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To: chrisser; GodGunsGuts; Fichori; tpanther; Gordon Greene; Ethan Clive Osgoode; betty boop; ...
Been learning a lot about fertility. It’s a darned complicated process when everything is there and working. Beyond just the organs necessary, there are all the various fluids, timing, pathways. How the heck did all this evolve if it has to be there in order for procreation. It’s worse than a chicken and egg dilemma.

And throw in the gestation period, then need for critical timing for that gestation, a couple weeks either way and viability is threatened, not to mention that a full term pregnant female would be an EASY target for predators.....

Then there's the feeding the baby part. Lactation must be perfectly suited for the baby's arrival both in terms of quality for completely nourishing the baby until he can eat and timing so that the baby doesn't starve to death. That had to develop at the same time as the ability to reproduce, no less.

Not to mention that nine months is a LOOOOONNNNNGGGG time to be pregnant.

17 posted on 12/29/2011 3:25:00 PM PST by metmom (For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore & do not submit again to a yoke of slavery)
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To: metmom
Not to mention our tremendous brain had to evolve long before it gave us any advantage. To support it, babies have zero defenses for the first couple of years of life and have no chance at all against most predators for many more years after that.

And that brain doesn't actually peak until your fifties -- long after average live expectancy at all times except that latter half of the last century.

Its survival advantage is largely found in our organization, specialization and very advanced tool making none of which were possible when the brain would have evolved. In evolutionary terms, it would have been a huge cost with no apparent advantage until it has been around a while and had time to solve problems. Gradual improvements only make the problem worse -- a person with an IQ of 50 still has a brain that is large and very expensive for the organism.

So you are left with a random baby born that is more helpless for longer and looks odd, but won't see any real advantage for at least 20 years, if it lives that long.

65 posted on 12/30/2011 7:11:40 AM PST by hopespringseternal
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To: metmom

Pardon me here, but you’re operating on a misunderstanding. The developments you mention - lactation and internal gestation - are fairly recent evolutionary developments. In addition, their timing need not coincide with the ability to reproduce, which occurred quite a bit earlier.

Basic reproduction is an essential trait of life, and indeed would likely have been around since before it could be called life, back when it’s merely a mass of self-replicating pre-RNA or the like, according to one hypothesis.

Lactation and internal gestation on the other hand came about a long, long time later. The mammilian line, if memory serves, descended from a therapod egg-laying ancestor. Internal gestation could come about from slight, gradual mutations to the established gestational process, and lactation is essentially a repurposing of other functional portions - though it’s not my specialty, so I’ll have to look up a few papers on it if you want more detail.

Overall, the major misconception you’re making is that evolution does not produce from nothing a full-blown human; that’s what creation claims. Evolution is a description of how life changes over time, and that is the important part: change. Evolution does not require that all these things you mention poof out of nothing all together, but instead explains how small genetic changes can accumulate to give the wealth of diversity present on the planet.

If you have any questions, I’d be happy to field them.


122 posted on 12/30/2011 12:15:01 PM PST by Muridae
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