How does evolution work? It's not a conscious thing, how can a fish, for example, develop a fucking lamp...

Is there any chance humanity will ever figure the universe out?

Is it true that we live and die in the blink of an eye, but our brains' perception is that everything happens slowly?

Got kinda off-topic, sorry.

That's why evolution takes billions of years, but none of the failed morphologies are around to look at.

Like I said, ad hoc.

>fact is thereare no transitional fossils.

There are plenty of transitional fossils. The only problem is that you have A and B, then you say "where is the transition?" So then you find C between them and then say "well what about between A and C? And between C and B?" SO then you find D and E that are between them and then they say "But what about between A and D? And between D and C? And between C and E? And..." etc etc. It never ends. You would need an infinite number of fossiles because they just move the goalpost every time

>Only thing to fill the gaping hole in this would be some ad hoc story, in which he "probably" developed them in tandem, or they served a different function beforehand
Correct. Complicated new adaptations, such as a light dangling on a limb, always evolve via some pathway where every single individual tiny improvement serves some useful function on its own.

As you say, this often takes the form of old body parts gaining entirely new functions, or related components evolving in lockstep fashion. More often, though, it is simply the case that a greatly simplified version of a fully developed organ is still useful. Consider that light dangler; a version that is just mounted on the forehead instead of on a limb STILL allows the fish to see further underwater and hunt more effectively there, and STILL attracts prey to its attack range. Not nearly as effectively, certainly; but still more useful than nothing. That explains why that organ could quite easily have evolved from a simpler forehead-mounted version. (This is just an example -- I have no idea what the evolutionary history of that body part is, in reality.)

>ad hoc story
It is true that we usually don't know the details of how something evolved. Sometimes we can work it out well; other times, there simply isn't enough historical information available to reconstruct the history. Fossils are very rare, and only provide a tiny part of this sort of history. Very often, how something evolved is guesswork. It is still clear how evolution was the general mechanism, though.

Sorry, but you don't know exactly every step of how something evolved with supporting fossil evidence for every single generation, then that proves that God is real.

Have we stopped evolving? Has it reached a point where it said 'Ok, this is my final form' ?

Don't fucking start this.

Why did God create all those undiscovered life forms under water? We will probably never discover most of them, the world could go on without them.

Apparently it started as a modified dorsal fin.
evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/fishtree_05

Darwin is not the final word on evolutionary theory. There has been quite a bit of research done since the 1800s in the field of evolution. Also, you're cherry picking lines. After Darwin states that about eyes, he then continues to say that it's not that impossible when reasoned out:
"...if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory."

Also, low hanging fruit, but if there are no transitional fossils, then what is Archaeopteryx? It is quite definitely an organism that features some traits found only in dinosaurs and some traits found only in birds. What is that if not a transitional state? It has wings and a wishbone, but also an opposable hallux, teeth and a long bony tail. No transitional states my ass. How about Tiktaalik? What about the well documented history of horse development? Educate yourself:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils

You ask for evidence yet you give none of your own. Show me the organism that we have no line of descent for. Show me the organism that had to have been created, that popped out of thin air and has no lineage. There are no mystery organisms out there today that we can't find distant relatives for in the fossil record, stretching back 500+ million years ago to the Cambrian. I am a scientist, convince me! Show me your supporting evidence! Show me your methods, your discussion of your reasoning! Otherwise, your 'truth' is merely opinion and wild speculation. And shitty opinions at that.

We would go extinct if we HAD to grow a light source to survive. Most species have gone extinct because the environment changes and they don't adapt fast enough. But imagine if by some freak genetic mutation a fish produces a tiny light. This fish catches a shit ton of prey that are attracted to the light and it has a bunch of offspring due to its success. Now you have a hundred luminescent fish swimming around fucking dominating because of their advantage. Each of them is slightly different genetically, and the ones with the best light will reproduce the most. Extrapolate this process over billions of genetic iterations over the course of hundreds of millions of years and you get to a species that has a lamp built right into its biology.

>Is it possible to adapt to everything, like if it was necessary could we develop limbs that worked as flamethrowers etc?
If there was a selective pressure for our ancestors to develop flamethrowers (e.g. some freak developed a second dick that functioned like a candle and allowed him to bang more females who mired his lighter dick, eventually having his ancestors fighting a flamethrower dick arms race), then yes. As you can imagine, this would be awesome, but unlikely.

So why do species still have weaknesses? By this logic should everything living today be untouchable? Why didn't we evolve in a way so we didn't need food, water etc but just sunlight and air?

>How does evolution work?
That which endures, endures.
That which does not, does not.

>Why didn't we evolve in a way so we didn't need food, water etc but just sunlight and air?
If only that were possible, some species would do it...
Oh, wait.
Srsly tho... things that just need sunlight and air get eaten by other things.

You'd need to redesign your body on a cellular level to not need water and macronutrients like proteins and lipids. If evolution wasn't chaotic, you could probably make untouchable species in the timeframe multicellular life has had, but the principle of natural selection is you don't need to be fastest, just faster than the guy next to you.

the trick here is "millions of years"

Because it's not a forward progression. Species simply change over time to best fit their environment. If a region is dry and becomes humid, and then goes back to being dry, you will find organisms with similar adaptations in the dry climate and very different ones in the humid climate. The other thing is that all organisms are changing over time and interact with each other. It's an ever changing arms race.

Let's say species A is a predator and species B is a herbivore. Species A and B live in a plains region. Species A develops a a more curved claw that allows them to hook under species B's shells to flip them over. Species B develops a shell that is more bottom heavy, making them heavier and harder to flip. However, the environment changes from plains to desert as the region heats up due to an oceanic current shift. Species B is too slow and heavy to migrate out effectively so it slowly dies out. A new herbivore (Species C) species migrates to the desert as they are better suited for it. Species A has trouble hunting species C as species C is built for agility and species A is adapted for hunting slow heavily armored species.

And so on and so forth for millions of years as the environment changes, global climate shifts and species migrate and change over time. No system or environment is completely isolated, all of them are influenced by global changes, and changes in neighboring regions. Species do not necessarily become more complex or superior as time goes on. After each major mass extinction, the fossil record shows that for the most part, only simple, primitive forms survive. Then they diversify and refill all the niches left over from the old paradigm.

>So why do species still have weaknesses?
globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange1/current/lectures/predation/predation.html
Prey need predators as much as predators need prey.
Tiny bit drunk here, but my wife took money without asking (thief).
She sucked dick (mine) for money.
Now she's threatening to cheat if I don't have sex with her against my will (rapist).
All I have to do is not stick my dick in her, and she's a FAILED extortionist/rapist.
My life would suck entirely, except the last laugh is on her. 24 years in the marine corps, and she can't even rape some loser like me. fucking hilarious, what a cunt...

>god works in mysterious ways is so much more credible than a silly strawman comic

I get it. Sorry for the dumb questions. I know nothing about science. Our education system sucked and keeps on sucking. I want to learn.

Yeah. When you consider the time it takes, it's not so surprising. I wanted to know if these changes first happenned as accidents/mistakes or not. But explaned it well, I think.

No worries m8, ignorance isn't the same as being dumb, and can be fixed as long as you're willing to learn

woah, tmi, link me to your thread on adv/ though when u make one

>woah, tmi,
Sorry. More than a "tiny" bit drunk.

please make a thread on /adv/ about it

>Sorry. More than a "tiny" bit drunk.
But my point still stands.
Prey need predators the same way victims need villains.

I see, that makes sense. Thanks

when u gna send the link?

>How does evolution work?
That is a good question as the process of evolution is a subtle one. This paper is great and seems to disprove the idea that evolution could have happened in the lifetime of the Earth because the required rate of mutation is much too high.
>The Truth About Evolution
>vixra.org/abs/1602.0132

This is now the origin story for my new fire mage character. Flamethrower dicks get all the ladies.

>The Truth About Evolution
>If inter-dimensional aliens are trying to enslave and eat humanity, it may be vital for them to crop these regions from our genome because they give us a natural immunity to aliens. Why do people think there is junk DNA? How long before a geneticist asks for a grant to remove the “non-coding” DNA from human genetic material so he may grow experimental children?
You uh... might want to consider actually reading articles before you cite them. On top of being a complete nutcase, the author clearly has no grasp of genetics, biology, or even simple probability.

learn basic biology and understand that evolution isn't an entity or thing but processes related to DNA that over time result in complex traits suited to environments but not perfect or optimised, or the only trait that could appear. It's not like a linear thing and it's completely blind.

Pretty much pure RNG over billions of years.

I know this is bait but a half evolved eye is a million times better than no idea. We can actually see animals in nature with basic "half evolved" eyes.

No. Evolution never stops.

Because evolution only does things that are possible.

>and not to mention darwin also conceded that the evolution of eye escapes evolutionary sense for him personally.

I can tell you're just repeating things you heard somewhere without checking the source yourself. It's a common tidbit from creationist propaganda that blatantly distorts facts by quote mining.

You're lazy. You're incurious. You don't really want answers. And worst of all, you want to drag down others to your level. I suggest you change that.

Read the source you're referencing, then educate yourself on the other stuff you're spouting, and don't come back until you actually know what you're talking about.

Here's your (You)
Read the origin of species, Darwin has a small statement about someone thinking the eye is potentially being unable to evolve, then expands on that and says he sees how it is possible through iterations ad gradual changes to evolve an eye

A picture is worth a thousand words

Bump

What I don't get is, what are the chances of a fishthat lives in the dark depts of the sea to grow an organ that can emit light, even in millions of years? It sounds too much of a coincidence.

>It sounds too much of a coincidence.
What possible grounds do you have to expect your intuition is reasonable on this subject?

Correct answer

Once upon a time a fish had the great idea to go to a greater depth of the ocean to avoid predators. He likely had some sort of adaptation that allowed him to handle the pressure better. Since he didnt get ate, he was able to reproduce and spread his genes. While they were protected from predators they had trouble finding food sources. One day another one of these fuckos was born with a tumor that glowd a little bit. Since this new fucko was able to attract prey to his glowing tumor he survived and reproduced and had other little tumor babies. Over time the fish that had the brightest tumors got the most food and were able to reproduce more tumor babies with brighter tumors.

Thats how it worked. It happened over millions of years and you literally have no conception of how long that really is.

>Thats how it worked. It happened over millions of years and you literally have no conception of how long that really is.
This. I understand why creationism sounds more likely to people, though. Because it's hard to wrap your head around evolution over millions of years

Gr8 b8 m8 I give it an 8/8

lmao you just btfo him so hard.

>But imagine if by some freak genetic mutation a fish produces a tiny light.
This isn't a fucking fairytale. A light doesn't just "mutate" out of nowhere.

Actually that's pretty much exactly how it works.

Oh right, I guess if user says a light can randomly mutate on an organism, it must be true.

The light is actually produced by bacteria that produce the light. When there are enough bacteria in the same space the signalling moleulcules from the quorum sensing are in high enough concentrations that the bacteria produce light. So, it's more a case of evolve an appendage, and once you've built it, they'll come

Well, the light is there on the fish

We know plenty of bacteria, algae, and small animals produce bioluminesence. We know the chemical mechanisms that cause them to do this.

All we are lacking is how the chemical mechanism came to be in the glowing animals, and choosing between long term, understood processes that we can study in a lab (like the ecoli/antibiotics experiment) or a special creation to do it seems like a pretty clear choice imo without some more evidence.

>ecoli/antibiotics experiment
After many thousands of generations, the bacteria haven't speciated, they're basically the exact same bacteria from the start of the experiment, with small differences.

>evolution of novel traits in the lab doesn't count because muh macroevolution is different
listen here you stupid cockmongler

why do retards have retarded kids

Backwards causation that looks like intelligent design. Consider this: the Universe is everything that exists. When causation takes place, it needs a cause and the cause can be only within the Universe. Since within time this cause can only come from the potential future, causation is directed to a goal, whilst natural selection is inherent to any system making it not the novelty that darwinians think of it.

Because there is no such thing as a perfect species, evolution and nature itself doesn't have prefection as a goal. Only adaptation.

And evolution might work on similar canvas but produces different paintings. The evolution of plants is different from the evolutionary pathway of humanity. These pathways separated a looong time ago.

Simple, elegant, true and even fun.

I like this post.

>there is no such thing as a perfect species

>he doesn't know about white men

Only minor changes have been observed after more than 60,000 generations.

but we actually do do lots of research on proving where each mechanism evolved from

for example: I do research on how the genomes of generalist insects evolved to enable them to have such broad host ranges in comparison to specialists

My papers don't just have "it evolved hurdurr"

How did the brain evolve to perform Fourier Transforms on sound waves? Where the fuck do you even start with something like that?
I know evolution makes the most sense based on the evidence we have, but some shit just makes me question everything.

Life forms are impressive as fuck. Even scary. Some materials that aren't alive come together and become alive and gain consciousness.

>minor changes
>de novo development of a whole new metabolic pathway
this is actually a big fucking deal in bacteriology. since all bacteria look pretty similar (minor variations in shape), it's their biochemistry that really distinguishes them.

I like you.

How do we explain this when the glow is caused by bioluminescent bacteria? The fish grows a growth and the body puts bacteria there. Its genetic coding adapts to pressure, starts to detect the bacteria, learns to absorb it, learns that the growth is a good place for it and the growth also grows long. The bacteria's genetic coding also learns not to stop detection or absorbtion by a certain body, adapts to its homeostasis and learns to feed off the fish's body.

These are all caused by happy little accidents in the genetics of both organisms genetic coding. Odd organisms are just oddly evolved for very specialized environments and environmental niches.

MODS!!!

Evolution is a lie.

The theory of relativity is the law of reality in actuality. Thoughts come from thoughts. Life from life and so on. Mainstream science is fucking kiked beyond the blur and society is caught up in a bipolar stolkholm syndrome without the use of psychedelics and embracing that eternal love, dude. Bow, hoe. Bow down.

Would it be a minor change if humans could survive and reproduce during exposure to mustard gas at 1000x the concentration that kills us now?

Because thats about the scale of the change for the bacteria. Is that small?

If anything, their reproductive cycle is more interesting, since the males' only goal in life is to search for a female, and then bite into them, releasing an enzyme that digests the female's skin and male's mouth so that they fuse together, and then live the rest of their lives as a parasitic sperm source for when the female spawns. They are so dependant on this process that they are incapable of eating, are several times smaller, and are solely reliant on a female's blood supply, with enhanced eyes and olfactory organs for the sole purpose of seeking females out (since their lives literally depends on it). This would probably be driven by the scarceness of their species in their environment, resulting in an advantage for the males to be permenantly bonded to the female.

Reminder that humans are bioluminescent

sciencealert.com/you-can-t-see-it-but-humans-actually-glow-in-visible-light

Does this mean that back people glow the most (due to higher melanin content). In which case, they may not be the most hidden in the dark?

And I'm doing research on why two lizard genera have evolved to have differing sizes between sexes. maybe in the early 1900s "it evolved" would've been acceptable, but even then probably not

>like if it was necessary could we develop limbs that worked as flamethrowers etc?
No thats fucking retarded and only machines could do something like that.

its written in the laws of the universe.

Good explanation. I'd like to use a similar simple scenario that my school teacher gave us.

We have a colony of yellow mice living in a sandy beach. Every week, 1 percent of the population is eaten by hawks. There is a 1-2 percent chance that a mutation makes a baby mouse black instead of yellow, and these mice typically are eaten first because they are easier to spot.

A volcano eruption covers the beach with black rock. When the mice try to survive here, the yellow ones are now much easier to see. The black mutated mice now survive an average of 10 times longer than the yellow ones, meaning they are the ones that survive and reproduce the most. As time goes on (think in terms of hundreds of thousands of years), the black mouse gene becomes the majority of the gene pool, because black mice have a random feature that happened to make them better suited to their environment.

I like the Peppered Moth example because it actually happened in real life and isn't just a hypothetical

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution

Not even the guy who conducted the e. coli experiment claims that he observed speciation.

Can their alleged predators distinguish those colors?

>Fish gets mutation to make light

>Human gets mutation to produce lightning from his fists

Do you see how retarded you are, yet?

>has a mutation ("mistake") in its DNA that makes its teeth be much stronger than usual.

But this is purely retardation. This would require the fine coordination of many dozens of structural genes, perhaps requiring specific regulatory proteins or RNA fragments.

You just got cucked.

>as a half evolved eye would be an impediment and would never gradually get better

Finish him.

wait anons, help a brother out
I understand the mechanisms of evolution, such as randomness in gene + an objective function.
My question is, how is that objective function defined? We can say that the objective function is to reproduce so that the species continues, but then what's so special about reproduction?
I'm just trying to figure out the objective function in life, and how it became about, given a universe filled with particles and certain laws of interaction.

>Three problems, though: (1) Kettlewell was responsible for nailing dead moths to the trees for the birds to feed on, (2) peppered moths rarely alight on tree trunks, and (3) birds don't normally feed on months moths that are on the side of trees. Even after scientists were informed of these inconsistencies, many still clung to the validity of the experiment, perhaps because they wanted to believe it as the canonical example of observed natural selection.
And yet again, the evolutionist is caught with a banana up his euphoric ass.

So, I'm familiar enough with textbook cases of evolution, which typically involve instances of simple mutation resulting in lost or modified function of the original gene, resulting in something like a color change or an alteration of limb development. However, I don't recall ever hearing many examples of how a species would develop an entirely novel set of genes with coordinated functions without losing a similar number of proteins in the process to accomplish that change solely through mutation.

How do species add completely new proteins to their genome without compromising the function of already existing proteins? For that matter, how do new chromosomes develop and why would mammals, with their relatively short evolutionary life and population size, have such drastically different numbers of chromosomes and functional genes despite the tortuous path required to turn a random pile of junk DNA into a sequence of coordinated functional proteins?

On the other end of the time-scale, how the fuck does something like a ribosome come into existence, whose function is basically the only reason why a cell can produce proteins yet consists of a large, highly-specific sequence of proteins and RNA itself? What made it in the first place? How did it suddenly get much larger in mammals without ceasing function somewhere along the process?

>How do species add completely new proteins to their genome without compromising the function of already existing proteins?

Maybe I dont understand your question. I dont think your genome has proteins in it. Dont quote me on this, but I think amino acids are encoded in our DNA. So different codes translate to different amino acids, which translate to different proteins. So the answer to your question is mutations result in different proteins that are produced by the biological processes that read that DNA.

>how do new chromosomes develop

New chromosomes are usually duplicates of old chromosomes. Chimps have more chromosomes than humans, and its pretty clear that their extra chromosome is a duplicate of one of the chromosomes we both share.

>How did it suddenly get much larger in mammals without ceasing function somewhere along the process?

Well its certainly did cease functioning somewhere along the process, but those individuals were selected out of the gene pool.

>Not even the guy who conducted the e. coli experiment claims that he observed speciation.
speciation is a pretty meaningless concept in bacteria, since they reproduce asexually and readily conduct horizontal gene transfer. the species concept, among prokaryotes, is essentially artificial. you'd know this if you had any sort of education in biology.

the very existence of microevolution implies the plausibility of macroevolution. and if you want an example observed in real time, check out Rhagoletis pomonella, the apple maggot.

>Can their alleged predators distinguish those colors?
niBBa are you actually asking if birds are capable of distinguishing black from white? literally EVERY animal that can see can tell the difference! it's the most basic form of vision!

>But this is purely retardation. This would require the fine coordination of many dozens of structural genes
and thanks to epistasis, this can be done by a point mutation. suppose there's a "master switch" gene whose protein regulates a bunch of other genes that control enamel deposition. Now suppose a mutation in that gene (or its promoter) causes it to be expressed more strongly. because the gene is expressed more, its effects on other genes are more intense, so enamel production is increased, leading to more durable teeth.

it's not that hard to understand

yep, that's why zebras are going extinct