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Natural Selection

from Mar​-​Rar by Brandon Edge

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lyrics

[stolen from a post by "SurfDude" at http://forums.savage2.com/showthread.php?t=15984 ... 02-23-2009, 06:13 AM. lyrics in []'s by me]

[i'm bored and i'm lonely so i got on my computer and i looked something totally inane up on the google search. i did, and now i'm gonna sing what came up. i didn't find what i was looking for but i found something else, about evolution...]

Here's the jist. I'll try to leave out many of the technicalities so that you can get the most from a very basic description. There is much more going on that what I'm about to say, but can't get into because there is too much to say about very complex systems that are hard to briefly describe. Understand this: [you could die] You could major in evolutionary biology and still not know all there is to know about evolution.

First you have to understand DNA. DNA is basically information. Just like information on your hard drive, everything is stored as a series of yes/no bits. Just like the information on a hard drive can be the difference between a hacker's hack pad, a gamer's pc, or a master scientist's life work... the DNA in your cells can code the difference between an amoeba, a duck, or tomato plant.

Now you have to figure in the 1 basic property of all living organisms... the need to reproduce.

We'll start basic. Things like bacteria and other single-celled organisms have a very simple reproduction cycle in that they just split apart and one cell turns into two. On average, bacteria do this once every two hours. Now imagine that every so often, throughout replication somehow one (or more) of those little yes/no bits in the DNA change... As in they don't copy exactly. Suddenly, you could have anything from a radically new super-bacteria, to a very very similar bust slightly different bacteria, to a deformed and dysfunctional bacteria that will die in a matter of seconds (and thus not be able to reproduce), and everything inbetween. Over the course of thousands/millions of years, some amount of these "changes" accumulate until you eventually if you were to compare this new bacteria to to the old one, you'd never know the two were once the same.

Now imagine that you let this course happen for billions of years. Eventually you'll start getting more complex organisms that have more complex ways of reproducing. Such as us organisms that require two to tango. When you stop making copies and start introducing more variety to the equation, you get a faster rate of evolution. Variation is essentially the driving force of evolution. With increased variation, you get a better chance for the offspring of the two parent organisms to have some "new" DNA sequence.

Now I haven't said anything about natural selection.

This term is a GIANT misnomer, for two reasons. 1) No one is "selecting" the genes that mutate and get to live on/ reproduce, and 2) People tend to think that natural selection allows for organisms to "select" which mutations they want to have. In the case of 1, religious idiots tend to point to their supreme being and say that he must be the "natural selector", which is moronic. For 2, you can't "want" to have a baby with eleven fingers and then pop out an eleven-fingered baby. You'd have to find a mate with eleven fingers, and then hope that the eleven fingered gene passes down to your offspring from your mate.

So what exactly is natural selection? It's better described as the "only the strong survives" law. When a genetic mutation occurs, it can be somewhere from beneficial, to benign, to harmful. When it's harmful, such as mental retardation, you generally don't see those organisms reproduce and pass on their retard-DNA. When it's benign, the organism will reproduce just as normally, and pass on it's useless mutation to subsequent generations. Finally you can have positive mutations. These are what biology tends to favor. The general order of life tends to find the most optimal genetic mutations to assist in an organisms living. You can find examples of these everywhere you look. Why do you have nails? Why are your teeth arranged the way they are? Why are butterfly's wings built they way they are? The list is endless. This happens because, generally speaking, when an organism is lucky enough to be born with one of these positive mutations, they out-compete the rest of the other organisms, live longer, and reproduce more. Eventually everyone has this positive gene... And the process restarts.

But this process isn't as jerky as it sounds. It's not like a plant one day gave birth to a little seedling with a brain. It's not like a fish had a little fish baby that grew legs. It's an incredibly slow, luck based, process which often makes very subtle changes at a time. If you read about the brain, you'll read about how some parts of the brain are millions of years old, while others such as the prefrontal cortex are relatively new. This is because it took a long time to first create the brain... and then it took longer to add new parts to it.

A final rule that is also good to know about evolution is that it tends to not "add" new parts to an organism. Here's an example. Do you think that a giraffe's neck has extra spine bones, or do you think that it's neck just has very large spine bones? The answer is the ladder. Evolution tends to change (aka mutate) what is already there, rather than to add/remove parts. This of course is not always the case... obviously.

So what is evolution? It's a roll of the dice. An offspring that intends to be an "evolved form" of another needs to 1) Be EXTREMELY lucky enough for their DNA to mutate, 2) Be EXTREMELY lucky enough that their mutation works out well, and then 3) Finally live long enough to reproduce and have healthy babies that pass on their mutation.

And as for "Intelligent Evolution", I wouldn't have a clue what you're talking about.

credits

from Mar​-​Rar, released March 12, 2016

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about

Brandon Edge Texas

Austin, TX-based songwriter. 30 albums avail. on bandcamp or elsewhere [youtube & mediafire]. All downloads are FREE or name- your-price! See my FB artist page [linked below] for full discog and links to almost all of my music [click the "about" tab then click "see more" under where it says "description"] ... more

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