Evolution
- Thread starter omega 616
- Start date
You are underestimating just how long a time frame we are talking about here. If a horse has a neck a few MM longer, which helps it eat leaves, it will be more successful. Were talking, like, able to avoid starvation 1% more often then the shorter necks. Maybe, when there's a food shortage, 101 longer necks survive, 100 shorter necks. A tiny, minuscule difference that we would dismiss, but is still there. When that generation mates, any individual horse may be 1% more likely to mate with a longer neck. 51 times out of a hundred, it will choose the longer neck. The weaker of the long necks get stuck with a short neck slightly more often then half. Give this a few dozen, maybe hundred, maybe more, generations, and then you will have some horses with necks a whole couple centimeters longer. Maybe they are 5% more likely to not die of starvation. Well now its very obvious who the horses are with longer necks, and animals are programed to not like creatures that are different. So Long necks mate with long necks much, much more often (Maybe the difference percentage wise is all the way in the teens!), short necks with short necks. Over millions of years, those 1%'s accumulate and compound endlessly, and you start getting real change. Its like compound interest: It adds up fast, even if fast by evolutionary standards is thousands of years. Eventually, you get a change that we can see.omega 616 said:
As for the spider, well, it decides to eat the wasp because it is starving and will die if it doesn't. A bunch of spiders start doing this, and maybe one can jump a few milimeters farther, so it catches that wasp an extra 1 time in a hundred, which saves the life of about 1% of those slightly further jumping spiders. Some may get another few percent because it knows how to avoid the sting. I think you can see where this is going. A tiny change gets multiplied by a tiny amount, hundreds and hundreds of times, until the change becomes huge. And chances are, once some spiders started jumping, there were spiders that DID stick with there webs, and were likely better at making webs then the jumping spiders. The spiders didn't stop spinning webs, some spiders just found a different niche, and they diverged.
randomsix said:
[sub]Sorry I did just quote you for a cheap meme related laugh. I apologise, it's like a compulsion at the moment.[/sub]
Israel's IVF clinics politely disagree.kasperbbs said:No matter how sexy you are, you can`t reproduce if youre dead.Erana said:It seems like half the time, its not "Survival of the fittest," its "Survival of the sexiest."
OT: There is nothing here I feel I can add other than cheap jokes, while I understand the theory others here have beaten me to explaining it and have done so better than I could.
Evolution-wise, the purpose of being "fit" is to survive long enough to have sex. Evolution wise, nothing else matters besides having kids that can have kids in turn.Erana said:It seems like half the time, its not "Survival of the fittest," its "Survival of the sexiest."
What you need to realize is that nature is extremely hostile. Lots of animals die, so even a slight advantage can make a difference. In the giraffe example, being slightly taller means that they will be able to eat more leaves, which makes them healthier. Unhealthy animals get picked off by predators more often. Picture a single generation of these proto-giraffes. Some are pretty short, some are a little taller. The tall ones have slightly more to eat, so they're fairly healthy in general. The short ones aren't quite as healthy, and a few of them get picked off by predators. Now, a higher proportion of the population is tall. Since height is based mostly on genetics, the next generation of proto-giraffes will have slightly taller members on average. Repeat a few million times, and voila. This is evolution by natural selection.omega 616 said:
What you were talking about is sexual selection, where one gender chooses a mate based on traits that they see as desirable, even if it's not good for the species as a whole. This is why we have peacocks. Bright and bold plumage is generally a sign of good health, so peahens kept mating with the most impressive peacocks. Unfortunately for them this got so out of hand that peacocks can't really fly because their plumage is so large and unwieldy.
As for the wasp and spider example, you're approaching it in a slightly different manner. The jumping spider probably never built a web. It and web-building spiders just have a common ancestor that had 8 legs and all the other basic characteristics of a spider. Some groups of spiders lived in a place which had a bunch of early insects. The spiders were slightly bigger or faster, so they were able to eat the insects. As the insects evolved more defenses, like a stinger, flight, etc., the spiders who were best able to adapt to these changes got more food, so they were more likely to survive and reproduce.
Yeah, but not everyone who survives is at the peak of perfection. Once animals get old enough to mate, its often the attractiveness that takes precedence. Animals are designed to prefer to mate with what they find attractive, and being attractive is not always the most adept at existence.kasperbbs said:No matter how sexy you are, you can`t reproduce if youre dead.Erana said:It seems like half the time, its not "Survival of the fittest," its "Survival of the sexiest."
Well, pretty much all mammals came from rodents that survived the mass extinction that took out the dinosaur.omega 616 said:
OT: Animals aren't sentient, they only care about eating and fucking. Some animals chose mates that have traits they are instintively are attracted to, like how Human males are normally attracted to women with large tits. This is from a behaverial adaptation that came from a mutation that continued through the species thanks to the increased chances of survival it gave the organisms who had it.
this is kinda true, because what we, or any other animal think of as "sexy" is actually something usefull to there survival, usualy anyway, for example a slender and fitter girl tends to be seen as more attractive then one who may be overweight, this could be because the slender fitter girl can run for longer periods of time possably after prey or away from preditors. and ya i guess posting this in responce to what was obviosly a silly and funny post might not have been propper but i just wanted to expand upon what you said =)Erana said:It seems like half the time, its not "Survival of the fittest," its "Survival of the sexiest."
Isn't what you said considered trolling? Posting something totally unrelated to the thread, just to get a reaction? I am aware that I am "feeding the troll" but I don't take kindly to being labled a troll when I am just asking questions.Coraxian said:
This is my thinking aswell, surely there not admiring the more adapt mates, there admiring the more "sexy" mates. So is it just pure fluke the "sexiest" mates are also the most adapt?Erana said:Yeah, but not everyone who survives is at the peak of perfection. Once animals get old enough to mate, its often the attractiveness that takes precedence. Animals are designed to prefer to mate with what they find attractive, and being attractive is not always the most adept at existence.kasperbbs said:No matter how sexy you are, you can`t reproduce if youre dead.Erana said:It seems like half the time, its not "Survival of the fittest," its "Survival of the sexiest."
Read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. It's still a somewhat disputed interpretation, but it makes a lot of sense to me. Basically, genes constantly mutate from any given member of a species to the next. The ones with certain genetic mutations that die the least are the ones that survive. That's a vast oversimplification. Read the book.
There is so much evidence for evolution that denying it is like denying the holocaust, most people just automatically deny it in the face of huge evidence because it would bring their faith to shambles.
No. When it is fact ie considered to be true by most of the scientific community like Evoultion is then fine. Just saying right we have a pretty good idea what Gravity is why don't we stop looking into it? That is a really piss poor attitude to have. If we just stuck to theory we would still think that light is a stream of particles and atoms look like plum pudding. If we stopped there we wouldn't of thought light was a wave and then photons. We wouldn't know anything about electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks and etc.Elcarsh said:
I never said it was a bad theory I just meant that we shouldn't just stop there. We can always come up with something better and fine tune it. Thinking that this is the best we are going to get is a bit silly. Maybe I could of said what I was saying there more clearly but that is what some people think from evolution and that is not true as you have said.
The fact that I said we can't say we come from is true because despite what people think is we can be categorised like normal mammals.
Great thanks for taking what I said completely out of context. Just to restate what I have already said. Yes I know theory is the best we can but stopping at one theory and deciding not to improve on it is a bit stupid. For example(restating again) we wouldn't of known about subatomic structure or the structure of a proton or neutron if we just deciding to take one theory as true or complete. We can't really evolve from apes when we are apes. That is a bad statement to make. To say we evolved from apes is more to say we evolved to monkeys ie have tails. I do see what you are but it is badly put across.TheDist said:Glademaster said:
Theory in science is the most solid you can get and not only did we come from apes, we ARE apes.
Also I would like to say that thinking something is fine just because it is fact by science is not a good idea. We should always strive to improve on theories like Evoultion so we can build a more complete model of what it is. Building on previous theories is necessary. Without it we wouldn't have relativity or the idea that light is a photon.
I hope I made what I was trying to say a lot clearer.
in some cases yes its kinda like a fluke but the odds are rigged in evolitions favior lets say we have 1 female blaa blaa and 10 male blaa blaa's now which she makes with is up to chance at this point and male number 3 lets call him frank (dont ask im just throwing random names out now =P) has a 1 in 10 chance of having kids with the female but if a deciese hits which effects male blaa blaa's but which frank is immune to due to mutation and lets say 5 of the other males die franks chances of having kids doubles to 1 in 5. im sorry im very tired so my explination sucksomega 616 said:Isn't what you said considered trolling? Posting something totally unrelated to the thread, just to get a reaction? I am aware that I am "feeding the troll" but I don't take kindly to being labled a troll when I am just asking questions.Coraxian said:
This is my thinking aswell, surely there not admiring the more adapt mates, there admiring the more "sexy" mates. So is it just pure fluke the "sexiest" mates are also the most adapt?Erana said:Yeah, but not everyone who survives is at the peak of perfection. Once animals get old enough to mate, its often the attractiveness that takes precedence. Animals are designed to prefer to mate with what they find attractive, and being attractive is not always the most adept at existence.kasperbbs said:No matter how sexy you are, you can`t reproduce if youre dead.Erana said:It seems like half the time, its not "Survival of the fittest," its "Survival of the sexiest."
