Evolution or Devolution?

Well, it seems Cliff Clavin makes a reappearance on this board:

quote:

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(from "Cheers")
Cliff: Interesting little article here. It says that, uh... the average human being only uses seventeen percent of his brain. Boy, you realize what that means? We don't use a full, uh... sixty-four percent.
Norm: Some don't use even more.

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Dr Silverman, could you (or one of the admins) please fix that long link, so as to make it not mess up the page width? Please take a look at the help on dBCodes (left of the edit window in the reply page). Or take a peek at the code of this message (with the peek-button just below it), to see how I made my version of your link look like this.

Let me help you."[W]here did that blueprint come from in the first place?"It never existed, at least not as a blueprint of "how they should evolve." If the genome is a blueprint at all, then it is one of how the individual zygote should develop into a mature example of its species. Kerner is making the same mistake as the screenwriters of Star Trek, who, in one particular episode, had a computer extrapolate millions of years of evolution, "calculating" the current phenotype of a species from a DNA-sample of an ancient ancestor.What they, and Kerner, failed to take into account is the fact that chance plays such an important role in the course of evolution. Even if a genotype were a blueprint of an evolutionary development - which it most definitely isn't - then how are such things as rogue comets specified in it? There's no way of telling how, for example, mammal evolution would have played out if a comet or planetoid had not struck the earth 65 million years ago, effectively wiping the dinosaurs off the face of the earth.Because of such capricious events, the notion of the genotype being a blueprint of how a species should evolve is utter nonsense.This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 28 February 2005 10:43 AM

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

You are changing the subject.I am not talking about the (misguided) idea of the statistical improbability of abiogenesis and evolution. We can talk about that some other time, if you want.Right now, I would like you to address the issue of events taking place which cannot have been specified in the proposed "blueprint of evolution". Please read my post again and come back with something pertaining to it.

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

How about an answer to Message 54?