Evolution, religion, and ignorance.

[Mister Agenda]

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.

The self-replicating molecule.

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.

Eggs have been around a lot longer than chickens.

The idea that given enough time these actions would occur in one place to create life is in itself a huge fallacy.

Which fallacy?

It doesn't matter how much time is needed to create randomness, it is still random.

Except for the natural selection half.

Life is a team effort, with all of the parts working together in agreement to support the life of the organism.

We wouldn't be around to enjoy it if life had stayed simple.

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.

That's an inference, not a deduction, but otherwise, fair enough.

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.

You don't science at all, do you?

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.

You don't read books either, do you? They'd just hold you back, right? Each step in the journey from single celled to multicelled has been explained... We've even observed single cells making the transition to multicellular in the lab.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/01/r...-2-months/

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.

Why so simple? Triaminopyrimidine can form spontaneously in solution and form thousands of paired nucleotides. I'd start with something like that.

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.

Yeah, you'd need a molecule similar to triaminopyrimidine rather than a simpler molecule, wouldn't you?

You might conclude that the starting of life has nothing to do with the ongoing changes we see in living creatures.

You might conclude that if you didn't bother to learn anything at all about organic chemistry.

If evolution is true, it has to apply at the beginning of life, if it started that way.

Because you say so? No matter how the first living thing is generated, evolution applies thereafter. Evolution doesn't depend on abiogenesis at all to be true.

Instead of looking at fully developed creatures and backdating the process, see the absurdity of single cells becoming upwardly mobile.

You being too thick to understand something doesn't make it absurd.

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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"

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It's amazing what can be assembled with human intervention, or intelligent design to direct things. There was nothing random about this thing happening. Would this have ever happened if nobody ever made it happen?

So your position is to complain that we haven't done it AND complain about how close we've come?

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How did things really happen. There was no intelligence in the beginning. No rules to establish the mechanism of life.

The rules of organic chemistry were in place.

No parts floating around looking for some useful place to fasten onto.

No parts looking for anything, plenty of parts floating around, though.

What good would a random strand of DNA do if the directions( which it did not yet have) not appear to direct the construction of something which as of yet did not exist.

More likely a random strand of RNA or RNA precursor that could replicate itself. The odds against that aren't nearly as steep as the odds of a complete cell forming as if by magic. One molecular replicator, and natural selection kicks in to start incrementally improving the process. We use virtual selection pressures today to get computers to design protein molecules for us.

Random creation and evolution is one of the biggest lies out there. Don't swallow it.

You must feel you're surrounded by liars all the time if your basis for determining the truth is whether you can understand their explanations, because you don't seem to be very good at understanding explanations.

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I suppose that I should have mentioned the absurdity of mating couples by accident. What was the male of every species on earth doing before his mate was constructed?

If we had a prize for most misunderstanding of biology, I think you might be the one to win it. Evolution is about populations, not individuals. You don't get a new species in one generation. There is never a male wandering around that is a new species all by itself. It would be just slightly different than its parents and bear a variation that is selected for.

You have a male with all of the capabilities of using his sexuality before there was even a mate. What are the odds of two different sexual beings being accidentally together at the same time with all of the necessary opposite parts being complete at the same time so an offspring could be created. No Possibility! Did the male have all of the female parts himself, and then share them with another man? You know where that one ends up.

Your conception of evolution could be called child-like if you were capable of learning why you are wrong.

Both creatures had to be built to be compatible in every way before a birth could even occur. Birth? What a monumentally problematic idea that had to be. A sole creature had been making offspring all by himself, then one day, an opposite and completely correct match was found accidentally that could provide life. Is this getting dumber by the moment?

Yes, your misconceptions about evolution are proving dumber by the moment.

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You have to make unwarranted leaps of (logic?) to make sense out of scenarios which can make no sense.

They're your scenarios, not ours. That seems to be why they're so ignorant.

Imagine if the female mentioned before did not have one of the needed parts to create a child. You know that nothing would happen. What would a sole holder of genetic information do when his byproduct had to match that of the female who would be needed to provide the other half of the genetic traits he was giving half of? The biggest impossibility would be that he had any desire to do something about this problem. His drive to be with a woman had not even been developed yet.

I would have thought it was a bigger impossibility to misunderstand evolution this badly, and then you come along. The scenario you describe is a fantasy that has nothing to do with how evolution is actually understood to work.

Multiply this by every animal that exists and you see that growth of species could never have gone this way. Any other ideas?

How about read a book that explains how evolution actually works?

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I have been directed to multitudes of things to read on this site, and I have investigated them all.

Then you should be ashamed of your inability to comprehend them as demonstrated by the lack of similarity between what you claim about evolution and what those sources actually say about evolution.

The difficulty with any teaching (religion included) is that whoever you listen to on a subject only give you the positives of the argument. When you went to church, did anyone EVER give you a list of contradictions or difficulties about the book they were trying to share with you? Of course not. It's human nature to (give you all the good stuff to make you believe) for approval and credit to the teachers intelligence. I've studied the pro's and con's of all kinds of subjects.

I hope you had better luck understanding the other ones than you've had understanding evolution.

I can't know all of the answers, but I can sure point out the goofy ones.

Only if you understand them. Without that, you'll just make yourself sound like an idiot.

It takes time to learn something, and you feel proud when you make knowledge connections. I try to share what I find in the Bible to fellow Christians, but they yell and howl every time I don't agree with them. I've seen so many problems with scriptures that I wonder how I can even keep my faith.

I had a similar experience.

If a partnership of two future mates, or many mates, the difficulty lies here.

No, the difficulty lies in you being unable to comprehend what we're saying to you.

The notion that something good can happen later doesn't work as an argument in favor of future pair bonding.

No, it doesn't, but that's what you think we think, not what we actually think.

If the different parts have yet to be tested, there is no way that evolution can modify it. All of the connections have to be right, at the same time, in order for the future use of the parts to be handed down.

Malarky. The average human carries 60 mutations that distinguish him or her from either parent. Perfection is not a requirement to reproduce. If it were, you wouldn't be here.

You have to cross the line that at one particular moment a man coupled with a woman with-who knows what- consequences. Adaptation of an alternate to suit some future use can not happen. There are trillions of ways to make mistakes here which can not be adjusted with time or circumstance.

That paragraph barely made any sense at all, but natural selection removes deleterious variations and conserves advantageous ones. It doesn't matter how many 'mistakes' are made if only the neutral or fortuitous ones are preserved.

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I know that new ideas are difficult to absorb, so I have to be bold to share my knowledge with you.

You haven't demonstrated any new ideas, nor knowledge, concerning evoluton. If you knew nothing at all about it, you'd know more than you do now.

I have had huge groups of church people try to lay on of hands to drive the demons out of me to no avail. I found faults with the literature and the swarms proceeded to drive me out. Some God's Love huh? I don't blame a single one of you for being atheist.

Thanks, and I'm sorry you had to go through that.

People are the same wherever you go, including here. After the church junk, I actually feel more at home here, since I have gone through the absurdities the same way as many of you. Don't be too upset at me sharing this stuff. Where else do people talk about problems with Church and Science. Back tomorrow after work, Thanks, Rick.

You're welcome here as far as I'm concerned. You're engaging with us more than some have. I just wish you knew half as much about evolution as you think you do.