An accurate analogy of Evolution by Natural selection

Does everyone around here agree with you ???I sincerely doubt it, and if it is so, then would like them to say it as openly as you did.I'll just answer one thing you said: I think I very CLEARLY said that my analogy represented a static environment. In a static environment, the species is already fine-tuned to that environment, and so if it doesn't change, then the next generations should be very similar to the original, since they are in the same environment.Even then, in my analogy, I didn't put an initial video that was already perfectly fine-tuned, leaving space for beneficial and deleterious errors.

Has anyone told you it was a good analogy? So your analogy isn't really an analogy, because there is a caveat that it is nothing like the reality of evolution. Tell me where a static environment exists and how would we determine that a species is fine tuned for this static environment? That in itself destroys your whole premise that this is a good analogy.

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Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts

The creationist coelacanth 'living fossil' argument is answered by evolutionist by stating that it was in a static environment, and so that this is why it has remained unchanged for 65 million years. The beneficial-to-deleterious ratio of mutations in a populations in a given environment could indicate the fine-tuning of the population to that environment, since when it would be ''perfectly'' fine-tuned then there would be 0 beneficial mutations.Edited by slevesque, : quote error

False. The coelacanth has changed, the species living today are not the same as those found in the fossil record, they're not even classified in the same genus.

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Or any living fossil, if you wish, it doesn't change the point that static environments can exist in nature ...There are many species that we find in the fossil record and alive today, meaning that that the environment was static, which was my point. This pretty much the argument used for all living fossils. Just look at point 1 on the talkorigins.org page on living fossils.(CB930: Living fossils)I do not know the coelacanth case enough to argument for it as a living fossil, so that if you claim it, then I'll just believe you. I have never read any scientific paper on the classification of the modern-day coelacanth compared to the fossil one. All I know is that it is still described as a living fossil by journals intended for the general reader. Like in this exampleAncient coelacanth caught in Indonesia - USATODAY.com)Edited by slevesque, : No reason given.

This is off-topic, but just to clarify what Dr. Jones is saying, the coelacanth is considered a legitimate living fossil, but it is also true that it is not unchanged from 60 or 70 million years ago (the age of the most recent known fossils). The coelacanth species alive today are not the same ones as those fossil species. Coelacanth doesn't even refer to a species, it's an order. That's three levels up from the species level (species, genus, family, order). Other living fossil species like the horseshoe crab are in the same situation, very similar to remote ancestors but not the same species.I agree with others that your first attempt at an analogy to evolution, the video copying, should be abandoned.The purpose of an analogy is explanatory, to render understandable something unfamiliar by showing how it is similar to something familiar. But there is nothing similar to evolution in day-to-day experience - if there were then evolution would have been figured out long before Darwin, and there wouldn't be so much difficulty understanding it today.You mentioned the creationist "tornado in a junkyard" analogy, and it isn't an analogy to evolution in any recognizable way. Random parts just flying together to create a 747 is a miracle, not evolution.I'd never heard of the creationist house blueprint analogy, but it sounds like something that might have potential. How's it go?--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

OK. It's a bad analogy, and we have no need of an analogy.It's bad because:* It allows no significant or interesting changes, if you're only selecting for video quality. The process you're suggesting isn't going to give us a result where the bride says "I don't" and then the groom starts making out with the bridesmaids. Or if you were using a video of a fish, there would be no way that your process would turn it into a video of a frog.* It presupposes an end goal to be reached, namely high video quality.* It involves artificial selection, whereas most evolution is by natural selection.* It allows no adaptive radiation --- your "species" of tape will never split into two species. Not only are you taking the environment to be static, but there is only one niche in it to be filled.* There is only one optimal solution, and there are no local maxima.* There is no meaningful distinction, in your analogy, between genotype and phenotype.* It seems intuitively unlikely that the process that you describe would produce any improvement, or even change, whereas scientists can see beneficial mutations and natural selection happening all the time.We have no need for it because:* We don't need any analogy. The ideas in evolution are not so abstruse that we need it put into baby-talk for us.* The purpose of an analogy is to explain the unfamiliar by means of the familiar, as with Einstein's famous metaphor of space-time as a rubber sheet. But no-one has ever seen the process you describe, whereas anyone can see evolution if they have some bacteria, a petri dish, and some antibiotics.* No analogy is perfect. This is why creationists keep producing supposed analogies of evolution --- because then they can attack the analogy instead of undertaking the hopeless impossible task of arguing against the theory of evolution. I have lost count of the number of times that I've said to a creationist words to the following effect: "No, the theory of evolution is not like saying [some idiotic analogy that the creationist has made up]. It's actually more like saying that the action of natural selection and genetic drift on variations produced by mutation, recombination, and lateral gene transfer, and propagated by reproduction, can produce evolution. Would you care to argue against that?"Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Then why make arguments that you don't even understand. You should have some idea of what you are talking about before you try to make a point.Do you read what your sources say?
From your talkorigins link.

quote:

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The theory of evolution does not say that organisms must evolve morphologically. In fact, in an unchanging environment, stabilizing selection would tend to keep an organism largely unchanged. Many environments around today are not greatly different from environments of millions of years ago.

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This says nothing about not changing? Says largely unchanged but nothing about the ideal or no change. What about superficial changes?Also, from same source

quote:

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Some so-called fossil species have evolved significantly. Cockroaches, for example, include over 4,000 species of various shapes and sizes. Species may also evolve in ways that are not obvious. For example, the immune system of horseshoe crabs today is probably quite different from that of horseshoe crabs of millions of years ago.

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So your point was???Not exactly unchanging would you say?Edited by Theodoric, : Another quote

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Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts

Maybe it only seems this may to me because we're discussing with people with such a big stake in not understanding evolution, or who have already been exposed to a lot of misinformation and miseducation, but the poor science background of Americans in general leads me to believe that maybe the process of evolution, even at just a general level, isn't anywhere near as obvious to them as it seems to us.--Percy

Hi slevesque This website has good information on the Coelacanths:http://www.dinofish.com/With lots of links to more information (news, history, biology, etc)DINOFISH.com - COELACANTH Biology and Behavior
DINOFISH.COM - Weird Bodies Frozen in Time

quote:

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The classification of coelacanths is a murky business with more than one vairation in the class category, but we'll give it a shot. Kingdom: Animalia, Phylum: Chordata, Class: Pices (fishes), Sub class: Gnathostomata- jawed fishes, Sub class: Teleostei- bony fishes (though cartilaginous, coelacanths are usually classed with the teleosts), Sub class: Sarcopterygii (lobed-finned fishes), Order: Crossopterygii, Family: Actinistia (coelacanths), Gennus: Latimeria, Species: chalumnae and menadoensis.

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Note that the modern ones fall into a new genus, Latimeria, not just a new species, compared to the fossil ones.Enjoy.

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Hi again slevesque Why would you want to consider an analogy made by someone who doesn't understand evolution (or more nefariously, doesn't want you to understand evolution)? Why not ask a biologist? Let's play a game:Start with a hundred dice and two people and throw the dice all at once.The dice represent a breeding population.Now the two people are the "fitness environments" - in one environment only 1's can survive, while in the other only 6's can survive, so after the first throw all the 1's are collected by the first person, while all the 6's are collected by the second person.Throw the remaining dice and repeat.Fairly soon you will have all the dice in either population 1 or population 6, yes?What you have seen is mutation (the dice throw), selection for fitness to an environment (either 1 or 6), change in the hereditary traits from generation to generation (the proportions of 1's and 6's increase in the total population with each throw of the remaining dice), leading to speciation (the division of the parent population into two daughter populations).This is how evolution works in a broad sense, however this game is still not perfect, as it does not involve reproduction and death, nor does it involve competition between the daughter populations, so like all analogies, it must be treated as an approximation of what occurs in nature.Enjoy.Edited by RAZD, : leading

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I said that the concepts weren't abstruse. Unless I study tensor calculus, then maybe Einstein's "rubber sheet" metaphor is the closest I'll get to understanding what he was talking about.Evolution, on the other hand, can just be explained to people.And, as you point out, there are many people with a vested interest in not being able to understand evolution. Experience tells me that when you try to explain anything to a creationist by means of an analogy, he'll seize on some implied detail of the analogy which you didn't even mention and which has no correspondence to the thing that you were trying to explain and start whining about that, rather than using the analogy as a tool for understanding.The theory of evolution, as it actually is, has to be repeatedly shoved in their faces for them to turn to their last resort and try to find something wrong with the actual theory. If you offer them any excuse not to confront it, they won't.

Guys, we don't have to look far for something familiar to be analogous to biological evolution. The evolution of language is the closest thing you will ever get to biological evolution. And the best part about the evolution of language is it's undeniable because it's an undeniable part of our history and it's still happening right in front of our eyes and ears. Unless they want to argue that god created spanish, french, and all the other modern languages at babel.

You're right about language being a good analogy.That why at least one creationist poster I ran into on another website denied that the English language had evolved. When confronted with examples of middle and old English he had myriad excuses why those didn't mean anything and that he was right.As with many creationists, his mind was made up and no amount of evidence would make the least bit of difference.Heinlein was right: "Belief gets in the way of learning."

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.