thanny said:
Tanstalas said:
thanny said:
Im actually interested to hear an evolution based explanation of the point Dioxinis initially made. It seems to be a good point to me; I can understand how if an organism had, for example, eyes, it would give it a survival advantage... natural selection etc. But that would never mutate all at once, one single part of it would have to mutate, and that single part would have to give it a survival advantage. I dont really see this happening. This logic can be applied to any body part, really. Just about all of them need all of their parts to work.
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If it has eyes, can see predators, it's offsprings can escape while the blind die, hence leaving only the ones with eyes.
Organism grows hands next, now if can hold stuff, defend itself, climb up higher where no other species are..
Next legs.. now it can run, can run away from predators, still looks like the other species it came from, eyes and hands, but now it has legs and can get away from stuff that wants to eat it... or chase and grab stuff it wants to eat..
Over and over these things happen, they do not happen over a couple years, or hundreds, or even thousands of years, these evolutions took MILLIONS of years (and if you believe in creationism - you KNOW that can't be true, because the earth is only what, 6000 years old?) Yeah Carbon dating is a myth...
I'm sorry, but I will believe science in it's "Earth is MILLIONS of years old" stance.. If you think that the earth is 6000 years old and dinosaurs only walked the earth 4000 years ago.. you are a fool
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I think you completely missed my point. I understand how natural selection works and i wouldn't try to argue that it doesn't take place. My point is that a mutation will not produce an eye or a leg or a hand in one go. It will produce one initial component of it. And i would argue that any first component of any of these things is useless and would not cause natural selection to take over. For example the first leg did not just appear all at once all of a sudden. At first a tiny stump (for eg) would have formed. That stump of a leg wouldn't have given the creature a survival advantage as it wouldve had no use.
And i see where you are coming from WereKitten, but in my opinion that doesn't really explain the majority of instances. The eye would have had to have many working parts to be useful as anything - As would many functions of the body. As for having a photosensitive area, I can see how that would make sense in terms of natural selection, but that in itself is not at all 'simple' and would not be formed in one mutation.
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Except they likely wouldn't have been useless but would have conferred some added benefit in their particular environment. Using the leg example, the legs were originally fins, which then defined themselves into legs. In each successive generation, the animals with the more defined legs were the most likely to survive on land.
As for your second paragraph, having photosensitive area, in nature there are a number of instances of organisms ranging from microorganisms to mammals that utilise light for a range of different purposes and functions. I have no idea why you think that it has to be simple or that it has to be formed in a single mutation. The proteins and the structures that make up the eye would have all had their uses seperately, and if they didn't, would have had little to no detrimental effect. The eye from our ancestor would have been far simpler than our current eye. As time passes, we accumulate more mutations with natural selection getting rid of the majority of the detrimental mutants.
Succesive generations of mutants give rise to the complex interactions and structures of the human body. On a smaller molecular and protein level we actually have software that can find networks of sites which may have co-evolved (not neccessarily simultaneously, but show that If position X is mutated, a mutation to position Y will give a new function/structure/interaction).
