Evolution, religion, and ignorance.

[Mister Agenda]

[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]

[Mr Greene]

[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.