Ready When Made

Extinction would certainly support a deteriorating world. We hear of animals becoming extinct, but we don't hear of animals evolving and improving. Indeed, if we do need to evolve something, time becomes our enemy. What if we need something desperatly quick? millions of years isn't exactly a quick fix. I think there would be no possibility of survival. Getting 'lucky' just doesn't suffice for me. We see a lot of extinction in the fossil record, aswell as extinction before our eyes.This kind of makes problems when dating the earth 'millions of years'old. I mean we are equipped with a lot of stuff to help us survive. But what about millions of supposed years ago when we needed this stuff. All this, to me, indicates we came equipped rather than, we came to get equipped.[This message has been edited by mike the wiz, 10-15-2003]

MTW I am sorry mike I am not sure what exactly the question is that you are posing?

Lol, good point, I guess I'll leave this topic for people to ponder.

Mike,Why do mass extinctions precede mass radiations, then? There are five major ME events, plus many smaller ones, even after the Dino's croaked.Mark

its pretty clear as to preciesly what Mike said. I thought I was hearing something "alien" when I first heard an ICR back to genesis clip that introduced creation with the appearence of age. You may try this and see if it helps in understanding what Mike the Wiz said.

I don't get what you're trying to argue, either. We see just as about as many species dissapear in the fossil record as we see appear in the fossil record. While the variety of species follows a heavy boom and bust cycle, we see an overall increase invariety in the precambrian, and then a slow overall increase in variety as we get into more modern sediments - exactly what one would expect to find. What would you expect to find?New species are being discovered all of the time. It is your *assumption* because of your creationist viewpoint that all of them were already there, waiting to be discovered. While in very remote locations, this may be the case for most of them; however, new species (and especially subspecies) (occasionally even genuses and families) are regularly found in heavily studied areas, as well. The rate of such findings is roughly relative to the frequency of the animal's reproduction - for example, we can witness speciation in a vat of bacteria at a phenominal rate (in fact, familial transitions have been observed - in one case that I'm familiar with, a non-colonial species developed into a colonial species).In larger animals, it is more rare, because of the slower breeding rate. I'm not aware of any large mammal species for which species-level cladogenesis has been observed to occur, although there are numerous subspecies-level developments. And I know of several of small mammal species-level transitions that have been observed. Given the time frame, this is about what is expected.------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."[This message has been edited by Rei, 10-15-2003]

Listen we've only got room for one genius per argument - and thats Brad You guys are missing my main point. When we need to evolve urgently, is millions of years urgent?
Remember , we SEE extinction, do we see improvement?
Simple questions deserve simple answers.

Species that "need to evolve urgently" don't. They go extinct. I've heard estimates of the percentage of all species that are extinct that are in the high 90's.

You're not understanding the most basic elements of the evolutionist viewpoint. When a species dies out, it is replaced by other species living at the same time - nature abhors a vaccum. If there is a food supply not being utilized, or a weakness in the chain, species move in to exploit it. The species that replace it tend to split via cladogenesis.What your point boils down to is an argument that they're not radiating fast enough. The fossil record clearly shows quite the opposite.------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."[This message has been edited by Rei, 10-15-2003]

About 99.9%. At least.------------------
Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!

Gould wrote p 677 The Structure of Evolutionary Theory"I like to play a game of "science fiction" by imagining myself as an individual of another scale (not just as a human being shrunken or enlarged for a vist to such a terra incognita). But I do not know how far I can succeed. As organisms, we have eyes to see the world of selection and adaptation as expressed in the good desgin of wings, legs, and brains. But randomness may predominate in the world of genes - and we might interpret the universe very differently if our primary vantage point resided in this lower level. We mightthen note a world of largely independent items, drifting in and out by the luck of the draw - but with little islands dotted about here and there, where selection slows down the ordinary tempo and embryology ties things together. How, then, shall we comprehend the still different order of a world much larger than ourselves? If we missed the strange world of genic neutrality because we are too big, then what passes above our gaze becuase we are too small? Perhaps we become stymied, like genes trying to grasp the much larger world of change in bodies, when we, as bodies, try to contemplate the domain of evolution among species in the vastness of geological time? What are we missing in trying to read this world by the inappropriate scale of our small bodies and minuscule lifetimes?Once we have become mentally prepared to seek and appreciate (and not to ignore or devalue) the structural and causal differences among nature's richly various scales, we can formulate more fruitfully the two cardinal properties that make the theory of hierarchical selection both so interesting and so differnet from the convential single-level Darwinism of organismal selection. The key to both properties lies in "interdependence with difference" - for the hierarchical levels of causality, while bonded in interaction, are also (for some attributes) fairly independent in modality. Moreover, these levels invariably diverge, one from the other, despite unifying principles, like selection, applicable to all levels. Allometry, not pure fractality, rules aong the scales of nature."I dont think our beloved EvC has gotten here yet despite the obvious weight on the E side of mike's V"". I thought of this when the bacetrial avatar looked like a man once. Saymasu's reproductive position aside in the last sentence of Gould to which I have not been able to philosphically judge as to if S already wrote on this herein you asked this science fiction question to Mike I think for the reason I mentioned already in this thread that Matchtte explains that individuals are still linked relative to the absolute- this would apply to Gould's notion of core extended individuality from the multilevel perspective but we would need a tool or a way to assume the time event sequence you mentioned or the scale differences in size changes different levels of organization provide. I feel that only a specialized .net application using XML targeted to say this audience which automatically coordinates the levels in the discussion esle we end with Joralex being accused falsely I would see for not being at every point in the table of entries that the maximum flow of posters is at. I am likely guilty of this as well.

'You're not understanding the most basic elements of the evolutionist viewpoint. When a species dies out, it is replaced by other species living at the same time'What if all species NEED to quickly evolve?- alternative - extinction
Does millions of years solve this, or, wouldn't they become extinct before evolution happens?
So if humans died out, what would replace us?

'Species that "need to evolve urgently" don't. They go extinct.'Which is my point entirely. I do not think we would have survived millions of years.

Mike, there have been times of rapid environmental change, i.e., species 'need' to evolve quickly. And they go extinct a lot of the time. What do you expect?

Where do you get that even a measurable percentage of species in the world are going extinct currently, let alone historically? Large mammals are going extinct faster than they're developing, but that's mostly our fault. We've only been here for the past couple tens of thousands of years. The fossil record shows no overall "extinction" trend, just boom and bust cycles.------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."