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Re: Queen mother (of Britai...

AC
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SubjectRe: Queen mother (of Britain) has died
FromAC
Date2002-04-11 05:24 (2002-04-11 05:24)
Message-ID<3cb5003c.308875@news2.randori.com>
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Newsgroupsalt.fan.tolkien
FollowsBeren
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On Thu, 11 Apr 2002 03:10:51 GMT, "Beren" <beren@beleriand.com.me> wrote:

Beren
Evolution is true, in the sense that one particular species can evolve to adapt better to its surroundings. However, there is no convincing proof that one species can evolve into another. For example, there is not one single case of a series of fossils showing the continuous succession of one species evolving into another. The classic case of the horse skeletons which showed three species of horse, each different in size, does not prove that they evolved from one another. The fact that not one skeleton was ever found to represent a transition between the horse species is not good for those convinced of evolution.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

A fossil record, by its very nature, will never be complete. However, even in Equus fossil tree, enough transition can be seen to fill in the blanks. By your arguments, the transition of Proto-Indo-European languages to the numerous subgroups we see today would be considered ludicrous. Yet, linguistics can say with extraordinary confidence that German, Romany and Latin are all members of the same family. It's merely a matter of taxonomy and an understanding of linguistic change. Biological evolution is no different.

And natural selection" is a rather silly notion if you define it as nature selecting those species who are fittest, to survive, because you run into circular "logic": Which species survive? The fittest. Who are the fittest? Those who survived. Etc, etc. There is no possible way to prove that the species on Earth now were in fact the fittest a couple of thousand years ago. In fact, many biologists who specialise in the evolution of certain species define "fittest" to mean "those species who produce the most offspring", which does not at all mean that those species are necessarily the fittest at all.

How you can turn a perfectly logical argument on its head is pretty amazing. Besides which, evolution works on the individual, not the species. And evolution itself is merely a change in allele frequency.

Say you have two populations of Wooly Critters, happily living in cold climes. Climate changes for Wooly Critter population A, and starts to warm up, while the climate for Wooly Critter population B stays constant.

For Wooly Critter population A, those with thinner coats are of wool will find the climate far more tolerable, and will have to expend less of their energy dissipating heat. Initally this may only give them a small advantage over the more wooly counterparts, but in each generation, the alleles for lighter coats of wool mean that eventually the heavier wooly coats will disappear.

Now go back to Wooly Critter population B, which had no such selection pressure. After many generations in reproductive isolation, it is quite possible that it will no longer interbreed with the descendants of population A (either due to accumulated behavorial differences or outright genetic blocks to producing viable hybrids).

This is evolution. It has been observed in modern populations, and explains the fossil record rather better than Creationism, unless your an advocate of Last Thursdayism.

--- AaronC

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