Wow. You should stick to lurking.

Sarn : Shout at me on AIM and I can explain it all to you.

Question: How does a singled-celled organism become a complicated multi-celled organism?

Illustration of my boredom in the form of another question: How does a zygote become a human being?

I can't remember the exact answer (to the original question) that Dawkins gave in The Blind Watchmaker, but I do remember that it was remarkably simple. Some of us have actually read books about this stuff.

Yeah because no one wants to bother covering the material from bio 101.

It's not our responsibility to educate you. Go pick up some evolutionary biology texts and read for yourself. But since you're too lazy to do that, you could also just look for explanations on YouTube, there are some decent ones out there.

JM: Don't have access to AIM currently. I'm on a boat.

Detty: I fail to see how a human body going through its different genetically predetermined cycles of life (zygote to human, if you insist) has any coorelation to a simple single-celled organism reproducing into a more complex multi-celled organism which has the capability to reproduce in kind.

Recusant: tl;dr.

Just kidding, I did. First, thanks for actually attempting an explanation of the original question, rather than trying to change the subject or or ignoring it completely. I won't pretend to understand more than the basic concept of the process you're trying to describe, but I still don't believe it's comparable to the question at hand. The problem is still that the stuff you're describing is still just adaptation of a specific species. It's not stepping outside of it's (again) predetermined genetic bounds.

Emon: Can't get to youtube. I'm on a boat.

But, "it's not our responsibility" is the same cop-out I've been seeing for these last 9 years.

All: But in reality, I can't say as I really care all that much. I've accepted that no one will be able to provide me with any better answers than I've already gotten, and quite frankly, this sort of stuff does not affect how I live my life. I more just wanted to point out how we always talk back and forth for pages, but whenever it comes down to the actual knitty gritty of how this stuff works, which is the real bottom line, no one really has any answers.

No, you just refuse to look for them. You'd rather bask in your own ignorance than educate yourself.

You can probably read this on a boat: http://talkorigins.org

And you are basing this off of what? There are people who do know the "knitty gritty" because that's their field of research. Seeing that this particular field is over a century old, there are alot of those "little details" one can learn about.

Not only that, why call it quits when things get complex? I've heard so many people say it's "too complex" as if that is the final verdict. It just calls for more research and understanding.

I was simply illustrating the point that simple things become complex things all the time. A zygote is a single cell, a human is multi-celled. Zygotes become humans, with the ability to reproduce.

But this is all irrelevant to how complex organisms originally came into being, especially since a single-celled organism would not have been the originally form of life (single-celled organisms are very complicated, simply because cells are very compicated. The cell probably evolved as a convenient container for clusters of cooperative genes, just as complex organisms developed as a container for cooperative cells. The best explanations come from starting with the simplest unit of (the gene) and working up, this of course is the whole basis of The Selfish Gene (which is a fantastic read, for what it's worth).

Haha holy ****

bodybagged

Cosigning The Selfish Gene. Get it.

Sarn, what is all this "genetically predetermined" stuff? I don't think you understand the concept of a species very well. Generally speaking a species is a group of organisms that can breed together and produce viable offspring (there are fuzzy edges to this with hybrids and so on but we won't go into that). They don't have to remain the same over time, you yourself mentioned the example of moth colouration. Now imagine for example a group from that species becoming geographically isolated from the rest of their species, if they change over time, they may well do so in a completely different direction.

For example, using the duck photo from above, imagine a species of duck that colonises an island, this species has males that mate agressively and sometimes harm the females in the process. This creates a selection pressure for females to develop genitalia that are difficult to mate with without the female's co-operation (she gets hurt less, gets to eat more without harassment and has more eggs as a result). The males of the species will similarly do better if their intromittent organ is better shaped for the newly convoluted job.
Result? A duck with a penis (not the normal situation in birds) that corkscrews almost twice its length. There's no reason why the bird's ancestral population from the mainland would have evolved in the same direction. In fact it's quite likely by now that they physically cannot mate together. Now you have two species - mainland duck and island duck with a common ancestry.

That's precisely what religion is for.

There are many colonial single-celled organisms, and the cells of more complex organisms are often very similar to their simple antecedents. For instance, the cells of a sponge (considered the most primitive animal), when taken individually, are indistinguishable from animal-like protists.

As for how this arose, it's not that complicated. Cells give rise to other cells, which can disperse or not. If cells that stay together are more successful, the gene that influences that will be passed on. Eventually through mistakes in genetic copying, some cells might begin to specialize in certain functions. At that point, it's a multi-celled organism. Ta-da.

Hmm, yes. I think I see your logic.
If a forum full of physicists and computer scientists can't give a detailed and accurate explanation about high level modern biology that you are capable of understanding it means that explanation doesn't exist.

I understand.

This is why you're in the Navy.

He's in the Navy so he can sail the seven seas.

And I think you mean "full of wannabe physicists (with a few notable exceptions)"

Who or what we are doesn't change the fact that it's kindergarten logic.

I have a degree in theoretical physics.

Psh, wanna-be.




(I was talking about myself.)

I hate both physics and computer science

Yet nobody actually mentions the mechanism by which genetic material can actually expand? Somebody discuss duplication errors, viral injection, and symbiotic absorption please.

Well, when a mommy loves a daddy...

Your posts are only slightly more useful than a single pronged fork.

You mean a chopstick...?

No, I was going more for 'how can it be a fork with only one prong?'. But a lone chopstick is a... well, it's a skewer. Which isn't very useful unless you want to skew things.

But a chopstick not used in the consumption of food can still be very "useful." You didn't state just for dining. It just becomes a gloried stick or a short, bar shaped structure.

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For once steven actually gets it.

I still have not, to this day, heard a convincing arguement against evolution. If you can argue why you are right and evolution is wrong, I invite you to explain yourself. Personally I will side with evolution every time because I prefer to believe in facts - things I can see for myself - instead of believing what I am told without question.

Why do you believe in something else? Because it was what you were brought up to believe? Do you always believe the things that you are told first? Why shouldn't you believe what you are told afterwards?

Those are the underlying problems if you ask me, it's nothing to do with evolution as a theory. It's about the conflict it creates with your original beliefs.

(Serious or not, there is always a debate on this subject so why not add my say)

Why can't we ever argue about a non-boring scientific discipline, like electricity?

There's really nothing to argue about with electricity. Except maybe sign conventions.

Let's reignite the debate over AC vs DC, and electrocute some more elephants! This time while ROCKING THE **** OUT.

Because it's immediately useful and doesn't stop people believing in santa. So doesn't cause any kind of debate. People just accept it for what it is.

Evolution on the other hand, doesn't have a direct effect on peoples lives (it influences medicine but people can't see it first hand) and goes against what people want to believe, and people don't like being wrong.

Have you done all the research yourself? Have you actually seen and measured these facts? Or do you just believe what a scientist told you without question?

The thing about evolution is that at its core, it's an incredibly simple concept. Small, random changes, combined with various environmental pressures, will combine over time to form huge changes. Not only can it occur, wherever there's self-replication with imperfect copying it has to occur.

Evolution is not random.

Nor is it likely that random mutation is the primary source of the entropy that allows a species to change.

i think sarn wants to see an example of a species evolving into something radically different, growing a pair of legs, poison fangs, what have you. what is laughable is that he wants us to procure an example of this happening on the order of thousands of years and/or in one step (this is what i THINK he means when he says "stepping outside of predetermined genetic bounds", which is vague at best), clearly showing he doesn't understand the theory of evolution enough to argue against it.

I have an example. Bees. The gene responsible for venom in the common honeybee's sting has been isolated. There are species of bee that are not venomous that host a virus which contains this same DNA. The venomous bee is venomous because this retrovirus injected the DNA for venom production into it. The bee became venomous in one step.

he wasn't saying evolution is random. the point is that evolution works quite simply if you boil it down to its essence; that is, something that is able to replicate itself best (see fitness) combined with limited resources, will increase in number over all others in the same niche. that provides the basic framework. exactly how these changes come about (genetic recombination, random mutation, etc.) is an area of on-going research, though we have learned a lot. take an introductory bio class, which usually covers evolution/cell bio.

i do agree that not all mutations are random. an easy example of a non-random mutation are transposons, which are genetic sequences that are inclined to "move around" on a chromosome. the flu virus is notorious for having evolved mechanisms for purposefully introducing mutations in the genes that code for its antigens, making it harder to combat. it's probable, and interesting to think about, that organisms have evolved ways to push the effects of random mutation towards being beneficial (through actively conserving certain sequences via conformation, etc).

interesting, but how do you explain why the virus had the venom production genes to begin with, which are more than likely longer than the virus's own RNA? a more likely scenario is that the bees had evolved venom production long before, and one day the viral DNA integrated into a bee's chromosome in such a way that the gene encoding for the venom itself was disrupted, making that bee non-venomous. what would strengthen this hypothesis is if non-venomous bees still had similar stingers, similar stinger-related parts, or some vestigial structures relating to venom production or the stinger. what immediately weakens my hypothesis is that i don't see, at this moment anyway, a clear selective pressure that will increase the occurrence of the non-venomous trait.

Just because a pressure is not obvious does not mean it does not exist. It is also possible that the pressure no longer exists, and there is no pressure to develop venom because all the things likely to eat bees already know to stay away from them. But IIRC from wherever I read this study the venom DNA wasn't in the non-venomous bees at all. Just in the virus they hosted.