Evolution v ID v Desire

[peale]

I’ve never been entirely satisfied with Darwin’s theories of evolution. Waiting for mutations to occur has always struck me as a slow way to evolve, take a giraffe for instance why should a slight gain in neck length out perform the shorter necked giraffe to the point that one goes out of existence. I’m sorry but it just does not work. But neither does the idea that some intelligent being is making the changes. Life has been evolving for 500 million years; even if this is blink of an eye for god why take so long over it. In fact if god was so clever why not get it right first time, instead of confusing us all with a half nature, half god evolution. Any way I’ve thought about this years and have come up with my own theory of evolution, maybe some one else has come to the same conclusions, I hope so.







Evolution Driven by Desire.







Back to the giraffe analogy. The short necked giraffe looked up at the trees and desired the leaves, after all he was hungry and hunger is a great motivator. He stretched as far as he could for an entire lifetime. His offspring born into the same circumstances desired the same leaves, generation after generation stretched, trying to reach as far as they could. Now lets consider that the blueprint for each successive generation of giraffe is stored in its parents DNA, what if during their lifetime of stretching they somehow change the code a little? Its not that crazy really is it; these tiny stings of coding are within the body of the giraffe, why shouldn’t they be adjusted while the giraffe is alive. After thousands of generations we end up with the long necked giraffe we all recognise. If you apply evolution driven by desire to any creature it works perfectly. Whether it’s the cheater’s desire to run faster so she can catch the antelope, (and the antelopes desire to run faster to escape the cheater) or the elephant who just wanted to be big so no animal would prey on him. Notice that survival is the great motivator but what happens when survival is no longer a problem, perhaps evolution for that species grinds to a halt, or perhaps new desires take over.







What about mans evolution? The basic model of man is at least a million years old, and perhaps this design was reached by the desire to survive, but once we had reached our optimum physical design what drove us then? Perhaps our desire to communicate. Like many animals of the same species we lived in communities and we quickly found we needed a language, although we did not know that’s what was needed. As well as a few physical changes language required a greater mental capacity. You can’t underestimate just how much smarter we needed to be to talk, look at computers no matter how powerful they get simple speech recognition software is still pathetic when compared to a child. So we desired intelligence, and the most interesting part of this evolutionary process was just how fast we became smart, the more you use the brain the better it becomes. With intelligence came questions, the same questions we are still asking today who, what and why. More importantly a new desire, one that is more powerful than anything we or any other creature had experienced before. The desire to continue to exist after death. We have never been able to cheat death, ultimately it gets us all. What if we would not accept death now that we where aware of our own existence. We desired to live on, we desired heaven, we desired god. Now this for me is the whole point, I believe that our desire to have a god has given us one, it is real as the trees outside but it exists because we created it, it did not create us. I think gods existence is as much grounded in science as it is philosophy, and I don’t doubt that although it may have been created by us it has long been independent of us. It has always been intelligent and even exercises influence in our world, not the physical world, just us, I don't think you can blame god for earth quakes ans tsunamis. It is also possible that there are several gods each created by different communities, but I doubt they have the same petty arguments we have. Maybe it is time to start desiring life again so we can evolve a little further, because we have truly lost the plot of late. Thats my two penith worth

[wil]

whee this one speaks to the law of attraction, and our thoughts being oh so powerful as the proponents of the non sentient beings profess (ramtha, seth, abraham)...

[_Z_]

I saw a program on tv about a 600 year old tree, on it were insects that had evolved to suite that specific tree- yet in such a short amount of time! One would think that the desire drive had a dramatic effect, if the insect was human I would wonder if we can literally change our evolution by what we think about! [which could be true to a degree] however some insects don’t even have a brain to think about their environment, I wonder if they have being and spirit thence having ‘will’ in its simplest form. If so then even without a brain, they can still desire and thence change their form [all creatures are shape-shifters ].



Just thoughts.

[sara[h]ng]

Unless I misunderstand, I'm afraid that this thread shows a poor understanding of evolution. By your reasoning, one could also say, 'A man desires to be strong, so he works out everyday and gets big muscles. Therefore, his son will have larger muscles.' Unfortunately, genetics does not work like that. Things 'acquired' in life do not effect DNA. This is not a hypothesis and is not arguable.

- Sarah

[Kaldayen]

Hi Peale,

Your "Desire theory" is actually Lamarck's transformism theory. It stated this :

The best-known feature of Lamarckianism in the subsequent tradition—the theory of transformism via the inheritance of acquired characters—functioned as a subordinate, diversifying process through which major animal groups were adapted to local circumstances.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) lived before Darwin. His theory has since then been invalidated because it was scientifically proven that acquired traits weren't inherited to the next generation.

You can learn more there : http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolution/

Now wheter or not we created God or God created us is out of science's league.
___
Kal

[_Z_]

Sorry sarah, but that is incorrect, our DNA has ‘switches’ [external to the core elements of the double helix]. When the egg is removed from the womb for ivf treatment, sometimes these switches are changed simply by placing the egg in a different environment – this can lead to genetic disorders. Secondly, if we only use one arm for long enough [many millennia probably], then eventually humans would only have the one arm, its simple adaption.



Kaldayan, hi

acquired traits weren't inherited to the next generation.

Interesting! Is this not being questioned still? Some say that mutation is not the only form of transformation – I don’t know though. Did that tree beatle [in earlier post] really suffer so many ‘mutations’ in just a 600 year lifespan of a the tree.

[FriendRob]

I highly recommend Jonathan Weiner's The Beak of the Finch:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/067...books&v=glance

He shows that year-to-year variation in the finches of Galapagos is much greater than the rate required by the fossil record. The real mystery is not how evolution can happen so fast, but why it happens so slowly.

[wil]

Namaste,

Since the advent and worldwide use of the television height has become a major leadership factor...While it hasn't been shown that tall people are better in business or public service, they tend to get promoted, hired, and elected more often. They get higher pay and more perks...all because of height. This has instituted a desire for height...and in China we are talking 1" every decade....half a generation, and each generation is not reverting back to the original and starting over they are simply growing taller, and not taller due to parent's they are all growing taller then their parents.

Now we've justified this in developed nations to be the reason of better nutrition, however this change has been going on in China for 50 years and occurs all over...as the desire to be taller drives them ever taller than thier parents...

I'm sure there is a reason beyond that of the starter of this thread....

uhoh, desire... de sire- of the Father...wouldn't want to introduce that either...

[Kaldayen]

Hi everyone,

_Z_,
Well I had not heart about the "switches" in the DNA. Do you have a link where would could learn more about it?
As for the unused arm of humans disappearing after let's say 1000 years, I have doubts. What's the logic behind that? According to what I know, the only way it would disappear is if a mutation created a one-armed-human and that he was more adapted to his environment so he would create more childrens then a two-armed-human until all the two-armed-ones would disappear... which is why evolution takes so long to happen...

FriendRob,
I haven't read that book but I'll have a look to find it. Now, does it say that a single bird's beak grows during his own adult lifetime in order to adapt to his surroundings? That would indeed be something I'd be interested to read about.
___
Kal

[Kaldayen]

wil,
An inch per decade is indeed a lot. I'd love to see those statistics somewhere. Other than a better alimentation, I could also think of another cause : China is a heterogenic population. People in the north (manchuria, inner mongolia, etc.) are often taller than the Hàn population; same thing for the immigrants from Korea. Maybe an increased mobility of the population (now that they don't need visas to travel from province to province anymore) could result in a higher degree of genetic mixes, thus accelerating the Hàn population's growth rate. That's only a theory though...

Could desire also takes part in it? I guess we don't know... the mind has power over the body that we don't quite understand.
___
Kal

[_Z_]

Sorry kaldayen, I saw it on a documentary, it is new stuff, and so I am sure if you look around on the net you’ll find something, as for the other, you are right I was wrong – at least that was a really bad explanation I gave. I was thinking along the lines of the beetle for the said tree, that had grown a single claw hook for some reason, thus it made some kind of sense that if something could grow an extra part, then we could loose it via misuse! kinda lizard like - I always wondered how evolution could arrive at loosing a tail to foil predators, and the use of colours as warnings [like with yellow and black stripes].



I’ll have a look for a link for you on the tv websites.

[Tao_Equus]

Here is a starter link to how protien switching in genes is an inheritable factor that can and does effect consecutive generations.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/prog...ostgenes.shtml

I recently saw another interesting example on TV in which a plant took only a few generations to produce false 'mimic' eggsacs identical to the real ones a recently introduced insect predator produces*. Evolution does seem to fastrack when required on occasion. The more we learn about DNA the more we realise that its only a scaffold on which many poorly understood and highly complex interactions take place. We are still at the begining of that journey of exploration.

*How does the plant know what it looks like?

Regards

TE

[sara[h]ng]

Originally Posted by _Z_

Sorry sarah, but that is incorrect, our DNA has ‘switches’ [external to the core elements of the double helix]. When the egg is removed from the womb for ivf treatment, sometimes these switches are changed simply by placing the egg in a different environment – this can lead to genetic disorders. Secondly, if we only use one arm for long enough [many millennia probably], then eventually humans would only have the one arm, its simple adaption.

Interesting! Is this not being questioned still? Some say that mutation is not the only form of transformation – I don’t know though. Did that tree beatle [in earlier post] really suffer so many ‘mutations’ in just a 600 year lifespan of a the tree.

This is a little late, but just to clarify, Kaldayen and I were saying the same thing.

I'm not sure what you're talking about with the switches. I'll have to check TE's link and get back to that.

- Sarah

[sara[h]ng]

A bit off the topic of the thread, but several of the posts have addressed this. Incidentally, in my genetics lecture today, we talked about this very thing.

Regarding the speed of evolution, there are two 'types'. There is 'gradual' evolution and 'punctuated'. Gradual is what we all know as evolution, takes a long time and all that. It is 'forgiving', you could say. In this type, beneficial mutations are nice and may eventually lead to speciation, but they are not likely to prevent a mass extinction, and so take a long time to become a dominant trait.
Punctuated evolution happens when there has been some kind of disruption - a changed ecosystem, a change in climate, whatever other dramatic thing. It happens more quickly because those organisms that do not adapt, quickly die out.

- Sarah

[sara[h]ng]

Originally Posted by Tao_Equus

Here is a starter link to how protien switching in genes is an inheritable factor that can and does effect consecutive generations.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/prog...ostgenes.shtml

Having read this article, I'm surprised to learn that people think this to be new and controversial. I thought it was well-known - not necessarily well understood, but well-known. There are certain 'non-genetic' factors that can indeed influence genetic expression or even the DNA itself. But these are things such as viruses and prions, not mental focus.

As for activities of parental generations affecting the expression of the offspring's genes, yeah, but these are chemical changes, not, say, changes in muscle or in joints, promoting strength or flexibility, etc. It's all about nature vs. nurture. There is the genetic potential that an organism may have, 'nature', and that is refined by 'nurture' based on its health/nutrition/environment and that of its near ancestors.

I'm about to be kicked off of this computer, so I better cut this here. I'll elaborate if that wasn't clear enough.

- Sarah