Crayfish wrote:It is interesting to consider which genetic traits are currently being passed on at the highest frequency though. Are they those of the career minded, educated, athletic intellectuals who get so involved in life that they end up having time for a couple of kids at most, or those of the workshy troglodytic scrotes who see kids as child benefit income and sit on their ass pumping them out for their entire adult life?
Makes you warm to eugenics just a little in that darkened corner of your heart, doesn't it
This is a sociological problem though. The problems a trailer trash family have are almost nothing to do with genes.
Yes, you are "excepted" from normal conversation (due to being stupid). I was going to try to make a few points about why you're wrong in your post, but I feel it would be wasted.
really thinking about it we could of come from anywhere. even from an alien science lab. we could of been made to reproduce on planets and then self destruct. we could of been created by god or by evolution. science or christans cannot fully justify what really happend. all the christans have got to go on is a book. the sciencetist only has dna patterns and theorys. the past is still unclear nor is the future. but theres still one more think out there. this so called scientology i think its called. which is completly a load of lies just to make more money from a book.
tombom wrote:
This is a sociological problem though. The problems a trailer trash family have are almost nothing to do with genes.
(you probably already know this)
Not sure, it could easily be half and half. I'm not sure if 'trailer park trash' (USA) is the same situation as 'council' (UK). I suspect there are similarities.
At least here, while I don't believe that everyone on a council estate is genetically predisposed to be stupid and lacking in motivation, I do believe that in this demographic there is a higher proportion of these unadmirable traits than would be found in a sample of e.g. scientists or businesspeople.
Sociological concerns can only reach so far, it's more than possible to extricate oneself from an impoverished situation in a western society given enough merit. A lot either choose not to or are intrinsically unable.
Rewarding delinquency and SPECIFICALLY the overproduction of children (here in the UK the poor/unwaged get a quite reasonable regular payment for the support of each child they have to maintain) doesn't bode well in terms of the future genepools, which would be increasingly dominated by less desirable traits.
I've heard a speculation that (as higher-achieving humans tend not to breed with the unwashed masses), distinct species could arise as the estate denizens deteriorate into goblinesque idiocy while those in the social environment that rewards effort and success will exclusively interbreed. With little or no gene flow between the two populations, this would eventually be expected to lead to a sympatric speciation event.
That one's all bollocks of course because the distribution of these traits is relatively normal rather than so clearly bimodal. Make a great scifi story though.
Not sure, it could easily be half and half. I'm not sure if 'trailer park trash' (USA) is the same situation as 'council' (UK). I suspect there are similarities.
Oh man, I'm a Brit and used that term in order to avoid confusing you because I thought you were American! BOY IS MY FACE RED
I really can't think of anything genetic that's wrong with council estate style people though. I guess it's possible.
I'm not so sure about macroevolution (changing from a species of ape to human) being right. There has to be many genes together changing in order to cause a new species to evolve, offspring coming from different, but closely related species are usually infertile, and there's only sparse evidence of macroevolution existing. Plus, we don't know enough about DNA to say that it does. As far as I'm concerned, we could have all come from some sort of sea creature that no longer exists (because of mutations which involve gills and webbed feet in people) just as easily as we could have an ape if I were going by the Evolution Theory.
Last edited by Panda on 27 Mar 2008, 03:28, edited 1 time in total.
Panda wrote:I'm not so sure about macroevolution (changing from a species of ape to human) being right. There has to be many genes together changing in order to cause a new species to evolve, offspring coming from different, but closely related species are usually infertile, and there's only sparse evidence of macroevolution existing. Plus, we don't know enough about DNA to say that it does. As far as I'm concerned, we could have all come from some sort of sea creature that no longer exists (because of mutations which involve gills and webbed feet in people) just as easily as we could have an ape if I were going by the Evolution Theory at all.
Species is a very nebulous term. Macroevolution is the same process as evolution, it's just the term for studying the long term changes. The many genes changing happens over many years, and usually after separation between the two species so they evolve in different ways. There is a lot of evidence for it. There's a very good reason we can't have come from "some sort of sea creature" - we have too many similarities to apes for it all to be a coincidence, the amount of change to come from a sea animal to a human in 2 million years would be immense and the fossil record doesn't make any sense like that.
We know a lot about DNA and evolution in general - it's kind of insane IMO to go "WELL A CERTAIN TYPE OF ARBITRARILY DEFINED EVOLUTION DOESN'T EXIST" when we have so much evidence for it and it's been studied in such detail.
Panda wrote:I'm not so sure about macroevolution (changing from a species of ape to human) being right. There has to be many genes together changing in order to cause a new species to evolve, offspring coming from different, but closely related species are usually infertile, and there's only sparse evidence of macroevolution existing. Plus, we don't know enough about DNA to say that it does. As far as I'm concerned, we could have all come from some sort of sea creature that no longer exists (because of mutations which involve gills and webbed feet in people) just as easily as we could have an ape if I were going by the Evolution Theory at all.
We do come from sea creatures, as does all life on land. Remember that we're talking a timescale of literally billions of years with the history of life, and around 500 million years with the history of large multicellular life. Those are just numbers, but try for a moment to think about how long a period they really represent. It's almost unimaginable, and a lot of time for relatively slow processes to cause major change (actually not that slow except relative to our limited temporal frames).
Of course the sea creatures preceded the apes by a long way, but (also obviously) apes retain similar features to ourselves that are reminiscent of a marine existence.
I don't have the time to go into all the evidence for 'macroevolution' and the full human ancestry right now (I will later), but as someone who works in biological research the words 'I'm not sure if evolution really happens' strike a similar chord to telling a computer scientist 'I'm not sure that computers can really be programmed'. We truly, unequivocally answered that question decades ago and are onto the much finer details now.
SwiftSpear wrote:Why is it called a "council estate"?
The local council owns the homes and then people live there who are too poor to afford anything better. During the 1980s a lot were sold off to the people living in them but there's still the same stigma. Wikipedia has an ok explanation I guess!
evidence is not proof. Science is based on observation. We have the assertion that macro evolution is real but it is no more real then saying that the world came from creationism. Micro evolution is an observable phenomeon but most of the scientific community has rejected the origonal theory of evolution and while some concepts are good to use as assumptions we really do not know how things were created because we have not observed it. We can only observe small changes.
This thread is one of the many reasons I wish moderation was a bit more strict on political/philosophical/religious/heated discussions like this. Thoughts and discussion existed on the TA Universe site and the drivel there-in made me lose much respect for those who posted there.
in the end we are left with the fact that we cannot say that something does not exist and only that it does. Science is based on observation and not on that which we cannot observe.
There's something I don't understand about evolution. The theory goes, random mutation produces superior lifeform, which dominates previous lifeform or whatever. It is a new type of life that comes to exist. This happens through tiny changes over millennia.
The part I don't get is, there are countless parts of a body which are useless unless they are fully developed. For instance, the tongue. A little hunk of muscle is totally useless and only serves to consume energy, so why would it develop and develop and get bigger and bigger and now we can chew food effectively and talk with it? The whole theory goes like that, "little change over millions of years".
Now, I can accept that we are on one planet in one corner of the galaxy in one corner of the universe, and the odds being staggeringly bad don't overrule anything. But I can think of so many examples of things like this. Eyes aren't useful unless you can see through them, so of what use would a little sack of fluid be before it develops into something useful?
Ok, how about another example. A great wide number of earth's species have a tongue. Even supposing all these came from a common ancestor, given the wide diversity of these animals, just how underdeveloped was that common ancestor when it began to split off into all these different species? Was it an organism of only a few billion cells perhaps? Then where did the tongue come in, if it's something so totally beyond that type of life? Did some magic force just make one animal say, "hey way cool, that guy's got a freaking tongue!" and then it "motivated" its cells to start developing one for future generations fifty thousand years in the future to begin to possibly benefit from?
Moreover, if evolution results in better and better lifeforms, why haven't we got wings? I think wings would come in handy, myself. There were a few winged dinosaurs, so it's not like there's some off switch for large animals being able to fly.
Legs, I can understand. You push yourself around with them even if they're rather small. Arms even. But what about the incredibly complex parts of a human body which are absolutely useless until fully developed, or at least strongly developed? If you're willing to believe that there's a force called evolution which "just makes it happen" even if it makes no sense by my previous reasoning, isn't that the same as believing in some all-powerful diety?
Why does virtually all life on earth share the same types of organs? Again let's assume everything came from a common ancestor, given how wildly different life on earth is, why does virtually everything larger than an insect have the same vital organs? You can have animals which are completely dissimilar in size, appearance, and ability, but they'll always have a heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, etc. If evolution is a series of random events, why have we all got the same stuff inside?
~~~~~~
And now, if I may go on a rant. If there hasn't already been an assclown mention the south park "flying spaghetti monster", I'm sure it'll come soon. Every time I see this topic come up regardless of where it is, some ipod-listening trendy whore thinks he's clever and mentions that bit. I thought it was funny too, but holy crap, let it die. The belief in a "god" which - at least allegedly - had direct involvement in human affairs, is incomparable to that nonsense anyway. Still people whose only experience with creationism is their crazy head-up-ass parents and religious wackos on TV, and of course internet forums, throw that out like it's the right bower and think they've blown away any other arguments.
Last edited by Caydr on 25 Mar 2008, 22:50, edited 2 times in total.
we kinda work like mechs with hardpoints for equipment if that makes much sense... things like a tongue are important. I watch my turtle eat from time to time. Turtles are omnivores like us, and she tastes her food as she goes to eat it. As she wraps her beak around the food she passes her tongue over it. I think most likely the tongue came from the fact our ancestors supposedly had an ancestor which was a jawless fish. the tongue probably served to help grasp food. Prior to that we most likely had some sort of proboscis which we ate with.
Your supposition doesn't answer the question though - if we were doing just fine with X, why did we develop Y when Y would be useless until fully developed? A tiny bit of jaw bone is worthless and expends valuable energy to create. So why does the jaw just get bigger and bigger? Does "Evolution" tell the creature that it'll pay off at the end? I just don't get it.
tombom wrote:This is a sociological problem though. The problems a trailer trash family have are almost nothing to do with genes.
(you probably already know this)
Darwin never said it's survival of the fittest genes. Realistically it's never just about genes, it's also about location, distribution, standing with other members of the species, etc.
A trailer park trash family lives in tornado alley, alongside 50 other trailer park trash families that all watch nascar, and are universally reviled by the rest of the world, even being called "trailer park trash" sometimes.
So there's location, distribution, and relationships, figure out why they're still alive
Sociobiology, not biology nor sociology in isolation. I find myself unpopular in the field of sociology because I bear both studies in mind and attempt to use them in conjunction to address larger problems.
