I'm in the Navy and happened to walk into a conversation between a officer whose major was marine biology and an uneducated young Sailor. The Officer had seen several of the books on my desk (The Greatest Show on Earth, in particular) and was actually telling this young lady that he couldn't believe, with all the intricacies of the human body, that we (or life in general) is a product of "chance". The officer left abruptly so I wasn't able to clear this up. However, what I will be confronting him with is the fact that evolution is the EXACT OPPOSITE of chance. It is the mutual compilation of genetic mutations which have added to the fitness or survival value of an organism over millions (or billions) of years that are manifest in the genome of offspring. Is there a more succinct way of putting this so it can be more easily brought across to people? I would think that a biology major would at least understand this much, but apparently not!

It's chemistry, not chance.

Haha! Cute. I love it!

Explain selection as the acting of natural filters on variation. Pour a bucket of cloudy/dirty water through a column of clean sand. What happens? The water is much cleaner. A filter. Ask him if that is incredible. Is there a god of filtered water??
Once he gets that, then you can go into drift, migration, sexual selection...

Anyway, that will demonstrate the concept of NS. The environment is not homogeneous, but there are gradients and variation all over, both physical, and biotic. Tell him that this is where the information comes from. The replicators that do better, are those where the phenotype they produce gives them an advantage is reproduction. Those those genes increase in frequency at the cost of genes that produce less fit phenotypes. Simplicity itself...that, and time...lots of it.

An officer? What a dumb shithead?? [Or an extremely bad education, probably at a Christian University, no doubt. Or Annapolis.] Religion makes smart people dumb.
Well, I sure hope his leadership skills and war craft are better than his scientific reasoning....

A major in marine biology? He would have failed my intro to science class!

Haha! Thanks Darwinsbulldog! Yeah, I tracked him down earlier in the passageway and confronted him with this. It was an ignorance shitstorm! I can't believe the things that came out of his mouth! It was like a creationist textbook! I said, where did you get your degree in marine biology from? Oh, Gordon College. Go figure. So, I looked up the webpage and saw this crap:

http://www.gordon.edu/page.cfm?iPageID= ... _Institute

Ah, imagine that!

Another wonderful point! I was raised in South Carolina where I was NEVER (not ONE FUCKING TIME) introduced to Natural Selection. I only learned about it by watching a youtube video called "Growing Up in the Universe" and I have been educating myself. To be honest, I don't remember having learned much science. I've had to start from the floor up. I finally have (I think) a decent grasp of the theory of evolution. I've been pissed off at my parents since then and I've been pissed off at the education system in the south.

lewis.breland wrote:Another wonderful point! I was raised in South Carolina where I was NEVER (not ONE FUCKING TIME) introduced to Natural Selection. I only learned about it by watching a youtube video called "Growing Up in the Universe" and I have been educating myself. To be honest, I don't remember having learned much science. I've had to start from the floor up. I finally have (I think) a decent grasp of the theory of evolution. I've been pissed off at my parents since then and I've been pissed off at the education system in the south.

Sounds like your are a steely eyed missile-man! It takes a lot of courage to resist adopting a idea contrary to what most of the community hold.

Darwinsbulldog wrote:

lewis.breland wrote:Another wonderful point! I was raised in South Carolina where I was NEVER (not ONE FUCKING TIME) introduced to Natural Selection. I only learned about it by watching a youtube video called "Growing Up in the Universe" and I have been educating myself. To be honest, I don't remember having learned much science. I've had to start from the floor up. I finally have (I think) a decent grasp of the theory of evolution. I've been pissed off at my parents since then and I've been pissed off at the education system in the south.

Sounds like your are a steely eyed missile-man! It takes a lot of courage to resist adopting a idea contrary to what most of the community hold.

I'll second that!

Um, just realized the sentence does not make sense!

Don't worry; I'm not sure nobody didn't fail to notice.

Delvo wrote:Don't worry; I'm not sure nobody didn't fail to notice.

It is not not uncommon for me to make those sort of mistakes, the spell-checker can only sort out some dyslexic errors. It is a wonder that I understand anything at all. Curse my stoopid brain. Fuckin' parents could have left me with decent wiring.

lewis.breland wrote:Another wonderful point! I was raised in South Carolina where I was NEVER (not ONE FUCKING TIME) introduced to Natural Selection. I only learned about it by watching a youtube video called "Growing Up in the Universe" and I have been educating myself. To be honest, I don't remember having learned much science. I've had to start from the floor up. I finally have (I think) a decent grasp of the theory of evolution. I've been pissed off at my parents since then and I've been pissed off at the education system in the south.

I was taught properly in high school, but primary school was a totally different matter. We were taken to the small "TV room" which had some evolution posters on the wall. For example, showing different transitional phases that demonstrated the changing morphology of a horse's toes/hoof. The teacher would show us how it changed over time. Then...

"Some people believe this, that animals change. If a giraffe stretches its neck a lot, its children will have longer necks. Some people believe that. Other people believe this here..."

And then we would sit and watch an animated video about god creating Adam and Eve. So those were my options as a child. Creationism or watered down Lamarkism. Never a single mention of natural selection during that time I think the teacher was forced to discuss evolution with us.

Darwinsbulldog wrote:

Delvo wrote:Don't worry; I'm not sure nobody didn't fail to notice.

It is not not uncommon for me to make those sort of mistakes, the spell-checker can only sort out some dyslexic errors. It is a wonder that I understand anything at all. Curse my stoopid brain. Fuckin' parents could have left me with decent wiring.

Your are being too hard on yourself.

lewis.breland wrote:However, what I will be confronting him with is the fact that evolution is the EXACT OPPOSITE of chance.

That´s pretty much a bullshit line. I think we can agree that a game of craps is a game of chance. Casiono dice are pretty fair (it´s probably unavoidable to have some bias), according to Christie et al. (2001, "Experimentally obtained statistics of dice rolls") they are fair enough to state that the probability of rolling a 4 or more is different by no more than about 1/300 to that of rolling a 3 or less. Now consider a simple model of evolution. We only look at a pair of one birth and one death. We also disregard cases where this does not alter the allele frequency of an allele we are interested in (i.e. if a carrier is born and one dies or a non carrier dies and a non-carrier is born). And we restrict ourselves to haploid organisms (the model also works for allelic selection in diploids, but in other cases it gets more complicated).
In this model there is a probability pinc of the allele under consideration increasing in frequency by 1/N (where N is the population size) and this is (1+e-s)-1. Likewise the probability of decreasing by 1/N is given by (1+es)-1. s here is the selection coefficient, which you calculate as follows: divide the mean fitness of carriers by the mean fitness of non-carriers and take the natural logarithm of the result. Now, for an allele under positive selection s rarely exceeds 10-5. In terms of selection that´s a huge value. And now compare the probabilities. They are far closer to 50% then we know the dice in casinos to be. How then can one claim that evolution is the opposite of chance? It simply isn´t and that´s not a weakness, but a strenght of the theory.

One of the things to note there is that if you asked mathematicians that specialize in probability theory, the mathematical description of chance, what the top 5 contributors to their field in the 20th century were and asked the same question to evolutionary biologist, you´d see some overlap in the lists, particularly F.A.Fisher, with a good probability of Wright and Haldane making an appearance. That they contributed to both fields is no more accidental than Newton working out both calculus and classical mechanics - probability theory was a neccessary tool to understand evolution.

Edit: Fixed formula and misspelling of craps.

If for some reason the only fruit left to eat is growing high off the ground. It's not chance that the animals with long necks are the only ones to survive.

susu.exp wrote;-

....a game of crabs....

http://www.otterarchives.com/bountygame.html


I'm am not taking the piss mate, but what game of crabs do you mean.

I suspect he meant craps.

hackenslash wrote:I suspect he meant craps.

Just checking, I have no idea what craps is either, although I have heard the word. Time to google again.
Susu.exp made an error, therefore his whole argument is wrong, Yay! [giggles!]

well... Chance is something that is part of evolution too, but chance is only a starter that will be introduced to natural selection.

I have a mutant gene that makes me possible to use lactose in my food. That gene was mutated by accident, but it wasn't an accident that it survived and grew in the population.