Well, he did it: the Digital Cuttlefish found a novel argument against evolution. It has to be seen to be believed — this creationist is claiming that the X-Men disprove the theory of evolution.
Already you should be saying “It’s a comic book and a movie! It’s not real!”, and for a bonus you might point out that the biology of the X-Men franchise is ludicrously awful, and in general, the mass media don’t understand evolution, but let’s give him a chance. Let’s see this argument.
Every living organism – including humans – is in a constant state of degradation or deterioration not evolution. From the moment something comes to be, it already is dying and will eventually die.
The entire living organic system is in a constant fight for survival. Unfortunately, there is nothing in its intrinsic composition powerful enough that would enable it to suppress the inevitable and fateful pull toward its own dissolution or death.
Otherwise, it would divert all of its energy into overcoming said fate by ‘evolving’ out of it, exactly like X-Men’s Wolverine manages to do. Why? Because the survival instinct is the most dominant one. Said evolving characteristic – if it were possible – would in turn be uniformly present in all of creation and entropy would be nothing but a bad memory.
So if evolution were true, we all ought to be super-strong, virtually immortal beings with the ability to heal any injury. Why? Because such an individual would win against death, and therefore is the paragon of evolution. This ignores the mechanism by which evolution works: by incremental improvement in the populations ability to cope with stress from the environment.
Once you’re born, you see, you’ve got all the genetic potential you’re ever going to have — sorry, gang, but you aren’t going to ‘evolve’ the ability to regenerate or grow claws. But maybe, if you’re lucky, your children might acquire a mutation that enhances wound healing slightly, or makes them better at fighting, and if the environment tolerates the change, or they’re thereby made more fit, you’ll have more children and grandchildren and etc., and maybe there will be selection for further improvements.
Get it? You’re done. You aren’t going to get any genetic improvements. But maybe your descendants will, and then they’ll be better than you at surviving, and then you get to…die. And be replaced.
Evolution is about changing from generation to generation. Part of that change is death. Individuals are discarded as the population improves. The individuals who succeed are the ones who leave the most progeny, not the ones who live forever and beat up the most bad guys, and by that measure Wolverine is an evolutionary failure. So there isn’t just pressure to evolve better claws, but there’s an even more significant pressure to reproduce, or assist in reproduction, a goal which might actually be hindered by having giant claws.
Not that he could have evolved in the first place: his powers are unreal, physically impossible, and not the product of any version of evolution that science has ever offered.
It’s a comic book. Are you also going to argue that we ought to be able to fly like Superman, because evolution?
Excuse my ignorance, but isn’t “biological immortality” actually a thing that some species already have? They don’t start “dying” until something else starts killing them, right?
World history based on The Flintstones and evolutionary theory based on The X-Men. What’s next, human rights based on Animal Farm?
Darn…
When have little things like physical impossibility ever troubled the kind of people who worship a fictional undead carpenter?
Awww….!
*sniff, sniff*
*heart… breaks….*
Just as bad is the Pokemon “evolution”. When I taught 9th grade biology, I taught the kids to be smarter than the Pokemon cartoons, to be able to list the differences between biological evolution and cartoon evolution. It didn’t occur to me to bring up metamorphosis, which they would all have known, so that they could compare metamorphosis with evolution in general. Next time!
Actually the Great Lakes Avengers has a mutant, Mr.Immortal, whose mutation is to be immune to death*. He’s destined to be the last living thing in the Universe. So take that evil-utionists!! /s
*He’s not immune to pain though and he was around before Kenny.
sorry, gang, but you aren’t going to ‘evolve’ the ability to regenerate or grow claws.
Developing a teratoma would count, sorta, right? At least in the short term.
biology of the X-Men franchise is ludicrously awful
Biology? Hell, the physics is ridiculous!
(But I have been wondering, ever since the first movie, when some idiot creationist would concoct an argument-from-X-Men. Thanks, guys, for continuing to live down to my expectations).
I tried, insofar as I’m qualified – not very, to shed some light over there. They’re dug in like ticks. At least they published my 1 comment. From the Chief Believer, via email: “[ET] doesn’t make sense.”
Considering that most of evolution is actually geared towards achieving the bare minimum for survival in any given set of selective pressures, their idea that it should tend towards the maximum possible is particularly absurd.
I thought Wolverine was the worst example they could have chosen, because wasn’t he a product of engineering, not mutation?
(Please correct me if I’m wrong. Which I may well be. Not a fan, just picked up a bit from fans in the family.)
Tigger_the_Wing @#11:
Both. His mutation (super healing) allowed him to survive the engineering (binding admantium to his skeleton).
I’m gonna go stick my finger in an outlet and see what superpower my will to survive grants me!
Lasers. In my eyes. I want frickin’ lasers.
@Tigger_the_Wing #11:
Wolverine is a bad example because Marvel’s mutants are born with predefined super powers, while “it would divert all of its energy into overcoming said fate by ‘evolving’ out of it” sounds more like DC’s “metagene” concept, where your power is closely related to whatever (almost) killed you.
/nerd
Nothing new.
Way Back When – circa 2001-2 over on CARM – Helen Fryman, later Helen Setterfield (yes THAT Barry Setterfield!) brought up the “mutations are degeneration,” claim and linkied to one of the movie websites.
…never changes.
fusilier
james 2:24
I always suspected that Ken Hamm was a member of the Friends of Humanity.
So these hard things on the ends of my digits are a figment of my imagination? I would like science to get on that regenerating body parts thing though, I need new eyeballs and a new spine.
I’d settle for able to leap tall buildings at a single bound.
Pete Seeger evolved the ability to have finger claws which made it possible to better play the banjo.
Well, he actually hit the fingernails with a hammer and they grew back thicker, but it probably made claw-hammer banjo easier.
Sili wrote:
If I were to visit the U.S., I’d like the ability to shrug off bullets.
hah, I knew Stan Lee was a god. :)
I think I like The Punisher better. He has no superpowers and yet he can blow away bad guys with his arsenals in a heartbeat.
So long as he’s not encountering villains who are immune to bullets, yes.
Yet another anti-evolution argument predicated on thinking of evolution as a process that acts on individuals rather than populations.
Yet another anti-evolution argument based on dishonestly making up a fake version of evolution theory, and then trying to refute that strawman.
Isn’t life already technically “immortal?” I mean, everything started at a single organism, and we are all, every one of us, merely a continuation of that single organism. So, like, that first organism is still alive, in some way, inside each of us.
QFT. I noticed that almost immediately. That’s what happens when you get sloppy with language to justify the unjustifiable.
I may or may not still be experiencing the lingering effects of treatment for my sprained knee…
Speaking of comic books: http://popwatch.ew.com/2014/08/20/spider-woman-derriere-posterior-rump/
Sili
A one foot tall building is tall for some creatures so yeah, I already can.
Wow, this takes me back to the annoyances of the Creatures games. For those unfamiliar with the series: They’re virtual life games in which you raise and breed cute little creatures called Norns. Each one has its own “digital DNA” and over time the population changes, helped along by the occasional mutation.
Unfortunately, the game made it possible for several solitary mutations to render the Norns effectively immortal. If you left them alone for multiple generations (always fun to see how good they were at surviving), there was always a good chance you’d come back to find your computer on the verge of crashing because somebody popped up with one of those immortal mutations and passed it on to their offspring and now the world was nightmarishly overpopulated by dull, inbred creatures. Goodbye, diversity. Goodbye, entertainment.
Luckily, real life doesn’t work like that.
Has anyone mentioned the Celestials yet?
azhael@10: stop telling evolution what it can do!
Less sardonically, your statement is a misrepresentation of evolution (albeit nowhere near as bad a misrepresentation as the creo ones). Evolution is not “geared towards achieving the bare minimum for survival ” any more than it’s geared towards producing comic-book superpowers. It’s geared to whatever the available genome and environment provide. If a mutation arises in a population that creates a major increase in reproductive success, then it will spread rapidly. One example: the evolution of photosynthesis. Now obviously this wasn’t the result of one single mutation, but the result was the evolutionary equivalent of a superpower — the ability to eat air and sunlight! And change the Earth’s atmosphere!
Also, I’m pretty sure Wolverine has left behind more children than anyone ever. He’s just a terrible absentee father, but pretty good at the genetic arms race.
I know some gene therapy researchers who’d like to dispute this statement.
The thing is, we kind of are. Not immortal exactly, but extremely tough (most bacteria won’t even try to infect humans–and those that try fail as often as they succeed) and quite durable and massively evolutionarily successful. At this moment, at least.
Well we know Celestials can die. In the Guardians of the Galaxy they use a severed Celestial head as a base. In the movie it’s a mining camp. (It’s nice they have the “sense of wonder” that’s been missing from sci-fi lately.)
dianne@35,
There’s also the question of whether your commensal bacteria (gut, mouth, skin) should be considered part of “you”.
Well, if fiction can be the basis for evolutionary thinking, then I posit that man arrived on Planet Earth (constructed, as you know, by the Magratheans) in the “B” ark from Golgafrincham. As a result, we all have innate talents to become hairdressers, telephone sanitizers, and tired TV producers. Its in our genes, people.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1695
Wolverine was a bad choice, he’s not “evolving”, he just has rapid healing. However, there actually is an X-Man with the power of “reactive evolution” that kicks in whenever he’s threatened with death. He’s called Darwin :)
microraptor @ 24 The Punisher has been known to break out more exotic weaponry that he’s confiscated in the past to deal with those who are bullet proof :)
Well, they are used to claiming that the fiction of the Bible refutes evolution, so a comic is not much of a stretch, eh?
This is nothing new. The Bible thumping novelist Frank Peretti ( a disciple of Wells) has been making the X-men argument for years.
Correct me if I’m wrong on this anaolog. IANAB, but think of evolution like those peg boards for toddlers. Different shaped pegs for different holes. The pegs are the mutations, and the holes are the environment. A square peg fits perfectly for a square hole of the same shape, but a square peg won’t fit into a round hole. But a round peg will fit into a square peg of the same size. But it won’t fit perfectly, it’ll be a good enough fit. So the round peg is a more general adaption, but the square peg is a more specific adaption that is only useful in specific environments.
Am I getting this right?
Well, you might if you were three years old. We had to break our two daughters’ hearts at about that age. Both of them had mistakenly presumed that when they grew up they’d be able to fly like their favourite TV character, Astroboy. They were tearful and upset when they learned otherwise.
But they got over it.
Shame these dunderheads can’t.
My goodness, that’s the strongest case of Poe’s Law I’ve ever seen.
That… can’t possibly be a sincere argument, can it?
@45, it’s not that simple, but you have the general idea. IANAB, but some mutations are deleterious – they might mean a quick death sentence for newborns, therefore no genes get passed on. Others might weed themselves out over generations, for instance a gene for slowness in herd animals living among predators.
Actually, despite having a reputation for really getting around, Wolverine only has two known surviving offspring: Dakon, who’s a supervillain, and X-23, his teenage female clone.
He used to have a large number of kids, but some supervillain or other rounded them up years ago, trained them into an army, and had them attack Wolverine for the sole purpose of being able to tell him their identities after they were all dead.
blf @ 2:
Worse: human rights based on the Bible!
If evolution is true why is there still The Justice League?
With the population size of 1, I’d say that Wolverine is critically endangered rather than highly evolutionally succesful. Heck, with some of his traits engineered (and hence not hereditary) and left only with possibility of producing offspring through hybrydisation with other species, he’s pretty much evolutionary dead-end.
Now, when it comes to producing clean energy, his ability to create matter and energy ex nihilo comes handy. I’d bet that we could made bladed turbines powered by his ever-regrowing limbs.
Well not with that attitude you won’t.
This made me laugh because Wolverine is actually one of the only Marvel Mutants that has been explained in terms of evolution. In fact there’s a whole plot line titled “Wolverine Evolution”. So fail and fail.
Um, geeksmn, I’m not sure where you’re coming from with this and I may have misunderstood you but … you do know we’re talking about the reality of evolution here? And that Wolverine is a fictional character in some stories? Mention of whom rather glaringly demonstrates that the creationist in the OP has absolutely no idea what evolution is … which is kind of the point?
@sili #19:
I recommend first gaining a superpower which enables you to survive a fall from a tall building.
Dammit, I got sucked into that site. Posted three responses before I realised that the site owner is an eye-meltingly stupid human being with no interest in even PRETENDING to listen.