What i can't understand about evolution....

Here's an inspector of police interrogating the suspect of a murder: You are like that inspector, Seeking. It seems you will only accept a complete list of each and every individual creature between you and your ancestral bacterium. It's preposterous, it can't be done, and you know it. But it's also completely irrelevant. Because the fact that we cannot produce such a list does not in the least invalidate the theory of evolution. There are lots of other forms of evidence, if only you'd care to consider them.The best thing for you to do would be to read Richard Dawkins' book "The Ancestor's Tale". It provides roughly what you're asking for. Dawkins even gives approximate figures for the number of ancestors between us and our forebears. It's a good read and it'll keep you busy for a while.

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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.

I suppose you haven't studied medicine, Peg, so I ask you: do you doubt what your doctor prescribes for you when you are ill? Or, another example, do you doubt that computers can actually work because you don't understand, much less haven't studied, quantum physics? Assuming your answer to both questions is 'no', why would you make an exception for evolution? Is it perhaps because, in your perception, evolution conflicts with your religion, and medicine and quantum physics do not? For goodness' sake, why not? Isn't that the whole point of studying, to increase your knowledge about a subject? It couldn't be simpler: someone who has studied something knows more about it than someone who hasn't. So, yes, it is perfectly reasonable to expect those of us who don't study, to simply accept the results of those who do study. Even if this simplified version of evolution were accurate, then how do you know what the odds are? Could you elaborate on the precise calculations of the odds involved? It depends on how you define life, of course. If you define life as something that can replicate, then some complex molecules qualify. If the replication is not perfect, and if resources are limited, then evolution is inevitable, even at this molecular level.Now, what happens to such molecules is just chemistry and physics. A cell is very much more complex than those single molecules, but ultimately, what's going on in a cell is still only chemistry and physics. And if that's the case, then, given that evolution can take place even at the molecular level, it's possible for life to come from non-life, wherever you draw the line between them. That's only to be expected. Because the fossil record is necessarily incomplete, we are bound to find 'sudden' appearances of species. It's as if you have pictures of someone as a child and as an adult, but not as an early teen or an adolescent. Has the child 'suddenly' turned into an adult? The picture record seems to say so. But then you realise that you are missing a lot of intermediate stages.That each and every species in the fossil record is 'fully formed and complete' is no surprise either, because every species is very well adapted to its own niche in space and time, or it wouldn't have evolved like that in the first place.Compare evolution with the development of automobiles in the course of time: at every stage in automobile history each new model was state of the art. In the nineteen twenties, nobody said of a car that it was half formed or incomplete. Only with the conceit of hindsight could you now say that those cars, without AC, airbags or ABS, were half formed and incomplete in comparison with modern cars. Who is to say that our cars aren't hopelessly inadequate compared to future cars?Likewise, you cannot say of any species, extinct or extant, that it is half formed and incomplete. Nor can you say that humans are more modern - more 'fully formed and complete' - than chimpanzees, because both species have enjoyed an equal amount of evolutionary time since their common ancestor lived. It's just that chimps have evolved to survive in the African rain forest, and humans on the African savanna (and later, by way of culture, everywhere). You might take a look at the evolution of mammalian auditory ossicles. In brief, it appears from the fossil record that three bones that fulfilled a function in the jaws of early reptiles have evolved into the three small bones in the middle ear of their mammalian descendants, where they now have a function quite different from the original.

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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.

What makes you think a conclusion cannot be a fact? Please consider the following:Premise 1: All mammals are warm blooded.
Premise 2: My horse is a mammal...
Conclusion: ...therefore my horse is warm blooded.Is it, or is it not the conclusion of this syllogism that my horse is warm blooded? And is it, or is it not a fact that my horse is warm blooded?

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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.

Perhaps it would be helpful to explain that the reliability is statistical in nature. Due to the fact that in a single petri dish the number of bacteria is huge, the chances of a mutation popping up that helps the bacterium utilize the new nutrient become near certainty.With species that replicate slower than bacteria you just have to wait longer for a beneficial mutation to pop up. For nature to try out billions of individual bacteria takes hours, whereas trying out billions of guinea pigs takes thousands, maybe millions of years. Fortunately, evolution has been going on for three to four billion years, so statistics comes to the rescue once again.

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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.

Your mentioning Nusslein-Volhard reminds me of an excellent book on the history of biology, as told with reference to different species that have been used as study material. The book in question is titled "The Guinea Pig's History of Biology", by Jim Endersby. It's a thoroughly enjoyable book that reads like a novel, and it's also very accessible for the layman. From Darwin and Mendel to Watson and Crick, to Nusslein-Volhard and others, they all play their part, as do Darwin's passion flowers, Mendel's peas, the fruit fly, the guinea pig, the zebra fish, and mouse eared cress. Highly recommended.Edited by Parasomnium, : No reason given.Edited by Parasomnium, : Added 'also' in "also very accessible", so as not to give the impression that I think Wounded King is a layman. He is probably one of the few real scientists frequenting this site, informing us with his in-depth knowledge. Thanks, WK.

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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.

Peg, let me try and explain some things to you. You seem like an intelligent writer and I think you're worth the effort. Oh, that sounds condescending. Anyway, it's not meant that way, and I'll try to keep it "short and sweet".You seem to misinterpret what Bluescat said. "Passing on changes to future generations" is not the same as "progressing up the evolutionary scale". I think the phrase "changes that make a species more likely to survive" is what prompted your reaction. Not to detract from Bluescat's explanation, but I think it's a bit of an unfortunate way of putting it.You could think that Bluescat was talking about a species changing into something that has a better intrinsic survival capability. Bluescat should not have used the word 'species', but the word 'individual' instead, like so: "Changes that make an individual more likely to survive ('until after reproducing', would be my addition) will be passed on to future generations."It's almost self-explanatory: if you survive long enough to reproduce, whatever changes in your genes helped you survive, will be passed on, by definition. Any changes that kill you off before you reproduce will not be passed on, obviously. That way, evolution is like a sieve that filters out detrimental changes, while letting through beneficial and neutral changes.On the extinct ape-men: one explanation for why they are no longer with us is that they were our ancestors' direct competition. The more they were like our ancestors, the more they would have competed with them for the same food sources and shelter and such. Someone had to win this competition and it so happens our ancestors did. The reason chimps, gorillas and orang-utans are all still around is that they don't compete with each other. (Orangs don't even live in the same continent as the other two.) They are increasingly competing with us, though. We want their trees.Incidentally, apes and us have enjoyed equal amounts of evolutionary time, so the apes are not really inferior to us. They're just well enough adapted to their way of life to have survived as a species until now. As are we to our way of life. Just as you can speak of modern man, you can also speak of modern chimp.Maybe not as short and sweet as you would have it, but there you go.Edited by Parasomnium, : No reason given.

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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.

A while back in this thread I got the impression that Peg's picture of evolution is influenced by the basic misinterpretation of two iconic ideas. These are "survival of the fittest" and the general tendency toward more complexity we see in evolution. So, to get an idea if I'm right. I'd like to ask Peg two questions to which I hope she'll give an honest answer. Others, please refrain from answering the questions until we have a reply from Peg. The questions are:1. In the phrase "survival of the fittest", who or what are being compared? In other words, with regard to who or what is the fittest deemed to be the fittest? Could you give an example of a pair of whatever it is you think is being compared, of which one is the winner (the fittest) and the other the loser (the less fit)?2. Are "more complex" and "more advanced" the same to you?

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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.

Kapyong,Although I am not a moderator, I would like to ask you to tone it down a bit in your replies to Peg. I think Peg is discussing things in a critical but positive spirit. You may not agree with Peg's arguments - nor do I - but please try to disagree in an agreeable manner. Just the facts and some sound logic, conveyed in pretty prose, is all that's needed to conduct a civil debate. And it'll keep your blood pressure down.But anyway, welcome to EvC.

From what you wrote earlier I got the impression that you had the wrong idea about it, but you've set that straight. In essence, you're saying that survival of the fittest is the result of struggle for existence between members of the same species - even though you use the word 'kind' - and often even between siblings. That's good. But a human is necessarily more complex than a bacterium, simply because of the fact that a human is multicellular and a bacterium is not. So if you are saying that all life is equally complex, no matter how small, I would beg to differ.Next, saying that "more advanced" means "higher" is not very helpful, because you're just replacing one term with another. You would need to define 'higher', not by example, but with a proper definition, such that it can not only tell a human from an ape in terms of "highness", but also a shark from a hawk, a mouse from an elephant, an ant from a bee, a rose from an orchid, et cetera.

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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.

The "experiments" you can do to confirm - not prove - evolution are a little more sophisticated than that. Most of these experiments take the form: "if the theory is true, then if we do such and such, we should find so and so."For example, if the theory of evolution is true, then you can predict that one of the most likely places to find fossils of a transitional between fish and amphibians is a geological layer of a particular age, and in a particular location on earth known to have had a particular climate at the time the transitional species must have been extant. The test you can conduct is to actually go and look in that layer at that location and see what you can find.They did just that and found Tiktaalik.It's this kind of "experiment", or "test" if you will, that provides corroborative evidence for the theory. No scientist will ever claim that the theory has definitely been proven, but they will all point to the massive amount of evidence that has been gathered by this and other kinds of tests. If, in the course of such "experimenting", they find a fossil rabbit in a Precambrian layer, for example, the theory is in serious trouble. In the 150 years since the publication of "On the Origin of Species" such damning evidence has not been found. And it isn't for want of trying: the theory of evolution is probably the best tested scientific theory we have.

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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.