Evolution at work? Craziest thing I've seen all day.

[Farmageddon]

highwaystar101 said:

Farmageddon said:

If I may, I think what's happening here is that Slimebeast simply hasn't saw enough evidence that, on this case, there's any difference at all between these lizards. They might just be reacting, through the same mechanism, to their different habitats.

Now, I think a simple experiment of taking a group from the south to the north and another from the north to the south could settle that well enough. That or sequencing their genomes :P

He never sees enough evidence. Slimebeast has an automated response to refute evolution, regardless of what evidence is given to him. It takes a lot of work to try and get him to admit when something is an evolution.

And yes, they are reacting with this mechanism to the environment, but the ability to react with this mechanism will lead to natural selection. They may be the same now, but over many generations under the same environmental conditions these lizards will be very likely to evolve and become viviparous.

Ooo, I just got the strangest sensation of deja vu

About the second paragraph, sure, I agree that wuld happen if the enviroment keeps that way and all that. The point that looking at any mechanism that depends on the ambient in any espicies which has populations in two or more different places with different conditions and saying "so, this will lead to evolution" isn't very special, as you could find millions of cases all the time. Furthermore, it's no extra evidence for evolution (not that I think it needs any) as it's simply stating a fact and saying what the theory predicts from that fact.It's not "evolution at work" (if that even makes sense, as if evolution decided to start or stop working now and then :P) as much as "basis for evolution to work".

And I think that's where you and Slimebeast are having problems. I don't think (but I might be wrong) he disagrees that having that difference in enviroment may cause future evolution and possibly speciation. I think what he expected (and to some extent that's what I expected too) was something along the lines of they finding a few different populations at different stages of this depending on their enviroment, and that the change is actually genotypical (no need to test the genes, simply taking groups of each population and letting them somewhere else, and ideally testing their calcium production, should work). That would be far more interesting as it would show that those populations of that species are actually changing due to their habitat. As it stands it's nice but it's just nothing so noteworthy.