Has human evolution stopped?

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Originally posted by Peter:
Just a thought on the question of whether Human evolution
has stopped ... maybe it's punctuated, awaiting a radical
change in environmental factors to produce new selective
pressures.

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Just a thought.

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--Certainly a valid speculation. I'd be curious what radical environmental change would 'precipitate' selected generational survival as such; perhaps to do with the AIDS virus or a nuclear holocaust.

quote:

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Originally posted by Peter:
Just a thought on the question of whether Human evolution
has stopped ... maybe it's punctuated, awaiting a radical
change in environmental factors to produce new selective
pressures.

​

Just a thought.

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Personally, I think this is exactly what has happened, though our ability to adapt culturally means that those selective pressures will have to be much more extreme than the pressures that would drive an organism that can only adapt physically-- say, bacteria.------------------
www.hells-handmaiden.com

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Originally posted by Philip:

So Mark, I’m damned if I get sucked into your trees, with both theistic and atheistic-gaps fallacies. And, I’m damned if I don’t (because your trees ‘prove’ my anti-Mega-ToE wrong). I’m curious where you draw the line of ID/God in your grand scheme of things. Because, I tell you that you too are damned and damning others by such fallacious confusion. Face the facts, Mark: we’ve ALL damned one another with our fallacious confusions.

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Aw c’mon, it’s not like I’m asking you to give up being a Christian. It just means the bible isn’t literally true, that can’t be that difficult to accept, surely? A 4,000 year old OT, previously passed on orally? God couldn’t have overseen every translation, otherwise we wouldn’t have so many different ones, it seems to me that the best you can take from the bible is a general message (no bad thing). The vagaries of oral transmission & continuous translation see to that. This is something the majority of Christians around the globe have already accepted. You can have God & evolution, you might say it makes it even more amazing.My own take on the world is to accept the current theory of anything, at any particular time, because it has positive evidence as it’s underpinning. I can’t disprove God, so I don’t try, which is why I’m agnostic, not atheist. Science is a very rigorous process, & just to deny it because it contravenes a belief is a bit scary, to say the least, particularly when it amounts to a staggering amount of corroboration, would it not make more sense to try to make it fit in with Christianity?Others have. Didn’t seem to do them any harm.You don’t have to be damned if you do, damned if you don’t.Mark------------------
Occam's razor is not for shaving with.

Mark, your agnostic ID is repeatedly necessary in the Mega-ToE And, I Can’t See the Forest for those Cladistic Tree Fallacies (A.K.A., How Paleontology Really Works)

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[This message has been edited by Philip, 06-19-2002]

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Originally posted by Philip:
Mark, your agnostic ID is repeatedly necessary in the Mega-ToE

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http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Guth/Guth3.html
http://hbar.stanford.edu/linde/Not if vacuum fluctuations relating to scalar fields give you infinite chances of the correct conditions for our universe.If you want to discuss anything in the rest of this post please do.

quote:

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Originally posted by Philip:

And, I Can’t See the Forest for those Cladistic Tree Fallacies (A.K.A., How Paleontology Really Works)

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[This message has been edited by Philip, 06-19-2002]

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This doesn't deal with molecular phylogenies AT ALL!!!!!The odds of humans not being most closely related to apes & monkeys is billion/trillions to one, & RISING with every non-homologous data set phylogenetic tree derived.This didn't even begin to address the problem.Mark------------------
Occam's razor is not for shaving with.

To answer your question "are we still evolving?"Yes! but only for the worse, people are becoming more like animals in mind and moral. Killing our own beings before they are born, snuffing out the old that aren't ready to die, and passing off responsibility by taking the life of a less fortunate, ie. down syndrom, and giving it a flowery secular word "mercy killing"The down sydrom and all those less fortunate are put here for us to take care of and give us more loving character.

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Originally posted by ringostore:
To answer your question "are we still evolving?"

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Yes! but only for the worse, people are becoming more like animals in mind and moral. Killing our own beings before they are born, snuffing out the old that aren't ready to die, and passing off responsibility by taking the life of a less fortunate, ie. down syndrom, and giving it a flowery secular word "mercy killing"

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The down sydrom and all those less fortunate are put here for us to take care of and give us more loving character.

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Sounds pretty much like the way humans have always behaved. History records much worse than your examples.But evolution is about survival, not morality.------------------
www.hells-handmaiden.com

oh but contrair'e JohnEvolution has never been proven to exist or proven that we are evolving to survive. History has shown many turmoils, disaster, tragedy, and destruction. That is the imperfect body we live in, and those that never heed the signs of sin, head to more destruction.
History has not shown the hidden selfishness and irresponsibity that runs rampant today.If anything I would have used the word de-evolution to make my point less ambiguous. If evolution was actually a term that had fact.

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Originally posted by ringostore:
oh but contrair'e John

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love your French!!!

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Evolution has never been proven to exist or proven that we are evolving to survive.

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But evolution does explain the data extremely well, what more do you want?You are right. Technically, evolution has not been proven. Short of our becoming omniscient, technical proof is impossible. Technically, you can't prove that all french fries are potatoes, or that gravity holds us on the planet, or that the universe is greater than .1 second old, or that this reply wasn't generated purely by static on the internet backbones.But I doubt that you are willing to give up everything you think you know (because it can't be technically proven), so stop hiding behind this smoke screen.

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History has not shown the hidden selfishness and irresponsibity that runs rampant today.

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Not even say, the bloody conquest of the New World and the murder and destruction that went along with it? For what? hmmmm.... lets see.... money and power.------------------
www.hells-handmaiden.com

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Originally posted by ringostore:

Yes! but only for the worse, people are becoming more like animals in mind and moral.

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People are animals. So are we becoming more like ourselves?

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Originally posted by ringostore:

Killing our own beings before they are born, snuffing out the old that aren't ready to die, and passing off responsibility by taking the life of a less fortunate, ie. down syndrom, and giving it a flowery secular word "mercy killing".

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Maybe we should follow the christian way and just kill anyone we suspect of following another religion. If they are good people god will reward them in heaven, right?

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Originally posted by ringostore:

The down sydrom and all those less fortunate are put here for us to take care of and give us more loving character.

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So your god deliberately puts millions of people threw hell on earth, just to teach the rest of us a lesson? He must be truly evil.------------------
compmage

Call me hard-headed (which I may be), but everyone of those phylogenetic trees seems merely correlated homologues of enzymes or retroviruses that give a false illusion (delusion) of phylogeny occurring in historical time.

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Originally posted by Philip:
Call me hard-headed (which I may be), but everyone of those phylogenetic trees seems merely correlated homologues of enzymes or retroviruses that give a false illusion (delusion) of phylogeny occurring in historical time.

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Think about it this way Phillip: Assuming that these trees are illusory, what are the odds of them APPEARING to be ordered as they are? In other words, what are the odds that the observed data would conform significantly to an incorrect theory?------------------
www.hells-handmaiden.com

Thanks for your reply.We've been through this before with Mark. He's got the A PRIORI statistical odds stacked in favor of Mega-evolution, with gross enzyme and retroviral homologues somehow denoting time-stamps, with correlative phylogenetic trees and such. His trees focused much on Apes, OWMs, and humans. I made a fictitious phylogenic tree of the table of homologous chemical elements It looked remarkably similar and equally suspicious. I.e., boron evolved from helium in their gaseous homologies, which evolved isotopically (based on molecular deterioration of isotopes over time) from carbon over a 9 thousand year half-life (time-stamp), with the transitional metals giving rise to silicon and geranium, etc. whose half lives make them millions of years older as progenitors, and blah, blah, blah.Moral: A PRIORI faith-biases plus statistics can prove any pseudo-science from astrology, biblical numerology, mega-ToE, flat-earth theories, Armageddon, and who knows what else.
similar

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Originally posted by Philip:
Thanks for your reply.

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Moral: A PRIORI faith-biases plus statistics can prove any pseudo-science from astrology, biblical numerology, mega-ToE, flat-earth theories, Armageddon, and who knows what else.
similar

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You just undercut your own arguments as well, by the way.Using this line of reasoning to sidestep the issue is not very effective. History is full of 'a priori faith-based pseudo-sciences' which eventually crack under the weight of accumulated evidence and analysis-- such as astrology, numerology, earth-centered cosmology, flat-earth theory. Saying that these can be proven with statistics and faith is just wrong. They can't.------------------
www.hells-handmaiden.com

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Originally posted by John:
You just undercut your own arguments as well, by the way.

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Using this line of reasoning to sidestep the issue is not very effective. History is full of 'a priori faith-based pseudo-sciences' which eventually crack under the weight of accumulated evidence and analysis-- such as astrology, numerology, earth-centered cosmology, flat-earth theory. Saying that these can be proven with statistics and faith is just wrong. They can't.

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--I undercut my arguments to appear less biased.--Example: Numerologists have repeatedly given numbers to Greek and Hebrew words supposedly proving that the Bible is inerrant due to patterns of sevens, twelves, and other peculiar associations via homology of characters, etc. This supposedly makes the Received Texts infallible as we have received them in their original languages. This is as ridiculous as scientists taking monkeys, apes, OWMs, and humans; comparing various protein homologues and retro-viral time-stamps and generalizing the broad enzyme families to phylogenetic trees. What a sham!Now, the Bible is infallible to most Gospel-fundy-YECs (like myself), I reject the numerologist’s vain attempts to prove it. Why?, because the Bible is only inerrant to a crucified-and-risen-with-Christ-believer. A numerologist is often a mystical know-it-all, using the Bible for Tarot readings, prophecies, and vain genealogies, etc. Most Christians I know blow off numerology like astrology.The ToE, while apparently fascinating, i.e., in discovering human evolution/mutations that just must be so, is impossible for skeptics, like myself, i.e., given my complex medical practice, innumerable physiological and biochemical ICs, depths of complexity and physiological feedback-loops, the psyche (which you seem to undermine in other threads), the fortuitous interdependent set-in complexities, the awesome human brain, etc., all of which seem to defy any ToE mechanism every supposed little step of human mega-evolution is easily refutable.