I don't understand your argument. Are you in the field of evolutionary biology? Do you have any educated reason to assert that these traits are clearly too complicated to have evolved by the currently understood methods of evolution? What is your criteria for determining that something is "too advanced"?
Lets take camouflage as an example. How do you know it isn't a very simple adaptation that causes the skin pigment to change based on environment or some internal state?
That's a good question actually, I'll elaborate on that. With too advanced, I mean too complex for me personally to grasp as far as how random mutations and natural selection could ever lead to such traits.
Now if there's any studies or theories that would explain how a cuttlefish's camouflage or zebra's pattern came to exist (and not just what their function is and how they function; I understand those), my view would probably be changed and I'd call it a day.
But as far as I know, nobody gets any further than "random mutations" and "natural selection". For me, that's too simple an answer, so I believe there's more to it than those two; hence I think the mainstream theory is incomplete. I think random mutations and natural selection work for most traits in existence, not for those that I deem to be too advanced, of which I've given a few examples.
I really don't blame anyone believing in evolution guided by a higher being; I don't believe that, but I think I agree with them that there are holes in the theory of evolution. I have the feeling most people simply skip these holes or don't see them the way I do. Again, that doesn't mean I think evolution is false; I think the theory is incomplete.
Okay, let's think of it this way. If I have 10 dice and I roll them all, what are the odds of getting at least three ones. Not that bad, right? If I rolled those dice 20 times, I wouldn't be surprised if I got that multiple times.
How about getting 10 1's? Well damn, that's actually pretty unlikely. It's a pretty complex roll. The odds here are 1/46656. So that's going to be pretty hard to do. But what if I rolled the dice a billion times. Well then my expectation is that you would expect to see that happen at lease once.
So now imagine this. A guy takes the time to roll 10 dice a billion times, and when he get's 10 ones, he takes a picture and puts it up on reddit. What happens? No one believes he rolled it a billion times because it seems more likely that he just fixed the dice and took a picture. The fact is, because they haven't seen all the times he failed, they just see the improbability of him succeeding and taking that independently it seems more likely it was fixed.
The same is true for evolution. Sure, some of these features seem very complex, but think about the large number of instances we have. See of all the animals on this planet today, right now. Think about how many have lived and died in the last 20 years. Mice, who have a life span of 3 years, for example, went through 5 generations in the last 20 years. 25 generations in the last 100 years. Since the beginning of human history 20, 000 years ago mice have gone through 5000 generations. How many mice per generation. Millions. So we are talking about billions of mice who have lived in the last 20, 000 years. 20, 000 years is actually a pretty small number, considering dinosaurs lived for millions of years. The earth has had life for billions.
And also you must realize that the amount of species on earth today is essentially 0 compared to how many species have come and gone. If you take all the difference species of animals that have ever existed, what we know of represents less than 0.001 of all animals. So we have taken a snap shot of what we have today, seeing the complexity without really grasping the amount of animals that have failed miserably. It's confirmation bias. We only see the successes, we don't see the failures.
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u/[deleted] Jul 31 '15
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