What made me evolve?

Question

Im not arguing, im asking. i asked a similar question and everyone thought i was having a go at evolutionists and athiests. i respect you, you respect me...
okay...so, ive heard that nature took care of evolution. that confuses me...can someone explain? what was the reason for evolution? apes seem to get on fine. natural selection? what does that mean?
ive also heard from evolutionists that "our ancestors" experienced random changes over thousands of years. if i experienced random changes, id probably die. why didnt they die?

Answer 1

Atheists will make you evolve.
jtm

Answer 2

Okay, athEIsts, right? Evolutionist isn't a real word, it's something the Church Lady made up.

Now, the point is not that the individual undergoes random changes during their lifetime, it's a matter of mutations of genes between generations. So you might have got a dodgy "xyz" gene from one of your parents, that is, different to a "normal" one. It may be that it has no effect, it may have a negative effect (eg you might die) or it could turn out to have a positive effect for you - and this is the important part - within your specific environment.

Those with "positive" genes are more likely to live to adulthood and reproduce, but those with "negative" ones aren't. Therefore there is more likelihood that the "positive" genes will be passed on to through the generations. This is natural selection.

Don't they teach this stuff in schools at all anymore? Not to be condescending, but really, it's pretty basic stuff...anyway, hope that makes it a bit more clear.

Answer 3

Natural selection explains it. In the most simple terms it is the struggle for the species to survive in a given environment. For example some butterflies have the same color as trees. This is used as a camouflage. Otherwise, they die off faster. What happened is that at one point none looked like the tree and very few survived. However, one, thanks to a mutation, resembled a tree 5%, and it was able live more successfully throughout time and reproduce. Eventually there were ones that resembled it 95%+. All the ones who were born that didn't had a higher tendency to die off.

Animals like apes are fine. However, if their environment forces them to need new "skills," the ones who get even a little bit closer to those skills will be able to survive. One example would be that monkeys move to an area where the top of the tree branches are weaker. Although they will be able to eat the fruit in the bottom half, the ones who are lighter physically will be able to eat fully from the entire tree because the branch won't break off when grappling it. If the ones that can only eat at the bottom reproduce too much, they will have less resources and die off. On the other hand, the ones that can eat from BOTH will have double the chances of survival. Ergo, being physically lighter will have evolved and be common in the species.

Answer 4

Natural selection means that in any group of creatures you are going to have some who die before they produce offspring. The creatures with the best mix of genetic traits have the best shot at avoiding this fate and they pass on their genes to the next generation.

Random changes in this sense means genetic mutations, which happen in all creatures even modern humans. Mutations are usually nuetral, neither positive or negative. In every generation there are children born with traits that are slightly different that those of their parents. Sometimes these changes are negative and the creatures who wind up with those genes do end up dying and therefore don't pass on their "bad" DNA.

All leaps in evolution come as the result of environmental pressure. They have found the skeleton of a monkey with its skull sitting a top its spine like a humans, not connected at the base of the skull like the rest of the primates. This creature had a significant advantage over other monkey's because the jungle of Africa were shrinking and this upright bipedal design was useful for crossing deserts and grassland. Over the next 20 million years or so the design improved by a series of small steps. Taller, smarter, eventually our ancestors became less hairy. Our eating habits evolved to include meat. When environmental change hit again about 100,000 years ago, hominid populations became isolated. Neanderthals adapted to the frozen climate of Northern Europe while the ancestors of homo sapiens adapted to live in a vast desert, which required intelligence to plan ahead years in advance.

Answer 5

ok lets see.

"nature took care of evolution." I am not sure what you mean but yes, evolution is a natural process that has been guiding life since the start. It is a blind process, there is no 'plan' or 'goal' or 'reason' behind it.

"Apes seem to get on fine" yes. but in those groups of apes those that are the most successful in breeding will see their gene-sets (what defines all aspects of their body/built) passed on to the next generation. Those that are less succesful will not. This is natural selection. Over time this process will optimise each species (not individual) for its environment.

"random changes" I am guessing you are talking about mutations and gene drift. Again, they are a generational thing, not an individual thing; individuals are stable and not prone to sudden mutations. And yes, most mutations will be deleterious. But some will be beneficial. Over time (generations!), these changes will accumulate.

There is no start and and to this process, there is no 'goal' or 'purpose', all creatures currently alive as as evolved as the others that are alive (so a monkey is as evolved as a human) as evolution does not 'breed' for intelligence, or self-awareness. Those things are just byproducts of our particular evolutionary path.

Answer 6

This teaching is to support addictions in a philosophical way.

If you are under stress and you turn to black and white thinking, you are not handling it in the most intelligent way possible. You would be part of a cult, in my estimation. Compare the systematic method of cladistics. A cladistic evolutionary tree always has binary nodes. Parsimony is used to decide what is important to consider.

What motivates binary node decisions? I've just said it. A cultic, societally based approach to stress.

I just saw a TV show tonight where a guy has spent years teaching wolf cubs how to be wild. What? Why do you need to teach a wolf cub how to howl? Has mankind gone completely psycho-nuts over his own rediscovery of the basics, so that now he needs to slow animal development down to a snail's pace to suit his own self-congratulation? Yes! Wolves and all animals are very intelligent. They don't need to be bitten on the ear so as to develop a fighting instinct. I think they end up confused when people tame them to be wild. No wonder they turn on the trainer.

This is the kind of rubbish that's on TV these days. Lions ate grass in WWII because the meat rations were low.

Animals, when they are let to do their own thing, have something like a sense of justice. I don't agree that it's the survival of the fittest. That's an excuse for human bad behaviour. It's a way to keep the science class sedated, because if they don't tow the line, some scientist will reinvent their life story too.

Answer 7

This is an idea of how it works.

Lets say you have 10 million mosquitos and you spray them with pestacide. 10.5 million of those may die but half a million may live because they have a natural genetic resistance to the pestacide. Maybe this natural resistance was caused by a spontaneous mutation within their parents or shortly after their conception. Maybe it was a mutation brought about by exposure of previous generations to small amounts of the pestacide itself. Maybe the mutation was caused by a virus. But anyway, half a million pestacide resistant mosquitos live and pass on their genes and spawn a generation of pestacide resistant mosquitos.

They are still mosquitos but maybe in a few million years after similar changes they won't be considered mosquitos anymore.

Spontaneous mutations that occure within humans during the individuals lifetime typically only manifest in the next generation or, if the trait is recessive, in a few generations. At some point in history, a mutation occured and someone gave birth to a redhead. This mutation may have occured in one person at one time or in multiple people at different times.

Of course redheads are still human, but if you took two humans populations and seperated them long enough under different environmental conditions, if the ability was there for them to adapt to those conditions, over time you would eventually get two populations who looked different. If the seperation continued, you'd get two populations who were genetically similar enough to mate but would only produce fertile offspring some of the time. Eventually the two populations would grow so genetically disimilar that no fertile offspring could be produced.

Answer 8

YOU are not evolving; you are staying the same, and in fact, your body works very hard to keep you just as you are. An individual organism does not evolve; a species evolves. A species evolves because of the pressures of the world around it - food, space, weather, predators, physical conditions, etc.

As for natural selection - it means that the organism that is best suited to the environment in which it finds itself is the most likely to survive long enough to produce offspring, and thus pass on its genetic traits. For instance, if you are rich, you might have a lot better chance of having children because you have better health care, food, shelter, etc., than someone who is poor, and unable to have those same things. Likewise, animals that are better suited to their environment live long enough to produce offspring, and pass their own particular genetic traits along.

An example of this in human society is very obvious when you think about it. There are people in our society who are born mentally retarded. VERY few of these people ever have children. They are effectively selected OUT of the mix. Likewise, a person with severe physical deformities may not be ABLE to procreate, particularly if the reproductive organs are involved, so his/her genes are not perpetuated. Other diseases kill a person in childhood; that person might be able to reproduce, but does not survive long enough to do so.

The "random changes" that you mention are not to the parent organism, but to the reproductive cells the parent produces - and many of them DO die. The VAST majority are not viable mutations, or are simply mutations that don't offer any particular advantage or disadvantage. However, there are mutations that occur with considerable regularity (to the point that science is beginning to learn how to use the rate of mutation to tell how closely together two people are related, for example). When a mutation gives an organism an advantage, it stands a better chance of reproducing, and thereby having its genes (complete with the mutated gene) preserved in ITS offspring.

The causes of genetic mutations are quite varied; what affects one species may not affect another. You could easily be walking around with mutated sperm (or egg, depending on your gender) cells; these mutations could be cause by things like radiation, climate, pollutants, injury, diet, and many other factors. You would have no idea that a mutation had occurred, because you do not "use" your sperm cells for survival - but you would see the results in your children if it was a significant mutation. If it were a positive change (something that helped the child in life in some way), then the child would have a greater chance of living, having offspring, and transmitting the change to his/her children.

And so it goes. I hope this helps you understand how the process works.

Answer 9

AHL, you're appropriate, issues do no longer evolve on their very own. Gold does not evolve into hydrogen peroxide, and by no ability has inert rely developed into residing rely. If an outbreak evolves from one form of ailment to a distinctive, then that would desire to be a function of the virus. If an outbreak did no longer evolve, then while a guy or woman developed an immunity to a definite virus (the only virus), then finally anybody could be resistant to it and it might ie. IOW, God made an outbreak to conform in a manner that it might desire to maintain on.

Answer 10

Good questions,I have seen on here people stating that there need not be an intelligence behind evolution,so how can it know when to start and when it is complete, and what random changes has humanity experienced? It is not odd that evolution only wants us here for a certain time and then decides to dispose of us wouldn`t it be much more evolutionary to evolve a set number of beings who cannot die and just keep increasing in intelligence and power?

Answer 11

Natural selection means genetic mutations occurred in the process of procreation, and these mutations were actually more beneficial in a given environment. As an example, think of a fluke gene that causes an "albino" moth. If this species eats white leaves, that would be a beneficial trait since it was camouflage it while other grey moths would be eaten up because they are easily seen by birds and other prey. Over time the entire species of moths would become albino. That is natural selection.