Love that evolutionary drivel. If evolution wants everything to live so badly, why no unlimited life spans? Twist that one, Darwinheads.
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Because unlimited lifespans would eventually lead to mass overcrowding without enough resources to go around, so everything would just die off, anyway.
Note that the longest-lived lifeforms on earth are also the ones that reproduce with the least frequency. If you're popping out babies continuously, then your evolutionary duty has been fulfilled, and from an evolutionary perspective, you're just taking up space.
I'm sure some fundie somewhere will interpret this as evolutionists saying we should euthanize the elderly. This is merely an explanation as to why longer lifespans are not selected by evolution.
Don't ask us. Ask the God of the Bible why, if He is so omnibenevolent, He goes on genocidal rampages every so often. By the way, evolution really, really hates being anthropomorphized.
Well, there's always cancer cells. Those have a fairly unlimited lifespan, naturally.
And gee, those are caused by a mutation of the cell. It's not an externally beneficial mutation, but to the cell it could be seen as such.
One cell's evolution is another cell's malignant growth.
Love that creationist drivel. If you can reproduce more by living a shorter life and making bigger litters thats what you will evolve to do(your species, not you personally). Twist on that one, hollowheads.
When we've started to colonize the galaxy and can easily spread at a whim to other worlds and just as easily "terraform" them, I'm all for eternal life. Until then, though, there's the problem of overcrowding.
See, unlike religion, science is not what we want, but what is. I've never seen anyone following a religion they didn't like--and that's no coincidence.
Why no unlimited life spans in the ToE? Because there are no unlimited life spans in nature. End of story.
Why no unlimited life spans? Maybe because, even if evolution was an actual being capable of thoughts and desires, unlimited lifespans would directly oppose natural selection, which is rather important for evolution.
Actually the question of why organisms age has been studied by evolutionary biologists. The answer doesn't have to do with overcrowding. That would take group selection which isn't very effective. The theory is that reproducing at an earlier age is generally a better strategy because indviduals will tend to die as they age through bad luck, predation ect. So the longer an organism waits to breed the lower the chances are that it will live long enough to breed. as a consequence organisms that breed relatively early outreproduce late breeders. This can vary across populations depending on the rate of predation and disease for example, low predation tends to be associted with longer absolute lifespans
So why do things then age? Mutations that decrease the bodies ability to maintain itself (e.g. killing cancerous cells) but do not have an effect until later in life will be invisible to selection since the organism has already passed along it genes before the detrimental mutations effects are felt and in a similar fashion mutations that increase reproductive success early in life but have a negative effect on health later in life will also become fixed in a population and cause aging.
These fundies seem to wonder why scientists have not thought about the simple problems with evolution that convince them that it is wrong. If they would just research the issues a little bit, they would find out that these things have been thought about and answered.
Species that don't die, don't need to reproduce. Species that don't reproduce, don't mutate. Species that don't mutate, do not evolve.
That wasn't so hard was it?
Papabear evolution certainly does deal with lifespans. There is a whole sub discipine of evolutionary biology, life history evolution, dealing with how natural selection can modify the timing and energy spent on reproduction. development and aging. In addition natual selection doesn't realy act on the species level very strongly, i.e. things don't evolve to help the species survive per se thats a by product of individual level selection
I'm not certain why there's no unlimited life span, but it has something to do with the Illuminati. Interestingly, science has come close to duplicating it by forcing people to listen to sermons by fundy ministers.
Is there actually a mental deficiency that creates these types of people, or is it just that we conglomorate all the idiot fundies.
Here's an idea - find an interesting, well researched and well written fundy.. oh wait...
Because unlimited lifespans are detrimental to the evolutionary process -- if nothing dies, then the population can only increase, thus consuming limited resources and killing off everyone anyway. If lifespans are limited, the species will procreate and continue to evolve without the inevitability of overpopulation hanging over its head. If evolution could care about anything, it wouldn't give a damn about individuals -- just the species as a changing mass.
Evolution isn't about living for a long time, it's about reproducing. It doesn't matter in terms of your evolutionary fitness if you die, just as long as you reproduce first. Once you are done reproducing you are useless evolutionarily and just taking up space.
Also, evolution is not a concious entity. It's an unconcious process, like gravity.
Of course, there is always the possibility that this fuckwit believes that gravity is concious as well.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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