Its pretty hilarious, that after getting a Biology degree, taking all those classes, reading textbooks, and talking to your professors, you find yourself not satisfied with what has been presented to you so you decide to turn to a Houston Rockets fan forum for justification on the topic of Evolution..
Wow... This thread is an makes me feel stupid just reading it. Some folks STILL don't believe in evolution? Or you F'ing kidding me?
Quiet! Or the invisible man will get you in your sleep! Spoiler <object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/g4uxIo4t7xM&hl=en_US&fs=1&start=87&autoplay=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/g4uxIo4t7xM&hl=en_US&fs=1&start=87&autoplay=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>
Again, go read Your Inner Fish. Or continue to be the intellectual equivalent of someone sticking their fingers in their ears and going, "LALALALALA" when they come across something that goes against their preconceived notions. Your call. And to be perfectly honest, your questions about mutations and genetics indicate that you lack even a rudimentary understanding of how such things work. Where did you go to school for this degree and who were your professors?
Do you understand dominant, recessive, codominant, incomplete dominance, pleiotropy, polygenenic traits, silent mutations, and epigenetics? Can you explain, using Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium and examples, why even lethal mutations persist in a population? I'll even get you started: Try sickle-cell anemia. What does current evolutionary theory say about where birds came from? Surely your professors (where did you get your degree again?) talked about it in class and why your egg example is actually pretty funny. These are all things someone with a biology degree should have no issues answering (without even resorting to the internets!) As you've ignore my posts thus far, as well as the nice video durvasa posted, I don't expect a reply, but that's fine. It would most likely be a hand-wave anyway.
There is fossil evidence that fish grew limbs and crawled onto land. Google "transitional forms" and "fish" and you'll find plenty of it. How do you explain the existence of such a species without evolution? You said that would expose them to predators. What predators? If they were the first vertebrates to get onto land, then they would presumably have been on top of the food-chain. Getting on to the land would be beneficial because there would be less competition for the food (plants/insects) that was available on the land. We're talking about hundreds of millions of years. Its "illogical" to you that in all that time (the human species have been around for merely blip in comparison), some small population of fish would eventually be pushed out the water for some reason? To you, it is more logical that the"land-fish" we know to have existed just happened to have strikingly similar DNA and physical structure to fish and were just materialized out of thin air by a creator?
In a way, I'm happy this thread was created. Evolution always made sense to me, but this thread inspired me to read up some more about it. I've been reading Jerry Coyne's book: "Why Evolution is True." It is extremely good, and I'd recommend it to anyone who is highly skeptical (like tomjc) or just wants to have a a more comprehensive understanding of the evidence in support of it (like myself).
If you have trouble imagining fish with legs, you don't have to imagine any more: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tanaka_juuyoh/2998363223/
Sea Robbins have spiny legs too. My family used to spend some time in Cape Cod and we used to catch them every now and then. Lets not forget Mudskippers that have leg like fins and can breathe air.
For want of starting a new thread and since we had an entropy discussion going in this one. I saw this in the comments section of a New Scientist, Quantum Mechanics article and it sums up my own sense of logic on the matter: Energy, Time And Space Thu May 06 16:10:43 BST 2010 by David Allen "Or is there really an influence that travels faster than light?" What specifically is the influence? If it is energy traveling through space, then Einstein's theories tell us that it should be limited to the speed of light. But if it is some sort of quantum information, then our understanding of speed simply doesn't apply. The wave-function exists independent of time and space, both measurements change the form of the wave-function. @Eric Kvaalen is right, it doesn't matter which one is first, or how far apart they are in time or space. Simultaneity is impossible to determine, and doesn't really matter. This leads to some interesting conjecture. If a wave-function is inherently dimensionless (no space or time), then why does it appear to be smeared through space? This implies that space is an emergent phenomenon that involves a form of entanglement. Wave-functions with similar spatial entanglement can influence each other, while others can't. Perhaps the process of decoherence, the mixing of quantum information, creates new spatial relationships, and therefore expands space as we know it. Time itself appears to have an arrow due to the thermodynamically irreversible processes of entropy. Perhaps entropy actually describes the thermodynamically irreversible processes of decoherence. This would mean that both space and time are emergent from the process of quantum decoherence. There would be no possibility of time travel, because everything that was and will be is right now, a soup of interacting wave-functions, driving time, driving the expansion of space. There is no past or future there is only the ever changing now. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627596.500-quantum-wonders-spooky-action-at-a-distance.html
Interesting stuff Dubious but I'm going to disprove that theory by travelling back in time and knocking the crack pipe out of Lewis Lloyd and Mitchell Wiggins' hands so the mid 80's Rockets win some championships.
On the contrary, I actually learned more about some of the finer points of evolution through this thread. Not tomjc's posts, mind you, which sounds like someone who hasn't even taken high school biology class. But there are some good stuff discussed here. As someone who generally disliked biology, it was nice to get some info on a concept that I've always known, but don't understand very deeply.
Not sure of the specific example your referring too, but it could due to sexual selection. Sexual selection is differencial reproductive success based on the ability to get a mate. Traits that offer an organism more mating opportunities, assuming that these traits are heritable, will be selected for. Lets say that by being the first organism from the sea to be able to move around on land offered that fish more access to new food sources and potential mates (moving from one body of water to another that is separated by a piece of land). If the trait that allowed the fish to do this is heritable, that trait will be more common in the next generation. There may not have been any predators on the land at this time, keep that in mind as well.
Edit Sometimes a trait that allows an organism more mating opportunities will be selected for EVEN IF it comes with a cost to that organisms lifespan.
