Mycroft
Ministry of Serendipity
This seems to be a real problem for some people hereabouts. Some don't seem to understand how Natural Selection works so I thought I'd take the time to explain it.
The most basic experiment you can conduct to evidence how natural selection works, and how everything is adjusted to its environment is take a worm and put it in a very visible place. Very soon it will be eaten. Why? Because the worm is only suited to a non-seeing environment. Underground. Once you put it in a seeing environment, it will quickly fall prey to things suited to seeing environments. In other words it will be naturally selected for death because it can't cope in the conditions it has been put in. But how did the worms get to the point where they were perfectly adapted to a non-seeing environment?
Let us say we have ten worms in their early stage of evolutionary development. They have no eyes, but what they have instead is light detecting cells at different places on each worm at different degrees of sensitivity.
Four of these worms have light-cells at the head. So, when our ten worms come up for air, the ones with light-cells elsewhere on their bodies are eaten, where the ones with the light cells at the head manage to retreat into the earth in the nick of time.
Our four remaining worms breed and carry their genetic data forward. Now we have ten new worms all with light-cells of varying sensitivity at the head.
When our worms come up for air again, five of the worms with the least sensitive cells are too slow to retract into the earth, having detecting the shadow of the bird too late, and are gobbled up.
The remaining five breed and carry that genetic data forward.
And this cycle continues on until one of two things happen:
1) either the organism becomes extinct due to being unable to adapt to its environment.
2) it is refined by natural selection until they are perfectly adapted to their environment.
This is what happened with the dinosaurs, essentially. Quite what the cause was is still opaque to us, (theories abound), but what happened was that their environment changed so fast and so suddenly that they were unable to adapt quickly enough to the new environment and died.
The reason the subject becomes fugged up, in all due respect, is that even scientists have a bad habit of projecting human values onto things that do not possess them. You might say a bird 'sings', but birds do not sing. They communicate at variable frequencies (many of which are outside of human hearing abilities). 'Singing' is simply a human projection. What you take to be the 'beautiful dawn chorus' is, in reality, a ritual in which birds communicate to those around them that they still occupy the branch they're on. If they fail to do so, another bird will move in and try to take the branch.
People say things like: the insect evolved to look like a leaf. But that's not how evolution works. Things do not evolve to look like anything, they evolved every which way and some insects just happened to look roughly like leaves. When these insects were on plain ground they found they were picked off, but when on leaves, weren't. So simply remained on the leaves. Their predators don't possess enough of an associative memory to tell apart the insect from the leaf even though the insect only looks very roughly like a leaf. It's important to avoid that projection, or see through it. They may also say things like 'It has horns to kill prey with'. No. It has horns and it does kill prey with it. But that is not the purpose of the horns. As horns tend to point in many different directions, some ill suited for slaying other animals, and some are blunt! They might say 'Camels have wider hoofs so they don't sink into the sand.' No. They have wider hoofs and they don't sink into the sand. But there is no purpose behind nature.
Let us say that you had a hard plat of solid bone on your shoulder. We might say 'The purpose of that is to ram obstacles with'. But this is not the case. If you had this bony plate, but had always lived in an open environment such as a desert plane, you'd never think twice about the growth at all. If asked 'what's that for?' you might say 'No idea. IT just grows there.' But if I locked you in a room, you might try the door. Then you might give it a slam with your fist. Then you might try to ram it with your hip. Then you might try ramming it with your shoulder - the one with the bony plate on it - and the door at that point might burst into splinters setting you free. You'll remember that and do it again in a similar situation. But unless you had been trapped in the room you'd never have used it as a battering ram so that is not it's purpose.
This process can be best observed in the Mimic Octopus. It's an octopus that can change its size and shape to assume the very rough identity of another fish, such as a Lion Fish. Now to you and I we can tell the difference between a Lion Fish and a Mimic Octopus trying to disguise itself as one, but marine animals cannot, they don't have a complex enough associative memory. Anyway, I'm rambling a bit, but I hope this helps!
The most basic experiment you can conduct to evidence how natural selection works, and how everything is adjusted to its environment is take a worm and put it in a very visible place. Very soon it will be eaten. Why? Because the worm is only suited to a non-seeing environment. Underground. Once you put it in a seeing environment, it will quickly fall prey to things suited to seeing environments. In other words it will be naturally selected for death because it can't cope in the conditions it has been put in. But how did the worms get to the point where they were perfectly adapted to a non-seeing environment?
Let us say we have ten worms in their early stage of evolutionary development. They have no eyes, but what they have instead is light detecting cells at different places on each worm at different degrees of sensitivity.
Four of these worms have light-cells at the head. So, when our ten worms come up for air, the ones with light-cells elsewhere on their bodies are eaten, where the ones with the light cells at the head manage to retreat into the earth in the nick of time.
Our four remaining worms breed and carry their genetic data forward. Now we have ten new worms all with light-cells of varying sensitivity at the head.
When our worms come up for air again, five of the worms with the least sensitive cells are too slow to retract into the earth, having detecting the shadow of the bird too late, and are gobbled up.
The remaining five breed and carry that genetic data forward.
And this cycle continues on until one of two things happen:
1) either the organism becomes extinct due to being unable to adapt to its environment.
2) it is refined by natural selection until they are perfectly adapted to their environment.
This is what happened with the dinosaurs, essentially. Quite what the cause was is still opaque to us, (theories abound), but what happened was that their environment changed so fast and so suddenly that they were unable to adapt quickly enough to the new environment and died.
The reason the subject becomes fugged up, in all due respect, is that even scientists have a bad habit of projecting human values onto things that do not possess them. You might say a bird 'sings', but birds do not sing. They communicate at variable frequencies (many of which are outside of human hearing abilities). 'Singing' is simply a human projection. What you take to be the 'beautiful dawn chorus' is, in reality, a ritual in which birds communicate to those around them that they still occupy the branch they're on. If they fail to do so, another bird will move in and try to take the branch.
People say things like: the insect evolved to look like a leaf. But that's not how evolution works. Things do not evolve to look like anything, they evolved every which way and some insects just happened to look roughly like leaves. When these insects were on plain ground they found they were picked off, but when on leaves, weren't. So simply remained on the leaves. Their predators don't possess enough of an associative memory to tell apart the insect from the leaf even though the insect only looks very roughly like a leaf. It's important to avoid that projection, or see through it. They may also say things like 'It has horns to kill prey with'. No. It has horns and it does kill prey with it. But that is not the purpose of the horns. As horns tend to point in many different directions, some ill suited for slaying other animals, and some are blunt! They might say 'Camels have wider hoofs so they don't sink into the sand.' No. They have wider hoofs and they don't sink into the sand. But there is no purpose behind nature.
Let us say that you had a hard plat of solid bone on your shoulder. We might say 'The purpose of that is to ram obstacles with'. But this is not the case. If you had this bony plate, but had always lived in an open environment such as a desert plane, you'd never think twice about the growth at all. If asked 'what's that for?' you might say 'No idea. IT just grows there.' But if I locked you in a room, you might try the door. Then you might give it a slam with your fist. Then you might try to ram it with your hip. Then you might try ramming it with your shoulder - the one with the bony plate on it - and the door at that point might burst into splinters setting you free. You'll remember that and do it again in a similar situation. But unless you had been trapped in the room you'd never have used it as a battering ram so that is not it's purpose.
This process can be best observed in the Mimic Octopus. It's an octopus that can change its size and shape to assume the very rough identity of another fish, such as a Lion Fish. Now to you and I we can tell the difference between a Lion Fish and a Mimic Octopus trying to disguise itself as one, but marine animals cannot, they don't have a complex enough associative memory. Anyway, I'm rambling a bit, but I hope this helps!
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