GameBanshee Forums

@Malta Soren: When forming an opinion and discussing a topic, it is always important to have basic knowledge about the topic at hand. Lack of basic knowledge and concepts often leads to misunderstandings.

Evolution is not a raising hierachic line from "primitive" to "advanced". That's how humans liked to conceptualise evolution back in the 19th century, due to the very human need to view ourselves as the pinnacle of nature. It is however an incorrect idea. Evolution is the gradual adaptation to environmental circumstances that occurs in groups of organisms over long time. Your example of white and black skin is a perfect example of evolution.

[QUOTE=C Elegans]@Malta Soron: When forming an opinion and discussing a topic, it is always important to have basic knowledge about the topic at hand. Lack of basic knowledge and concepts often leads to misunderstandings.[/QUOTE]

As I said, I can't read the whole thread because of a lack of time. However, I got quite some knowledge about evolution and it's growing every day (in fact, I'm reading a book about it).

[QUOTE=C Elegans]Evolution is not a raising hierachic line from "primitive" to "advanced". That's how humans liked to conceptualise evolution back in the 19th century, due to the very human need to view ourselves as the pinnacle of nature. It is however an incorrect idea. Evolution is the gradual adaptation to environmental circumstances that occurs in groups of organisms over long time. Your example of white and black skin is a perfect example of evolution.[/QUOTE]

OK, we're meaning the same.
Doesn't this mean evolution like bacteria-->land-fish-->human does not exist? That evolution only exists as degeneration? (Forgive me if this has been said before.)

I hope I interpreted this correctly...

[QUOTE=Malta Soron]As I said, I can't read the whole thread because of a lack of time. However, I got quite some knowledge about evolution...[/QUOTE]
A certain Greek persona once said Wisest is he who knows he knows not

OK, we're meaning the same.
Doesn't this mean evolution like bacteria-->land-fish-->human does not exist? That evolution only exists as degeneration? (Forgive me if this has been said before.)

I don't think that's what CE was trying to say; She said that evolution is not a rising line (i.e. less advanced -> more advanced), but didn't imply it was the opposite (i.e. degeneration).
To rephrase what she said (I have to admit to feeling guilt for putting words in someone else's mouth ) evolution is a way for an organism to adopt to its environment. Whether the decolorization of the skin was a degradation or not is irrelevant; people with a decolorized skin had a better rate of survival in northern lattitudes and were thus, not surprisingly, the ones to survive over the long run.

Hehe, it's nice to have somebody speaking for you when they say exactly what you want I should hire you, Vicsun

@Malta: Vicsun is correct on evolution not referring to neither "degradation" nor "hierarchic raising". It's a human interpretation to view adaptation to environmental factors (or, random mutations but these happens very rarely) as degeneration or development.

It's good that you read up on the topic of evoution, it's a big field. I have tried to summarise current status in the beginning of this thread (page 2-3 perhaps?), so you might want to read it later on when you have more time. When you read books, be careful to select books of good scientific quality, there's a lot of popular crap pseudoscience around. Two scientists who have also written good popular science books are Stephen J Gould (evolutionary biologist/palentologist) and Richard Dawkins (geneticist). Both of them have opinions, but both of them present the facts and make a good job in distinguishing between facts, speculations and their own opinions.

A good website with high quality material is http://www.talkorigins.com

Good reading!

In the sense that they are better adapted to their environment, it can be argued that the evolved form of an organism is directly superiour to that of its previous incarnation. However, the word 'superior' would then have to be defined as "better adapted", which would employ circular logic .

I find it amazing that people can take beliefs into science. It's all well and good that you believe in a God, but if His existance can't be proven then He has no place in scientific theory. I've always imagined a rigid line that seperates faith with fact; Newton was a perfect vessel of both existing in the same person. He was quite devout, and yet you don't see Genesis in the theory of gravitation, nor did he sprinkle bits of Ecclesiastes into Calculus. I find it offending that Creationism exists, it is the only major theory circulating that I can think of with such a religious bent.

In science you can almost never say, "just believe it". There must be an extraordinarily good reason before you can make such a demand of other scientists. As far as I know, there are only a very few things that scientists simply accept, the only one I can come up with off the top of my head right now would be the "fact" that the size of the universe is infinate. But Creationism basically take the stance that says, "the Bible says so, therefore it is so, and you have to believe that. If you don't, well then you're an idiot".

I think the real reason people were so opposed to evolution was that they were opposed to the idea of monkeys in their family trees. Humans, being the egotistical megalomaniacs that they are, like to think that they are incredible beings, supreme in the universe with the sole exception of God. If you stop to think about it, humans are really quite insignificant in the grand scheme of things. We're only the second dominant type of being, the first being the Dinosaurs. And they lasted for 200 million years, we can barely claim a tiny fraction of that (about 1/40,000-th, to be exact), and yet we act all superior. We'd be lucky if humans could last half that long, given the current trend of self-annihilation that humans seem to be on.