Someone dragged out the Watchmaker Argument AGAIN...
On the FNet forums, in the Ravenclaw Common Room (tis a sad day for the Ravens!) in response to:
"It's like a wath, [sic] even if you had all the pieces, they wouldn't forma [sic] watch unless you had a watchmaker, it would be basically impossible, and how much more complicated is this world than a watch?"
Except that evolution isn't proposing that a handful of broken pieces of metal suddenly sprang into the shape of a watch. Evolution's much more subtle than that.
Imagine you have a large box with a couple of hundred randomly bent bits of metal. For the sake of actually staying true to life, these bits of metal are able to breed - as in, they can combine their characteristics to produce little baby bits of metal. Also in this box you have a selection of plants, which the bits of metal need to eat to survive. You also have a number of birds which eat the bits of metal.
Now, in this environment, the circumstances favour bits of metal that are more watch-like. It doesn't neccecarily have to be a watch; it could be a computer or a washing machine or anything. But bits of metal that more closely resemble watches are, for the sake of argument, stronger than the less-watchlike bits of metal. They can win fights against other bits of metal, so they can get the best breeding partners and the best access to food. They can escape from the birds more easily.
What will happen? The less-watchlike bits of metal will die. They'll be eaten by birds, or starve to death, or, if they do survive, they're less likely to get a mate and produce children. In the next generation fo metal-bits, there'll be more watchlike pieces of metal. In the generation after that, they'll be still more watch-like, simply because the non-watch-like bits of metal are less likely to have children.
And eventually, you'll end up with, more-or-less a watch.
Real evolution is a lot more complex than this, and involves fewer watch-animals prowling the plains, but you get the general idea.
"It's like a wath, [sic] even if you had all the pieces, they wouldn't forma [sic] watch unless you had a watchmaker, it would be basically impossible, and how much more complicated is this world than a watch?"
Except that evolution isn't proposing that a handful of broken pieces of metal suddenly sprang into the shape of a watch. Evolution's much more subtle than that.
Imagine you have a large box with a couple of hundred randomly bent bits of metal. For the sake of actually staying true to life, these bits of metal are able to breed - as in, they can combine their characteristics to produce little baby bits of metal. Also in this box you have a selection of plants, which the bits of metal need to eat to survive. You also have a number of birds which eat the bits of metal.
Now, in this environment, the circumstances favour bits of metal that are more watch-like. It doesn't neccecarily have to be a watch; it could be a computer or a washing machine or anything. But bits of metal that more closely resemble watches are, for the sake of argument, stronger than the less-watchlike bits of metal. They can win fights against other bits of metal, so they can get the best breeding partners and the best access to food. They can escape from the birds more easily.
What will happen? The less-watchlike bits of metal will die. They'll be eaten by birds, or starve to death, or, if they do survive, they're less likely to get a mate and produce children. In the next generation fo metal-bits, there'll be more watchlike pieces of metal. In the generation after that, they'll be still more watch-like, simply because the non-watch-like bits of metal are less likely to have children.
And eventually, you'll end up with, more-or-less a watch.
Real evolution is a lot more complex than this, and involves fewer watch-animals prowling the plains, but you get the general idea.