why DID we evolve into humans?

Wheat was bred for certain characteristics. People picked out wheat stalks that produced more food than average, and bred those. With each generation, more food was produced, so humans had an incentive to continue breeding wheat into what it is now. Its a matter of artificial selection, rather than Lamarkian evolution.

I agree with Gary. Wheat contains variety within its genetic code. Natural selection or controlled breeding...either way you only have so much variance that is allowed. Even cross breeding is limited to the individual characteristics of the two specimens being crossed.I am new to this forum and have been reading through some of the messages in this string. One point I want to mention is that cephalopods, or squid and octopuses have compound eyes similar to that of humans. However, no evolutionist could even imagine a common ancestor between humans and cephalopods that also had functioning eyes. The answer I get from my biology professors?...Convergent evolution. By that they mean the seperate evolution of the same (or very similar) organ in two different animals. Science teachers sure can dance!Another point I would like to mention is the fact that there are animals that quite simply could not have evolved. The woodpecker for instance. The woodpecker has an extremely hard, pointed beak which it uses to pound into the trunks of trees. But this beak would be useless if it did not have a dense skull and a layer of impact absorbing tissue between this skull and the beak.Apply this to evolution. Suppose an ancestor to the woodpecker is born with an unusually hard beak. It flies to a nearby tree, cocks back its head and WHAM! The bird crushes its own skull. Or suppose the bird is born with an unusually hard skull. One smack against the tree and its beak splinters. The woodpecker needs multiple elements in its head in order to be able to strike a tree thousands of times a day. There is no survival value in the individual components of the woodpecker, only in the complete form. Throw this in there too. The woodpecker has an extremely long, sticky tongue which it uses to eat insects out of the holes it creates. What does the woodpecker do with this long tongue while it is not using it? Why it simply slides it out of its beak through a little notch in the side and inserts it into a muscular sheath under its scalp around its head, and then sticks it in its nostril. Which evolved first? The tongue or the sheath?there is too much design here to ignore

I think you are a little out-of-date on the issue by about 200 years. Lamark's proposed mechanism, that adaptive charateristics can be passed on to the next generation, has been blown out of the water for quite some time now. We have known for a very long time now that an animal can't pass on its adapted characteristics to its offsprings anymore than a pianist automatically passing on his pianistic skills to his offsprings.

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The Laminator
We are the bog. Resistance is voltage over current. For goodness's sake, please vote Democrat this November!

This is more of a response to people that are still clinging on to Lamarkian evolution. What mechanism would you suggest that makes such evolutionary event to occur? I'm talking about a pianist passing on his piano skills to his kids without teaching them. How is it possible?

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The Laminator
We are the bog. Resistance is voltage over current. For goodness's sake, please vote Democrat this November!

Most of what you have posted is, at best, peripherally attached to the topic of human evolution but let's look at them. That is why evolution doesn't depend on only natural selection. What you say is correct to a degree. However, you are forgeting about the addition of new characteristics due to the mutations that pretty well every single individual organisms carry. Before you use examples in your debate you need to get your facts straight. A minor detail is that octopi and humans do not have compound eyes. That is a term used to describe insect eyes.At best human and octopi eyes are only superficially similar. In fact, they both show the separate evolutionary history that they went through. In addtion, it is arguable that the octopus eye "design" is better than human since the blood supply to the retina is the right way around in the octopus. It is a significant structural difference between us and then. The woodpecker is, as you note, higly adapted to it's particular method of hunting. But what you should ask is: "Are there any other birds that acquire insects in a similar way but are not as specialized as a woodpecker?" Have you checked? Do you know anything about the feeding habits of similar or even rather different birds? Please fill us in on your studies in this area.Do you actually think that there is no niche for a bird that is capable of getting insects out of places that are not as difficult as hard wood? A bird that needs a tongue something like a woodpeckers and a beck shaped like a woodpecker but without the same skull. You may lack imagination but you inability to think of a pathway to a woodpecker from a related bird doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Did you check this out? Can you tell us both that no such birds exist today and that no such fossils are available? What are the genetics of woodpeckers and what are they related to? Do you know that?You can go off wildly like this. But you actually have to know quite a lot before you will be taken at all seriously.

It should be pointed out that while there are strong similarities between human and cephalopod eyes, their developmental pathways couldn't be more different. In humans, the eye develops from tissues of the brain; in cephalopods, the eyes develop from tissues of the skin. What about that explanation do you find unsuitable? Suppose it merely shoves its hardened beak into a soft, rotting log, finding great amounts of insect prey. It tries harder woods in a state of less decay, and backs off when it hurts too much. It does pretty well because no other birds are eating these insects.Much, much later, with a population of beak-hardened rotting-log peckers, a mutant is born with an unusually dense skull. It's able to tunnel into much, much harder rotting logs than its peers. It's able to tap into a food source that none of the others can, and it's offspring do better than all the others. Over time, these two mutations come to dominate the population, and we call them "woodpeckers" when they wake you up on a Sunday morning. That's simply a failure of imagination on your part. I've provided one situation where a hardened beak would be advantageous on it's own; not all wood is so hard that a hardened skull is needed. There's too much idiotic design, like the backwards human retina, to presume that it's the result of an intelligent designer.

Ned and Crash did a great job of answering your questions but I'd like to add to what they've said. Surprisingly, woodpeckers do not live solely on insects from hard trees. They also eat fruit and seeds.Here is a link to which fruits will atttract which birds and surprisingly, you'll find that many of the fruits will attract woodpeckers. What Birds eat what fruitAnd from the Florida birders guide is an article that expands from fruit to include information on other feeding habits and also nesting. Again, it's observed that woodpeckers will use man made nests instead of building.Having lived for many years in the habitat of the Pileaated Woodpecker, the classic example of the real strongly built, chip the wood away species, I can tell you that they favor softer woods like pine over oak, and a dead tree over a live one. I have spent many a year watching and studying woodpeckers and they are remarkable critters, but no real mystery.Notice in this picture from the Wake Audubon site, that the Pileated Woodpecker nest is built in a pine tree. Wake Audubon siteThe picture is in the left colum about halfway down.I have never observed a Pileated Woodpecker nest in anything except a pine tree or dead tree.By the way, the Pileated Woodpecker is BIG and most impressive. Awesome even.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

I’m new to this forum, I got a random e-mail from some Jesus freak about carbon dating being inaccurate so I did some research on my own and found this forum.This kind a goes under this subject,I’m big into philosophy I’m actually a libertarian socialist actual anarchist anarco any wayWhy did we develop conscious thought? Why would that trait be beneficial in a situation of life or death? Not logical decision making, or rationality, but the whole, I think therefore I am thingAlso, on the whole thing about there only being one way of evolving, what about sexuality, given your example one gene is passed on because its possessors lived in the modern world, just about every one lives but we are still evolving, getting taller, stronger, and so on because of what is sexually attractive, and who is able to mateAlso from what I’ve read, evolution, mutations, don’t really happen unless there is a large catastrophic event, i.e. ice age not sure where that came from hmm, any one read that also? Or am I pulling stuff from the mystery bag of B.S.

It's a side-effect of advanced language. Mutations happen to everybody. You probably have between 5 and 50, and maybe as many as 500, of your own.But, mutations don't generally become fixed in the population (that is, everybody in the population has it) unless the population is undergoing rapid expansion from a small set of founders/survivors. That's the idea of punctuated equilibrium, anyway. That's probably what you're thinking of.

How so? Dolphins, and whales have an advanced language system but they don’t have conscious thought at what point is consciousness advantageous to a species can you imagine being the 1st one to have consciousness? given you wouldn’t have the intellect that you do now, it would still be horrible any way, I don’t see how it’s just a side effect that because you are able to communicate that you suddenly have consciousness. yea thats what I was thinking about..

Don't they? How do you know they don't? I think consciousness exists on a gradient commensurate with the complexity of one's language. I don't think it's as simple has having it/not having it. It's more like, you're able to abstract complex physical relationships and data about the universe into symbols; therefore, you have consciousness.

Crash,Consciousness is one of my areas of interest; I'm just curious about your thinking here.Do you have any references or can you draw out a more detailed picture here for me?To me there's three things going on here (conceptual / symbolic knowledge, language, and consciousness). I'm not quite sure how you're relating them, and why. If you're willing to explain and interested to discuss, I'd like to do that.Thanks!
Ben

I too would like a better sense of your definition of consciousness. this is not how I use the term. I actually think that when I'm nonverbally sensorial aware that I'm more conscious than when I'm think. When I'm translating (abstracting) my sensory experience into words and then operating in linguistic mode I have important functionality such as this writing, but I have less sense of actually existing, of self awareness.lfen

Most of what I've come to believe about the relationship of consciousness and language stems from the accounts of various "feral" children, as well as from primatology.Also "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter has shaped my thinking a great deal.By no means do I have this all figured out, so I'm not sure how I can clarify my thoughts on the subject. I think it might be exciting if you cared to open a new thread for some of the "great" questions about consciousness, and we could discuss them.

I know the sort of state you're referring to; athletes and martial artists call it "flow state" or "the no-mind."But I'm exactly of the opposite opinion. That's a state of less consciousness than the kind of linguistic self-reflection that you refer to. I suspect that, if you found yourself somehow transmuted into an animal, you would find yourself in something more akin to the first state than the second. I guess the only way I can think of to plumb the nature of consciousness is to study things that don't have it, or to study humans when they enter states of non-consciousness (acting on autopilot, fugue states, etc., not the unconsciousness of dreaming.)