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Illegal Beings: Human Clones
The Suburban Ape
libfemme ( 12/24/2004, 14:28:50 )Evolution is not an all or nothing game. It's about making a living. It goes something like this:Suppose you had a town,and everybody has a house inside the city limits. 20 years later the kids in the town grow up and want to marry and move into their own house. But all the land in the city limits is already taken, occupied by their parents houses. So what do the kids do? They move. They build a new housing development on the outskirts of town. Newspapers would call it "everyone is moving to the suburbs". But if they are moving to the suburbs does that imply the center of town is now deserted? Of course not. It means the city is now twice as big but the growth is on the outskirts.Why do bacteria still exist? They are at least 3 billion years old. Why have they never changed? Well of course they have changed, just not so much that we don't still recognize them as bacteria.Bacteria exist because it is possible to feed off things in the air, ocean or land the way bacteria always have feed. But there are other ways to feed, ones that don't compete with other bacteria. Those individuals that can take advantage of these other ways do.A successful bacteria organism may have billions of descendents. Each will spread out to find some place to live and thrive. When it gets overcrowded in one place the ones that can make it to a new place will do so. Why compete when you can go somewhere else where the pickings are easy? When you go someplace new you change the conditions under which you are living. That means some of your offspring in the new place will survive better than others. The best survivors will breed more and so their characteristics will, over time, become concentrated in this new population. At some point we say the species has changed.Why do fish still exist if there are land animals? Well because the oceans still cover a majority of the planet and are still rich places to feed and survive. There are more marine species than land species. It's not an either or choice. It's an AND. Every place that can support life does eventually. Every living arrangement that can take advantage of a environment eventually does. When animals developed a whole new opportunity opened up for bacteria as well.Do you have a sibling or a cousin? Will she pass on her genes to her children and they will be like her? Does that negate your existence and the fact that you will pass down your own genes to your children at the same time? Both lines can co-exist and take different paths.None of the ape species living today are our ancestors. However there was an ape species millions of years ago that had, well, at least two offspring. One went down one path and made a successful living climbing trees for fruit. And another line found they could stand upright and as a consequence could travel farther from the trees and find new sources of food not already claimed by their ape brothers. Both lines were successful in their own way.Evolution is not progress. I don't know how many times biologist have to say this. It is CHANGE. Change may result in more complicated living arrangements over time, or more often it may not. A more complicated living arrangement could be a bacterial colony or multiple cells acting in concert as an individual organism such as a plant or even an animal.Living conditions change. When this happens some offspring live longer than others. The ones that live longest are, by definition, the ones that are best adapted to that particular change. You have to be alive in order to mate. The longer you live, the more mating opportunities that come your way, the more offspring produced with your genes.Over hundreds, thousands and millions of subsequent matings of the best adapted to the best adapted to the best adapted of a population, eventually the offspring produced will be born with only those characteristics that can survive in the changed conditions. The unsurvivable characteristics tend to get bred out.Because we are so close to the situation we see any differences between offspring as significant. We call them variations, or breeds or species. But there are no hard and fast lines of separation in nature. To evolution chimpangees and human beings are both successful. They are best adapted to their environment. They live.The best example that evolution is not progress is the rule of 3. The observations that it takes 3 generations for a family to go from rags to rich and back to rags. A tycoon will build a fortune in oil or steel, a Rockefellor or a Vanderbilt, and the next two generations will spend it all. How often does a son of a brillant man turn out to be as brillant, let alone more so than his father? Sometimes, but not invariably.Genetics is a roll of the dice. A recombination of existing genes. It creates not new genes, but an individual will a different set of characteristics, strengths and weaknesses. The environment determines if those characteristics are advantageous or not.
This Message is being posted for educational purposes, as well as for comment and criticism, by the visitors to the HumanCloning.org Foundation website (www.HumanCloning.org ).
Disclaimer: Information provided on this web site is for educatonal purposes only. It is not a substitute for, nor can it replace advice from your own physician.
HumanCloning.org™ Established December 11, 2002.
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