I think you will find - if you could be bothered to look, which you clearly didn’t do before posting - that you are wrong.
As for the rest, it’s point-and-laugh time:
Obviously they wouldn’t originally need to - they’d only need to know that there wasn’t food here, and have some get lucky. Your ability to think is so shallow it’s comical.
So you are ignorant of a large swathe of animal behaviour…
… and you think all marine organisms are fish.
You should put that at the start of every post you make. It’ll save people the trouble of having to work out whether you are worth taking seriously.
There is no need for active cognisance when we are dealing with natural selection that leads to evolutionary changes within a population. There is a need for variation between individuals, that some individuals get more grandchildren than others (differences in fitness) and that the differences between individuals that affect fitness are heritable. If you have these three, there will happen evolutionary changes within the population.
As previous comments have shown, there are (blind) mechanisms that lead to barriers in reproduction, in other words speciation. You do not need active cognisance at any stages of the process. The need for active cognisance seems to be a misunderstanding caused by the use of inaccurate language. For example, ‘improvement’ is a word that may be understood in a wrong way. That word might be used, for example, when a new variant is better adapted to its current environment than its ancestors (it has a higher fitness). It does not mean that the new variant is otherwise ‘better’ than the other variants, it is just different in some feature that affects relative fitness in that environment. In that sense, humans are not somehow ‘improved’ or ‘better’ creatures compared to flies or bacteria, we are just different. Luckily different enough that God has communicated with us in ways that would not be possible for flies or bacteria. It is a matter of faith or speculation whether God originally intended to create us as we are now, through the process of evolution.
It seems you may underestimate the potential of millions of years of evolution. If small changes accumulate through generations, we eventually get major differences. A large number of mutations happens every generation, so small changes do happen. The mutations are not ‘good’ or ‘bad’, they just may affect fitness, differently in different environments. Some may be detrimental in all environments, others detrimental in some but not in other type of environments. Some mutations increase fitness in particular type of environments (not necessarily elsewhere) and ‘blind’ natural selection ensures that the new variant (mutation) gets more common in that environment.
Before you also get flippant you might try using that thing inside your skull. It’s just so simple for ou! No need to think it through, just insult. You have already made up your mind about me, that much you have made very clear. But you have not watched evolutionary theory grow. You only know what is known now, and all the hype that goes with it. You think you knw it all? Think again (or at all)
And there was I thinking (hoping) you were going to ignore me (it would be more polite)
Quite the utter non sequitur, since math was the topic.
Our informal club was around in 1985, and we were aware of others. I don’t recall encountering the new use until 1991, which was when YECers started to try to join our group.
I don’t think there was any formal movement or anything very much public. I have just one book somewhere in storage that was about intelligent design from around 1990 and it made no references to creationism, nor did it use any of their or later ID terms, though there was some overlap in arguments.
Our majority conjecture was that some creationist picked up the term from one or another group like ours and reacted like, “Ooh, shiny! Me take!” though some considered independent origins.
This is the only one that I think fits with what he meant, which I think was relocation to a different geographical location. Those boil down to better water sources, competition for food, and improved safety (shelter) (standard needs hierarchy). The first and last can be the result of environmental change due to climate or geological processes and/or their interaction.
Anyone who has done backpacking or remote camping where living off the land is a significant element will understand all three of the above categories.
Because they weren’t couch potatoes with no awareness of the world and searches for food followed where the best was. Herd migrations are rarely sudden radical shifts in movement, and where they are it can be shown that their ancestors didn’t have to go as far to find the better seasonal conditions, but as climate shifted the seasonal sources grew farther apart and so the herds’ journeys became longer.
Via roaming and also via chemical scent. There are salmon species that can find the outflow of the stream they were born in while still 200km out at sea, a feat that requires distinguishing parts per trillion; that’s kind of the upper outlier as far as I know, but a lot of animals can sense really low concentrations of important chemicals.
[We did an experiment on this once after completing our limit when clamming on day; we’d brought fried chicken for lunch and started tossing the bones in the water to see how many crabs we could attract. While the tide stood still only one showed up, but as it shifted and a slow current began across where we’d tossed bones, crabs started coming from farther and farther away. We couldn’t detect the smell of those bones held at arms’ length, but the crabs were detecting it from a hundred meters away!]
Doesn’t need to, all it has to do is recognize that a certain type of creature has eaten its kin in the past.
No, it’s natural selection in an elegant system that is so impressive that studying evolution has drawn people to God.
Doesn’t it depend on the species? I recall some orphaned ducklings at a farm that didn’t know to migrate, they even ignored the flocks of ducks that rested in their pond on the way south. It was only after a freezing night that they joined a flock that started late. An ornithologist said that without that flock the young ducks would probably have headed south because facing south mans facing warmth, and they would seek warmth, but that they would have had no idea of where to go without that flock.
The amazing thing was that a duck only has to follow the migration route once and it then knows that route for life!
Actually he’s right, just not on an individual organism scale; instinct is somehow built up over the life of a species or even genus. The obvious culprit is DNA, but how that works is a mystery.
Maybe this time the point will get across – that’s better stated, I think, than my attempts have been.
Last year sometime I read an article by a definitely secular – my assessment was that he was agnostic – scientist who argued that upright bilateral symmetry was evolutionarily inevitable and the most like form to develop intelligence. I remember not being as impressed by his arguments for the latter as for the former; I wish I’d bookmarked the article. My reaction was one of delight, thinking how awesome it was that God set up a system that would produce something like us given time.
BTW, this is a point where I see God as able to experience surprise and delight; He began the universe with just the right parameters to get life and intelligence, but didn’t know ahead of time the precise series of all events, and thus He could enjoy watching His handiwork unfold (and with trillions of galaxies, billions of years suddenly wouldn’t be boring) – and could also take delight in watching the reactions of His angels and sharing their awe and wonder.
Given the observed mutation rates and assuming that has been relatively constant, it sometimes surprises me that there isn’t more diversity. We should at the very least not be surprised by what we do find.
I will admit I was thinking of geese (Fly away home film?))
I think the migration of the Monarch Butterfly would be harder to explain away.
However, I thank you for not just dismissing my comments on this occasion.
At the risk of derision, I am bewildered as to how the DNA production of amino acids produces blueprints for structures and / possibly, traits? There must be more to it than that. Having mapped the Human Gnome are we any nearer to understanding this?
As far as I know we still haven’t got a clue. I saw an article that argued that somehow instincts are transferred from the mother in the womb, but that fails for birds and fish.
My personal conjecture is that Jung was onto something with his collective consciousness – that each species has its own and it interfaces with new brains when they’re developed enough.
I am relieved. It means my arguments are not just hot air.
To use an analogy
You have found the letters, even some of the words, but the actual meaning is still missing.
How can you compare sequences and not know whether you are comparing English with French?
How can you claim progressive growth (change) if you do not know how the blueprints actually work?
For all you know it might be as I have suggested the equivalence of a “plug and play” module whereby all Nature has to do is find the right lottery ticket and “bingo” we have a full set of wings! (Fully functional complete with manual)
If you do not know how the system works you cannot claim that DNA sequences are not building blocks with all the repercussions that would entail in terms of construction and heredity. (Algorithms be d@mned)
So you are allowed to be flippant, but you object to others doing the same? I wonder if you are capable of noticing how hypocritical you are being, or how, given your quoted comment above, how inadvertently comical.
P.S. I’m not an expert, but I think instinct arises from the brain and nervous system development of individual animals, which is controlled mainly by regulatory DNA but also influenced by environmental factors and epigenetics. As such, instincts vary across individuals and, since they can affect survival chances, evolve. The lesser effect on survival of instinctive behaviour as opposed to more physical aspects of development may make the evolution of instincts slower and harder to assess.
About instinct, if there is a nasty fly in the house that keeps on harassing me I go after the fly in an attempt to kill it. And it is amazing such a small creature with it its microscopic brain manages to escape the many times from the violence directed at it. Can it be learned or is it hard coded in its genes, my bet is on the latter.
Definitely - longer-lived social species have less need of a migration instinct because fledgelings can learn from the rest of the flock. Short-lived asocial species that migrate as individuals rather than as flocks need better migration instincts.
Migrating butterflies are a better example, because some of them simply don’t live long enough to complete an entire migration cycle. They can’t be taught migration routes by earlier generations, since no individual butterfly makes the trip twice. In some species no individual even makes the trip once, it takes multiple generations to cover the complete migration route.
Migrating butterflies are indeed a good example of migration instinct.
For example here, some butterflies like Painted lady and Admiral, arrive during late spring or early summer. The painted laidies may have born in North Africa and leave that area when thistles dry in spring - summer is dry in that region. After some days of flight, part of that at high altitudes where they are carried by jet streams or other strong winds, they have reached areas that have green vegetation and emerging thistles and nettles (the food plants of larvae). They lay their eggs and die. Later their offspring are born.
During early autumn, the next generation or during some years, maybe even the third generation feels that winter is approaching and prepare for migration. They feed and wait for a suitable weather. When a northern wind starts to blow during a chilly autumn morning, the butterflies rise high and head towards south with the wind. They are active through the winter so they cannot winter in areas with snow and freezing conditions. That means they have to fly several hundred, probably even thousands of km before they have reached their wintering areas.
All springborn butterflies have died before the autumn so they do not have other guides than their instincts. This is really amazing, especially if we think that their brains are tiny.
The selection pressures for this kind of behaviour are hard - those that remain in areas of dry vegetation cannot get any offspring, those who stay at northern latitudes until the winter will die. Only those that make the correct seasonal migration survive.
DNA doesn’t produce amino acids, nor are there any blueprints.
We have understood the mechanics of amino acid production, protein translation, and protein folding for a while now. The hardest of those has been predicting how the linear amino acid sequence folds into a 3d shape, and this is due to the complex interactions of hundreds of amino acids. However, recent advances in AI have made a lot of headway:
Amino acids: We scavenge a lof of amino acids from our diet, and a subset can be produced de novo if needed. These reactions are carried out by proteins, not DNA. All of the enzymes and biochemical pathways are known.
Protein translation: This is also a well understood process. In these reactions, mRNA is the chemical substrate where proteins and tRNA’s bind to produce proteins, which is a polymer of amino acids.
Many, many experiments have been done to find all of the human mRNAs that are responsible for producing proteins, and these have been mapped back to the genome. The map of human genes responsible for proteins is one of the most rock solid maps we have of the genome.
As we have now established that the exact working of DNA in terms of manifestation is a mystery you are making a grand assumption
The standard response is that fly have a much shorter reaction time (as opposed to us) so it is just avoidance.
You are reaching.
AI by definition is not explanation but simulation, and guesswork at that, seeing as the way amino acids construct is still a mystery. how can you program AI if you donpt have the working to go from?
But is just a map with no understanding or detail. You still haven’t the first notion how amino acids, proteins or anything else can construct 3d objects.
We can recognise a bone cell , from a skin cell etc but how they know which bone or what area of skin they belong to is anyone’s guess.
There’s tons of info on that page on that gene, including where in the genome it is located, exons, introns, transcript isotypes, variation in the human population, comparison to the same gene in other species, and so on.
I agree that is pretty stupendous, but scientists are not completely in the dark. Much of the cell signalling during embryonic development has been unraveled. But there is no easy way to learn about developmental biology, it is insanely complex and therefore demanding.
A book, which may be in your public library, directed at non specialists but still very detailed, is
Regarding flys, I have known people who can routinely catch flies by hand. they have observed or learned the evasive response the fly always reflexively makes and grabs at that point. No real brains needed on the fly’s part to evade, just reflex. and not a lot of brains needed to catch, judging by those I have known who catch them.
Because every single observation so far has pointed to “progressive growth”.
It’s like building fighter planes: if your opponent builds a plane with capability X, you don’t have to have the blueprints to know that X is possible because you observed it. If that capability comes from a more powerful engine, you don’t need the blueprints to know that they somehow increased the thrust available.
Except for the fact that nothing of the sort has ever been observed. A “plug and play” scenario would involve a sudden drastic change in forms in the fossil record, and if that were common we should have found something like it, but so far nothing. Everything points to incremental change, and computer simulations show it works. Positing some other phenomenon without evidence is useless and violates Occam’s Razor.
