Do you believe in evolution?

Question

According to evolve theory- the world sprays out mutants and the process of natural selection keeps the best suited.

But everything goes in cycles- heats up--cools down--lots of vegatation--lots of land. These are long cycles--over thousands of years the earth heats up..solar radiation increases... but the selection process is done in the short span of a man's lifetime-- say--30 years.

How does nature know how to select the right specie in a 20 year period that will be the best selection a hundred thousand years later?

Reversability says the fluctuations over a man's lifespan are vastly greater than the gradient of nature's progress. So hairless men die on a very cold day but the survivors die on very hot days-- that's reversability--there's is no arrow of evolution to point the way to natural selection

Face it- many young blacks die from a bullet-what are the odds nature intends to evolve black males into an armor-plated thing to survive bullets?

Answer 1

"Do you believe...?" Evolution is not a willful activity. It is an algorithm, a logical cascade of events corresponding to the nature of reality, not unlike water running downhill. You don't "believe in" evolution, you understand it, the way you understand any other logical process, like the orbit of earth around the sun. Denial of evolution is like denial that water flows downhill. Whether or not it occurs exactly the way we theorize and model it, is the only controversy. The only mystery is, why is the universe such that it does produce the gravity we observe, or the evolving life we observe. There is still room for belief in a willful creator -- science does not, and cannot, address the question of whether there is one.

"what are the odds nature intends to evolve black males into..." Zero. First off: Dead people do not contribute to evolution of the species. It is the SURVIVORS who do. If there were any people who survived gun violence because they have thicker skin, theoretically we might eventually evolve armor plating. But this is not the case. Survivors live because they do not encounter gun violence. Therefore if gun violence were acting as a selective force on a population, that population will evolve towards use of different problem solving methods. But this is an oversimplification.

Asking what nature intends for us by making some of us die from violence is simple minded -- human violence is not caused by the "intentions" of nature. The selective pressure on human city-dwellers dying from gun violence is ultimately resource limitation from overcrowding/overpopulation. Members of marginalized social groups are most vulnerable to dying because of that, and it's because they're marginalized - not because they are directly unfit for the environment in a survival sense.

Please at least try to understand the basic concept of evolution -- that it is an algorithm, not a willful activity -- before attempting to analyze the finer points of evolutionary theory, and especially before trying to apply evolution to situations that it does not govern at all. You wouldn't want me to approach creationism with the assumption that the Creator must follow a set of arbitrary rules I prescribed, would you? You wouldn't want me to press you to explain why the Creator forces me to waste my time on Y! Answers, right? It's a similar thing.

Answer 2

"but the selection process is done in the short span of a man's lifetime-- say--30 years."

Wrong.

The selection process goes on continuously over tens of thousands of years, and it is only on a timescale of tens of thousands of years that you will see significant changes in a isolated human population.

"How does nature know how to select the right specie in a 20 year period that will be the best selection a hundred thousand years later?"

Stupid question.

Nature doesn't "know" anything. It does not have a mind. Nature is simply random environmental factors, like meteors hitting the Earth and throwing up clouds of dust that blot out the Sun and kill most of the plants, for example.

"what are the odds nature intends to evolve black males into an armor-plated thing to survive bullets?"

Another stupid question.

If you killed everyone with thin skin, the only people that would be left alive to breed would be ones with thicker skin. Then if you killed everyone in the next generation with thinner-than-average skin, you'd have only the thicker-skinned people left over. Then if you do this over and over and over, but let the species recover its population each time (so you don't kill them all), eventually you'd have a species with extremely thick skin.

Your failure to grasp the most basic evolutionary ideas belies a mind that is very, I daresay MILITANTLY, unaware of the facts of biology.

Answer 3

Evolution has no goal and is not directional. You are looking into the future, natural selection does not. Variation that is worked on by natural selection is suited to the environment of now. Other variation down the line may be suited to the environment of then; or it may not. Survivability is not the " coin " of evolutionary success; only reproductive success counts. You have a convoluted appreciation of the process. You need further instruction in evolutionary theory, as it is not a matter of belief, but of evidence.

PS Natural selection must work with the materials at hand. There will be no bullet proof human male, what ever the mutation and selective pressure.

Answer 4

I must briefly applaude you, of all the stupid theists I've argued with, your understanding of how Evolution works in the closest to the truth.

Having said that, I have no idea what you're talking about with the "ice ages happen every 30 years" stuff, I'm 34 and javelin not noticed that.

And no, Natural Selection is NOT about about psychically knowing what will survive 100 years from now, it's about slight advantages now. Having a mutant gene that let's you survive the Black Plague, for example.

Answer 5

Where do you get this balony that things occur in a man's life time??? things happen over MILLIONS of years, not 10's of years...

I will give an example of how things are selected for, due to the conditions present at a particular time and place.
( and this is a classic example) where a moth has 2 alleles for wing/body colour....1 is for a white mottled version and the other is a dark colour ( colour is a very simple genetic change in organisms)....the pale version makes it hard for mothes to be seen on trees with pale lichen....so that birds can't see them against the tree bark where they rest...the darker moths are easily seen and quickly eaten by birds/predators.... as the pale moths are more plentiful they have more offspring and most of these will also be pale coloured...over time you will see less and less black moths and more and more pale ones.
If there is a change in condtions ( in the case of the peppered moth it was the industrial revolution which caused lichen to die off, but it could be a disease, climate change leading to drier/wetter conditions, warmer/cooler conditions which may lead to another ( and maybe different coloured )lichen to be present or no lichen present)...this leads to the darker coloured moths being harder to see by predators and over a period of time they will increase in number and the pale coloured moths will decrease in number....

with skin colour in humans, those that had darker skin colour in africa had less chance of skin cancer!! the melanin protects the skin, when they moved to europe there was less light intesity and I think there is something to do with vitamin D defiency...so people further north had less and less melanin....Again these things DO NOT happen on 1 day and change back on the rest!!!!! It happened in this case over thousands of years, but as I pointed out earlier, pigmentation change is probably the most simple change in organisms and happens a lot in various situations ( bu does not mean its a "new species".

Answer 6

I don't even want to refute your errors because you clearly have not understood evolution to any degree. Read a few more books and perhaps you will understand (even the catholic church accepts it). Not "believing" in evolution is the intellectual equivalent of not "believing" in gravity or a spherical earth.

Answer 7

Many parts of the evolutionary theory have been disputed by scientists for years. Mutation has been used to explain how different lifeforms are produced from pre existing life forms, but this has been shown to be practically impossible. Mutation usually damages the organisms it takes place in, not improves them. Furthermore, it has been shown that all creatures stay within their own genome. Whenever mutation or any other process brings any life form too far away from its genome, it dies and any offspring it produced eventually revert back to the normal form of their species.