"I have a question. How are certain things created in an animal that weren't there before? For example, when fish began to evolve into amphibians and land-dwelling animals, how did they evolve lungs which are a completely new organ."

Slowly.

"completely new species being created by random."

this is NOT part of the theory. First no completely random species has been created - they are usually forced by environmental factors - by which i mean food supply, predators and sexual selection pressures.

The fact that this is NOT random is clearly seen by the existence of animals in Australia which are 'like' their mammalian counterparts, but which are not closely genetically related. This convergent evolution may include the evolution of the same/similar genes in separate unrelated populations. Here is a list of marsupials which happen to fill similar ecological niches as mammals:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adaptive_radiated_marsupials_by_form

second, the are NOT new, they are 'improved'.

You can't be both, a product which is described as 'new and improved' is clearly lying, because it is either completely new OR is based on an old product with some small improvements....

That said, when i say 'improved' i'm still talking about these small changes which you have accepted, eventually lots and lots of accumulated changes will result in a animal with very different features. see: http://4photos.net/photosv2/evolution_of_man_pictures_1283151342.jpg
similar species with different traits.

http://www.piffe.com/images/evolutionofman.jpg
note the change in posture of the last version of 'man'

'The Theory of Evolution itself is viable, but the earliest life didn't just spontaneously form. There had to have been divine intervention at the very beginning. I think that God created the earliest life, sat back and let evolution run its course. In the Book of Genesis, the world was created in 7 "days" I think that in the context of the story, "days" is not an objective term. 7 "days" could really mean 7 billion or trillion years.'

best estimates put the Universe at 13.7 billion years old. If this is correct then there have been no trillion years.

The simplest single cell life-forms could very easily have formed aswell. Never-minding the evidence that the mitochondria in our cells evolved separately as a bacteria and developed into a symbiotic relationship with our ancestral animals cells. Complex chemicals can reproduce themselves without being in a cell - if in the right environment, take a look at prions as an example of a mutated protein which spread's it's mutation - simple chemical structures grow on their own without being complicated, again their growth will be limited by the chemicals in their environment - in this case i'm talking about crystal growth.

There is a huge difference between a 'single cell' and a 'single protein' but each has a similar property, that of self-replication which even exists in simple chemical systems like crystal growth.

I admit it is harder, more complicated and less likely that 'life' will develop. There are specific qualitative difference, but in billions of years it is more than possible. (earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old, lots of time for simple proteins to form)

I'm looking not at those differences but at the similarities, and crystal self-replicate. So can prions, so can single celled life-forms. It is beautiful and it is God as i understand the concept.

Non-living matter becoming living matter is the border between chemistry and biology. A specific explanation could be given, but you need to understand organic chemistry in order for it to make sense because it will be in the form of a series of chemical equations.

A great video treatment of abiogenesis (beginning of life)... using only what we know of chemicals and how they interact:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6QYDdgP9eg
(it gets moving about one minute in)

And, to address a couple favorites of the evolution doubters, here's a video that succinctly deals with the evolution of the eye:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Stb9pQc9Kq0
...and of the flagellum:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdwTwNPyR9w

I love that comic, it was great! And yes, also joey1, you'll continue to be confused if you keep trying to think of "how amphibians turned into reptiles", for any number of reasons. For a start, for the purposes of looking at evolution, "reptile" is a completely meaningless classification, but never mind that. You're wondering about the transition from a soft shelled egg which needed to be laid in water, to a hard shelled egg that needed to be laid on land, what about an amphibian species which laid its eggs in shallow ponds that occasionally dried up? If it's eggs had developed some sort of a film or a rudimentary film of some kind, perhaps they'd have been more likely to survive if the pond dried up. This would explain the beginning stages of the process? But we don't really know, it's all just speculation of course.

@joey1, as mafialligator notes, an inbetween stage - to deal with an in-between environment is a completely reasonable mechanism to drive a progressive hardening of the shell... and it does *not* require that there be any surviving "missing links" currently - only that they were advantageous vs. a completely soft shelled egg at some point in that particular environment. Certainly there are plenty of transitional environments between the ocean and arid dry land... examples would include a pond that dries periodically, a tidal flat, tide pools, a tropical forest, an intermittent stream, a zone constantly sprayed by water - such as where waves break or near the base of a waterfall, the mouth of one of the parent animals, etc. And since there are transitional environments, there is advantage to be had by transitional forms... any incremental hardening of the eggshell in these environments would confer an advantage - yet the environment is not harsh enough (like a desert, for example) that would doom the transitional form to a quick death. ...and... as the eggshells progressively hardened over generations - the animal's range away from the water source/humid environment could increase (conferring an advantage to those animals, in turn).

@ Orathaic, dexter, mafialligator, AWB, Acmac: Good work guys.

It annoys me when people express skepticism about things which are scientific facts, when clearly they haven't bothered to read up on the basics of the science they're questioning.

joey, KingAtom, basic texts on evolution will answer most of the questions you've asked so far, and many more. The WebDiplomacy forum isn't necessarily the best place to look for these answers. Lucky for you guys like orthaic were on hand today.

...besides, it's not even like the line between reptile and amphibian as far as egg shell hardness is even that sharp. (from Wikipedia: "Some fish and amphibian eggs have thick, leathery coats, especially if they must withstand physical force or desiccation...
...Eggs laid by snakes generally have leathery shells which often adhere to one another. Depending on the species, turtles and tortoises lay hard or soft eggs." So there.

So there indeed.

:-)

The fact that dexter morgan, and to a much less detailed extent, myself, were able to accurately guess at intermediate stages of hard shelled and soft shelled eggs among reptiles and amphibians without actually doing any research demonstrates the predictive power of the Theory of Evolution. That's another creationist claim that bugs the hell out of me, that evolution doesn't meet basic scientific muster because it can't predict things, we just demonstrated how it does.

The claim for creationists is always from ignorance and always demands more evidence (claiming there are gaps or missing links no matter how much data there is and how well it fits the theory).

I've heard the analogy of a woman jumping off the roof of a 50 story building... and her body being discovered on the pavement below. The scientist says "clearly she fell from the roof to the ground below, accelerating as she went, resulting in an impact that was not survivable... besides, there is no other body - and she is wearing a white gown just like the woman from the roof - clearly this is the same woman and she fell." A creationist/believer-in-magic steps up and says - "no, all we know is that a woman wearing a gown left the roof and a woman wearing a gown appeared here on the pavement - the simplest explanation is that God put her here... to claim that some unseen force (gravity) acted upon a single woman the entire way down through all that distance is too unlikely... besides, this "woman" down here doesn't look at all the same - she's all bloody and spread about. Mind you, I understand how when I jump up how I come back down and I feel the impact in my feet - this sort of micro-gravity I can readily understand and accept - but the theory of macro-gravity that you claim resulted in such destruction to this woman's body seems beyond any possible merely physical cause - surely there had to be divine intervention... besides, there were no witnesses on the way down".

A person runs out of the lobby of the building at that moment and exclaims "I live on the 40th floor - I thought I saw a woman in a white gown fall past my window a minute ago - oh my, how horrible". The scientist says, see, there is the proof that the woman fell from the roof. The creationist says "that's not proof - clearly God was also responsible for that woman observed out the 40th floor window... after all, it's not like you've found the missing links of the other 49 floors. My solution to the question only requires one God and is much simpler and obvious - your solution requires complicated physics, an unlikely connection between these obviously very different women, and 49 missing pieces of data (which you don't have) to all agree with you. Not to mention that this sort of macro-impact you propose is not at all likely - considering what I see when someone jumps up and down. What if a person from the 10th floor reports someone falling past their window in what seemed to them to be a white pantsuit, that would disprove your theory completely. As it is, your "theory" assumes an awful lot. Have you no eyes to see the evidence of God that is all around you?"

At that moment, another person comes out of the lobby and says "I live on the 4th floor and I just saw and angel in white outside my window - only for a moment, but I'm sure that's what it was" The creationist then says "See? Now surely you won't doubt The Truth. The evidence for God is overwhelming and clear as a bell."

Dexter +1

Good one.

@dexter: wow, just wow. I like your story, but i think it's a little unfair, the levels of complexity in biology are such that they go far beyond our understanding... still.

Just as a point, we can get spatial resolution down to a single atom (with an AFM) but the temporal resolution at this point is about 5 minutes, which is too slow to measure the chemical reactions going on in any particular cell. So while we know a lot about what is going on in a cell, and how to destroy it by messing with some vital system, we also know there's a tonnes of interesting stuff which we don't know... molecular biology is really frakking cool and nowhere near as simple as a two-body gravitational problem.

The fact that this is not taught very well is a failure of the educational system.

The fact that some people choose to believe one authority (their church/right wing politician/right wing media) as opposed to another authority (any scientist/left wing media/random internet mooks like me) is not in itself that big a failing. At least compared to the failing of the educational system.

And to the creationists out there. I believe you can file 'creationism' and 'last thursdayism' under the same category of 'un-scientific' and teach them in philosophy class.

The concept of 'last thursdayism' is a rather interesting one which i'm sure skeptics will appreciate and definitely support in class (in case you don't know, it presupposes that everything we know and remember was created last thursday in the sate we remember it, it is entirely possible, and an example of the kind of theory for which skepticism allows)


Actually, i tell a lie, creationism can produce testable results and it has been disproven: "many creationist beliefs can be framed as testable predictions about phenomena such as the age of the Earth, its geological history and the origins, distributions and relationships of living organisms found on it. Early science incorporated elements of these beliefs, but as science developed these beliefs were gradually falsified and were replaced with understandings based on accumulated and reproducible evidence that often allows the accurate prediction of future results"

Mornoic, simple-minded tripe. Please don't suggest that this idiotic cartoon is some sort of revelation of truth to you...

Because I could EQUALLY produce some simple-minded, ill-informed *cartoon* that supports Creation. What sort of a jack-ass posts this shit as relevant....and more impoprtant...what sort of jackass replies as if this stupidity has meaning????

krellin, i've missed you! please do post an idiotic cartoon, i love your entertainment!

@orathaic, the fact that microbiology continues to present puzzles to us, puzzles that are beyond current technology to completely decipher - and is far more complex than a two body gravitational problem - is certainly a given. Indeed, I understand that even a three body gravitational problem (such as a three star system) is darn near impossible to completely get our brains/computers around... the interactions become seemingly "chaotic" - but really, our failure in dependably predicting motion in a three body problem is more the fault of insufficient technology... as is the case with some micro-biological issues, no doubt. I understood that not only was I switching evolution to gravity (the latter being *far* less "controversial") but that I was simplifying things quite a bit. I'm not sure of your point there, though. Please explain. These gaps in our knowledge, though present, are not exactly effective refutations of the overall theory of evolution - any more than the fact that we can't see individual electrons in real time is a refutation of quantum mechanics. Both theories have very strong predictive power. One needn't know the entire contents of a black box in order to accurately describe and understand and predict the behavior of the black box (or black bird, if you will) given innumerable observations and a basic understanding of the major components of said box... or bird. Darwin understood natural selection and Mendel understood inheritance without either of them knowing about DNA specifically.

I definitely agree that education is the key... but then, one should not fault the education *system* in isolation - arguably kids learn as much or possibly more (and, importantly, earlier) from their parents and peers and popular culture... and often, especially here in America, parents, peers and pop culture are often lined up against science (as evil, ungodly, mechanistic, boring, partisan, socialistic, etc.). I am training currently to be a teacher in a conservative area in California - and my master teacher straight out told me to soft-pedal evolution because if I didn't, the school board would kick me out in a hot second and could hurt her career. She knew of a couple teachers who lost jobs over it (not officially - but it was the clear underlying reason). So - my point is that there are limits to what the education system can do on its own. And yes, I still taught evolution - but it had to be done very carefully at some points... certain hot buttons were avoided (though I lead students to get there, more or less, on their own).

And yes, without a strong set of evidence behind it, evolution or any theory presented in school can look no more convincing than what the student's pastor told them. That is, of course, why school teaching (and parental teaching, and any teaching) should be more about how to think and the values of evidence and logic then it should be about simple facts to be memorized. Of course.

I'm familiar with "Last Thursdayism" and find it rather endlessly amusing (as an illustration of the absurdities that Creationists ask us to believe).

Yes, agreed that Creationism is testable - and has been falsified as a theory. Of course Intelligent Design is the retreat position - and, in its purest form (of an uninvolved God who simply started the universe and hasn't participated since) is, of course, untestable... and thus, likely to persist. Of course in this weaker form, it is also far less dogmatic and dangerous... as you're not going to get as much religious/political ferver up about an uninvolved god of non-specific form and function as you are the rather moody and ruthless character found in the Bible, for example. ...and, thankfully (I say as a scientist), this retreat position also puts it squarely outside the science classroom - though people still need to be educated on the logic of that position.

@krellin, the fact that the information is presented in a cartoon doesn't make it ill-informed or irrelevant... anymore than crap information being presented in a finely bound illuminated volume makes it worth something. It's not like we expected this format to speak to you - but, sometimes the Cliff-Notes version of a complex topic can be useful in communicating it clearly... to some. It beats throwing a textbook at someone. ...on the other hand... hmm.

@dexter: if i'm not mistaken (and this is a possibility) you're point was that the complaints of creationists are ridiculous in the extreme, as highlighted by your rather amusing analogy with gravity.

And your position was entirely correct. My only point was that it is not as clear that these two theories (gravity and evolution) are the same thing. And that the ability to explain/understand/accept one, but not the other, is a property of the differences between the two theories.

So i cite the main quality by which they differ, the levels of complexity.

Now that you bring up chaos, i must point out, we now have a mathematical understanding of chaos, and how complexity arises from it. I don't think our technology fails us, our minds are perhaps limited, and our mathematics doesn't find suitable language to describe the properties of the (rather large) set of problems which are 'chaotic', but that is a failing of our mathematicians...

I do think our physicists have got it down though. You can't use a standard mathematical treatment, but you can get a qualitative understanding of the properties of a chaotic system and i believe that fundamentally this is a part of nature.

This 'apparent randomness' is a things which exists in certain types of non-linear systems, and is fundamental to our current understanding of the Universe.

This is a randomness which is unrelated to quantum mechanics, it is an unpredictability in a system where there is no analytic solution. We do have numerical solutions, and i'm not sure why we would expect to be able to describe the solution analytically. I think that's a problem for a mathematician/theoretical physicist with greater analytic skills than myself.

I agree that blaming education while ignoring the system/society/culture is not fair. (i am fortunate to live in a place where this is not a sensitive issue, i don't believe i could be fired from a teaching post for teaching this...) but i did not mean to lay the blame solely at educator's door.

I simply meant to take it away from the creationist/student's. It is not the victim's fault, nor the perpetrator of the crime, it is the fault of the system which allows such crimes become so prevalent which must be targeted.

"I simply meant to take it away from the creationist/student's. It is not the victim's fault, nor the perpetrator of the crime, it is the fault of the system which allows such crimes become so prevalent which must be targeted."
And a fine point that is. Agreed, totally. The creationist students I've run across (though, admittedly some may have stayed incognito) still show a genuine interest in understanding my position - especially once I fail to attack them for theirs. We all, after all, are in search of truth and understanding... The walls come down and I think I've actually gotten through to some of them and certainly given significant pause to others. Evidence does tend to argue loudly - so long as their ears haven't closed do to me attacking them personally.

As to levels of complexity... I would submit that its less about complexity than it is about personal experience - or the lack of it - and dogmas. Both Astronomy and Evolution have conflicted with the church - gravity not so much. And both Astronomy and Evolution deal with time/space scales beyond our every day experience. Does it make evolution complex, or does it simply make it alien? Evolution is actually pretty simple, in general concept (granted there *are* complexities, but I don't think it is why evolution is hard for some to accept**). It is like a dice game like Yahtzee. Variation happens due to pretty well understood mutational processes, the natural environment serves to "select" which variations are adaptations and which are dysfunctional or neutral for the population, and so it goes. Really it's pretty much out in the open what is happening. (again: Darwin and Mendel) Besides, what causes gravity hasn't actually been directly observed... no gravitons, no gravity waves... it's quite a mystery. haha. But we accept it readily because we experience it on a moment by moment basis. It seems completely natural. Evolution, on the other hand, works on a scale far beyond personal life experience - and thus relies on evidence rather than that direct experience to understand. As Dawkins points out, we are in the middle world where things on our scale (both of space and time) are far more understandable to us, than things outside of that world - things on geologic scales of time or on microscopic or astronomical scales.

**as far as complexity... consider how complex aerodynamics, metallurgy and electronics are - yet the average Joe has little to no problem accepting that planes do actually fly based on valid scientific/engineering concepts/forces - even while battling their emotional fears about flying... that they know intellectually are irrational.

I completely accept evolution and would be willing to accept evolution, but the probabilities seam to vast for me. What is the probability of a mutation in each generation that is beneficial? How many generations are there. So for large, long lived animals, I don't see that the probabilities work out to create completely new species as often as we have observed them in History.

I'm not saying that evolution is impossible, just that it seams that the dice are loaded. And it is in the realm of probabilities that I see God working (that is why I love Quantum mechanics).

You are right; mutations are rare indeed. It's also sometimes that these genes are "hidden", so while it may look the same externally, there is something that makes it able to survive something different.

Be it radiation, or a volcano, or extreme temperatures, there is something different in the genetic code that will be reproduced (Punnett Square), and through natural selection, the animals with that specific gene will be able to survive.

I was just watching a BBC program on pre-historic early life where they talked about Amphibians and then how they came reptiles. And they really glossed over this section between Amphibians and Reptiles, so when I saw this topic on the forum, I thought that this would be a good place to ask my questions.

I am a strong Catholic and I believe that God takes an active interest in this world. However I also understand that he tends to obey his own rules that he has set up on how the universe is governed. Evolution and Quantum mechanics both deal heavily with probabilities, so it is really hard to say that God can not influence them because they are simply probabilities.

So is this a new category a 'loaded dice evolutionist?'

Here is my calculations. (They could be completely wrong, please correct me when appropriate)

According to the wikipedia "Dinosaurs diverged from their archosaur ancestors approximately 230 million years ago" and they died out 65 million years ago, leaving 165 million years as dinosaurs.

Given that Dinosaurs were likely long lived species given there size, lets assume that an average generation is 25 years. Giving 6,600,000 generations. Scientists have been breeding fruit flies in the lab studying evolution for the last 60 years. A generation for a fruit fly is about 2 days giving 10,950 generations. I have not heard that they have ever been able to create a new species of fruit fly that is unable to mate with other fruit flies. So lets say it would take 10-50 times that number of generations to create a new species. Lets say 250,000 generations (does anyone have a better number to use here). Therefore in the 6.6 million generations of dinosaurs, there would be 26.4 different new species. We have fossil records for many more species then this.

So that is why I say that the dice are loaded (or at least were in the past)

A new species takes about 50 years.

Well, that's what I heard anyway.