Dinosaurs v. Mammals: The Final Conflict

[Barrister]

Why am I not surprised that there is a Beria Centre in Whitehorse?

http://www.beringia.com/

[alfred russel]

How is it not true?

A human being is a more complex organism than a Myllokunmingia.  I don't think "more evolved" would be unfair.

If you look at it in terms of changes in DNA, I would think the rates of change would be much higher in a population of bacteria rather than humans (at least those with conjugation). That seems like one logical way to quantify evolutionary change.

[Ed Anger]

If it was a Laventri Beria center, I'd get my tickets STAT.

My mere presence would swell the tourism dollars up there to 20 bucks for the year.

[Razgovory]

The thing with living organisms is that they've all share the same lineage.  Since all organisms share the same line of decent all the lines of decent are the same age.  All organisms would be at the same level of "evolved".  Complexity is different issue but more complex organisms are not more evolved organisms.

[Viking]

How is it not true?

A human being is a more complex organism than a Myllokunmingia.  I don't think "more evolved" would be unfair.

That's a bit subjective there defining a complex organism as "more evolved", simple organisms can be almost perfectly adapted to their environment. Furthermore you have many apparently simple organisms which have many times more genes than we do, sure they are more complex than us? Your anthropocentrism dissapoints me.

[The Brain]

How is it not true?

A human being is a more complex organism than a Myllokunmingia.  I don't think "more evolved" would be unfair.

That's a bit subjective there defining a complex organism as "more evolved", simple organisms can be almost perfectly adapted to their environment. Furthermore you have many apparently simple organisms which have many times more genes than we do, sure they are more complex than us? Your anthropocentrism dissapoints me.

How do you evolve when you are perfectly adapted to your environment?

[alfred russel]

The thing with living organisms is that they've all share the same lineage.  Since all organisms share the same line of decent all the lines of decent are the same age.  All organisms would be at the same level of "evolved".  Complexity is different issue but more complex organisms are not more evolved organisms.

A lot of factors influence the rates of genetic change besides the passage of time: average generation time, population size, mutation rates (these are not the same as there are different environmental factors, as well as different intracelluar controls), sexual life cycles (typical diploid sexual such as us, haplodiploidity in many eusocial species, and the extent asexuality is present), and the extent genes can be integrated from the environment.

[alfred russel]

Raz, think about it this way: if we put a 20 year generation time period on humans and our recent ancestors, in the past 5 million years we've had 250,000 generations. It's possible for bacteria to cram that many generations into a human lifetime.