Hash (imported) wrote: Mon May 30, 2011 9:09 pm Think about the evolutionary theory, man, animals evolve, changing as needed or as wanting in order to adapt to their environment, but what drives or pushes for these changes?
Random chance. The very essence of Darwinism is that huge periods of time and random chance combined with selective pressures result in changes. Darwinism depends on pre-adaptation, that a change has already occurred before it is needed. The idea that an organism wants or wills the change is exactly what Darwinian evolution is NOT.
Hash (imported) wrote: Mon May 30, 2011 9:09 pm Can a lower life form think and reason that they need to evolve into a more complex life form and then by sheer will evolve? What's the motivator for evolving?
Evolutionary pressure. Some peppered moths were melanistic (very black) some were not and just white sprinkled with black. In preindustrial times, the black ones stood out on lichen covered trees and birds ate more of them so they had a hard time reproducing (because they were dead). With the Industrial Revolution the trees got covered with soot, the white moths now stood out and got eaten (and taken out of the reproductive cycle) and the black moths were cleverly camoflaged to look like sooty bark. For the last thrity years, air pollution laws have put an end to industrial pollution (at least in the form of soot) and now the trees are no longer covered with soot, now the white peppered moths are making a comeback. The species has both whitish and melanistic varieties, which of the two reproduces more depends on which avoids being eaten which depends on random events beyond the moth's control. The same thing occurs with dandelions. There are tall varieties and ground hugging forms. In manicured lawns, the tall forms are cut down before they reproduce and so in parks and suburban landscapes, that form prevails; in wilderness areas, the tall forms prevail because they are not cut down and being tall they can scatter their seeds more effectively than their ground-hugging cousins. The two varieties have to already be there before evolution can select one or the other.
Because it is not about personal will but about what we have to start with. If you don't have the ability to change sex, then you can't select for it. That is why, despite years of trying, there are no true blue roses. The blue flower pigments, cyanins, aren't manufactured in any rose, so you can't select for it. You can select unpigmented roses and come up with white varieties, you can select varieties with xanthins and produce pale to dark yellow roses, and red roses from pale pink to deep almost black red or mix the two and produce salmon or orangey-pinks, but you can't breed blue roses because short of genetic engineering, there are no blue cards to play. Darwinian evolution only works with the cards it is dealt; new, playable cards are extremely rare.Hash (imported) wrote: Mon May 30, 2011 9:09 pm If we say man has evolved, then why haven't we, why can't we change our sex at will?
The simplistic element is your misunderstanding, but that isn't evolution. Darwinian evolution removes any form of "decision" from the process. Traits appear by random chance and are selected for by impersonal survival pressures once those traits appear in the gene pool. Evolution is the biological equivalent of Brownian motion; what you are ranting about is a teleological construct, generally referred to as Lamarckianism, which is the biological equivalent of faith healing; and you are right; it is a crock. It is also a straw man.Hash (imported) wrote: Mon May 30, 2011 9:09 pm What's always been difficult about evolution is the simplistic decision that an animal can by sheer will over hundreds of thousands of years, change it's design.
I still don't get hot flashes. Hope it stay that way. :-\