Early Retirement Extreme Forums

@ George
"The Dude - not sure what this has to do with ERE"
Awwww. I like you (and all the rest of you) too much to continue all this for my own benefit if this is annoying people.
In answer to the statement, not too much, but some people choose to make religion or charity their lifetime goals. Others give all their possessions away at points in their lives because of extreme belief (my parents did this and became missionairies. We lived in a converted school bus at this point in their lives. I like to think this would qualify as minimalist and non materialistic).
I tend to post a lot of irrelevant topics because I have a sense of community here and I think in terms of a lot philosophical topics and interests. If my brain farts on this are too far off posting this topic then I will call this to an end on my part unless people have questions for me. I was just curious what convinced people.

@TheDude
"no animals can communicate using human speech"
I suppose our brain, our speech and our linguistic capabilities evolved over time and in the beginning there wasn’t more than simple grunts.

Animals can also communicate in complex ways, it doesn’t happen to all species, but some end up being better suited to it. Example some birds have complex whistling skillz http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 125101.htm

So I can imagine that someday there have been pre-humans who were a bit better at some the necessary characteristics to develop something slighly more complex than simple grunts.

Language and intelligence probably stimulate eachother a lot, so they may have gotten increasingly better at it in later generations.
It seems logical that the more specialised we got in human language, the less other species were compatible with our way of communicating.
But a number of animals have learned to somewhat use human speech anyway. Though generally they have an extremely limited vocabulary.

Most just seem to “parrot” words without understanding them, but others can be taught to understand a very limited subset of human language (dolphins), and some (esp. birds) seem to be capable of using some human language somewhat intelligently.

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

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-animal_communication

I suppose animals in general lack the required vocal abilities, intelligence and human-specific brain circuits to master human language. But if you’d create a breeding program with super-intelligent talking parrots, combined with language training, I bet they’d be able to have pretty good conversations after many hundred thousands of years.
"I will not be surprised if we eventually make a talking horseman if we splice enough DNA:) The hard question for me then will be “Does it have a human soul?”."
I’m rather sceptical to the existance of souls.
"As for breeding, and to reference the article, I have never seen a dog give birth to anything but a dog."
Me neither. But you’ve only given the dog a number of months to produce a puppy. Maybe if you give it millions of years there will be so many mutations and variations that there will be very little resemblance with what we call a dog and the result won’t be able to breed with dogs anymore.
From the Wikipedia page on speciation:
“One example of natural speciation is the diversity of the three-spined stickleback, a marine fish that, after the last ice age, has undergone speciation into new freshwater colonies in isolated lakes and streams. Over an estimated 10,000 generations, the sticklebacks show structural differences that are greater than those seen between different genera of fish including variations in fins, changes in the number or size of their bony plates, variable jaw structure, and color differences.” (Kingsley, D.M. (January 2009) "From Atoms to Traits," Scientific American, p. 57)
There’s also allopatric speciation, during which a population is split geographically , for example because of geographic changes, and becomes so dissimilar that they are reproductively isolated and are no longer capable of exchanging genes: “Island genetics, the tendency of small, isolated genetic pools to produce unusual traits, has been observed in many circumstances, including insular dwarfism and the radical changes among certain famous island chains, for example on Komodo. The Galápagos islands are particularly famous for their influence on Charles Darwin. During his five weeks there he heard that Galápagos tortoises could be identified by island, and noticed that Mockingbirds differed from one island to another, but it was only nine months later that he reflected that such facts could show that species were changeable. When he returned to England, his speculation on evolution deepened after experts informed him that these were separate species, not just varieties, and famously that other differing Galápagos birds were all species of finches. Though the finches were less important for Darwin, more recent research has shown the birds now known as Darwin's finches to be a classic case of adaptive evolutionary radiation.” (Frank J. Sulloway (1982). "The Beagle collections of Darwin's finches (Geospizinae)". Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History) Zoology Series 43 (2): 49–58.)
Etc.
"I don’t understand the lack of evidence on earth for all the transitions between species. Without this evidence, and IMHO there should be MILLIONS if not BILLIONS of examples, macro evolution does not hold water for me."
Billions of humans live on the earth nowadays. While there have been many generations of humans and pre-human beings in the past, they probably weren’t very numerous.
Also, they didn’t exactly put their skeletons in storage for posterity. I can imagine that after millions of years, on a planet that is subject to important geological changes, not much is preserved in recognizable shape near the surface of the planet and sufficiently abundant to be found and identified.
I sometimes wonder what future civilisations (if any) will think about the way we lived. We tend to completely demolish buildings before we build others. They won’t find the information that hasn’t been stored on a durable form of hard copy. They would find some stuff, but would probably complain that much is missing.
"I don’t see how we can conclude that something gradually turned into something else without tons of solid examples."
Well the above examples from wikipedia are already something. Maybe our scientists can dig up better answers.
I’m sorry to say that I’m not holding my breath for tons of solid evidence from the other camp.
Not hoping to convince you, but couldn't resist trying to answer.

"I sometimes wonder what future civilisations (if any) will think about the way we lived. We tend to completely demolish buildings before we build others. They won’t find the information that hasn’t been stored on a durable form of hard copy. They would find some stuff, but would probably complain that much is missing."
Enter the toilet bowl theory. One thing our civilization has are sealed landfills. These environments are anaerobic and thus nothing lives there. Researchers have for decades old viable hotdogs in landfills. How's that for preservatives. Now, we build most of our junk out of plastic and wood rather than stone, but we do build some things out of ceramics. The biggest things which are widely build happens to be toilet bowls. They are very hard to break too and will probably survive our civilization.
What conclusions one may draw from a civilization who built so many of these objects I don't know.

@TheDude
"no animals can communicate using human speech"
From a ny times article:
"Of the 20,000 genes in the human genome, few are more fascinating than FOXP2, a gene that underlies the faculty of human speech.
All animals have an FOXP2 gene, but the human version’s product differs at just 2 of its 740 units from that of chimpanzees, suggesting that this tiny evolutionary fix may hold the key to why people can speak and chimps cannot."

@TheDude
"no animals can communicate using human speech"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6KvPN_W ... re=related
From Wikipedia

"he could identify 50 different objects and recognize quantities up to six; that he could distinguish seven colors and five shapes, and understand the concepts of "bigger", "smaller", "same", and "different", and that he was learning "over" and "under"."
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/09/arts/ ... abstract=1

@The Dude

Firstly, I think you might have a mistaken impression about just how rare fossilization is. The dinosaurs (as an entire group) roamed the earth for several hundred million years, and how many fossils total have we excavated? Put it this way, according to a quick google search about 30-50 incomplete (where that may mean down to a single bone fragment) T-Rex's have been found. And T-Rex lived for an estimated 2 million years. Fossilization is a very rare event, so finding every permutation, especially of unsuccessful mutations which may not even survive a generation is vanishingly unlikely. Even then with such a small sample size I doubt we can truly say that what we have isn't one of those variations.
"This is why I don’t understand the lack of evidence on earth for all the transitions between species. "
I'm not sure how discrete a piece you're looking for though? Things do die out, and sometimes even because they've changed into new species. I'm not sure I understand the question, to me it's like asking 'why aren't my great-grandparents still around?'. Or saying "well, I see my grandparents, and parents, but I don't see the transitions connecting me to them, just a bunch of discrete generations".
To you, what would a 'transitional' fossil have to look like to convince you? I recall seeing an exhibit of horse skulls lined up and showing a clear progression from a small deer like creature to the modern horse. There were maybe 10 or so spanning several million years. Is that something like what you'd look for just more discrete? Or do you mean more evolutionary dead ends, failed mutations and the like?
To the failed mutation case, I think that is generally addressed by the general rarity of fossils. Furthermore, fossils are very incomplete records of an animal. For starters none of the soft tissue is preserved. Think of how many genetic defects occur in humans that would be invisible to someone just studying our fossilized bones.
As to the dogs: There is at least sub-speciation. Mating a chihuahua and great dane is largely impossible without outside help. There seems no reason to me that two breeds of dogs couldn't keep being selected for so differently that they can no longer interbreed even with artificial help (thus meeting a definition for separate species), heck maybe even start a new genus. I haven't seen it personally, but I hear donkeys can give birth to mules, and have heard of ligers.
Also if your 'big bang' spontaneous isn't abiogenesis, I'm not sure what you mean? (At least your explanation seems to imply you don't equate those two). I don't think anyone is arguing mutations are big and sudden, like you won't grow a carapace overnight, but change can happen given millions of years.
P.S. I enjoy conversing (or typing or whatever) with people through this medium, and don't think that this forum should only be ERE or nothing, and after all there is a specific 'Politics, and other eternal disagreements' category.
@Alex Huh, you're probably correct on the denotation of the word and I should have used representative to be correct. Though I will argue that my sentence is technically correct, though you have to infer that the atheist is a representative.

@Thedude
Check out http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ for evidence on macroevolution. They have a lot of information including about transitional forms and speciation.

Somehow I can't imagine myself one day explaining to the God of the Bible how my studies into evolution were so brilliant that they trump His own Book.
But then that's just me!!!!

@HSpencer

What parts of evolution do you see conflicting with the Bible? The only way I can think that it directly contradicts is if you take the literal interpretation of the Genesis story as the Young Earth Creationists do. Also I'd think you'd have to discard other branches of science (like physics regarding the formation of the Sun and planets) as well?

I like to think that a god who would gift us our intelligence would not begrudge our use of his gift.
Hypothetically speaking.

"What parts of evolution do you see conflicting with the Bible? "
I think generally there is no conflict since an omnipotent being could make the universe behave in any manner (including to incorporate evolution). Furthermore, religion is outside the realm of science and can't be validated or invalidated since you can't use religion to make testable hypotheses (a supernatural being can do anything) and hence it can never be shown to be false.
However, if evolution can explain many of the phenomena that we humans used to invoke a god for, then by Occam's razor you might argue why bother invoking the presence of a god.

This discussion always highlights how badly our society misuses the word "belief."
Belief:

1. something believed; an opinion or conviction: a belief that the earth is flat.

2. confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof: a statement unworthy of belief.

3. confidence; faith; trust: a child's belief in his parents.

4. a religious tenet or tenets; religious creed or faith: the Christian belief.
Evolution is immediately susceptible to rigorous proof and those proofs have been done. Thus, using "belief" with "evolution" is incorrect. Evolution does not require belief, while creationism does require belief as it is not susceptible to rigorous proof.