CDarwin

A firm belief and the will. At least 2 of our last 4 presidents have been Creationists, that doesn't mean they did much more about it than pay a little lip service. The fact is, the States and the courts have had a historically more important role in evolution education. The Feds just don't care that much and few national politicians want to weigh into a controversy with actions when they could get just as much political capital with words. That said, I must say that seeing those three names in support of Creationism made me instantly dislike all of those three candidates... I guess I'm arguing against myself as much as anyone.

It's certainly unsettling having scientifically-illiterate leaders, but when you get right down to it most of the battlegrounds in the 'evolution controversy' are in the courts and on the local level. The Federal government in general, and the President in particular, doesn't really have that much to do with it, at least directly. You probably shouldn't judge a leader's thinking abilities too harshly based on Creationism either. Really, some of the smartest people I know are Creationists. It's pretty easy to get roped into it, you just need to misunderstand a few scientific principles or believe the wrong people. When you get right down to it evolution vs. Creationism is all about who you want to believe if you don't have the proper training. Do you believe the scientists that scare me and what they say or the Creationists/Jesus and what they say? Many choose the latter. McCain's an IDist, (or is the phrase IDiot? ), or at least he's come out in support of teaching it in schools. I'm sure many of the others are too.

And that's my point. They use their nervous system in a completely different way. Do you think you could handle eight arms at once? We can consider animals in their context as opposed to simply seeing how much we can make them act like us or imparting human emotions and motivations to their actions.

Haha, there's an Asian girl I know who's sixteen and looks like she's twelve. She still has her baby teeth even. Of course her breasts are bigger than her head, so that kind of tips you off. *clears throat* Anyway, Asians as a group are supposed to be more neotenic, which means they retain more juvenile features than peoples of other geographic persuasions. Of course as a true aspiring biological anthropologist I disdain the entire concept of race, but if the premise is correct than it does seem that it is likely the melanin in the skin that slows the appearance of wrinkles. I would be interested to see anything on how Australian Aborigines age when live a life comparable to a middle class African-American.

This whole discussion is sopping with anthropomorphism. Animals haven't 'learned' anything of the kind. The whole kingdom minus humans didn't try out big brains for a while and then decide "Eh, this isn't really for us. Too much stress." Animals aren't 'smart' like humans are but that doesn't mean they don't have unique mental abilities. Think of the mental acumen it takes to coordinate eight tentacles at once, or to navigate a maze of vines and branches to find a favorite fruit tree. No gibbon could write the Odyssey, no gibbon could write at all, but really who cares? Certainly not the gibbon.

I didn't say all members of the population were sterile. I said those that differ functionally from the ancestrula would be unable to bud. Completely aside and not to reopen that discussion: There really are upright petrified trees. They occur a lot in coal deposits. Here is the Talk Origins page explaining them. I made a mistake on my response to, though. Corals with algae can't live more than 90m down. I am somewhat gratified that we seemed to make similar points. I take that to mean I can at least look like I sort of know what I'm talking about.

Likewise, I should think. If I sound a little offensive, its just how I sound when I get into it. Which one? Active Creator or passive Designer? There is a difference. This is something Creationists can get away with but evolutionists can't. You can be vague about your actual positions because most of Creationism is simply negative arguments concerning evolution. I'd just like to nip this argument and ones that stem from it in the bud here. When you look at a painting, you know it was made by an artist because you've seen artists make paintings before and you know what to look for. No one has seen God make a frog, so we couldn't know what to look for to identify divine creations. We tend to look at things that seem complicated and designed to us, but all that can possibly suggest is that those things were made by humans. We have no idea what God would be like, or what evidence of his creation would look like. It could be all around us or not present at all; we couldn't know. We do however know how nature works, and we can see evidence of its actions all over the earth. Parsimony holds that we make the fewest assumptions, and it is therefore more parsimonious to assume that nature (which we can know the mechanisms of) shaped earth rather than a Creator (who from a scientific perspective we can only make up the mechanisms of) who acts exactly like nature. We may well be wrong, but science can't deal in certainties. This a fairly comprehensive rebuttal to Noah's Flood. I would add another argument that I don't believe was covered in there (it has been a while since I read it). Noah and company would have had to done a good deal of scuba diving in addition to gathering two of every terrestrial animal on earth. We tend to think of only land animals being affected by sea levels, but most marine organisms are pretty locked into specific depths and temperatures. Raising the sea level enough to cover Mt Sinai would substantially mess with that. Corals and shallow water creatures are a perfect example. Most of the world's marine life lives in shallow waters on the continental shelf, many in coral reefs. Reef-building corals can't live below 600 m because of the needs of their symbiotic algae for sunlight. If all the continents were deluged there wouldn't be any coral left. Most animals don't just fossilize where they drop dead. They'll usually get washed in a gully or body of water and fossilize there. That mixes all sorts of creatures. Paleontologists don't deny the existence of floods, either. There have been plenty of them. They just don't hold to a global flood for the reasons laid out in that link. It's not the commonalities per se that are telling, but how they are distributed. Everything doesn't have exactly the same parts developed in exactly the same way from the embryo, as you might expect if organisms were factory produced. Parts converge and radiate and show a whole range of specialization from common patterns, and we can see this happening with a temporal dimension by looking at the fossil record. There are some major differences between many groups, but there are also underlying similarities that become more and more basic in more distantly related organisms. Mammals and earth worms share a body cavity but are different in almost every other way, for example. Ameobas and mammals share even fewer similarities, but are linked by there common possession of a nucleus and organelles. But evolution is the only mechanisms that allows the environment to change, as environments are absolutely want to do. If organisms were immutable, or simply fixed to a certain 'kind' (cats can't become dogs, to quote a common Creationist axiom), then wouldn't you expect to see a winnowing of diversity through time as environments change and organisms are magically unable to adapt? You do not however. There are more families of animals alive today than there ever have been in the entire fossil record. And those places are telling. Geologists know how to spot uplift and erosion and things that muck about with the order of strata, and they also realize that in most places all the strata won't be there (in East Tennessee, for example, most of the surface rocks are Cambrian-Ordovician if not older). This doesn't mean the rocks can't be recognized, however. Correlating rocks from the same relative age is actually rather easy, even if just looking at the rocks themselves. Limestone, for example, has only been layed down extensively in North America a few times, the last the in the Permian. A good geologist can spot Permian limestone and correlate it in one area to Permian limestone in another. Polystrate Trees These are the result of strata being rapidly laid down by local floods. Again, no one says floods can't happen. Yes, but not necessarily a global flood. They could also be the result of geologic action after the tree was fossilized. Not really. As I said, things don't usually fossilize where they fall. They are washed somewhere else. And fossils aren't organized in the fossil record by their 'natural location.' There are plenty of fish in Cenozoic strata and plenty of Pterodactyls in Mesozoic strata. And the fish in the higher Cenozoic strata look more modern than the fish in the lower Mesozoic strata. Funny coincidence, eh? I'll get to those articles eventually. Sorry, I'm kind of busy right now, or at least should be. As for the finches, whether or not they stayed finches is irrelevant. The Grants observed the mechanism of evolution in action. Unless you seek to propose some sort of magical line between what we have arbitrarily decided is a 'finch' and what we have decided isn't a 'finch', then there is no reason why this mechanism couldn't produce new 'non finches' if it continued to act long enough and was accompanies by some sort of reproductive isolation. I concur, they are completely different things. Evolution occurs because of the imperfect nature of heredity. Mutations slip though and change the genetic makeup of populations. But observing changes in species does, and this has been done. Instances of observed speciation.

*coughs* It's the way myriad evidence from all over nature comes together to lead one to believe that all life shares a common ancestor and has changed through time. You have the fossil record; you have comparative anatomy; you have genetics; you have all that geology can tell us about the earth's past; and finally you can observe evolution occurring in real time on earth today. Rosemary and Peter Grant did with Galapagos finches. Countless microbiologists and entomologists can similarly attest to observing selection molding gene frequencies in populations. This is evolution.

If you had an organism that was rendered sterile by any functional change in its genetic code relative to the population's progenitor, then you would have a population for which evolution was impossible. Imagine a coral or bryozoan colony where all the zooids are clones of the original ancestrula and any that derivate functionally from the ancestrula's genetic code cannot bud. It might be difficult to conceive and probably wouldn't last very long as species but it does seem possible, and would be an instance in which evolution was impossible. It might be more likely with a life-form for which the method of inheritance was different than it is on earth, perhaps more holistic.

I just really want to respond to this. Go to the link Phi sent you for more information, of course. If you really are a troll... you got me I suppose. Two problems: A. Humans didn't evolve from modern apes. We evolved from the earlier hominids (for which we have an excellent fossil record), who themselves evolved from one of the families of extinct 'apes' that lived in the Miocene. B. Evolution isn't a progressive 'march to humanity.' Evolution is the cumulative effect on the gene pool of a population of natural selection and random events like mutation, 'genetic drift', and gene flow between different populations. The other Miocene apes didn't evolve into hominids because they weren't subject to the same selective pressures as our direct ancestors were. Uranium series and Potassium-Argon dating, I believe. Someone might want to check me on that. No. The acceptance of an ancient earth came first in geology years before On the Origin of Species and the wide acceptance of biological evolution. It was based originally on the amount of time it would take natural processes to shape the geological features we see on the the earth and in the geologic record. Now it's backed up by absolute dating techniques provided by geochronology. No, because you aren't using the same columns and the same fossils. If you can absolutely date a layer of ash at Laetoli to 3 million years, and then you can find fossils in that ash and other dated locations that appear to occur in a limited period of time, then you can use those to arrive at provisional dates for sites for which absolute dates aren't available. That's how the date on the Toumai skull in Chad was arrived at. Ok. Archaeopteryx. Australopithecus. The Therapsid reptiles. There are many others which I can't name off of the top of my head. Talk Origins has a more complete listing. Here you go. The 'missing link' is a fallacious concept anyway. It presumes that there is some one moment when an animals stops being a 'fish' and starts being a 'frog', but it forgets the fact that 'fish' and 'frog' are just arbitrary distinctions we apply in retrospect. Any animal could be a 'missing link.' Because we know that chemicals can assemble naturally to form the compounds of life. Just because we can't do it doesn't mean it can't be done naturally. No one said it was simple. Again, just because we can't do it doesn't mean it can't happen naturally. I'm not sure about the technology now, but for most of human history we haven't been able to 'make' crystals. We can only allow them to precipitate naturally from a super-saturated solution. Does that mean crystals can only come from God? Live differently. The first living beings were probably chemosynthetic, which means they nourished themselves directly off of the chemicals in their environment. There are chemosythetic bacteria today in dark, anaerobic environments. It isn't. Abiogenesis and spontaneous generation are two slightly different things. Spontaneous generation holds that the air can contain a 'life force' that will manifest itself into life whenever the conditions are right. Abiogenesis simply holds that life may have first arisen from the proper combination of chemical in the primordial past.

Bloody interesting. Excellent find. Cats aren't similar to humans in the content of the actual code, but in the arrangement of the genes on the sex chromosomes. A remarkable convergency.

Here's an actual article on the subject: Molecular divergence between Carnivores and Primates

I can't find anything about that on the internet... Are you sure?

Uhm... no. The closest orders to Primates are those in the superorder Archonta, the treeshrews, bats, and flying lemurs. We're also possibly of some relation to the rodents and elephant shrews, the systematics are kind of fuzzy, but I've never heard that cats are very closely related to the primates, at least not more than any of the other Carnivora.

If you have a lifeform (a breeding population) for which change from one generation to the next is impossible, (an 'immutable form'), then you can't have evolution. That doesn't necessarily mean that the lifeform wouldn't be subject to Darwinian principles, however. If there were other lifeforms (mutable or immutable) competing with our immutable little subject, then natural selection would still have a hand in deciding the fate of the species. You would have an odd instance where natural selection was occuring without changing the genetic makeup of a population, i.e. evolving it. That doesn't happen on earth to the best of my knowledge.

That is a characteristic of primates. Primates are food to mouth feeders as opposed to mouth to food. We bring things into our mouths using our hands as opposed to sticking our heads down to what we're eating. This however, isn't a universal behavior among primates, nor is it unique to them. Squirrels also tend to feed food to mouth, as do other animals such as otters and many marsupials. Greater use of the hands in feeding, especially in retrieving food, is something that might have served to select for greater dexterity in the hands of early primates, however. Good point. Only a small proportion of primates create tools. Opposable thumbs are evident in the earliest adapiod and omomyiod primates from the early Eocence, about 50 million years ago. Tool manafacture is a little harder to pin down. After all, termite fishing sticks don't preserve very well in the fossil record, and if they did, who'd realize it? It could hardly have predated the mid Miocene, the period when you first start seeing really large-brained apes. Maybe 15 million years.

I know meat's an... unpleasant female... to digest. I doesn't require big bacterial fermenting chambers like folivores need, but it takes a lot of energy to break down all the proteins. Too much meat also causes health problems like higher incidences of colon cancer. Our systems just aren't designed to take it. Now as to why, physiologically, I'll leave that to someone who actually knows what he's talking about.

Stupid question: What's the ultimate difference between a mammalian molar and premolar? I can tell the difference between them in a given skull, the premolars are usually smaller and simpler (with exceptions of course), but are there any universal diagnostic features?

I'd be interested to hear the experiences of anyone's whose been the benificiary of a public school biology class in the Southern United States. How was Evolution covered? I go to a high school in East Tennesee, and here there's not so much hostility as indifference. People just don't want to broach the subject. I'd say about 60% of the students are Creationist, so teachers just prefer not to deal with it.

Oh no, all of my science teachers are evolutionist. Maybe its just because I don't go to the most advanced high school, and the 'controversy' is just easier than the actual population genetics and what-not. We also have block scheduling which limits the amount of curriculum you can cover. Georgia has some pretty good schools, too. I'd be interested to hear from people in say Alabama or Arkansas. In fact I think I might start a thread about that.

Yes... I know. And as you saw, it was something of a waste of time. Any contrary evidence can simply be incorporated as an exception or by softening the theory. And that's my point. AA doesn't fit with mosaic evolution, which is just the modern accepted interpretation of evidence that's been here for half a century. Not according to Stephen Jay Gould. Recapitulationsts would accept within their theory a broad range of exceptions, and due to the enormity of the body of evidence, they could always get away with it since just as many facts could be found to support Recapitulation. They also softened it considerably. After a while whole organisms weren't seen to recapitulate, only individual organs, and of course with exceptions all dubbed as 'cenogenesis' (adaptive evolution) as opposed to 'palingenesis' (true, or progressive evolution). Mendellian genetics and the shift to experimental embryology undid Recapitulation. The reason I mentioned Recapitulation specifically was because I got the notion that big theories are usually undone by a change in theoretical outlook from Phylogeny and Ontogeny, which was about that.

I'm stuck at my mother's school with a crappy computer a lot, so I'll edit when I'm there. I've never tried making an article.

Uhm... what? I don't think we're understanding each other, or at least I'm not understanding you at all. I grant that escaping predators is important, but all animals have to do it, and a lot of animals other than primates have to do it in trees. That doesn't explain why primates are different.

You have to consider the fact that most arboreal mammals don't look like primates. Arboreality can't be the only prime mover in primate evolution. Any arboreal animal is going to have to escape from predators, why do most still have claws, eyes on either side of the head, no post-orbital bars, etc?

This forum seems to be atrophying somewhat, so let's talk about primate origins! Does anyone have any personal favorite models? I like Rasmussen's idea. He sees the urprimates as mounting to the trees in order to exploit the new resource of fruits on terminal branches, but then evolving other adaptations (such as stereoscopic vision) for exploiting the insect resources that would be disturbed in the course of fruit foraging. It's a sort of synthesis of Cartmill's Visual Predation Hypothesis and Sussman's Angiosperm Hypothesis.