[Home]NaturalSelection

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[Natural Selection] - a mod for HalfLife, someone finally actually implemented a commander having a top down rts game, with crew playing an fps.  And it works.  Very very well.  TF2 is gonna be a dissapointment when it finally arrives.



Oh yeah, it's also a set of theories about how species evolve.  Some guy whose house is now a college that used to be a mill house and overhangs a punt hire place.

Evolution is quite an interesting theory, but some of my more bible oriented friends said that it's not right. People who like evolution support it with observations and evidences, while churchy people rebutt it using Mysteries -ColinLeung

That is unfair.  As far as I am aware there has only been one experiment by direct observation, and that only involved looking at an island and syaing 'this must have happened'.  Also, the theory of evolution is not complete now (and certainly was not as first proposed) and contains a fair amount of circular reasoning itself.  (Survival of the fittest.  The fittest to do what?  To survive.  Survival of those that survive.  Uhhh... wait...)  --Vitenka (But yes, fundamentalists are daft.  Fundamental everythingists and ians)
[evolution has been observed]

But we can definitely see natural selection at work, from the extinction of various stuff, infestation of various vermins (RATZ!), to the new strains of various bacteria (super-bugs)... and it's only short term we're looking at. Just extrapolate a few million years or so... I'm sure the biologist among us can think of cooler examples. - ColinLeung
DevilsAdvocate again - but here we go.  Your extrapolation is just silly enough to laugh at.  Extrapolation suggests that mountain ranges climb all the way to heaven if you go far enough in, that the earth is flat and other such bits of silliness.  Extrapolation is dangerous, let alone over 'millions of years' (also remember, creationists argue a much shorter timescale)  Your other two examples - rats tells us that in circumstances that a creature finds pleasant, that creature thrives.  Whilst Darwin agrees with you there, that would be because it's bleeding obvious.  The extension that this allows newer and better creatures to evolve is not.  Super bugs tells us that new bugs are created which are resistant to our medicine.  Heck, it could even be that there are some immortal bugs which just grow hardier over time.  (Ok, that second one involves throwing away everything else we know about medicine).  There's nothing to say that the bugs evolved in the way Darwin suggests and aren';t, I dunno, cooked up in some evil underground lab somewhere.  Having said all that - Darwin's theory is the best we've got right now, and it works well to give us a handle on things and try to extend it.  It has also lead to some wonderful branches of information science and the creation of great simulations.  Butt... we are still missing a reasonable explanation on how 'junk' - old features that were once useful and the code is retained for in case they are useful again - re-emerges.  The timescales involved are still very very great - millions of years doesn't seem enough.  And the requirements of evolution to hit upon several innovations simultaneously are problematic.  (The classic example is the eye - each piece (apart from the retina) in isolation is useless - together they are wonderful.  How does it all evolve at once?)
That's a fallacy. The pieces are not useless in isolation. You can get from a light-sensing cell to the eye by incremental improvements. - MoonShadow
Aye - but it's still the classical example.  And it is a lot of changes, if it's to be done incrementally - and doing it in paralell does require the invention of some surprisingly useless-in-isolation stuff.  --Vitenka
I don't see that doing it incrementally is a problem.  Initially, you have a light sensing cell.  After a bit, you get a light sensing cell recessed so that you can sense better in a given direction (there's a fish that does this, basically a light sensing bit in a hole).  Then the sensitivity of the light sensing bit increases and the hole to the recessed bit gets smaller, as that increases resolution.  At some point along this, a transparant bit starts to get put in front of the light sensing bit because light sensing cells are pretty fragile, or the light sensing bit grows thicker, transparant stuff in front of itself to protect itself.  After that, thinkening the bit at the front to give a lens giving better results.  Muscles around the lens start to allow better focussing.  Hey presto, you have an eye. --Angoel
[evolution of eyes] - it is indeed a classic example; every creationist mentions it sooner or later, apparently not having considered asking the web about it.
While evolution might have just got 'lucky' - we need a lot more understanding of the problem space to tell.  (After all, if the eye is just one of several billion possibilities, and it just happened to be the first selected, then it's not unlikely at all - and evolution provides the perfect mechanism to explain why it is used almost exclusively)  --Vitenka
Ooops, missed one other - that creationists argue that while it may work on a small scale, it does not work on a large scale.  That is, they dislike your extending observations made on bacteria to those made on cows.  --Vitenka

AIUI there are no problems whatsoever with NaturalSelection. We know it happens, we have observed new species forming that way. The theory of evolution is basically history - a study of what we think gave birth to what, based on the premise that it all happened through NaturalSelection, and observations - the species we observe now, records and fossils. It has gaps in, and always will do, for much the same reasons that most other historical knowledge we have spanning those amounts of time is always going to be imperfect. It is the best thing we currently have that fits the available data. --MoonShadow, who will now sit back and wait for the biologist to correct him ;)
Strongly disagree.  We know that some species come after one another in some regions of the fossil record.  That record is horribly incomplete, and in no way shows that the species are related in any way other than appearance or that, for example, periodically god looks down and makes a new batch of creatures.  (Indeed, the punctuated nature of many of the changes strongly suggests the latter.)  --Vitenka
To clarify, are you strongly disagreeing about "evolution being the theory that best explains the fossil record", and are you claiming instead that "periodically god looks down and makes a new batch of creatures" is a better explainition.  If not, what are you strongly disagreeing with, and what is your alternative solution. --Angoel

Just to be contrary, the phrase horribly incomplete as applied to the fossil record is possibly an overstatement. For certain lineages, namely vertebrates, certainly.  For smaller things, not so.  In many cases microevolution can be observed, one of the cases being a set of shales in Wales.  Funny how that rhymes.  Anyway, trilobyte evolution can be seen to occur on a small scale with the trilobytes basically evolving a couple of extra segments as you go up the sequence, those with more segments getting more numerous and the older type getting less numerous.  Other problems which have been cited as proof by both sides are things such as convergent evolution.  This is where the same body plan evolves and goes extinct multiple times throughout the fossil record, and is usually exhibited by single-cell organisms again but hey, it's more difficult to do that with multicellular life, and the more cells an animal body has, the less numerous those animals tend to be, and so you get less preserved.  To be even more controversial, an interesting and weird question to ask is what is the current driving force for evolution in the human population?.  My personal view is that it is most certainly not intelligence, and is in fact probably more likely to be stupidity. --Jumlian
Humm.  The drive for a high birth rate is very odd currently.  It cuts out the middle range of people, and leaves the rich and succesful and those in poverty.  Of course, you have to survive - and currently I'd say a tendency towards violence and a drive for fitting in to large social groups are the requirements there.  MatingRituals have selected for, of all things, fashion sense - and I can't help but wonder how many scientists have tried to get grants to study that..  Anyhow, intelligence is in social groupings a bit, and in rituals a bit - but it isn't writ large, no.  --Vitenka
I am, of course, blinkered by my own predicament, but my feeling is that intelligence is punished by society (both socially, and frequently economically too), and therefore not selected for as an evolutionary pressure.  --Jumlian
No, that's honesty.  Intelligence allows people to work out how to game and exploit the system.  Ethics is most definitely selected against.  --Vitenka
True, but, you miss my point.  Define what "the system" is.  You cannot say that it is intelligence that leads to having hugely more children than you can support.  Such behaviour is only valid if "the system" will bail you out to the point where your offspring would survive, in this case the system would be the state.  From the viewpoint of your genes, this is probably a good thing, but it would probably mean that your personal living conditions are worse than they otherwise might be if you had less kids.  From your personal viewpoint therefore, from a purely selfish view, you would have been better off (conditions and perhaps "quality of life" wise) with a decent education, job and salary.  From your genes' point of view you're better off forgetting about family planning, getting a council house and living off the state.  Obviously I am phrasing this badly, harshly, and perhaps somewhat offensively but being offensive is not my point.  Some people may fall into that loop by accident, and some people may take that route deliberately.  If so, it is not what I would call intelligence.  I would call it base cunning, gaming the system or even pragmatism, in a way, but intelligence, no, as seeing how to game the system in this way is not challenging in the slightest to anyone, and is often to the detriment of the standard of living who take that route, so unless that is how you *want* to be, it is not your (selfish) aim, though it satisfies that of your genes (distribute as widely as possible).  This then begs the question of what point is there in having what society "values" as intelligence, if one can survive and reproduce massively by doing the minimum necessary?  --Jumlian

And just don't start on the "gradual evolution through time" vs. the "quick bursts of evolution" thing.  The latter (punctuated equilibrium) theory is a nice idea and has been observed (as in the microevolution example above) but the former idea is the basis of so-called "genetic clocks" which rely on a constant mutation rate (which, I hasten to add, doesn't really work IMHO).  A lot of people stand to lose a lot of credibility if either idea is refuted, and so there is currently a lot of argument.  Although this didn't stop a fellow geologist doing a project on genetic clocks for his master's and finding out that apparently horses gave rise to jellyfish.  --Jumlian
Now you cannot just say that and not explain.  --Vitenka
Well, I did.  Um.  OK.  If you insist.  The genetic clock argument says that given a fixed mutation rate, if you have organisms A,B and C that all have a common ancestor (N) then if you look at one specific gene carried by all four, N, A, B and C have different versions of the same gene.  Basically then, the number of differences between A or B or C and N, in that one gene, depends on when A,B and C diverged from N.  The more differences, the longer ago they diverged.  If you know the mutation rate in each species (a matter of total guesswork), you can get a date.  You can do weirder things if say N gave rise to A and B and then C evolved from B, pinning dates on the whole evolutionary web.  When my mate did this it turned out that basically jellyfish were more similar to horses than to starfish or other echinoderms which is odd as the evolution sequence is jellyfish - echinoderm - horse.  Obviously the genetic net has been cast stupidly wide here but you can see the problem, hopefully, as it implies that either jellyfish evolved from echinoderms, and horses from Jellyfish, or that Jellyfish evolved from horses from echinoderms, which is a bit weird, to say the least.  --Jumlian
Oh.  That's a lot less interesting than I hoped.  In fact, you'd think it would be enough to prove that mutations don't happen a constant rate and/or are not the only mechanism for genetic divergence.  --Vitenka
1.  I never said the nitty gritty was interesting.  2.  It never is.  3.  Proving mutation rates is very difficult as it is ludicrously slow and lives are short, as is the time that DNA remains viable for analysis.  Even if you observe some variations, what is there to say that it doesn't reach a "stable" average mutation rate on a millennial or million-year timescale?  There is no way to tell that, currently.  --Jumlian

I think we need some ukrc/google groups links around this time, to save people covering old ground.. - MoonShadow

Vitenka would just like to reassure everyone that he is a firm believer in natural selection as an incomplete theory, and wonders how anyone who has played with alife simulations could ever not be.  --Vitenka  Agree that some FAQs would be nice though.  (Why doesn't this automagically wikify words with initial double caps?)

Jumlian would just like to point out that he isn't always this cynical about humanity in general.  Actually, come to think of it, maybe he is.  Oh well. --Jumlian



Also see MTG: Natural Selection - WikiMtGConspiracy

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