To those adhering to evolution.-several questions. I assume plant, insect and animal life came before human?

Question

life. We all know that plants have no eyes and can't actually see. Why did sightless plant life desire to, or evolve into, having eyes/eye sight? If never having sight, how would a plant know what sight even was? Where did it get the brain power to even consider it? Does upper level plant life such as a tree, wish it could see? The human eye is extremely complex. Did evolution--continuous evolving-- account for that complexity? Many animals have better sight than humans. Why did sight digress? Does evolution have a goal in mind? Is there a finish line? Being able to fly on our own accord (not a jet etc,) would be a greatly desired trait for humans. If humans are further up the scale than insects and animals, why would such a desired, advanced attribute be lost? Why can't we live under water like fish can? What is mans next step in evolution? Three eyes? Able to fly? Turn from visible into invisiblre? Grow 10 ft. tall? How and why did all this happen?

Answer 1

Ummm You ask these questions because you don't understand how evolution works......only humans think the way we do!! What happens is that mutations occur in our DNA (about 1 mutation per person per generation), or a new combination of genes occur and sometimes these create new features....sometimes these are beneficial (sometimes they have no effect and sometimes they are detremental).....if something is successful (ie it is better suited to the environment than others) it will produce more offspring...passing on that character to its offsrping and very gradually it will increase in the population. If the envrionment changes due to ice age etc the changes that have taken place may not be so successful and it may die out (due to not being able to cope with new condition, not being able to compete for food, loss of habitat, space, mates etc). 99% of all life has died out, so whats left today is the present day success stories....obviously some are still dying out (humans are a cause of many today!).
In the distant past some creatures were able to survive on land..those that did make it had little competition, so did ok and gradually those features which made it easier to survive on land became more common and gradually became essential....to the point we are not able to go back in the sea, but whales and dolphins did (but they cannot stay underwater forever and have to get air like us!) Whales have little (vestigial) leg bones which have literally become smaller as it was more advantagous to those in water NOT to have them....
Some animials gradually devopled better eyesight as it favoured them (remember it starts by chance but stays by being advantagoues at the time)......

Answer 2

Yeah as previously acertained by other answerers, you have no idea about evolution do you?

Oh and for the record, unlike another answerer seems to think, evolution is not a religion. Religion is all about faith; believing in things for which there is no evidence. If anyone could provide hard evidence for God's existence, then the world wouldn't be full of atheists would it?

A few points I'd like to make. Firstly: Thomas Aquinas's watch. This argument is essentially 'life is so complex to have occurred by chance'. The universe we occupy today, is approximately 13 billion years old. We know an awful lot about it, but not when the universe was one Planck old [Planck time is an extremely small unit of time, and before this the universe was such a tight bundle of quantum mess no one has worked it out yet]. We don't know how many universes came before us. We also don't know how many planets there are. The point is, given a sufficiently complex system and a few million years, all kinds of things crop up which no one expects. Some people think evolution is hollow, and that only by a devine creator does our life have some meaning. But let me make a good, if trite, analogy. I give you a coin, and ask you to flip it 10 times. Every single time its a head. Pretty amazing huh? What are the chances! But then I let you in on a secret, it was actually a weighted coin and I had a hand in everything from the beginning. Oh, it suddenly becomes a lot less amazing doesn't it. This to me parallels with the amazing idea that life today exists because of millions of years of random chance, compared to the relatively boring concept that a devine creator 'magicked' us into existence. If he is all powerful, frankly I think he could have done a better job.

Secondly, is just an issue with the God/Science thing. In olden olden days, God was given arbitrary power. He kept the sun bright, made the earth spin, explained how birds could stay up in the air. But then science came a long, and explained nuclear fusion, gravity and aerodynamics. The computer you are typing with, exists because of the scientific method. We are taking away from God with every single scientific breakthrough, of which there are a lot.

At which point do you start denying science of its abundant successes? If you reject the sensible hypothesis of evolution, which has been backed up with fossil evidence and experiments, then why do you still believe that its gravity that keeps the earth moving? By denying evolution you are denying the scientific method, and in so denying the sensible world in which we live into something completely arbitrary and essentially 'magick'. I know where I'd rather live.

Answer 3

Thanks for inviting us, fuddles!

I have just one thing to add to what others have said: Humans and NOT further up the evolutionary scale than insects and animals. That is evidenced by your own questions asked here. Why can't humans fly? Why can many animals see and smell better than humans can? Why can cheetahs run 3 times as fast as the fastest human?

All of these add up to humans going in a different direction, not "to the top of the heap".

If you are really interested in reading science of evolution, please read a book or two by Richard Dawkins. May I suggest "Climbing Mount Improbable" or "The Blind Watchmaker"? You do not need to be a biologist to understand either of these books and both talk specifically about your "eye" question which is one of the most commonly asked.

Can I challenge you to read one or both of these suggested books and then come back and talk to us again? Maybe in biology?

Answer 4

Too many disjointed questions all at once. It's difficult to answer so many in this format.

But a general comment might answer most of them:

You are caught up in notion that *everything* is the result of goals and desires and intent. Why? When it rains, it's not like the clouds "desire" to rain. And when that rain makes it to a river that flows downhill, it's not like the river "knows" which way is down or "wishes" to flow downstream.

Evolution is like a billions of raindrops falling on a mountain. They all will tend to flow down the mountain without a particular "goal" in mind, but the specific direction each one takes is not predetermined.

Because evolution is not predetermined, there is no way to predict how we will evolve in the future. There are biological and genetic reasons why developing a third eye is unlikely, and turning invisible is impossible (as a biological development). But there is no "goal" in evolution, any more than there is a "goal" in the direction a raindrop will take down a mountain.

Answer 5

I think you're a little confused. This model of evolution - the Lamarckian model, in which individuals evolve desirable traits because they want to and pass these on to their offspring - hasn't been accepted for over a century, and neither has the model of a ladder with humans on top. The history of life as biologists understand it today is more like a grand family bush.

Consider a human family tree for analogy. At the start, you have a couple founders. They have many children; a few die young without children of their own, but others go on to found their own families. One adult child specializes in carpentry, another farming, still another thievery, and another simply becomes a drifter with her husband.

Time passes; several generations later, the bottom falls out of the carpentry market, and that line of the family dwindles to nothing. The thief line is also forced to adapt to the changing tides of the market, but the farmers and drifters still thrive happily. More generations pass; some of the thieves give up that line of work, seeing better prospects in wallet design.

Eventually, say after a hundred generations, someone compiles the family tree with the intent of holding a grand Reunion. At the reunion, all the branches of that founder's family come together... and they barely recognize each other!

Life, of course, is more complex than that, but that's part of why humans don't suddenly give birth to hawks - our family line and the hawks' diverged eons ago.

Also, the evolution of the eye is fairly well-documented, looking at the fossil record and modern species with simplistic proto-vision. Eons and eons ago, some mutation granted a newborn animal with the ability to sense light. Nothing else - just distinguishing between brightness and darkness.

Even this was a pretty significant advantage for the time - in the world of the blind, light-sensing cells make you king. It passed this trait on to some of its offspring; and then, as time passed, the ones which could "see" better lived longer and ate better, passing on this incrementally better vision to THEIR descendants, and they to theirs, and so on through the branching family tree of life. Several branches, obviously, have eyes today - it's like several branches of the wallet family branch above specializing in different types of wallets, but still using a signature technique, sort of.

I hope things are a bit clearer now, and that you were asking in honesty and not to troll. Wikipedia has an excellent article for further reading.

Answer 6

You have a really gross misunderstanding of evolution. Before you start asking all these questions, why don't you sit down and read up a little more about what you're asking. THEN people will take you seriously.

To start you off, evolution isn't based upon desire. Natural selection is the phenomenon is the basis of evolution. Mutations arise in a population, and those that are more adapted to the change in the environment will survive and those that aren't will die. Thus, the population changes. Many many generations of natural evolution lead to speciation (new species) and that leads to the great diversity we see today.

Answer 7

Okay - I know this is useless, but here goes. If you would like to know how the eye evolved (and, BTW, it's not just one "eye" - various eyes (that work in various ways) have evolved at least three times in different groups of animals. The eye of a squid works differently than the eye of an insect which works differently than the eye of a mammal.

Quite honestly, you have so many mistakes, misstatements, and outright lack of knowledge (I'm trying to state this in as kind a way as possible on a board), that it's pretty hopeless to attempt to answer each and every thing you've got just flat out mixed up and wrong. It would take at least five hours of typing to even attempt to get close to answer it all.

So I suggest that you try looking here. A lot of what you go on about has already been answered. I know you're not going to take the time to do so - but on the chance someone else comes by here at a later date and would like some real information - I'm going to post the links. The first is on the evolution of the eye.

Try:
http://home.austarnet.com.au/stear/evolution_of_the_eye.htm

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/1/l_011_01.html

http://www.2think.org/eye.shtml

http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-qa.html

http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-mustread.html

Answer 8

Plant life with times and seasons of the day and year for it, if every day is the same, why another?
Noah was 375 days in the Ark in the bible story. But all else was created in 6 days, then Adam lived to be 930 years old?
It takes some study to get these details in order, the word day that is as old as this word sure has another meaning.
The earth speaks for all that has happened on it, and an ages old earth went into ages of preparation to ages of plant life before ages of animal life of one kind, the the other.

Answer 9

If a trait is not needed it's eventually lost. Colour vision of vertebrates depends on cone cells in the retina. The progenitors of mammals had the full complement of cones, but during a time in their evolution when they were mainly nocturnal, and colour vision was not crucial to their survival, early mammals lost two types of cone cells, where they used to have four. That's why mammals including human colour vision is very limited compared to birds.

Answer 10

It didn't. Certainly not the way you just described. You need a primer on evolution. You will probably have a better understanding of this when you reach middle school.