Trek versus Evolution

[clearspira]

Evolution is just stuff happening. Trek writers believe Evolution has a plan.

In real Life, Survival of the fittest depends upon the environment: Critters living in the marsh will evolve towards webbed feet and oily fur; Critters living in the mountain will evolve warm fluffy fur and pointy hoofs. That ain't Gene's vision. Evolution has a plan.

Dear Doctor Evolution plans to genocide the Civilised and bless the Neanderthals.

Humans, Klingons, Cardassi etc are all descended from alien amoebae.

Tatoo alien White men manipulated the DNA of Native Americans.


Threshold Humans are duty bound to evolve into naked salamanders in a swamp. It wouldn't be so bad ifn we evolve into Salamanders wearing pants living in cities with space tech like the dinosaurs in VOY. No chance! We must "evolve" to the swamp.

Penpals Riker justifies genociding the planet because of the Cosmic Plan TM

Gene's vision of Evolution, we hates it. We hates it forever.

Its funny because for all of this talk of ''a grand plan'', evolution often works in completely unexplained and detrimental ways in the Trekverse. There are the Xyrillians where the women permanently develop boobs that do nothing due to the fact that the men grow them in a different place later on, the Ocampa who as Chuck notes make more sense as genetically engineered sex slaves than actual people, the Tac-Tac who have a thing blocking off their mouths, all of those aliens with nostrils on their foreheads, the Xindi who make no sense on ANY level, and my personal favourite is the blue alien that fights Kirk from Undiscovered Country who presumably crushes his testicles every time he kneels down.

And let us not forget ''Genesis'' where humans apparently partially evolved from every creature on Earth. Needless to say, if that was true, we would look A LOT different.

[clearspira]

again, I wanted to get back to the idea of, plausible in real life or not, this explains how different species can breed with each other.

also, can we really compare aliens to god or fairy tales since scientists are fairly certain we are not alone in the universe?

Absolutely we can, because there is NO evidence whatsoever that aliens exist apart from the math that says they should. Any ''aliens did it'' explanation requires faith, not science.

[Darth Wedgius]

"The Chase" didn't make scientific sense to me because seeding planets with life could produce similar biochemistry to some extent (making it more likely that a human could eat a Vulcan fruit), but there's no reason to believe it would have produced so many hominids without continual tinkering by the progenitors. The same primitive life developed into sheep, oak trees, oysters, and that stuff in the back of your fridge that you've been meaning to clean out. We can't interbreed with any of that stuff, either. There's no reason another descendant of the progenitors shouldn't have four arms, feathers, and a beak.

You could claim convergent evolution, but then you don't need the progenitors at all.

The only ways I can think of it working is if the evolutionary path was somehow programmed into the DNA or done by other means (subspace nanobots? quantum? if it's quantum you just have to go with it), and was resilient enough to overcome the switch to an atmosphere with oxygen (maybe Earth's greatest ecological catastrophe), climate changes, asteroid impacts, etc., or if convergent evolution works precisely over billions of years, but only after being given the right push very early on. Either way, evolution would have more or less had a plan.

That didn't ruin the episode for me. It's Trek. Human experience provides the canvas, science provides the palette, but they'll go Jackson Pollock on crack when it comes to the actual painting.

[Dragon Ball Fan]

"The Chase" didn't make scientific sense to me because seeding planets with life could produce similar biochemistry to some extent (making it more likely that a human could eat a Vulcan fruit), but there's no reason to believe it would have produced so many hominids without continual tinkering by the progenitors. The same primitive life developed into sheep, oak trees, oysters, and that stuff in the back of your fridge that you've been meaning to clean out. We can't interbreed with any of that stuff, either. There's no reason another descendant of the progenitors shouldn't have four arms, feathers, and a beak.

You could claim convergent evolution, but then you don't need the progenitors at all.

The only ways I can think of it working is if the evolutionary path was somehow programmed into the DNA or done by other means (subspace nanobots? quantum? if it's quantum you just have to go with it), and was resilient enough to overcome the switch to an atmosphere with oxygen (maybe Earth's greatest ecological catastrophe), climate changes, asteroid impacts, etc., or if convergent evolution works precisely over billions of years, but only after being given the right push very early on. Either way, evolution would have more or less had a plan.

That didn't ruin the episode for me. It's Trek. Human experience provides the canvas, science provides the palette, but they'll go Jackson Pollock on crack when it comes to the actual painting.

I always assumed the evolutionary path was programed into the DNA. but real evolution does happen in Trek since the Ancient Humanoids had to have evolved naturally and there are the odd completely non-humanoid aliens.

[Riedquat]

I always assumed the evolutionary path was programed into the DNA. but real evolution does happen in Trek since the Ancient Humanoids had to have evolved naturally and there are the odd completely non-humanoid aliens.

You can't program an evolutionary path into DNA. Evolution happens when DNA gets changed by unpredictable external events. It cannot have changes coded in to itself.

[Madner Kami]

Technically ciliates aren't bacteria. Bacteria are prokaryotes;

You are, of course, correct. Ciliates are single-celled Eukaryotes, hence my mental shortcut to calling it a bacterium. Mea culpa.

again, I wanted to get back to the idea of, plausible in real life or not, this explains how different species can breed with each other.

also, can we really compare aliens to god or fairy tales since scientists are fairly certain we are not alone in the universe?

Aliens are the functional god of the modern day. Are there aliens? Yes, quite likely, almost inevitably likely given the size of the universe. But whenever someone brings up aliens as an explanation, it's just an explanation that fills a gap of knowledge, as did the gods of old. But just as the gods of old, aliens are completely replaceable by easy explanations, once you have an information that you didn't have before or a new understanding of natural laws, like finding a picture depicting how the stones were transported on sleds with a person ahead that seems to pour a liquid onto the ground in front of the sled. Experimental archeologists try and find out that watering the sand in front of the sled makes it considerably easier to pull the sled. They even find out, that a 2 to 5% saturation level is the best for that method. No aliens needed, at all. Occam's Razor.

[Darth Wedgius]

...
The only ways I can think of it working is if the evolutionary path was somehow programmed into the DNA or done by other means.
...

I always assumed the evolutionary path was programed into the DNA. but real evolution does happen in Trek since the Ancient Humanoids had to have evolved naturally and there are the odd completely non-humanoid aliens.

Maybe. There are sequences of DNA with no function apparent to us, probably just junk DNA left over like our tailbones are left over, but could they be rarely-invoked corrective mechanisms in the Trek setting? This gets past my comfort zone in genetics and into my shrugging zone. And Star Trek had spider introns reactivated in an organism with no spider ancestry (Lt. Barclay), so it's probably as realistic as genetics is in Trek anyway

Though this would be evolution with a plan, it would at least justify evolution having a plan thanks to the progenitors putting it there, despite all appearances to us of it being a random, adaptive process.

[Worffan101]

Technically ciliates aren't bacteria. Bacteria are prokaryotes;

You are, of course, correct. Ciliates are single-celled Eukaryotes, hence my mental shortcut to calling it a bacterium. Mea culpa.

Eh, we all have brain farts.

I always assumed that the Preservers actively engineered life-forms across the galaxy to be bipedal anthropoids, then evolution took it from there when the Preservers died out. It's basically impossible to anticipate for responses to the environment on the macro scale like that.

[CharlesPhipps]

Absolutely we can, because there is NO evidence whatsoever that aliens exist apart from the math that says they should. Any ''aliens did it'' explanation requires faith, not science.

This statement has a lot of problems even if it's arguing from a reasonable position since a lot of what we know about the universe beyond Earth is because, "math says they should."

Pretty much all of theoretical physics.

Aliens are the functional god of the modern day. Are there aliens? Yes, quite likely, almost inevitably likely given the size of the universe. But whenever someone brings up aliens as an explanation, it's just an explanation that fills a gap of knowledge, as did the gods of old. But just as the gods of old, aliens are completely replaceable by easy explanations, once you have an information that you didn't have before or a new understanding of natural laws, like finding a picture depicting how the stones were transported on sleds with a person ahead that seems to pour a liquid onto the ground in front of the sled. Experimental archeologists try and find out that watering the sand in front of the sled makes it considerably easier to pull the sled. They even find out, that a 2 to 5% saturation level is the best for that method. No aliens needed, at all. Occam's Razor.

I'd argue gods are the functional god of modern day but that's because the science of the universe is as weird as the faith. Mind you, the thing about Occam's Razor is it only works with matters you already understand. Occam's Razor indicates, for example, the sun rotates around the Earth and there's not billions of galaxies.

You need to know the facts in order to make a broad statement of simplicity.

[TrueMetis]

Evolution and Star Trek have a lot of if's and's and but's.

The whole "Klingons, Cardassians, Humans, and so on are all related" was blasted by some people for supporting intelligent design but it was the usual case of idiot-savants on the internet trying to read the forest for the trees. It wasn't making a political statement, it was to try to satisfy fans who wondered why the hell everyone was a humanoid that looked basically human. The DEEP THOUGHTS OF THE SHOW that people read into it being contrasted with its effect as a television series' internal logic.

A explanation that is completely unneeded by anyone who really understands evolution, because while the aliens in trek may have a superficially similar outside their insides are so drastically differnt on the inside from us and each other (IE Vulcans with copper based blood and Klingons with many redundant completely different organs [8 chambered hearts!]) that anyone who has a good grasp of evolutionary theory would be able to quickly tell you that we clearly aren't related.

Of course they also make it so that, despite vastly different internal chemistry and structure, these species are perfectly capable of hybridizing. Something that makes no goddamn sense and isn't helped by the ancient aliens thing because again these guys are so incredibly different internally there's no fucking way they can be related, let alone closely related enough to mate. By Star Trek logic you should be able to fuck a horseshoe crab and have kids.

I also point out the whole "Sky People" thing wasn't really on Star Trek except for the fact they got taken in by a con man. Jamake Highwater is one of the worst people in the world as he was a "professional fake Native." He sold himself as an expert on Native American culture when he was a white guy pretending to be various tribes. He served constant streams of warmed over stereotypes and racism to whatever white people would believe it despite actual Native Americans repeatedly pointing out he was a huckster.

Guess who Voyager hired as an expert?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamake_Highwater

So we can blame the Sky People on him.

No, I'll still blame trek for not properly vetting their expert.

This statement has a lot of problems even if it's arguing from a reasonable position since a lot of what we know about the universe beyond Earth is because, "math says they should."

Pretty much all of theoretical physics.

Right, but just because the maths backs up say string theory for example doesn't mean you can just insert string theory as the explanation for why oranges are orange.

The Maths say aliens probably exist, that doesn't make aliens a useful or reasonable explanation for anything.

I'd argue gods are the functional god of modern day but that's because the science of the universe is as weird as the faith. Mind you, the thing about Occam's Razor is it only works with matters you already understand. Occam's Razor indicates, for example, the sun rotates around the Earth and there's not billions of galaxies.

You need to know the facts in order to make a broad statement of simplicity.

That's not really how Occam's Razor works, because simple when using Occam's Razor isn't the easiest explanation but the one with the fewest assumptions. And Geocentrism had and has some really big assumptions about what force would cause everything to orbit the earth, why planets go retrograde, and how big the universe is.

So no, Occam's Razor 100% is on the earth orbits the sun side of thing, because it doesn't require nearly as many assumptions like those of perfectly circular orbits, epicycles, the equant, or whatever the fuck causes the sun to orbit the earth in the first place.