Not a science freak, but I'll offer a rebuttal from an average joe that's read a few books on the topic.

Incorrect. The very reason that people found evolution so threatening (and still do) is because it suggests that man is NOT at the top of the "great chain of being". Evolution is not a ladder with man at the top. Evolution is a complicated bush with many branches. Man is just a single branch. We no doubt have the best brains for problem solving, that's true, but plenty of animals destroy us in other departments. Mere bees have better navigational skills, for example.

Each animal has its own goodies (and baddies) and its own goodies it "missed out on".

Only if you hold the position that man must have everything that is awesome because he is the greatest animal there is.

He's not any different than the others. Monkeys and apes don't have any of those wild mechanisms either. We don't need any of it, though.

What do we do when we're cold and we see a bear with thick fur? We kill him and we steal it!

We can set traps, build weapons, outsmart, outmaneuver, build, and domesticate. The fact that we don't need thick fur or poisonous claws is because our brains allow us a detour around that evolutionary branch. If we wanted them, we'd just steal them from someone else. And we could do it because we're smart enough.

More or less, yeah. It doesn't have to be a survival trait though. It could be just a sexually attractive trait, too. Like the feathers of a peacock. Do you think those feathers help them out much? Nah. But the ladies think they're sexy.

If he is asserting that evolution is false, this demonstrates how little he understands biology.

Didn't need them. For one thing, our earliest ancestor were from around central Africa, which is hardly the north pole. And we did have more body hair at one time, which is how we still have a little bit now (or a lot, if you're one of those sweater-chested men). We didn't need thick coats because we could commandeer them, which was a much easier solution than waiting for our genes to do the work.

Why does a diurnal species need night vision? Does any other diurnal species alive today have night vision? There are no doubt some that have much better night vision than we do (e.g. cats), but this is another example of him wanting mankind to have everything. Nobody gets everything. We're a diurnal species, we have the vision of a diurnal species.

This is assuming that we even had them in the first place. Wings would be pretty wicked, but we never had those either. Some of our mammalian relatives developed them, though, using the same arm-and-hand structures that we possess (hold out your arms to your sides in "v" shapes and then spread your fingers, tilting your wrist so they point downward. Imagine your fingers are incredibly long, and you've got the skeleton of a bat wing.) This shows how much he doesn't understand evolution (and therefore biology). By his logic, the unicellular organisms at the very beginning must have possessed everything, and then simply divided up all of its awesome traits, diluting its original form into little families.

I'm afraid that's not how it works.

This argument goes like this:

I don't understand this thing, and you can't explain it to me, therefore I get to make up whatever I want. God did it.

I would have proposed that since neither of you knew the answer to those questions, the universe must have been created by a benevolent ham sandwich from space.

I mean, as long as we're allowed to just plug in anything we want, right?

Don't quote me on this, but I think that if you trace our lineage back far enough, our ancestors actually did have tails (as some of our miniature cousins still do). I think the pointy triangle doo-hicky at the back of our pelvises are the remainder of whatever tail we had. But again, don't quote me.

Brains. Awesome fucking brains. If we don't have it, we'll steal it. If we can't steal it, we'll make it. A tiger would whip the shit out of a mere human, but give that human the ability to make throwing spears and burmese tiger traps, and voila! You've got a kick ass animal.

The "macro" trait is called a phenotype. It's an expression of the genotype (the "micro" mutation).

I really hate the word "mutation" these days. Mutation is but one small input into the the data processor that is evolution. There's a view among the IDers (and others that aren't well-versed in evolution) that mutations are strictly random. To some degree, there is randomness, true, but there's more than just the strange concept of radiation-induced coding errors.

(The rest of this post is in response to the OP.)

First, we don't get those traits (night vision, winter coats) because we never had them, or we lost them along the way. Elephants don't get winter coats, and they do just fine. So do rhinos, and other mostly-hairless mammals. We don't get winter coats because we evolved in a place that didn't have much of a winter.

As for the night vision: who needs night vision, when you're holed up for the night. We don't have night vision because we don't hunt at night. Or, more precisely, we don't hunt at night because we don't have night vision. (It's the physical trait that develops first, allowing for the behavioural trait., though they can re-inforce each other: hunting at night selects for those with the best night vision. Hunting at night doesn't produce night vision, though; that trait must already exist.)

And we have something predators don't have: the ability to model our complex world abstractly, and make plans based on that model. A few of our ape brothers also have this ability, though apperantly not to the degree of us naked apes. This ability pretty much trumps night vision, as we can hide more effectively. It trumps winter, because we can use furs and fires to keep us warm.

It's quite obvious we did evolve.

And if he wants to talk design, let's talk about our "design" flaws: the nerves that connect to our cones and rods in our eyes are connected on the front, not the back. They have to cross over the front of the eye, exposing them to damage; and they plunge into a hole in the retina that wouldn't be there if only it were wired from the back. We drink, eat, and breath through a single pipe, which diverges in the throat. That leads to many choking deaths a year. Our appendix isn't needed, and can blow up and kill you. The cord that feeds us when we are in utero can strangle us before or during birth. There are so many design flaws that can only be explained by evolution, and not by an intelligent designer.

None of these can be explained through "degeneration," the idea that we are decaying due to the second law of thermodynamics (which they *love* to trot out, though it ignores the gigantic fuck-off energy gradient produced by the sun). These are basic design flaws that must have been with us from the creation, proving that had God produced us, he's a sucky engineer.

Anyway, good for you to admit ignorance, and then seek to shore up your knowledge. And don't short-change yourself. I love the phrase "the unsuccessful genes get 'eroded out' over time." It's brilliant. visual, descriptive, and references another natural process that produces amazing things (the Grand Canyon, for instance). The rest off your argument was sound, and had he been reasonable instead of a dick, he would've recognized his weak argument. I mean, how stupid is it, to assign an arbitrary requirement for survival without considering the environment? "How did we survive without the ability to shoot fireballs from our penis? HOW DID WE SURVIVE?" He's begging the question, with the conclusion built in to his assertions.

If you're interested in continuing the subject, may I suggest "The Blind Watchmaker," and, "The Selfish Gene," by Richard Dawkins? He's a firebrand these days, but when he wrote those, he was merely trying to describe the process of evolution in an accessible way. They are quite good, and an easy read. There's also a book called "Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement." This is a recent book of essays by various experts from various fields. It is also quite a good read.

Good luck, Sir.

Huh.

Thanks. That's very interesting research. Something to bootstrap the system in case of failure. Makes perfect sense.

Okay, so scratch the appendix.

This is sort-of what I thought, though I'd envisioned linear 'tracks' of some sort rather than the far more sensical branching structure.

What? You're saying a YET lied to me through his teeth?

I'd have never guessed.

Since this point was absolutely central to his argument (humans are most highly evolved so must have all the best evolutionary traits), the fact it isn't what Darwin asserted pretty much destroys everything thereafter.

I saw his line of 'reasoning' being used to pre-emptively rebuke any retort regarding how poorly 'designed' we are.

Young Earth 'Theorist'.

Someone who insists a thus far incomplete fossil record is somehow evidence that the Earth is just a few thousand years old. I myself don't even know why this idea is central to their own ideas about the world, but given the fervor with which such a proposterous proposal is often defended, I guess it's important to them.

I was going to ask him something like this, but decided against it in light of the fact he was using using words like 'phenotype' and 'common ancestry' and 'cellular mitosis' and a host of other terms I know fuck all about, and which suggested he commanded a great deal of knowledge in the field of biology, so would simply use such a question to continue illustrating what a simpleton I was.

You know, I think I will go see if I can find a copy of The Blind Watchmaker today. I'd been mulling it over for a while, but always just decided, "Meh. Comics about giant robots are cooler", which is still true, but clearly my brain could use the excercize - and your recommendation sealed the deal.

Thank-you for all of the information, guys. I feel considerably less stupid now (because, hey, I am!). The fact I felt like a YET had just intellectually kicked my ass had me gloomy and frustrated for a good chunk of last night; this more than makes-up for it.

 Should you find yourself in this situation, and if you wish to a proper response to them, I would state the following, if he/she started this conversation. That your biology knowledge is not up to par and that you would hear their arguments, however you will do your own research, with the use of material from actual accredited biologist (such as Dawkins, and various other biologists) and would gladly respond to his arguments at a later date (give yourself a week or so, never the next day because you want to make sure you understand what your going to be stating, so give yourself some time to try to understand the material). As the material is pretty much available online, in your local libraries, etc, etc, etc. Them write out points about his arguments (pretty much seems you have done that anyways) and then counter them...and if possible completely obliterate his ignorance and his argument out of the water. This type of strategy has worked fine for me for the last few years.....and gives me a reason to study these topics in a bit more indepth than I normally would.

Oh, and that reminds me of another thing. It doesn't much matter what Darwin said. He wasn't even the first person to conceive of evolution. The reason he is famous is because he was the first person to conceive of a mechanism that would allow evolution to work (natural selection).

There was a lot of information that Darwin didn't know. For example, he wasn't aware of Mendel's work with crossing the traits of pea plants and flowers. Also, the gene hadn't been discovered yet.

These days we go by the modern synthesis, which is much more sophisticated than what is written in Darwin's Origin of Species.

Freud is often credited as the father of psychology, but his writing is not modern psychology.

Darwin is credited as the father of evolution (though more accurately just natural selection), but modern evolutionary biology knows much more than Darwin ever did.

Funny story:

So, sure as anything, Mr. Fountain of Enlightenment decided to approach me again at right after my lunch break. I guess seating arrangements are 'beneath' those as informed as him - I found him parked at the station next to mine, twinkle in his eye and all, as soon as I went back to work.

He asked me if I was more prepared for a talk today, and I guess his mouth operates on a different wavelength than his ears, because despite my insistence that I really wasn't, off it fucking went anyway. I was flustered and, in spite of picking-up the Blind Watchmaker and getting a few pages in (really good read! Thanks for the recommendation!) as well as having read all of the brilliant points made this morning, my brain apparently decided to stuff the information in a drawer somewhere in the back of the giant clusterfuck of a filing system that is my memory, so I basically just sat there feeling stupid (again) and took a verbal pounding for about an hour, and finally just started to concede to the 'brilliance' and 'scientific veracity' of his arguments so he would shut-up.

And then, something absolutely amazing happened that I didn't see coming. He asked me, "So, what time on Sunday should I pick you up? About eight, say? Trust me, it's easier if you take this first step with someone, and someone you can trust,"

Yup. The fucker thought he had me. Not only that, he fucking hard closed me (Hi! I'm Kevin's resume! See where it says, '4 years worth of retail sales experience'? That's your first hint that he's well versed in impulsive sale techniques, like the one you just tried to use, so trying to use them as a manipulative tool on him is only likely to piss him off) like I was his bitch in a used car lot. Now, while that alone is likely to boil the blood of most atheists, what blew my cork was his 'About eight?' comment.

I don't give a shit who you are, or what the fuck you think you know, or how important you think you are: You don't fucking get to tell me where and when I'm going to be tomorrow (figuratively).

This is a real pet peeve of mine, to put it lightly. It suggests, in my opinion, that you don't think my time is worth anything (or that yours is just worth so much more). Sure, I'll agree happily to schedules, dates, get-togethers and all that wonderful stuff - but I get to be involved in making the when and where decisions.

Friends of mine have always said this about me: I have the best thoughts when I'm having the worst time. This would prove to be yet one more such instance.

I'm not a big and intimidating guy. I'm about a hundred pounds soaking wet, shy of six feet tall and some days I feel lucky if I manage to lift two big jugs of milk at the same time. So even when I got hot under the collar and look at you with a certain gleam in my eye, it's nothing to shy away from.

When I was finished chewing-up this asshole's shitty ideas and spitting them all over his immaculately polished and spiffed-out ego, he motored back to his assigned seat like it his only hope against the bombs going-off around him. He was visibly shaken.

I think today marks perhaps the first time I'm actually pleased with myself over having clearly hurt another human being in person. I'm not sure if that's such a great thing - but I'm quite sure whatever injury was inflicted was well deserved.

Basically, I just decided to dive into an analogy. I may not know biology, Darwinism or genetics from a can of tuna - but when I got angry, I basically told myself, "You know what? Fuck this. Organisms aren't the only things that have evolved over time. War's done plenty of that - and I sure as Hell have done plenty of homework when it comes to armed conflict."

I'm not sure the analogy is all that good from an academic standpoint (the evolution of warfare is very much an intelligently guided process, with certain emergent 'outbreaks', opposed to natural selection), but it did it's job. And I was so pleased with myself I even spent the second half of my shift jotting down the jist of my arguments. I'm not sure they bring anything new to the table, but I actually wouldn't mind posting them up as an article. Is there a way to submit work for that purpose to Brian?

As someone who is a professional in this area and with more years experience than I want to remember, I think you did as well as you could

You might have met his first assertion - that Darwin said this or that - with the retort that you thought that Darwin was only the originator and as far as you know, evolution theory has been through several generations of development and refinement since then. (Archioptrix commented on some of the details of this). Fundamentalists (religious or biological) love to quote original authors and the older the better rather than the ideas - i.e. appeal to authority rather than reason.

As for his principle argument, about our not possessing the best capabilities in the animal world, the commentator that replied "Because we don't need them". comes closest to the truth. Had it been me, I'd have said that, in the first place, we don't have them because those characteristics are possessed by specialists and we are generalists. Cheetahs may be the fastest, but they lack many other capabilities. Birds can fly and have the keenest sight, but little else and, thus, the appellation of birdbrain and so on.

The most knowledgeable answer would be because we have a unique (a lot of biologist shy away from the word unique for Homo sapien, but it's true) constellation of features or capabilities that gives us superiority to all other large animals on earth. - only very recently have we taken on the microbes. That constellation consists of 1) upright posture (allowing a head carriage with vocal apparatus - not shared by our primate relations - that is capable of producing complicated uncorrelated formants in our phonemes and thus, the highest vocal bandwidth ) which led, in turn, to selection for 2) complicated language development and the brain development to support that language. 3) An opposable thumb - that allows precision grip and manipulataion - which is not unique to humans or even primates, but critical when paired wth 4) excellent stereoscopic vision from inches to about 20 feet. 3 and 4 allow not just object manipulation - a trait shared with many other species- but, precision manipulation.  Finally, we have 5) the pre-frontal cortex, the executive center of the Homo sapien brain which is unique to Homo sapien and allows us to coordinate the other 4 in ways that account for our being able to make tools that far exceed the capabilities of all other animals - but only when we need them. Most of these characteristic's gradual development is traceable in our primate lineage although the interaction of these elements was powerful enough to accelerate the development of brain areas for speech, executive function, and memory tissue to support their refinement. So, again, it isn't one or the other, but the constellation that is unique and truely unique in Homo sapiens. That's the biological evolutionary set up, but our prowess as a species rests on the coordinated use of these features with others of our kind.

That is, it should not be assumed that those features alone or together account for our supremacy as it is the complicated social structures that these (complex language, object/tool manipulation, memory, planning ability etc), allow in our social cooperation with one another and  it is the cultural evolution of our species that makes us the hot species that we are today. Most of "what we know" and too often tend to take personal credit for (as your boorish coworker did), is really the accumulated knowledge of what works and what doesn't and wisdom of our predecessors passed down to us through our parents, teachers, role-models and reading - writing being speech made permanent and the key to sustained cultural development and improvement with inferior word-of-mouth traditions and crafts repeatedly reinvented, but dying off when civilizations crash. Written words live on.

So, in a nutshell, that's it - the reason that we don't need no stinkin claws or wings or big long tails to balance better when we're swinging from the trees or running down a Thomson's gazelle on the savanna. With apologies in advance to vegetarians, vegans, and animal-rights enthusiasts, if we want gazelle, we can go to an exotic food restaurant and order it - thanks to millennia of accumulated knowledge of our predecessors.

Did you just make that up? If so, that's one for the quote books.

When I'm on the road, and someone bombs past me (or sometimes when I bomb past someone else) I remind myself of a simple truth. 'There ain't no front of the line.'

This also applies to genetics and evolutionary thought.

Any creature that did manage to reach the 'top' of the evolutionary ladder would have one amazing trait. It would be all alone on the planet.

We fill niches, (we being biological entities) natural selection is a brutal process, and like they say in 'Highlander' there can be only one. Add to this the presure from the enviroment itself as well as those creatures in other niches. for instance, behold the bunny. Rabbits are an amazingly sucessful creature, and given the chance will (ask the Aussies) fill their available niche to the absolute exclusion of all other similar creatures. They also make a tasty treat for the predators (who occupy their OWN niche in the ecosystem).

However no creature can fill ALL niches, not even man. We might destroy and pollute those environments, but that is NOT evolution. We do not have gills, we can never compete with the trout on it's own terms. There is no ultimate being, no top of the ladder, no front of the line.

LC >;-}>

While it is true there are other theories to explain the dissapation of the H. neanderthalis lineage, the evidence against our ancestors is overwhelming. It is important to remember that this indictment is not one of open genocide or atrocity. I am talking about an extremely gradual process of erosion of one line in favour of the other, during a period that marked the end of the last Ice age, approximately 10,000 years in length, from 40,000 to 30,000 BCE. The H. neanderthalis is built in a manner distinctly different from the H. sapiens. They are shorter, stockier, and they have a distinctly jutting jaw and thick ridge line across the brow, a larger skull and a larger brain. Less agile, but physically stronger, than the Cro-Magnon. The last thing that experts agree on after the Pan/Homo split 5 million years ago is that the H. erectus originated in Africa, the first Hominid to tame fire. The H. neanderthalis originated 130,000 years ago, but the trail gets muddy with so many different species in the Homo genus. We know that the neanderthalis settled near the region which today has the Danube, in the German-Polish area, and in Southern France, during the last ice age. The disappearence of the neanderthalis is suspicious for several reasons. One, it coincides with the movement of the Cro-Magnons from the Fertile Crescent area into Southern Europe. We used to have this image that H.G Wells called "paleo-racism". The Neanderthal, according to archeologists, was a brute, a savage, a knuckle-dragging idiot. But this has been largely overturned. It is clear now that the Cro-Magnons and neanderthalis were so close that some archeologists have classed them into a subspecies diverge, the Homo sapiens neanderthalis, and because the two are so close, it leaves the possibility that they might have interbred. And by all accounts of how fighting between nomadic roving bands of Cro-Magnons and the less seasonal neanderthalis occured, they would have stolen each other's women, which leaves the possibility that there is some neanderthal blood in the human line. But, to put it simply, the dissapearance of every Hominid except us is not a coincidence. There is no way that a Hominid population could simply replace its antecedants in such a short time span except through violence. By 31,000 BC, the neanderthalis had been driven deep into Souther Europe, into the mountains around Croatia and Yugoslavia. By this point, the last of the bloodline of the neanderthal was vanishing. The Cro-Magnon had an advantage because of the rapid climate change that resulted during the end of the last ice-age. The ruthless have always been the winners in the history of the Homo genus.

Yes, this is plausible. The neanderthalis have many broken bones, injuries similar to rodeo cowboys and Spanish bullfighters, because of the way they hunted. Obviously the Cro-magnons managed to get the upper hand in the first place when they migrated out of the Middle East into the neanderthal territory specifically because the neanderthal was more maladaptive when the climate was changing. I'm not suggesting the H. sapiens came with fire and stone axes and deliberately initiated open extermination of the neanderthalis. There was an interplay of factors, one of which was the climate change, which allowed sapiens to gain the upper hand.

wrong. wrong. wrong. WRONG.

There is no such thing as "the highest form of evolution." Evolution works towards no goals. Organisms adapt to survive in their environment, and are successful if they reproduce. There are many different methods of doing this. Every living thing on Earth is "the highest form of evolution" in that each of them has a successful "strategy" for surviving. A bacteria's way of life is just as valid in the eyes of evolution as a human's. The reason we don't have many of these things is because they are costly. Natural weapons are cumbersome and oftentimes not very effective. "Enhanced senses" may not be necessary. The benefits of having great hearing and smell and being able to see in ultraviolet may actually be less than the costs of growing such organs. Even if this isn't the case, evolution can't simply provide an organism with all of the "gizmos" it can. Evolution works on what is already there, and depends on the current situation.

Pretty much.

Bullshit. This demonstrates how little he understands about biology. Humans have the extended phenotype of making tools and using clothing, which in itself can be less costly and more beneficial than having thick fur and claws.

He's the one who doesn't know what he's talking about. I encourage you to research evolution. If anyone comes up with an argument you don't understand, tell them you'll research it and get back to them on it. You can't argue things that you don't understand, so please take the time to learn, or at least point people in the right direction where they can learn for themselves.

We don't have night vision because we have excellent color vision. Let me explain. The retina has limited space, and rods and cones come from the same type of embryological cell. Rods are excellent at picking up minute amounts of light, but terrible at sensing color. Cones can sense color but are very bad at seeing in the dark. So, what you have is a cost-benifit situation, where two "goods", rods and cones, are "bought" by allotting retinal space to them. Whichever configuration results in the most generally efficient solution wins. It just so happens that human's early lifestyle relied more on color vision than on night vision. Humans had to see each other's changes in skin tones to assess emotions and sickness, and they had to be able to determine which fruits were good to eat, which were ripe, and which were rotting merely from sight. Color vision would have been very useful for picking out predators in dense foliage as well. It just so happens that certain animals are better adapted to night vision, and others to color vision, but there is a distinct trade-off between the two. Birds, for instance, have even better vision than humans. They have another specialized cell which can see slightly into the infrared and slightly into the ultraviolet. The cost of these cells? Fewer rods. Worse night vision.

There are several hypotheses about the layers of fur. The first is that humans early lifestyle probably revolved around running down and chasing prey in the savannah, and thick fur would have reduced our ability to sweat and shed off heat as we ran. In fact, the lack of fur is one of the things which makes humans some of the most efficient runners in the animal kingdom. A human can (slowly) outrun almost any animal, from horses to cheetahs to impalas, as long as the temperature is very hot and the distance very long. Humans have some of the most efficient sweat systems in the animal kingdom, and it was hypothesized that the lack of fur aided in our ability to run long distances and shed heat through sweat, which would have allowed us to run antelope and other large game to exhaustion. The second theory is that fur-borne parasites became endemic to humans as they moved onto the plains. Things like lice and fleas became a major nuisance, and could even cause sickness and death. A gradual loss of fur may have been driven by increased death due to fur-borne parasites. The third is that humans, being a social species, had to efficiently communicate to one another through gestures, facial expressions, and changes in skin tone (blushing). Humans, though a combination of sexual and natural selection, would have lost their fur in order to more easily communicate. The truth is probably a combination of all three hypotheses.

Tails were lost with the advent of bipedalism. Like chimpanzees and orangutans, we spent a great deal of time on the forest floor, and tails simply became cumbersome to our movement and they were gradually selected away.

Use the internet instead. Or read a book like the selfish gene or Darwin's dangerous idea. It should really clear things up.

I had thought of one more thing you might consider. Which is you might try including a little research on that young earth creationism bull shit. It could be helpful to know exactly where there bs argument is coming from and be more prepared with a solid debunking of bull shit that they would have a harder time dodging.

Loved reading your further interactions with Mr. AssHat