gambit:- You, personally, are not evolving into a better human being, but what makes you think the rest of humanity isn't?
Evolution takes a very long time - and it needs pressures to make it happen - without a good reason to select one model over another there will be very little change over millions of years. Crocodiles, for example, are a damned good fit to their niche - so they haven't changed. Early humans were a less good fit - we needed to walk more upright to conserve energy (waddling like a chimp is inefficient, walking on two legs is very efficient), we needed larger brains (ours are measureably larger than proto-human's) and so on.
Were you expecting Aunty Flo to suddenly grow longer arms so she didn't keep asking you to get things off the top shelf? IF, given a very large number of generations an Aunty Flo had a better chance of survival with longer arms than without then yes, all other things being equal, longer arms might develop. One of the issues is that all other things /aren't/ equal - there are so many competing pressures that change is generaly slow and very hard to predict.
This has a bearing on the evolution/creation argument.
Creationists often point to examples of great complexity, claiming that it couldn't have evolved at random.
The reduction of these complex patterns is a good example of how there is often a fairly simple underlying driver.
Oh, and the other thing that annoys me is that creationists claim evolution is random. It isn't. Mutations are random /within the pool of available starting points/. That pool has been selected by other pressures for billions of years. The starting point isn't random at any point, it's based on something that previously worked - non-functioning examples having been discarded along the way.
HeartlessMachine:- Would the total risk of infection be less if he had all howevermany piercings spread out over a longer time? I see no reason to think it would.
Rules preventing food manufacturers claiming health benefits for their products go back a very long way, and with good reason.
In the UK there's a brand of tea called PG Tips which originally stood for Pre-Gestive (or somesuch), intended to allude to a baneficial effect on your digestion. That was a minor player in what was otherwise a huge see of competing claims - few of which were verifiable by consumers.
There's one at the entrance to The Eden Project - it's quite amazing, but sadly unsuited to having kids climb all over it, which is, of course, exactly what they wanted to do. We didn't let them - but in a long queue a climbing frame might have been handier.
I wonder whether the lower rate of twins in the subcontinent is fully explained by the results not being skewed by IVF, or whether twins die more readily being generally smaller and less robust. It'd be interesting to see whether the proportion of boy twins is much higher than girl twins. In a country where girls are still seen as a burden in some rural areas, twin girls might be the straw that broke the camel's back.
Evolution takes a very long time - and it needs pressures to make it happen - without a good reason to select one model over another there will be very little change over millions of years. Crocodiles, for example, are a damned good fit to their niche - so they haven't changed.
Early humans were a less good fit - we needed to walk more upright to conserve energy (waddling like a chimp is inefficient, walking on two legs is very efficient), we needed larger brains (ours are measureably larger than proto-human's) and so on.
Were you expecting Aunty Flo to suddenly grow longer arms so she didn't keep asking you to get things off the top shelf? IF, given a very large number of generations an Aunty Flo had a better chance of survival with longer arms than without then yes, all other things being equal, longer arms might develop. One of the issues is that all other things /aren't/ equal - there are so many competing pressures that change is generaly slow and very hard to predict.
Creationists often point to examples of great complexity, claiming that it couldn't have evolved at random.
The reduction of these complex patterns is a good example of how there is often a fairly simple underlying driver.
Oh, and the other thing that annoys me is that creationists claim evolution is random. It isn't. Mutations are random /within the pool of available starting points/. That pool has been selected by other pressures for billions of years. The starting point isn't random at any point, it's based on something that previously worked - non-functioning examples having been discarded along the way.
Though I'm sure she meant it the other way round, in my cash-strapped state it made perfect sense.
In the UK there's a brand of tea called PG Tips which originally stood for Pre-Gestive (or somesuch), intended to allude to a baneficial effect on your digestion. That was a minor player in what was otherwise a huge see of competing claims - few of which were verifiable by consumers.
Of course - that'll be next, hovering doughnut vendors. Or possibly a delivery service carrying doughnuts slung under helium balloons.