Evolution Simplified

Here's an example of the kind of predictions the theory of evolution makes. This particular prediction was made by Charles Darwin himself.(From: Deep Jungle by Fred Pearce, page 59)

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Darwin's last laugh

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Even at his death, Darwin's ideas of natural selection remained controversial. For many sceptics, the confirmation of his theories came only with the strange story of the comet orchid, a native of Madagascar. The orchid produces white waxy flowers that attract pollinating insects with a fragrance that is specially seductive after dark; but any insect alighting on the flower in the forest night will have great trouble finding its nectar, because it is hidden deep inside a narrow tube roughly 30 centimetres long. This curious plant was first discovered by Aubert du Petit-Thouars, a French aristocrat and botanist who narrowly escaped the guillotine during the French Revolution and spent years travelling Africa before daring to return home. It was another fifty years before the first comet orchid was coaxed into flowering in Europe, in 1857, and a further five years before its notoriety reached the attention of Darwin at his home-cum-laboratory in Kent.

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For Petit-Thouars, the plant was little more than a curiosity. For Darwin, it raised a fundamental question: what kind of insect could suck the nectar from such a flower? He experimented in his greenhouse, using bristles and needles and glass rods, but the answer was clear enough to him. For this orchid to be pollinated, it required an insect with an extremely long proboscis, many times the length of its body. Darwin predicted that one day such an insect would be found. He was laughed at by many of his peers for what seemed an outrageous suggestion. Whoever heard of a moth with a tongue as long as that of an elephant? And yet, another forty years later, in the depths of the Madagascan jungle, a subspecies of the Morgan’s sphinx moth was discovered with just such a tongue - and it pollinated the comet orchid. Darwin was long dead by then, but he surely had the last laugh.

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On the same page are some pictures of the first time this insect was filmed sucking nectar from a comet orchid.-------If I may comment on some of your objections against Chiroptera's opening post: As you may have noticed, Chiroptera used scare quotes around the words 'good' an 'bad'. This means he doesn't really think the traits are good or bad in an absolute sense of those words; that if some trait is good at some point in evolutionary history, it will always be good, or that if it's bad, it will always be bad.Whether a trait is good or bad should always be looked at in the light of the current circumstances. It is always possible that the circumstances change in such a way that what was once a good trait now becomes a liability, and vice versa. Chiroptera isn't suggesting that life is continually getting better and stronger, but that life is continually adapting to a changing environment.You quoted Richard Dawkins as saying: "We all agree that there's no progress." It might have been better if you had quoted him more extensively, to put that one-liner in perspective. Here's what he said about it in full:

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Stephen Jay Gould argues against progress in evolution. We all agree that there's no progress. If we ask ourselves why some major groups go extinct and others don't, why the Burgess Shale fauna no longer exist, I'm sure the answer is "Bad luck." Whoever thought otherwise? There's nothing new about that. On the other hand, the short-term evolution within a group towards improved adaptation ” predators having arms races against prey, parasites having arms races against hosts ” that is progressive, but only for a short time. It's not that everything in evolution has to be progressive, but there will be a period of a million years when a lineage of prey animals is evolving together with a lineage of predator animals, and they're all getting faster and faster, their sense organs are evolving, their eyes are getting sharper, their claws are getting sharper: that's progressive. The prey animals are getting better because their predators are getting better.

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I doubt that. It depends on what you mean by 'advanced'. The function of "the 'simplest' organism" is to replicate. The only thing it can do is make copies of itself. A computer is a multipurpose machine. With the right programming, it can do a plethora of different things. In that respect, it is much more advanced than "the 'simplest' organism" Then where do wolves come from? I'm not asking this because I want you to tell me, but because I want to show you the kind of questions you should be asking yourself. I have never seen the Second Law of Thermodynamics formulated that way. It's a law of thermodynamics and it has nothing to do with direction by informational programs, "ingestion-storage-converter mechanisms", or complex structures. The way you formulated it - or more probably cut-and-pasted it - seems specifically tailored to using it in an argument against evolution. It also contains a mistake: the Second Law of Thermodynamics is only applicable for closed systems. If you want to use the Second Law of Thermodynamics against evolution, you should use it in the form that is accepted by science. And then you'll fail.This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 04-May-2006 10:31 AMThis message has been edited by Parasomnium, 04-May-2006 10:45 AM

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

First of all, could you cite some research that supports these figures?Whatever the exact figures are, you base your conclusions on a simple comparison between the harmful mutations and the beneficial ones. Since the percentage of beneficial mutations is lower than the percentage of harmful ones, so you reason, the conclusion must be that life deteriorates.However, the problem with this line of reasoning is that harmful mutations are less likely to be carried over to subsequent generations, per definition. The mutations that make it to subsequent generations tend to be the neutral ones and the beneficial ones. However small the percentage of beneficial mutations, al long as it's non-zero, it will it have an impact on the development of the population, i.e. it will be ever so slightly better adapted to its environment.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.