Evolution: The Scientific Evidence

[brunoparga]

Originally Posted by Fusion_power

Look back at Xilman's post which points out that the great apes have not changed significantly in that million years.

Originally Posted by xilman

It seems to me that the great apes have actually evolved relatively little over the last 5MY or so.

Chimps, bonobos and modern humans are all very similar from an anatomical point of view. It is only our arrogance that puts the three species into two genera. All three are much closer in anatomy than, say, Canis lupus and Canis adustus (the grey wolf and the striped jackal respectively) and, IMO, they should all be in the Homo genus.

Wait, wait, wait a minute. I'm not a native English speaker, so it seems that you and me, Fusion, have understood Paul's post in opposite ways.

You've quoted him as meaning "while great apes didn't change a lot, humans did", which is favourable to your argument. However, I read him as meaning something a bit like "Great apes, that is, chimps, bonobos and humans, have changed little." This would seem consistent with what I had said and against your position.

Thus, I'd ask Paul himself to please clarify this point, if he wants to.

Bruno

[Jwb52z]

Originally Posted by brunoparga

I don't disagree with that, I'd just draw this picture in a larger scale.

First, I wouldn't use the expression "scientific belief". Think of a kid who wears a Superman uniform and jumps out of his window, believing he can fly. We know he cannot, and he'll fall down and suffer severe injury and perhaps die. It's just the same with other scientific areas, say, cosmology or evolution. The scientific evidence is there, and it remains there regardless of whether we believe it or not.

It's funny the way you say that because that's the same way I talk about God. His existence doesn't require our belief for His existence to be so.

Originally Posted by brunoparga

I know this wasn't probably your intention, but the way you mentioned "scientifically supported papers" in your first post seemed to me like science was a sort of a secret cult with secret knowledge. It is not

Bruno

For those of us who have tried all through school to understand science with anything more than, "I just have to learn this for the test" or "I want to understand this more than, 'just accept it'", but failed, it does seem as some kind of secret that we're not being let in on now. At least, that's how I always felt. I always had very low grades in science classes because it always felt cold and I don't do well with fact memorizing. It never had any meaning to me the way it was taught. I don't even know if science can have any meaning to me where I could learn it well enough to do it. I always did better in subjects like English because that had meaning for me beyond some kind of artificial construct. Science feels like, to me, someone walking into a big blank room that all of a sudden becomes filled with stuff I have no hope of making sense out of unless something enhanced my brain.

[Jwb52z]

Originally Posted by jinydu

What if I rephrase the question again, changing the word "criterion" to "test"?

Using the word "test" would mean there is no physical test that you could run that I know of that could exist. Until we would confirm that there is at least SOMETHING at all outside the universe, and how we do that I'm not smart enough to guess, we can't even begin to conceive of a test for that kind of thing. It's like trying to reverse engineer the fabric of space, so to speak.

[jinydu]

Originally Posted by Jwb52z

For those of us who have tried all through school to understand science with anything more than, "I just have to learn this for the test" or "I want to understand this more than, 'just accept it'", but failed, it does seem as some kind of secret that we're not being let in on now. At least, that's how I always felt. I always had very low grades in science classes because it always felt cold and I don't do well with fact memorizing. It never had any meaning to me the way it was taught. I don't even know if science can have any meaning to me where I could learn it well enough to do it. I always did better in subjects like English because that had meaning for me beyond some kind of artificial construct. Science feels like, to me, someone walking into a big blank room that all of a sudden becomes filled with stuff I have no hope of making sense out of unless something enhanced my brain.

I would think that you would have learned the answer to that in your school: Scientific theories are verified using replicable experimental tests. The reason the scientific results may seem so bewildering is that there is not enough time in class to actually perform all the experiments that led to the theory becoming accepted.

Originally Posted by Jwb52z

Using the word "test" would mean there is no physical test that you could run that I know of that could exist. Until we would confirm that there is at least SOMETHING at all outside the universe, and how we do that I'm not smart enough to guess, we can't even begin to conceive of a test for that kind of thing. It's like trying to reverse engineer the fabric of space, so to speak.

Well, we don't even have to use the Universe example. Given any system that you believe has a purpose, how would you prove to someone else that this is the case?

[brunoparga]

Originally Posted by Jwb52z

It's funny the way you say that because that's the same way I talk about God. His existence doesn't require our belief for His existence to be so.

Well; Hindus believe in a multitude of gods. In ancient Persia there was this religion, Zoroastrianism, which (if what I heard is right) believed in two gods, one good and the other evil (not like Satan, which would be a creation of the good God; those two there were equal in power, their only difference being their "personality"). Ancient Greeks and Romans believed in a lot of gods, too. And they thought about them exactly what you believe about your God: that their existance was independent from their belief, and that they'd get actually quite angry if people stopped believing them. However, people did, and guess what? No-one died because of that. Absolutely nothing happened.

Now, as it has been pointed out here: the existence of God(s) as an idea in human minds cannot be questioned; its existence as something else, however, is what's being discussed in another thread. Perhaps there would be the place to ask this, but here it goes: if I told you the Sun is a chariot which rides above us every day, you'd certainly ask me for a proof, for evidence. Since you're claiming there exists a supernatural, purpose-giving being called God, you'll certainly reckon that it's up to you to prove its existence.

Please note, however, that for what I said above about the ancient gods which people no longer believe, that any reasonable evidence mustn't derive from your belief itself. For the things I had mentioned (e.g. gravity and evolution) there's evidence which doesn't depend at all from belief.

Regarding your post about your school years: I honestly believe it's never too late to learn; our discussion has been positive, fruitful and pleasant, at least to me, and perhaps from what's being talked about you can try to look at the same things you didn't learn too well with a different perspective.

Cheers,
Bruno

PS: please note, however, that there's already a "Does God exist?" thread; perhaps there'd be a better place for you to try to answer that question, and please don't forgive reading the previous posts, which have already presented some common arguments for that.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by brunoparga

Wait, wait, wait a minute. I'm not a native English speaker, so it seems that you and me, Fusion, have understood Paul's post in opposite ways.

You've quoted him as meaning "while great apes didn't change a lot, humans did", which is favourable to your argument. However, I read him as meaning something a bit like "Great apes, that is, chimps, bonobos and humans, have changed little." This would seem consistent with what I had said and against your position.

Thus, I'd ask Paul himself to please clarify this point, if he wants to.

Bruno

I was about to post a follow-up when I first saw Fusion_power's misinterpretation of my words.

To be completely transparent: I include humans in the collection of species which go under the name "great apes". That collection also includes chimps, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans. I didn't specifically mention the last pair because I was concentrating primarily on how little Homo sapiens differs from Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus.

By the way, this page http://www.williamcalvin.com/teaching/bonobo.htm is a delightful description of Pan paniscus and indicates how little they differ from us.

My claim is that we as a species have not evolved an enormous range of differences in the last few megayears. Neither have the other great apes. There have certainly been changes, but nothing out of the ordinary and certainly nothing which is markedly different either in nature or in degree from many other species.

Consider, for example, how the grasses have evolved in the last 20 megayears or so. Their present day variability is immense, from tiny creeping mats to immense tree-like bamboos; from tidy clump-forming mounds which propagate primarily through wind-distributed seeds to species which flower at most once every few centuries and yet will spread their rhizomes many meters per annum even through or above the hardest and stoniest ground. Some species are deciduous, some evergreen. They live everywhere from tundra to steamy jungles; some are epiphytic and, although none are purely aquatic(as far as I know), a number of species (including rice) are adapated to living in areas subject to frequent and prolonged flooding.

I would claim that grasses have evolved much more variability in the last 20 megayears than have primates.


Paul

[Wacky]

Originally Posted by xilman

My claim is that we as a species have not evolved an enormous range of differences in the last few megayears. Neither have the other great apes.

Consider, for example, how the grasses have evolved in the last 20 megayears or so. Their present day variability is immense, from tiny creeping mats to immense tree-like bamboos;

I don't dispute the difference in diversity between the two groups cited. However, are you really comparing "apples and oranges"? For example, look at all of the diversity among the mammals.

The true grasses are monocotyledonous plants (Class Liliopsida) in the Family Poaceae. The bamboos to which you refer are not even in that Class, but they are still in the Family Poaceae.

Class Mammalia is a class of animal within the Phylum Chordata.
Hominidae are but a small portion of that Class.

[Jwb52z]

Originally Posted by jinydu

Well, we don't even have to use the Universe example. Given any system that you believe has a purpose, how would you prove to someone else that this is the case?

The only example I can think of, and it doesn't involve science, at least, I don't think it does, is if I created something for a purpose and told someone, but that's not really a test.

[Jwb52z]

Originally Posted by brunoparga

Well; Hindus believe in a multitude of gods. In ancient Persia there was this religion, Zoroastrianism, which (if what I heard is right) believed in two gods, one good and the other evil (not like Satan, which would be a creation of the good God; those two there were equal in power, their only difference being their "personality"). Ancient Greeks and Romans believed in a lot of gods, too. And they thought about them exactly what you believe about your God: that their existance was independent from their belief, and that they'd get actually quite angry if people stopped believing them. However, people did, and guess what? No-one died because of that. Absolutely nothing happened.

Well, it wasn't for someone's disbelief, most of the time, but there are people, according to the Bible, who were killed for disobeying God at some point.

Originally Posted by brunoparga

Now, as it has been pointed out here: the existence of God(s) as an idea in human minds cannot be questioned; its existence as something else, however, is what's being discussed in another thread. Perhaps there would be the place to ask this, but here it goes: if I told you the Sun is a chariot which rides above us every day, you'd certainly ask me for a proof, for evidence. Since you're claiming there exists a supernatural, purpose-giving being called God, you'll certainly reckon that it's up to you to prove its existence.

Well, I wouldn't really personally ask for proof because I would first kinda wonder if you were well. If I did ask for proof or evidence, for me it would only be because that would be an interesting thing to see. I never thought it was up to people to prove God's existence because the way I believe, it's impossible to prove it the way humans want to prove it because God wants Faith from humanity. If you have proof, you know for a fact that something is true. If you know something for a fact, you cannot have Faith.

Originally Posted by brunoparga

Regarding your post about your school years: I honestly believe it's never too late to learn; our discussion has been positive, fruitful and pleasant, at least to me, and perhaps from what's being talked about you can try to look at the same things you didn't learn too well with a different perspective.

Cheers,
Bruno

I always WANTED to learn science because I was interested in bits of it, but you either had to learn so much to get to the bits I wanted to know to understand those bits that I just didn't care THAT much to go that far or in school they just wanted you to memorize lists and the textbook, which I didn't do well and still don't.

[jinydu]

Originally Posted by Jwb52z

I always WANTED to learn science because I was interested in bits of it, but you either had to learn so much to get to the bits I wanted to know to understand those bits that I just didn't care THAT much to go that far or in school they just wanted you to memorize lists and the textbook, which I didn't do well and still don't.

Well, there's not much of a way around that. Scientific theories aren't just a collection of interesting bits; they are coherent frameworks for describing phenomena. You can't truly understand a scientific theory without knowing its basic assumptions and how to derive the important consequences of those assumptions. And in the case of many theories, especially those in physics, that requires a great deal of knowledge about mathematics.

But perhaps you could answer my earlier question: How can tell whether any system has a purpose or not?

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by xilman

I would claim that grasses have evolved much more variability in the last 20 megayears than have primates.

And note that there is no small amount of evidence indicating that the changes in the 2 (e.g. by way of changes in the nature of the flora and fauna of the African savannah) may be interrelated. Fewer trees and more grass makes it advantageous for a bipedal-capable species to be able to stand and walk upright for long periods. You still have chimp-like and ape-like species inhabiting the the forested regions of the continent, but if the study of these processes has taught us anything, it's that when a new niche opens up, species will move (both in physical and evolutionary terms) to exploit it.