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Originally Posted by Highdesertsuby
Here is something for you to consider about the whole "survival of the fittest thing". When you get right down to it, Darwinian evolution requires new information to be added to the DNA (ie, developing legs where none existed before). No living thing can develop a feature that was not coded in the DNA beforehand, since any feature requires a DNA "blueprint" in order to develop. Mutations cannot do this since a mutation is damage to an existing fragment of DNA. Damaging something does not make something new. Every microbiologist and geneticist will tell you that there is no known process that can add new informaiton to DNA...period. "Survival of the fittest" is a phrase that means nothing, and is actually contrary to Darwinian theory. If evolution progresses because of mutations and copying mistakes in DNA, then each generation that carries these DNA errors are inferior to the unaltered originals. They would no longer be "the fittest", and therefore, would not be the ones to pass their genes to the next generation. All theory aside, just look at nature today...when a member of a group of animals develops some weird genetic mistake, it is immediately isolated and it usually dies without reproducing. Then your "mutation" gets lost and not passed on. One good real-world observation is better than a million pages of untestable theory.
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You're just gonna have to deal with the fact that I get most of my science from from TV since I graduated from Junior College, but I'm still going to post in this thread.
Aren't there a multitude of examples where animals have evolved? Aren't there moths and flies that have such short life cycles that by simply changing their environment, their color or their wings change accordingly, etc? I just saw a show this week where they showed a bird that only lives in Hawaii and they showed the bird it supposedly evolved from and their bills were complete different due to the food sources available in their respective environments. Is the National Geographic channel lying to me?
And Joel, I imagine that mutations are actually encouraged by evolution, since they are part of the recipe. Mutation is a trait just like any other that evolution controls. If there weren't mutations, we couldn't evolve. And don't let language like, "encouraged" and "controls" bug you. It's not intended literally, at least to me. Evolution is a force of nature and is lifelike so it's easy to speak of it figuratively. Also, it's hard to identify mutations because they are slow gradual processes. Fish don't just sprout legs overnight. But slowly over time, they do.