Being a brain surgeon does not lend your opinions on evolution any greater weight.

So you're saying that if the brain surgeon happens to agree with your statement, the fact that he's a brain surgeon *does* matter? Interestingly selective.

D'A

Roland, please provide evidence and explanation for what you mean by "relevance for the diversity of lifeforms is less than 1 percent". Seriously, I have no idea what you mean by that.

I asked for evidence and clarification, please do provide both.

Being a brain surgeon means you are educated on certain topics, evolution has nothing to do with brain surgery and a brain surgeon may or may not know anything about evolution. Just as he may or may not know anything about rocket science or the best way to kill my weeds.

Being intelligent does not mean you are educated. Being educated does not make you an expert on all subjects.

I don't think that's why D'Archangel made this claim. But that said... have you read Climbing Mount Improbable? It explains how a lot of things that sound impossible to have evolve actually can evolve.

I'll do some research into eukaryotes, but it sounds like a rerun of "the eye couldn't evolve, what good is half an eye?" For a long time people used that as their example. Except, it's really stupid because there is tons of benefit for half an eye, and we've shown very well how an eye can evolve.

Now they move on to something else. But they don't say, well, we were wrong about eyes, so we guess eyes did evolve, but maybe eukaryotes were divinely made and it all evolved from there. Nope, never had that claim made, which would be a somewhat rational claim from someone who felt that everything past eukaryotes could evolve.

Personally, I think since they keep showing further and further back that it's just a matter of time before every argument is beaten down. Since it's really not that hard for much of anything to evolve.

Sorry, Roland, your guess misses by a vast margin. The references in the original description indicate more correctly why I made this claim, but to explain in simple terms:

Creationists are fond of finding people whom common wisdom would construe as supremely knowledgeable and getting them to support their agenda. This exploits the misconception that expertise in one field confers expertise in all others.

The only motivation for this claim is to emphasize this misconception, especially as connected to brain surgeons.

Next time, please read before you post.

D'A

Okay, I researched the evolution of eukaryotes. It doesn't look difficult ot unlikely at all. There were plenty of mitochondria-like bacteria around. All that was needed for a proto-eukaryote to form was for it to absorb it and work symbiotically. Over time, the eukaryote with mitochondria would not longer need to produce its own ATP directly, so it could, over generations, lose the ability to do so.

What's so odd about that?

The combination of:
http://www.emc.maricopa.edu/faculty/farabee/biobk/BioBookDiversity_3.html
and
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/resources/readings_dawson.shtml

do a decent job of describing it.

I really don't see what's so tricky about eukaryotes.

There are certainly people whom the average brain surgeon is smarter than. I'm probably one of them. Nonetheless, they are no more qualified than I am to speak to the subject of evolution by virtue of being brain surgeons. This is not a matter of intelligence or "common sense". This is a matter of ignorance, pure and simple, and it is possible to be both supremely competent in one area and utterly retarded in another.

Bollocks.

I apologize for the formatting on that previous claim. Looks like my finger slipped while closing the tag.

Did I mention I want claim preview?

D'A

What do you mean by unlikely? How do you determine how likely something is? We don't have enough data to determine that, except to say that it obviously did happen once.

Also, it doesn't matter if something is unlikely or not. That has nothing to do with evolution. Unlikely things do happen. In fact, if you have billions of incidents, unlikely things are probably going to happen. That is why the youngest female on record to ever have a baby was 5 years old. It's well documented. It's incredibly unlikely for a 5 year old to be able to get pregnant and to actually do so and give birth to a healthy baby. But with hundreds of years and billions of people, it's likely for outliers to exist.

This planet has existed for millions of years, and has had billions of lifeforms. Of course unlikely things happen. Unlikely things are likely to happen.

I don't understand what your point is. So what if I have the same mitochondria as grass does? So what if it only happened once?

If I went to a place that had a billion rocks and I tossed a coin out into that area the odds of it landing on any particular rock would be infinitesimally small. But it's basically guaranteed to land on a rock. If someone after the fact looked at it, they could say - wow, look at that it just happened to land on that particular rock. What were the odds? How could that possibly have happened? But any rock it landed on that would have been true of.

The same is true for evolution. Something has to happen. That it went one way and not another doesn't really matter. I don't understand why the odds of it having happened the way it did are relevant to anything. And as I said, there were billions of chances for it to happen. Flip a coin 10 times and it is unlikely to come up heads 10 times in a row. Flip a coin in sets of 10 one million times, and it'll almost certainly come up heads 10 times in a row now and then. Evolution has had millions of flips. So, it's not surprising that these sorts of things happen.

How come evolution isn't relevant? Evolution can be a slow process or a fast process, and it depends on what you mean by "fast" and "slow". Sometimes evolutionary changes happen pretty quickly.

And I still don't see how the odds of things turning out the way they did matter. For one thing, odds are determined through doing repeated trials and seeing how often it happens. You can't do that with eukaryotic evolution. For one thing, once one evolved, it affects the odds that others will.

The trial has only been run once and eukaryotes did evolve. That makes the odds 100%. However, it has no statistical significance because the sample size is too small. We don't know the odds of eukaryotic evolution, except that we know it is possible, because it did, indeed, happen.

"Evolution is not relevant."

"Some chose a god as solution, other chose the evolution theory, and I chose to think for myself."

May you always be as happy in your ignorance as you are now.

D'A

Roland, it sounds like you're saying that evolution doesn't explain life because you cannot imagine how it could. That is the classic Argument from Incredulity, which goes "I cannot believe it, or see how it could be true; therefore, it cannot be true."

I'm sure that you can see that this is a very weak argument. I don't understand string theory, but that doesn't mean I go around saying that it isn't true.

Wow, you're ignorant and offensive. I'm sorry, I really tried to argue reasonably with you. But you keep responding with nonsense.

So what if it only happened once? That doesn't connect to any argument. You don't explain why that can't happen through evolution. You simply say that it can't.

Really that makes as much sense as seeing, evolution clearly is false because humans made cheese. How can evolution work when people made cheese? Only chaos theory explains cheese!

If you want to actually present arguments, I'll listen, but really... can you learn statistics and probability first? Maybe D'Arch was right and it's a total waste of time to talk to you. But I do believe in human potential. I do think you can develop your mind. And I have a lot of free time. But maybe it is totally pointless and we should just ignore each other.

Anyhow, if you do reply, please actually connect your arguments together.

Oh, then we have no disagreement. Evolution does include both rare occurences and quick changes. They are less common, but they certainly can happen. This isn't quite the same kind of change, but is one of the famous examples of quick changes in evolution:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution

Evolution sets no limits on the degree of change or rarity of the change. As such, I think there is no need for an extra theory.

Roland: allow me to suggest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium for a starting point for reading about evolution on quicker timescales.

I think nothing of it yet, because I don't know his reasoning. Why does he think that couldn't happen? Having done some reading, it certainly looks pretty possible through evolution to me.

I obviously haven't read the book, but I did read that page. And it sounds like Lane is not in any way saying that eukaryotes could not have evolved. He is arguing that they evolved along a different path than some people think they evolved through. This looks to be in-line with evolution in general but arguing over the details of how it occured.

Can you please be more specific. I read:
http://pages.britishlibrary.net/nick.lane/Extract%20chapter%208.html

And it supports evolution, but presents a possible new model for a small aspect of how evolution played out - not any changes in the theory of evolution itself, but a difference in application.

It also offers up the hypothesis that eukaryotes evolved only once because they evolved under unusual circumstances that didn't exist in most times and places.

Puntuated Equilibrium, cross species DNA transfer and the occasional random mutation which REALLY WORKS are all part of the process of "evolution / natural selection." Darwin had a narrow view of how species adapted to their environment over time, but that doesn't mean it's the only way things happen.

Nobody here other than you is talking about Darwinian evolution. Darwin was a genius, but he was also a scientist. He probably hoped and expected that people would build on his works.

If I was discussing genetics, would you say genetics is false because there is more to genetics than Mendelian genetics? There certainly is. Mendel just had a brilliant insight about dominant/recessive genes work through his observations. But not all genes are dominant/recessive. There is also co-dominant and cumulative. Which probably explains eye color and skin color.

Nothing you said refutes evolution in the slightest. You're just misunderstanding what "evolution" means within current scientific understanding.

A brain surgeon may tend to be more educated than an average person. But I wouldn't listen to a brain surgeon on a specialization outside his field unless he seemed truly competent for reasons beyond being a brain surgeon. Just as I wouldn't listen to an average person without more reason than that.

Non-experts tend to make a huge number of mistakes. I can't tell you how many times I've heard educated people say that humans only use 10% of their brains. There is no truth in that at all. It's amazingly ignorant. But smart, educated people get taken in by common myths outside their field. I probably have some outside my fields.

So, any difference based on being a brain surgeon would be too small to matter.

If you're comparing experts in the field, things work very differently. If the brain surgeon is simply parroting what he read some expert say, it devolves to comparing experts.

Also, calling the brain very homogenous strikes me as wrong. Of course there aren't many cell types, but that doesn't mean it is homogenous. It is modular. Different sections of the brain do different things. Knock out broca's region and you get consistent losses. Knock out the optic nerve and you get a different result that is still consistent from person to person.

Also, the brain shows clear evidence of evolution. We have the bottom of the brain, the spinal cord and medulla which we share with most animals. It controls basic activities like heart rate. We have the mid-brain with nifty things like the amygdala and cerebellum that controls emotional reactions and balance, which we share with many animals, but fewer. Then we have the upper brain, the cerebrum, which gives us the nifty abilities for language, debate, and Jyte use, which far fewer animals have.

Evolution is quite a problem for us, because we use our upper brain to tell us when our mid-brain is wrong or to mess with our lower brain. It's inefficient, but it's the best we can do because of the way evolution works. In enough time, we may improve the system.

Roland, you are again using logically hollow arguments. You claim that there is "no time for evolution" in a few hundred thousand years, but this seems to be simple argument from incredulity. We do not know how the neocortex developed, exactly. But it is more parsimonious to presume that evolution is behind it, since we have conclusive evidence that evolution takes place, and no conclusive evidence that there are other causes for genetic shifts.

Furthermore, it is clear that you do not understand genetics or "Chaos Theory", because if you did you would know that the chaos theory does not speak to genetics in the way you seem to think. In animals such as humans, genes are not chaotic systems, they are precisely ordered systems, with complex systems in place to reduce the number of mutations.

Since the historic development of the neocortex happened over a short period of time, good hypotheses for its evolution would posit a small number of genetic changes resulting in a large increase in the size and complexity.

Here's my speculation, which is probably too wild to be called a hypothesis: "Mirror neurons", which trigger when an action is being taken as well as when an action is observed, became much more complex and prevalent, endowing humans with the capability to better understand one another. This happened in several thousand years, when a band of proto-humans developed a culture in which intelligence and facility for communication were prized, and through sexual selection developed a progressively smarter, more communicative gene pool: one where the gene for mirror neurons was expressed in more and more areas of the brain.

Thank you, Rorek. He commented to say much of what I wanted to say, but better.

As already discussed, evolution can happen quickly and sometimes does. Being fast is in no way an argument against evolution.

Well, I don't want to jump in on that argument - it seems you all believe in the evolution of species and are just arguing about how it took place.

The original claim is still a bit suspect, even though I completely agree that you can be supremely knowledgeable about somethings and utterly ignorant about others.

Certainly in the society I live in, nobody could qualify as a brain surgeon without studying evolution to some degree. If you're comparing him with someone with no experience studying evolution, it makes sense to give his opinions about evolution more weight. Of course if you want to compare him with someone who has specialized in it, you should give his opinions more weight. I suppose this is just pedantry though.

I am a bit concerned that this principle would suggest you should defer to a Sasquatch expert on matters of the existence of Sasquatch, or a professor of Theology on the existence of God.

Kybernetikos, I agree with you that we are both making arguments that agree with evolution, except I am not arguing about the details. I don't know the details well enough to have much of an opinion about how much of it was steady, slow change and how much was rapid change, especially likely to happen in unusual or changing conditions.

The argument is that Roland keeps describing evolution and then saying he doesn't believe in evolution. And then those of us who read this (mainly me) keep going... uh, but you just described evolution!

At this point, I'm not sure what to do.

Kybernetikos, I agree with you that we are both making arguments that agree with evolution, except I am not arguing about the details. I don't know the details well enough to have much of an opinion about how much of it was steady, slow change and how much was rapid change, especially likely to happen in unusual or changing conditions.

The argument is that Roland keeps describing evolution and then saying he doesn't believe in evolution. And then those of us who read this (mainly me) keep going... uh, but you just described evolution!

At this point, I'm not sure what to do.

Might be a good time to exercise your whimsey.

It depends just how opinionated the brain surgeon is and who they're operating on...

The Alliance for Science winning essays to the question: Why Would I Want My Doctor to have Studied Evolution?

The original claim was related to: Michael Egnor, M.D.'s claim that
Evolutionary biology isn’t important to modern medicine.

The average brain surgeon probably has stronger knowledge than the average person of the biochemical principles that make evolution possible; I would bet real money that the average brain surgeon is more likely to accept the reality of evolution than the average person, as well!!

Strangely enough, that's not what this claim says. Though enough people have thought it did that I should perhaps come up with a more graceful and obvious formulation.

D'A

I suppose I interpreted it to mean, is it likely that the opinions of a person selected at random from the population of brain surgeons should be considered more weighty on evolution than a person selected at random from the general population.

Whereas my intent was a refutation of "Michael Egnor doesn't believe in evolution, and he's a brain surgeon, so ha!". Which I clearly failed to communicate.

D'A