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JerZ: ok, so evolution with nature selection are just randomly mutating things for billions and billions and billions of years?
they both don't have a reason for doing so?
when it comes to insects developing pesticide resistance, it is less than a decade and evolution never misses a new pesticides cycle ever! every time it develop a pesticide resistance for the new pesticide... but by chance???
Moderator cut: delete
Yes, it makes much more sense to believe in things that would sound COMPLETELY ridiculous to everyone if you took them out of the context of religion. Never mind the fact that the particular religion that YOU believe sounds insane to someone who believes a DIFFERENT religion ... but of course YOURS must be right and theirs must be wrong. (Of course they are thinking the same thing.)
Moderator cut: off topic
Last edited by Miss Blue; 05-12-2013 at 05:07 AM..
As far as I understand things, the mechanism you mention is simply the fact that those with the characteristics that are beneficial to living in their environment live longer and better and so do their offspring. Over time, therefore, there end up being more of them, than those with less of a chance to live, procreate and pass on their own genetics.
I don't see consciousness in the equation, personally.
Absolutely! Offspring are, biologically, the mechanism to retain the changes. Genetics forms the basis for the "memory" portion of the system.
If you look at other mathematical applications, you can generalize this to some way to store the best result of a population of candidate solutions to a particular optimization process. This allows someone like the OP to observe the underlying algorithm, the mechanics of evolution, work on a mathematical data set apart from biology. So not only do we have evidence that living things can evolve, we can also show that we can solve optimization problems using the underlying mathematics of evolution. Both theoretically and practically, it just works!
Consciousness is not needed, and really not involved in evolution. It just isn't required.
is evolution or nature selection sentient things? are they coniscous? are they self-aware?
conscious - consciousness
capable of understanding what's it's actions are.
state of alertness.
understanding realizing knowing
aware - awareness
realizing or knowing of what's it's doing.
Evolution is a process. It can not think. It is not a "thing." Saying evolution "chooses" something is like saying sleeping chooses your dreams. It makes no sense.
Nor is natural selection a thinking "thing." Natural selection doesn't "decide" in a conscious, forward-thinking way any more than a series of very cold winters consciously decides to eliminate warm-weather plants. Again: makes no sense.
JerZ: ok, so evolution with nature selection are just randomly mutating things for billions and billions and billions of years?
they both don't have a reason for doing so?
when it comes to insects developing pesticide resistance, it is less than a decade and evolution never misses a new pesticides cycle ever! every time it develop a pesticide resistance for the new pesticide... but by chance???
Moderator cut: orphaned.
I am beginning to think that you are not here for an actual conversation, but I feel like a glutton for punishment tonight...
What you are describing is explained very well by the model I laid out. Random mutations occur, and natural selection due to environmental pressure is the mechanism by which beneficial mutations are preserved, and harmful ones discarded.
To use your example, if an insect is well adapted to its current environment, then most of the random mutations that occur will be harmful, and thus will not be preserved in subsequent generations. When a new pesticide is introduced, it kills bugs before they can reproduce. When a random mutation makes the bugs more resistant to the pesticide, those changes are retained, as the more resistant bugs will be better able to reproduce.
Thus pesticide resistance is developed by chance. We can demonstrate that this works by using the same techniques to optimize control systems, or economic forecasts, or filter design.
-NoCapo
Last edited by Miss Blue; 05-12-2013 at 05:09 AM..
is evolution or nature selection sentient things? are they coniscous? are they self-aware?
conscious - consciousness
capable of understanding what's it's actions are.
state of alertness.
understanding realizing knowing
aware - awareness
realizing or knowing of what's it's doing.
Sorry I was not more clear.
No, they are not.
I don't know how they could be since natural selection is simple genetics and environmental pressure, and evolution is natural selection plus random mutation. None of these things is an entity, or a mind. They are processes, nothing more nothing less.
hello! i have few questions if you guys have the time to reponse to them.
is evolution a sentient thing? is it self-aware? is the process conscious?
if the answer is no! then...
when your stomach produce a mucous lining to protect itself from being digested by the acid, that's not because it can understands the risk of the acid, but because it was taught to operate that way.
If you swallow a liquid which is a poison, your stomach will absorb that liquid, because that's what it meant for it to do and from there it goes to your blood stream and once that poison is inside the body it will be used. It's not the fault of your stomach that made you get poisoned and it's not it's responsibility to check what your throw in it, but it's you who has a consciousness to understand that this is wrong.
how does a tree knows what it's fruit should taste like to humans? so it makes them so sweet with tempting smell, looks and colors? why the fruit supply us with important nurtrients and it's not posionous?
is the tree a sentient thing? is it self-aware? is it conscious? if the answer again is no! then...
if an it " evolution" doesnt know and an it " tree " doesnt know then who does?
You are assuming there must be a "who" behind everything that happens. If you think that, I would ask you WHO is to blame when a nice person gets cancer? WHO is to blame when a tornado, hurricane, earthquake, landslide or volcano kills people? Who is to blame that people die from accidents and disease, or suffer a very long time before actually dying? And from a personal perspective, WHO is to blame for migraines or acid reflux?
Evolution and natural selection do not require conscious decision making. Living things reproduce, and the heritable genetic changes that help survival will dominate in the quest for food and resources. Changes that are not beneficial also occur, which is why we have birth defects. And if you think a "who" is behind everything, why would this entity cause (or even allow) birth defects that kill, cause pain, and/or shorten the life of an innocent child?
Trees have flowers or fruit because that is how they reproduce successfully--by attracting insects and animals to fertilize other trees with pollen and to eat their fruit and spread their seeds in more places. Whether the fruit tastes good to you isn't a part of the process, until mankind starts growing trees and plants specifically to eat their fruit. Then we take control of the process of natural selection, and make sure to propagate only the plants that produce the best fruit.
And some fruits are poison--in 2011 in Africa, a child died and 4 others were in critical condition after eating a wild fruit that turned out to be poisonous. Child dies after eating poisonous fruit - YouTube Again, is "someone" to blame for the existence of this poison fruit that killed a child who was hungry? The reason many fruits are edible is that plants using fruits to reproduce are relying on their fruit being eaten so the seeds may be excreted and start new plants in new locations.
I know many find it comforting to think "everything happens for a reason," and that some compassionate supernatural being is in control of everything that happens. But there are many things in life that are simply incompatible with a benign controller--the suffering and/or deaths of young children being the most obvious example. The fact that countless atrocities in history have been caused by those who passionately believed in their religion should not be ignored, nor should the fact that religious people are just as likely to rip you off as any atheist.
OP, evolution is deterministic. If you don't know what that means, you should look it up. There is no guiding hand, consciousness, or foresight involved and/or required.
Do your due diligence and learn what is meant by the evolutionary process.
While Capo's excellent explanation hardly needs addition, to sum the evolutionary process up, it is adapted changes in response to ecological conditions. It is not a question of amoebas sitting down and working out a plan to develop, but of constant mutational changes going on all the time. This is an unconscious process and, so long as conditions don't much change, the species don't change which is why we get long periods of stasis for some species.
Where there is some environmental change, say forest turns to grassland through an Ice age ending and the climate getting drier, the mutation that made the neck grow a bit longer enabled those with that adaptation to reach more and higher leaves and survive better than those that couldn't. Over time, this process resulted in a long - necked and long legged animal. There was no conscious process involved. Where the changes are too great for any adaptation available to enable a strain of the species to survive, we get an extinction.
The current problems with strains of pests or infections that we eradicate and come back stronger than ever are because of evolution. We eradicate all but those with an adaptation that enables them to resist the extermination method. They are small in numbers, but proliferate to fill that ecological nice and gradually we become aware that the problem is back, tougher than ever and requiring new methods to control it. Evolution has been likened to a biological arms race.
I'm from the middle east and English is not my native language, so please bear with me a little bit.
When a turtle baby hatch from a buried egg it digs up, not down or left or right. once the turtle above the ground it runs in complete darkness toward water, even when turtle never once saw anybody els doing it before.
Inside your lungs there are small hairlike structures which are brushing dirt upward toward the exist of the trachea, they are not brushing the dirt downwards into the lungs.
so the question again... can evolution with the help of nature selection sense directions?
If evolution is not self-aware then why the lungs is brushing dirt outside of it? why there is a mucus that acts as glue and cilia to brush the dirt outside of the lungs? without this cleaning mechanism the lungs' airways will be blocked in a matter of few weeks and the living creature will suffocate to death.
If evolution is without a consciousness then who knew that fishes need gills to breath oxygen from water and humans need lungs to breath oxygen from air?
you need a consciousness to understand those things.
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