Mike Huckabee and Evolution

[Agamemnon]

we also have the most polluted gene pool by about 30-60% of ANY animal population. Where's your pedestal now? I'd say that there are far more dangerous things than predators out there for the human race...war being an obvious example. One you might not be aware of is our little plasmodium friend called "malaria". You honestly can't tell me millions of deaths per year to malaria doesn't count as predation. Another terrifying and impending thing is an airborne plague. Wasn't the black death responsible for 1/3 of Europes population dying at one point? I'd take a few bears and lions over that ANY day if we are talking about individual mortalities.

you can't call that predation as malaria affects all species, and humans do have medicine and vaccines for many diseases that still kill many more animal species than humans. rabies is one example. natural disasters and war do not count as predation. look at human populations, they don't decrease or stay the same year to year. every year they increase. look at many animals species, many of them are decreasing rapidly. humans do not have any predators. you cannot argue with this fact. your argument about war and disease is weak. they may kill many humans, but the population continues to increase.

There are actually two different measures. For those that care for their young and have a conservative amount of young, success is measured by those offspring that go on to have offspring of their own. Therefore successfulness reproductively means you basically have to be a grandparent. For something that spawns en mass, such as insects, it's simply a measure of how many infants survive in the wild as they don't put any effort into infant care.

thats not true from a biological standpoint. the sucess of a one generation is the ability to create another generation. regardless of the care a parent gives to its offspring, if it has unfavorable traits, chances are it will die in the wild. look at coloration as an example. many species change color to blend in with their environments as a mechanism for survival, to avoid predators. if an animals coloration makes them stick out, predators will be able to prey on them. over time, this will decrease the number of individuals with a certain coloration and begin to favor a different trait.

Incorrect. Luck cannot be denied. Do you have any idea how many turtle hatchlings bite it to birds on the way to the water just by dump luck? Do you know how many actually DROWN in the waters along the beach on their way into deeper water because they are so tiny? A bad wave hitting or a bird dumbly selecting you is all it takes for your 'fitness' to go out the window. Of these lucky ones, fitness is a big issues though. It's not a matter of a single generation passing genes, as you seem to fixate on. It's the accumulation of many, many reproductive events eventually leading to a more solid set of traits for their environment.

that is very weak argument. dumb luck means nothing in evolution. just because a few individuals have luck does not mean they will significantly affect the gene pool. eventually a trait will arise that protects turtles from the effects of "big waves." im not focusing on one generations traits, evolution takes place over the course of many years. you seem to contradict yourself. "of these lucky ones, fitness is a big issue." like i said, luck means nothing. eventually these unfavorable traits will be cease to be passed on to the next generations.

Actually humans had a rapid evolution leading up to modern man. If you think the 1 million years it took to get from some 'cave man' and cycle through several different species is anything but very rapid, you are incorrect. People are not in stasis, as many people think. Think about it this way: We have undergone a HUGE environmental shift, making it easier on us. We also have intellectual pressures as well as artificial stress that is off the charts. Surviving offspring doesn't necessarily mean the genes will be passed- do you think someone with severe downs syndrome or autism has much chance of reproduction? Sorry if it offends anyone, but they aren't exactly reproductively competative.

i did not mean the evolution from cave man to homo sapien. i was discussing the present day evolution of man. it will takes generations upon generations for even the smallest evolutionary to take shape because we dont have random mating, etc. also, just because you the individuals that have downs' syndrome arent mating actively doesnt mean that the disease will not show up. downs' syndrome is caused by crossing over in meiosis. a couple who do not have downs' syndrome can produce a baby with downs' syndrome.

also, luck can be denied. science is about hypotheses and being able to get the same results over and over, not just being lucky a couple times.

 

[Vampy34]

Of course we have predators. We have just gotten smart enough to know how to put a fucking bullet into the predators skull.

 

[Dan the Man]

Ummm.... why are we automatically assuming evolution is correct, it still is a theory. Look into it before you unquestionably believe what you get in a high school class room. Believe it or not there are serious questions that evolution has yet to answer.

Some of the things that evolution can't explain are irreducibly complex devices, the Cambrian explosion, and the origin of the human soul. Until there is a good explaination for those I have to think that it cannot adequately explain life.

 

[Glen]

Ummm.... why are we automatically assuming evolution is correct, it still is a theory. Look into it before you unquestionably believe what you get in a high school class room. Believe it or not there are serious questions that evolution has yet to answer.

Some of the things that evolution can't explain are irreducibly complex devices, the Cambrian explosion, and the human soul. Until there is a good explaination for those I have to think that it cannot adequately explain life.

okay

im going to chime in to say one thing

learn the fucking scientific definition of 'theory'

 

[Dan the Man]

It means they can't prove it beyond a resonable scientific doubt, if they could it would be called a law. For example, boyle's law, ideal gas laws, etc... Those are laws because you can prove that what they say is true, at least that's what it means scientifically

 

[majesty]

I actually posted the defintions and such in my first post (bottom of previous page).

I didn't say Malaria was a predator. I compared it to the effects of a predator having a certain mortality rate within a population. It was just an example among many, but probably the most deadly in modern times. War is still a mortality factor no matter what you wanna call it. World War 2 killed a great many people, more than any consistent predation could on a population within such a short time.

So you're telling me that if I take care of my offspring for 20 years, for example, it doesn't matter if they day at 21 without offspring, I am still a success? The moment you actually start pouring energy into the success of your offspring you are measured by that success. I don't know what you think about that, but according to every ecology/biology class I've ever taken that is what the thinking is.

that is very weak argument. dumb luck means nothing in evolution.

Let me give you another example of luck affecting evolution, okay? How about this: You have hypermelanisation in a population. The odds are 1 in 1 million that this genetic mutation will arise. Even if you have 3 million individuals, it doesn't promise this trait will ever occur. It is simple luck that it will occur. Now, lets say even further that this trait makes the individuals stand out like a sore thumb in their given environment. Guess that lowers the chances even further of that trait being passed. Now, what happens if there is an environmental shift and their food source moves onto a darker colored nearby substrate (ie volcanic ash fields)? Hypermelanisation is a good thing now...unfortunately, the odds are still low that it will arise. Now if you have voracious predation to these lighter colored animals to the point where it severely cripples the population. The odds are STILL low that it will arise. Either the hypermelanisation will arise, by luck, and the animal will reproduce (assuming no reproductive pressures, etc) or the species will go extinct. Just based solely on the 1 in 1 million chance. You're telling me that scenarios like that AREN'T LUCK?

You are right in some instances though- given enough time, logically, any trait can arise and spread. That's assuming, of course, you aren't on a limited timeclock. Also, the turtle example should still stand. If you have a turtle that is a faster swimmer as an adult, it doesn't mean it is going to escape the jaws of a bird on the beach or live through the predatation in the sea. THAT is luck. Stephen Jay Gould has my back on this one.

also, luck can be denied. science is about hypotheses and being able to get the same results over and over, not just being lucky a couple times.

Just because science operates that way it doesn't mean something studied by science has to. Luck is a factor in evolution whether you like it or not.


We do have random mating today, there is just no factors eliminating the weaknesses from the gene pool. Didn't I say something like that?

we also have the most polluted gene pool by about 30-60% of ANY animal population.

 

[majesty]

Just for the sake of it:

http://www.smogon.com/forums/showpost.php?p=877454&postcount=46

You really should be reading that if you think that it is 'just a theory'.

Sorry for double post, I thought it should be pointed out to Dan the man a little bit better where to find the information that Glen was asking him to learn.

 

[Surgo]

Ummm.... why are we automatically assuming evolution is correct, it still is a theory. Look into it before you unquestionably believe what you get in a high school class room. Believe it or not there are serious questions that evolution has yet to answer.

Why are we automatically assuming quantum electrodynamics is correct? After all, it is still a theory.

Why are we automatically assuming gravity is correct? After all, it is still a theory.

As for your "questions"...

Some of the things that evolution can't explain are irreducibly complex devices

Um, what?

the Cambrian explosion

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/03/4/l_034_02.html

Doesn't seem to be a problem to me.

and the origin of the human soul

What the fuck? The human soul is not a scientific concept. It is not falsifiable. Hell, it doesn't even have a proper definition.

 

[majesty]

@ Surgo: Irreducible complexity was smashed by microbiology as well. Their main thing was the 'flagellar motor' which has some 50 parts last I checked (ie proteins, enzymes etc all working together) and works like a mini outboard motor on flagellates (correct me if wrong on the group, please). It was a VERY elegant arguement...til they actually asked a microbiologist. He showed a structure on a bateria that had only a fraction of the parts. By the logic of irriducible complexity, that shouldn't work at all. Yet here it was, with no extra parts; reduced and working as a sort of 'spear' to gain prey.

Also @ the Burgess shale: You cannot even use that as an example. Of all the biological fields I'm formally trained in, Paleontology is one of the most in depth ones I've gone into. Hell, I've even done field work AT the TYPE SITE for the Burgess Shale (I'm special). The reason we cannot use this as an arguement, Dan the Man, is because as we move further and further from modern times the 'scope' on what is actually going on really decreases. So to just say out of the blue from a handful of sites in the Canadian Rockies and Montana (those ones suck though) as well as the Chenjiang formation in China is absolutely retarded. It's like taking a photograph of something more complex than we can imagine. It is ONE ecosystem at ONE 'snapshot' in time. It's nice to see, but to just assume it came from nowhere is retarded. Punctuated equilibrium be damned, there is more to the story than creationists should be gouging science for. Good on you, Surgo, for knowing about it.

 

[Cathy]

Just for the sake of it:

http://www.smogon.com/forums/showpost.php?p=877454&postcount=46

You really should be reading that if you think that it is 'just a theory'..

That post, while helpful, does mix up theories and the phenomena they explain. Gravity is not a theory; it's a phenomenon. A theory is a model that makes falsifiable hypotheses that are supported by all of the available evidence. The theory that explains gravity is general relativity.

Similarly, evolution is a phenomenon: the shifting frequencies of alleles in a gene pool. There are various mechanisms which cause this shift, and they are theoretical in nature. The theory that explains evolution is often called the "modern synthesis" and it includes such forces as natural selection (by far the most important), genetic drift, etc.

 

[Dan the Man]

Reserving this space for later, I don't have time to write anything now, but will return and continue discussing later. Most likely somtime over the weekend.

Quick thoughts:
- Irreducible complexity says that you take a specific part of a cell and look at what forms it. According to evolution it had to be formed by a series of small changes each improving the part of the cell in question.
Will talk about in more detail later

-Cambrian explosion: If evolution were true then one certainly wouldn't expect so many different fossils to appear in such quick succession because evolution takes time. It seems that an evolutionary fossil record would have its fossils more evenly distributed

-Soul: If evolution explains the origins of human life, it should be able to explain everyting about us. Evolution can't explain the human soul

Again, these were just quick thoughts. When I have time I will come back and elaborate more

 

[Surgo]

Evolution can't explain the human soul

Maybe because the human soul is a literary concept and not something that actually exists? lol.

I'll wait for you to get back for the others.

 

[majesty]

@ Colin: As far as theories go, these ARE theories. I think you misunderstand. Theory is basically an idea that has a siginificant amout of 'proof' (ie. evidence) but has yet to be disproven. If you are looking for a theory that is more on the verge of becoming LAW than Evolution, you might be out of luck.

@Dan: before you finish your *yet to be editted post* I'd first like to know your level of education and if in Univeristy, what in. I'd love to know just how much you know. I'm not being an ignorant ass, I have friend in hardcore biology stuff that would defend you to the death...just gives me a bit of clairvoyance into you thought process here.

 

[Agamemnon]

I didn't say Malaria was a predator. I compared it to the effects of a predator having a certain mortality rate within a population. It was just an example among many, but probably the most deadly in modern times. War is still a mortality factor no matter what you wanna call it. World War 2 killed a great many people, more than any consistent predation could on a population within such a short time.

Thats like a natural disaster or a disease. They are very few in frequency. Now while wars kill people, you cannot compare them to the predator vs. prey relationship. This is the equivalent to a natural disaster such as a volcano occurring and destroying a significant part of a population. I still dont understand where you are going with the war example. So it kills many humans, so what? The population continues to grow.

So you're telling me that if I take care of my offspring for 20 years, for example, it doesn't matter if they day at 21 without offspring, I am still a success? The moment you actually start pouring energy into the success of your offspring you are measured by that success. I don't know what you think about that, but according to every ecology/biology class I've ever taken that is what the thinking is.

A generation's is success is defined by how many offspring it leaves. If your offspring die, you are not successful; if they live, you are successful. When the second generation begins to reproduce, their success depends on how many offspring they leave. Thats when natural selection comes into play. Nature will select those offspring best suited to survive, the ones with the most favorable traits. I do not understand what your above post means, but thats what success is defined biologically.

Let me give you another example of luck affecting evolution, okay? How about this: You have hypermelanisation in a population. The odds are 1 in 1 million that this genetic mutation will arise. Even if you have 3 million individuals, it doesn't promise this trait will ever occur. It is simple luck that it will occur.

I see what youre saying, but its a little more than simple luck. It all depends on how the subunit ribosomes read and translate the genetic code given to it by the mRNA. If there are deletions, substitutions, etc that affect the order of nucleotides, then a genetic mutation will take place. The trait could theoretically occur in all 3 million individuals, it is just a matter of probability.

Now, lets say even further that this trait makes the individuals stand out like a sore thumb in their given environment. Guess that lowers the chances even further of that trait being passed. Now, what happens if there is an environmental shift and their food source moves onto a darker colored nearby substrate (ie volcanic ash fields)? Hypermelanisation is a good thing now...unfortunately, the odds are still low that it will arise. Now if you have voracious predation to these lighter colored animals to the point where it severely cripples the population. The odds are STILL low that it will arise. Either the hypermelanisation will arise, by luck, and the animal will reproduce (assuming no reproductive pressures, etc) or the species will go extinct. Just based solely on the 1 in 1 million chance. You're telling me that scenarios like that AREN'T LUCK?

This is where natural selection occurs. The tendency for specific alleles to become unfavorable, or in your example favorable, is what evolution is about. When the food sources move to the volcanic ash fields, the lighter colored individuals will die faster and leave the darker colored individuals, although they are rare. Overtime, the darker species will outnumber the lighter species as they are more fit to survive. Thats why random mating is so important, because it keeps the gene frequencies high, meaning a wider variety of traits exist. Scenarios like that aren't luck, they are scenarios of evolution.

We do have random mating today, there is just no factors eliminating the weaknesses from the gene pool. Didn't I say something like that?

Thats exactly what I said. No predators to eliminate unfavorable traits. No competition. None of the other factors other species have to live through to survive. Humans in no way have random mating. If it were random, males or females would be reproduce with many different mates chosen at random. We instead choose to mate with one individual of our choosing. How many interracial children do you see. If random mating was in effect, the frequency of interracial children would increase. You cannot argue with that.

 

[majesty]

Thats like a natural disaster or a disease. They are very few in frequency. Now while wars kill people, you cannot compare them to the predator vs. prey relationship. This is the equivalent to a natural disaster such as a volcano occurring and destroying a significant part of a population. I still dont understand where you are going with the war example. So it kills many humans, so what? The population continues to grow.

Have you ever SEEN a predator prey relationship? While people's desire for sex and therefore their ownage in population is staggering... hold on, I gotta reiterate:

Now while wars kill people, you cannot compare them to the predator vs. prey relationship.

This is the equivalent to a natural disaster such as a volcano occurring and destroying a significant part of a

1. In what world could a single volcano kill as much as world war 2? Or as much a Nuke in Japan?

2. Malaria in the affected regions of the world is devastating. Don't you ever say it isn't. Just travelling there makes us do profillactic treatments AND after treatments that suck so hard people avoid it. By the way, when I said Millions, I didn't mean something like America, canada or most of Europe (ie neglectible amounts). This is a location friendly disease. I mean hardcore deaths in that area. Try to neglect that.

When the food sources move to the volcanic ash fields, the lighter colored individuals will die faster and leave the darker colored individuals, although they are rare

What if the trait (I hate the word allele, sorry, it doesn't = trait), like in my example, doesn't allow for a likely presentation of the favorable trait in the new environment? What if we make it...say, 1 in 1 trillion? EXTINCTION. Is that luck, if they simply don't encounter that "X-factor"?

 

[just some chick]

Additionally, the argument made by evolutionists saying that apes evolved into humans through natural selection is flawed. With natural selection, all organisms without the advantageous trait are wiped out and the new organisms with the beneficial mutation continue to live on. If this is the case, why do monkeys, birds, and all lower life forms still exist? If it is in their best interest to mutate and grow into a higher organism, why do they not do so?

Because you adapt when you need to, it doesn't necessarily have to happen. Birds and monkeys and "lower life forms" don't need to become a "higher organism" in order to continue to reproduce and survive. Sharks have not changed for millions of years because they seem to function completely fine already. Natural selection clearing away the mutants and leaving the normal ones is just as much natural selection as the normal ones dying out and the mutants living - it has to do with which has better survivability in whatever changes happen in the environment. If I remember AP Biology correctly, that is.

Also an important thing to note is that we didn't necessarily evolve from monkeys as in modern-day monkeys, that is a very false misconception. For example, we did not evolve from chimpanzees. Rather, both humans and chimpanzees evolved from a different species, and for whatever reason the two began to branch away from each other and continued to evolve from there (we started eating meat? started living in areas that weren't wooded? etc etc etc).

Not to mention the DNA difference between us and chimpanzees is a mere 2%. If that small change can cause such a noticable difference between the two species, it is really that unlikely that evoution is possible?

 

[Surgo]

Gravity is not a theory; it's a phenomenon.

Well, sort of...

When Majesty and myself are referring to gravity as a theory, what we're really referring to is the theory that it's attraction between two masses that's causing phenomena such as "when I jump, I'm pulled back down". An unfortunate mix-up in that gravity is referring to a couple different things but that, at least, as what I'm referring to when I speak of gravity. It's a popular (mis)conception.

 

[Agamemnon]

majesty, i dont understand where youre going with the malaria. i understand that it is still wreaking havoc in places like africa, but what point are you making about it. that it kills people? people have adapted to it. sickle cell anemia is an evolutionary breakthrough that has arisen due to malaria. please explain what you mean further.

 

[Brain]

- Irreducible complexity says that you take a specific part of a cell and look at what forms it. According to evolution it had to be formed by a series of small changes each improving the part of the cell in question.

"Irreducible complexity" is nonsense. The only way to show that a structure is "irreducibly complex" is to give an exhaustive account of all thinkable predecessors to the structure and show that none of them is likely to occur. And to show that a predecessor is not likely to occur implies the same process, recursively. That has never been done because it is unfeasible: there is an absurd amount of thinkable evolutionary paths for any given structure and to claim that they are all impossible is a very, very, very strong claim. Looking at the sheer amount of possibilities, an irreducibly complex structure would be an oddity. Typically, ID "scientists" take a few paths they deem obvious, show that they're unlikely and call it a day. And then real scientists search better and find very plausible predecessors. Pretty much every single example of irreducible complexity has been debunked, showing how poorly thought out the theory is.

-Cambrian explosion: If evolution were true then one certainly wouldn't expect so many different fossils to appear in such quick succession because evolution takes time. It seems that an evolutionary fossil record would have its fossils more evenly distributed

You know, this is as if when Einstein saw that there were flaws in the Newtonian model of physics, instead of coming up with relativity, concluded that gravity didn't exist. Get a clue. Evolution is pretty much impossible to deny, just like the existence of gravity, but that doesn't mean we are aware of all its subtleties. Cases like this only give us material to study so we can understand it better.

It's not like it's hard to imagine how something like the Cambrian explosion could occur. Look at Surgo's link, there are a few hypotheses.

-Soul: If evolution explains the origins of human life, it should be able to explain everyting about us. Evolution can't explain the human soul

That's because the human soul does not exist. You can't even define that thing.

 

[Dragontamer]

About Mike Huckabee: a person could perfectly be a great president even if he disbelieves evolution. Sure, it's not very reassuring, but there's worse.

I agree. The worst case I can see is him legalizing (or forcing) Intelligent Design in public schools... which is pretty bad... but thats for Congress to decide and for the Courts to hopefully throw out. If it does come down to it however, I'll be one of the first to petition it out.

Anyway, my thoughts on Evolution. Computer simulations of Evolution were so sucessful that they have been developed into a modern AI technique.

Here is an introduction for Java programmers interested in this subject.

Here is a paper describing the use of Evolutionary Algorithms as applied to learning the values of Chess pieces.

(One of my favorite examples), Robocode robots are evolved and eventually beat a handcrafted bot.

CoreWars programs (another simpler programming game) are also evolved in this article. So far, the results of this experiment indicate that it is possible to evolve predatory strategies. The number of wins and ties against all warriors generally increases with each generation.

Indeed, this is not only applied to games. This is a real life AI technique with multiple sucess stories. In this laymans introduction,

If genetic algorithms use the array of configurable gates in an FPGA as their digital chromosome, then they can be used to "genetically evolve" the chip for a particular task. This has already been accomplished; at Stanford, Koza and Forrest Bennett evolved an FPGA to sort seven numbers by size. After fifty generations were created, a sorting algorithm was found which was incredibly faster than one patented 35 years ago.

. If you don't want to read the whole article, an FPGA is pretty much a chip that straddles the line between hardware and software. It is a hardware chip, but all the internal connections are programmed with software.

The best quote, which is the one that I've been searching for because it is one of those mystical and scary moments in AI is this:

After a certain amount of evolution, the program worked brilliantly, but what is downright scary is this: the FPGA only used 32 of its 100 available logic gates to achieve its task, and when scientists attempted to back-engineer the algorithm of the circuit, they found that some of the working gates were not even connected to the rest through normal wiring. Yet these gates were still crucial to the functionality of the circuit. This means, according to Thompson, that either electromagnetic coupling or the radio waves between components made them affect each other in ways which the scientists could not discern (Taubes 1997) What this means for the world of artificial intelligence is that computers themselves can do things internally which even the human beings who designed them do not understand.

In essence: the program evolved to a point where yes... it worked. But no one knew how it worked. So yes, believe in "Intelligent Design", but it is rather hard for you to prove that Evolution is not intelligent. After-all, a computer simulating Evolution already can produce devises humans do not understand. This hasn't just been "proven", it has already happened over a decade ago.

And thats what? A couple of weeks of simulated evolution with a sample size ~100 inside a weak Computer from 11 years ago? What can a couple BILLION years of real evolution do with a sample size in the trillions of organisms participating around the world do?

 

[majesty]

majesty, i dont understand where youre going with the malaria. i understand that it is still wreaking havoc in places like africa, but what point are you making about it. that it kills people? people have adapted to it. sickle cell anemia is an evolutionary breakthrough that has arisen due to malaria. please explain what you mean further.

Well let me ask you: Do predators kill people?

Does Malarian Kill people? Especially people en mass?


Does that still equate to moratlity?
Do they not get own, on unprecidented mass, by it?

people have adapted to it

.

in referenece to malaria: LOL. Are you serious? Malaria kills more than basically any modern force, saving lumping together all the types of cancer? Also, lumping all cancer together is STILL a laugh from TRUE biological standards.

sickle cell anemia is an evolutionary breakthrough that has arisen due to malaria. please explain what you mean further.

What are you even talking about? SCE is a disease...not a breakthrough. SCE is a disease whereby the haemocytes cannot carry oxygen because of their, sorry, inferior shape (sickle, not circular). Meanwhile, Malaria attacks your liver upon entry from tropical mosquito salavary gland transmission. It then moves on to attack red blood cells...which then rupture and basically say a big "GG" to either your red brain or blood cells...or both.

 

[obi]

Sickle cell anemia is essentially a side-effect of a gene that aids in resistance to malaria. If you have one "copy" of the gene (inherited from one parent), you have resistance to malaria and no sickle cells. If you have two "copies" (inherited from both parents), you get sickle cell anemia.

 

[majesty]

Sickle cell anemia is essentially a side-effect of a gene that aids in resistance to malaria. If you have one "copy" of the gene (inherited from one parent), you have resistance to malaria and no sickle cells. If you have two "copies" (inherited from both parents), you get sickle cell anemia.

Wow, Obi. I hadn't really thought of that. However, that isn't a specific 'resistance' to Malaria. That happens to be circumstantial. Infact, unless you contract malaria, SCE is harshly detrimental...those that carry ONE gene of it actually feel it in spades if they happen to be African- they have an observed margin of difference, and contract it at WAY greater rates. So before we start calling it an 'adaptation', I think we should think about things. If having 1/2 legs (thinking people, since we are shallow) is positive to 1 million out of about 6 billion people, would EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE 6 billion people want 1/2 legs just to 'resist' a disease? I doubt it.

 

[obi]

No, but if a trait had a 50% chance to give you 1 leg, and a 50% chance to make you less likely to die to a disease like malaria, you could see why the trait wouldn't be completely eliminated. Evolution isn't so much what I want as what my ancestors needed. This is, I feel, a good example of "luck" influencing evolution on a specific scale, but leading to fairly predictable numbers on a general scale. If you are lucky enough to have only one gene passed, you're more likely to have children (and these children are more likely to have the same crapshoot you face), but if you are unlucky enough to have both genes passed, you are significantly more likely to die of SCE than you would be of malaria with no copy of the gene.

 

[majesty]

Thank you Obi, for throwing down another (and more eloquant) example, using said oppositions arguement against him. What a badass you are. This could be why I'm not an English major and have to have people proofread my papers...