About evolution and gender roles (in nature)

Absolutely right. But as you also correctly said, it manifests itself differently in humans. In fact, sexuality in general is just different per species, and per individual of that species, humans included. It's unwise to extrapolate any truths by correlating another species' behavior to our own, but that doesn't mean that our sexuality is any less complicated.

I'm not sure what point you were trying to make, and please try again if I missed something, but I think you may have also disproved it yourself.

@video_game_king Mom! It's educational! I swear!!!

Males do all the hunting and dangerous stuff in nature because we are expendable. We offer our seed and are no longer needed biologically.

That is also why we do the wooing. We have to prove we have the stuff before the female is willing to devote their life to raising a strong healthy offspring.

Did my mom lie to me?

@development: Only one way to find out bub.

All the time.

I personally do believe that God began and guided the evolution of the universe and all things in it, but even I am confused at a some of the logic being tossed around here, especially regarding gender.

Good on those trying to explain as best they can. Fortunately, there are a lot of resources nowadays for better understanding these topics.

evolution and gender are both fake

@zella said:

@development said:

Perfect, will watch after I finish the BBC show, thanks.

@cale said:

Sound logic, I understand the bigger picture now about slow hit-and-miss mutations over long centuries, it makes sense. Thanks! I don't believe in absolutes, I like to mix my facts and spirituality, I'm crazy like that, so while the evolution thing is very legitimate and actually mindblowing and I believe it, I still believe in God's hand in the madness that is life on Earth, I think the two theories go hand in hand, feel free to roll your eyes. I'm not religious or anything btw. I simply don't think this debate is important enough for me to ensure believing the right thing, it's not essential in everyday life, so I mix it up a bit, it's fun.

Anyway, yeah the first question is answered now, the last piece of the puzzle is wrapping one's mind around the fact of mutations, but nature is a mystery. Also CaLe your graph of Earth's timeline is insane, I like it.

The future truly is now.

This is where the whole theory of evolution completely falls apart. I know from the field of medicine, a single point mutation in just the right place of DNA code, can cause massive problems and can lead to death. The one carrying the mutation would not be able to even reproduce. Congenital birth defects show us death can set in before being born and having a proper working genetic code is of essence. Genetic code is not as erratic as evolutionary theorist would make you believe. On a molecular level, DNA-replication mechanisms have a 1 in 300,000 chance of making in an error in replicating. If you want to give a mutation to your offspring, this has to be done in your germ cells (ovaries or testicles).

An example is sickle-cell anemia. A single mutation from A to T causes a whole different protein being built into red blood cells, making the cell sickle-shaped instead of the beautiful bi-concave functional form we all know. In its most severe form it can lead to death, in mild forms it's actually a positive trait to have in malaria infested regions of the earth. Malaria parasites have big problems infecting sickle shaped red blood cells, thus giving those people protection to malaria and giving them better chances on surviving in those areas and reproducing. Statistics show sickle-cell anemia to be more prevalent in malaria infested areas.

The theory of completely random mutations giving positive (evolutionary) selection to a species and drastically changing one species to another is completely false. About 95% of the humane genome is non-coding, meaning it does not code for anything useful. The remaining 5% codes for a variety of things, including traits like eye color which has no significant evolutionary benefit to have a mutation in. Let's say a mutation happens in the useful 5% of the genome. You have a 1 out of 4 chance that a single point mutation leads to a different amino acid, and depending on the molecule a chance it may alter the function of the protein and give you a different trait. There is a small chance it happens in a trait that might give an evolutionary edge on the hostile environment. Now this mutation has to withstand DNA-repair mechanisms and cellular death. Let's say these very slim chances happen. Now that single germ cell with the mutation has to be selected among millions of either sperm or egg cells, it has to lead to a succesful conception, a succesful pregnancy and birth. Now this organism has to survive and succesfully reproduce. This has to happen in consecutive offspring to make the human primate evolve into the human we know now.

If we go back to the inception of life, even the evolution theory does not have an explanation for it. The most basic organic molecule contains a Nitrogen and a Carbon molecule. Somehow, in either the lifeless waste that was an ocean or the toxic atmosphere of billions years ago, a Nitrogen and Carbon molecule came together. This is not a spontaneous process as there is or was simply no energy to bring these two together. Maybe a lightning strike? Who knows.

Let's say it happened, then what? You'd have an organic molecule with no ways of reproducing itself or having itself registered in some primitive DNA-code. The most basic amino acid in life is alanine (and still more advanced than our organic compound). It does not reproduce or have a thrift to survive, reproduce or multiply.

Evolution tries to teach us that during DNA replication, a 1 out of 300,000 error is made, this happens in the 5% of coding genome, it has to be in a beneficial trait, with a 1 out of 4 chance of actually lead to a different protein, with an even smaller chance of being a functional protein, with a 1 out of 300,000 chance again the error is not fixed by DNA-repair, with a 1 out of 6 million chance of being the sperm cell that fertilizes an egg cell, with a 1 out of 5 chance leading to a succesful implantation/pregnancy, with a 90% chance of the individual being born, with a chance of surviving to get to reproducing age and so on.

I've studied enough science to believe in Intelligent Design.

Not that it ever claimed to.

" Look at this poor guy working his ass off to attract the female.. I'm wondering why don't the females ever do this job in nature?"

Because animals, are decent people.

If they can't explain it themselves, why do they critiscize religion for it? Religion states God created life. Evolution theorists do not have an answer at all, but do try to shove it down everyone's throat like it's gospel. I don't blame the theory itself, it is what it is. Scientists that claim you can't be a religious scientist annoy me to no end, as if you have to be in one or the other camp.

Because it does claim to?

And doesn't have evidence to back it up other than pure faith. That's kinda the key part. Science loves evidence and dislikes lack of evidence. You can claim whatever you want and if you can back it up, great! If not, science says get that weak shit outta my face! On the other hand science has no problem with the answer "I don't know."

A biology teacher at our university once said that Science and Religion are non-overlapping areas and it should stay that way. Science should not try to approach religion and religion should not meddle in science either. Science and religion are two very different mindstates and one should not try to explain the other, since as you said it, science bases everything on empirical evidence and religion on faith.

That statement sounds crazy to me.

Science and religion have intermingled to great effect for hundreds if not thousands of years. And they've also had their share of differences. But faith and science can both evolve, adapt, and coexist. Neither has to exist in a vacuum separate from the other.

Are there any religeous sites where I can go to spout something babyish and get reasonablly clever people to waste hours of their time providing me with information I'm not remotely willing to understand?

Evolution is as much a reality as gravity. Denying it in 2014, 155 years after Darwin published On The Origin of Species, is pointless.

You're on it baby.

Vinny bless you.

You mean the appendix? Recent insights propose a function in the immune system.

You mean job experience? I'm just a student, though I do circumcisions (surgery assistent) and I'm certified to vaccinate.

I think he means the penis.

Not to mention that, if intelligent design were real, it would be pretty stupid. Intelligent Design proponents only seem to focus on the positive examples of evolution while ignoring the negative (because an omnipotent being, like the Christian God, cannot make mistakes) such as the fact that most rabbits have to eat their own droppings in order to absorb the nutrients because they can't do it the first time through or the billions of examples of evolution that didn't live on at all. Evolution is a trial-and-error process. I don't see how anyone can look at evolution and see it as being guided by an all-knowing, omniscient being. To semi-quote Neil DeGrasse Tyson, badass scientist extraordinaire, things like that close a door. They don't lead to further questions or answers.

A full quote from NDT this time:

"The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."

@mariachimacabre: Yeah, but your hand waving. Your not actually countering his points. He does make a fair observation to the mathematical/statistical problems with evolutionary theory. You then have other issues like Evo/Devo. I don't believe in intelligence design because, frankly, its not much of a theory; but that doesn't mean that evolutionary mechanics can't be criticized nor is it completely sound(no theory is).

Curiously, there is been a significant movement within theoretical physics that hypothesis idea of simulation theory. From what I understand, its seems to be a rebranding of intelligent design. Replacing God with computer code.

I don't really see how countering the notion of "Intelligent Design" with examples of clearly unintelligent design is hand waving. You can't really counter the idea of "All Knowing, Infallible God Designed All Animals" with anything except examples of evolution being a very-clearly-not-flawless, trial and error system. It's a pretty common bullet point in the Intelligent Design debate actually. The first place I heard about the rabbit's eating their own droppings was in such a debate. Intelligent Design is just a very thinly-veiled attempt to invoke Creationism while having a slightly more legitimate sounding name and process. It does not, and cannot, stand next to a time-tested, nearly-universally accepted (among scientists anyway) scientific theory like that of Evolution. Sure, it has holes but every major scientific topic does. Scientific analysis is almost never convenient and always creates more questions than answers. The Big Bang is a perfect example of that.

And yeah, the Simulation Theory is just a weird offshoot of Intelligent Design that seemed to get a lot more popular post-Matrix. That's dumb too. After those last two films, no one should take that shit seriously.

Well, Tyson entertains it or at the very least scientists who have laid the possibility of it.

I am willing to understand and I already understood what I learned here about hit-and-miss mutations that happen over centuries, as well as female species sucking semen out of their males.. So I'm sorry to disappoint your typical post, you're wrong.

The last thing that matters about religion is creationism, but you keep perpetuating the false belief that religion is nothing but a story about a dude who created the fucking world. That religion means creationism.

I'm mildly religious in certain (somewhat unorthodox) spiritual ways and I don't give two shits who created what. Stop crucifying religion to sound smart, religion is not a thesis about the origin of the world, it's a rich well of life lessons and teachings, a moral compass, and a source of inner peace for millions around the world. Even if they're delusional, they're happy inside and many of them are peaceful and tolerant, dammit.

You are to religions and believers what FOX news is to you, you crucify and ridicule and lay blame without understanding or distinguishing the beliefs or their believers, they're all basement-dwelling neck-bearded nerds to you who play San Andreas then go outside and stab homeless people. If religion is synonym to creationism then gaming is synonym to being a fat lonely loser who will one day shoot up a school.

Edit: This isn't against you personally VGK it's aimed at evolution enthusiasts who call out "religion" without being specific.

The one thing about evolution that has confused me is the concept "survival of the fittest" which is I guess a pretty big part of evolution. Specifically, I find it confusing why there is still no explanation as to why humans, who supposedly evolved from apes, are the only creatures to evolve so far? And why do apes and monkeys still exist? I mean type in evolution into Google and you're bombarded with a trillion variations of this IMAGE, which is obviously a simplification, but implies that humans are the peak form of evolution in the homo genus, at least for now. If true, then why didn't all the other apes die away, or evolve along with us?

@liquidprince: Well, a very easy observation is that we didn't evolve from apes. We are apes(a form of an ape). We share a common ancestor with other species of apes.

I can understand the confusion, duder, and it's unfortunately part of people popularizing "survival of the fittest" over "natural selection". How people often understand it is a kind of perversion of the concept, and it was made more popular for many decades thanks to people using it to reinforce racial supremacism. (aka. "The ridged foreheads of Africans mean us Caucasians are the more "fit" and "evolved" forms of humans." ugh.)

Evolution takes a long time, and the results of evolution aren't absolute. In other words, a living thing never just entirely becomes another living thing overnight. There is often the misunderstanding that a creature evolving from another creature means the original creature has to be completely replaced. If that were the case, then there wouldn't be any diversity at all. There are creatures who still exist which are about the same as they were millions of years ago. Other creatures may have come about from them through the process of evolution, but the existence of other creatures does not mean the original automatically doesn't still continue to create more that are more like the original. If it is still able to live in its environment and hasn't been pushed to change much at all, then it could very well stick around while other branches become their own species.

Survival of the fittest is used scientifically to mean the higher probability that a creature more "fit" for the conditions of their immediate environment will survive to pass on their genes. It doesn't mean those deemed "less fit" will somehow be all wiped out. Human beings have come about thanks to the evolution of an apelike creature in the past, and that apelike creature evolved in various ways to break off into multiple other creatures. That apelike creature eventually died out, leaving the remnants of apes and human-like creatures. These eventually became what we are and what the modern apes are. If the environment had been different, it's possible that distant ancestor could still exist, but alas, that isn't the case.

There are many different kinds of birds that come from common ancestors. They have become different species, just as we and apes have become different species. We may deem ourselves more "fit" creatures, but that only means we have a higher probability of overcoming the immediate challenges we face. It doesn't mean all challenges, and it doesn't mean those deemed "less fit" won't survive, as well. Nature simply doesn't work like that. If part of a population of a species moves somewhere that is less hospitable to how it is or something changes for part of a population, that subsection may feel selection pressure to end up favoring certain traits. With sufficient time, a new species may arise simply due to the differing factors. That doesn't necessarily mean the new species is "better" or more universally "fit" than the original that it broke off from, only that it is more fit for the conditions it specifically faces.

Natural selection inherently has more to do with nature's impact on evolution than on some idea of creatures being the "fittest" overall. Evolution doesn't lead to living things evolving better or worse, just different. Then, the environment(nature) impacts whether those differences are more or less beneficial. If a difference is beneficial enough, it may just make a different creature dominate or survive while others fail. Or maybe a difference will just be a difference. Doesn't mean it has to improve anything. Evolution sometimes hurts creatures. It isn't just a solid stairway upward. It's a lot of differences within an environment which may or may not give advantages or disadvantages based on those differences.

We can say we're more "fit" than other creatures, but more than anything else, we're simply different. We might be able to say we lucked into having the best adaptations for our environment, and that has led us to be the top of the food chain. We have come so far that we could wipe out all other creatures. Yet, once again, that doesn't mean we are inherently the "best". It just means that for the environment of Earth at this present moment, we are a relatively "fit" creature for the situation.

Until we destroy ourselves, of course. Which could happen. Then we really weren't "fit" enough to survive the environment, as we became our own worst enemy. Maybe we evolved an eventual fatal flaw or the remnants of what we were couldn't handle the rate at which our minds developed. We shouldn't get ahead of ourselves. No matter how much we like to act like gods, we are still subject to nature as much as anything else.

In summary, both apes and humans came from a common ancestor, and that ancestor died out. Didn't have to die out, but it did. Evolution isn't inherently progress-based, and natural selection influences but doesn't dictate changes. Diversity exists because evolution isn't a ladder; it's a messy, long process of deviation over time which may lead to some creatures being more "fit" for an immediate environment than others.

Hope that perhaps helps explain it a bit. :)

(And if anyone has any areas of additional input, please feel free to share. I'm just trying to explain it as best I can in a simple way.)

Basically what I'm saying is I saw a dude monkey fuck a chick monkey and then she brought him a banana, and that's nature, but I expect a broad to get me a sandwich and all of a sudden I'm the pig?

I'm sure I can't add anything near the level of detail and intellectual discussion that's already been going on in here. That's not really the way I roll, I dislike specifics and usually just like to find a way of thinking that makes things make sense, so I'll share mine on your two questions. I try to simplify things as much as possible so obviously I'm making generalizations.

Evolution: The main mistake people make is thinking something evolves a certain way to ensure an animals survival. This is thinking about it the wrong way. The way evolution really works is that the other things die off. Thus things don't necessarily evolve in the way people think of it it's more last man standing wins.

Giraffe example (easiest to think of): People think that the giraffe has a long neck because they evolved them to get at the food higher up. This is the wrong way to think of it. What happened is that food was scarce at low levels (due to competition with other animals, overpopulation, certain plant became extinct, whatever), the shorter giraffes didn't get as much food as the slightly taller giraffes. This made them die out, lose mating potential (starvation, weaker than the taller ones so lost fights for mates, shorter females can't eat as much as taller ones so more shorter females babies died before birth, died from lack of nutrition from milk, not as much nutrition so more at risk for disease, etc) leaving the longer neck giraffes to thrive.

It's not as glamorous as people think, and it's not an a to b thing. It's lots of factors combining together to get to a random advantageous outcome. It's also important to not think of evolution as "right". Just because something evolved a certain way doesn't mean that way was the way it was supposed to happen. Think of it like a tree, the tree grows branches, leaves at certain points, not because the tree is meant to grow that way, just because whatever confluence of soil nutrition, water, oxygen, wind and countless other factors meant it sprouted a branch at that spot and not 2 cms further up the trunk.

Gender role: This is a combination of a few things. 1) It takes a lot of energy to gestate and then feed and raise a child, you don't want to waste that energy on raising a child that doesn't have as much of a chance at survival. Thus females get to be choosy, and they want to pick the father that will have the highest chance of producing healthy offspring that with in turn thrive and produce. Females can also only produce a set number of offspring in a lifetime, due to the time it takes to birth and raise them, males on the other hand get the benefit of fire and forget so to speak. 2) The ratio of males and females in the population. Usually there is more females than males, due to males fighting or whatever. But in animals where the population is more evenly split or even flipped the other way then the females thrown themselves at the males. 3) The type of breeding competition that animal employs. Your thinking of the classic, male fights male, male shows display of dominance, male proves he can provide better than other male. But there are other competition some species use, such as sperm competition, where females go in heat for a short specific time, and gets with as many males as possible in as short a time as possible, thus the males themselves don't compete for the female, the sperm competes for the egg. There are some others I read about too but I forget. Anyway hopefully I added something to the conversation and didn't just blab all glib like for 10 minutes.

We didn't say creationism; we said religion. I'd go a little further, but I'm not sure if you're criticizing me or the person I'm quoting.

@video_game_king: I'm wondering what religion has to do with this topic, besides the part about God creating the universe.

@trafalgarlaw:

The problem in your logic is in your '1 in 300,000 chance' of an error in DNA replication. That's 1 error every 300,000 nucleotides, of which there are billions in each cell. The DNA is then proofread, but plenty of mistakes can still get through. Plus, once a error does get though, it's permanent; if that cell divides, it's dividing based off of the new, mutated DNA - that's what's being replicated, and that's what the proofreading is being based off. It's perfectly feasible for random mutations to occur through errors in DNA replication.

To put some numbers to it, here's a Scitable article from Nature:

Even mutation rates as low as 10^-10 can accumulate quickly over time, particularly in rapidly reproducing organisms like bacteria. This is one reason why antibiotic resistance is such an important public health problem; after all, mutations that accumulate in a population of bacteria provide ample genetic variation with which to adapt (or respond) to the natural selection pressures imposed by antibacterial drugs (Smolinski et al., 2003). Take E. coli, for example. The genome of this common intestinal bacterium has about 4.2 million base pairs, or 8.4 million bases. Assuming a mutation rate of 10^-9 (i.e., midway between reported estimates of 10^-8 and 10^-10), every time E. coli divides, each daughter cell will have, on average, 0.0084 new mutations. Or, another way to think about it is like this: Approximately 1% of bacterial cells will contain a new mutation. That may not seem like much. However, because bacteria can divide as rapidly as twice per hour, a single bacterium can grow into a colony of 1 million cells in only about 10 hours (10²⁰ = 1,048,576). At that point, approximately 10,000 of these bacteria will have accumulated at least one mutation. As the number of bacteria carrying different mutations increases, so too does the likelihood that at least one of them will develop a drug-resistant phenotype.

And that's with a mutation rate of 1 in every billion nucleotides over 10 hours. Evolution has had a whole lot longer than that.

Plus, you don't appreciate how much chemical synthesis you can do with lightning strikes. Read up on the Miller-Urey experiment. You can produce all 20 amino acids with a very simple electrical discharge setup, as well as producing molecules like sugars and hyrdocarbons. Add in a bunch of carbonyl sulfide, which catalyses peptide synthesis, and suddenly you have a recipe for proteins. Plus, it has been shown that racemic amino acid mixtures can spontaneously co-crystallise with a not insignificant enantiomeric excess, so it is totally possible to generate complex, long-chain proteins, and you can even get the an excess of L-amino acids over D.

Life is complex but not infeasible; no God required.

I think this thread is now ready for "the atheist's nightmare":

How does this guy explain coconuts?!

Easy wording: Male wooing female because mammal male doesn't bear child and doesn't have a pregnacy period to wait until he can procreate his genetic information into offspring. Evolution is not the survival of the "most bodily fit organism or individual" but the survival of the "most fitting into enviroment" organism or individual. Mind that there are a lot of exceptions (especially among us Humans) for the first statement and no exceptions (that I know of) for the second. Have a nice day.

In your question about evolution, I think one element you are missing is that we see those changes that helped the specie move forward, not the rest. Its not that at some point "nature" (meaning, the conscious creator) decided that claws or a change in pigmentation would help some specie, but that of several mutations and small changes, some tended to help the individual and were passed on to the next generation, and some were less beneficial (and some were downright prejudicial) and died out.

That is the main point of evolution that differentiates it from intelligent design theories: That it is constantly working, even now. It does not assumes that peacocks where always the same, or monkeys were always the same, but that small changes occurred to them that lead to the version we know now, and in a thousand years, they will be different. We have seen this during our history with dogs, which we mess with in order to create varieties that didn't exist in nature a thousand years ago. In our own history, we have records that indicate mankind was shorter in the past (among other things)

Those changes are not like a stair, either. One small step forward and upward to lead to a better version of the specie. It is more like a tree, where branches come out in every direction. Some branches are shorter and end pretty soon after they grow out of the main branch, while others grow larger and give birth to branches of their own (sorry about my lack of specialized vocabulary, this is as far as my English goes). Some mutations could lead to entirely different species, while many others will die out in one or two generations.

Alright, I read some of this and felt the need to input. To clarify I am a undergrad Sociology major, and one of my mentors focuses pretty exclusively on gender studies. As my minor is Biology, I spent a lot of time in evolutionary courses as well. I can't tell you 100% of this will be true, but I'll do my best it convey my understanding of it.

EVOLUTION

Evolution makes things look like they were designed to that specific area. For your Penguin example, the males w/o the pouch would be less likely to have their offspring survive and therefor less likely to pass on the pouch-less gene leading to it being rare and die out. Some of evolution happens by mutation. A few members of the species will be born with something that is abnormal to the standard genome, but if it helps them survive and doesn't negatively effect their mating habits, then those abnormal genes will propagate through a society. Other evolution happens because of useless things the body doesn't need anymore. Sea Lions are going through evolutionary changes right now regarding weather or not they can walk on land, but i didn't pay attention in that lecture sorry. Humans used to have a tail that we are theorized to have used to help us stand up straight, but as we evolved further, we didn't need this anymore if was a waste of body resources to keep this tail, so we lost it and now it is the fused spinal vertibre we call our Coccyx. Our 3rd molars, colloquially called wisdom teeth, used to help us chew on cellulose i believe, but now that our diet has changed along with the ability to digest many more things than we used to, our wisdom teeth lost its purpose and is believed to eventually be phased out of the human genome.

GENDER

Gender doesn't vary that much among humans. I'm going to let you in on a little secret. You know the saying 'boys will be boys'? Well actually boys and girls have no evidence of being socially different. Meaning the only reason for 'boys being boys and girls being girls' is that WE make them that way. Its called Genderization, look it up if you want a way better explanation for this. However, the gender bias is prevalent through out human history. So why is that? Well I don't know. I have heard theories that made sense, that it is based off the fact that women carry the child inside them, making them the primary protector according to humans a very long time ago. Why is it that men fight wars in history and women don't? My guess is that it has to do with the 2 or so years the women would be unable to fight (with gestation and the following need to breast feed and such).

I realize this doesnt answer all of your questions, but I have a sociology final in an hour that I need to go to. I'll answer any questions to the best of my meager abilities and if someone sees something blatantly wrong, tell me so I know!

Thank you duders for making this point more clear, as I think it's the main concept that the OP (and other folks who are maybe more actively trying to disprove evolution here) are getting confused about.

It's easy to see animals perfectly equipped to their surroundings and assume that they were clearly given those attributes so that they could get along in the best way possible. The key revelation is that it wasn't even the animals changing to better suit their environments, as if in a Spore kind of way, when an animal needed claws it sort of leveled up and got them. It was more so the environments themselves shaping which traits the gene pools of the population would pass on to future generations in greater number.

To use a totally abstracted and hopefully not even more confusing example, consider a jell-o mold.

You pour the jell-o in, let it set, un-pan it upside down, and you get this lovely thing. But then someone who's never seen jell-o before comes around, sees your creation, and is astonished. "What a feat!", they exclaim. "That jiggly thing is the absolute perfect fit for that pan right over there!". You try to explain that the jell-o started off as a liquid which is why it naturally took on that shape, and only later get set, but they don't believe you. "Clearly it's a solid(ish) substance. I can see it with my own eyes! Stop being so humble. You carved it, and made it so it would fit. And it's obviously the exact shape of that pan, so you must be super talented. I don't even think a mortal person could make something that perfectly suited to its environment." And so on...

I hope maybe that helps elucidate something. Evolution isn't some kind of force that drives an organism to gain beneficial traits. It's simply the observed effect of an organism's environment in a discreet population potentially causing certain traits to get passed on rather than others. There's no goal, there's no action, and there's certainly no design. It's a passive system.