Aaron pretty much hit the nail on the head in his last post, down to the final quote-response.

OP, I suggest that you not continue this line of argument. Your last post (along with your earlier ones) highlights your lack of understanding of the intricacies of evolution and natural selection.

When you say things like the following, it's clear you haven't been exposed to the study of evolution in practice

Predictions aren't tough to make. Good predictions arise naturally from theory. And natural selection may SEEM simple, but it isn't.

Please don't.

Realize that many of the posters here either have or are working toward a PhD, and have studied/researched evolution, ecology, and medicine for a living. You might be able to learn something if you couch your understanding in a less cocksure way.

OP keep in mind, you have a biology major's understanding of genetics and molecular biology. while the amount learned is extremely variable, i daresay it's waaaaaaaaaay more than the general population knows. for someone with a very basic understanding of meiosis, recombination, mutation....(btw, just for the non biology inclined, not everything here would be absolutely required for change and selection of a trait), evolution might be obvious even without darwin (though since the above were discovered with the knowledge of darwin, it's hard to say how those topics would be presented in his absence). for someone without that background, it's less so (you alluded to it in your original post). give em a break.

btw, don't think i evolution would be obvious to me without someone having taken the time to collect and present the data that darwin collected (i only have pieces of knowledge of his data, never read origin of species fully as i found it less than entertaining). and my other training (whether right or wrong) would have me thinking that mutation is bad, causing me to ignore potential positive outcomes so i doubt i woulda just pulled the idea out of my head without the zoological data.

and speaking from experience the undergrad biology education it is only a small fraction of what is known/theorized/hypothesized/modeled, which in turn is likely only a real small fraction of what will eventually be learned. this doesn't apply only to genetics and molecular biology either

You are all PhDs in evolutionary biology? Wow, I didn't know that...I assumed the repliers in this thread are people who already accept evolution but aren't actual scientists.

Anyway, Aaron has totally derailed this thread. It was supposed to by about "Why is evolution so hard to accept?" But I'll post something like "Earth is a few billion years" and Aaron will ignore everything else I say but just focus on how I'm wrong and the Earth is 4.54 billion years old. All you PhD geniuses, please answer me this. Is the following statement true or false?

Say we have a population in which each individual has a heritable trait that affects survival, say flagellum in a bacteria population. The flagellum can be long or short. The process of one individual in the population dying is the EXACT SAME process that causes evolution. Of course, if it's a large population and just one individual dies then there will be a negligible effect. But if two individuals die, the effect is a little larger. And if half the population dies, the half with say short flagellum, then the evolutionary consequences will be large.

Doesn't the entire current population always die regardless of the size of their flagellum?

No I'm not one of the PhDs in this thread, but I'm pretty good at basic logic.

Sorry, not understanding your question. It's impossible for just one individual to die? It's impossible for one individual human to die? Either no one dies or all of humanity must die at the same instant?

So please explain the relationship between a snapshot in time (when an individual dies), and evolution. I would say there is none.

Oh well if you're gonna nitpick...

I'm not a phd student, I gave up biology at the age of 16, but like many in this subforum, I am self-educated on a wide array of subjects, and have some logical ability, and I am confident in saying that no matter how you paint it, the above is equivalent to neither evolution nor natural selection.

Math is easy! 2+2=5!

I'm not a PhD in evolutionary biology, but I do have one in math with a reasonable background in physics. (I had initially wanted to be a mathematical physicist before jumping to analytic number theory.) I don't claim to have a deep understanding of evolution, but I know enough to know that you're pretty far off the mark in terms of what you're actually saying about it.

The answer to the question lies in the fact that you don't actually understand what you're talking about. It's hard for people to accept because the definition of evolution that you've been using is not logically connected to the question that you asked.

I have given you the constant genetics example as something that is clearly "evolution" under your definition, yet also clearly does not translate to "evolution" in the sense of "Why is evolution so hard to accept?"

The definition of evolution you've given is, in fact, trivial. If you have any population at all that has any genetic diversity, then unless everything lives forever and never reproduces, evolution WILL happen. But that's an artifact of your definition, and not at all related at all to the idea that large scale changes in creatures happens over time.

I want to try one more adjustment to your example to try to illustrate this point:

Okay, let's change one thing:

Or perhaps:

Are you still convinced that "that's evolution"? It fits the definition that you've put forth because we've changed the frequency of colorblindness. But does this actually explain anything about how we go from bacteria to people? Not really. Actually, not at all.

Evolution is hard to accept because you don't really understand what evolution is.

I'll quote myself:

I guess you'll probably never see why.

Ok Aaron, you've become a little less rude so I'll answer you. I told you THE definition of evolution. This is the one the entire scientific community uses, this is the one I learned, this the one wikipedia describes. How would you or the public define evolution?

The answer is probably "change in species over time". That's incredibly vague and if that's all you know, it almost seems like "magic" that evolution occurs.

And my example of one colorblind person dying is exactly related to large species changes over time. Maybe I should have used a different organism as an example though, because we humans are a kinda weird exception when it comes to evolution. Of the hundreds of billions of species out there or have lived (Aaron, I don't literally mean hundreds of billions! I'm just making a general point), we are the only one to use technology to really prevent members of our species from dying.

If you don't see how that is natural selection, then you don't understand at all how evolution works. You probably couldn't even define natural selection.

And all those examples you mentioned, cloning and gene therapy, are evolution! Evolution is a process, and even if the change in gene pool is so small that the result is barely noticable, it's still evolution.

Maybe this hypothetical example will help you understand. Let's go back in time 3.5 billion years ago. There's no life on earth, no plants, but one tiny colony of bacteria. Let's say there's 10 organisms and their genetic composition is:

1 White
6 Blue
2 Green
1 Purple

Let's pretend that today, the same loci for these genes are in ALL organisms but we all have the green gene. There's no more white, blue, or purple genes in any organism anywhere on earth today. What must have happened is natural selection killed off all the non-green bacteria 3.5 billion years ago. If we go back and time and kill one green bacteria, there will be only one green individual remaining and the chance he survives to pass on his green gene goes way down.

Natural selection isn't going to instantly kill ALL non-green bacteria. It just makes it so green are more LIKELY to survive compared to non-green. Maybe with two bacteria, the chance that green survives to later dominate is 70%. With one bacteria it drops to 30%.

Now do you see where I'm going with this? Killing just one bacteria drastically affects whether, 3.5 billion years later, all organisms have a green gene or not.

Wow, unbelievable that you still haven't dropped the condescending tone.

If we have a population of 100,000 organisms, then killing just one individual probably will have little to no consequence on the evolutionary path that species follow. By maybe killing two individuals has a slightly larger affect. The PROCESS of an individual dying is the exact same as two individuals dying, only for the latter the process happens twice. Maybe killing 100 individuals has an even larger effect.

Let's say we have 100,000 australopithecus individuals (and let's pretend these directly evolve into **** sapiens). 50,000 have a "larger brain" and 50,000 have a "smaller brain". Let's say we kill just ONE individual with a "larger brain". Now let's repeat this exact same process 49,999 times. Now we have a population of 50,000 "smaller brain" individuals, and this drastical affects whether we **** sapiens will ever evolve, or whether our evolution is delayed. Or whether we follow some different evolutionary pathway.

As I've already noted, the definition that wikipedia provides is different from the one that you've presented. I've given you a specific example, which is still open for you to explain whether "50% red" is a "heritable characteristic."

You still don't even understand the objection that is being raised. The objection is that under the interpretation that you've provided of "evolution" is that it's trivial and does nothing to provide any suggestion of anything other than "stuff happens." You've allowed it to include birth, death, gene therapy, cloning...

You realize that the definition of "evolution" you provide speaks NOTHING of natural selection, and that natural selection is irrelevant to the point being raised, right? Of course not, because you don't understand the objection. If you did, you wouldn't be rambling about stuff that really doesn't matter at all.

(I'm also pretty sure that your example is not "natural selection" by any reasonable interpretation of the term, but that's a separate conversation.)

Is there anything to you that's NOT evolution? As I pointed out several times now, you've trivialized the definition so that it's basically tautological that evolution happens, and it STILL doesn't say anything about the larger point you're trying to make about people accepting "evolution."

Let's say for a moment that you convince someone that "a colorblind person dying" is evolution. In what way does this speak to the question of wolves turning into pitbulls? There's no logical connection between the definition of evolution you have presented and the consequences of evolution that you wish to assert.

Nobody objects to this point (at least, nobody ITT so far). That you feel like making this point is going to do something for you simply reiterates the idea that you're completely lost in this conversation.

Right here, you've used the word "evolve" to mean something like "change in species over time." You are saying more that "a change in the allele frequency in a population." You're talking about the introduction of NEW traits and things like that which are independent consequences of things like selection that are not logically tied to the definition of "evolution" that you've presented.

Do you really not see that you're mixing a narrow technical meaning with a broader colloquial meaning?

Computer programmers eventually succeed in creating AI. They then create a virtual world, analogous to the SIMS or something similar.

The programming of the virtual world includes evolution in a sense - all the species have DNA and the rule set (physics etc.) are programmed into the environment so that change can occur over time. AN entire universe is created in this virtual space.

The AI characters are then "inserted" into the game environment, on a planet, and the game is booted up, allowed to run freely, and not even the programmers know how things will unfold - the AI characters will "act" on their free will.

Eventually the AIs in the game begin codifying their environment, and slowly but surely, over time, start to discover/unravel more and more of the rule sets that govern their environment.

Question is though, could they ever be able to put the pieces together to know the origin of their world, and themselves?

another reason people tend to not accept what "intellectuals" tell em.

guilty of saying things the wrong way myself.

Quiz for those who think they have a good understanding of evolution:

Does evolution have a directional* tendency towards more complexity, less complexity, or neither?

*Directional as opposed to random - that is, because complexity is favored/disfavored for some or other reason.

Define "complexity." At what level?

That's one of the difficulties, but hopefully we can have a discussion anyway. I think a lot of definitions rely on organisms that have more parts being more complex etc. We can probably get by with a very informal version that relies on fairly clear intuitive distinctions: most species of plants are more complex than most species of bacteria, and humans are more complex than most species of plant (you can contest this if you like).

My question was whether evolution as a whole has a directional trend towards more complex species, but the question is also interesting if we just consider within single lineages.

Without a stringent agreed-upon definition I predict this conversation is doomed to failure. If you say "plants are more complex than bacteria," I could come up with probably adozen ways in which bacteria are more complex, e.g. ability to metabolize nutrients/chemicals.

You might be right. I'm hesitant to use any one definition (e.g. genomic complexity: the amount of information a sequence stores about its environment) because different researchers use different definitions of complexity in order to test specialized phenomena.

This simply isn't true. A classic misconception is to associate all traits with selection. Evolution can happen without selection (e.g. genetic drift - random changes in the gene pool because of random deaths, for example). Not everything exists for an evolutionary purpose. To even talk of such a purpose is misleading, I believe.

I'm fairly sure this is wrong. People are evolving, and not particularly slowly at that. I think someone mentioned this earlier.

I don't think you did assume that. I think you assumed that a lot of people didn't know, then came in here trying to prove how smart and educated you were.

I think this a false dichotomy. People don't either believe in logical methods or faith to find truth; most religious people would accept the scientific method (or at least some form of it). I think the debate is more about when conflicts between opposing worldviews happen, and people's response to that. (not this debate obv, this thread more about how someone wants to teach something he doesn't understand himself)

NOOOOO

Fairly nitty point: I don't think you should use the words "evolve" or "evolution" when talking about culture. Changes in culture happen in a very different way to changes in populations. I prefer "change" or other neutral terms, otherwise it all gets way too confusing. Tilts me in the same way that journalists use "exponential" for "big" or "fast" when it has a firm technical definition which is different.

This hurts my eyes. I hope you realise why. (Pro tip: this has nothing to do with evolution, or me being a denialist, or me hating on you for presenting the 'truth'.)

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_are_t...roduction_rate :
if the conditions are favourable then the average time for a bacteria to reproduce is from 15 to 20 minutes. their offspring increases exponentially, which is expressed as 2x. with this rate 1 bacteria can produce 1 million cells in 7 hours.