Things You Would Like To See An Evolutionist Explain

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Not only that, but there are different strategies. To look at this from a business perspective pumping out cheap crap is a good strategy for Wal-Mart, one that gives it financial success, however, Neiman-Marcus and other similar businesses don't use that strategy, instead they sell on prestige and that strategy gives these companies financial success. We don't have to point to different environments necessarily, simply because changes are random and different animals will find different niches, somewhat like different businesses find different niches.

Can someone show a statistical chart that measures the number of known species with the amount of evolutionary intermediates?
I don't doubt Punctuated jumps to macroevolution, but I question the amount of evidence on which we build these grand schemas. I am with genetics, microevolution and the occassional speciation.

Also can someone show me an intermediate from single celled simple prokaryotes developing into the more complex eukaryote that is the building block of all known large organisms.

The fossil record is incomplete, but we're finding new intermediate forms all the time.


The endosymbiont hypothesis is the most commonly accepted. I'm not sure what fossil evidence we have behind it, but it is very strongly supported by genetics and cellular physiology.

Reproduction is not the only function of sex. The bonobos that Jono mentioned are a good example, but humans work about as well. If reproduction was the only function of sex, females would advertise the fertile part of their cycle, like female chimps do. But bonobos and humans have concealed ovulation, and have sex (and sexual desire) when there is no chance of conception.


Depends on your baseline. True if humans are compared to chimps, not when compared to bonobos. There is a general trend that if males can control a resource crucial to reproduction, they don't need to be nice to females. For some seals, like sea elephants, the resource might be the beaches where the females give birth and nurse their pups. In other species the resource might be the social group. Where there is no such resource, sometimes males still have the option of just grabbing the female. The more control females have over mate choice, the more the males have to offer what the females want. There are many strategies for females to increase control over reproduction, both behavioural and physiological.


Anna, have your encounters with human males been biased towards the relatively more enlightened lot? Historically, and even today in a good many cultures, male control over female reproduction is strict, backed up by very credible threats of violence, and sometimes fairly routine violence.

Coming back to the original topics, the patterns of violence conform to what you would expect from an evolutionary analysis. Rival theories (from the social sciences, I don't think creationists have even tried to tackle the subject) don't fit the data so well. That doesn't stop a good number of social scientists from arguing strenuously against evolutionary explanations, usually because the social scientists consider evolutionary theories an affront to human dignity. The perceived insult seems to be based on missconstruals of evolution.


Orwell put you right on the question of origins. Would you mind explaining what your question or argument is about the Cambrian explosion? I have to guess that you think there is no evidence for precursors to the species found in Cambrian deposits. That would be wrong, but it might not be what you mean.

Good points. (Jono, I have since been reading up on some stuff about bonobos and a bunch of other species, BTW, and I'm happy to admit that maybe we are more certain than I thought about non-human species practising recreational sex...my point would be that since we don't really know what's going on in animals' heads or whether they're experiencing the kind of feelings we do, we are limited to what we observe of them. From observation, bonobos look like they must be having a fun time. But anyway...)

The point that strikes me about female sexual pleasure is that even if you argue it's got some reproductive significance, it's nowhere near as reliable as the male response, so even if it was selected for that purpose, can't have been selected for as specifically or for as long.

It is, though, possible that the female response would, under 'natural' conditions, be a lot more reliable, and that the haphazard, or in some cases barely existent, sexual response of perhaps the majority of human females today is culturally conditioned. In most of the West, for much of our history, female sexual response has been denied, ignored or suppressed - mostly by men, although women have colluded with that, sometimes to survive but at least to be accepted in their society.

That's one facet of the male control you mention. The other main ones are reproductive, social and financial. In the West, those are rapidly being eroded, and while have doubts about some aspects of evolutionary psychology, the terror that feminism inspires in some men does seem to be coming from somewhere rather primitive...

hmm. I'm not sure what you mean by violence. you mean like in Saudi Arabia? Afghanistan? that's not the majority you know. and not really my manor.

I find both Creationism and the Theory of Evolution fascinating.

Richard Dawkins was in Portland on Saturday
with a new book. The Greatest Show on Earth

I want to read his books but don't have the time to do so.

I'd have to say, he may be ok as a biologist, but what he gets his fame for - his ardent fusion of science and metaphysical claims - are very Michael Moore'ish. If there is a poster boy for Dunning-Kruger syndrome he's it.

Richard Dawkins fuses science and metaphysical claims? Since when does Richard Dawkins believe in metaphysics? I thought he was an atheist.

He's a fundamentalist atheist, not admitting even the vaguest possibility that he might be wrong. His degree of atheism actually seems to rise to a level of faith that there is no God, complete with an evangelical "need" to convince everyone else that he's right (and a tendency toward treating anyone of differing faith as a heretic, worthy of punishment).

It's possible to be atheistic without completely despising the faithful - unless, of course, you're Richard Dawkins, or one of his disciples...

You are incorrect in your assumptions and portrayal of my statements.
You, I, and the late Pope JP2 all agree. Evolution is a valid theory but it does not explain origins.

The fact that we can delineate between Micro and macro is proof that they are both qualitatively and quantitatively different. This is not saying that Macro is not dependent on Micro.

I will be away for a few days, so don't take my lack of a response as having nothing to say

Actaully you can't. Evolution is something that happens in the present. There is no conciousness or plan. 'Microevolution' is a term the ID proponants have used to try tie into the evidence toward evolution, in order to have thier cake and eat it.

The start of life is another matter altogether. The primordial soup theroy is one posibility for the start of life on earth, though defninately not the only one.

More or less. Apart from laws that put women under male control, as in Saudi Arabia, there are honour killings from Turkey to Pakistan, female genital mutilation in East Africa. Less extreme, until a few decades ago a woman in Britain could only take a job if her husband agreed. Domestic violence was pretty much ignored. The law on rape was extended to sex between spouses only in the last few decades. Before then husbands were seen to have a right to sex. In Afghanistan that is still the case. They recently passed a law that a husband may starve a wife who refuses to have sex with him.


I hope it no longer is. It used to be.


I very much hope not.

I'm sorry if I portrayed your statements incorrectly but I could of sworn that with your other posts, you were promoting Intelligent Design as valid. I also got the impression from your post (the one I replied to), that macroevolution is not well supported. Macroevolution is supported by the fossil record. As for my assumptions, I think it would be informative if you looked up ring species. As I understand it, a simplified explanation is this. Lets say that we have a population of three different kinds of organisms and call them A, B and C. Organism A can interbreed with organism B and thus A and B belong to the same species. Organism B can interbreed with Organism C, hence B and C belong to the same species. However, Organism A cannot interbreed with organism C. Therefore, B belongs to the same species of both A and C while at the same time A and C could otherwise be different species. The only thing that connects A and C via breeding is B. Without organism B, organisms A and C are two different species. This is what is meant by a ring species. The standard definition of a species is that populations of two different species can't interbreed to have reproductive offspring. However, as illustrated, the existence of ring species tend to complicate matters. What this also shows is what happens with enough mutations over time. Instead of three types of organisms living in different populations as illustrated above, lets assume that a similar chain exists (a much longer chain) and that the genetic difference between each organism represents a mutation that occurred as time on. Every organism in the chain with a new mutation would still be able to interbreed with its predecessor before the mutation occurred. However, assuming the original organism did not become extinct (maybe the mutations happened in a population of the original organism because of geographical isolation or whatever), it would not be able to interbreed with the final organism because the genetics have diverged too far. This is why microevolution and macroevolution cannot be delineated. In the above example, there was no specific mutation created a new species. Speciation occurred only because the accumulation of the genetic mutations in the isolated population caused that population to genetically diverge far enough that it could no longer interbreed with the original organism. That's why I said that the difference between macroevolution and microevolution is only a matter of quantity, not quality.

See the following to see that ring species do exist:

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

I believe that Desmond Morris explained this in terms of a means of re-enforcing the pair bond. If I am not mistaken, his argument is that female pleasure would cause the female to be receptive at all times, thereby ensuring that male would stick around to assist with child-rearing... or something on that order.

Because men can do the raping.

Basically, it doesn't matter whether or not the woman enjoys it because she can be raped by a man, that is why it is more important for a man to enjoy sex because he has the sticky out bit not the hole.

Also, this is just evidence that women don't need to enjoy sex that much for there to be survival of our species.

If they did, we just wouldn't be here.