[thechat] Mythology was comics

Judah McAuley judah at wiredotter.com
Thu May 24 18:30:58 CDT 2001


At 06:31 PM 5/24/01 -0400, Norman wrote:
>I, like you, have never seen the statement by Darwin.  I suspect it is an
>urban legend thought up by some "well-meaning" people to debunk the theory.
>However, I cannot say that genetics has proven natural selection.  While I
>will buy into adaptation as a reasonable result of natural selection, it is
>more difficult to apply it to wholesale species changes.  It is interesting
>that the fossil record shows no indisputable instances of missing links (to
>my knowledge) when you would think that there certainly would be.  Heck, we
>can't even locate where one species originated!

Actually, we have seen the speciation in the lab.  In both Drysophila 
(fruitflies) and C. Elegans (round worms) if I recall.  Part of the problem 
is the definition of "species".  I tend to use the strict biological 
definition which is that two individuals are of different species if they 
cannot mate to produce viable (reproductive) offsping.  That is, if they 
mate the their germlines die off.  In order for speciation to occur, 
incompatibilities in reproductive mechanisms need to arise.  This isn't 
seen very often because 1) most mutations are detrimental and 2) 
detrimental mutations in reproductive mechanisms have a disproportionate 
effect on fitness (the ability to reproduce).  That being said, there are 
certainly many gradual mutations in reproductive mechanisms that over time 
produce incompatibilities with the original species but still allow for the 
new species to keep reproducing.


>While evolution is a theory on how life has come to be, it does not tell us
>why anything is, much less life iteslf.  Given that as best we can tell
>something cannot create itself out of nothing, the concept of a
>self-existent creative entity is quite logical.  To me thinking that things
>just happened is quite illogical.  To say that any creation myth could be
>true, thus all of them must be false is also illogical to me.

It seems to me that a "self-existent creative entity" is something that 
would have to have "just happened".  Last time I saw a presentation on the 
origins of the Universe and what was before the Big Bang, the idea was that 
there certainly was "something" before the Universe as we know it came into 
existence.  As I understood it, the current theory is that there were 
dimensions and time, but not space as we understand it.  At the moment of 
the Big Bang, there was a signature change (like going positive to 
negative) in the direction (flow? dimension?) of time and at that point 
space and matter came into existence as a consequence.  I don't pretend to 
understand very much, but the diagram was described as "imagine time and 
space looking like a pair of bellbottoms".  Now pants I understand.  Except 
hotpants.  I don't understand those.


>Is it just me, or am I starting to sound like a Christian Vulcan? :)

Regardless, Live Long and Prosper.

Judah





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