Evolution, Me or us?

[reverse]

Any one care to take point with one of the following?

 

1 : Creatures evolve to greater complexity.

 

2 : A human being is a collection of smaller life forms.

 

3 : unused structures remain latent within the genetic coding and may be re-expressed

at a later date.

 

4 : people are highly specialised worms - with fancy sensors and limbs and other energy storage and distribution systems tacked on.

 

5 : In that primeval pond at the dawn of time we looked fairly similar to the microscopic viruses that are now competing for life with us.

 

6 : It is the most foolish thing to think of a person as an individual organism because we can not synthesize sunlight directly, therefore are at best symbiotic.

[Artorius]

just for starters point 5..... what pond? how can we have looked similar to viruses,WE WERE'nt there!!

come on your just making this up are you not:)

[Ophiolite]

how can we have looked similar to viruses' date='WE WERE'nt there!!

[/quote']

I think reverses underlying contention is that there is very little to distinguish us from primitive life. (Who wants to challenge the notion that viruses are alive?) We are just an agglomeration of inherently simple forms. So, in that sense we were there, just not assembled in our present form.

[Artorius]

what pond!!!

Nobody cannot state such a primordial soup ever existed or was the catalist for all life.Well they can but its superstitious hogwash...

[Ophiolite]

1: Creatures evolve to greater complexity.

It depends what you mean by this. The statement appears simple, but carries some important and contentious implications.

Which of these options do you mean?

A: The overwhelming drive of evolution has been towards ever greater complexity. This has been true whether we are speaking at the level of phyla or of species.

B: Some creatures evolve to greater complexity, but others become simpler, while others may change, but not in terms of complexity.

C: Other

 

2 : A human being is a collection of smaller life forms.

Partially true. There is little doubt that the complexity of Eukaryotic cells is due to the absorbtion, through symbiosis, of formerly independent organisms. However, this absorbtion is so complete that the statement would only be true today in a poetical sense. (Or are you thinking, for example, of the bacteria in our gut that are essential to effective digestion.)

 

3 : unused structures remain latent within the genetic coding and may be re-expressed at a later date.

True.

 

4 : people are highly specialised worms - with fancy sensors and limbs and other energy storage and distribution systems tacked on.

Fine. And worms are highly generalised people. And brachiopods are just sharks without a skeleton, but a really big lopophore. This seems so general as to lack meaning.

 

5 : In that primeval pond at the dawn of time we looked fairly similar to the microscopic viruses that are now competing for life with us.

No, we didn't. We are almost unrelated to viruses. 'We' looked like Archaebacteria and mycoplasmas.

 

6 : It is the most foolish thing to think of a person as an individual organism because we can not synthesize sunlight directly, therefore are at best symbiotic.

If you are a mushroom you are entitled to foolish thinking.

[Ophiolite]

what pond!!!

Nobody cannot state such a primordial soup ever existed or was the catalist for all life.Well they can but its superstitious hogwash...

My experience of pig cleansing confirms that hogwash contain a bewildering variety of amino acids' date=' peptides, porphyrins, proteins, other organic molecules, bacteria and viruses. So, excellent comparison. I'm not sure about the superstitious bit. Did you mean interstitial? Perhaps you were thinking of Cairns-Smith's hypothesis that life arose on clay mineral templates. (See more on this at my post here..

http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showpost.php?p=120281&postcount=55)

[reverse]

Great thanks, yes it's a bit poetic, just to inspire new thoughts on old themes.

 

as for the pond, it would have been much harder for life on earth to start on land .so I thought pond.

You are right I wasn’t there.

do you think some of the primary instructions in your present actual DNA code was there? most likely.

 

and the worm.

That came from the observation that all really strong feelings seem to come from a small median line extending between both orifices.

 

take away all the other structures, what do you get - a long gut with a directional passage for food.

a worm.

[reverse]

Artorius.

 

Did you have another idea on how life on earth took it's first foothold?

 

would be very interested to hear it.

 

liquid borne is the only one I have come up with so far.

 

tx boot.

[reverse]

Ophiolite.

 

just read your linked post.

 

hey , never thought of that.

 

but have noticed how the path of rust under paint reflects exactly the path of a river from the air and how both look like blood vessels and other structures employed by living things.

 

liked the microchip thing.

 

how about this.

 

if we looked like bacteria back in that (possible) pond-

 

and some of us went for an increase in size and complexity and cooperative behaviour-

 

while others refused to evolve, opting to stay small, individual and low in complexity-

 

how strange that bacteria type forms and that sort of thing, are a much greater threat to our species than even the most refined predator.

 

they took the easy way, and might win in the end!

[Artorius]

Im very comfortable with the fact that god created all life.What im not comfortable with is someone from a scientific stance using the cup-a-soup theory as though it had any scientific basis in fact.When clearly it is no more credible than alien visitation,relieving themselves behind bushes and polluting the earths environment with its bacteria.When something cannot be scrutinised by the scientific method its a guess..so the answer to what pond/soup...should have been multiorganicatany.

[reverse]

strange thought.

 

really abstract and out there.

 

you don’t suppose the earth is alive do you?

 

like one huge organism floating in space?

 

and the weather and volcanic systems are its form of breathing?

 

and all the creatures upon it are a scaled up version of all the microscopic organisms within our bodies assisting our life processes?

 

you don’t suppose that the internet and television and radio are the very beginnings of its emerging rudimentary conscious.

 

man I gotta lay of this coffee.

 

tx boot.

 

 

.

[Artorius]

not reallllllllyyyy.....perhaps you and LSD dont get along that well...

[Martin]

Great thanks' date=' yes it's a bit [b']poetic[/b], just to inspire new thoughts on old themes.

 

as for the pond, it would have been much harder for life on earth to start on land .so I thought pond.

You are right I wasn’t there.

do you think some of the primary instructions in your present actual DNA code was there? most likely.

 

and the worm.

That came from the observation that all really strong feelings seem to come from a small median line extending between both orifices.

 

take away all the other structures, what do you get - a long gut with a directional passage for food.

a worm.

 

then David Slavitt is your poet

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~wh/samples/slavitt.html

 

GUTS

 

All that fine-tuned high-toned discrimination,

where does it get you? Evaporating like foam

on the hard line of hot sand, it's cute

but has nothing to do with the depth or pressure of truth's

 

mucky bed. To feel in the guts is to claim

less but more, their crude fundamental reports

being of pain or not, distention or

relief, or the pleasant fullness of having dined

 

well. The head is a clever place but hardly

the domicile of the self, that big but shy

tube-within-a-tube, that deep-sea creature

of autonomic certainties you invoke

 

as too dumb to lie when something matters

enough for it to notice or care about.

Or let it be rather that lazy baby

you once were and still largely are,

 

with rage and content its only modes, brooking

no nonsense except its own. Words

always fail, don't they, and meaning, prior

and urgent, slithers away. That imperious being

 

is all you can trust--even when it comes

to the bad news. The five senses fool you,

but here is common sense, the sixth sense

you never like to speak of, even though

 

it keeps your manor going--or the chateau

where you play the lord while strains of music offer

genteel diversion; but you remain alert

to catch one of its slight but ominous rumbles.

 

 

"that big but shy

tube-within-a-tube, that deep-sea creature

of autonomic certainties you invoke"

 

our intestinal tract evolved among deep sea creatures, perhaps, and so

internally we still are this deepsea creature, our gut, but just equipped with modern accessories like arms and legs and eyes and ears and brain

 

I think you are saying this. so meet David Slavitt a prettygood living american poet

[reverse]

"not reallllllllyyyy.....perhaps you and LSD dont get along that well..."

 

how is that going to move the ideas along!

 

fyi , never touched drugs.

 

have had four years formal training in lateral thinking as well as art and engineering type education.

 

God has all the time in the world, did you consider that he may have decided to start us in a pond as soup?

[Ophiolite]

but have noticed how the path of rust under paint reflects exactly the path of a river from the air and how both look like blood vessels and other structures employed by living things.

Fractals. One of the unifying features of the Universe.

 

how strange that bacteria type forms and that sort of thing' date=' are a much greater threat to our species than even the most refined predator.

they took the easy way, and might win in the end![/quote'] They won in the beginning, have never lost and stand no chance of losing. The total mass of microbial life far exceeds that of all plants and animals on the planet. They can handle virtually every extreme the planet offers. [You liked my last link, so try this one - the second part http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showpost.php?p=105281&postcount=4 ]

And when the unseen comet comes out of the glare of the sun, giving us four days warning of doom, those little buggers will be sitting calmly waiting a convenient blast into space - onwards and upwards; to infinity and beyond -so they can drift through the void to a convenient new planet and start the process again.

 

you don’t suppose the earth is alive do you?

 

like one huge organism floating in space?

The Day the Earth Screamed Arthur Conan Doyle

[Ophiolite]

When clearly the cup-a-soup theory[/i'] is no more credible than alien visitation,relieving themselves behind bushes and polluting the earths environment with its bacteria..

Both are plausible explanations. Occam's razor would push us towards the former.

[AL]

Im very comfortable with the fact that god created all life.What im not comfortable with is someone from a scientific stance using the cup-a-soup theory as though it had any scientific basis in fact.When clearly it is no more credible than alien visitation,relieving themselves behind bushes and polluting the earths environment with its bacteria.When something cannot be scrutinised by the scientific method its a guess..so the answer to what pond/soup...should have been multiorganicatany.

 

A cup-a-soup hypothesis is scientifically testable. If abiogenesis from ordinary molecules in a primordial soup occurred, it would be theoretically possible to duplicate it in a lab. Many have tried (Miller & Urey for instance), and all have unfortunately failed. But failure does not prove it is impossible. It at best proves no one knows how to do it yet.

 

A "God did it" hypothesis is not testable, though you may be able to test some implications of it and from that possibly make a weak induction that God really did do it, but that's another topic altogether and I don't want to sidetrack this one.

[reverse]

Artorius.

 

God creating all things is fine with me.

 

science satisfies curiosity, but can never satisfy the soul.

 

in the end even a belief in science can be considered faith.

 

True story.

 

Exiting an aircraft the first time with a parachute, looking down at the ground, I realised that the concept of air and gravity and all the things I held as fact were simply a matter of faith.

I found myself realising that I had just taken my teachers word for most of the scientific principles I was about to trust my life to.

 

but what the heck I thought.

 

I took a leap of faith , a leap of faith in science.

 

But still a leap of faith none the less.

 

Ok, perhaps the palm of the person waiting to exit behind me shoved into my back made it a little easier.

[reverse]

hey Martin. great poem.

 

try this.

 

remember the sensations of say fear and pride and shock and excitement etc and see if you can place them along your median line (from input port to exit port).

the strangest one is one of extreme affection, it seems to sit in the heart, or is that just social conditioning?

[reverse]

And when the unseen comet comes out of the glare of the sun,

 

that made me laugh.

 

you just had to throw the dramatic in there for effect.

 

somehow I don’t think comets have to employ world war two fighter tactics to sneak up on unsuspecting planets.

it's more like, I’m a big flaming comet what are you gonna do about it.

[Vladimir]

Creatures evolve to greater complexity.

Smaller life forms have a grater chance of survival in a competative environment, therefore it is actually better for the species to remain simple

[Ophiolite]

Complexity and size are not necessarily related.

 

Smaller life forms have a grater chance of survival in a competative environment

Not true. If it were we wouldn't have blue whales.

[Vladimir]

Ofcourse its true, do you understand how much a blu whale eats? why just form its left overs singular celled organisms can feast and grow

[Sayonara]

you just had to throw the dramatic in there for effect.

 

somehow I don’t think comets have to employ world war two fighter tactics to sneak up on unsuspecting planets.

it's more like' date=' I’m a big flaming comet what are you gonna do about it.[/quote']

No, that really is how they can approach undetected. As in one very recent extreme-close-call flyby showed.

[Ophiolite]

Ofcourse its true, do you understand how much a blu whale eats? why just form its left overs singular celled organisms can feast and grow

 

I think you are missing the point. If there were no competitive advantage in being large there would not be any large animals. (Equally, if there were no competitive advantage in being small there would not be any small animals.)