Evolution - and how we know it's right

[Windu Chi]

 

 

Darlin', if you don't know by now, we're not going to 'educate' you.

So, do you think you can have something close to sex with a male blob, Jae.

Or, whatever the hell that blob will be made of.

I don't know if I can bang a female blob.

And, I won't definitely mess around with a female blob made of electromagnetic hot plasma.

My ass will be fried or vaporise for sure.

[Jae Onasi]

So, do you think you can have something close to sex with a male blob, Jae.

Where there's a will, there's a way....however, I'm terribly and delightfully monogamous so I'll never know.

Besides (cheesy attempt to bring this vaguely back on topic), a blob-human baby would do bizarre things to evolution here on earth.

[Windu Chi]

Where there's a will, there's a way....however, I'm terribly and delightfully monogamous so I'll never know.

I guess the first explorers of Milky Way galaxy will probably find that will and the way to mate with a blob.

I don't know how the hell they will mate with a hot electromagnetic plasma.

But, as I believe that nothing is impossible.

I will have to concede with that belief.

Besides (cheesy attempt to bring this vaguely back on topic), a blob-human baby would do bizarre things to evolution here on earth.

Well, the universe is a bizarre place.

[Samuel Dravis]

Sorry for the late reply, but I didn't have anything better to do today.

 

Hoyle's numbers are convenient to use. I could do a good chunk of the stats myself on my stats calculator, but it'll take forever without a program, and at the moment I don't have a ton of time to do this. The very simplest forms of life (around 100 proteins) are still incredibly complex, and all the parts have to be there for them to work. Miss out on one part of the cell membrane/wall or one of the proteins, and you've got nothing.

Apparently you think it'd be impossible to form RNA because it is so complex. It doesn't have to be random (PAH world hypothesis is an example), and in the case of already replicating molecules/cells it most decidedly is not random.

 

You apparent espousal of the inability for 'irreducibly complex' structures to exist without all their parts is unwarranted. Yes, they cannot function without all their parts now. Evolutionary theory actually predicts the coevolution of distinct parts in such a way as to create 'irreducibly complex' structures without any intervention whatsoever. Indeed, using genetic algothrims this has already been tested and shown to be true. It's like constructing a building with scaffolding, then taking off the scaffolding. If you take it apart now, does it stand? Of course not; the scaffolding provided support only for when it was being built. Now that's it's gone there is nothing to hold up the individual parts. This doesn't mean that it necessarily simply appeared fully created, an invisible hand held up the rafters, or any other similar idea. While strictly speaking possible, those ideas have absolutely no demonstrable evidence behind them and are therefore eliminated by Occam's Razor.

 

In addition, there are very few reputable scientists that actually support the idea of irreducibly complex structures. Here is a refutation of IC for your enjoyment.

 

The holdup--having enough undergrad/grad level courses in stats, chemistry (organic and general), physics, biochemistry, biology, anatomy/physiology/embryology, among others (because I am a school junkie. Don't ask how many undergrad hours I had, you'll want to throw up. ) to evaluate the arguments pro/con evolution and actually understand the underlying scientific principles driving the findings. Some arguments are great and make sense. Some things require leaps in logic that I'm not able to make along with others. I see scientists on both sides of the evolution fence conducting some good scientific experiments that I find utterly fascinating. And there are bad experiments done solely to 'prove a point', and politicizing science drives me crazy.The complexity of the simplest bits of life, the extremely low probability of the formation of even simple proteins, and the fact that DNA and RNA have never been found to form on their own (at least, outside of a living cell) makes it more difficult to believe it happened all by itself than by being helped along in some way by someone who put the pieces all together to get it going in the right direction.

 

At some point it boils down to a fundamental faith in the development of life with or without a creator.

The probability of life develping with/without a creator is not affected in any way by the veracity of abiogenesis, evolution or anything else. The Creator is God, remember? If he planned it, and by definition he did, then he created life regardless of any particular way he chose to do it. I don't see how religion is a holdup unless you're some sort of young earth creationist, which I doubt.

 

Again, I have no interest telling you whether to believe, disbelieve, or have no comment on any scientific subject. I'd just like you to use science where science is appropriate - attempting to explain the how. 'God did it' provides no useful conclusions (regardless of its actual truth) and therefore divine intervention is useless in practice. There simply is no reason to believe it happened - no evidence, no knowledge of what happened, no divine voice telling us the state of things, no nothing. There's a reason that no evidence exists for something - our level of technological advance is not capable of finding the evidence, it is something the scientific method cannot be applied to, or the phenomena doesn't exist. Since it's impossible to discover things that we are incapable of discovering and it's totally useless to apply the scientific method to something it doesn't apply to, it leaves only one realistic answer - the proposed phenomena doesn't exist for the purposes of the current level of scientific inquiry.

 

I prefer extrapolation on scientific subjects, even if it is inaccurate, to random guesses that involve totally unquantifiable factors.