Your population is evolving RIGHT NOW!

Okay, if allopatry is far and away the easiest way to speciate, but it's very difficult to do on a continent, then how did continents become so speciose? I don't buy that sympatry ever actually happens, no matter what the models say, and although I don't doubt that parapatry is real, I have a hard time believing that it happens enough (or quickly enough!) to be responsible. Am I just vastly underestimating the availability of rivers and mountains and other things useful in allopatry?

A while back, I read The Selfish Gene. At one point, the famous peacock's tail was brought up along with a few interesting and plausible just-so stories. And then Dawkins threw out a question: Why is it that in many human societies, it is the FEMALES who are bright and fabulous?

I couldn't even think of a decent just-so story, though it seems like clothing is pretty essential - the jump from "drab female" to "take a look at THIS!" and back again can easily be made several times a day.

"We are conducting a study on general knowledge of and beliefs about evolution. We would appreciate your participation in completing this survey, which will only take a couple minutes of your time."

—Michael Shermer, Adjunct Professor, School of Politics and Economics, Claremont Graduate University

I'm probably not the first or last to say "self-selection error" and "sampling bias", but let's see what happens.

I wonder what the fossil record will look like in several million years: a giant carbon stain from the man-made carbon situation, and then nothing? Thinking about this makes me sad. Am I being alarmist? How adaptable is wildlife to humanity, really?

Anyone else ever think about this sort of thing?

Alright, there's something I've always wanted to ask this community for a very long time, but never did. First, it seemed too desolate sometimes, and I wasn't sure it'd be of any use to post it, though now I see there's still some activity in this community every now and then. Second, I wanted to wait until my course in Human Evolution was finished, to see if perhaps that would help answer my question, and indeed it did, but only a small faction of it. So, I figured now would probably be a good time, because I've completed that college course, and since it was only for Core Class credits (I'm an English major at SUNY Brockport, and just had my first semester September to December), and it's doubtful I'll take another anthropology class. Also, I have the time to write it now, and I very much doubt I'll read any more of Origin of Species for the foreseeable future (slowly got to Chapter 7 last year, before I gave up and stopped renewing the book from the library). So here it is:

Why do humans have the hair we have?

That's the main question, but I have a lot of sub-questions relating to it.

First off, why did our ancestors have fur? Was Africa colder? For that matter, why do a lot of modern animals that live in warm climates have full-body fur? It would seem to just make them hotter and less able to be active during the day, and it seems counterintuitive that many mammals, such as tigers, lions, monkeys, and most rodents living in warm climates would have fur covering their body, and it seems odd there aren't more mammals in warm climates such as Elephants, Hippos, and naked mole rats, animals that have very little fur cover. I've heard something about fur helping to minimize how many cuts and scrapes an animal gets if the animal, but it seems like that's not a good enough reason for an animal in a hot climate to keep fur.

Second, why did our ancestors lose much of their fur? Obviously fur doesn't preserve very well, so it's not clear how much hair our various ancestors had, but it's quite logical to think our early ancestors, perhaps even further back than Lucy's Australopithecus afarensis, had a full covering of hair head to toe that was nearly the same thickness and length everywhere, with slight deviation. But obviously no modern human looks like that, and only a few circus freaks grow full-body hair, so obviously somewhere between our pure-animal (in the completely non-human definition, not the Kingdom Animalia definition) ancestors and the modern humans seen today, humans lost quite a bit of their hair cover. Why might this have been?

Third, why is the hair we have arranged as it is? Going by what humans would look like if they never shaved any of their body, most people's hands, feet, arms, legs, and buttocks is largely hair-free compared to other parts, with very low hair densities, and indeed even the hairiest legs don't compare to the density of other parts of the body. The underarms have a rather high density of long, curly hair, as well as similar hair above their genitals. Meanwhile, the chest and in men the scrotal sack have hair somewhat in-between the length, density, and curliness of the arm hair and underarm hair. As for the face, we have moderately long, perfectly straight, but not very dense eyelashes, and very short, dense, and curly eyebrow hair. Finally, there are the two areas of the head, the top of the head and around the face, that have very dense hair which is usually straight, depending on race, and the rest of the face is mostly hairless.

Fourth, why do we have the various hair lengths we have? I already asked about hair length on Yahoo! Answers, and found that natural hair length is caused not by the hair growing to a certain height and stopping, but by the rate at which the hair in various parts of the body sheds. I'm not sure whether or not growth rate varies around the body, but I doubt there's too much difference between the growth rates of our millions of follicles. But still, length various tremendously throughout the body. I'd rather not measure the various lengths of my hairs, but I'd ballpark that in metric, hand and feet hair is about 3 cm, leg and arm hair 4-5 cm, and chest hair about 6 cm. Underarm and pubic is a bit harder to ballpark since it's so curly, but off the top of my head I'd ballpark 7 cm for underarm hair and 9 cm for pubic hair. Eyelashes usually grow about 2-3 cm, and eyebrows about 1 cm. But just as with question 3, beard and head hair is the most interesting. I'm not sure how long people have been cutting their hair, but it seems to me that if never cut, a beard could reach down to a person's lower chest, and head hair could feasibly reach down to someone's buttocks before natural hair shedding caught up (minus Rapunzel, of course). Then many places, such as the forehead, the palm of the hands, most of the buttocks, the outside of our ears, the bottoms of our necks, and our shoulders usually don't have any hair at all. What might be the meaning of this?

Most cats and dogs are covered head to tail in hair that's nearly the same thickness and density, or at least which seems to have much less variance than our hair. Chimpanzees don't have much fur around their ears, eyes, and hands, but also have a consistent fur length around the top of their heads as the rest of their bodies, and little fur around the mouth, unlike us. In fact, it seems the only animals that naturally grow hair to extreme lengths despite the warm climate are domesticated animals like sheep and horses. So, to recap, I wonder why humans have the hair we have. Further, I wonder why our ancestors had fur, why we lost ours, why fur density is distributed as it is around the human body, and why different hairs grow the lengths they do, such as the short eyebrow and hand hair, to the medium eyelash and pubic hair, to the beard and head hair that will grow to lengths many times more than the hairs on other parts of the body, if it's not cut.

Has speciation ever been produced through selective breeding? (By speciation I mean gametic isolation.)

There has been much to-do lately about the teaching of evolution in American public schools, and I thought I might weight in with a side of issue that you have probably not heard about before. Some people might try to have to believe that science and the scientific community have conclusively proven Darwin’s theory of evolution to be 100% true. The fact is, though, that evolution is still just a theory. It has never been conclusively proven and I have never read a book that presented any evidence supporting it. Evolution, along with the theory of a round or spherical earth, Newton’s Laws of Motion, the laws and principles concerning gravity, and the existence of pi, are all completely unproven and have only been proven in controlled circumstances. I have never seen the whole Earth at once, have you? No one has! So we cannot say for certain that these theories are fact.

The truth is, I cannot be certain that anything ever happened before May 22, 1986—the day I was born. There is no conclusive proof that the world existed before that date, there are just numerous untested account and theories. Furthermore, to me, my birth was most certainly the most important event in the history of time. It is totally illogical for me to believe that there was not a plan involved in my birth, and it defies all of my senses to think that my life has not been somehow significant and completely logical for me to believe that May 22, 1986 is the most important date in history. Therefore, I would like science textbooks in American schools to be required along with containing information on evolution to have a small passage detailing my equally valid point of view. The passage should contain a small picture of me, an explanation of my beliefs, and a focus on May 22, 1986 as a possible date for the beginning of the universe.

But evolution is scientific fact, right? How can you argue with science?
These are common questions, but here a few things you should consider:

FACT: Radiocarbon dating is not 100% sound. I cannot know if a fossil is truly millions of years old without my personal account of it being as such. The idea that diamonds come from coal is entirely ridiculous!

FACT: In my lifetime, I have never discovered a single fossil or artifact that I could conclusively say was created before May 22, 1986.

FACT: Evolution is contradicted by the basic laws of science. Evolution teaches that creation is continually being accomplished by nature’s evolutionary processes, but the most basic law of science, the Law of Energy Conservation, states that nothing is now being created or destroyed. So, nothing has ever been created ever that wasn’t around when the universe began 18 years ago.

FACT: If physical science is governed by laws, then we know that there cannot be randominity in the world. If this is so, then the random evolution of species is false.

Let me be very clear: I am not a scientist, I just want to change your child’s science curriculum in a way that forwards my completely nonscientific agenda. I’m not asking you to not teach your children evolution. I am just asking for equal time to be given to equal theories. All I am asking is that both sides of this argument be presented to students and that the students can get together with their parents and decide for themselves how the universe was actually formed. It should be stressed that my argument is not religious, it is merely an unscientific theory based on exclusive logic which forms an arbitrary set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader, myself, by which I live my life and encourage all others to do so. I am not pushing my religion in your schools. I am merely asking that equal sides of an issue get equal press, and I think that’s what America is all about.

My boyfriend cayro_dein and I are in the process of putting together a booklet that we plan to freely distribute at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY. The purpose of this booklet is to refute the museum's major erroneous claims in an approachable and reasonable manner. We know it's a daunting task, but we're optimistic about the idea and believe it will be able to accomplish something if it's presented well enough.

We've been collecting various articles from people online about certain topics - we've got one person writing an article on hominid evolution, one on endogenous retroviruses, one on geology by an ex-creationist geologist, and several others. At this point, we are only lacking one needed article: an essay on why creationism is bad for Christianity, and how Christianity and evolution are compatible and complementary.

We're having trouble finding someone to write this, so we were wondering if anyone here would be up to the task. You'd obviously be given full credit and recognition, as well as the benefit of the knowledge that you're taking part in the war on ignorance. We would want this article to be by a Christian in order to maximize its effect, so if there are any well-read theistic evolutionists around with some time on your hands, we would be very grateful for your help!

It doesn't need to be too long - somewhere between 2000 and 3000 words would be fine.

If you want to read more about the purpose of this booklet, you can read cayro_dein's introduction essay here.

Please comment if you're even remotely interested.

(x-posted)

Here is the email I sent him trying to debunk most of his arguments. I know it's not the strongest because it doesn't have sources or anything. But I think it will suffice, and I don't want to waste any more time with someone who won't listen to reason. Let me know what you guys think!

Dear xxxx,

(first I appeal to the emotional religios side)
I have studied evolution in depth my entire college career, as my majors were biology and anthropology, and within those majors, I focused on and took as many classes possible that had anything to do with evolution. It is a concept that I am passionate about because it shows in depth how much of a miracle life is to me. To me, the mechanism is so amazing that it is actually evidence to me that G-d exists. It (and genetics in general) is so complex and deep, just like other mathematical and scientific concepts that only G-d could have designed it so well. Futhermore, I have no problem beleiving in both the bible's creation story and evolution because I was always taught that the torah is not meant to be taken completely literally. As Jews, we "build a fence" around the torah and interpret it in many ways because the torah is cryptic and has many deeper meanings than what is just on the surface. We interpret it in as many ways possible because we want to make sure we didn't miss something that G-d wanted us to know. This is where Oral Torah comes from, and all the laws that Jews follow that are not in the written torah. Anyway, the way I understand it is that the "days" of creation may actually be "G-d days" and could equal what we know to be millions of years. The order of the appearance of things in the creation story, and what the earth's pre-historic markers tell us is very similar. Based on these premises, I think the creation story is a record of what scientists believe to be the beginning of the earth and the evolution of life with a different definition of what days are. The fact that they agree so relatively well, makes me believe in torah even more. I was under the impression that most Jews see it this way too. As for where the very first life originated, that is still a scientific mystery and lends itself even more to the creation story.

(then I define evolution and give an observable example)
The definition of evoltion is the random mutation of DNA that causes changes in genes in the resulting offspring, which are then selected for by those that are most able to survive and reproduce. This is actually observed in antibiotic resistence in bacteria that are developing from the overuse of these drugs. For instance, MRSA, and VRE that are mostly seen in hospitals. The bacteria that randomly mutated a gene that created the ability to be resistant to the drug are the ones that survived. This is evolution-in-motion and it is an observable fact. It is also observed in bug resistance to pesticides, and domestication of animals and plants. Anyway, evolution on this scale is called micro-evolution. A lot of creationists don't have trouble believing in evolution on this scale, but making the jump from this to speciation (the creation of a new species from a different one) is what they can not beleive. Given that the earth is 4.6 billion years old based on isotope dating techniques, it is not so unbelievable that one thing could evolve into another so much in this span of time through the exact same mechanism. Humans can not fathom millions of years because our lives are the blink of an eye in comparison. I suppose it is possible that G-d made all the fossils to fool us, and purposefully made rocks that look older than they are with the amount of atomic breakdown they have undergone, but I think that is unlikely. I don't think G-d wants to test our faith because Judaism is supposed to be a cognitive religion. You are supposed to question and understand why you are doing what you are doing to worship G-d, because how sincere can it be if you don't even understand why you're doing it??

As for the other things you have claimed that the bible states that history denies:
Parting of the Sea: I once watched a scientific documentary that explained how a huge earthquake under the ocean could cause a wave so big, it would effectively look like the sea was parting. I think G-d caused an earthquake at just the right time to save us!

Flood: There is geologic evidence of a big flood at certain strata of the earth that suggest a massive flood. It can be found in many areas all over the earth at approximately the same strata. I can't remember the source on this one, sorry.

About the symbiotic relationship of the wasp and the fig. It is really cool, but I think it happened gradually. I don't think that the ancestors of those creatures were always symbiotic. I think there had to have been a transition time in the history of their evolution where they HELPED each other, but didn't rely on each other, but helped each other so much, that they eventually evolved into symbiotes because it was the most advantageous way to survive.

Anyway, that's why I think what I think, and I have no doubt at all that speciation is true. I also have no doubt that G-d exists, and that the Torah is true. Evolution is also very important in my career too, because understanding how the jaws have evolved throughtout time gives us as clinicians greater understanding as to how the jaws have gotten malocclusions and how to fix them better.
Hope it makes sense to you!
-Jenny

I met a guy online I have been emailing with for a couple weeks. I was beginning to think he might be the guy of my dreams. But then I just found out he doesn't believe in evolution, which is something I am very passionate about. I mean evolution is just so common sense and important to me. I spent pretty much my whole college career studying it. It is very dissapointing. :( Why can't I just find my perfect package?? Is that so much to ask!? Has anyone ever heard of passionate evolutionists and creationists falling in love?? How important is this issue for you all when it comes to dating??