Real_Trouble
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quote:
ORIGINAL: seeksfemslave
I say that if the environment changes in such a way as to threaten the survival of a given species then that species will become extinct not change into another species. Happens all the time.
I'm glad you say that. Do you have any experiments to back that up you can show me?
And here, I do not mean observing it happening once; that is a standard of proof too low for the claim that "species will become extinct not change into another species".
Your bar of proof for this claim is to show that this has NEVER happened in any circumstance. I suspect this is likely to be unattainable; we should know the limits of our knowledge.
Obviously speciation is not a well-understood process, but that's not an argument against it, either. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Right now I would suggest that we have tentative evidence for it, but not much evidence that it is impossible and never occurs.
quote:
ORIGINAL: seeksfemslave
Keep throwing humans into the middle of the ocean and they will drown. They will not revert to fishes. Am I wrong?
That's a rather unique take on selective pressure; so you are suggesting all evolution must occur on a single-organism basis within a very short timeframe or it is completely impossible?
I would suggest science agrees strongly with you on the fact that this is far too short of a timeframe for evolution to appear.
I regret that we cannot perform the experiment, but I would be interested to see the impact on humanity of gradually rising water levels and necessary high levels of interaction in aquatic environments over a period of approximately 500 million years, however. Do you think we would see the exact same result (everyone dead from drowning) here?
Also, what makes you think a fish is the way humans would evolve, or was that just a red-herring example (pun intended)?
quote:
why evolution doesnt occur all the time and everywhere.
Actually, it does; evolution is a random stochastic process. This means that there will be periods of intense change and long doldrums where nothing occurs all interspersed with periods of moderate activity as well. In fact, I would suspect evolutionary progress follows something of a power-law distribution, though I don't claim to know enough about it to prove that. However, this is to say that long periods with no observable effect are, in fact, precisely what this kind of behavior predicts!
Other good examples of stochastic random processes would include stock prices. Have a look, for instance, at Microsoft.
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AMSFT
Notice, in the ten year view, there is a long period of relative inactivity from mid-2002 through 2006, yet intense changes that dwarf that period in the late 90s and early 2000s. This is typical of this kind of process; it is truly random, non-gradual, and non-linear.
I think the problem here is that you are conceptualizing evolution as a linear instantaneous process, so I'll turn the question around to you:
Why should all organisms necessarily evolve at once from one species to another, without exception, at the same time?
Why should evolution only possibly occur over extremely short (your drowning example) timeframes, and not much longer ones?
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