slims999

Life feeds on life. In order for everyone to live, we have to die... Amazing huh?

--Slims
www.niftyhosting.com

Amos

Nature doesn't have a mind to know anything but animals (including man) do have a mind and with it they select what is desirable and what is not. With this mind they "tie down" what is good into their eternal mind and that is how traits are reinforced. In other words, we are predetermined to find what we are looking for and we are temporal to change our mind on the spur of the moment.

Yes we do know the future to the same extent as we are determined, but we do not know it exactly because out temporal lobe is in the way.

Keith

I think I understand the process reasonably well, and you did a great job of explaining it. Here is what seems so strange about it.

How many species of bats are there? Why did any of them survive? Where is the variation in structures that are the most complex, such as eyes and ears?

Tell me if I'm wrong...what we observe in animals tells us that in terms of some of their most complex body parts there isn't any discernable variation. I'm talking about their eye structure, ear structure, and so on.

Keith

Starboy

Keith, that is one way to look at it. But consider this. All creatures are adapting to the same environment. Could the similarity in structure be due to the possibility that there is just not that many ways to make an eye that works well in this environment? What we see may not be the result of any specific plan but just what it takes to adapt to present conditions. At one time there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. Any oxygen present was deadly for the life forms present. Yet look at things now. Without oxygen most life forms would be toast. What we see is not some plan but what results when you adapt to the current environment.

Starboy

Oxymoron

Can you make toast without oxygen?

Starboy

Sulphur might work, but it would taste nasty.

Oxymoron

On the contrary, there is considerable variability in structure between species. Bats are good examples, because some species use their ultrasound locators in quite different ways. Species sharing similar locations use different frequency bands and the hardware changes accordingly.

Contrastingly: there are many examples of near-identical structures evolving independently. Eyes and ears have evolved many times in utterly different conditions in species that are totally unrelated.

Remembering that environment drives genetic selection, we would expect that an identical environment would not be likely to produce significant variations in some feature, given that the feature gives some advantage in that context.

Athius

The question was "Why is the goal survival?"

Here's my answer:

Some people make it sound like as if nature is a creature or being that programmed life and gave it a purpose, that's not true. When we use the word nature we're just using it to represent a concept, the concept of life, evolution, etc. The reason why all life is striving to survive is not because someone programmed them to do so, it's because of what happened millions of years ago when the first anaerobes were formed, and the whole "Hot Thin Soup" theory. In that time one day out of chance, the primitive gases in the atmosphere and one or more source(s) of energy (perhaps lighting or radiation) caused a chemcial reaction that formed the first anaerobes. This reaction probably occured millions of times creating millions of primitve anaerobes all with different characteristics. Some who couldn't fit the environment (i.e. resist the dangers and harsh environment, etc.) died away, and the rest survived. That was the first natural selection. The anaerobes who were probably nothing more than a tiny mass of RNA, protein, sugars, fats, and ATP, eventually evolved when CO2 became abundant forming the first autotrophs, and so on. All these evolvings only occured not because the anaerobes wanted it but because some fit the environment and some didn't. Evolution happened like this billions of times over millions of years until you see what we have here today. I hope that answered your question.

O and let me just say that the first anaerobes were probably not real living things, they were probably nothing more than a mass of (what I mentioned earlier) that caused a certain chemical reaction to occure over and over producing CO2 as a result.

Keith

I should have made myself more clear. I didn't mean across different species, I was responding to Starboy's post which said..."a better way to understand adaptation is to realize that FOR A GIVEN SPECIES not every creature alive OF THAT SPECIES is identical to all other members." (emphasis added)

Sorry for the confusion. Anyway, do we observe any differences within the same species in terms of these complex structures?

Keith

Jayhawker Soule

Given that "purposeful" is not the opposite of "random and chance-driven", "purposeful rather than random and chance-driven" is a false dichotomy.

The term 'purpose' is used in two ways: (a) as 'intent', and (b) as 'function'. You are in total charge of what some set of phenomena "suggests" to you, but you've offered no reason to deduce intentionality from a set of causes.