Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Jerod on August 20, 2011 at 1:23pm

Thank you for your replies! To be honest I am quite suprised even for an atheist forum. :) Say you walk into a room that is completely empty except for 6 marbles arranged on the floor in a circle. You don't know if anyone has been in the room before you, but you do know that there is no evidence that someone has. No footprints or DNA or anything at all besides the simple fact that the marbles are in a circle. Does that mean the marbles got there by chance? Or is it more likely the one who put them there made sure to leave no evidence other than the circle itself? A silly example but you see what I mean I hope. :)

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Permalink Reply by Nelson on August 20, 2011 at 1:52pm

with all due respect, you should understand evolution before you take to criticizing it. you come off sounding uninformed, as if you care less about whether evolution is true and more about defending your preconceived faith that it is not.

 

no one with an understanding of evolution would claim that evolution can be analogized the way you have. evolution by natural selection has two main features. the random mutations and recombination errors that provide the process with variation, and the selection of beneficial traits by the environment that the organism finds itself in. once this is understood, we can see that natural selection is not a chance process. the environment SELECTS which traits afford the organism the best possible chance of survival and reproduction, allowing it to pass its genes on to the next generation, these genes being the ones that gave it the survival advantage in the first place.

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Permalink Reply by Darrell Mont on August 20, 2011 at 1:57pm

Here is a slightly more direct line of though using your analogy. If you were to take 6 marbles and toss them in to a room and let nature take its course, the marbles will come to rest as they lose their kinetic energy and settle in to their steady state. If you do this repeatedly over and over and over through about 2 billion years, you will from time-to-time develop all sorts of cool configurations on the floor; eg perfect circles, straight lines, hexagons, etc. All of nature functions in a state where it tries to achieve the most energy effiecency. Atoms combine it to molecules because it is the most energy efficient state for them to be in. Lighter compounds combine to make heavier compounds because it allows them to form more and more stable structures and to share electrons. Some of them form amino acids as a natural process. Some of these amino acids, like your marbles, spend 100s 1000s or even millions of years bouncing in to each other, trying to find that perfect "fit" that will be the most mutally beneficial for energy conservation. Some of these configurations are larger amino acids, some of them are chains, some of them are proteins. This process continues in the very very small incrimented steps you learned in high school biology, (i hope). As different configurations of proteins continued to combine, some of them found that they were naturally suited for environmental adaptation. The largest majority of the possible combinations just didn't join well, weren't suited for the environment, or, for a myrid of other reasons, just didnt make it. But a miniscule few over an amazingly long period of time managed to take hold.

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Permalink Reply by erik112358 on December 11, 2011 at 8:16pm

excellent response.  Nature likes to balance low odds with extremely large numbers.

Would you expect to impregnate your wife with a single sperm?  No, that's why you deposit about a million at a time.

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Permalink Reply by Artor on August 20, 2011 at 2:16pm

You are right, it's a silly example. I see what you think you mean, but it's still not very good.

Say you walk onto a primeval planet with oceans of various minerals, each with their own peculiar molecular structure. There are volcanic vents, lightning strikes, meteor strikes, energy of all kinds constantly pumped into this soup. Some of these minerals form up under these conditions to make amino acids. This has been reproduced in labs decades ago. Some of the amino acids begin to form chains, which is what amino acids do.

For millions of years, that's as far as it goes, until one of the chains develops that has the ability to make copies of itself out of all the loose bits floating around it. Is that so mysterious?

Do you conclude that someone intentionally arranged these molecules in this particular configuration? [edited by moderator. -Nelson]

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Permalink Reply by Doug Reardon on August 20, 2011 at 9:01pm

somebody had to lay the flooring.

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Permalink Reply by Ron V on December 11, 2011 at 6:05pm

The flying spaghetti monster laid the flooring

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Permalink Reply by Gaytor on August 21, 2011 at 3:54am

So let's discuss your premise. You say someone arranged them. In the world do we not see shapes without or other phenomenon that seems to require a human or above's intervention? Should we throw up our hands here and suggest that this http://blog.karmona.com/index.php/2007/08/26/sliding-milestones-cal... is God? How did these toys get rearranged into shapes and include classifications if humans were not involved? http://dobermansden.com/donnie-the-doberman-arranges-toys/

Your general line of thinking would require an answer of human intelligence or better. But in both cases it has nothing to do with humans. Simple observation eventually answers the question and it's not what the initial assumption would be. Pre-supposing an answer will often lead you to the wrong conclusion. The scale of time and possible answers to abiogenesis is beyond what you can conceive, but there is no reason to toss your hands up and say goddidit. I want to figure out who the engineer was that showed bees how to create Pentagons for their hive structure. There must have been an engineer involved for that strength and efficiency.

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Permalink Reply by Darrell Mont on August 20, 2011 at 1:29pm

The ONLY thing one needs to support abiogenesis is an appreciation for stupidly long periods of time. Once you grasp just how long 2.5 billion years really is and do some simple math on the frequency of biodiversity and gene mutation, it is perfectly reasonable without any sort of creator at all.

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Permalink Reply by Rick on August 20, 2011 at 1:37pm

Just because ID doesn’t identify the designer, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t imply a deity. The fact that you even have a designer to begin with does.

 

Jerod, you are splitting hairs when you say ID is NOT religion. It’s heavily based in religious argument and folklore, mixed with pseudo-science.

 

While on paper, ID may not specify the designer, in practice it does: Yahweh. Out of all of the possible design theories, how many are being are really being forced in public debate? One. The Christian theory of design. To point to the clever wording and intentional vagueness of the ID description as evidence to the contrary is just a bold attempt to deceive. ID is a Christian scam and not a viable scientific alternative.

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Permalink Reply by Alice Browne on August 20, 2011 at 3:26pm

I don't know what answers you are fishing for, ID is not science. It has no explanatory value aside from Goddidit, makes no predictions, and cannot be falsified. All IDers can put forth to bolster their "theory" is lame stuff like "I can't understand how something so complicated can exist, therefore God (or possibly aliens) must have done it." What is there to learn from that? It's a dead end.

 

Also, I'm not a big fan of the complexity argument because complexity is messy. Why should we need a dozen or so different organelles in each cell? Why does the Krebs cycle have to go through so many stages? What is up with the recurrent laryngeal nerve? Biology is so messy, wasteful, inelegant and inefficient. It's almost as if the current batch of critters *gasp* wasn't designed at all (let alone intelligently), but rather came together gradually, over time, from earlier forms.

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Permalink Reply by Steve on August 20, 2011 at 3:35pm

The human eye is also badly "designed", and interestingly is sometimes brought up as being too complex to have evolved (Darwin is claimed to have said so, but the people quoting him leave out the "but" that follows). Yet it has a blind spot where the optical nerve passes through the retina and blood vessels passing in front of the retina.

Cephalopod (like the octopus) eyes have both those flaws "fixed". There are plenty of other design flaws in the human body like our spines or the appendix.

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