Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question
Posted: Fri Jun 26, 2015 2:08 pm
Selene can answer Flabbergasted herself, but I would like to answer as well. It's clear by now that Flabbergasted is promoting Creationism, appealing to one Intelligent Designer. He's too careful to state his position plainly, so he makes allusions to "engineers" and "complexity" and "wishful thinking".
Poison glands are an evolved efficiency of a process that originates in the "vomiting" or "spitting" of digestive juices or saliva, respectively. The distinction between animals that do such things and those that don't is initially tribal, cultural. One group of the same species for any number of reasons separates sufficiently from another to develop its own method of feeding. As a result of their behaviour, their internal balance of processes changes, and thereby a new evolutionary path is found. Enzymes detect the internal change and adapt their own behaviour accordingly, their handling of DNA and RNA changes, transcription is affected. This eventually leads to some glands specialising in being just poison glands. The detail of it all is too complex for us to ever quantify, because the working of the structures is intelligent. That is to say, objects at all levels of the hierarchy have minds - molecules and cells and organs. Minds work associatively, they are abstract and decoupled from the physical processes that underpin them. The clue is in the simplicity of the starting point (in this case "vomiting" and "spitting"), not the eventual complexity that is so dear to Creationists.
Note that the example of the toad fishes, some poisonous and some not, contradicts mainstream evolutionary theory. If it really was "survival of the fittest", one or the other variety of the fish should be extinct. The fact that both species co-exist shows that they are both "fit" to survive and did not evolve through necessity. They evolved culturally, evolution is driven by intelligence of the objects concerned, not the intelligence of some mythical Creator.
PS: I agree with the poster in Derailing Room - if this evolutionary discussion is moved to its own thread, fine by me. It's an important discussion.
Poison glands are an evolved efficiency of a process that originates in the "vomiting" or "spitting" of digestive juices or saliva, respectively. The distinction between animals that do such things and those that don't is initially tribal, cultural. One group of the same species for any number of reasons separates sufficiently from another to develop its own method of feeding. As a result of their behaviour, their internal balance of processes changes, and thereby a new evolutionary path is found. Enzymes detect the internal change and adapt their own behaviour accordingly, their handling of DNA and RNA changes, transcription is affected. This eventually leads to some glands specialising in being just poison glands. The detail of it all is too complex for us to ever quantify, because the working of the structures is intelligent. That is to say, objects at all levels of the hierarchy have minds - molecules and cells and organs. Minds work associatively, they are abstract and decoupled from the physical processes that underpin them. The clue is in the simplicity of the starting point (in this case "vomiting" and "spitting"), not the eventual complexity that is so dear to Creationists.
Note that the example of the toad fishes, some poisonous and some not, contradicts mainstream evolutionary theory. If it really was "survival of the fittest", one or the other variety of the fish should be extinct. The fact that both species co-exist shows that they are both "fit" to survive and did not evolve through necessity. They evolved culturally, evolution is driven by intelligence of the objects concerned, not the intelligence of some mythical Creator.
PS: I agree with the poster in Derailing Room - if this evolutionary discussion is moved to its own thread, fine by me. It's an important discussion.




