Darwin: Genius or idiot?

Darwin postulated that new species arise by the gradual accumulation of small mutations in present species to the next. He stated that the fossil record will show transitional fossils linking each species to the next, the problem being that it ain’t necessarily so. Darwin was actually wrong? Where is the missing link if it is not LLCoolJ?

New species do not seem to depend upon previous structure or even environment it seems, but rather develop spontaneously, without requirement of any biological substrate.

So Darwin was WRONG perhaps? Would anyone admit it? If he was wrong would the Creationists have a point larger than they are allowed by media and conventionally scientific accepted opinion (always dangerous that) that seem to continually pound down anyone with a different opinion?

I am not a "Creationist" but I respect their views. I start this thread as one humble in his lack of understanding in this area, but who has witnessed an intense and powerful debate about this because obviously there is a teleological ingredient, a theological one and a scientific one and I am hoping to get a good debate going, and there are a few very good minds here I would like to learn something from.

 

Darwin was wrong, but he was on the right lines. He said that humans evolved from chimps. This is incorrect, we evolved from a parallel species, of which we are the surviving sub-species. There was something the other week in the news about the remains of another sub-species in south-east Asia, I think it was. Now how vague was all that, but I hope it gives you a starting point.

 

Darwin wasen't completly right but he did have some good points.
Theory of Evolution
1.Perpetual Change- life isn't static. Organisms once present are not here today.
2. Common descent- all forms of life decended from a common ancestor. ( some evidence of this is the shared traits in many organisms such as embryonic gill arches and mitrocondrial DNA that has found a link between all organisms that have one in cells "almost everyting above the most primitive bacteria")
3.Multiplication of species- evolution produces new species through adaptive radiation, the splitting of species into new ones.
4.The rates of evolution fall into two categories: gradualism- the slow accumulation of incremental changes. And Punctuated Equilibrium- Rapid speciation. The way it really happens is somewhere inbetween these two with both finding some merit.
5.Natural Selection- Processe where adaptions that are better then others gradualy become dominant overtime to form new species. The five observations of Darwin to lead to this theory are:
1. Organisms have the potential for great reprodution and exponential growth if they are not kept in check.
2. Organsims don't however have exponential growth when found in a balanced ecosystem.
3.Natural resources are limited( aka the carrying capacity)
4.All organisms show variation in characteristics.
5.Variation is heriatable and is passed to offspring.

Sorry if this isn't very clear im in a hurry and didn't have time to go back and check myself and these were out of my notes so I was looking between two places and ended up with a head ache. So if you have any questions just post them and I will get back to you.

Oh and in response to the fossile record haveing gaps. Conditions must be just right to form a fossil and not every species will have one made plus we may not have found it yet. We find new fossil species every day.

 

Well if we evolved from a parallel species that is fine. I suppose its hard to figure out just why humans are SO advanced compared to all other forms of life. Regardless that a million chimps with a million typewriters and a million years could produce Hamlet it just seems the divergence is too enormous!

The Creationists believe that humans are indeed different from other animals in that we have awareness of our future and our personal death, but most importantly that we act from a conscience rather than from pure instinct.
I realize this is getting into a different area than simple "evolution:fact or fiction", but it seems to me as a reasonably informed layman that human beings are quite distinct on this planet, and quite different from the myriad other animals and species we encounter. We exist on an entirely different level.

It is almost as if we were "placed" here ...

 

While the theory of evolution is still not perfect, Darwin was right about most of the important elements of his theory. Many of the things he predicted have been observed experimentally; many others are still being tested in the lab. A few of his ideas have been tested and discarded, but the theory of evolution today is still very similar to Darwin's.

Creationists, on the other hand, routinely ignore the scientific method. They look for "evidence" to fit their conclusions, instead of looking for conclusions to fit the evidence.

While Darwin's theory was not perfect, he was much, much, much, much closer to reality than Jerry Falwell.

For those not familiar with the theory of evolution and natural selection, here is a thought experiment to help understand it better. While it may seem a little complicated at first, its actually quite intuitive when you stop and think about it:

Suppose you have an ecosystem containing gazelles and lions. A few (say, 10%) of the gazelles have genes for long legs, allowing them to outrun the lions. The other 90% do not. Obviously, the long-legged gazelles have a better chance of surviving into adulthood than the regular gazelles. Therefore, they have a better chance of reproducing their genes than the regular gazelles do. Eventually, the long-legged gazelles' numbers will grow in proportion to the population. Over the course of thousands of years, long-legged gazelles become the norm.

Hundreds of thousands of years later, the gazelles might have evolved so much that they can no longer even be considered the same species as the gazelles at the beginning of this thought experiment. This is how evolution works: little changes over great lengths of time.

 

Humans and chimps have diverged for at least two million years (probably closer to five million). While this amount of time is not significant in geological or cosmological history, it IS significant in biological history (multicellular life is only 540 million years old). That's really plenty of time for us to radically diverge from chimpanzees. Other (extinct) species of hominids that are more closely related to us, such as Neandrethals, have brains that are more on par with humans.

 

.

 

I always seem to be playing devil's advocate (uh, there is a devil right?) but my biggest problem here is with the so-called “missing link”.

You must admit that human beings have a huge swath of ability over all other life forms we encounter, except perhaps dolphins.

You will accept that the obverse of your argument could be true because you actually admit the theory is only that - and that the evidence is ONLY the preponderance of evidence suggesting Evolution, but you also accept the theory is inconclusive and perhaps even faulty.

Experientially humans are VERY different from all other beings we encounter on this beautiful planet and that is what I don't understand within the confines of the Darwin theory.

Maybe we came from the Moon J

 

EDIT: nevermind

 

Missing links are being found all the time. Just this year, anthropologists made a bombshell discovery in Indonesia (probably one of the most important discoveries to date relating to the evolution of humans): they discovered a species of three-feet-tall hominids that existed at least until 11,000 years ago (and possibly as recently as 500 years ago), long after the Neandrethals died out.

While there are other "missing links," there's no reason to suspect that such links do not exist.

But it hasn't always been so. Neandrethals had bigger brains than humans, and roughly equal intelligence. Humans just happen to be the only surviving species of humanoids.

Our closest living relatives - chimpanzees - aren't even the same biological family as we are, so I don't think it's a big surprise that there are major differences between the species despite the similarity of our genes. Yes, we have 99.6% of our genes in common with chimpanzees...but we also have 98% of our genes in common with mice, and 80% in common with jellyfish.

This is a misunderstanding of the word "theory." In scientific fields, a "theory" is something with an overwhelming amount of evidence behind it, and is about as close to a fact as you can get. Other theories include gravity and relativity. This word is often misused even by scientists ("string theory" is not yet a theory in the scientific sense of the word) which makes it all the more confusing.

Again, that's mostly because no other humanoid species survived into the present day; not because they didn't exist. Anthropology suggests that Neandrethals had art, technology, and rituals. If they had survived into the present day, we wouldn't be "so different from all other beings we encounter."

 

.

 

Oh come on..

Plato, Da Vinci, Einstein a thousand more. They did not chip or paint their theories onto cave walls nor did they find a hostile intellectual climate. In fact their immediate environment supported them no end.

My point is that we are so superior to the neanderthals you posit it is laughable. They simply do not compare.

 

not true. Evidence indicates that they were every bit as intelligent as homo sapiens. If they had survived, they would be indistinguishable from any other person in terms of intelligence (and possibly in terms of appearance too). They did indeed chip and paint, just like early humans. What makes you think that Neandrethals couldn't have produced a Plato, Da Vinci, or Einstein? The only reason they didn't accomplish much is because they died out before the end of the Ice Age, and I don't think humans during the Ice Age were accomplishing much either. But the potential to do great things was there.

Don't think of them as big, dumb, lumbering cavemen just because that's the last thing they were before they died out. Humans were dumb, lumbering cavemen too. Had they survived, Neandrethals and humans probably could've coexisted (maybe peacefully, maybe not) in the same cities and even interbred.

 

Fair enough ... chalk one up (on the cave wall) for the N guys but why did they die then if they were so good and equal and strong and honest? It is veering off the point a bit, I mean I only asked where Darwin went wrong ...

 

I've heard that too. Supposedly (I don't know if this is true) if you raised a Neandrethal in modern society, no one would be able to tell the difference.

However, I would think you would at least be able to tell a Neandrethal apart by appearance, just like you are able to tell an African from a Swede. But I could be wrong.

 

I don't think anthropologists really have a concrete answer as to why they disappeared. There are a couple theories that have at least some merit: A) They became extinct when humans arrived in Europe, either by being on the losing side of wars or inadvertantly through disease; B) Their bodies were adapted to cold, glacial Ice Age Europe, and couldn't adapt fast enough when the Ice Age ended. Humans, originating in warmer Africa, were better suited to it.

Either way, humans might have been slightly more adaptable to their new circumstances. Neandrethals were probably just as smart, but in the end that couldn't save them from radical climate change, or an onslaught of humans. It doesn't necessarily mean that they were inferior to humans from an evolutionary perspective...just that they were not as well-suited as humans to adapting to the particular circumstances that they found themselves in. Had the Ice Age gotten even colder, perhaps Neandrethals would be trying to figure out why humans died out.

 

.

 

Probably he was a great scientist, and he made important steps away from the bible-style-bang-everything-there ideology of the church, to scientism how a sort of galapagos Finch appears in different ways, or why there are different sorts of rabbit,...
Genius and madness are sometime close together

 

.

 

Well, lets not get carried away. Neandertals had bigger brains than us, but it was shaped differently, with less developed frontal lobes. They had bigger bodies than us, more bulk, so that would explain why their brains were bigger. They would not be indistinguishable, not in behavior. They had shorter throats so probably couldn't make all the sounds we can, probably didn't think quite like us. You could dress one up in a suit and put him on a subway and no one would notice anything but a muscley big-skulled guy, but if you went to talk to him, you'd know somethings wrong

Not to say they were dumb, they had reletively advanced stone tools, used fire, probably clothing, and may have had art and religion (thats up in the air). We don't know if we could interbreed with them, and we don't know why they went extinct. Some say we bred with them and absorbed them, some say we fought them and killed them out, some say we simply outcompeted them and reproduced faster, and took the better lands (which in the ice age would spell danger for the N men). I favor the last option, but who knows...

Also, as far as missing links go...there aren't any, not for human lineage. Now, it seems like it, but we have like, a dozen species between us and the human-chimp common ancestor: the Ardipithicus genus, then the Australopithicus genus, then the Homo genus, the latter two containing a few seperate species each. More will likely be found, but we have a pretty consistent fossil record showing the changes.

As far as Darwin goes, he was mostly right on everything (even before the discovery of DNA as a method for heredity). The main thing he was wrong on was his strict gradualism; saying that evolution must take a very long time. But that doesn't fit with either the fossil record or with common sense. If the environment changes suddenly, if life can't adapt quickly (both behaviorally, but also genetically) they they will die. We've had ice ages (they come on in a few hundred, or maybe a few thousand, years, quick by geological standards), asteroid impacts, and all sorts of other sudden climactic change, as well as biological change (sudden introduction of new species to an area, for example, creating new competition/predation). Life has had to be able to change quickly, thus we have punctuated equilibrium. Life evolves slowly in the static times, then may evolve much faster during major changes.