Explain This, Evolution!! Volume 3

Philosophy Forums Science, Technology, and Math
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the cuckoo bird!

this thing is pretty crazy, and even more hilarious than the mind control ants and considerably less amazing than the vibrating japanese honeybees.

the cuckoo bird egg relies on a nest to live. it relies on a mother bird to feed it. if it doesnt have these things, it will surely die.

the mother cuckoo bird has no clue how to make a nest, and no clue how to feed its baby.

what does it do? well… its kind of less amazing than the ability to build a nest…

but anyway, this bird finds a certain kind of nest full of foreign eggs. it waits until the mother leaves its eggs unattended, and then it lays its own big, disproportiantely huge egg into the nest.

the unsuspecting bird sits on its own eggs as well as the cuckoo birds egg, since those birds dont know shit, they dont even know how they made their own nest.

then one day, that cuckoo egg comes to life. somehow, it knows that it has to push out all of the other eggs. it just chucks them out onto the ground so that they die. i think the documentary i saw, they were all unhatched, but it wouldnt surprise me if it chucked hatched ones because the cuckoos bird is gigantic compared to its host.

i mean, its gigantic. the hilarious part is that the host mother feeds it as if it were its own. the even more hilarious part is that the host continues to gather food for its parasite baby even when the baby is like 3 or 4 times bigger than the mother. the video footage showed this thing overflowing the entire nest, and the mother had to stand on a branch above it to vomit food into its mouth. i mean it was amazingly huge. the mouth is bigger than the head that vomits into it.

so when the genetic code of this bird was formed, it just randomly mutated into a completely instinctual behavior that made it immediately eject all siblings from its nest?

what about before its parents knew that it had to parasitically insert their egg into another nest? would it eject its own actual siblings? wouldnt that decrease the chances of this new species from reproducing more than the previous species?

ok! so the parents learned first that they ought to parasitically insert their babies into host nests. (first of all, id like to know the genetic code behind this one, since clearly birds cant understand nature this fast in one lifetime), but second of all, the logical error would be that…

fuck i cant think of one. you win this time darwin!!! but not for looooong!!!

regardless, i think we should all know how interesting nature is, regardless of its controversy

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:astonished:

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Groan, not again. Do you want me to pick this one apart as well Futureman :wink:

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Check out the Philadelphia inner-city for an answer to this question. People are impregnating women all over that then taking off. Frequently, crackhead moms give their kids to relatives and then disappear. All of this amounts to “making” others take care of your offspring with little expense to oneself. It’s much the same thing.

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yeah but i dont think the brains of the cuckoo mothers fill up with the same happy-brain-chemicals that flood the brains of men while having sex. then again, maybe all instinctual animal behavior can be explained in this way.

when the honeybees vibrate around the intruding hornet, they are actually feeling like they are having sex, and thats how they learned that thats what they have to do. and when the dung beetle rolls feces into a ball, it feels like when a sexy fat girl poops on your chest when youre wearing a leather blindfold and ball-gag. mmm.

ill pm you matt. about the chest poop.

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O_o

I uh, dont have any answers to that, Future Man. Though I would like to put forward a question of my own into this very subject.

Could both Creationism/Religion and Darwinism/Evolution be correct with the following reasonings:

Lets say Darwin was correct. We all evolved from some microscopic organism millions and millions of years ago. Lets say those microscopic organisms did come from some meteorite. How then did they get on the meteorite?

Oh yes! The big bang. Where there was nothing and then it exploded! …Creating rocks, gasses, coca cola - you name it, it was there!

Ok, taking the above into consideration, could we not then interperet the bible a little differently? Lets say God did create the world and universe and all life in his seven days or whatnot; but he did it through the big bang and microscopic organisms. He created them with the intention to slowly evolve and knew beforehand everything they would evolve to, specifically adding us into his microscopic equation?

If those two theories were to be correct, Darwinists and Creationists would both be correct… But then again, these are just random thoughts, from a drunken mind.

W.C.

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there is absolutely nothing in the darwinian theory, or any theory that can coherently talk about how life was created on earth.

we know that there are certain chemicals that are required for life as we know it. but god only knows what chemicals can combine in the same way to create life that is completely different. i dont know how long ago it was, but some time in the last 50 years, we all thought that life lived on one of two resources, photosynthesis or eating things that used photosynthesis (or eating things that ate things that used photosynthesis) and then we found bacteria on the ocean floor that turned methane and sulphur (or probably just methan i forget) into energy. something completely unexpected.

fact is, life eats shit. could be the sun, could be a relatively unstable particle converted into a more stable particle. theres lots of those all over the universe.

but if anybody thinks that darwinian evolution disproves gods influence on the creation of life, he hasnt looked at what science has to say about the creation of life: nothing.

im still waiting (or ive forgotten) on the way that japanese honeybees know that they are supposed to dogpile onto intruding hornets and vibrate in a specific way such that the temperate inside the dogpile is two degrees hotter than the hornet can survive in and two degrees lower than the bees can survive in. random mutation? i cant prove it wasnt a random mutation, but holy crap what a mutation. there is no step-by-step process, its all or nothing genetic brain encoding that one single generation was endowed with. you cant halfway instincutally learn that you have to not only lure giant hornets into your nest, but you have to signal to your sisters than they all have to dogpile and vibrate with a specific frequency.

and thats not even the most amazing thing bees can do. and they learn nothing. its all instinct. one mutation at a time, no step by step process. the cuckoo bird can be explained step by step. not the bees.

god could program bees but not write an intelligible book that humans can agree on? either he sucks or he didnt even try to write that stupid book.

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could some bees a really long time ago just start vibrating at this certain frequency when attacked, for no real reason but small evolutionary code, and killed the wasp, these bees survive and make more bees who do the same until you get the vibrating bees of today.

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If you take the strategy of the cuckcoo bird as a evidence of god’s tweaking evolution on earth,(I don’t) then that opens some interesting questions about god’s character.

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I feel like Darwin is beginning to become a fading horizon… ‘evolution’ as we know it now isn’t just random genetic mutation, but something far more sophisticated… so sophisticated in fact that a few diehard athiest/agnostics publically declared (keep in mind these guys are like 60/70/80) that they now believe in God based on the complexity shown in ‘evolution’.

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Of course, then you have the “other” people who rave on about aliens…

…don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to read up on Vol. 4…

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You said it

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I just posted this in another thread.

Here’s the thing with all of the universe and evolution and everything: if you look at it from now and go backward it all just seems too good to be a matter of chance, however, if you look from an original atomic position then it’s easy to understand.

Everything in the universe fell into position naturally and formed what is today. It’s as if you were holding a cup of paint and then dropped it on the ground and by accident it formed what looked like a picture. The quality of the paint, the air, the height, and the texture of the ground all lent themselves to the formation of the picture. Since we saw it happen we think little of it. However, someone that comes along later thinks that it is a very stylish painting done by a calculating master.

What you are saying is like the second guy’s perception. You think that because what’s here works that it is something good. Well, it’s not good it’s just what was bound to happen given the nature of the universe.

None of this stuff is complex if you look at it from the start rather than from the end to the start. it’s all just the clinging together of atoms in ways that they will and do cling together.

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I am new here… But I thought I should just jump right in.

You say science has nothing to say about the creation of life, but I fear my friend, that you are mistaken. Many theories have been presented, all of which are backed with empirical reasoning. The theory presented to me in an intro level molecular biology course could be narrowed down to the summation of ideal conditions found in “early earth” resulting in the synthesis of the organic from the inorganic, to eventually spark a genesis of prokaryotic life. Crazy you say? Well consider for a moment the Miller-Urey experiment, where hypothesized conditions of early earth (warmed water, hydrogen, methane, and ammonia, along with sparks to mimic lightning) were reproduced under experimental conditions, which resulted in the formation of organic compounds (including some amino acids, the building blocks of proteins). Just something to think about, perhaps.

My main point here is that science, just like theology, has reasonable justification for all of its claims.

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This isn’t even a discussion which can intelligently be had. I think I’d be correct in saying that very few of us here are qualified to argue the merits or lack thereof of evolutionary theory in any but the broadest of terms. I expect we could thrash out this mockingbird issue, but to be honest it’s not worth the grief.

Evolution is a fact, and no amount of creationist propaganda can change that. Observe the list of steves , a list of doctorate-holding scientists who agree with the theory of evolution and whose name is either steve or stephanie. The list currently stands at around 540. I think it’s clear where the scientific community stands on this.

It’s interesting to note that creationist arguments against evolution are delivered to the public and not to the scientific community (creationist theories rarely appear in peer-reviewed scientific journals). Even controversial and unpopular scientific theories of the past have trodden this path, and it is telling that creationists are unwilling to subject themselves to such scrutiny. Rabble-rousers? Maybe!

If you’ve a shred of sense, don’t engage with creationists. They won’t thank you for it, and it won’t make you feel better. If you’ve that deep a need for mindless drivel I suggestyou hire Charlie’s Angels. It is most diverting!

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I personally cannot renounce an entire area of thought if I do not know everything about it. Consequently, I feel that I do not have the ability to renounce any form of thought, whatsoever. I take an open approach to all knowledge presented.

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Pez, that’s an admirable little paean… but I don’t really see how it’s relevant.

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good point, except this study was done in 1953. organic compounds are easy. actual life does not just pop up once you have certain kinds of molecules. there are currently experiments going on, that i read about in national geographic, where people are trying to create rudimentary little prokaryotes.

i think if they have succeeded, it would be on the news.

the discovery of organic compounds means nothing. there are organic compounds flying all over the place on numerous moons around jupiter and saturn. the easy creation of organic compounds means one thing: when life was created, it was made to use materials that were currently present.

it didnt use plastic or tetrahydrocannabinol because those chemicals didnt exist when life was created. “”“organic”“” chemicals were around. the creatures that were created just so happened to use those chemicals which were easily created in the presence of water, carbon etc.

nobody created life. they created chemicals that are amenable to the specific kind of life we see on our planet. the artificial creation of oxygen/protein/carbohydrates/anything life needs to live wasnt any more amazing. same thing.

i would like to know why any single scientist believes that life can be created without god. i dont doubt that such a scientist exists, but id like to know what the infidel thinks. and why all of his experiments have failed.

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Future Man- Several of your assertions are fallacious.

For some relatively lay-folk explanation of some of the facts regarding abiogenesis, have a look at this article on talkorigins. It’s not easy going, and that’s the dumbed down version. Neither you nor I really understand the real details of abiogenesis. As I said before, perhaps we ought to leave the theorising on abiogenesis to the people who do it for a living.

You might care to note that the article is extremely well-referenced.

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mmmm… thc :smiley: