Are we on the RIGHT planet?

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Nicely said Idaho. But now a question for you. Do we have to discover this purpose, or does God give it to us at the proper time? And do we have to work at it or do we just fulfill his purpose for us whether we know it or not? How does that work?

My viewpoint in it has been changing lately. I absolutely do not believe in evolution as creator, or that 1 species can randomly evolve into another. That may be anthropomorphising (if that's spelt right I deserve a gold star!), but I see far too much planning for it all to be chaos.

However, does not mean that a creator can't write in "upgrades", things to come online and play a bigger part down the road. A thought that has intrigued me these past few weeks is that autism could be one of those upgrades. It's always been there, playing it's part, but figures seem to indicate that it's becoming more and more common in recent years. Whether this is evolution or devolution isn't easy to say, but personally I think that perhaps it is an improvement "coming online" across the species, and in 20 or 50 or 100 years time, everyone will be discernably on the spectrum, and benefitting from it.

I think differently... We are on the right planet at the right time, as everything is just a coincidence...

i think evolution can be seen in many different ways, mine is lodged in numbers and combinations, i think we are all a different combination of the same building material, and these combinations are a based on a trail and error approach.... in other words, we try and fail, but then we try and fail better..

this can be seen all around us, nature is full of errors, everything from freak mutations to evolving illnesses... nature is also full of mutations which have spread over the globe like wildfire due to their success..

one can see it as controlled by something other then Human genetics, but if it is controlled by something else wouldnt you expect better results? even Human genetics are now close to making it possible for humans to expand their life time into the 500's..we are also on the verge of making our bodies better suited for self repairment of the flesh, and the list goes on... i find it very hard to believe in a being that makes everyone like they are today... so i stick with evolution without a creator....i dont feel like a lab rat anyway:)

one interesting idea though is that all the living beings here on earth are controlled in part by the things that have happened before them (chain reactions) and so our evolution is somewhat predetermined..... actually that would make our reality non linear which i believe it is...all my evidence seems to point that way....

one can also think about a wast common conciousness which guides this path of ours onwards towards something.... personally i think evolution is allot like me, i change whenever i meet a problem...and there are always problems to be found...to bad i get so easily overwhelmed:P

OK, just to note: Natural selection is observable in the world around us. We've never observed macroevolution, but (artificially induced) natural selection can be seen just by going to your local dog breeder. And there is nothing about natural selection that goes against even the strictest interpretation of any religion. Macroevolution is what some people have trouble with; I personally think it is too unlikely to happen in the 6 billion year time frame we're given, without either divine intervention or universal consciousness or some property of matter we haven't discovered yet that causes it to become more complex even when, on the way to complexity, it becomes temporarily less likely to reproduce (yes, I'm one of those odd "intelligent design" people)...

That said, natural selection isn't as simple as that. "Like breeds like" and "the dead don't breed" may be basic concepts, but you're forgetting (as Darwin forgot) that individuals almost always live in groups of other individuals, rather than competing on their own. Darwin has, for example, no explanation for altruism--no explanation for the dog that dies to save its owner's life. Different species; different DNA; where's the natural-selection benefit for the dog? According to Darwin, none. According to Darwin, interspecies altruism is an evolutionary mistake that comes from mistaking another species for your own. Darwin also doesn't have an explanation for homosexuality or asexuality--sexual orientations that should be the worst possible arrangement for reproduction, and die out quickly, but are still around and still very common. Granted, back then he might have filed it away under "crazy people", but there were still old maids and bachelors and clergy back then, and enough of them, and analogues of them having existed throughout all history, that he really should have considered that problem. He didn't. He also doesn't have an explanation for autism (or any neurodiverse arrangement) still existing after all these years.

You could say "recessive trait" and leave it at that, but it's not that simple. We already know that autism doesn't have one bit of DNA that causes it. We know it's multifactorial and polygenic (that is, different bits of DNA can create autism in different people; and those bits are found all over their DNA and not just in one place; and there's probably more than just DNA to it because, although autism is highly heritable, the strength of the autistic traits is not--so the prenatal and perinatal environment probably has an effect too!).

Answer to the dilemma: Add sociology. Consider the natural selection of entire societies--family groups, small towns, any little group of individuals that share social customs. They needn't be genetically related or even of the same species; what's being passed down isn't genetic information (though that's passed down too) but information. Successful societies survive; unsuccessful ones die out, change their customs radically, or are absorbed into other societies. Darwin didn't consider that human beings are a tool-using, information-preserving species, and that's why his theory breaks down when it comes to human society (it breaks down partially with some animal societies, too, but humans are particularly striking).

Societies live because their members live. That's the interconnection to regular natural selection. People who don't reproduce may not be passing on their own DNA, but they're making their societies more successful, especially since the energy they don't spend on children gets spent on something else--inventing something, passing on knowledge, raising other peoples' children, creating resources. And when they make their societies stronger--societies composed of people to whom they are most likely genetically related--they pass on their own genetics indirectly, through relatives. It's beneficial to have non-reproducing members in a society, because that way, when you have children, the children are more likely to survive, and they'll have more and better tools and information that will help them do so.

Return to autism. We know autism and creativity, autism and genius, and autism and mental illness all run in the same families. It hasn't been proven, and I don't know how it could be, but I believe, as many people do, that some of the same genetics that makes autism also makes some very beneficial traits. Autism doesn't make you more likely to reproduce; we all know that. But a society with autism genetics in it is better off than a society without those autism genetics; and it doesn't matter that the people with more of those genes than most people may not reproduce as much.

It makes sense to support non-reproducing members of society. They don't even have to contribute directly. Let's say we've got somebody who's really, really autistic. He can't contribute as much as an asexual neurotypical person (you can never say he contributes nothing)--not directly--but by his very existence he strengthens the society. When a society supports vulnerable members, people become more altruistic. The society becomes more interconnected. If an individual knows that when he becomes vulnerable, others will take care of him, he is more likely to take care of others. That means that the contributions of people with various difficulties that might otherwise compromise their survival are not lost. Those differences can be as small as clumsiness or bad eyesight.

In a society where no one takes care of anyone else, generalists who can do everything for themselves are favored; but because there are only so many resources any given individual can allocate, such generalists, genetically and developmentally, do not have extreme strengths. Whereas, in a society where weaknesses are compensated for by others through a social contract, it is possible to develop an extreme strength. The nerdy cave-man who invented fire probably had other, strength-specialized cave-men to keep the sabre-toothed tigers away from him while he did it. And in a society where every individual, no matter how vulnerable he is, has his needs fulfilled (including the need for respect), the social contract is strengthened, specialists are encouraged, and new information increases exponentially.

Back to autism: Yes. This is why there are still autistic people, possibly even more of them now than fifty years ago, after all this time. It was profitable to us, as a species and in our small groups, to keep autistic genetics in our gene pool. It is actually profitable to have vulnerable members in a society, if you have the resources to take care of them. And those vulnerable members give back a thousand times what you gave them in the form of social progress...

Actually i think you are very wrong here, when it comes to Altruism one can look at this links as a good example of why it would be passed on:

http://dienekes.50webs.com/blog/archives/000128.html

Homosexuality if it is proven to be genetic, could very well be a dormant gene in the non-gay parent(s) and so could be passed on and the child could end up with a active gene...this is also the case for families where they have a genetic illness such as Cancer which is dormant in some and active in others, a gene might also be active but be cancelled out by another gene.

http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2008/10/ba ... ality.html






Autism if proven to be genetic could very well be a number of genes acting together, this is as i said above due to the dormant and active versus active thing...but that does not mean everybody has them as we dont all share the same genes, this is because we are all subject to evolution and in that we change as i have changed from my parents ect...this we can see in genetics very clearly... ofcourse all genetic traits do depend on triggers...some are however triggered from the very start by the subject being born into our reality..








actually as one cannot be sure that whatever genetic trait you may mean is passed on via relatives, it might be a mutation matrix that has occurred in that individual alone and so when that person dies it probably dies with him/her.

also what you are saying here is just theory, we dont know what makes a successful society as opposed to a non successful one, and how do you judge that? are all "dead" societies "non successful"? what about the Roman empire, did it die? was it successful? none of these questions you can answer with 100% certainty, all you can give me is theories which hold no real bearing since all the records we have of society compromise something like 10% (in relations to time) of human civilization...