"Intelligent " Design ( I D )

[JHAQ]

Why is it that ID proponents look at modern complexity of any of lifes attributes & say it could never have been arrived at by chance but had to have had a "designer " ( usually their God ) . They totally ignore the power of incremental gradualism over huge time periods in bringing about change . It was 3.5 billion years ago the prokayotes evolved ( after an large amount of time ) & then another billion or so before an eukaryotic cell became functional . All metazoa ; that is ALL , came much later . To me this says an eternity of time was there for experimentation with molecular combinations to sort themselves out & produce a functioning entity which could be described as living . I suggest they read Edward O Wilson , Richard Dawkins & Stephen J Gould on such topics . An analogy might be to consider how the infinitisimals of calculus can be manipulated mathematically to describe very complex physical events .

[Edtharan]

Why is it that ID proponents look at modern complexity of any of lifes attributes & say it could never have been arrived at by chance but had to have had a "designer " ( usually their God ) .

I would guess it is because of fear. Fear of the unknown, Fear of death, Fear that their beliefs might be wrong, Fear that their life might not be of significance (in the grand scheme of things), Fear of morality (both theirs and others), Fear of abandonment (there is no one looking out for them) and so on.

[JHAQ]

Edtharan-- I would say you are exactly right because to accept evolution is to accept natural selection ( ns ) . Ns proceeds by death in many harsh brutal & often horrible ways -- accident , starvation . predation , climate change etc etc . The question then becomes how to reconcile that with a benign & loving God & would HE have created such a system .

[the tree]

Take yourself back to when you were a young child, back to when maths consisted of five symbols (+,-,X,%,=). Then, with that frame of mind, look at an image of fractal geometry and tell me you belive maths did that. With the same frame of mind, look at a wave and tell me you belive that can be boiled down to a few simple functions.

 

You see? When something is too complicated for you to see the system behind it, you don't want to belive that there is one. In the same way that you think that pretty swirly pattern was made by an artist, you want to belive that species were made by some god.

[Red_Ninja]

What's particularly hilarious about ID people and creationists (ever see them in the same room together?) is how they 'dumb down' God. God has to break his own laws to make the world we see.

 

I find it incredibly amusing that they would insult God in this way - he hasn't got the subtlety to create life by just setting the Universe off and allow it to follow its own laws. He can't think on a timescale of over 10,000 years. Ha ha.

[Chupacabra]

I'm not a proponent of ID "theory" (as an ecologist, in fact, cannot be). Still would like to show you some points unexplained by the darvinian evolutional theory.

 

1) natural selection promotes survival of the species most fit to certain environment. Still in can't explain why complex and highly organized creatures originated from more simple ones. Complexity doesn't correlate with survival chances; in fact, some primitive bacteria stay unchanged for billions of years perfectly fit for their environment;

2) why the consciousness appeared once in the course of evolution? It doesn't help to survive, in fact, the ability to reflect on our actions more often hampers our ability to make quick decisions. And, primitive men had the same mental abilities than we have. How the abilities like taking square roots or conceiving metaphysical systems helped primitive men to survive?

3) Darvinian theory has nothing to do with the appearance of life on Earth. There are no valid scientific theory to explain these.

[bascule]

I'm not a proponent of ID "theory" (as an ecologist' date=' in fact, cannot be). Still would like to show you some points unexplained by the darvinian evolutional theory.

 

1) natural selection promotes survival of the species most fit to certain environment. Still in can't explain why complex and highly organized creatures originated from more simple ones. Complexity doesn't correlate with survival chances; in fact, some primitive bacteria stay unchanged for billions of years perfectly fit for their environment;[/quote']

 

Progressive evolution occurs when circumstances bring about a "watershed event" where some higher level evolutionary problem is accidently solved in finding a solution to a lower level one. These watershed events include things like sexual reproduction and the leap to multicellularity. Progressive evolution can occur quite rapidly in the midst of an "arms race" between predator and prey (i.e. predator has to eat enough prey to avoid starvation. prey that get eaten before reproducing do not pass on their genes. therefore each must keep ahead of the other long enough to reproduce)

 

Dawkins wrote a large section devoted to this in The Ancestor's Tale which I quoted on this thread:

http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?p=228787#post228787

 

2) why the consciousness appeared once in the course of evolution?

 

It came after a long period of explosive brain growth in humans, which has been theorized to have been brought about in a number of different ways (and likely it did involve several factors working together), such as sexual selection, coevolution with the thumb and a leap to bipediality, and the benefits of being able to work effectively in groups which remain organized despite being geographically seperated.

 

It doesn't help to survive

 

How can you say that? Thanks to technology, no animal on the planet can take on a properly prepared human being. We can survive in any climate. We can repair injuries which would've killed any other animal. We can live for decades upon decades, and our population growth continues to be explosive. And we haven't had to speciate in order to do any of these things.

 

in fact, the ability to reflect on our actions more often hampers our ability to make quick decisions. And, primitive men had the same mental abilities than we have. How the abilities like taking square roots or conceiving metaphysical systems helped primitive men to survive?

 

The ability to exchange abstract information via spoken communication necessitates the capacity for abstract thought.

 

3) Darvinian theory has nothing to do with the appearance of life on Earth. There are no valid scientific theory to explain these.

 

The problem with explaining abiogenesis is the lack of anything resembling fossil evidence. That doesn't mean we haven't created all sorts of thoroughly plausible hypotheses for explaining it, just that we have no evidence for which one is true.

[Chupacabra]

How can you say that? Thanks to technology, no animal on the planet can take on a properly prepared human being. We can survive in any climate. We can repair injuries which would've killed any other animal. We can live for decades upon decades, and our population growth continues to be explosive. And we haven't had to speciate in order to do any of these things.

 

Remember one important thing: as archaeological evidence tells us, human brain hasn't changed noticeably for at least tens of thousand years. For the most of this period the technology remained very primitive, there was also little population growth. In fact, thinks like bipedality and large brain (entailing smaller jaw power, bigger parturient mortality etc.) hampered primitive humans significantly. Being so awkward and feeble, they were an easy catch for many ancient carnivorous. And their average longeivity was in fact much smaller than that of apes. Circa 70000 ys. ago they were even on the verge of extinction, remaining not more than several thousands on

the whole Earth. And natural selection doesn't work by "what'd be better over millenia", in works by "what's better now".

 

The ability to exchange abstract information via spoken communication necessitates the capacity for abstract thought.

 

That's inconsistent. The ability to exchange abstract information can't exist without the capacity for abstract thought.

Knowledge the primitive humans really required was very applied. The capacity for abstract thought in those remote times when we should've evolved led at best to the invention of religious practices and shamanic rites that took out time and energy from humans with little practical utility. Thus it couldn't evolve just by natural selection.

 

The problem with explaining abiogenesis is the lack of anything resembling fossil evidence. That doesn't mean we haven't created all sorts of thoroughly plausible hypotheses for explaining it, just that we have no evidence for which one is true.

 

Were any of them plausible, why the process hasn't as yet been reproduced in tube? Scientists can simulate the conditions in the middle of stars, what's wrong with abiogenesis?

[bascule]

Remember one important thing: as archaeological evidence tells us, human brain hasn't changed noticeably for at least tens of thousand years. For the most of this period the technology remained very primitive, there was also little population growth. In fact, thinks like bipedality and large brain (entailing smaller jaw power, bigger parturient mortality etc.) hampered primitive humans significantly. Being so awkward and feeble, they were an easy catch for many ancient carnivorous.

 

Unless armed with an assortment of hunting implements, and cultural knowledge of hunting skills, not to mention the best group hunting skills of any creature on the planet. The physical weakness of humans is more than made up for by our enhanced capacity for communication/socialization and technology. While one, unarmed human may be weak, a dozen armed humans, working together as a tightly knit unit, are a foe no predator can match.

 

And their average longeivity was in fact much smaller than that of apes. Circa 70000 ys. ago they were even on the verge of extinction, remaining not more than several thousands on the whole Earth. And natural selection doesn't work by "what'd be better over millenia", in works by "what's better now".

 

Correlation vs. causation fallacy. 70,000 years cooresponds to a mass extinction event following the eruption of the Toba supervolcano.

 

That's inconsistent. The ability to exchange abstract information can't exist without the capacity for abstract thought.

 

Yes, clearly the two evolved in tandem.

 

Knowledge the primitive humans really required was very applied. The capacity for abstract thought in those remote times when we should've evolved led at best to the invention of religious practices and shamanic rites that took out time and energy from humans with little practical utility. Thus it couldn't evolve just by natural selection.

 

Memes need not evolve for utility. They only need to be good replicators... something one human, for whatever reason, feels compelled to pass it onto another person. The better a meme is able to do this, the more successful it will be. It's for this reason that we see pathological memes like chain letters and urban legends.

 

Were any of them plausible, why the process hasn't as yet been reproduced in tube? Scientists can simulate the conditions in the middle of stars, what's wrong with abiogenesis?

 

We've created autocatalysts with variadic products. It's quite likely that such reactions have occured innumerable times throughout the course of the universe, and the chance of any of these reactions leading to the eventual formation of a chemical chain reaction as stable as the prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells is quite infintessimal. The improbability of abiogenesis is offset by two things: it need only happen once, and by the anthropic principle if it didn't happen we wouldn't be here to care.

[brad89]

while I am all for evolution, I do not understand a few things about it, my biggest problem is how something as complicated as "the valves in our veins" originated so that blood would flow forward.

[JohnB]

Were any of them plausible, why the process hasn't as yet been reproduced in tube? Scientists can simulate the conditions in the middle of stars, what's wrong with abiogenesis?

Time and mass. The occurrence of Abiogenesis is similar to the old "Infinite number of monkeys typing Shakespeare". We are talking about millions of square miles of Ocean over millions of years. How could you reasonably expect to recreate Abiogenesis with only a couple of litres over a couple of decades?

[Aardvark]

1) natural selection promotes survival of the species most fit to certain environment. Still in can't explain why complex and highly organized creatures originated from more simple ones. Complexity doesn't correlate with survival chances; in fact' date=' some primitive bacteria stay unchanged for billions of years perfectly fit for their environment; [/quote']

 

Evolution does explain why some organisms become more complex, where complexity does correlate with higher survival chances, for instance in a lifeform developing photosynthesis, or a plant producing a bitter alkaloid to ward off predation. Where complexity is not required, it does not develop. Which explains perfectly why some bacteria have remained unchanged for billions of years.

 

2) why the consciousness appeared once in the course of evolution? It doesn't help to survive, in fact, the ability to reflect on our actions more often hampers our ability to make quick decisions. And, primitive men had the same mental abilities than we have. How the abilities like taking square roots or conceiving metaphysical systems helped primitive men to survive?

 

There are a number of different theories that could explain the development of consciousness in humans. Having greater intelligence allows more communication and cooperation which would have obvious advantages in such matters as hunting, maintaining larger social groups, passing on information about threats, dangers and useful facts such as the location of water or shelter.

 

Alternatively sexual selection is a possibility. Just as the Peacocks feathers have little utilitarian purpose so the human brain could be the same, developed as an ornament.

 

Either way, there is nothing inherently inexplicable about the development of consciousness which challenges Darwinianism.

 

3) Darvinian theory has nothing to do with the appearance of life on Earth. There are no valid scientific theory to explain these.

 

Darwinian theory is nothing to do with the appearance of life on Earth. It does not pretend to explain it. Darwinian theory does not explain how jet engines work or what fuels the sun. That doesn't invalidate Darwinianism in any way.

[Chupacabra]

There are a number of different theories that could explain the development of consciousness in humans. Having greater intelligence allows more communication and cooperation which would have obvious advantages in such matters as hunting, maintaining larger social groups, passing on information about threats, dangers and useful facts such as the location of water or shelter.

 

Consciousness and intelligence are quite different things and shouldn`t be equated. In fact, most decisions we make in our life are unconscious (for those rejecting free will, in fact, all the decisions). Coordinated and purposeful group behavior requires neither consciousness nor high intelligence (look at insects like bees and ants, who also have complicated systems of communication). Likewise many mammals elaborated advanced hunting skills often involving highly-coordinated group behavior (look at wolves, lions etc.) The only thing exclusive for humans is the abstract thinking, but this didn`t influence significantly survival chances of primal humans and thus couldn`t have evolved by natural selection.

 

Alternatively sexual selection is a possibility. Just as the Peacocks feathers have little utilitarian purpose so the human brain could be the same, developed as an ornament.

I really like this hypothesis:-). Personally prefer smart girls

 

Darwinian theory is nothing to do with the appearance of life on Earth. It does not pretend to explain it. Darwinian theory does not explain how jet engines work or what fuels the sun. That doesn't invalidate Darwinianism in any way.

 

Yes, it doesn`t. But it certainly questions the overconfident claims that life and consciousness apperared by a pure chance owing to purely matherial processes, leaving no room for God, spirit, free will and afterlife. At best it`s only a hypothesis, not an evident fact.

[swansont]

Likewise many mammals elaborated advanced hunting skills often involving highly-coordinated group behavior (look at wolves' date=' lions etc.) The only thing exclusive for humans is the abstract thinking, but this didn`t influence significantly survival chances of primal humans and thus couldn`t have evolved by natural selection.

[/quote']

 

But humans are not as fast as most predators, not are we equipped with the same kind of "armament." If you can't see the survival advantages of things like pattern-recognition (for e.g. tracking game, vs. having a keen sense of smell with a nose several feet off the ground), or the ability to make tools and fire, then I think you just aren't trying very hard.

[bascule]

Coordinated and purposeful group behavior requires neither consciousness nor high intelligence (look at insects like bees and ants, who also have complicated systems of communication). Likewise many mammals elaborated advanced hunting skills often involving highly-coordinated group behavior (look at wolves, lions etc.)

 

Yes, but who would win in a battle of a dozen armed humans (for the sake of argument, armed with only primitive weapons like spears) vs. a dozen wolves or lions? Humans outsmart their prey while working as a group.

 

The only thing exclusive for humans is the abstract thinking, but this didn`t influence significantly survival chances of primal humans and thus couldn`t have evolved by natural selection.

 

This is simply ridiculous. Technology and advanced communciation/cooperation most certainly offer a survival advantage. You need to stop thinking of early humans as if they didn't have an advanced toolmaking culture (compared to any other animal at the time) which was as much the result of natural selection as their biological evolution was.

 

If you can't see the survival advantages of things like pattern-recognition (for e.g. tracking game, vs. having a keen sense of smell with a nose several feet off the ground), or the ability to make tools and fire, then I think you just aren't trying very hard.

 

I think Chupacabra is trying very hard to not see the obvious.

[Chupacabra]

Yes, but who would win in a battle of a dozen armed humans (for the sake of argument, armed with only primitive weapons like spears) vs. a dozen wolves or lions? [/i'].

 

Not sure about this, esp. about lions. What about the stories of a few raging elefants devastating whole villages in India? Or single cannibal lions killing scores of people before being hunted? Or even not-so-intelligent creatures like locust or malaria plasmodium?

 

This is simply ridiculous. Technology and advanced communciation/cooperation most certainly offer a survival advantage. You need to stop thinking of early humans as if they didn't have an advanced toolmaking culture (compared to any other animal at the time) which was as much the result of natural selection as their biological evolution was.

 

Humans are not so fast, they have very poor hearing and scent comparing to most animals, without fur they are susceptible to cold, their muscular power is many times smaller than that of most apes, their stomack cannot digest hard food etc., etc. Looks like humans evolved not because of natural selection but CONTRARY to it. Yes, primal humans could make fire and knives, but animals just don't need fire, having got a fur, likewise they don't need knives, having got claws and fangs. Imagine you provided gorillas with fire. Would they benefit from it in their environment? Not sure.

[padren]

Humans are not so fast, they have very poor hearing and scent comparing to most animals, without fur they are susceptible to cold, their muscular power is many times smaller than that of most apes, their stomack cannot digest hard food etc., etc. Looks like humans evolved not because of natural selection but CONTRARY to it. Yes, primal humans could make fire and knives, but animals just don't need fire, having got a fur, likewise they don't need knives, having got claws and fangs. Imagine you provided gorillas with fire. Would they benefit from it in their environment? Not sure.

 

What you say is contrary, is IMO, more an indicator of when roughly we branched off towards intelligence as the strongest survival aid. Bigger brains trumped bigger teeth and claws...so the humans with bigger brains did better than the ones with bigger teeth and claws. The moment we could make and wear clothes and weapons, there was no evolutionary pressure to evolve towards having fur or claws. Interestingly, a theoretical mutation that caused us to have worse "fur" would actually be a survival aid, as we would be smart enough to wear animal furs in the cold, yet be adaptable to hot areas. I am really not sure how much general mutating went on from the time we became intelligent till now, since I think humans with our intelligence are very new on an evolutionary time scale (a biologist would know more).

 

A Gorilla evolved to deal with its environment based on its raw physical form and instinct, with limited learning skills. It got good enough at it unless it's environment changes significantly, there will be no evolutionary push towards utilizing tools including fire.

[bascule]

Not sure about this, esp. about lions.

 

One of the books on my shelves is Facing the Lion, a story of the African lion hunt, which is performed with "traditional" weapons which any primitive human could've fashioned. If you have a culture of lion hunting with primitive weapons, it doesn't pose an issue. No humans were killed in the process of hunting the lions. When these African tribes decide to hunt the lions, the lions are screwed. A group of humans with the technology and cultural knowledge of how to defeat an animal foe are a force no animal can reckon with. If they do manage to take down a human, it's through that individual's ineptitude, or sheer luck.

 

Here's a quote from the book:

 

During the middle of the night, I woke to this huge sound - like rain, but not really like rain. I looked up. The starlight was gone, clouds were everywhere, and there was a light drizzle falling. But that wasn't the sound. The sound was all of the cows staring to pee. All of them, in every direction. And that is the sign of a lion. A hyena doesn't make them do that. An elephant doesn't make them do that. A person doesn't. Only the lion. We knew right away that a lion was about to attack us.

 

And therein lies the beauty of cultural knowledge, of memetic evolution. Look at the massive amount of cultural knowledge about lions this statement represents. This statement comes from a child who is going on his first lion hunt. He has never encountered a lion before, but thanks to the culture of his people, he is able to ascertain from his surroundings that one is approaching, from only pissing cows which he is able to distinguish from falling rain.

 

This is what you are completely overlooking. Whereas with most animals, the amount of culture that needs to be transmitted in order for an individual to be able to survive is realtively small, with humans it is vast, but the advantages it confers are enormous. Anyone who lacks the cultural knowledge needed to survive is naturally selected out, but those who do survive possess a vastly greater survival ability with each passing generation. Memetic evolution occurs at an exponentially increasing pace, one which increases the survivability of the species orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution ever could.

 

What about the stories of a few raging elefants devastating whole villages in India? Or single cannibal lions killing scores of people before being hunted?

 

Knowing the specifics of these scenarios might be interesting, but I would guess this all comes down to ill-preparedness. Humans react best when they have a culture based around a practice and are prepared for a specific encounter. Those who are ambushed or otherwise ill-prepared are naturally selected out. But a group with shared cultural knowledge of how to survive a particular situation, working together to ensure that the entire group survives become an insurmountable foe to any predator (or group thereof). One human which comes up with one neat trick to defeat a particular enemy can spread it to the entire group almost instantly. If it works, it becomes part of their shared cultural knowledge, and will likely be passed onto the next generation, especially if the same foe is encountered repeatedly.

 

Or even not-so-intelligent creatures like locust or malaria plasmodium?

 

Disease is a foe primitive man was clearly below taming. But it's also one common to all animals on earth. Pestilance is one which only plagued man after the agricultural revolution, after man had developed an elaborate infrastructure to remain self-supporting, and had a genotype which was, for all intents and purposes, identical to the one we possess today. At that point our genetic evolution was essentially "complete".

 

Humans are not so fast

 

You don't have to be fast if you can use long range weapons like spears, bows and arrows, atlatls, build traps, etc.

 

they have very poor hearing and scent comparing to most animals

 

But can relay abstract messages among group members, so what one hears, or smells, or sees, all can be made aware of.

 

without fur they are susceptible to cold

 

But can fashion clothes (and build fires). Clothes mean you don't need fur, and not having fur means you don't have to spend half your day picking parasites off of your buddies.

 

their muscular power is many times smaller than that of most apes

 

But can build tools and simple machines which greatly amplify their strength.

 

their stomack cannot digest hard food etc., etc.

 

Many primates don't depend on a diet of cellulose, in which case their caelum is vestigial.

 

Looks like humans evolved not because of natural selection but CONTRARY to it.

 

Or perhaps the advantages offered by technology and culture can make up for those which aren't given to us at birth via genetics.

 

Yes, primal humans could make fire and knives, but animals just don't need fire, having got a fur, likewise they don't need knives, having got claws and fangs.

 

And contrarily, humans didn't need fur, since they have clothing and fire, and don't need claws and fangs, since they have knives, spears, bows and arrows, blowguns etc.

 

You continue to overlook the simple fact that the sociotechnological advantages which can only come through the human ability to comprehend abstract knowledge make up for whatever disadvantages our other genes bring about.

 

The human brain, coupled with technology and culture, provided enough of a survival advantage to make up for our other physical deficiencies.

 

You really need to read Dawkins' book The Extended Phenotype. This very much seems to be the concept you are failing to grasp in terms of human evolution. Phenotype extends well beyond mere genetics, and without focusing on the full range of phenotypical manifestations of a species, you cannot begin to ascertain how that species survives in its natural environment.

[swansont]

Humans are not so fast, they have very poor hearing and scent comparing to most animals, without fur they are susceptible to cold, their muscular power is many times smaller than that of most apes, their stomack cannot digest hard food etc., etc. Looks like humans evolved not because of natural selection but CONTRARY to it. Yes, primal humans could make fire and knives, but animals just don't need fire, having got a fur, likewise they don't need knives, having got claws and fangs. Imagine you provided gorillas with fire. Would they benefit from it in their environment? Not sure.

 

 

All of this argues for intelligence being an advantage. We didn't evolve the way of claws, superior strength, fur, keen eyesight and smell, because those niches are occupied. We ended up along a path that led to superior intelligence, and leveraged that.

[Chupacabra]

One of the books on my shelves is Facing the Lion, a story of the African lion hunt, which is performed with "traditional" weapons which any primitive human could've fashioned. If you have a culture of lion hunting with primitive weapons, it doesn't pose an issue. No humans were killed in the process of hunting the lions. When these African tribes decide to hunt the lions, the lions are screwed. A group of humans with the technology and cultural knowledge of how to defeat an animal foe are a force no animal can reckon with. If they do manage to take down a human, it's through that individual's ineptitude, or sheer luck.

 

The technology posessed by modern African tribes can by no ways be compared to that of palaeolitic men, it by far surpasses it in every aspect. E. g. people you are talking about should've got iron pikes, knifes and spearheades, and ironmelting is a comparatively recent invention.

 

Your knowledge on early humans seems to be out-of-dated. They were mostly scavengers, only occasionally hunting small animals and birds, being unable to kill a single mammoth. They perished from predators en masse, but actually benefited from them, picking the remains of their meals. Also they picked from the corpses of already dead mammothes.

 

You don't have to be fast if you can use long range weapons like spears, bows and arrows, atlatls, build traps, etc.

 

Would the early hunter benefit from the better eyesight or hearing, however intelligent he is? Would people leaving near the edge of glacier benefit from a dense fur, however good are their clothes-making skills? Would early humans living in dangerous and challenging environment benefit from speed and muscular power? So why all these abilities evolved the other way round?

 

The problem with your views: you are putting the cart before the horse. Looks like humans were given the large brains and week bodies to stimulate their mental activity.

Natural selection hasn`t led to the apperarance of humans, it simply was unable to wipe them out thanks to the combination of favourable conditions, at the same time being a stimulus for the technological advance (memetic evolution you are talking about).

[swansont]

Would the early hunter benefit from the better eyesight or hearing' date=' however intelligent he is? Would people leaving near the edge of glacier benefit from a dense fur, however good are their clothes-making skills? Would early humans living in dangerous and challenging environment benefit from speed and muscular power? So why all these abilities evolved the other way round?

 

The problem with your views: you are putting the cart before the horse. Looks like humans were given the large brains and week bodies to stimulate their mental activity.

Natural selection hasn`t led to the apperarance of humans, it simply was unable to wipe them out thanks to the combination of favourable conditions, at the same time being a stimulus for the technological advance (memetic evolution you are talking about).

[/quote']

 

 

That's not how evolution works. Just because some trait might be an advantage under some circumstances does not mean that it will appear in a population. Cart before the horse, indeed.

 

Evolution is constrained by what genetic material is present right now, and with what you are competing for survival.

[Jim]

Why is it that ID proponents look at modern complexity of any of lifes attributes & say it could never have been arrived at by chance but had to have had a "designer " ( usually their God ) . They totally ignore the power of incremental gradualism over huge time periods in bringing about change . It was 3.5 billion years ago the prokayotes evolved ( after an large amount of time ) & then another billion or so before an eukaryotic cell became functional . All metazoa ; that is ALL , came much later . To me this says an eternity of time was there for experimentation with molecular combinations to sort themselves out & produce a functioning entity which could be described as living . I suggest they read Edward O Wilson , Richard Dawkins & Stephen J Gould on such topics . An analogy might be to consider how the infinitisimals of calculus can be manipulated mathematically to describe very complex physical events .

 

I have a hard time imagining what life was like when my mother was young. When I once held a Roman coin I felt like I was touching a party of antiquity. Yet my mother's birth and the Roman civilization occurred during the last fraction of a fraction of a second on a 24 hour cosmic clock. I do not find it surprising that people do not intuitively appreciate the length of time life has been evolving on this planet.

[bascule]

*sigh*

 

The technology posessed by modern African tribes can by no ways be compared to that of palaeolitic men, it by far surpasses it in every aspect. E. g. people you are talking about should've got iron pikes, knifes and spearheades, and ironmelting is a comparatively recent invention.

 

I didn't read about any metal weapons in that book...

 

Your knowledge on early humans seems to be out-of-dated. They were mostly scavengers, only occasionally hunting small animals and birds, being unable to kill a single mammoth.

 

You're kind of all over the place in terms of timeframes. Humans took millions of years to evolve. From now on, if you want to make arguments about selection pressures on human ancestors, please define the timeframe and why you think the selection pressures on our ancestors during that timeframe are inadequate to explain the emergence of man.

 

Approximately 10,000 years ago, there were most certainly mammoth hunters.

 

Would the early hunter benefit from the better eyesight or hearing, however intelligent he is?

 

Yes, but he's not going to get it from natural selection unless the need is so dire that he dies without it.

 

Would people leaving near the edge of glacier benefit from a dense fur, however good are their clothes-making skills?

 

Yes, but if their clothing is enough to keep them alive then there's no selection pressure.

 

Would early humans living in dangerous and challenging environment benefit from speed and muscular power? So why all these abilities evolved the other way round?

 

Because the selection pressures were solved by technology.

 

Natural selection looks for the "good enough" solution.

 

Natural selection hasn`t led to the apperarance of humans

 

It wasn't?

 

it simply was unable to wipe them out thanks to the combination of favourable conditions

 

Actually, it was likely an unfavorable change in conditions (deforestation of Africa and conversion to a savannah) that lead to the divergence of the population comprised of our common ancestor with chimpanzees.

[FreeThinker]

 

Would the early hunter benefit from the better eyesight or hearing' date=' however intelligent he is? Would people leaving near the edge of glacier benefit from a dense fur, however good are their clothes-making skills? Would early humans living in dangerous and challenging environment benefit from speed and muscular power? So why all these abilities evolved the other way round?

.[/quote']

 

If the brain allready offered these advantages in a different way, where would natural selection apply the pressure? If you have someone who has dense fur, and someone that can make fire, natural selection would favour the "making fire" human. The human with more fur wuld have more weight to carry and therefor would not get away.

[Chupacabra]

That's not how evolution works. Just because some trait might be an advantage under some circumstances does not mean that it will appear in a population. Cart before the horse, indeed. Evolution is constrained by what genetic material is present right now, and with what you are competing for survival.

 

Imagine the animal ancestor of humans. If it were as week physically as we are, but with much smaller mental abilities, it most certainly just couldn't survive the competition and would't exist at all. Then, if it were more strong and agile, like modern apes, then why it evolved into "weaker" creature? It's better to be smart AND physically strong then either one of the two, anyway.

 

*sigh*

You're kind of all over the place in terms of timeframes. Humans took millions of years to evolve. From now on' date=' if you want to make arguments about selection pressures on human ancestors, please define the timeframe and why you think the selection pressures on our ancestors during that timeframe are inadequate to explain the emergence of man.[/quote']

 

Well, Homo sapiens before the neolitic revolution. The animal bones processed with primitive tools of palaeolitic humans almost always also bear the marks of the large predator`s fangs, implying humans were scavengers (human bones with such marks are also abundant). This corresponds to the technical impossibility of challenging large animals with primitive tools found on archaeological sites.

 

Approximately 10,000 years ago, there were most certainly mammoth hunters.

 

Not sure. Besides, Homo sapiens were anatomically formed 200-500,000 years ago, so 10,000 years is inappropriate anyway.

 

Yes, but he's not going to get it from natural selection unless the need is so dire that he dies without it.

 

Why not, if the more agile and sensitive hunter will get the most food and will not suffer from hunger?