Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with evolution

Explain life, the universe, and everything to a 5 year-old.

mayurasana — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 13:46:22 -0800

What are some good resources to help explain the Big Bang, evolution and, the meaning of life to my delightful 5 year-old nephew? Fairly equal emphasis for each, but I am stumped most by "but why are all the things and people here, mayurasana?" than the rest. I have checked out this question from several years ago, but new resources and new mefi-parents have probably emerged since 2005.

He's a bright and highly inquisitive kid, and I'm sure he'd love Cosmos for kindergarteners — but does that exist in any format (book / audio / video)? He loves to read — little dude practically lives at the library — and has very limited screen time, so reading material would be much appreciated.

I'm encouraged to honestly answer his questions whenever we are together so there are no issues there. We're close but I don't have kids, and I'm not familiar with elementary brain-aged teaching resources. Somewhat tangentially, what are good blogs or other sites concerning teaching science and philosophy in general to elementary school aged children?

What are the odds? Is intelligent design more plausible than chance?

rabbitrabbit — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 15:46:02 -0800

I'm a cataloging librarian who works a couple hours a week on the reference desk. This morning I had a patron come in to ask me for sources that back up the claim that the probability that life on earth formed by random chance is so small that some kind of divine intervention is more likely. I've spent about an hour trying to find good resources, but a) there is just so much out there on this topic and I literally don't have the time to sift through it all to find the good stuff; and b) everyone seems to have an agenda.

This just seems like a huge scientific/philosophical/religious debate that I don't have a good enough grasp of to separate wheat from chaff efficiently. I understand that DNA is really, really intricate and that that seems to be the driving force behind many arguments against random chance: it's just too complex to have formed by chance!

Does anyone know of good, reliable, well-reasoned (maybe academic / peer-reviewed?) books or articles which address this topic?

He already has Proof of heaven : a neurosurgeon's journey into the afterlife by Eben Alexander.

Why are baby animals cuter than baby humans?

fermion — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 20:24:38 -0800

Why do kittens, bunnies, puppies, and their ilk seem so much cuter than human babies? This is something I've always wondered, and I am surprised that it doesn't seem to have been asked here. I've seen some idle speculations about the reasons in various places around the Web, but nothing resembling evidence. Is there any actual research related to this topic? Or is the question based on flawed assumptions somehow? I'm also wondering if there are cultural variations in the phenomenon. Is it only the Internet that's so much more into kittens than babies? Did anyone alive two centuries ago think that dogs outshined humans in the baby-cuteness department? Do most people start finding baby pictures cuter than bunny pictures once they've had kids of their own?

Remind me

Postroad — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 07:50:53 -0800

Looking to find either the author's name or his article. Trying to locate the article or the author of a piece that gave a listing (ab out 25 items) of those things that All humans in All places and All times have in shared in common since they are human traits or needs. Examples: happiness, fear, etc.

I think the article might have been by a sociologist, and I know it is cited sometimes to show our inter-connectedness, via culture and/or evolution

Whence this feline other?

farishta — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 07:41:58 -0800

Please help me learn about the evolution and cognition of house cats. There are ten dozen books, articles, and documentaries about the evolution of dogs, but I want to learn about cats! Thus far everything I've found is overly-narrow ("they were in the Fertile Crescent!") or Cat-Lady vague and creepy ("I wuv their purrdy lil' genes!"). The only books out there seem to be about training your cat, which isn't really what I'm after.

Are there any good, comprehensive texts or documentaries that will help me learn more about how house cats think and act? Thank you in advance!

It feels good, it must be good.

alex_skazat — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 13:11:49 -0800

Further science/philosophical reading about human evolution and the woes of our modern life. Looking for suggestions, please! I popped into a random Facebook thread, basically dealing with how our smartphones and the hyper-connectivity to instant information and socialization, also seem to bring a deep insulation to the user of the phone and their immediate environment. Example being someone mindlessly texting/looking for directions on a phone, while walking around a busy city block: They have insulated themselves to their immediate environment, to get information perhaps about.. their immediate environment, without having to also make social contact.

I began to realize that you could theorize that this type of behavior could be explained in an evolutionary sense: in the history of our species, individuals that were social, seem to have an advantage with survival. Thus, we all feel a natural inclination to be social - and smart phones (social networking, etc) allow us to not only be social, but HYPER social, to the point that its detrimental - but since we're all humans, with human brains attuned to a specific type of environment, (things too small or too big are hard for us to mentally understand), we don't see the detremental consequences of over-using this type of technology. In other words: it feels good to do it - really good, as well as natural, but there's causes that when you do it TOO MUCH, it's not good at all, but in fact, bad - almost as if it's an addiction.

Another example is fatty sugary food - how it's very yummy to eat a big piece of chocolate cake and I'll admit that left alone to my own devices, I'll eat an entire choco cake, if one was available. Again, you can view this in an evolutionary frame: a surplus of fatty/sugary foods back in the day (say, before even agriculture got started and hunting/gathering was derigueur) was a scarcity, so we've been tempered to not only crave these, but also get a nice little tap in the pleasure centers of our brains when we actually do get these things, with nothing in our systems to say, "hey YO stop! You're full!", because - hey! you don't know when the next time you're going to get such a treat. That's great and all, but now there is a surplus of such things and overeating and bad nutrition is an everyday thing for a lot of people: What used to be a evolutionary advantage is now working against ourselves.

I could go on - say the idea of being able to move - to travel and to go fast - to catch a meal or to get away from being a meal has an evolutionary advantage. Say, car ownership taps into this desire and evolutionary urge that says, "yes! Cars are good! Go FAST! FAR! Yes! Own a car" and on paper, cars are pretty incredible contraptions - except when there's a billion+ of them on the planet and you realize on that type of scale they're an environmental disaster, their means of production undermine workers, people seem to be buy models they really can't afford and their current fuel has countries fighting wars over and is also perhaps reached its peak of production. Again, even though it seemed like a great idea, gave us an amazing advantage, it may be a big undoing, since we're (in my opinion) overusing it, even though it feels natural to utilize this invention.

So, as you can see, I'm jumping around different topics and I am neither a scientist, nor a student of philosophy - but first, what's this type of theory called, and what are some accessible books written about it? It could be as main stream as Malcolm Gladwell, or slightly a different topic, like Laurence Gonzalez's book about survival, where he postulates that humans evolve to speed up entropy in the Universe. I'm most interested in more examples of similar things I'd laid out and perhaps the psychology of how a once-useful evolutionary trait now seems to be (in some people's opinion) our undoing, even though it seems right and natural to do it.

And, am I making sense?

Are your eyes so tough you animal are your eyes very tough

Greg Nog — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 11:36:47 -0800

Which animal has the hardest eyes? I was thinking about how eyes are pretty soft and it might be advantageous for a creature to have "natural goggles" protecting its squishy eyes. Which animal's eyes have the toughest coating? (I do not care to hear about the protective qualities of retractable eyeLIDs, only the surface which can not be retracted, and which must be seen through.)

Slow down I just wanna get to know you

Wretch729 — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 14:31:46 -0800

What could slow down the pace of change (religious/scientific/economic/cultural) in a civilization? (Please see specific details inside.) Many scifi/fantasy settings talk about centuries-old unchanging nations or dynasties. This has never seemed terribly realistic to me. None but the most ancient human societies manage more than a century or two without significant changes occurring.

I'm developing a civilization for a private worldbuilding project and I'm trying to figure out how to slow down the pace of change for a specific period. I’m not interested in normative arguments about this topic except as they apply to the feasibility of the method suggested. The details of the setting are not finalized, but would probably be vaguely analogous to Scythia and the Greek city states circa the 4th century BCE (think semi-nomadic people trading with settled city states and slowly becoming more settled themselves). I'm looking for specific ways to stretch this scenario out to about 500 years (~25 generations).

Ways I've already thought of that I don’t like:
-Strong central rule by a rigid theocratic or conservative autocratic authority (workable but doesn’t fit my story)
-Increased child mortality via plot device, keeping population growth low and forcing labor to be devoted to survival rather than innovation (haven’t thought of a good way to do this, and too depressing)
-Restrictions on travel via plot device, for example giant impassable mountain ranges on all sides (sort of ruins the trading angle, and seems very artificial)
-Periodic catastrophe that wipes out progress and returns civilization to square one (also seems too artificial)

Wot Ape?

Miss T.Horn — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 14:22:07 -0800

How were the ideas expressed in The Origin of Species received among country people and laypersons in Victorian England? I'm guessing the book was expensive to acquire, either via a lease from a bookseller or at a university library (?). Also, it's not exactly an easy read. How, then, would the Household Words-reading crowd and, further, illiterate and uneducated people, have a) heard about the ideas expressed in The Origin of Species and b) reacted to them? Would, for instance, they read sensational newspaper articles on the subject? Would they have heard about the idea of evolution via word of mouth? Would the ape/man connection be made at all, considering The Descent of Man came out years later? Just how big of a deal was this in popular culture, and how much did it shift the zeitgeist at the time? Eg. if I were a scullery maid, would I even know about this? What about a farmer? How far up the social ladder would you have to go in Victorian culture for Origin of Species to have made a difference in 1859?

Why did the human body evolve to crave nicotine?

jacobean — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 11:38:42 -0800

Why did the human body evolve to crave nicotine? People addicted to nicotine have my sympathy. Using an emulsified
stick of chemicals just to get their fix from their last use of the product.

I can understand why the body becomes addicted to high-fat and sugary foods, because in the past, calories meant survival for our species. I can understand peoples addiction to sex. Again, an evolutionary reason.

But, I cannot understand the evolutionary reason why or how people become physiologically addicted to nicotine. How did the physiology of the human body ever evolve to crave this wretched substance?

Hey, how did we get here and who do we have to thank?

cincinnatus c — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 11:53:33 -0800

How many generations am I (or you) the product of? That is, how long is the continuous sequence of paired organisms in the chain of reproduction for a human in the 21st century? A mind-boggling thought, for those of us who might live childlessly, is that the generations before us that have successfully produced offspring go back hundreds of millions of years, with no exceptions. That is, our family trees contain unbroken sequences of reproduction all the way back to the swamp. Anyone who does not have children will be the first of their line to not do so since at least the Devonian period.

Is this correct?

If so, is it possible to estimate the number of generations that have reproduced in order to bring us here? Would any estimate be meaningful?

Furthermore, how far back is it possible to go in identifying our ancestors?

For example, is there a commonly accepted chain that looks something like this:

(single-celled organisms) > (?) > (trilobites or something?) > (?) > (fish?) > (primitive amphibians?) > (?) > (?) > (?) > (mammals) > (primates) > (us!)

Please fill in the ?s, if you can, or provide a better-informed sequence!

Sloppy MicroChips: Can a fair comparison be made between biological and silicon entropy?

0bvious — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 09:05:10 -0800

Was reading about microchips that are designed to allow a few mistakes (known as 'Sloppy Chips'), and pondering equivalent kinds of 'coding' errors and entropy in biological systems. Can a fair comparison be made between the two? OK, to setup my question I probably need to run through my (basic) understanding of biological vs silicon entropy...

In the transistor, error is a bad thing (in getting the required job done as efficiently and cheaply as possible), metered by parity bits that come as standard in every packet of data transmitted. But, in biological systems error is not necessarily bad. Most copying errors are filtered out, but some propogate and some of those might become beneficial to the organism (in thermodynamics sometimes known as "autonomy producing equivocations").

Relating to the article about 'sloppy chips', how does entropy and energy efficiency factor into this? For the silicon chip efficiency leads to heat (a problem), for the string of DNA efficiency leads to fewer mutations, and thus less change within populations, and thus, inevitably, less capacity for organisms to diversify and react to their environments - leading to no evolution, no change, no good. Slightly less efficiency is good for biology, and, it seems, good for some kinds of calculations and computer processes.

What work has been done on these connections I draw between the biological and the silicon?

I'm worried that my analogy is limited, based as it is on a paradigm for living systems that too closely mirrors the digital systems we have built. Can DNA and binary parity bit transistors be understood on their own terms, without resorting to using the other as a metaphor to understanding?

Where do the boundaries lie in comparing the two?

The taste of yesteryear

5imon — Thu, 24 May 2012 07:31:16 -0800

What foodstuffs taste the same today as they did millenia ago? Idle query. Currently on a lifeless conference call eating a salad.

It strikes me that the taste and texture of this salad may be completely unique to the time we live in, since most (if not all) produce has been subject to aeons of selective breeding and latterly genetic modification.

This begs the question: what is the least fubar'd foodstuff? What can I eat today that tastes the most similar to me as it did to Oscar Wilde, Isaac Newton, Chaucer, King Cnut, Jesus, Cleopatra, and Solomon Which of nature's bounty is still as close as possible to how it evolved naturally?

The modulation of our sense of smell

peacay — Sat, 19 May 2012 04:20:28 -0800

How and why do we become accustomed to smells? What makes some odours personally super-pungent one day and unnoticed 'background noise' later on, despite the smell remaining objectively unchanged? We've all got our own examples. The peculiar odour from some houses that the occupants don't recognise but visitors do; our incredulity at how someone could work in a place like a fish gutting factory; the reduction in the ability to notice, say, stale, fetid air in a room we occupy for long hours, or how the sickly sweet air nearby a cake factory becomes less noticeable over time, if you live in the neighbourhood. Maybe not the best examples perhaps, pulled out of the air on the run, but I think you know what I mean.

Is this process/ability 100% psychological? Or is/are there physical mechanism(s) at play? Do we innately 'muffle' familiar smells to the background as a protection system, so we're more able identify the odours of potentially dangerous and unfamiliar products/agents? Does any of this point towards it being an evolutionary element? Or is it all a kind of a modified thinking process, where we basically innoculate ourselves through repeated exposures and semi-consciously decide not to let it bug us??

Why are there no lobsters the size of horses or horses the size of shrimp?

jeb — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 08:50:49 -0800

Why are there no lobsters the size of horses or horses the size of shrimp? For the most part, you can split the creatures into two broad categories: "squishy outside" and "squishy inside". Bugs, lobsters, shrimp, and clams are all squishy inside: they use some sort of hard shell to protect their squishy bits, to hang their internal bits off, and I would assume, to act as leverage points for their motive parts.

"Squishy outside" creatures are like humans, whales, birds, and so on. They generally start with a rigid internal frame, and then hang organs from it, attach muscles to it, and so on.

Of course, there are plenty of non-plant living things that this categorization doesn't cover, or is vague about: what about water-filled rigid things like starfish, what about things that are just totally squishy like sea cucumbers, what about squids, cuttlefish, and so on that might have a rigid part, but use some sort of other structure (like tentacles) for things the bony animals use bones for? Worms? But for the most part, huge amounts of creatures fit clearly into one category or the other. It's still a useful distinction, I think.

But it seems like there are tons and tons of squishy inside creatures that are relatively small. Insects. Crustaceans. Whatever those little bug type things big whales eat are. Both in terms of total amounts of them on the planet and in terms of different types. The biggest one I can think of is a really big lobster. I've also seen some terrifying videos of huge CRABS picking their way around northern fjords, or shimmying down trees in the south pacific. The smallest are super-small. I don't know what they are but definitely sub-naked-eye visible. Aren't there some little mites that live on your eyelashes?

There are also a pretty decent amount of squishy outside creatures: lots of fish, all the birds and furry animals. The biggest ones in water are whales. The biggest on land are probably elephants, right? There are lots of examples bigger than all the biggest squishy-inside creatures I can think of. Easily. On the small side, the smallest I can think of is maybe some kind of mouse.

However, there aren't very many super-small squishy-outside creatures, and there are no super-big squishy-inside creatures. Why is this?

Besides being some sort of engineering or physical constraint, I considered the fact that maybe this was just a chance of evolution, but I looked up the page for "exoskeleton" and "endoskeleton" (there's barely anything in wikipedia for endoskeleton) and it says that at least "exoskeletons" evolved independently loads of times in totally different lineages. It doesn't say anything for endoskeletons. I'm not even sure if this is the right division of creatures. For instance, the exoskeleton page talks about lizards with armor plates, which in my classification, would probably still make more sense to look at as a squishy-outside animal. An armored lizard still has a spine, and so on. I also can't figure out where else to look this up.

In olden times, there were way bigger dinosaurs (squishy outside), but there were also way bigger dragonflies (squishy inside), right? So…what gives?

Why is this? Is there something in the engineering of squishy-inside/hard-outside creatures that doesn't scale up well? Why were there no herds of armor-plated ruminants grazing across the American plains in the 19th century? Why do you never find an infestation of thumb-sized gerbils in your attic?

It's hard not to notice that the big extant squishy-inside creatures either live in the water, or are probably super-closely-related to things that do. On the other hand, the biggest everything lives in the water, so maybe that's a red herring.

Is it that the squishy-outside/bones-inside system only evolved once, and that happens to be the system that most of the big creatures evolved from? (Except squids, and weird borderline cases like those enormous jellyfish colonies or corals or something) Or is it that over a certain size something stops working? And if so, what? Is this even the kind of question that is meaningful to biology (in that a model that produces testable predictions can be made)? Or is evolution just so complicated you have to throw up your hands and say "it's a large parameter space, we ended up on various local maxima and for the same reasons there's a dune here and not there."

If you know any resources where I can figure this stuff out for myself for the future (I have a lot of other questions about plants and animals and stuff) I'd appreciate that too.

Christian apologetics book recommendations that accept the fact of evolution

huxham — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 09:07:36 -0800

Looking for recommendations for books on Christian apologetics that take seriously the reality of evolution rather than denying it in favor of the argument from design. A little background: I was raised as a Young-Earth Creationist so, naturally, I denied the fact of evolution and the old age of the earth in favor of believing that God made the whole earth and all life as they appear today ~10,000 years ago. Lots of the Christian apologetics books I read growing up were written from this perspective and many of their core arguments depended on evolution being false. The argument from design was trotted out to prove God's existence, the reasoning being that life and the universe look designed…therefore there's a designer (exhibit A: Intelligent Design). A lot of the anti-evolution content was written in response to the "new" atheists like Richard Dawkins who argue that evolution makes belief in God unnecessary. These books also explained away the existence of pain, suffering, and death by saying that God originally made a perfect world, but since humans have free will, we rejected God, brought in death, and royally screwed things up.

I was intellectually satisfied with this way of thinking until I went to college and realized the mountain of evidence in favor of evolution and a really stinkin' old universe. However, despite this change, I still call myself a follower of Jesus because I realized that a literal interpretation (rather, application) of how the Bible describes creation is unnecessary. (See, for example, John Walton's book The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate.) One can believe that God is creator without having to believe he created everything in 144 hours ca. 4004 BCE.

I now reject the conflict thesis that says religion and science are incompatible with each other. Both the fundamentalist creationists and atheists virulently push this idea that you can't follow Jesus and believe evolution is true. Instead, I take the middle route popularized by theistic evolutionists like the BioLogos Foundation that says you can be a Christian and accept the findings of evolutionary biology, paleoanthropology, geology, etc.

SO, I'm looking for apologetics or philosophical literature written by Christians who accept evolution as the method by which God created life, who don't use the argument from design to "prove" God exists, and who explore the implications that the theory of evolution has in thinking about death and suffering (an evolutionary theodicy?). I'm not looking for theology/biblical studies per se (e.g., Peter Enn's The Evolution of Adam offers a more nuanced interpretation of Genesis in light of evolutionary theory) but rather studies that go about "defending the faith" without attacking evolution or falling back on Intelligent Design.

Would works by Alister McGrath and Alvin Plantinga fit the order? I just don't know what's out there having grown up on the stuff by Lee Strobel and Norman Geisler.

P.S.: This question doesn't seek to start a discussion on whether or not God exists, whether or not evolution is true, whether or not Jesus is the way, etc. I'm looking for apologetics books that fit a theistic evolution point of view. Thank you for being civil and for your help!

Here be there no dragons.

hegemone — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 06:23:46 -0800

Evolutionary biologists: I'm trying to recall the concise explanation a professor gave in an evolution and ecology course about why dragons just plain did not exist. I should have probably saved my notes from class but... I was trying to explain to someone why dragons, as they are popularly imagined (four legs + two wings), were not evolutionary possible? In terms of that number and arrangement of appendages being very unlikely, given that vertebrates, from bats to elephants to humans, kind of have similarish skeletal body plans? Anyway, I wasn't doing a very good job of explaining, and was forgetting how to use correct terminology ("convergent... uh... synapomorphies that... uh... wait, no...").

Could someone please throw me a bone here and say what I'm trying to say with appropriate evolutionary terms?

The way things are going, they're gonna ...

holdkris99 — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 21:06:24 -0800

Conversations with my Father-in-law have lead him to lose his faith in God. My mother-in-law is not coping well with this and blames me. What do I do? My father-in-law and I have been having conversations about God, faith, science, evolution etc for about three years now. Basically it started out as him trying to "save my soul" but have had the opposite effect. He now no longer believes and, as a 60 year old man who always considered himself a strong Christian, this has really shaken him to the core. It was never my intention to convince him he was wrong, but we had an agreement that whenever we have these kind of philosophical talks that we would both be honest in our feelings and beliefs, so when he asked me a question, I answered it honestly.

You can no doubt imagine the avenues these conversations went down: the inerrancy of the Bible, evolution vs creationism, the role of Christianity in society, etc. Basically we would have talks about these different subjects and he would ask my opinions and I would give my opinions and point him to reading materials that I based my opinions on. He would comeback with findings that he would get from Young Earth Creationist sites and I would counter and so on.

After a while he became bothered by things that he thought were ironclad, undisputable facts and really began to question himself and his God and recently he decided that what he previously believed could not be true. He has been severely depressed and began feeling that he has wasted good chunks of his life with religion. The thing is, he was a great Christian who let his actions speak louder than words. He is a good man and I admire and love him dearly. In the last week or so he has been coming around to the fact that his Christian upbringing and morals have served him well and has said that coming to this realization will make his last years more enjoyable and more fulfilling.

My mother-in-law is a different story. She completely blames me for his recent depression and for his changing outlook. Again, she is a great Christian woman and we have never had any real issues. She never minded the long talks my father-in-law had because she thought they would lead myself and my wife "back into the fold." She no longer allows my wife and I over to the house and does not want her husband talking to me anymore. My wife and I have talked and have kind of taken the position that we will just not attempt much contact and wait for them to contact us, but that of course it is hard because we both love and care for them and enjoy being with them. It made for a very awkward Christmas! I guess my question is what is my responsibility here? Is there anything I could or should try to do to help diffuse the situation other than let time work its magic?

I will be happy to answer any questions.

I can't remember the name of this kids' book about evolution.

thehandsomecamel — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 19:06:06 -0800

Help me find this children's book about evolution that I used to read as a kid. I can't remember the name, and I have only a vague recollection of what it looked like. Here are some hints:

1) Primarily what I remember are the illustrations, which looked a bit like mosaics -- a dinosaur's skin looked like it was made up of small pebbles -- even though I'm pretty sure they were actually paintings.

2) I'm pretty sure it covered most of the history of life, starting with single-celled organisms and going up to humans. At one point, when the dinosaurs go extinct, mammals are shown as coming out of the shadows and entering into their prime, and the early mammals look something like lemurs. It also definitely covered the Ice Age, and there were some bleak paintings of Ice Age humans trying to survive.

3) Possibly the word "When" was in the title? E.g., "When The Earth Was Young," although I googled that and only got Young Earth Creationism.

4) I was reading this book, I think, some time between 1978 and 1985.

5) The book was definitely formatted in "landscape" orientation, rather than portrait.

6) I'm pretty sure there were dinosaurs on the cover -- maybe coming out of eggs? (Although that might have been on the inside. But there was definitely a dinosaur hatching somewhere in the book!)

That's all the information I have, but I remember loving this book and would love to get it for my kid!

Did you hear about the biologist who had twins? She baptized one and kept the other as a control.

holdkris99 — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 07:47:15 -0800

What are some article length studies readily available on the internets that summarize the evidence for evolution? My father-in-law and I have been having a good natured discussion about evolution vs creation for some time. He has recently kind of upped the ante by sending me a William Dembski article to read on creationism and I am looking for something similar to send to him (peer reviewed if possible). He won't read a full book or else I would be set as I have a good collection of stuff (a lot of which I found out about through the various Ask posts).

As I said, this is a good natured exchange we are having, I am not looking for something that is insulting to a creationist (personally - it may be insulting to their ideas) or anything like that, just something that kind of lays it out for the layman. I realize that a lot of evolution science is technical by nature when you get down to evidence, but (despite him citing Dembski) I don't think he will read anything that is full of numbers.

Why do birds migrate?

selenized — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 19:46:38 -0800

Why do birds migrate to the Arctic and Antarctic? I've been watching Frozen Planet and during the summer there is this huge explosion of life and all sorts of sea birds and what not migrate to the poles. Truly spectacular in HD, but I can't help but wonder: Given how much work it takes just to get there, well, why do birds bother?

Or to make my question sound more science-y: what is/was the selective pressure that drove various sorts of sea birds to begin these large migratory patterns in the first place?

Why are Chimps So Strong?

musofire — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 06:41:55 -0800

How is it chimps are stronger than humans? Chimps are known to be much stronger than human beings. How is that? Presumably their individual muscles are more or less comparable to ours, ounce for ounce.

Is this something we gave up in the nerve department when we evolved towards fine motor control, or is it a matter of leverage, or what?

Is intelligent design actually an actual philosophically true scientific theory? The question is not asking if ID is “true”, but how well does it pass the scientific theory tests?

4Lnqvv — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 13:18:53 -0800

Let's see if this can be done without causing any ideological controversy. The simplest yet most descriptive explanation of a true scientific theory is below. "A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena." An actual theory must be falsifiable as well. My understanding is that Intelligent design does not fit the bill as a set of empirically proven facts or pass the falsifiability test. Also, I understand that Darwin's theory may have the most facts supporting his theory (therefore it is the best explanation for the evolution of life we currently have), but that it may not be falsifiable as well. The basic question is what is intelligent design if not a theory? I don't think it qualifies as a hypothesis either. Please explain to this scientific layman. Bonus points if you can explain how The Theory of Natural Selection is falsifiable.

The Origins of Life

whitewall — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 08:51:26 -0800

Does anyone know how to hunt down an animated film they used to (or still do) show at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History? It was attached to the marine life/oceans exhibit and was about the origins of life and natural selection. Absent finding a copy of the film online, does anyone else remember seeing this? For reference, this would be from the early 90s. Unfortunately, the only scenes I clearly remember are some single-celled organisms floating around, plus lightning striking a shallow pool.

Question inspired by seeing this gem at a film festival.

Why is the concept of evolution seen as contrary to Christian teaching?

brownrd — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 11:32:00 -0800

Why is the concept of evolution seen as contrary to Christian teaching? In my walk as a Christian, I took it at face value that evolution was an evil lie from Satan. As I have grown, both in my Christianity and in my scientific knowledge (homeschooling 5 kids will do that to you) my opinion has changed: not only do I believe that evolution has occurred, but I now believe that, contrary to what I have been told, evolution doesn't disprove a Creator - it makes creation all the more wondrous, complicated, and ingenious. Why would God make static organisms which could not change in response to their environment? More importantly, why is this seen as somehow contradictory to God's word? I am not looking for a debate of evolution vs. creation - I am convinced that they exist simultaneously. I am really looking for reasons why Christians are so opposed to this concept.