leave once too many times (but first you'd have to promise to stop doing that), but you shouldn't continue trying to change the topic of this thread.If you do continue with these off-topic efforts then I will recuse my self as Percy, wait a few days, then if the problem still persists I begin moderating as Admin, at which time I will suspend you from this thread.This concludes (hopefully, though it's really up to you) my posts as Admin in this thread.

No, and no-one said that they were. What they said was that they disprove Landen's claim that "the light receptor is still 100% useless without a brain capable of deciphering the light in to "message"", since these are organisms without brains that use light receptors. Of course, there are some people who think their visual capacities were magicked into existence by God, but I gotta say your idea sounds much more plausible. I think I'll call it ... evolution.

That was not the question. The question was how could primitive systems be beneficial, and thus subject to natural selection, for organisms without a complete (ie fully evolved) eye and brain ... and how would they function without the other parts (the "IC" perception). The fact that there exist today thousands of species that continue to function at primitive levels of light sensing, and continue to survive and breed because of their ability, shows that it is beneficial at these levels of development. Indeed. The evidence is that eyes evolved independently 10 or more times. Some of the evidence for this is:

1. bug compound eyes, each with their own sensor (photoreceptor\retina)
2. nautilus eyes with no lens, and focus is made by making a "pinhole" aperture,
3. octopus eyes with nerves behind the retina that focus by moving the retina relative to a fixed lens, and
4. mammal eyes with nerves in front of the retina that focus by changing the shape of the lens while the retina is fixed

And I'm sure you can find a few more.Nor is there any claim that bug eyes evolved into mammal eyes or that octopus eyes evolved into mammal eyes.The claim is that it is easy to evolve eyes because we start with light sensitivity and then add improvements in tiny modifications that improve the effectiveness of the eye and offer more benefit to the organisms with the new and improved models.Enjoy

Indeed, that is a big argument against "intelligent design". An actual designer is free to introduce new elements to his design, including going back and completely reworking portions of it ("going back to the drawing board"). That includes introducing components from other unrelated designs (eg, a couple decades ago, Plymouth Voyager mini-vans, an American design, could come with either a USA engine or a Japanese engine; we owned one and it only lasted 75,000 miles, unlike my Saturn which I had to retire just past 200,000 miles).For some odd reason, the "Intelligent Designer" of Life has never done that. Instead of going back to the drawing board or grafting in components from unrelated designs, He/She/It/They/Whatever always, without any known exception, conducted Himself/Herself/Itself/Themselves/Whatever-sel(f/ves) as if {ARRRRGHH!!! Let's stop that stupid ID pretense!} She were somehow constrained to restrict Herself to working with and modifying only that which already exists, to live with and work with every single wrong decision She had made from the very beginning, completely powerless to change even the slightest mistake.

quote:

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Dr. Carol Marcus: Can I cook, or can't I?

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In other words, why is it that that "intelligent design" ended up looking exactly like evolution had done the job?Actually, I once read a criticism of the writings of the leading figures of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), Drs Henry Morris and Duane Gish, what wrote the book!, and describing the lengths they had to go to to explain away why all the world keeps looking like evolution had happened.

I don't think this is a valid or strong argument.First, I think an ID proponent could make the argument that there have been some 'back to the drawing board' developments. It seems likely that the various means of flight exhibited between mammals, insects, and birds developed completely independently. Insect eyes are enough different from human eyes to have developed along a completely different path even if there was some common point way back when. Besides that, even for things that look fairly similar, we theorize that there has been independent parallel development that resulted in similar results.Secondly, while a supernatural designer is not bound to reuse developments, there is nothing preventing such a designer from doing so. If in fact, we could never find diverse solutions to similar problems, that does not suggest very strongly that there was no intelligent designer absent some reason to impute motives to the designer.

Oh, sure, the ID proponent would say that the Designer was so perfect that She wouldn't have ever had to go to back to the drawing board. A perfect supernatural agent could do anything She wanted to do. Big Fracking Woop! And yet we never see that happening. That is what I'm talking about.