Freethought & Rationalism Archive

snatchbalance · 07-04-2002, 12:52 PM

I think you can put certain characteristics on a scale:

Cats are highly adapted as predators. Thier jaws and teeth are very good at severing muscle and bone etc. Probably better than any other terrestrial animal.

Cetacea are the largest.

Elephants largest on land.

Humans, most succesful mammals - to date.

everything changes.

SB

[ July 04, 2002: Message edited by: snatchbalance ]</p>

Amen-Moses · 07-04-2002, 01:01 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Bill:
The only realistic scale upon which you can measure progress over time is a scale of INCREASING COMPLEXITY!

On which scale bacteria rule supreme.

Amen-Moses

Autonemesis · 07-04-2002, 01:30 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Bill:
The only realistic scale upon which you can measure progress over time is a scale of INCREASING COMPLEXITY!

How do you measure complexity? The human genome is indeed complex, but it also contains <a href="http://www.nature.com/nsu/010215/010215-3.html" target="_blank">a lot more junk</a> than the genome of creatures like the fruitfly.

Quote:

Clearly, there is little correlation between the complexity of an organism and the amount of DNA it has. The human genome contains at least 200 times more DNA than the yeast genome's 12 million bases (the letters of the genetic code), but the genome of Amoeba dubia, a unicellular creature as simple as yeast, dwarfs the human genome by 200-fold.

And even if the phenotype's quality of being "advanced" or "primitive" were correlated to number of base pairs, it is still not clear that the human phenotype deserves the "credit" for evolving such complex structures:

Quote:

Large stretches of the human genome show signs of having once, perhaps millions of years ago, been viruses. David Baltimore of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, one of the discoverers of reverse transcriptase, says that "in places, the genome looks like a sea of reverse-transcribed DNA with a small admixture of genes". The genome is a museum of the viral infections suffered by humanity and its ancestors. Viruses made us what we are.

[ July 04, 2002: Message edited by: Kind Bud ]</p>

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07-04-2002, 12:52 PM	#11
snatchbalance Regular Member Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: CT Posts: 333	I think you can put certain characteristics on a scale: Cats are highly adapted as predators. Thier jaws and teeth are very good at severing muscle and bone etc. Probably better than any other terrestrial animal. Cetacea are the largest. Elephants largest on land. Humans, most succesful mammals - to date. everything changes. SB [ July 04, 2002: Message edited by: snatchbalance ]</p>

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