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How Nature was able to understand what we need.
October 13, 2017 at 9:07 pm
This question may sound "dumb" for some people, but the fact is, there is no stupid question.
The fact is I didn't learn about the theory of Evolution in school because I grew up in a Muslim country where teaching Evolution for what it is, is next to impossible. The books about the theory are either banned, or people don't dare look for them (you think you guys in America have it bad, try to go where I grew up and let's see what you think after). I'm planning however on taking a class on Biology or Evolutionary Biology at some point during my undergraduate degree (thankfully now I live in a Western developed country). So what I know so far about the theory is mostly by documentaries and a few books here and there, but not enough to give me the full picture, and here comes my question.
How was nature able to "understand" or "determine" what a living being needed? For example, how was nature able to "decide" that this creature needed a better eye to catch the light? Why did it even know that this being required to figure out where the light is in the first place? I don't know if my question makes sense, or if there is a better way to word it, but in simpler terms, how did the creature with light senses was even able to know that there is a light out there, a light outside, how and why did it know that it needed sight in the first place? Does my question make sense?
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RE: How Nature was able to understand what we need.
October 13, 2017 at 9:16 pm
thousands of your creatures may have developed slight variations in their eye structure, only the variations that conferred a significant benefit over the other creatures would be expected to produce more off spring
the majority of the eye variations would not have been advantageous, and those creatures would have had fewer off spring
'nature' doesn't 'know' anything, it just rolling the dice over and over and over, and the accumulation of winning hands is what your looking at
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RE: How Nature was able to understand what we need.
October 13, 2017 at 9:23 pm
You're not thinking about it properly.
Evolution is a directionless process. To take your example, suppose we have a creature with no visual sense capability (no eyes) at all. For a million generations or so, these creatures managed to survive - they didn't 'need' sight, neither they nor nature 'decided' anything.
One day, one of these creatures underwent a mutation - just one of those random genetic scrambles that can happen in the best of families. This particular mutation turned a few skin cells light-sensitive. They weren't 'eyes' in any meaningful sense of the word, they merely enabled this particular creature to distinguish a slightly darker area from a slightly lighter area. Over time, mostly through trial and error, the creature made the association of food with the slightly lighter area (the things it ate happened to be in the light). And bingo, the mutation turns out to be beneficial. These few light-sensitive cells gave the creature better access to a food source. Being able to eat better means you're likely to stay alive long enough to have offspring, some of which may inherit your mutation. Over time, selection pressure improves the light sensitivity as well as the organization of the cells in question. In another million or billion generations (evolutionary processes are nothing if not patient), you have eyes.
And no one had to decide anything.
Boru
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RE: How Nature was able to understand what we need.
October 13, 2017 at 9:33 pm
Nature doesn't decide anything. Creatures that have traits which give them an advantage, however slight, in terms of survival and reproduction, get the chance to live long enough to be sexually selected, reproduce and thus pass on the genes responsible for those traits. Nature is a filtering process, not a guiding intelligence. There's a lot more to it than that, but those are essentially the basics.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
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RE: How Nature was able to understand what we need.
October 13, 2017 at 9:39 pm
(October 13, 2017 at 9:07 pm)RayOfLight Wrote: This question may sound "dumb" for some people, but the fact is, there is no stupid question.
The fact is I didn't learn about the theory of Evolution in school because I grew up in a Muslim country where teaching Evolution for what it is, is next to impossible. The books about the theory are either banned, or people don't dare look for them (you think you guys in America have it bad, try to go where I grew up and let's see what you think after). I'm planning however on taking a class on Biology or Evolutionary Biology at some point during my undergraduate degree (thankfully now I live in a Western developed country). So what I know so far about the theory is mostly by documentaries and a few books here and there, but not enough to give me the full picture, and here comes my question.
How was nature able to "understand" or "determine" what a living being needed? For example, how was nature able to "decide" that this creature needed a better eye to catch the light? Why did it even know that this being required to figure out where the light is in the first place? I don't know if my question makes sense, or if there is a better way to word it, but in simpler terms, how did the creature with light senses was even able to know that there is a light out there, a light outside, how and why did it know that it needed sight in the first place? Does my question make sense?
Nature didn't decide anything. Evolution is not teleological.
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RE: How Nature was able to understand what we need.
October 13, 2017 at 10:04 pm
(October 13, 2017 at 9:07 pm)RayOfLight Wrote: How was nature able to "understand" or "determine" what a living being needed? It wasn't. All the stuff you see..that;s what's left. Everything else is dead.
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RE: How Nature was able to understand what we need.
October 13, 2017 at 10:40 pm
I think something that gets missed in most discussions with evolution deniers is the vastness of the genetic pool. It seems as though their thinking is linear through a single string of "evolution". The thing is, there are many millions, no, really, billions of organisms, with all kinds of variation. How many organisms have a mutation that helps? Hard to say, but it likely takes a lot of organisms mutating (because many of them may die or be eaten before reproducing) before that mutation actually propagates in the species.
We don't know that "Nature" is sentient; the evidence says otherwise. What "we" "need" is to survive; that is ALL. Many species die out all the time. What about their "needs"? They got aced out of the gene pool. How did Nature "understand their needs"?
Another, though slightly off topic, is the claim that mankind hasn't seen one species evolve into another. Given that the current population of the world is the end result of millions/billions of years of evolution, what else would one expect? Most of what exists is already the "end" product.
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RE: How Nature was able to understand what we need.
October 13, 2017 at 10:56 pm
OP, if I asked you why do all meteors land in craters, you'd think I'm silly.
Same goes here.
There's a place in the American desert where the brown mice live protected amongst the brown rocks and not very far away there are light coloured mice living happily amongst the light coloured rocks.
If the mice hadn't mutated their skin colours respectively, we wouldn't even be talking about them because they would have perished like the vast majority of species.
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RE: How Nature was able to understand what we need.
October 13, 2017 at 11:09 pm
(October 13, 2017 at 10:56 pm)ignoramus Wrote: OP, if I asked you why do all meteors land in craters, you'd think I'm silly.
So would I. Meteors don't land at all, in any sense.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
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RE: How Nature was able to understand what we need.
October 13, 2017 at 11:22 pm
(This post was last modified: October 13, 2017 at 11:29 pm by AFTT47.
Edit Reason: word omission
)
I can't explain it any better than those who posted above me. I would like to add one thing though: The universe doesn't care whether or not you understand it. It goes on existing the way it is. Do you understand how a television remote control works? How about a blood-pressure medication? How about a fission reactor? All of those things go on functioning according to the laws of physics - irrespective of whether you understand the physical principles under which they operate or not.
We all have our strengths and weaknesses when it comes to understanding and expertise. I am particularly adept at mechanical and electronics technology. Biology isn't my thing. But I understand the scientific method well. I also understand the system within which scientists of all types operate. It is a demanding system which can be brutal to individual scientists and individual hypotheses. It demands results. Put up or shut up. When a theory survives scrutiny under that system for so long and even grows stronger the more it is put under the microscope...well, we begin to have a lot of confidence in it
Perhaps you might study the scientific method itself. It is a methodology for learning what is true as long as the proposition is testable. The claims made by the theory of evolution are testable and have withstood a barrage of testing for over a century. There are few theories of science that are on more solid ground than evolution. I don't personally have a strong understanding of it but my understanding of the system under which it thrives gives me tremendous confidence in its truthfulness.
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