Evolution and bats???

Originally posted by galveston75
But why would some ancester of the bat ever have need to develope such a hunting technic? As long as this would have taken to perfect, how would they survive in the meantime?

defense mechanism? to let them fly around in the dark?

flying first, then nocturnal, then echolocation?

seems like a bat would be a sitting duck for a hawk in the daytime.

Originally posted by menace71
The probability of life appearing spontaneously on Earth is so small that it is very
difficult to grasp without comparing it with something more familiar. Imagine a
blindfolded person trying to solve the recently fashionable Rubik cube. Since he can't see the results of his moves, they must all be at random. He has no way of knowing whether he is ...[text shortened]... 00 are almost unimaginably vast.

Just googled this to see what would come up.

Manny

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organization

Self-organization

Self-organization is a process of attraction and repulsion in which the internal organization of a system, normally an open system, increases in complexity without being guided or managed by an outside source. Self-organizing systems typically (but not always) display emergent properties.

The most robust and unambiguous examples of self-organizing systems are from physics. Self-organization is also relevant in chemistry, where it has often been taken as being synonymous with self-assembly. The concept of self-organization is central to the description of biological systems, from the subcellular to the ecosystem level. There are also cited examples of "self-organizing" behaviour found in the literature of many other disciplines, both in the natural sciences and the social sciences such as economics or anthropology. Self-organization has also been observed in mathematical systems such as cellular automata.

Sometimes the notion of self-organization is conflated with that of the related concept of emergence. Properly defined, however, there may be instances of self-organization without emergence and emergence without self-organization, and it is clear from the literature that the phenomena are not the same. The link between emergence and self-organization remains an active research question.

Self-organization usually relies on four basic ingredients:

1. Positive feedback
2. Negative feedback
3. Balance of exploitation and exploration
4. Multiple interactions

...

Self-organization in chemistry

Self-organization in chemistry includes:

1. molecular self-assembly
2. reaction-diffusion systems and oscillating chemical reactions
3. autocatalytic networks (see: autocatalytic set)
4. liquid crystals
5. colloidal crystals
6. self-assembled monolayers
7. micelles
8. microphase separation of block copolymers
9. Langmuir-Blodgett films

Self-organization in biology

According to Scott Camazine.. [et al.]:
“ In biological systems self-organization is a process in which pattern at the global level of a system emerges solely from numerous interactions among the lower-level components of the system. Moreover, the rules specifying interactions among the system's components are executed using only local information, without reference to the global pattern.[6] ”

The following is an incomplete list of the diverse phenomena which have been described as self-organizing in biology.

1. spontaneous folding of proteins and other biomacromolecules
2. formation of lipid bilayer membranes
3. homeostasis (the self-maintaining nature of systems from the cell to the whole organism)
4. pattern formation and morphogenesis, or how the living organism develops and grows. See also embryology.
5. the coordination of human movement, e.g. seminal studies of bimanual coordination by Kelso
6. the creation of structures by social animals, such as social insects (bees, ants, termites), and many mammals
7. flocking behaviour (such as the formation of flocks by birds, schools of fish, etc.)
8. the origin of life itself from self-organizing chemical systems, in the theories of hypercycles and autocatalytic networks
9. the organization of Earth's biosphere in a way that is broadly conducive to life (according to the controversial Gaia hypothesis)

Originally posted by big bern
...if we were from an ancient form of animal then wouldn't logic dictate that in that line of species that we supposedly came from their would be at least the remnants of a half human half Ape ( or some type of animal) in their lineage...

We do have remnants from the ape stage. Some infants are still born with tails and some are
born with excessive body hair to mention a few recurring mutations (and I sincerely doubt their
mothers had affairs of the perverted nature that this would otherwise suggest). Also, without
meaning to make a mockery of ex-president Bush (he's been mocked with too much already), but
his ape ancestry is very hard to deny, being sort of written in his face and all.

http://tinyurl.com/lkk9wl

It's childish of me, I know, but I just never grow tired of that pic.

Anyway, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that scientists keep finding that genetically
there are far more commonalities between all forms of life on earth than there are differences.
That we appear very different from pigs in no way mean that we are on a genetic level. When
you consider how often the same patterns repeat themselves with subtle differences in all forms
of life, it's no marvel how one extinct (or existing for that matter) species can be the ancestor of
many subspecies.

I read a while back about a luminescent mouse. They took a gene from a jellyfish and somehow
fused it with a mouse gene. Lo and behold! The super mouse glowing in the dark! The fact that
this is even possible tells me that the jellyfish and the mouse has to be pretty similar in a genetic
sense. Had this genetic mutation occurred by nature (and there's no saying it hasn't at one time or
another) and if it was a good idea for a mouse to run around glowing in the dark with hungry cats
hunting the area, we might have had mice providing good disco feel at night.

Be that as it may, as far as I can understand, there are really only three possibilities for the
similarity between animal genes that allows our funny scientists to mix them up like that:

1. God got inspired, or
2. Some pretty amazing coincidences has taken place in nature, or
3. Maybe, juuuuust maybe, all life has a common ancestry from a very, very distant past