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Richard Dawkins's "The Blind Watchmaker" is a great book covering these very topics. It helped clarify many of the subtle but important issues around evolution for me.
Thanks. I've been meaning to read that book....haven't had the chance.
i read the God Delusion........it was life changing (for me).
And I'm only half joking. It has been shown that people with lower IQs tend to have more children. As the structure, and therefore function of, the brain is affected by genetics, I'm not too optimistic about where humanity is headed.
I don't see how there can be any doubt that our propensity to keep any and all alive (and many of these later to breed) completely opposed to 'natural selection' and 'survival of the fittest' will result in anything but an increasingly inferior human population...hopefully it will be a small enough segment not to upset a balance
The Blind Watchmaker is a great book. And if you want to hit the highlights of it but don't have a lot of time, you can see the video version of it here:
It doesn't work that way . . . the changes occur through mutations of the genes . . . and the environmental advantage aids survival . . . so the changed genes get passed on more successfully.
Yup, Mystic got it right, as usual. Addendum- it also works on a geological timeframe. In five or six centuries, the change will not yet be big enough to notice.
Yup, Mystic got it right, as usual. Addendum- it also works on a geological timeframe. In five or six centuries, the change will not yet be big enough to notice.
Yes, but when we have around 500,00 species at present, one would think at least one of them would be caught morphing into another species.
Yes, we have examples of adaptation all around us and apparently these are just seen as a complete species which are not changing into anything else. We see dolphins - mammals which have changed into a fish - shape just as dinosaurs changed into the fish - shaped icthyosaur, and seals have part adapted so they can come out on land for some social interaction just as did the plesiosaurs.
Then we have sharks changing into the recent hammerhead shape because it gave an advantage. Others have imitated the whale growing to great size and browsing on krill.
Of course, evolution doesn't happen for the sake of it. So it's no us asking why a species that is doing very nicely thank you doesn't change. What need is there for it to do so?
Having said that it would be handy to find a lizard with gliding webs developing feathers or a leaping monkey finding skin - gliding webs useful. However, not having every single example of evolutionary process to hand does not do much to undermine the massive weight of evidence for natural selection being the mechanism and evolution the fact.
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