So if chased by other sea predators, or if our water hole dried up, we became ‘land rovers.’ We hit the beach a crawlin’.
Tiktaalic was an ‘Acanthostega’ technically, and Carl Zimmer in Discover June 1995 explains how it came to be. “Coastal lagoons were a new ecosystem in the Devonian Period, full of dangers and opportunity. The plants that grew in them created a rich stew of organic matter that a dense ecological web of animals could enjoy. But as in today’s wetlands, bacteria used so much oxygen that sometimes life became hard for gilled fish. Some of them developed lungs and so could breathe air when their gills couldn’t function.”
“And some of these fish with lungs, developed shoulders, hips, limbs, and digits. They couldn’t support themselves on land, but they could grasp the rotting branches in the water and climb past them, rather than simply trying to wiggle through. They could walk on the bottom of the wetlands, their guts supported by the water. They could paddle their oar-like feet.”
So we made land and God said “it was mighty up and walkin’ good!”
Then sometime along in the Triassic period, nearly 200 million years later, God must have made the dinosaurs, though the Bible says nary a word about them. Maybe that’s because the dinosaurs were one of his biggest mistakes and he was reluctant to mention them to the early Bible writers. They were in the way of the little mammals and had to be eliminated. So they became extinct.
Here is where creationism has its first great problem.
What does a “hands on creator” do when he’s tired of his creations? He eliminates them by “extinction.” So extinction is a nice word for “God killed them all” (or allowed it to happen – same thing if you’re all powerful!). So in the case of the dinosaurs, God appears similar to a spoiled child, who, when he’s tired of his toys, he busts them up. They’re all gone! The only remnants we have are the birds. Somehow God missed them.
Now, once God ‘smoted’ the dinosaurs, the mammals were off and running. He let them scamper around for another 200 million years from the Triassic, through the Jurassic, Cretaceous and finally getting bored; he made man late in the Cenozoic. Unfortunately, along the way God had to eliminate an awful lot of species to make room for man. But, of course the earth’s only so big you know, and some just had to be put down. Yes, but most people don’t believe God would deliberately destroy his creations out of boredom, or because he errored, so evolution must be the truth. So let’s see –
One of the first arguments Anti-evolutionists use for an excuse is the “complicated eye” - or vision. Way too much for mutation and selection alone, they say. Maybe not.
McClatchy Newspapers, November 7, 2007 in Washington, Scientists have traced the origin of eyes back to a transparent blob of living jelly floating in the sea about 600 millions years ago.
That creature, the distant ancestor of a modern fresh water animal known as a hydra, could only distinguish light from dark.
But that simple trick was such an advantage that it was passed on from generation to generation of the hydra’s cousins and their myriad descendants. It was the precursor of the wildly different, ever more complex eyes of fish, ants, flies, giraffes and people.
US News November 10, 2003 reports that around 550 million years ago, “the first eyes probably belonged to a trilobite. Eyes equal better predators; predatation means more evolution.”
So the eyes have it. Their evolution seems a lot simpler to have taken place than the creationist made it out to be. Notice the driving force, ‘predatation’. The victims would develop better eyes also for self-defense. Mystery solved.
In the September 11, 2000 issue of US News and World Report Charles Petit describes the work of Jordan Pollack and Hod Lipson on the Golem Project at Branbeis University. They’re into “Automatic design and manufacture of robotic life-forms.”
To get machines to design their machines, Pollack and Lipsom borrowed a strategy from Nature: Darwinian evolution, played out not in a warm pond but in the software of a computer. The computer was programmed with a set of designs that were no more than disordered collections of struts, ball joints, and electric motors, plus electronic circuit parts for a nervous system. It randomly altered, or mutated, the initially useless designs. Next, the computer chose the “fittest” mutants – those that showed hints of locomotion – while killing off the other, in a digital version of natural selection. It further mutated these chosen few and then repeated the process over hundreds of generations, gradually evolving more capable robots.
Some work by hunching forward like inch worms, other drag themselves along by walking on elbow-like protrusions, and still others creep sideways, crablike. But they do move – proving how evolution can work. These designs evolved without human aid.
In the January, 2001 issue of Discover, Brad Lemley explains computers can write advanced software, design other machines, predict who will pay their bills, evolve and adapt. It’s called “evolutionary computation.”
Here’s how it works. A genetic algorithm “mates” the first population of individual-solutions, combining them in artfully randomized ways to “breed” slightly varying off-spring-solutions. A so-called fitness function then evaluates the progeny by “looking for a combination that is nearly optimal in cost, simplicity, speed, or any other collection of qualities the programmer desires.” The fitness function then kills off the parents (silicone evolution turns out to be as merciless as its biological counterpart) and picks the best solutions from the off-springs ranks. Those solutions mate; the fitness function sizes up their children, weeds out the losers and mates the winners, then they have children and so on.
The task ends when the off-spring all start to look alike. That means the best solution has been reached.
The implications for life are – pass it on down and get out of the way!
In the article Melanie Mitchell of the Santa Fe Institute, brings up an interesting thought. “If computer systems can evolve and adapt, it does become harder and harder to say there is some fundamental difference between biological life and machines.”
In the same article Bill Joy, Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems says, “in just 30 years, our machines may surprise us in intelligence, then realize they no longer need us.” Not good! However, the genie’s out of the bottle and if we’re not sharp, we’ll have trouble, because evolution drags us kicking and screaming into the future, whether we like it or not!
It’s everywhere, all the time! Evolution happens on the inside, too. January, 2010 Discover explains, “The battle for survival is waged not just between the big dogs but within the dog itself, as individual genes jockey for prominence from the moment of conception, a father’s genes favor offspring that are large, strong and aggressive (the better to court the ladies), while the mother’s genes incline toward smaller progeny that will be less of a burden, making it easier for her to live on and procreate. Genome-versus-genome warfare produces kids that are somewhere in between.”
“Not all genetic conflicts are resolved so neatly. In flour beetles, babies that do not inherit the selfish genetic element known as Medea, succumb to a toxin while developing in the egg. Some unborn mice suffer the same fate. Such spiteful genes have become widespread not by helping flour beetles survive but by eliminating individuals that do not carry the killers code. “There are two ways of winning a race” says Caltech biologist Bruce Hay. “Either you can be better than everyone else, or you can whack the other guys on the legs.” Hmmm! Can any of you “creationists” tell me why God had to go to these extremes?
What about the real world, is evolution still going on?
Science Digest – July 1982. “The Kilihi Rock Wallaby is an entirely new species only 60 generations old. They are descended from a single pair of Australian Wallabies that fled from a Hawaiian zoo in 1916. The Wallabies’ adaption to their new environment was not only