If it were done as a single nerve in a direct route, it would be subject to damage from a jerking head motion. This way, the slack (and bundling) adds protection to individual nerves. And again, it works just fine, in ALL mammals.

Let's coin a new term. How about 'stress relief'?

Another point. The heart is functional before it descends into an expanding chest cavity, taking ancillary nerves along for the ride.

And lastly, the evidence points to incremental phenotypic alterations along with some jumps here and there. The first is indicative of environmental adaptations, with possible genetic manipulations [ID] on occasion.

In fact, we ourselves are on the cusp of being able to alter phenotypic outcomes, by PCR, electrophoresis, and subsequent spicing to alter structures and codes. For our progress at this point, search 'genetic engineering'.

While not proof of prior gene altering to alter phenotypes, it is at least evidence that it can be done, while at this juncture, no substantiating evidence exists for random mutations, HGT, and genetic drift to radically alter body plans. Just for minor quantitative adaptive alterations [pigmentation, bone density, fur and hair content, metabolism rates, and yes, cephalic index, essentially brain size increases].

IOW, the evidence clearly points to both microevolution, a likely 'designed-in' function to aid in survival, as well as ID for radical re-designs, possibly by multiple intelligentsia over vast time. Google MDT for more on that possibility.

well how much of a force in our evolution is gravity... if gradually change our exposures and make generation after generation adapted to lower gravity... will our phenotypes change? longer bodies, long heads? lol....

I appreciate your tone. I really do. I just wanted to leave you with some suggested google scholar searches. If you haven't already, check out the recent research in gametic or transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. It'll be really jargony and difficult to understand. One take home is that the gametic accessibility of genetic material for transcription has been shown to have reliable effects on the phenotype of progeny in animal models. Further, human studies have shown transgenerational effects on the adult weight of offspring in response to the diet of the mother during pregnancy and even in response starvation events dating back further generations (although the mechanism is not necessarily known).

Anyway, nice chat.

Which phenotypical traits lead you to your conclusions? RE:Mother overall doesn't look intelligent.>> ^chilaxe:

@longde
I mention Herman Cain and Seal because people are hyper-focused on ethnicity, even if it's a red-herring. For example, if this was a video featuring Asian Americans, nobody would be hyper-sensitive about it.
In business, it's valuable to be able to accurately sum up how a person's mind works within the first few moments of meeting them.

1)I thought you said it was entirely to do with culture, yet you bring up their appearance. And then mention Herman Cain and Seal, which seems like a non sequitur given your claim about culture-only. Are your claims based on race/ethnicity or not?

2)You must be a very skilled specialist if you can determine someone's intelligence and occupation from their appearance. Which phenotypical traits are you referring to to come to such conclusions?

3)So using slang and goofing off in a hospital at a joyous occasion make people lower class? I'll keep that in mind.

>> ^chilaxe:

@longde
• Obese mother (associated with negative health outcomes for children)
• Mother speaks in a lower class manner. (She says something about "trippin.")
• Mother overall doesn't look intelligent. Her job is probably cognitively simplistic.
• Father speaks in a lower class manner.
• Father's brief visual appearance is consistent or as least doesn't refute the other lower class signals, and the likely low cognitive complexity of his wife the mother of his child lets us to make predictions about him.
• Father's not embarrassed to act lower class in a hospital with his pregnant wife.
None of these things would apply to a sophisticated person like Hermain Cain or Seal.
The future belongs to cognitively complex people. People who don't like to read or improve themselves and have bad values are going to face worse and worse outcomes. Automation and globalization will continue, and being simplistic is no longer of value.

Well, it is partly biological, not solely biological, of course. We agree.

I think we are on the same page. If you go to my profile page and read the conversation between ChaosEngine and me, you can see that I also have concerns about the children and see that I believe strongly in keeping religion out of the laws.

I don't think the indoctrination of children IS a separate issue -- I think it is part and parcel of the passionate energy that some atheists bring to the conversation and I believe strongly it needs to be dealt with -- short of removing the kids from the home or going ahead and sterilizing fundies. You are 100% correct, I think -- education, education, education.

The thing about a perfect world also applies to our conversation.

Fundamentalist religious folks think they have the answer. Fundamentalist atheists think they have the answer. I'm just saying -- carve out your territories and stop trying to invade people's minds. Both of these groups need to stop that. It is a losing game. Create a game where you can win -- [edit] religious fundies stay out of the laws and [edit] rational atheists need to put up the billboards. And the internet! Ah, the lovely internet. Saving grace for many an isolated person.

In reply to this comment by Skeeve:
I think you have dug to the heart of our disagreement.

First, you repeatedly state that religion is biological. I think that is partly accurate, but it's not that simple. I think religion itself is memetic, but the need to believe in something is biological. Religion is a symptom of our evolutionary need to believe/explain what we don't understand.

As for not being able to force evolution, we've been doing that - consciously or unconsciously - for thousands of years. While sterilizing the religious and only allowing atheists to breed might be one solution, I think the proper course is education combined with laws separating religion from the government.

While education doesn't work 100% of the time (as your example points out), it is pretty clear that those with more education have less religion. Nations with better education systems have less religious adherence and individuals with higher educations tend to have less religion. And the key words in those sentences are "less religion"; it doesn't mean less belief, it just re-aims that belief from religion to rational thought/science/etc.

Education is to religion as the scalpel is to the appendix - it removes the evolved, no longer useful, but still dangerous, problem.

With regards to it not being right to tell someone not to take comfort in that which comforts them, I partly agree. If it isn't harming anyone else, then I don't care what someone believes and I'm not going to get in their face about it (if they try to convert me though, they have opened the door and are fair game). But the line is drawn when someone's beliefs harm or pose a threat to the well-being of others. In that case, anyone who opposes equal rights (whether for homosexuals, women, non-religious) are fair game.

The issue I struggle with personally is the indoctrination of children. Having experienced that personally, knowing how that limited me (and harmed me, in some ways) I have difficulty allowing the indoctrination of children to go uncontested. But that's a different problem for another discussion ;


>> ^bareboards2:

We'll have to agree to disagree.
I don't think you can force evolution. It isn't a choice. Not unless you start breeding programs.
Want the biological need for the divine to go away? Sterilize all religious folks. I don't think you can talk folks out of it.
I speak from experience. My brother is a retired Air Force pilot with a Master's degree in aerospace engineering. Grew up in a secular household. His need for structure and the divine led him to the Mormon Church. Talk about goofy beliefs!! Good lord! And he voluntarily turned off his reasoning brain to accept all their nonsense as true. You say religion has "served its purpose." So why did he go there, when he wasn't indoctrinated into it growing up?
Not for me to tell him not to take comfort where he takes comfort.
However, it is for me to tell him to back off on gay marriage and not impose his church's beliefs on others. (And to tell him that when the church's membership starts falling, I guarantee his Prophet will suddenly hear from God that it is okay to be gay now.)

>> ^Skeeve:
I think most atheists would agree with you, that religion has served an evolutionary purpose. I don't have "The God Delusion" with me at the moment, but I'm pretty sure Dawkins acknowledges that as well.
But whether or not it serves an evolutionary purpose or not is irrelevant. The appendix served an evolutionary purpose - then we evolved to do without it. The same goes for the wisdom teeth; most people have them removed because they can cause huge problems, but in a world without dental care they are incredibly important.
Most of us atheists believe it is time, at least in the west, to "evolve" beyond the need for an invisible sky-daddy. We have the opportunity to do with religion what evolution did for the appendix.
Belief in a god is irrational. That's not to say it didn't serve a purpose, as evolution is not bound by the rational, only by phenotypic fitness. But, religion has served its purpose and, like the appendix or the wisdom teeth, it's time it was removed from our lives.
>>

I think you have dug to the heart of our disagreement.

First, you repeatedly state that religion is biological. I think that is partly accurate, but it's not that simple. I think religion itself is memetic, but the need to believe in something is biological. Religion is a symptom of our evolutionary need to believe/explain what we don't understand.

As for not being able to force evolution, we've been doing that - consciously or unconsciously - for thousands of years. While sterilizing the religious and only allowing atheists to breed might be one solution, I think the proper course is education combined with laws separating religion from the government.

While education doesn't work 100% of the time (as your example points out), it is pretty clear that those with more education have less religion. Nations with better education systems have less religious adherence and individuals with higher educations tend to have less religion. And the key words in those sentences are "less religion"; it doesn't mean less belief, it just re-aims that belief from religion to rational thought/science/etc.

Education is to religion as the scalpel is to the appendix - it removes the evolved, no longer useful, but still dangerous, problem.

With regards to it not being right to tell someone not to take comfort in that which comforts them, I partly agree. If it isn't harming anyone else, then I don't care what someone believes and I'm not going to get in their face about it (if they try to convert me though, they have opened the door and are fair game). But the line is drawn when someone's beliefs harm or pose a threat to the well-being of others. In that case, anyone who opposes equal rights (whether for homosexuals, women, non-religious) are fair game.

The issue I struggle with personally is the indoctrination of children. Having experienced that personally, knowing how that limited me (and harmed me, in some ways) I have difficulty allowing the indoctrination of children to go uncontested. But that's a different problem for another discussion


>> ^bareboards2:

We'll have to agree to disagree.
I don't think you can force evolution. It isn't a choice. Not unless you start breeding programs.
Want the biological need for the divine to go away? Sterilize all religious folks. I don't think you can talk folks out of it.
I speak from experience. My brother is a retired Air Force pilot with a Master's degree in aerospace engineering. Grew up in a secular household. His need for structure and the divine led him to the Mormon Church. Talk about goofy beliefs!! Good lord! And he voluntarily turned off his reasoning brain to accept all their nonsense as true. You say religion has "served its purpose." So why did he go there, when he wasn't indoctrinated into it growing up?
Not for me to tell him not to take comfort where he takes comfort.
However, it is for me to tell him to back off on gay marriage and not impose his church's beliefs on others. (And to tell him that when the church's membership starts falling, I guarantee his Prophet will suddenly hear from God that it is okay to be gay now.)

>> ^Skeeve:
I think most atheists would agree with you, that religion has served an evolutionary purpose. I don't have "The God Delusion" with me at the moment, but I'm pretty sure Dawkins acknowledges that as well.
But whether or not it serves an evolutionary purpose or not is irrelevant. The appendix served an evolutionary purpose - then we evolved to do without it. The same goes for the wisdom teeth; most people have them removed because they can cause huge problems, but in a world without dental care they are incredibly important.
Most of us atheists believe it is time, at least in the west, to "evolve" beyond the need for an invisible sky-daddy. We have the opportunity to do with religion what evolution did for the appendix.
Belief in a god is irrational. That's not to say it didn't serve a purpose, as evolution is not bound by the rational, only by phenotypic fitness. But, religion has served its purpose and, like the appendix or the wisdom teeth, it's time it was removed from our lives.
>>

We'll have to agree to disagree.

I don't think you can force evolution. It isn't a choice. Not unless you start breeding programs.

Want the biological need for the divine to go away? Sterilize all religious folks. I don't think you can talk folks out of it.

I speak from experience. My brother is a retired Air Force pilot with a Master's degree in aerospace engineering. Grew up in a secular household. His need for structure and the divine led him to the Mormon Church. Talk about goofy beliefs!! Good lord! And he voluntarily turned off his reasoning brain to accept all their nonsense as true. You say religion has "served its purpose." So why did he go there, when he wasn't indoctrinated into it growing up?

Not for me to tell him not to take comfort where he takes comfort.

However, it is for me to tell him to back off on gay marriage and not impose his church's beliefs on others. (And to tell him that when the church's membership starts falling, I guarantee his Prophet will suddenly hear from God that it is okay to be gay now.)


>> ^Skeeve:

I think most atheists would agree with you, that religion has served an evolutionary purpose. I don't have "The God Delusion" with me at the moment, but I'm pretty sure Dawkins acknowledges that as well.
But whether or not it serves an evolutionary purpose or not is irrelevant. The appendix served an evolutionary purpose - then we evolved to do without it. The same goes for the wisdom teeth; most people have them removed because they can cause huge problems, but in a world without dental care they are incredibly important.
Most of us atheists believe it is time, at least in the west, to "evolve" beyond the need for an invisible sky-daddy. We have the opportunity to do with religion what evolution did for the appendix.
Belief in a god is irrational. That's not to say it didn't serve a purpose, as evolution is not bound by the rational, only by phenotypic fitness. But, religion has served its purpose and, like the appendix or the wisdom teeth, it's time it was removed from our lives.
>>

I think most atheists would agree with you, that religion has served an evolutionary purpose. I don't have "The God Delusion" with me at the moment, but I'm pretty sure Dawkins acknowledges that as well.

But whether or not it serves an evolutionary purpose or not is irrelevant. The appendix served an evolutionary purpose - then we evolved to do without it. The same goes for the wisdom teeth; most people have them removed because they can cause huge problems, but in a world without dental care they are incredibly important.

Most of us atheists believe it is time, at least in the west, to "evolve" beyond the need for an invisible sky-daddy. We have the opportunity to do with religion what evolution did for the appendix.

Belief in a god is irrational. That's not to say it didn't serve a purpose, as evolution is not bound by the rational, only by phenotypic fitness. But, religion has served its purpose and, like the appendix or the wisdom teeth, it's time it was removed from our lives.
>> ^bareboards2:

I keep making the same comment on videos about religion and no fundamentalist atheist has intelligently responded to my point.
Humans have evolved with the need for religion, some portion of humanity. It has survived the evolutionary process. THEREFORE there must be some purpose or use for it, for some portion of humanity.
I find it galling in the extreme to read over and over again the chastisements of atheists dismissing a belief in God as being stupid and irrational.
The human need and ability to create the divine MUST HAVE AN EVOLUTIONARY PURPOSE. Scorning and scolding people about an ingrained, evolutionarily chosen trait is ignorant and rude and no different from evangelicals, those who have that trait in spades, forcing their beliefs onto others.
I do not believe in an intelligent force in the universe, guiding everything. The doctrines and specific myths told by religions ... I personally do not understand how folks can believe these things to be factually true.
But millions do. Millions have. There must be some need for it and it is NOT MY PLACE to tell someone else to abandon something that gives structure and solace.
Just stay out of the laws of the land.
That is why I like this vid so much. It shows the human need for ... something... without it being doctrinaire.
And Richard Dawkins isn't the only atheist in the world. He is just a loud one, @ChaosEngine.

The gaps are fundemental..here are some more quotes:

"Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document a gradual steady change from ancestral forms to the descendants. But this is not what the paleontologist finds. Instead, he or she finds gaps in just about every phyletic series." (Ernst Mayr-Professor Emeritus, Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, What Evolution Is, 2001, p.14.)

"All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt. Gradualists usually extract themselves from this dilemma by invoking the extreme imperfection of the fossil record." (Gould, Stephen J. The Panda’s Thumb, 1980, p. 189.)

"What is missing are the many intermediate forms hypothesized by Darwin, and the continual divergence of major lineages into the morphospace between distinct adaptive types." (Carroll, Robert L., "Towards a new evolutionary synthesis," in Trends in Evolution and Ecology 15(1):27-32, 2000, p. 27.)

"Given that evolution, according to Darwin, was in a continual state of motion ...it followed logically that the fossil record should be rife with examples of transitional forms leading from the less to more evolved. ...Instead of filling the gaps in the fossil record with so-called missing links, most paleontologists found themselves facing a situation in which there were only gaps in the fossil record, with no evidence of transformational evolutionary intermediates between documented fossil species." (Schwartz, Jeffrey H., Sudden Origins, 1999, p. 89.)

"He [Darwin] prophesied that future generations of paleontologists would fill in these gaps by diligent search....It has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm this part of Darwin's predictions. Nor is the problem a miserably poor record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction was wrong." (Eldridge, Niles, The Myths of Human Evolution, 1984, pp.45-46.)

"There is no need to apologize any longer for the poverty of the fossil record. In some ways it has become almost unmanageably rich, and discovery is out-pacing integration...The fossil record nevertheless continues to be composed mainly of gaps." (George, T. Neville, "Fossils in Evolutionary Perspective," Science Progress, vol. 48 January 1960, pp. 1-3.)

"Despite the bright promise - that paleontology provides a means of ‘seeing’ evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists the most notorious of which is the presence of 'gaps' in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them. The gaps must therefore be a contingent feature of the record." (Kitts, David B., "Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory," Evolution, vol. 28, 1974, p. 467.)

"It is interesting that all the cases of gradual evolution that we know about from the fossil record seem to involve smooth changes without the appearance of novel structures and functions." (Wills, C., Genetic Variability, 1989, p. 94-96.)

"So the creationist prediction of systematic gaps in the fossil record has no value in validating the creationist model, since the evolution theory makes precisely the same prediction." (Weinberg, S., Reviews of Thirty-one Creationist Books, 1984, p.

"We seem to have no choice but to invoke the rapid divergence of populations too small to leave legible fossil records." (Stanley, S.M., The New Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes, and the Origin of Species, 1981, p. 99.)

"For over a hundred years paleontologists have recognized the large number of gaps in the fossil record. Creationists make it seem like gaps are a deep, dark secret of paleontology..." (Cracraft, in Awbrey & Thwaites, Evolutionists Confront Creationists", 1984.)

"Instead of finding the gradual unfolding of life, what geologists of Darwin’s time, and geologists of the present day actually find is a highly uneven or jerky record; that is, species appear in the sequence very suddenly, show little or no change during their existence in the record, then abruptly go out of the record. and it is not always clear, in fact it’s rarely clear, that the descendants were actually better adapted than their predecessors. In other words, biological improvement is hard to find." (Raup, David M., "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology," Bulletin, Field Museum of Natural History, vol. 50, 1979, p. 23.)

Chicago Field Museum, Prof. of Geology, Univ. of Chicago, "A large number of well-trained scientists outside of evolutionary biology and paleontology have unfortunately gotten the idea that the fossil record is far more Darwinian than it is. This probably comes from the oversimplification inevitable in secondary sources: low-level textbooks, semi-popular articles, and so on. Also, there is probably some wishful thinking involved. In the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions. In general, these have not been found yet the optimism has died hard, and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks...One of the ironies of the creation evolution debate is that the creationists have accepted the mistaken notion that the fossil record shows a detailed and orderly progression and they have gone to great lengths to accommodate this 'fact' in their Flood (Raup, David, "Geology" New Scientist, Vol. 90, p.832, 1981.)

"As we shall see when we take up the creationist position, there are all sorts of gaps: absence of graduationally intermediate ‘transitional’ forms between species, but also between larger groups -- between say, families of carnivores, or the orders of mammals. In fact, the higher up the Linnaean hierarchy you look, the fewer transitional forms there seem to be." (Eldredge, Niles, The Monkey Business: A Scientist Looks at Creationism, 1982, p. 65-66.)

"Transitions between major groups of organisms . . . are difficult to establish in the fossil record." (Padian, K., The Origin of Turtles: One Fewer Problem for Creationists, 1991, p. 18.)

"A persistent problem in evolutionary biology has been the absence of intermediate forms in the fossil record. Long term gradual transformations of single lineages are rare and generally involve simple size increase or trivial phenotypic effects. Typically, the record consists of successive ancestor-descendant lineages, morphologically invariant through time and unconnected by intermediates." (Williamson, P.G., Palaeontological Documentation of Speciation in Cenozoic Molluscs from Turkana Basin, 1982, p. 163.)

"What one actually found was nothing but discontinuities: All species are separated from each other by bridgeless gaps; intermediates between species are not observed . . . The problem was even more serious at the level of the higher categories." (Mayr, E., Animal Species and Evolution, 1982, p. 524.)

"The known fossil record is not, and never has been, in accord with gradualism. What is remarkable is that, through a variety of historical circumstances, even the history of opposition has been obscured . . . ‘The majority of paleontologists felt their evidence simply contradicted Darwin’s stress on minute, slow, and cumulative changes leading to species transformation.’ . . . their story has been suppressed." (Stanley, S.M., The New Evolutionary Timetable, 1981, p. 71.)

"One must acknowledge that there are many, many gaps in the fossil record . . . There is no reason to think that all or most of these gaps will be bridged." (Ruse, "Is There a Limit to Our Knowledge of Evolution," 1984, p.101.)

"We are faced more with a great leap of faith . . . that gradual progressive adaptive change underlies the general pattern of evolutionary change we see in the rocks . . . than any hard evidence." (Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I., The Myths of Human Evolution, 1982, p. 57.)

"Gaps between families and taxa of even higher rank could not be so easily explained as the mere artifacts of a poor fossil record." (Eldredge, Niles, Macro-Evolutionary Dynamics: Species, Niches, and Adaptive Peaks, 1989, p.22.)

"To explain discontinuities, Simpson relied, in part, upon the classical argument of an imperfect fossil record, but concluded that such an outstanding regularity could not be entirely artificial." (Gould, Stephen J., "The Hardening of the Modern Synthesis," 1983, p. 81.)

"The record jumps, and all the evidence shows that the record is real: the gaps we see reflect real events in life’s history - not the artifact of a poor fossil record." (Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I., The Myths of Human Evolution, 1982, p. 59.)

"The fossil record flatly fails to substantiate this expectation of finely graded change." (Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I., The Myths of Human Evolution, 1982, p. 163.)

"Gaps in the fossil record - particularly those parts of it that are most needed for interpreting the course of evolution - are not surprising." (Stebbins, G. L., Darwin to DNA, Molecules to Humanity, 1982, p. 107.)

"The fossil record itself provided no documentation of continuity - of gradual transition from one animal or plant to another of quite different form." (Stanley, S.M., The New Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes and the Origin of Species, 1981, p. 40.)

"The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution." (Gould, Stephen J., "Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?," 1982, p. 140.)

"The lack of ancestral or intermediate forms between fossil species is not a bizarre peculiarity of early metazoan history. Gaps are general and prevalent throughout the fossil record." (Raff R.A, and Kaufman, T.C., Embryos, Genes, and Evolution: The Developmental-Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change, 1991, p. 34.)

"Gaps between higher taxonomic levels are general and large." (Raff R.A, and Kaufman, T.C., Embryos, Genes, and Evolution: The Developmental-Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change, 1991, p. 35.)

"We have so many gaps in the evolutionary history of life, gaps in such key areas as the origin of the multicellular organisms, the origin of the vertebrates, not to mention the origins of most invertebrate groups." (McGowan, C., In the Beginning . . . A Scientist Shows Why Creationists are Wrong, 1984, p. 95.)

"If life had evolved into its wondrous profusion of creatures little by little, Dr. Eldredge argues, then one would expect to find fossils of transitional creatures which were a bit like what went before them and a bit like what came after. But no one has yet found any evidence of such transitional creatures. This oddity has been attributed to gaps in the fossil record which gradualists expected to fill when rock strata of the proper age had been found. In the last decade, however, geologists have found rock layers of all divisions of the last 500 million years and no transitional forms were contained in them. If it is not the fossil record which is incomplete then it must be the theory." (The Guardian Weekly, 26 Nov 1978, vol. 119, no 22, p. 1.)

“People and advertising copywriters tend to see human evolution as a line stretching from apes to man, into which one can fit new-found fossils as easily as links in a chain. Even modern anthropologists fall into this trap . . .[W]e tend to look at those few tips of the bush we know about, connect them with lines, and make them into a linear sequence of ancestors and descendants that never was. But it should now be quite plain that the very idea of the missing link, always shaky, is now completely untenable.” (Gee, Henry, "Face of Yesterday,” The Guardian, Thursday July 11, 2002.)

>> ^Drax:
Shiny, it's kind of like you're saying,
Ok, we have: . -> O
And you say, ah! But there's no transitional species that spans the gap of . and O
Then we find . -> o -> O
And you say, ah! But there's no transitional species that spans the gap of . and o
or o and O
Basically, the more evidence we find.. the stronger your argument gets! <IMG class=smiley src="http://cdn.videosift.com/cdm/emoticon/oh.gif">
ok, that last part's just a joke.. but seriously.. the other parts ARE your stance.
It's either that, or you're looking at o and e and expecting to find æ, which just doesn't happen.

The difference is actually a bit more, the traditional view is 2%, but I've heard Craig Venter say its probably a bit more than that, maybe as much as 5%. But anyway, like other commenters have suggested, this is a bit psuedo-biologistic by Tyson. He still has a point, but I think hes best when he sticks to astronomoy and astrophysics. Difference in genetic makeup is not the same thing as difference in phenotype. For example, only relatively few genes control the development of the entire brain, but even if we identify them all and understand them all, we are still far from understanding the brain itself, because the brain is more than just a product of genes, its a product of development and lots of complex interactions.

But his point does pretty much stand, we could all look like blabbering morons to more intelligent creatures. Atleast Tyson is not anyware near as idiotic as Michio Kaku on evolution, that was just embarrassing

>> ^therealblankman:

>> ^zombieater:
I think many people are missing the main point of this video. No, it does not show biological evolution via natural selection in an accurate way, but I don't think it was ever meant to do such a thing. What this video does succeed in showing is the evolution of a line over time due to the build up of random mutations. It does NOT show evolution via natural selection, because there is no selection involved of any kind, natural or otherwise.
Think of it as displaying the evolution of a neutral phenotype (something the organism has that is not selected for or against by nature). If we look at it in that context, then it is a perfect analogy.

Your point might be valid were not the video titled as "An illuminating metaphor for the process of biological evolution".
Just sayin'


Touché.

>> ^zombieater:

I think many people are missing the main point of this video. No, it does not show biological evolution via natural selection in an accurate way, but I don't think it was ever meant to do such a thing. What this video does succeed in showing is the evolution of a line over time due to the build up of random mutations. It does NOT show evolution via natural selection, because there is no selection involved of any kind, natural or otherwise.
Think of it as displaying the evolution of a neutral phenotype (something the organism has that is not selected for or against by nature). If we look at it in that context, then it is a perfect analogy.


Your point might be valid were not the video titled as "An illuminating metaphor for the process of biological evolution".

Just sayin'

I think many people are missing the main point of this video. No, it does not show biological evolution via natural selection in an accurate way, but I don't think it was ever meant to do such a thing. What this video does succeed in showing is the evolution of a line over time due to the build up of random mutations. It does NOT show evolution via natural selection, because there is no selection involved of any kind, natural or otherwise.

Think of it as displaying the evolution of a neutral phenotype (something the organism has that is not selected for or against by nature). If we look at it in that context, then it is a perfect analogy.

>> ^chilaxe:

Recreational genealogy seems have a strong pull, but it seems almost as meaningless as astrology.
You only share 12.5% of your genes with each of your 8 great-grandparents, and genes can have very different effects depending on which other genes are present. If you want to know who you are, look at yourself, not your great-grandparents or anybody else.


That is true, but you should also consider possible effects from epigenetics.

Read the wiki entry, it's quite fascinating.

Excerpt from wiki:
In biology, and specifically genetics, epigenetics is the study of inherited changes in phenotype (appearance) or gene expression caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence, hence the name epi- (Greek: επί- over, above) -genetics. These changes may remain through cell divisions for the remainder of the cell's life and may also last for multiple generations. However, there is no change in the underlying DNA sequence of the organism;[1] instead, non-genetic factors cause the organism's genes to behave (or "express themselves") differently.