An Evolving Dog Day Afternoon

Indi half-dog-half-kangaroo (either half-kangaroo or half-jumping bean. I think the former isn't as big a genetic leap as the latter is) took me out for a stroll Sunday evening. It was cloudy and chilly. Probably in the mid 60's Fahrenheit (yes, that is "chilly" by a spoiled Southern Californian standard. If it ever gets cold enough here for the car doors to freeze shut, most of us would be unconscious and couldn't careless about using normal people's adjective in describing coldness).

I was bundled up in 3 layers and dreaming of steaming mugs of hot cocoa while furry Indi just went about her business with total indifference to the dropping temperature... Which, naturally, made me ponder about the 'common wisdom' that man is the most evolved species on the planet.

But, of course, man is not 'the most' evolved species on the planet. All the other species (hyperactive furry canines included) are just as evolved as we are! We just evolved differently to cope with our natural niche. And that's the same thing all the other living species do!

Drop an unarmed man into the middle of the wilderness anywhere with no tool whatsoever (knife and flint included), and most likely he won't survive anywhere nearly as well as all the other untooled local species can and do. Indi the kangadog, for one, is so well insulated by her fur that she'll be able to survive winter nights out without suffering hypothermia. Without my clothes, I probably won't be able to do that. And if the cold doesn't do me in, I'd probably starve because I'm not fast enough nor can I see well enough without my glasses to catch a rabbit or a panicky squirrel for dinner. 

Physically Indi the dog and Spooky the squirrel are much better adapted to the Southern Californian land environment than I am (and I can't live in water the way the sea bass and other fish can either). The one luck I and my fellow humans have, however, is that many many moons ago our human ancestor hit the genetic jackpot with brain development. Intelligence. It doesn't give us any physical advantage to other less intelligent species, but it along with the physical convenience of the opposable thumb allow us to improvise like no other earthlings could. We can't run as fast as the cheetahs can, but we thought up and built not only speedy cars but even rockets that can travel beyond our solar system. We can't see as well as the eagles do, but we thought up and created binoculars and even telescopes that can see galaxies forming so far away that it takes light 14 billion years to deliver their sight to us.

Having said that, having intelligence and using it are two different things. Why do I keep hearing people dissing the effort to reduce CO2 gas in the atmosphere and (hopefully) reversing the current global warming trend as if the natural- or unnatural- ness of its cause should make us behave differently? If you know that a moon-size meteor is taking a dead aim at planet Earth, would you not want the scientists to do everything possible to try to prevent the collision - regardless of how natural the event is? If you spot a naturally occurring wall of wild fire making a mad dash toward your house, would you not ask the firefighters to try to fight the blaze? Shall we sit prematurely defeated at home instead of organizing flood containing levees of sandbags when the river nearby overflows its banks?

Why should inaction be excused if man isn't the main cause of the current speedy warming trend (though the scientific consensus is that it is)? We are not trying to save the earth itself. The planet will survive the next ice ages as well as boiled ages with or without us. What the sensible people are trying to do is to do what is humanly possible to preserve the current earthly condition that supports our species' survival... regardless of whether its cause is more natural or man-made. Yes, the earth has seen many naturally heated and iced periods in the past. But why let it lapse into one of those humanly inhospitable conditions again if we can do anything at all that may prevent it???

The earth is going to be here whether Southern California turns into the bottom of a hot ocean or a frigid mile-thick glacier... You can either do what you can to prevent so drastic a climate change that will make it hard for your offspring to live or you can just sit on your hands while condemning others for causing you energy-inconveniences in their attempt to pass along a humanly viable earth to future generations. There is no escaping doom in the latter, whereas the former retains a possibility of survival. And if the driving force of this drastic climate change is more natural and our every efforts to stop and reverse it fails, at least the species will have gone down in fighting dignity rather than as a bunch of defeatists. If only all choices in life can be as clear cut!!!

PS: If you click on the link at 'climate change' to see the EPA's page on the phenomenon, be sure to read the footnote at the bottom of the page. It always bugs me how lay naysayers like to dismiss scientific views for the use of 'passive voice'. In the scientific world 'uncertainties' are measured on a very different scale as they are in lay conversations.

What's In A Star Rating Of An Item On Amazon.com?

Do you know? Do you? I apparently didn't... and I had written quite a few reviews for that site. :o( Here's something you should look out for:



(issue discovered and exposed by Max)
Intelligent Design is a FAILED postulation. It FAILED in its attempt to masquerade as a scientific theory. It even FAILED in the court of law when Christian parents in Dover, Penn sued to remove it from its wrongful imposition in science class at school there (and the trial, Kitzmiller v Dover, was presided and fairly ruled by a Christian conservative judge!).



What Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort are doing is a disservice both to the Christian religion and to science.... and, most of all, to the intelligence of those they are trying to propagate their willful quackery on. Dr. Ken Miller, the guy doing the lecture in the clip below, is a Christian, which means that he and I have a few things to disagree about. What Dr. Miller is NOT, however, is a sucker who abdicates his ethical will to use his god-given (pure figure of speech here) brain and ability to think in favor of lazily believing the BS other gullible human beings want to put in god's mouth.



Questioning what the certifiably unscientific quacks like Cameron and Comfort say about science is NOT synonymous with questioning god. Think about it.... Is there really a bigger blasphemy than to take whatever idiots like these says to be god's truth without even giving a god a benefit of the doubt that something as mystically powerful as that would be capable of sounding as incoherent and self-contradictory as these guys do?

Aside from KPBS's excellent recap of what happened at Kitzmiller v Dover, those really interested in knowing how Darwin's theory of evolution stacks up against the pseudo-science that is 'intelligent design' should see this very lay-friendly 2 hrs long lecture Dr. Miller gave a few years ago?

Die Blumen aus dem Balboa Park: Musing On Observed Evolution

Hmmm... I see the bees had already been through here.

This little Costa's humming bird was a busy glutton when I found him. He was so bent on sucking all the nectar out of the entire bush that he couldn’t care less about intrusive me and my prying camera.

Watching the feeding frenzy, I found myself wondering about how some grade school biology teachers would tell their student about the adaptation of the bird’s beak and the shape of the flower petals. How they fit so well - in some cases - that a certain type of flowers can only be pollinated by a certain type of insects or birds. Biology teachers have to be so careful with how they phrase their explanation or they’ll end up implying purpose where none is really warranted.

Adaptation by natural selection is not a purposeful nor is it a directional event. You don’t have the ‘which comes first; the flower or its pollinator?’ deal here. Both species had to have evolved together since one can’t survive without the other. The flower of a certain shape can only survive to reproduce if there also happens to also exist a pollinator that can physically enable the spores and eggs to meet... and one that is particularly attracted to the flower's particular feature. If such a pollinator didn’t already exist when the first flower with this structure appeared, then the flower would have simply died out... as many flowers and trees and animals obviously had done (and that's why 'purpose' is not inferred. If the process is directional or guided for a purpose, then there wouldn't be 'extinct losers' littering the history of this planet. Life didn't evolved on a one-on-one progressive basis. Many different varieties evolved (and are still evolving), and only those that hadn't gone extinct remain).

The pollinators also benefit from the 'fit', of course, especially when the specific hummingbird's beak type enables it to get to a food source that the other sorts of hummingbirds that have different beak-shape can't physically utilize. Then he can monopolize the food source without having to engage in more competition from other hummingbird varieties. Now... the pollinators come with varieties of their own, of course, and there is competition inside the same species (refining the 'fit') that, over time leads to greater diversity with more variations of petal shape and beak shape being accommodated by each other.

That is, until some abrupt changes in environment come about and cause a drastic drop in the population of one or more of these organisms thriving in a symbiotic arrangement. This 'bottleneck effect' is a big cause of extinction. Some organisms may survive the change, but if there isn't enough survivors to keep producing offspring that can also survive the new environment, then... Adieu, mes amis. Il faisait bien de vous connaître ...

And here I should probably give a shout out to those who love to dismiss the phenomenon of climate change/global warming as 'unimportant' or 'not worth worrying about since the earth won't get destroyed by it'. The really intelligent folks are worrying about it not because they think that the earth won't survive but because they realize that the sort of environment this climate change/global warming is leading to may not be one that OUR SPECIES can survive very well in. See the difference? And it doesn't comfort us any if we will be able to survive but the species that we eat for food will not - which also means that the survival of the species that our food source depend on for food is also of tremendous importance to us! Among other things....

Extinction... is a cold hard fact of life. That extinction occurs over and over again to reflect the change in environment and other 'stress factors' reinforces Darwin's theory. 'Survival of the fittest', be it a bit of a misnomer since a trait doesn't have to be the fittest to survive, it just has to be relatively harmless to the organisms' survival, is NOT a theory. It is an observed phenomenon of nature. A fact of life. The theory that Darwin came up with in order to explain that phenomenon is called 'Evolution by Natural Selection'. And what it says is simple - the diversity of life on earth came about because only the organisms that have the traits that enable (or at least fail to hinder) them to survive and reproduce (passing along those traits to the next generations) in the prevailing environment are spared from extinction. 'Swim or sink, you lot' is what nature says.

The theory hinges on there already being life (it does NOT say anything about how the first life came to be in the first place), a variety of it, for that matter. And it also depends on the traits being capable of modifications (mutations), and that the modified traits can be transmitted from one generation to the next. If possessors of a certain trait aren’t competitive enough and lucky enough to keep surviving to reproduce (not to mention finding a niche like the hummingbirds and the flowers with long and narrow tube-like petals enjoy), they just go extinct. The process is non-directional, but it is by no mean random. It is regulated by the prevailing environment (so if someone tries to tell you that ‘evolution says that things happen at random’, you should immediately look out for flying bullshit and other superfluously inane stuff that surely are about to start splattering around you).
Had life on earth been 'intelligently designed', then there shouldn't be naturally occurred extinction now, should there be? Else, the term should have been modified into 'unintelligently designed'.... in order to fit in with what the evidence says.