tikigod wrote:I have always believed that evolution helps prove the existence of a greater being(s). It also helps to disprove it, but I find that it helps to prove the existence of god(s) is more interesting so my ideas behind this are:
1. If life started from single celled organisms, what scientific purpose would there be to evolving past that, cause they have always seemed to be near perfect at living?
Well, it took a loooooong time to move from unicellular life forms to multicellular. While the earliest traces of life seem to stretch back to a few hundred million years after the Earth formed, the earliest traces of multicellular life are maybe a billion years old. So for about 3/4 of the time life existed on Earth it was something like cyanobacteria. You can still see stromatolites (big structures created by cyanobacteria) in Western Australia. And the earliest life forms wouldn't even be 'cells' in all probability - cells are far too complex to be the first forms of life. (I have to check my dates on multicellular life, don't quote me.)
But clearly, multicellular life offers advantages, including better survival in variable environments - you can create an 'internal environment' where conditions are more regulated. Early multicellular life appears in such odd forms as the Ediacaran biota, which looked like air mattreses, and were probably flat life forms that hogged seafloor space and photosynthesized. Early life forms were just 'more of the same' -- but then multicellular life forms evolved into a new ecological niche -- predator. In a relatively rapid stretch of time, it seems that some life forms began to eat other life forms. Compared to photosynthesis, eating other living things is a GREAT energy source. So there's a clear advantage in being the new guy on the block who can eat everyone else. You have unlimited food!
Once someone starts eating others, then there's an arms race, and competition, which drives evolution to produce newer, different life forms. Someone invents body armor, or toxins, or spines, or ...
Life forms adapt to their environment. When the environment changes, however, even a well-adapted life form can be in real trouble - pick up a lion (crown predator in Africa) and drop it in the Antarctic, and it won't do very well at all for long. So even 'perfectly adapted' life forms could find out that they were under serious selective pressure to change as their environment changed -- salinity, temperature, or whatever.
2. Look at what people have accomplished, what’s the point dose it really make that much more fit to produce young.
Individuals don't evolve - populations do. Fitness is measured as the success an organism has in terms of passing its genes to the next generation. Any organism that fails to pass its genes on has 0 fitness. There are caveats around this -- dying childless to ensure your brother's 5 children survive is actually a net gain in fitness, for example.
--R.
