Evolution, religion, and ignorance.

[Mister Agenda]

A living cell is required to have a collective, communicative cooperation of all of it's parts functioning together to provide for it's (symbiotic), life providing relationship to occur.

A living cell has been evolving for over three billion years, and likely is very different from the earliest living cells. And since you're talking abiogenesis instead of evolution (a mistake in itself when trying to demonstrate an understanding of biological evolution), are you not aware that no hypothesis for abiogenesis postulates life starting with a living cell?

In order for future alterations to occur (future animal designs), extra parts that are under consideration would have to be attached to this creature for use at a later time.

Are you still talking about single cells or just fail to segway?

Does the animal know what these parts will be, as they should have some appropriate rightful fitment within the integrity of the creature.

Nope.

If this is the way that animals change, then we should all have hundreds of experimental appendages all over us as these chance extra parts make their way into our future life.

It isn't, which makes the point of this thread very well.

Do you think that extra time is all that's required for these things to finally find their way onto a completed animal. NO WAY! Time is not a variable for the design of creatures.

Unsupported assertion.

Most every animal is fully complete to use every available part to it's fullest advantage. Not only are we considering the modification of individual body parts, but we have to consider all of the "hard-wiring" of these components parts as well. There would have to be constant planning for connections such as nerve networks, blood supply, waste removal, regeneration of damaged tissues, inter-cellular communication, ETC.ETC.

No planning necessary, required, or observed. The lack of planning actually explains a lot about many organisms we study. And discovering a verifiable case of advance planning in an organism's development would be a telling blow against evolution as it is currently understood. All you have to do is come up with one example of it.

To imagine that non-intelligent elements gathered themselves together with order to form anything at all makes no sense.

The layers of silt that form in a jar of dirty water must really mystify you, then.

The number of useful connections between these things would be truly astronomical, and this all happened by chance? NO WAY!!!

If only there were a process to bring order to the random variations in living organisms...maybe something to weed out those changes that were detrimental to its reproductive survival and conserve those changes that were advantageous to its reproductive survival...if only we could discover such a mechanism....

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When chance is 50/50 there is a probability that some thing can happen. At 100/1 there is not much chance of it happening. At one billion/1 it is highly unlikely that anything will happen at all. Try to calculate how many atoms it would likely take to create one virus. The odds of it happening are so far off the chart that it could not have happened. Throw in the variability of making those connections over time and the odds are so far off the chart that this discussion becomes laughable!

When the chance is billion to one against and there are a billion opportunities for it to happen, what are the odds it will happen at least once? If you can't determine the answer to this question, you really don't know what you're talking about at all. If you figure it out, throw in those billion opportunities happening every day for half-a-billion years and the unlikely event only having to happen once to become established, and you might get a glimmer at what's wrong with your argument. And that it would still be wrong at a billion billion to one given a billion opportunities every day for half-a-billion years.

And organic chemistry isn't nearly as random as you seem to think it is. A lot of very complicated molecules can form under completely natural conditions when carbon is involved.

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Someone wrote about the evolution of the mitochondria (the power-plant for the energy used in a cell) What else would a mitochondria do in a cell anyway if it was not used for managing energy. The odds of it being in the cell in the first place was only because it was needed in the first place.

Mitochondra have different genetics than the rest of the cell. You inherit your mitochondria solely from your mother. They almost certainly started off as another 'simple' organism that developed a symbiotic relationship to what are now modern living cells. Cells used to have to do without mitochondria, they just had to make due with a lot less energy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endosymbiotic_theory

A simpler chance addition of something else would have meant instant death.

You don't know bacteria very well, do you?

How many possible choices could have been designed into the cell that could not work at all.

Um, there are single-celled organisms that don't have mitochondria.

What was the cell doing before it had this device, and how many uncountable atomic sized connections had to be made to invent this item before it was installed.

It was surviving on less energy. In this particular case, it's likely most of the hard evolutionary work was outsourced to a single-celled prokaryote.

Randomly selected parts interchanged into an unknown combination does not make a completed part.

The selection is the part of evolution that isn't random.

This thing had to be designed to the right size for it's use, as well as it's acceptance into the cell.

Oh, please. It had to be small enough to envelop, and tough enough to survive within the host cell. You get that and its natural respiration within the cytoplasm would have given the host cell and advantage that enabled its proliferation. This event is estimated to have happened about 2.7 billion years ago, and it's likely that multicellular life wouldn't have gotten off the ground without mitochondria or something like them.

I know that this has got to be seeming impossible to some of you by now!

If you were using an accurate description of how evolution is supposed to work, you might be making some headway, but since about half the things you think are needed to support evolution would disprove it if they were true, you're only showing off the correctness of the OP. You're making Alpha Male look more knowledgeable, though.

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If atoms have an intelligent reason to assemble themselves into useful things, it can only be since they are under intelligent control. Odds are great for stupid atoms to create nothing at all.

Carbon is great at assembling itself into complex molecules.

They are just as likely to create as to un-create, a 50/50 proposition.

Natural selection conserving what works and weeding out what doesn't changes those odds dramatically.

I'll say they can just as quickly un-create anything they manage to create, certainly with no pro-life agenda.

They do what they do, with no agenda of their own at all. Concentration X of compound Y does Z at temperature F. Chemistry.

I live in Reno,NV,USA. I am not interested in Biblical dogma which so many people espouse. I look at things simply, and show the flaws of goofy beliefs whenever I get the chance. You guys react to me the same way the church people do.

I can easily believe you get what they think as wrong as get what we think. It takes something special to be equally nonsensical to both religious- and science-minded people.

This must be some new church service which hasn't worked out so well. Most of them don't like obvious answers either.

Are you going for poisoning the well, ad hominem, of just run-of-the-mill non sequitur?

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Absolutely so unlikely! Self replication involves the transfer of information from one place to another, in this case, from one cell to another. Information came from somewhere, transferred through an unproven medium to another place with the ability to decode the info and build a duplicate copy. Who said that any of that was simple?

Simple is a relative term. A highly complex molecule is much simpler than a living cell.

The processing of information technology by that process is still light-years ahead of any computer that we have. The DNA sequencing alone is a lock pickers nightmare. How many years did it take to just locate the genomes there, more importantly, we are just approaching the understanding what each one does, and how this info' process takes place.

Looks like it took about half-a-billion years from the time conditions allowed for the existence of life to the time life began.

How long would it take for you to pick a combination lock with just three variables? Now multiply that by ten thousand.

Way less than half-a-billion years.

Too many combinations to accidentally transfer any good information by chance.

Unsupported claim. You have yet to calculate the odds given how many opportunities there were for it to happen. And that's not even considering the billions of planets it had a chance to happen on.

Given billions of planets, billions of years, and billions of opportunities per day, life somewhere in the galaxy was probably inevitable, almost no matter how high the odds are against the first self-replicating molecule forming spontaneously. My computer says that's 3.65e+29 opportunities for a self-replicating molecule to occur, 3.65e+20 if we confine our estimate to Earth.

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If odds are so far against the chance production of life by accident, why not consider an alternate. I have not tried to fill you with religious ideas at all, just trying to refute ideas which have no useful place in science.

And you're about as qualifed to do so as one would expect.

I believe that animals change for a reason, to improve their useful life here on this planet.

On what facts do you base that?

If life is something beyond just a collection of physical parts, then we have to pursue that in a non-mechanical way.

Well, that's what you'd need to establish first then, isn't it?

Is there intelligence which directs outcomes, or is life just a combination of mistakes with a profitable result?

If outcomes are directed, someone has a lot to answer for.

The odds against accident is so overwhelming that I gave up that useless method.

You haven't come remotely close to calculating the odds properly.

I began to ask that intelligence what it is doing and I got answers. If you have not tried another way, you will not see the sense of trying.

Yeah, only the majority of us have been religious before.

I am not angry at any of you for the challenges I have given.

We're not angry, either. I think a strange mix of amusement at your antics and sadness at your miseducation applies.

I didn't think that I would get a happy response-I am challenging all of your previously valued beliefs.

That actually WOULD make us happy. We enjoy being challenged. I wish you had assertions that were less easily refuted, it would make the conversation much more interesting. I get excited at the idea of finding out I'm wrong about something, because afterward I am less wrong than I was before.

I am excited that I get a chance to share a new way of analyzing information. Odds are in your favor that you will get the same results I have.

How do you know that the odds of getting the same result are favorable? If people got the same results from trying to talk to the unknown, wouldn't we have far fewer religions?

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When you are dealing with odds, you have to consider that you will be successful most of the time to produce any good results. Trouble is, you have every possibility of losing everything which you just accomplished. In order for evolution to work, you have to assume that your huge single gamble paid off, and now you can bet again with all your winnings. That's the fallacy. Evolution requires you to win and win , one loss and the animal dies and you have to start over. You would run out of animals with that gambling policy. You just can't stack success upon success by rolling the options. The actual fact is that animals are changing without the death sentence which must be enforced with happen-chance as a mechanism.

Over 99% of all the species that have ever existed are extinct. Do you think that is more in accord with the predictions of evolution or more in accord with the idea that an intelligence is controlling the outcomes?

[Mister Agenda]

Randomness just creates more randomness. It's kind of like watching the TV after all the broadcasters have signed off for the night. You see the TV snow which is just equal amounts of white and black bouncing around all over the screen. You can watch this for all eternity, and you never see one good program. You can increase the size of the screen but the randomness just gets greater.

Not everything behaves like static. Some things are sorted into orderly patterns by natural processes.

If you see life around here, it's not because of random chance.

Certainly not because of random chance alone. Natural selection is also required, else there'd be nothing to sort the randomness into order.

You belief that through unproven methods of observation.

Prove they're unproven.

You were told that this method makes sense, so, you believe it.

I started out a creationist who didn't believe it at all. I didn't start believing it because I was told it makes sense, it made sense so I had to accept it as the best available explanation of the evidence.

The scientists have had to take a leap of faith in order to assume that we all came about by accident.

There was no such assumption. Scientists just kept finding out that things had natural explanations.

You will not accept a single facet of an opposing viewpoint because you are close-minded. Don't get upset if I state the obvious.

Not at all. 'You're close-minded' is the go-to tactic of the 'person whose hopelessly wrong's' playbook. People laugh at you. They also laughed at Einstein. That doesn't make you Einstein. People laughed at Bozo the Clown, too. What would make you Einstein would be making a prediction that no other hypothesis points to and having it be verified.

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When you find a chemical that makes life, let me know. We have been mixing the chemical pot for years without any success on making life.

Yeah, and we've been doing it for decades! Why haven't we already figured out what took Nature hundreds of millions of years to accomplish? That's a real stumper, eh?

We have torn apart various component parts of living things, and have reformed combinations which are different from anything before, but that is not life. We are changing the portions of parts which were alive into new positions and say we have created life. We can combine but so far we do not create anything from scratch.

We've created an entire bacterial genome from scratch, inserted it into a denucleated cell, and had that cell come to life and reproduce. Say, what would change in your beliefs on this matter if an entire living cell was made from scratch?

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What about the Michael Behe types? I suspect they understand it and still refuse to accept the evidence.

And they accept almost all of it, only pointing at a few as-yet unexplained questions for the gaps into which they want to squeeze God.

[Chas]

Populations of organisms do not change collectively, but individually. One animal will be born with a minor change to it's body that can be passed on genetically to it's children. These adaptive changes brought on by environmental conditions can't alter it's ability to mate or the change will not continue onward.

This part is true.

No, it's not. The environment does not drive genetic change in an individual.

[Mister Agenda]

This part is true.

No, it's not. The environment does not drive genetic change in an individual.

Good catch. My fall-back position is going to be that it's the least-wrong thing he's said about evolution because the rest of that statement is actually fairly on-the-mark. Thanks for the correction.

[Chas]

When you find a chemical that makes life, let me know. We have been mixing the chemical pot for years without any success on making life. We have torn apart various component parts of living things, and have reformed combinations which are different from anything before, but that is not life. We are changing the portions of parts which were alive into new positions and say we have created life. We can combine but so far we do not create anything from scratch.

'We' have been doing this for a few decades. Nature had 50,000,000+ decades.

The conditions on the earth pre-life were dramatically different than they are now. For instance, there was no free oxygen in the ocean or atmosphere.

[pocaracas]

We have torn apart various component parts of living things, and have reformed combinations which are different from anything before, but that is not life. We are changing the portions of parts which were alive into new positions and say we have created life. We can combine but so far we do not create anything from scratch.

We've created an entire bacterial genome from scratch, inserted it into a denucleated cell, and had that cell come to life and reproduce. Say, what would change in your beliefs on this matter if an entire living cell was made from scratch?

Oh, Mister Agenda, sir, how about A semi-synthetic organism with an expanded genetic alphabet?
Also known as the only being on Earth with a DNA that has 6 instead of 4 "letters"

[Mr Greene]

As far as I'm aware there really is only one creationist who actually understands evolution. Got a Harvard degree, but cut up a bible figuring out how much he'd have to dismiss if evolution were true and went with creationism. Can't remember his name though...

You may be thinking of Kurt Wise, but he's a geologist.

That'd be Kurt Wise.

(Crap - ninja'ed!)

Cheers guys, yep that's the guy. Was starting to wonder why my Google-Foo was failing...

[RDK]

Component parts of anything which exist have to find order from disorder. A cell, or anything else for that matter needs to be a collection of organized pieces which inter-relate before their combined result can be called life. Which single piece of a cell came first. It's sort of like, which came first, the chicken or the egg. Neither one came first, since without one the other would have never existed.
The idea that given enough time these actions would occur in one place to create life is in itself a huge fallacy. It doesn't matter how much time is needed to create randomness, it is still random.
Life is a team effort, with all of the parts working together in agreement to support the life of the organism.
It's easy to look at the variety of life on earth and just deduce that it all had to begin somehow and then change into whatever it can through time. Watching life alter itself does not show how it began, only that it changes after it has been created.
The simplest of mechanisms have to be understood from the beginning. Watching the process after it has begun does not explain how it started.
Cellular life can not be upwardly mobile. Let's say that a simple cell has all of the components in it to provide for it's simple life. It does not need anything else in it to change anything, it reproduces over and over with near the same results. Does that cell need a heart, a liver, eyes, ears, anything extra at all. No. That cell would not know how to integrate any of those extra parts anyway. I f this cell is going to change, it has to have a preprogrammed set of instructions so that the variation can be used by the creature. That cell did not have any provision for extra parts-it could not even find a place to connect them in or integrate these extra parts at all.
Let's say we have a simple life form with only four parts. Which part was invented first, and how did it manage to sustain itself without the other three. None of the four parts individually can have any life it. It is only when the four parts are brought together at the same time can life proceed. The most important aspect of this union is the timing of the events. Now this event could possibly occur at random if the right parts were joined together at the right time to make life. Unfortunately, life is not made of four parts, especially if the four are random atoms. There are a required number of interactions between the multitude of parts before life can take hold.
You might conclude that the starting of life has nothing to do with the ongoing changes we see in living creatures. If evolution is true, it has to apply at the beginning of life, if it started that way. Instead of looking at fully developed creatures and backdating the process, see the absurdity of single cells becoming upwardly mobile.

[The Valkyrie]

Definitely stretching credulity here.

[Cato]

RDK,
Mutation does not mean a cell suddenly coughs up a lung in one generation.

Please go learn something about evolution. The chicken and egg thing also betrays a severe ignorance of the process.