Evolutionary Progress

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Originally Posted by moeur

I don't believe in gravity; the Earth sucks.

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:lol:

(BTW do you EVER go to sleep ?)

I don't believe in that either.

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Originally Posted by mendhak

Should I stop believing that the planets in our Solar System revolve around the sun?

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My best response to this, unfortunately, is: Hunh?

I'm too lazy to review my post to see if I said anything that dealt wtih the solar system, and I don't see how that has anything to do with whether I think the concept of species is a poor representation of the real state of biology. So, what was that about?

It was something of an attempt to create an analogy of what I thought of your statement regarding the representation of species in biology and therefore my attempt to create a large run-on sentence such as this one.

I think what I was referring to was the concept itself. It may be an observation by us humans, true, but it's an observation nevertheless, and it exists. It's something like understanding the true nature of the universe. You never will be able to do that as long as you're part of it. But we observe what we can observe.

And similarly, while earth was considered to be static (literally) at one point, and that other objects revolved around it, that has now changed.

I am not sure how the analogy of the solar system came in, but that was my line of thinking at the time.

I think it would have been a better analogy to say that you don't believe that Pluto is a planet since he's talking about a definition of species vs. the definition of planet.

Ok, I sort of see where you were going, but I can't say the analogy was one of your better ones. After all, my point was that species doesn't exist. We defined it as existing based on a faulty understanding. Condsidering the terribly blurred lines we find between many existing species, surely there must be a better way to talk about creatures....or maybe not. Perhaps species are close enough. But since the lines are so blurred, at what point a single species is considered two seems to me to be a matter of academic interest only. If some group got together and looked at two populations of fish, they might be able to agree that they have now become two different species, with little change between them. Was it the last little mutation of a pigmentation gene that finally pushed them over the edge from being subspecies to full fledged species?

The system is dynamic, though the change may be too slow for most of us to watch it. We have a dynamic system forced into a static nomenclature for the simple reason that we thought the system was static when the nomenclature was created.

Yeah I am currently reading: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/...612116-2729243 and he says sort of the same thing . . .

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4156544.stm

Indeed Shaggy - exactly what you were saying . . .

It's all in the genes.

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

Ok, I sort of see where you were going, but I can't say the analogy was one of your better ones. After all, my point was that species doesn't exist. We defined it as existing based on a faulty understanding. Condsidering the terribly blurred lines we find between many existing species, surely there must be a better way to talk about creatures....or maybe not. Perhaps species are close enough. But since the lines are so blurred, at what point a single species is considered two seems to me to be a matter of academic interest only. If some group got together and looked at two populations of fish, they might be able to agree that they have now become two different species, with little change between them. Was it the last little mutation of a pigmentation gene that finally pushed them over the edge from being subspecies to full fledged species?

The system is dynamic, though the change may be too slow for most of us to watch it. We have a dynamic system forced into a static nomenclature for the simple reason that we thought the system was static when the nomenclature was created.

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Funny you should mention fish. I breed, or am attempting to, african chichlids from the rift lakes. Most of the species are almost extinct. Now we're running into problems. Apparently a bunch of different scientists studied a bunch of different sections of the lakes. Unfortunatly they ended up defining a bunch of different species of fish that were actually the same fish. they only move a few meters from where they are born and this caused color and size changes based on the rock that they were born on and the group they grew up with. Now all of these so called speices are breeding with each other in aquariums and no one really knows what the originals look like. This is unfortunate because most of them will be extinct in a decade and the only way to save them is aquarium breeding. Why do Africans crap in a lake rather than digging a hole and burrying it?

because at some point some idiot would dig up the hole you just filled in