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ORIGINAL: Carico

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ORIGINAL: Method

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ORIGINAL: evry1needsgod
We've already been over this. Labeling all Creationist's and Idist's science as "religious dogma" is just keeping you head in the sand my friend.

It was found to be religious dogma in the US courts by a Bush appointed, christian, conservative judge. He called ID "inanity". You guys had your fair hearing and you came up well short.

The only dogma is blindly believing anything scientists say even when they contradict reality and no one in history can verify their claims. Even children know that apes can't turn into people. So open your eyes and observe reality instead of blindly believing scientists who change their minds with the seasons.

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People are apes.

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ORIGINAL: evry1needsgod

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People are apes.

The last time I checked, I don't swing from trees, walk on my hands, or eat bugs out of my brother's hair. Maybe you do??? Apes aren't family! Do you have a family reunion at the zoo every year? I don't, but maybe I'm just weird like that. You are more than welcome to belittle yourself, believing you are an animal, calling yourself an ape, but leave me and the rest of humanity out of that depressing, degrading mentality. God made you special and unique, He loves you, and He gave you dominion over apes! Enjoy it.

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ORIGINAL: evry1needsgod
The last time I checked, I don't swing from trees, walk on my hands, or eat bugs out of my brother's hair.

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Apes aren't family!

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Do you have a family reunion at the zoo every year?

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You are more than welcome to belittle yourself, believing you are an animal, calling yourself an ape, but leave me and the rest of humanity out of that depressing, degrading mentality.

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God made you special and unique, He loves you, and He gave you dominion over apes! Enjoy it.

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ORIGINAL: BVZ
Our physical bodies are those of apes. There is no way to define 'ape', without including humans.

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Meat eating plants such as the Venus Fly Trap are very rare indeed. If Neo-Darwinism were true, we would expect them to be the norm because they are more fit since they are dual feeders.

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ORIGINAL: SavedToo

Meat eating plants such as the Venus Fly Trap are very rare indeed. If Neo-Darwinism were true, we would expect them to be the norm because they are more fit since they are dual feeders.

But then again, Neo-Darwinism is a pure fantasy.

Also, I wonder how vegetarians feel about them?

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Hi SavedToo, Venus Fly Traps die without sunlight therefore they are not 'dual feeders'. VFTs, unlike most plants, don't have roots and receive nitrogen from their prey instead. It makes no sense to say 'more fit' without also describing the environmental niche that will test for fitness. How much of our Earth has nitrogen-poor or depleted soil?

Neo-Darwinism is alive and well.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud


I think the problem here is that the argument amounts to "They developed such capabilities because they needed to" It may be that carnivorous plants would do better than others in nitrogen poor soil, but this does not explain, through neo-darwinian mechanisms, how such plants arose to begin with.

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But you don't accept descent with modification or macroevolution.

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(On a side note, your wife looks like my former developmental biology professor, and it's very odd...I feel like she's watching me type hah.)

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ORIGINAL: DanJames

I know this is way off topic because it addresses the OP. Carnivorous plants are carnivorous because they need the extra nitrogen. It is a very costly and inefficient way to get nitrogen, but for some plants, it's all they got. Carnivory is not an evolutionary advantage unless the plant absolutely needs it, far from being the "dual feeders" as the author of the OP put it. That being the case, carnivorous plants have not been demonstrated (as far as my very limited research is concerned) to be evidence for or against Universal Common Descent.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud

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Hi SavedToo, Venus Fly Traps die without sunlight therefore they are not 'dual feeders'. VFTs, unlike most plants, don't have roots and receive nitrogen from their prey instead. It makes no sense to say 'more fit' without also describing the environmental niche that will test for fitness. How much of our Earth has nitrogen-poor or depleted soil?

Neo-Darwinism is alive and well.

I think the problem here is that the argument amounts to "They developed such capabilities because they needed to" It may be that carnivorous plants would do better than others in nitrogen poor soil, but this does not explain, through neo-darwinian mechanisms, how such plants arose to begin with.

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ORIGINAL: Dihedral

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ORIGINAL: Jhud

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Hi SavedToo, Venus Fly Traps die without sunlight therefore they are not 'dual feeders'. VFTs, unlike most plants, don't have roots and receive nitrogen from their prey instead. It makes no sense to say 'more fit' without also describing the environmental niche that will test for fitness. How much of our Earth has nitrogen-poor or depleted soil?

Neo-Darwinism is alive and well.

I think the problem here is that the argument amounts to "They developed such capabilities because they needed to" It may be that carnivorous plants would do better than others in nitrogen poor soil, but this does not explain, through neo-darwinian mechanisms, how such plants arose to begin with.

Hi Jhud, 'neo-darwinian mechanisms' do a perfect job of describing how carnivorous plants came to be.

It's like that old saw:

Q) "What good is half an eye?"
A) "1% better than 49% of an eye."

It is easy to imagine a scenario where a certain type of (non-carnivorous) plant growing in mildly nitrogen-poor soil benefited from the decomposition of dead insects in its vicinity. From this easy starting point, I can imagine the plant evolving to attract insects (it may already have flowers for this purpose) and then kill them for 'food' (there is a tropical species of insect-killing plant that drowns insects for a similar purpose - supplemental nutrient intake).

Neo-darwinism is an awkward term and I prefer to stay away from it. I think the basic processes of evolution are well enough understood for us to avoid its use. Reproduction, beneficial mutation, and natural selection cover the practical aspects of evolution perfectly well for me.

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ORIGINAL: DanJames

Hey, Dihedral! Welcome to the forum! I've been lucky enough to do some studying of plants. I, too, could imagine a history where plants whose hairs can tangle or stick insects may benefit from a decomposing plant. The problem is that such imaginations fail to explain the mechanism for producing new and novel structures. How does the plant know that it needs more nitrogen? If we skip all the steps required for the plant to detect a deficiency of nitrogen, at what point does the plant develop the ability to collapse its leaves? Most plants can not survive the process of collapsing its leaves because of the energy required, so for the most part, any steps leading up to a plant capable of carnivory would be... well several generations of dead plants.

Again, welcome to the forum! We're glad to have you, and happy posting.

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ORIGINAL: Dihedral

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ORIGINAL: DanJames

Hey, Dihedral! Welcome to the forum! I've been lucky enough to do some studying of plants. I, too, could imagine a history where plants whose hairs can tangle or stick insects may benefit from a decomposing plant. The problem is that such imaginations fail to explain the mechanism for producing new and novel structures. How does the plant know that it needs more nitrogen? If we skip all the steps required for the plant to detect a deficiency of nitrogen, at what point does the plant develop the ability to collapse its leaves? Most plants can not survive the process of collapsing its leaves because of the energy required, so for the most part, any steps leading up to a plant capable of carnivory would be... well several generations of dead plants.

Again, welcome to the forum! We're glad to have you, and happy posting.

Hi DanJames, thanks for the welcome!

The plant does not know it needs nitrogen any more than our bodies know that we need oxygen. The plant does not choose its evolutionary development - what actually happens is that a species collectively experiences millions and millions of random genetic copying errors over enormous (or longer!) periods of time. Individual plants (and their progeny) that benefit from these mutations become more numerous at the expense of the individuals (and their progeny) that receive no (or less!) benefit from the mutations.

It has been estimated (how I don't know) that 99.9% of all mutations are harmful to an organism (e.g. there are many more ways to break something than to improve it). Offsetting this effect to some degree is the massive amount of offspring that most species produce. We humans have a warped perspective on this particular point, and it took Charles Darwin to highlight our relative oddness in having so few children in terms of affecting evolutionary procession.

There are many species of plant that can move both their flowers and the individual parts of their flowers, and I don't think the VFT is the only plant to do so explosively (I think some orchids are also explosive when trapping wasps prior to coating them with pollen). Many species of plants have flowers that open every morning and close up every night and many plants also secrete sticky substances that serve to either attract or waylay visiting insects.

Continuing our examination of plausible evolutionary steps that a prototype carnivorous plant might take we have something like this:

1) Plant benefits from nitrogen provided by decomposing insects in its vicinity.
2) Random mutation of plant makes insects more attracted to it hence more likely to die near it (scent, colour, shape, etc).
3) Random mutation of plant makes insects even more likely to die near it (sticky resin, etc).
4) Random mutation of plant makes insects more likely to die while actually on the plant (insect traps!)
5) Random mutation of plant makes these traps more and more effective (this is needed to offset mutations taking place that help the insect avoid being trapped).

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It is easy to imagine a scenario where a certain type of (non-carnivorous) plant growing in mildly nitrogen-poor soil benefited from the decomposition of dead insects in its vicinity. From this easy starting point, I can imagine the plant evolving to attract insects (it may already have flowers for this purpose) and then kill them for 'food' (there is a tropical species of insect-killing plant that drowns insects for a similar purpose - supplemental nutrient intake).

Neo-darwinism is an awkward term and I prefer to stay away from it. I think the basic processes of evolution are well enough understood for us to avoid its use. Reproduction, beneficial mutation, and natural selection cover the practical aspects of evolution perfectly well for me.

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Thanks. Acknowledging that it can occur is the most important part. We run the odds for it happening through our calculators and want to shake our heads but we don't properly comprehend the amount of time involved. Darwin identified one important aspect of the process (the huge over-supply of progeny) but was largely clueless about how much time has been available.

Consider two species of Widow spider; the Black Widow and the Red Back. These spiders produce about 2,000 babies each year and in a population of (say) 1 million (female) spiders that is approximately 2 billion opportunities every single year for a beneficial mutation to occur. Now start multiplying this 2 billion by some millions of years - that's a lot of opportunity to turn this:

[image]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cd/Black_Widow_11-06.jpg/211px-Black_Widow_11-06.jpg[/image]

into this:

[image]http://www.cap.nsw.edu.au/Collie-garden/animalPages/images/redback1.jpg[/image]

And once speciation occurs the new species will either compete against its closest relatives and/or further evolve to exploit a slightly different environmental niche. We wonder at the whole process because we don't properly consider the time factor.

I think your comment about most mutations having no measurable effect is not right. I think most mutations are detected and then either 'suicided' or corrected by the cell's own error correction methods. I think any cells that contain new genetic information are extremely 'lucky' to survive their own inception. (I need to learn more about how this error correcting actually works - don't quote me!)

Yes, I would be hard pressed to find an example of a beneficial mutation taking place right now but that's okay - natural selection has 20/20 vision and never sleeps.

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Meat eating plants such as the Venus Fly Trap are very rare indeed. If Neo-Darwinism were true, we would expect them to be the norm because they are more fit since they are dual feeders.

But then again, Neo-Darwinism is a pure fantasy.

Also, I wonder how vegetarians feel about them?