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Death and Evolution

FearGod

Freedom Of Mind
Natural selection occurs through differential rates of survival among variants. If every variant survives and reproduces, there is no differential survival and no selection effect. This is so obvious.

Further reproduction is exponential. If every progeny survives and if older generations so not die, population of organisms increase without limit. Earth has limited resources. So how is it possible for every individual to acquire enough food to survive.

Finally do you understand what death is. It's an entirely chemical and biological thing. The organism is a chemical factory and death is an irreversible breakdown of the process systems inside the factory either due to lack of raw materials to sustain it (food) or due to corrosion of vital components (old age or disease).

Finally under ideal conditions, certain bacterial cells and even some plants and fungi can indeed live forever. They rarely do due to resource stress or predation. More complicated organisms like us has too many internal parts to indefinitely work as factories without something or the other breaking down. This is old age. Death is not inevitable for all life, just very very probable. And the fact that it occurs is what drives evolution as it selects those who die less often and reproduce more due to better traits over those who do not.

If fishes live for eternal and some other fishes find its way to the land, then how evolution
won't happen, explain please how evolution won't happen if fishes live for eternal.
 

columbus

yawn <ignore> yawn
If fishes live for eternal and some other fishes find its way to the land, then how evolution
won't happen, explain please how evolution won't happen if fishes live for eternal.
It won't.
There's no evolution without death.
Tom
 

FearGod

Freedom Of Mind
It won't.
There's no evolution without death.
Tom

Evolution and change of kind happen for the next generations within a long period
of time, if the ancestor still alive it won't change the process for the next generations.
 

columbus

yawn <ignore> yawn
Evolution and change of kind happen for the next generations within a long period
of time, if the ancestor still alive it won't change the process for the next generations.
No.
If living things are not replaced by other, different, living things there will not be evolution of species.
You don't understand what you are talking about.
Tom
 

sayak83

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
If fishes live for eternal and some other fishes find its way to the land, then how evolution
won't happen, explain please how evolution won't happen if fishes live for eternal.
Assume you are a group of fresh water fish caught in a drying stream in a draughts. You have 100 progenitor, 99 of them are ordinary fish but 1 has some limited ability to maneuver on dry land to get to another patch of water.

Case 1: All the 100 fish are born immortal and do not die even if the water dries out. Then all the 100 fish survive and reproduce equally and the rare Mutation in that 1 fish gets quickly diluted away through cross breeding with normal fish. Speciation and evolution cannot happen due to dilution.

Case 2: Due to draught only that 1 fish with the rare good Mutation survives long enough to get to a nearby pond where it meets a few other lucky survivors. Now suddenly in the next generation, only 5 have survived and out of this five, one has this rate Mutation. The individual with the new gene constitutes 20% of the population instead of 1% were every progeny survived. Thus the new gene does not get diluted by cross breeding. A few more sequence of differential survival through droughts and soon all survivors belong to those who have this gene. The new gene has become 100% of this freshwater population, the species have evolved a new trait. Evolution has happened.


All of this is just simple math found in any elementary evolution textbook. It can be shown mathematically that unless certain individuals die at a faster rate than others, evolution simply cannot happen.
 

FearGod

Freedom Of Mind
No.
What does that have to do with speciation through evolution?
Tom

It means that eternal living isn't a factor in the process of evolution, assuming
that your ancestors are still living in Africa then how their survival will prevent
speciation.
 

FearGod

Freedom Of Mind
Assume you are a group of fresh water fish caught in a drying stream in a draughts. You have 100 progenitor, 99 of them are ordinary fish but 1 has some limited ability to maneuver on dry land to get to another patch of water.

Case 1: All the 100 fish are born immortal and do not die even if the water dries out. Then all the 100 fish survive and reproduce equally and the rare Mutation in that 1 fish gets quickly diluted away through cross breeding with normal fish. Speciation and evolution cannot happen due to dilution.

Case 2: Due to draught only that 1 fish with the rare good Mutation survives long enough to get to a nearby pond where it meets a few other lucky survivors. Now suddenly in the next generation, only 5 have survived and out of this five, one has this rate Mutation. The individual with the new gene constitutes 20% of the population instead of 1% were every progeny survived. Thus the new gene does not get diluted by cross breeding. A few more sequence of differential survival through droughts and soon all survivors belong to those who have this gene. The new gene has become 100% of this freshwater population, the species have evolved a new trait. Evolution has happened.


All of this is just simple math found in any elementary evolution textbook. It can be shown mathematically that unless certain individuals die at a faster rate than others, evolution simply cannot happen.

Evolution doesn't work in that way, death doesn't occur for one kind in a single day, it takes
millions of years for evolution to occur.
 

sayak83

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
Evolution doesn't work in that way, death doesn't occur for one kind in a single day, it takes
millions of years for evolution to occur.
No. Evolution occurs one generation to the next through steady accumulation of new traits by differential survival. It takes hundreds and thousands of years for the changes to accumulate enough for new species to become identifiable. It's like a growing tree. The growth is occurring every minute, but it takes years for the growth to accumulated enough that it becomes readily discernible.

For species with faster generational turnover (bacteria, flies, mice), speciation can be (and has been) observed to occur in hours, decades or centuries. But in all cases it occurs via accumulation of beneficial mutations through different rates of survival across progeny from one generation to next.
 

FearGod

Freedom Of Mind
No. Evolution occurs one generation to the next through steady accumulation of new traits by differential survival. It takes hundreds and thousands of years for the changes to accumulate enough for new species to become identifiable. It's like a growing tree. The growth is occurring every minute, but it takes years for the growth to accumulated enough that it becomes readily discernible.

For species with faster generational turnover (bacteria, flies, mice), speciation can be (and has been) observed to occur in hours, decades or centuries. But in all cases it occurs via accumulation of beneficial mutations through different rates of survival across progeny from one generation to next.

Yes and hence your analogy for fish doesn't work.
 

sayak83

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
Yes and hence your analogy for fish doesn't work.
It does. Which part did you not understand?

I showed how in one generation a trait that aided the fish survive longer in dry land became frequent in the population through dying off of those that did not have that trait. An amphibian is basically a fish with a thousand of such new traits that help it survive on dry land for longer and longer, and these traits steadily accumulated over thousands of generations by similar cycles as I outlined above.
 

FearGod

Freedom Of Mind
It does. Which part did you not understand?

I showed how in one generation a trait that aided the fish survive longer in dry land became frequent in the population through dying off of those that did not have that trait. An amphibian is basically a fish with a thousand of such new traits that help it survive on dry land for longer and longer, and these traits steadily accumulated over thousands of generations by similar cycles as I outlined above.

But our ancestors lived for millions of years, would you please explain as when and why
our ancestors went extinct?
 

LuisDantas

Aura of atheification
Premium Member
Is becoming old and die was good for the species?

By a certain perspective, yes. Death of the individual opens the way for new and potentially better adjusted individuals to step in.

Death is good for earth and for more species to come which is a sign that someone
has planned for it, living for some years and giving birth for new comers.

Uh, no.

What do you think? was it just a coincidence or a programmed death mechanism?

Neither. Biology is like that. It is a field ripe with examples of quasi-order emerging from chaos.
 

SomeRandom

Still learning to be wise
Staff member
Premium Member
We're better than chimps, but they're still existing.
We're not better than chimps. We're a different species, or subspecies if you prefer. That doesn't make us better, it just means our environment was different to chimps.
A lion is not a better species than a zebra. It might eat an unfortunate zebra, but both are suited the best to their respective environments.

Just happened to be so, IOW coincidence.
No, just happens as it happens. It is what it is. An observable phenomenon. It's like saying gravity is a coincidence. Like, just, no.
 
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