>> ^Psychologic:

Indeed. I would much prefer more specific designations for particular ideas within evolution (micro, macro, etc). "Evolution" seems to have a different meaning for everyone so at times it's difficult to know if two sides of a conversation are discussing the same idea.


"There is nothing mysterious or purposeful about evolution...it just happens. It is an automatic consequence of cold, simple mathematics." -- Scott Freeman & Jon C. Herron, Evolutionary Analysis

Microevolution is the change in an allele's frequency over multiple generations. Macroevolution is commonly referred to as speciation, the formation of new species via microevolutionary methods along with the isolation of organisms (either geographically or otherwise) and their eventual genetic divergence due to this isolation.

>> ^bmacs27:

Now, the real problem here is that what we mean by "evolution" is a moving target. It's so broad it's meaningless. In many ways "Darwinian evolution" has been falsified hundreds of times, much like Newtonian mechanics. It was wrong in the details.

I just get worried about how far people push the assumption of natural selection (e.g. evolutionary psychology).


Evolution is a moving target in as so much as any scientific discipline is. I'm sure if we started arguing about the physiology of vision, there would come a point where theory is still changing and, if I may, evolving within the scientific community. As I'm sure you know, this is just how science works.

Darwin was wrong in the details, true. Up to his death, Darwin believed in gemmules (small particles that travel through the body and deposit their "characteristics" into the gentialia) but that does not make his ideas any less sound. Modern evolutionary theory has filled in the gaps of Darwinian evolutionary theory. The fact that we can even reference Darwin 150+ years later should be a testament to how radically brilliant his ideas were and it should not undermine them just because he lived in a time where nothing was known about genetics (save Mendel's small garden patch).

About your last point concerning natural selection, I agree in so far that natural selection is not the only cause of evolution. Since evolution is merely the change in allele frequency over time, this can also be caused by migration and genetic drift, two very powerful forces and often more powerful in shorter time spans than natural selection. Albeit these forces are not influenced by agents of selection such as the environment, competition, predation, or sexual selection, they are still effective at causing the evolution of populations.

There's the whole temporal aspect of the issue. Who knows how long we'll be using electromagnetic radiation for communication. Perhaps in like, 100 to 1000 years we'll have invented some new method. Maybe we'll have changed so much by then that our current conceptions of technology and existence won't even be relevant anymore.

Say there's been, like, 1000 intelligent, space-faring species throughout our galaxy since the beginning of the universe. If we assume it took them roughly as long to evolve as it took to get complex life here on earth, we can assume that the first intelligent aliens took flight perhaps a billion years ago. And then, at even intervals a new species develops a technological society. Even with 1000 intelligent, technological species in our galaxy alone, there'd be like, on average, a million years between them. Chances of two of them evolving at the same time are relatively small. And even if they used radio-signals for like 10,000 years, before becoming something that we can't even conceive, or destroying themselves, that would still be an average of 990,000 years of radio-silence per 1,000,000 years. Thus, if we stick around even for thousands of years, we still only have a tiny, tiny chance of ever picking up a radio-signal from another intelligent species.

The ticker.."Several new species of hallucinogenic plants, consumed by Wayne."

>> ^shole:
>> ^SunTzu:
flying around the planet at thousands of miles an hour, a man who puts his life in danger to further the knowledge of mankind.

what do they actually even do up there?
i now i'm being ignorant and that they probably do a lot of great stuff but we never specifically hear about any of it
there's never been a news story like "bananas made of jam invented on ISS! astronaut Jamforbrains gets nobel for being awesome!"


Rofl..

He's probably involved in various zero gravity experiments up there, acting as proxy on behalf of people on earth who come up with new questions as to what happens if you do this in zero gravity. I don't know the specific purpose of the ISS unfortunately, but i suspect your question is a bit like asking "Why are you looking through this telescope at the moon?"

And the answer is, who the hell knows what you'll find? Why did we sail around the world and discover new countries, new species of animal.. why do we still search for new species? Why do we test those species of plant and animal to see what they do, what they're made of, what properties they have? Why step outside of our front door?

Because if we didn't, we'd never have invented the wheel or mastered fire.

Imagine how much shit we've found in our own oceans that we didn't know about a few hundred years ago. Imagine what we've done with that new knowledge.

Can you possibly begin to imagine the sort of shit we might find out there in space, which is infinitely bigger than our ocean?

Imagine if you'd asked marie curie why she was messing around with a luminous material? "Did you make a banana made of this new material? Stop wasting your time!" And we've just lost the x-ray machine.

Cmon, man.. that sort of question depresses me.. of all the amazing things we've found out through stargazing, through expeditions into space (the hubble deep field picture, to me, is worth all the money on earth) the one thing that would validate such a trip, to you, is a fucking jam banana?

Double huh? Mutations don't collectively occur across a group - they occur in individuals. These individuals then make a new species (which can be from as little as a single gene changing). The rest of the group (which don't have the mutation) remain the same as before. This group would be the common ancestor.

Even so, using your example, some of the chimp like ancestors remained - they are the ascendant group - where are they?

Can you point to evidence of the common ancestoral groups that we stem from still alive?

Interesting video. I guess we can't definitively know whether any skeletons from dead mammals are truly related to us or not unless we can get a DNA sample

edit: add "gene"

^Crake: Sub sends signal to the "nuclear torpedo", which is connected by wire to the surface landing module, which relays the signal to the orbiting craft, which uses the powerful antenna array to send it to Earth. Complex and one-way communication, but nothing NASA hasn't attempted to solve before. Unless they send it in metric...

^cybrbeast: I'm aware of the Drake Equation and it's implications on finding life within our own solar system. But when we're going specifically into places where we expect life to be possible, it's best to be too cautious than to assume there's nothing there, imo.
As for the likelihood of life under all that ice with no sunlight: If you watch the entire film, you see that they are in fact following a team of ocean explorers which take subs to the deepest parts man can survive in, in order to find new life, new species and understand how life survives there at all.
Europa is believed to have a molten core (which is the reason there's an ocean there at all, presumably), and is not just a big slab of ice. If that's the case, there might be Thermal Vents there, which allow life to exist on Earth in environments previously thought to be impossible.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is, let's go on a mission to see if there's life on Europa, while actually preparing to find said life, and not just doing it to mark a checkbox and say "Europa? Meh, been there, done that, got the T-Shirt".

"Thou shalt not evolve into new species". Brilliant!

If the retard who thought up this video managed to say every single scientific phenomenon is actually "God did it!", why not say "Yea, evolution is real, but it's God that makes it happen!".

If you're going to say "The first day wasn't actually a day (since there was no sun yet, or time for that matter), so when we say 4004 BC we actually mean billions of years ago, but we call the first few billions one day", why the f*ck would you waste time arguing about if the world is 6000 years old?!? Just agree that according the the bloody Gregorian calendar, it really was billions of years ago, it's just that you choose to count time in a different way! Then devise your own calendar according to which billions of years can be contained in one day, and presto! Your own creationist timeline!

WHY WOULD GOD PLACE FOSSILS AROUND? JUST TO MESS WITH YOUR F*CKING MIND?!?!?
I never understood how the argument that "Dinosaurs couldn't exist because they're not mentioned in the Bible" isn't immediately contradicted by the fact that the fossils aren't mentioned in the Bible either...

"Declaring that micro evolution was permitted, but not macro evolution". Where do you come up with this bullshit?

"This created confusion in the valley of the shadow of doubt, so God created Theologians to sort it all out". I give up. Say whatever you want. I'm going to do some math puzzles to try and restore some of the IQ I lost while watching this video...

--------

OK! After watching the whole thing, I will still keep this comment intact as a tribute to every theological discussion I've ever had with a person expressing the exact views this video is a parody of.
This deserves to be in the parody channel, but I'll leave it as is to make others go through the same mental frustration I went through

If this made sense for humans, it probably would have emerged in the form of a divergent species. There is a reason plants subsist on solar power, whereas animals eat plants or other animals: animals move around which takes a greater amount of energy than sitting still. When you eat food, you are essentially eating stored solar power...power which has been stored as sugar over months or years.

Even if it did provide energy, how many of you are outside for 12 hours a day, naked? You'd probably die of skin cancer or third degree sun burns long before you eliminated your hunger. Even if those problems could be overcome, who would want to spend 12 hours a day laying outside just to eat? As far as spending millions of dollars researching this for human benefit, well that would be quite a waste wouldn't it?

Its a fascinating example of the diversity of nature, and an example of how new species can emerge through hybridization.

I did not expect a video about the adaptation of resistance by bacteria would use these recent discoveries as arguments against natural selection.

Most species of bacteria have been around for millions of years (at least). How arrogant would we be if we believed that we would see evidence of new species within a few generations of human record keeping?

Darwin's explanation is still the best anyone has ever come up with, even if it has a few kinks yet to be worked out and perfected.

That Jonathan Wells guy has a PhD in biology and he doesn't think this is evidence for Darwin's theory? I can see the massive hole in his argument and all I'm going on is 10th grade biology. Life forms have had BILLIONS OF YEARS to evolve. BILLIONS! Its no surprise if we don't find new species emerging over a mere 150 years. In comparison to the time that life has been evolving, 150 years is like half a nanosecond. However the fact that we can clearly see great changes within one species over a small amount of time IS evidence for Darwin's theory, because it doesn't take much effort to imagine how such changes could accumulate over BILLIONS of years and cause massive changes, resulting in entirely new species. There is no boundary one species has to go across to become a new species. When it becomes different enough we call it a new species.

still would be intreting to see examples of where new species have emerged in creatuers and what it takes.

Psychologic, you are correct in saying that individuals with split, merged, extra, or in other ways funky chromosomes (aneuploid) are usually not viable, and are often sterile. However, if the individual is viable and fertile, finding a mate with the same issue is not always necessary. A beneficial aneuploidy can be passed on much as any other beneficial trait. And, with a terrific amount of luck, can increase in frequency within a population.

For instance, in humans with Down's syndrome, although fertility is severely reduced, many females can have children. You can imagine, that if this trisomy were in some way adaptive, it could eventually sweep the population. The rest of the genome would then likely evolve to accommodate the trisomy/new chromosome, and fertility would increase.

Here is a really neat paper where yeast evolve via aneuploidy to overcome the problems that occur when researchers delete an important gene:
http://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674(08)01196-3

As for needing to find a mate with a similar chromosomal aberration, you may be thinking of evolution through polyploidy, when the the entire chromosomal compliment is doubled (like you see evidence of in many plants and salamanders). That really screws things up, but because of the way in which plants reproduce, 'gametes' with double sets of chromosomes are common. Combine that with self fertilization and you have reproductive isolation and a new species in one generation.

This guy will be less happy when he realises he's found a mutant new species and his hand drops off next week.

Fear isn't a necessary response to warming. There is a likely hood that this will increase total farmland and enable for more habitable living in parts of the world. Though caution about global climate change is indeed warranted, a fear response that tend to be all negative will no do anyone any good.

Historically speaking, it is the colder ages that tend to be the most dark for all nature than the warm ones. The fact of the matter is, we just don't know what the effects of warming will be, just the fact that it is warming. Historically, this was a good thing. The disputed fact that humans might of contributed to this change doesn't really change these statements.

In other words, global warming does not have a necessity to be bad. Change seems to always invoke a fear response in man, and for something as large as our planetary climate, it is understandable. But standing on the edge of a natural and perhaps, man assisted phenomena, that might actually be good for the whole of nature is also a possibility. Most of the massive surges in life and new specie happens during times of Geological warming.

Anywho, just trying to add a fresh perspective and a slight tinge of logic response to the mix. In short, you can not equivocate warming and disaster as there is no evidence to suggest the 2 are part of the same whole.

Totally bogus. We are promised ten incontrovertible pieces of evidence that evolution is wrong, yet all of them hinge on believing the Bible is something more than a dietary guide.

The first minute is a set of testimonials (from people who don't sound very highly educated). Science isn't really the result of a plebiscite. It isn't like the law, either, where you are right until proven wrong.

The bottom line is that no self-respecting scientist would claim that evolution is the ONLY explanation of how we got here - but as far as the evidence goes, so far it is the BEST explanation. If it turns out to be wrong, then ID still has to be supported by evidence - it isn't automatically correct.

Then the narrator spends four minutes telling us we will hear the facts, and we should judge for ourselves. She claims the Bible is completely trustworthy, based on archaeological a prophetic evidence - except it is not. Sure there is some archaeological evidence, but let's see the evidence for the Garden of Eden. Parts of it are clearly historical, but parts seem to be diet restrictions, more than anything. As for prophecy, go ask the Late Great Hal Lindsey about that.

The film goes on to paint God as a rather horrible person, causing most all the suffering and tragedy on earth. This is an interesting concept in itself. The purpose seems to be to threaten you into believing their line of reasoning (NOT making up your own mind!), or incurring His wrath.

The film uses the long-disproven watch-watchmaker argument, now in terms of a creation-creatOR argument. As for the $250,000 prize that hasn't been claimed, I'll give $1 million to anyone who can offer a shred of evidence that the Bible is the word of God. But _I_ get to be the judge, and you can forget about me accepting your evidence. The fact Dr. Hoven doesn't ACCEPT the evidence doesn't mean it's not there.

When Darwin visited the Galapagos islands 150 years ago, he cataloged seven species of finches there. Now, in just a century and a half, there are thirteen species on the islands, all native - definite PROOF of new species. But, of course this is ignored by the video.

Finally, the very act of referring to the "Myth of Evolution", the film is putting conclusions into our minds, just what the first four minutes said it would NOT do - we were supposed to make up our own minds, remember?