Bob the Outcast

Bob the Outcast

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Reply to a YouTube video

[Dec. 1st, 2008|04:46 am]

[

Tags

creationism, darwin, evolution, youtube

]

Hello folks. I know I haven't so much as touched this thing in ages, but I'm finding YouTube's comment box to be far too small for my purposes, and I'd like to respond to one of the (numerous) "Questions for Atheists" videos out there.

Three Questions to All Evolutionists comes from US Christian bigjerre. Now the video is apparently from April and I don't really know YouTube's usual policies and such, so I don't know if he'll ever respond here, though I certainly welcome him to do so if he has the time. I'm afraid I've also not taken the time to review his entire YouTube portfolio, so for the moment I don't have any real reason to believe he is being anything but honest and straightforward in asking these very reasonable questions. Though I do, as always, somewhat object to the word "evolutionist".

Anyway on to the questions. I have tried to provide an accurate transcript because I find it more convenient to read than to skip back and forth through a video.

Question 1: I've heard some of you say that the human race has slowed down their evolutionary processes because we've been able to use the surrounding environment and have adapted to making things for our survival rather than changing our own genetics, but I have a question about this. If the human race, say one million years from now or longer, is still the dominant species on the planet, do you believe that certain races of the human race will be dominant, and have branched off from other humans?

I ask this because research supports that certain races are prone to more disease and sickness than others, such as how those of African descent are more prone to sickle-cell (anemia) for example. So does this indicate that say, there's a possibility that those of African descent will die off and other disease-prone races will cease to exist while allowing for the advancement of only a select few branches of the survival of the fittest?

I know a lot of amateur evolution advocates (which quite well describes me, a humble petroleum geologist) pull out this "human evolution has stalled out" thing, but that doesn't make it true or even widely accepted. In fact the very idea is specious. If tool-using is our most important evolutionary advantage, the fact that we have built tools would not "stall" our evolution. The process of natural selection will of course go on, perhaps primarily selecting for those qualities that enable better tool use and environmental manipulation. It is certainly true that there exist in the world species that have not significantly evolved (to the point of, for example, speciation) such as the alligator, which has survived with very little taxonomic variation for nearly 200 million years. However the alligator still experiences a process of natural selection like any other living organism.

With the human species, it is simply too early to tell if we have "stopped" evolving, or even slowed significantly. Many of the major causes that those who believe we've "canceled out" evolution will use as examples are extremely recent. Polio vaccine, good prosthetic limbs, anti-biotics, in vitro fertilization and other methods of artificially-assisted fertilization. Agriculture itself, arguably the single most important human invention of all time, is only about ten thousand years old. Homo sapiens, meanwhile, is estimated to have emerged about 200 thousand years ago. Two hundred thousand. Twenty times the time we've had agriculture. One tenth of a percent of the time since the alligator emerged.

Ten thousand years isn't enough time to fully adapt to agriculture. The polio vaccine is less than a hundred years old. In vitro fertilization is less than fifty years old. In a little over a hundred years we have gone from the first transatlantic radio communication to chatting with your friend in Japan with full-colour video virtually for free. We've gone from the invention of powered flight to landing robots on a neighbouring planet. We've gone from the vacuum tube to the silicon chip. There simply hasn't been enough time to determine what, if any, effect these things have really had on the evolution of human beings. If anything, evolution hasn't stalled, it hasn't even had a chance to catch up!

I've gone on with this so long that I feel I owe it to you to repost the next part of the question.

Qustion 1 redux: If the human race, say one million years from now or longer, is still the dominant species on the planet, do you believe that certain races of the human race will be dominant, and have branched off from other humans?

I ask this because research supports that certain races are prone to more disease and sickness than others, such as how those of African descent are more prone to sickle-cell (anemia) for example. So does this indicate that say, there's a possibility that those of African descent will die off and other disease-prone races will cease to exist while allowing for the advancement of only a select few branches of the survival of the fittest?

The short answer is that in say one million or ten million years, there probably won't be homo sapiens at all. Through either evolution or die-off we'll be extinct as a species, in all likelihood. But that doesn't really address your question regarding speciation of the human species.

First of all it is important to note that speciation generally only occurs when populations are isolated from each other. Although there is growing evidence that sympatric speciation occurs, a general rule of thumb is that if the populations are still able to regularly breed with each other, they won't branch off into seperate species. It seems highly unlikely that any natural obstacle would prevent any given human population from breeding with any other human population over a long enough period to see speciation, though it is certainly possible.

Secondly, and just as importantly, is to understand that the concept of race we apply to humans is an entirely social construct, a result of sorting human beings by common physical traits that have more to do with geographical distribution than significant genetic differences. The difference between a black man and a white man is more comparable to a redhead and a blonde than it is to the difference between a dog and a wolf. If speciation did occur in the human species, it would not be along the lines of race, but along the lines of geographic division. Make two seperate camps of white people and keep them apart for a couple million years and you'll get two seperate species, even if everyone in camp A was a blood relative of someone in camp B.

As for the idea that research suggests people of certain races are more prone to disease than people of other races, this is just wrong. It would be more accurate to say that people of different races are prone to different hereditary diseases. (Actually it would be most accurate to say that hereditary diseases follow a geographical distribution) Sickle-cell anemia, as you point out, primarily targets people of Sub-Sahara African descent (an important distinction from simply "African descent") Cystic fibrosis, on the other hand, is far more common in those of European or Ashkenazi Jewish descent than in Africans (1 in 25 as opposed to 1 in 65).

I'm actually glad you mentioned sickle-cell anemia specifically, though, because it's a wonderful example of evolution in action within our own species. The geographical regions in which sickle-cell anemia (a hereditary mutation of the haemoglobin) is most common are also the regions in which malaria is most common. This is not a coincidence. The mutation of the sickle-cell trait actually makes it harder for the malaria parasite to feed off of the host's red blood cells, thus increasing the host's chances for survival. Furthermore, in the United States, where malaria is not at all a problem, the incidence of sickle-cell anemia is far lower than in Africa, and falling. As it is a purely disadvantageous condition in the malaria-free environment, it is being bred out of the US population. Evolution occuring within our lifetimes, before our very eyes.

So, to summarize an answer to question one. If speciation within the human species occurs, it will not be along racial lines, but along lines of (most likely) geographical isolation. Just as it has in all species which is why you don't get kangaroos in the Carribean.

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Question 2: Being as we've all come this far in the world from a supposed evolutionary process, evolutionists it seems, in my opinion, have only looked into the past to support evolution, but rarely if at all do I hear of the future of it. But my question now to you is this: If evolution is to continue for an undisclosed period of time, say millions or billions of years into the future, what would be its limit? Would there ever be a point in time where there would not be a need to evolve any more, as the adaptation to practically every climate and situation/scenario on the world would seal the deal on plant and animal evolution?

The short answer is no.

The long answer begins with the caveat that evolution is not very good for making specific claims of what will happen a million or ten million years in the future. Primarily because we can barely guess at what conditions will be like then. Make a prediction of how seagulls will adapt to the current projections for global warming and a comet could hit the Earth next year and stick us in an ice age. Predict that dolphins will die off as melting polar caps cool the oceans and a volcano could erupt under the pacific and turn it into a tropical bath for the next million years. These are catastrophic examples that illustrate the point more clearly, but the far-more-common subtle and gradual changes in climate and environment are no less unpredictable on the long scale. We can't make precise long-range predictions into the future of evolution because we can't make precise long-range predictions about the future of the environment in which that evolution will take place. Well unless you go all the way ahead to the sun exhausting its fuel in which case yeah, evolution would stop when everything on Earth died.

But we can say with confidence that there will never be a point at which life simply stops evolving. The phrase "survival of the fittest" is a misnomer because it suggests there is such a thing as an ultimate, ideal fitness. Evolution has no end-point and no goal, it is not working towards any sort of "perfect being". A more useful phrase would be "survival of the one best adapted to the current situation". No creature imaginable could be perfectly adapted to "practically every climate and situation/scenario". The alligator I mentioned earlier has existed in more or less its current form for 200 million years, but dump it in Antarctica or the Sahara and see how long it survives.

A being adapted to cold weather would necessarily not be adapted to hot weather. The insulation and heat management systems that make a polar bear so well adapted to living in arctic conditions would prove fatal in the African savannah. There can never be a creature that is perfectly suited to all climates. Even humans really shouldn't be living outside of the tropics, what with our exceptionally thin fur and hefty year-round food requirements.

But will there be a point where we don't need to evolve more? I suppose it's possible. Our friend the alligator seems to be doing okay. But goodness knows how it will fair the next time a big extinction event comes around.

Evolution has no end point, no goal, no perfectly evolved creature. The only way to stop or stall out evolution is to have a perfectly static environment, something nature has largely been unwilling to provide.

==================

Question 3: I often wonder how triumphant I would feel if evolution was proven wrong by those who support it. But despite the idea that I would resort to the default "I was right all along" victory dance, I had a question that popped into my mind at the last second. If evolutionary science was finally found to have been proven wrong by, let's say, an overlooked error, and it was proven so by the top evolutionary scientists of various fields, what theory would you turn to next? If it's not "God did it", what else would you possibly have going for you in terms of the origin of man?

Well this is a legitimately difficult question to answer, because it would of course depend on what the evidence in question was. I suppose if God Almighty Himself came on down and proved his credentials beyond a shadow of a doubt (I have no idea how He'd do so but He's God so I'll give Him the benefit of the doubt and assume He'd think of a way) we'd have to accept that "God did it".

Beyond that though it's hard to think of any one thing that would disprove evolution. Although an answer I've always liked the answer from J.B.S. Haldane, "Rabbit fossils in the pre-cambrian".

The problem is that there is a mountain of evidence in support of evolution. I'm not saying that to be snarky. The evolutionary model predicts that like fossils will always be found in like geological strata, and they are. In fact outside of specific instances of fracturing and folding (both easily detected) you never find a layer of older rock above a layer of younger rock. Evolution predicted a link between reptiles and birds and howdy-doo, we've got dinosaurs with feathers. Evolution predicts that organic compounds can be synthesized from inorganic chemicals, outside of an organism, and Friedrich Wohler was making urea in his lab long before anyone had even heard of 'natural selection'. Darwin himself predicted that there would be a rich pre-cambrian fossil record, and he found it "inexplicable" that there was no evidence to confirm this. Until 1953, long after his death, when we had microscopes fine enough to see them. The benefits of evolutionary predictions to medicine are too numerous to even begin to address here. The time scales required for evolution even indirectly predicted the nuclear fusion that powers our sun, as 19th century thermodynamics couldn't explain a sun more than a hundred million years old.

Geology, anatomy, genetics, chemistry, medicine, biology, paleontology, and even physics. What "overlooked error" could possibly span all these fields? Just how many "overlooked errors" would it take to actually knock down enough of the evidence for evolution to even begin questioning the basic model? You're talking about a theory that is evidenced by something as trivial as how much you look like your parents, and so useful that it has revolutionized the way we fight infectious disease.

But, to draw back to your initial question. Say we assume that the fossil record is proven to be a plant by the Illuminati or the League of Atheist Scientists or just a mass hallucination of some kind. Say we dig down just a little deeper one day and find a giant plaque set into the pre-cambrian reading "Earth, est. 10,000 BCE". Even in this ridiculous case it would STILL make more sense to assume that Earth and all its creatures were created by ALIENS from Alpha Centauri who on their own planet evolved from simple organisms than it would be to assume that we were breathed into life by a being of indescribable power and influence that exists outside our physical universe, came from nothing, created everything, can do whatever he wants, and still thinks it's worth His time to care about who's having sex with whom.

And again you're talking about toppling a LOT of science across multiple disciplines to even get to the point that we start screaming about Little Green Men. Science that works. Science that benefits us every day. I agree that the fact that it's helpful isn't in and of itself an indicator of its truth value, but do you really think if there were a gaping hole in the theory of evolution it wouldn't have shown up by now?

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