evolved people don't procreate

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I would say that pandas are probably too "specialized" to become a dominant force in the food chain of their habitat.

Specialization "breeds" extinction, if you will.

Bat are the most successful species(plural) on earth besides humans.

Chiccken and cattle do not count because they expanded thanks to us.

Panda is a stupid model if you ask me:

They are originally evolved from carnivorous bear species; so they need to sit and chew this stupid plant all day to get their food needs.
Their mating is too complicated too.

Says the human.
I'm sure pandas would see human mating behaviour as far more needlessly complicated.

Coincidentally (large population speaking) it is the bats that are the prime suspect as the reservoir species of Ebola. Fowl and cattle also, are favored paths, or 'bridges' that pathogens follow to us.

I'm grateful for all the counterarguments. Good as an antithesis for me to work on. Which is a bit ironic when you think about evolution, because the way I see it evolution works in just the same way as a debate or the way your own thinking on a subject evolves when you get counterarguments. The cheetah and the gazelle evolve in tandem. You need the resistance or the counterpart to evolve.

As for the stagnation as opposed to perfection, maybe stagnation is perfection. I know that's not the way the common biological perspective goes. But I am approaching in from a holistic perspective, and I tend to question any commonly held definitions of things. This is found in the book History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell:

And as for humans being very numerous, I don't think that really matters in the matter that I discussed, because we are at the top of the foodchain. When you have a foodchain, as far as I know, there has to be a decrease in mass from one layer to the next upwards, because of loss of energy. So if we eat meat there has to be a bigger mass of the animal we eat. Well, we eat vegetables as well so that complicates the matter. I really don't know, just throwing thoughts out there. I'm not convinced one way or another.

double post

Last edited by tomato on 07 Nov 2014, 4:10 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Humans are not 'on top of the food chain.' We are no longer, by and large, the prey of larger predators (though that occasionally changes when we leave our civilization without weaponry), but we rarely kill and even more rarely eat the large predators that used to eat us fairly often. We evolved as a mid-level predator/scavenger, primarily surviving on plants with a little sessile meat (carcasses killed by other animals, mollusks, etc) thrown in for our brains.

The reason that you see 'less biomass in more evolved species' is threefold: first, you are making the mistake of conflating trophic level with greater evolution. Cheetahs and gazelles are equally highly co-evolved in an arms race of speed. The fact that cheetahs eat gazelles does not make them more evolved.
Second, as you hinted, the second law of thermodynamics and trophic level: T2 means that the vast majority of what we eat goes into simply keeping us alive: keeping us from falling prey to entropy by shedding heat in exchange for chemical energy and homeostasis. Very little of what we eat translates into built flesh for the next trophic level to eat; this means that each trophic step up results in a decrease in biomass by an order of magnitude or more. The level below simply cannot *support* more. Third, you are including inorganic matter in evolution. Non-living matter does not evolve. In order to evolve, a population must reproduce; its offspring must have differential success; and there must be copy errors. Without those factors, there is no evolution.

As for 'perfection,' wtf are you talking about? "Perfection" according to what standard?

It's quite clear to me that inorganic matter evolves. How would life ever have come about if inorganic matter hadn't evolved prior to that event. In fact you could say that inorganic matter created life in much the same way humans create technology. And we clearly see an evolution in technology. Even thought can evolve.

Once it was able to evolve, it was alive.

edit: also, inorganic matter has never produced life. All life as we know it is organic (that is, carbon-based).

I don't know. I've seen theories of abiogenesis that even describe complex carbon-based molecules developing due to a type of natural selection (still according to the usual rules of organic chemistry of course) even before they became the first pro to-cells.

[quote="tomato"]I feel like I'm talking to the TV when I chat on this forum. Bunch of regurgitators on here.

Here's one thing you might want to think about. I think you would have the idea that humans have evolved out of apes, and apes out of some more primitive animal, gradually though with no boundary, going back to a fish or something, to some plant or algae and to some microorganism. And prior to that it was some minerals. And prior to that only God knows what. Now, we can see that for every step upward in the evolution there is less mass. There's much more dead mineral matter in the universe than there is living matter. And there is much more plant mass than animal mass. Much more plant eating animals than meat eating etc. So the idea that you'd procreate more the more evolved you are doesn't seem to make any sense to me. Bacteria procreate more than plants, plants more than animals.[/quote]

If you are going to consider bacterial replication aso procreation you may as well consider every cell in the human body to be procreating. Size and biomass has nothing to do with evolution as a whole, unless adaptation calls for it. Same for technology, society etc. Humans are only considered relatively well evolved because we are well suited to our environment. If that environment suddenly changed, e.g. nuclear war contaminated the planet, we would become suddenly very poorly adapted. Cockroaches on the other hand, being radiation resistant, could be considered better evolved in this new world.

Now, the ability to procreate is essential to passing on your genes. Passing on genes is biologically speaking the meaning of life. By combining two genotypes to make a new one, variation in a population is created. This genetic variation is key to survival of a species. If we suddenly stopped the process of reproduction for humans, we would soon go extinct - viruses and other pathogens can quickly adapt, as they evolve too. A common genotype in a population may find that it is more susceptible to pathogenic infection. This is because pathogens are most successful when they can infect the most hosts possible, thus increasing their own population and gene frequency. By reproducing sexually we protect ourselves against one viral strain targeting the entire human population. In conclusion, procreation is essential in many ways to us being "evolved".

It didn't need to be cellular to have been alive. Indeed, it could not have been.

That is an entirely strange contradiction.

How can a species evolve if it does not procreate?

I will not be notified when a reply is posted. I don't care if anyone answers the question.

It's a misunderstanding by the OP of the word 'evolve' and 'evolved.'