Confronting Friends and Family

[Aractus]

That would be significant, howsabout you alert the press the next time a female gives birth to a child without "the other 50%"?

That's just nitpicking a minor error in my wording. The RATE is 50% (ie, you need a male AND a female for reproduction); whether that's done by 100% of the male population or just 1% of the male population is actually irrelevant, so the mere fact that you find an equal number of males and females in most species leads one to the thesis that it's because the optimum number of males, generally, is one male per female.

I'm not entirely sure I understand what you mean by the statement "not part of any of its individual components." Care to elaborate on that a little bit? How are you defining "the system" and "components"?

I'm sorry Hovik I didn't realize you wanted a response to this. Language is not a part of an individual, in fact it is pretty much useless within the context of individuality. There are many things about language that are not in clear "design" of language - like figures of speech, double-meanings, implied meanings, etc, and this is also a universal feature of language - even though you can't find it within a dictionary, and if you didn't know about them you wouldn't even expect them to exist in the first place. Language develops "outside of" humans, but is only used by humans. It's not a part of us, but we are a part of it. The rules and if you like "laws" of human interaction necessarily give rise to language - but language develops as its own entity quite seperate from the humans that are a part of it.

Really? By what evidence? It's a pretty sound theory. Species who reproduce asexually are very vulnerable to parasites and even slight changes in the environmwent, and there's plenty of evidence for that.

It is in fact not possible for asexual reproduction to be as fragile as you imagine it, because before life had sexual reproduction at all, asexual reproduction is all it had. Life was not only able to survive without sexual reproduction, it was able to evolve it and utilize it at the right time.

Bdelloid rotifers, not a single male has ever been found and they hasve abandoned sexual reproduction altogether. Species that produce sexually don't do it because they "can't survive without it", they do it because they derive some benefit from it. Sexual reproduction has costs, and therefore it has to provide enough benefits to pay for the cost. Sexual reproduction shuffles the DNA.

H. J. Muller, known for "discovering" irreducible complexity as a feature of evolution, and through his work in studying "lethal mutations" he concluded that most mutations are bad, and asexual beings don't have a mechanism to remove them and are thus irreversible. One problem with this argument is the fact that sexual organisms carry an entire set of unused genetic material - a duplicate - yet don't use it; but it's passed on to their offspring along with the genes that it does use! Why is it that it carries the second version of every gene that it doesn't use, and passes them on to its offspring? Shouldn't it, logically, only pass on the genes it is successfully utilizing, and that it has successfully tested?

The Darwinist view is that the thing upon which evolution operates is DNA. Natural selection, as we know, doesn't operate upon DNA, it utilizes creatures.

What "system"? The law of physics?

Ultimately, yes.

In a multiverse, many possible universes would be produced, so it very likely to produce one that supports carbon-based life.

Even if an universe that supports carbon-based life is only 0.00001% likely (and it has been shown that such a universe is much more likely thsn that) a billion universes in a multiverse (and if we had multiverse, we'd have far more universes than that) would very likely produce roughly one thousand life-supporting universes.

But you're still left with the fact that you have something that specifically "allows" for life to exist. Whether it's the universe we know, or this mythical multiverse, it doesn't change the fact that it is specifically designed to enable life. Are you trying to say that a multiverse self-created from gravity alone - this "one and only" multiverse is necessarily going to produce life-enabling universes? How is that more likely than a multiverse that produces barren universes? If your mythical multiverse exists then it simply means that it was specifically designed for life.