Welcome to a new series of mine, dealing with specific points I think skeptics should focus on when making arguments. Today's entry: It's populations of organisms that evolve, not individuals.Yeah, animations of organisms changing over time are a nice way to show the history of a lineage, but possibly thanks to Hollywood, comic books, and so forth, (alongside Creationists using such instead of textbooks in their inane arguments) there's a lot of Creationists who think evolution is about magical transformations randomly happening to individuals. This, of course, is complete bumpkis.
Those animations? It's better to think of it as the net averaging of a lineage over the course of generations. Mutations and combinations that result in a big difference are pretty rare. Usually, evolution takes the form of very small differences: For example, a gene that makes teeth a little bit longer shows up and is beneficial. The slightly longer-toothed individual has more kids than average, who have more kids than average, and so on until that gene is commonplace in the species. From that changed population, a new, different trait may take root, and so on. New traits may make old, previously neutral ones more beneficial than usual, so those propagate, etcetera.
Nowhere is the process directed or able to foresee the future. Steps don't have to occur in a particular order. Older "models" of a species can stick around for extended times if they're isolated and/or still competitive enough. Nowhere is there a requirement for a "wonder monkey" that shows up as a paragon of momentous change, like they do in the comic books. Sorry, X-Men hopefuls, it's an incremental process, and advantages will generally be small.
Metaphor time, since Creationists are fond of bogus probability: A species's evolution from one form to another isn't settled in a single pull on a big slot machine. It's more like some of those videogame slot machines that allow you to lock individual wheels. Now imagine you've got millions of people playing the same game, and when one locks a beneficial wheel, that benefit spreads to the other players. To add to that, there's several ways to win the jackpot. There's no individual wildly improbable act being done. When you've got millions of players, one of them getting a favorable turn of the wheel is hardly extraordinary. When those small successes are allowed to persist and spread over generations, progress is expected.
So, to summarize: An individual organism getting a big improbable change is the stuff of comic books, not evolution. I think any Creationist who makes such an argument should be ridiculed for not knowing the difference between the beliefs of Magneto and real world scientists.
22 comments:
I've been reading a lot of Dawkins lately. Right now I'm in the middle of The Blind Watchmaker which, along with Climbing Mount Improbable (a book I don't have yet but would like to get down the line) covers this in great detail.
I think you covered all the major points of this concept pretty well. The slow animations don't just mislead in the idea of a single creature changing but the other much more common misconception of a single family line changing over time.
I hear it all the time, "why are there still monkeys" is one form. Another is "why would anyone mate with the freak?". Heck Dawkin's book I've been reading adds "why didn't the slight modifications get washed out by the population?" (that's more of a misunderstanding of how DNA works, not as an analog "averaging" of traits but a more digital "either the gene's there or it isn't" thing).
Population averages are all it is. A gene that's more succesful, over time, becomes the predominant gene in the population, and from there it can build on it further.
Oh yes, as for "how often do mutations occur?", one thing that they don't seem to get is that, in sexually reproducing critters, EVERY child is essentially a massive combination of mutations. The pairing of half from one side and half from the other is effectively a massive set of potential mutations to work off of. After all, each decendant does look like a unique individual and not a clone. The trouble spot is when they say things like "but each GENE was still around!", as though to say you can't ever have advances in programming because "they still all just use all the same 1's and 0's, a 2 has never shown up!". It's the ORDER it's all in, and the relationships possible BETWEEN them, not the idea that there's suddenly going to be a surprise molecule beyond the standard 4 out of nowwhere.
Huh. If that's random spam, shouldn't that have a link somewhere?
The name is the link. I think.
Spam deletinofied.
It's back again. Why are Chinese or Japanese or WhateverthehellAsianscriptthatisese spammers posting here?
No idea.
Spam deletanized.
Heehee... now it looks like KoF and I have precognition, or something.
Spam deletified. Again.
And it's back again... That's one determined spambot. I wonder why it's fixated on this particular thread?
That's just not healthy. Deletinated.
Wow. Does it ever stop?
I think I'm beginning to see the strategy here... Rather than spamming every thread (which would probably eventually result in an IP block), it just picks one and keeps at it, reposting the same spam every time you delete it. Eventually, you'll probably just give up and leave it alone, allowing it to get indexed by Google. Quite clever really.
Well, then, we can't have that. Deleticons, transform and rise up!
It yet lives!
Deleters, Assemble! Backspace! Control-X! Overwrite! HaXX0r!
Defeat the Spamitrons!
Oh, you've got the inscrutable Asian spammers too? They've attempted 17 comments on my letter to the President post.
Yup. They've been doing it every day. Thankfully, I've been catching some before others commented on them, reducing the need for new variations on "deleted."
You have? I need to check more often, then. Gonna squeeze every last version out of you. =P
Another one.
Have you noticed that the address seems to be different each time? Almost as if this determined spammer is contracting out their services to questionable companies. I mean, it's not 'independent' spam. This would also have the advantage, for them, of making it harder to blacklist 'homepages', though I don't know if that's a concern.
Delete! Delete! Delete! Delete Keys HOOOOO!
(If anyone's curious, I ran the text of the latest one through google translate, and the result was just as spammy as you'd expect. It looks like it's shilling a dating site, or something.)
Anyway, I feel like I should get back on topic.
Not really sure what to say about the morphing sequences. I mean, Micheal Jackson showed that you can get that to work with pretty much any sequence of humans, or, presumably, other things of the same species... Which implies that the information that they're supposed to convey is "these two are so similar that it's not unreasonable to go from one to the other". Unfortunately, I don't think that ideas is out there much, or at all.
*Slashes at a notebook with a pen*
DELETE!
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