On 10/1/2012 3:54 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:
You've only demonstrated your own prejudice against reason.
no comment
Evolution produces many designs that are suboptimal, because natural
selection only
requires that a design be 'good-enough'
suboptimal for what? optimal has a meaning for a finite set of requirements, but not for
a almost infinite set of them. good enough is the best design when you have not a single
optimization but hundreds of them at different levels. the best trade of between
opposite requirements may be the optimum global solution, even if there is no optimal
solution for each individual requirement. Do you agree?
I agree that there are no optimal solutions except relative to some well defined
criteria. But it is you who were praising evolution as more clever than reason. Yet even
absent well defined criteria, some 'designs' are better than others and can be seen to be
so by reason. It's just obfuscation to say, well there are no well defined criteria so
nothing can be judged better or worse.
Arthropods make an elastic protein, rezulin, which is much more elastic
than that in
molluscs (abductin) and in vertebrates (elastin). Thus a fly can flap it's
wings
with less energy loss than a horse can run or a scallop can swim.
Probably the artropods can trade durability or repearability for elasticity. who knows.
Do you?.
Now you're just making things up. Do you know rezulin is more or less
reparable than elastin?
All are natural designs. What is the problem?. Probably Artropods rely more in
elasticity by the nature of the skeleton.
More unsupported conjecture. Where is your evidence for this?
In the same way a parasite is an step before the host defenses in parasiting strategies
because the parasite has more pressure to be ahead.
I fail to see an analogy.
The nerves in a mammals eye join the photoreceptor cells at the end facing
the
pupil. They run across the inside surface of the retina and exit together.
Where
they exit they create a 'blind spot' in our field of vision. So, first,
they partly
obstruct the retina and, second, they create a blind spot.
This is the vaunted topic of the eye in the mammals. Contrary to other clades The eyes
of mamals can rotate, that is a greath advantage. to rotate they have to be spherical.
to be spherical the nerves have to be internal.
But they could be spherical exactly as they are with the photoreceptor cells flipped end
for end so that they faced the light instead of the photons having to pass through the
nerves. This would also eliminate the blind spot. Incidentally cephalpods can also see
polarization.
being internal they have to exit trough a place, to exit, it creates a blind spot. but
the faculty of rotating and focusing an object without having to move the entire head or
body is a far greater advantage than in non mammals, even if the cost is a blind spot
(which does not appear in the brain image, because the eye constantly rotates)
You are just inventing stuff.
this does not means that octopuses , which have no blind spot have an "inferior" eye .
Probably it is perfect for its requirements.
People swallow and breathe through a shared passage. A design that results
in many
deaths due to choking on food.
That is a optimum design for a mammal with articulated talk that still can
breathe.
After complaining that there can be no optimal, now you are claiming an evolutionary
design is optimal. Yet dolphins communicate with separate breathing and swallowing
channels. Are they suboptimal?
Trade offs appear in any design, there is no way to avoid trade offs when there is more
than one requirement. In the ideal world of progressivia perhaps this does not happens.
"Trade offs" implies a simple binary choice. A human designer considers different
performance variables and weighs them. Of course there is no single opitmum, but there
are still some designs that are better than others.
Oxidation of fatty acids unnecessarily reverses the handedness of
methylmaloyl. In
the biosynthesis of some plant alkaloids, reticuline is formed in the S
configuration and then inverted to the R configuration; a step which could
have been
avoided by just using the S form for all the alkaloids. Lysine is
biosynthesized via
two different parallel processes when one would have served.
Probable we don愒 know the whole story. As many cases in evolution. The last case is the
so called "Junk DNA" which was supposed to be redundant, has a crucial function,
And what is that crucial function you have discovered - a Nobel prizes awaits.
but self appointed biological engineers considered it a failure of evolution
The designer of a larger and heavier vehicle on the softer surface uses
more wheels
to avoid sinking into the surface. Yet among animals the small ones,
arthropods,
have six or more legs; while the large animals have two or four. Why don't
large
heavy animals like elephants and rhinoceri have six or more legs?
The surface in contact with the ground is independent of the number of legs. Elephants
and Camels have all the surface they need for the weight and the soil they walk over.
But at the expense of having heavy pillar-like legs which slows their gait.
When animals with fur get cold little muscles attached to each hair folicle
cause
the hairs to stand up thus thickening the fur and increasing its insulative
value.
Humans also have these muscles which cause 'goosebumps' when we're cold.
This
increases our surface area and increases our loss of heat.
This is really interesting.
Another function badly understood. this muscle goosebumps increase the heat production.
A muscle, when contracted produce heat. goosebumps is a side effect of this adaptation
for heat production. it also has additional functions: goosebumps increase the perceived
size of the animal. many animals bristle hair when in front of a menace.
There are various levels of muscular contraction to produce heat: the goosebumps are the
second level response, the shivering is the third. but the first is the muscular
contraction of the muscles, specially in the back. That愀 why heating relax the muscles.
If you have a muscular pain in the back, just dress warm.
More just-so stories to avoid admitting that evolution produces some inferior
designs.
In the human male the urinary tract passes through the center of the
prostate gland;
a gland given to swelling. This stupid design causes a lot of pain and
difficulty
for older men.
I don愒 know why. neither you
Actually I do.
Brent
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
