But you expressed doubts about the formation of the eye, not about abiogenesis. How things like eyes evolve is well known and well covered by popular science books.
If you just want to assert that God had a plan in designing the universe in such a way that life could come about through the mechanisms we have discovered, that is fine. Few people will challenge that view, because it does not require denying any of the science that we have discovered.
If God had done it, there would be one eye design, the one that worked, rather than thousands. But there are thousands, and here’s the kicker: there’s some that don’t really work all that well, actually rather poorly “designed”, they just barely work well enough to give a tiny survival advantage. And sometimes, that’s all it takes.
And then, of course, there’s the opposite evolution, the evolution of cave-dwelling eyeless creatures evolved from animals who did have eyes. If God had done it, they would not have vestigal traces of eyes, they would have always been in the caves never needing eyes.
OK, case closed. Nothing more to see here, everybody go home. Shoo!
I posted about a good deal more than eyes. Typically, everyone lands on the easiest to explain (or what they believe is the easiest to explain, without having read the books in question and having my questions answered by someone with sufficient gravitas to be believable, I’m still not convinced. But that’s for another thread). I also posed the question of how such complex chemical functions have come to occur in the liver, how beings separated into sexes if they were already reproducing anyway (not to mention how and why did they develop such divergent physiognamies while still reproducing in the meantime, etc.?)
To my mind these things cannot just be hand-waved away as the natural progression of things over the eons, and the issue isn’t going to be solved here. Again, my purpose in this thread is merely to try to explain why so many people have trouble accepting that evolution explains life as we know it today, and believe that it alleges to disprove the existence of God.
And yes, I’m aware that certain creatures have barely functioning eyes or eyes that no longer function at all. (Saw some of 'em just last night as a matter of fact, in a program primarily about giant squid.) And I’m aware that some creatures are evolving their tails away. Etc., etc. But those are merely adaptive developments and I’ve already acknowledged the role of evolution in adaptation.
“Merely”? Dare we ask: what are the others?
Edit: I didn’t notice there was a page 2 when I wrote this, and most of this has already been addressed. Oh well.
Well, if it did die, we wouldn’t be here, right? That sounds trite, but think about it. Life may have sprung up thousands of different times, but without the right mechanism for reproduction, so it died off. Eventually one had a way to replicate and we’re off to the races.
This is a complex answer requiring a fairly decent education in biology. Ignorance and personal incredulity doesn’t somehow disprove it. I know in a lab they’ve managed to put together self-replicating sequences of RNA, but I don’t understand the molecular biology behind it.
Because there was competition. There are limited resources to go around, and so the organisms that were born with some sort of advantage in acquiring these resources survived and reproduced for the next generation, who tended to have these survival traits. Among that generation, the ones who had the most developed of these positive traits reproduced most, which lead to a refinement, etc. It’s all in the basic premise of evolution.
So it becomes an argument from ignorance and personal incredulity. Such things deserve scorn and mockery.
Sure, theistic evolution is certainly a more reasonable proposition than religious text literalism. It’s still dumb (there’s no evidence that there was supernatural intervention, and everything we’ve seen can be explained by natural processes) but it’s certainly not as dumb as “Cavemen rode dinosaurs 4000 years ago”.
She has proven herself willing to act on these beliefs. She advocates teaching of creationism in school, and while the president doesn’t directly dictate curriculum, certainly having someone in the white house advocating this would bolster their position. Wasn’t one of her city library book bannings also religiously motivated?
I think a lot of politicians are smart enough not really be religious, but they have to put up a song and dance for the voting public. If I actually believed that they were devoutly religious and fundamentalists/literalists then indeed that would be a pretty big mark against them. All else being equal, I’d always vote for an atheist candidate over a religious one. But that doesn’t fit in with our political environment, so even the politicians who attempt to rule in a secular fashion still have to go through the motions of being religious.
Palin, however, is not going through the motions. She gets blessed by witch hunters and thinks we should be teaching “God did it” in science class. There’s a world of difference there.
I wonder if she’s a “god planted dinosaur bones in the ground to trick us and test our faith” creationist or a “dinosaurs lived along with mankind thousands of years ago, the Flintstones is a documentary” creationist.
But this is a biggie! You can’t just blithely say “Eventually one had a way to replicate.” How did it come to have a way to replicate? That is one of the key questions. And how did it and its subsequent replications survive to replicate further? How did they obtain nourishment and avoid death from the elements? And on and on and on and on. You are talking about an extremely unlikely chain of events occurring not just once but over and over and over again for eons, without ever dying out and eventually bringing us to where we and all the other life forms we know are now.
(And bear in mind that even if a way has been found to get DNA sequences to replicate in a lab, such as you say, those replications were still triggered by a sophisticated outside source with specialized knowledge rather than just happening spontaneously first, and with the ability to survive and morph further afterward.)
Another question would be how did it become genetically beneficial for humans (or any two-sex species) to split off into two very different creatures biologically, both of whom are needed for replication, and assuming that it was, how was the transition managed without the creature dying out first? In other words, how did men and women or any two-sex species come to develop highly complex individual reproductive systems that rely upon and interact with each other in order for replication to occur; how did the original single-sex creature we (or they) presumably evolved from manage the transition, even over a very long period of time; and why was that incredibly complex and difficult transition preferable for survival to the one that had presumably already existed for eons in a single-sex or hermaphroditic being? Another question would be how and why do such seemingly simple things as growth start start and stop? If some organism or its subsequent life form just spontaneously erupted with the ability to replicate itself, why didn’t it just keep on growing until it either starved for lack of food or outgrew the planet? Yet every type of creature that ever existed grows to a certain size and then stops.
There are a jillion questions to be answered when talking about things like this, and to ascribe them all to the result of simple evolutionary happenstance that somehow occurred as the result of single cells being spontaneously created and then somehow morphing into what we know as life today sounds every bit as unlikely and incredulous to me as the idea of intelligent design does to you.
And we still haven’t answered the question as to whether evolution is adaptive or creative. You seem to be claiming that it’s creative first and adaptive later. Is that correct? And if so, is that what people are referring to when they speak to society of evolution?
And we still haven’t answered the question of whether “In the beginning, God created evolution.” 
So I’m afraid that belief in God is going to be around for quite some time even if its current dogmatic incarnations eventually fall by the wayside.
First, let me ask - what’s you goal here?
Are you attempting to cast doubt on evolution by attacking what you feel are weaknesses in our knowledge, because you personally have your doubts about it? Are you trying to show why it’s complex and therefore obviously people are reasonably confused and ignorant about it? Are you trying to show that it’s okay if our president believes god created the earth a few thousand years ago and would advocate for that to be part of the public school cirriculum?
The fact that the successes are self-selecting is a big deal here. If you had a round hole of a certain size and thousands of balls that are too big are dropped onto it and fail to go through, but one single ball that can fit through it drops through and therefore is the only ball on the other side of the wall, you could say “Wait, what are the odds that out of thousands of balls, this particular one would make it through?” … well, pretty good, since that ball is self-selecting to get through. The reason it’s here is because it was successful at getting through.
The life that’s suitable to survive… does so. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be here. One of the balls went through the hole.
If you want a specific answer to your question, I am unqualified. It’s highly technical and involves complex molecular biology stuff. But if you are interested in learning, this is a good place to start
I’d have to try to find the news story I read about this rather than possibly incorrectly recall what I was reading. But it sounded like it was a way to prove you could get non-life molecules to replicate themselves.
This page explains why sexual reproduction (in the sense of meiosis halving reproductive cells and having them combine) has advantages in creating genetic diversity.
As for why males and females differ - they’re subject to different selective pressures. The process of pregnancy requires significant modification of the body, hormonal state, etc. Since (in humans) different chromosomes carry differing genetic information, they can evolve seperately to different selective pressures. Something about the nature of the difference between men and women carries a reproductive advantage … or it wouldn’t be like it is.
Being big is not an unambiguous advantage. You need more energy to survive (and grow at the same time), you have a harder time hiding, and you have a network of organs that may only be capable of growing so much. There are probably other reasons I’m not thinking of offhand. So having a point where a species reaches physical maturity and can reduce its energy consumption, both because it’s not using energy to grow, and because it consumes less energy due to being smaller, has a selective advantage in most species.
I thought I’ve read that most reptiles and fish will actually grow indefinitely subject to having enough food.
But your lack of understanding stems from ignorance, not the fact that it’s unknowable. Intelligent design, on the other hand, has no mechanism for gathering supporting evidence, it has no way to disprove it, and it is essentially arbitrary. “Well, I don’t get it, therefore it’s wrong” is an argument from ignorance. You did not pose questions that have no answers, just questions that you don’t know the answers to.
I’m not sure what you’re asking here exactly.
Yep, so will belief in astrology and ghosts too. We’re weak minded creatures.
That’s an absurdly disingenuous comparison! It’s akin to saying that Mitt Romney’s lunacy-riddled and demonstratedly fictitious* religion shouldn’t disqualify him from serving as President either! Why not Sarah’s beloved witch doctor while we’re at it? Should no level – however deep – of devotion to delusional, provably false fantasies disqualify someone to serve as the secular leader of the most powerful nation on earth?
No, Sam, read the OP again, where Palin is quoted as follows:
In everything that happens to her, from meeting Todd to her selection by Mr. McCain for the Republican ticket, she sees the hand of God: “My life is in His hands. I encourage readers to do what I did many years ago, *invite Him in to take over.”*Obama, quite unlike G. W. Bush and Palin, most emphatically does not mindlessly and terrifyingly assert that God has “taken over” his life and imply that he’s under God’s telerobotic remote control, jes’ followin’ His orders, dontcha know. Sheesh!
This woman is deeply and irrecoverably psychopatholgical. I had been planning on donating heavily to her primary campaign to try to ensure she’s either at the top of the GOP ticket or, preferably, at the top of her own Nutjob Party’s ticket so she can split the authoritarian credulist vote and thereby ensure another Obama victory, but she might actually win and so this cretinous yahoo terrifies me more every day…
I can cite a recent Stanford computer science paper that firmly establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that the Book of Mormon was deliberately plagiarized by Smith and several others from earlier works. (Yes, I know that’s a very old premise that has failed scientific confirmation in the past, but the Stanford computer science of 2008/2009 has a degree of rigorous confirmatory capacity never previously attained).
I’d be very interested to see this paper.
I find it easier to believe that on a planet with abundant chemical compounds, energy, and time, that some of those compounds would combine to form amino acids, and that some of those amino acids would combine to form self-replicating and perpetuating proteins than that an omniscient and omnipotent presence would exist in a complete void.
Either one of those paragraphs is fine on its own, but they’re a bit troubling when combined. I read them as “the theory of evolution may explain such complex adaptations, but the details are best not discussed here”, and “without a detailed explanation, it’s understandable that people doubt the theory.” That seems a bit circular to me; an effort to excuse people for not advancing their knowlege of the world around them.
Conservatives whine about liberals thinking they are stupid, then they go on to display such incredible ignorance that the mind boggles. At least take person responsibility for how you are treated. You are not entitled to respect, you have to earn it.
How are we to take someone’s views on the economy, or the proper role of government seriously when they deny such basic concepts such as evolution?
We have a fossil record which clearly shows the progression of organisms. This is now backed up by DNA analysis which confirms the fossil record. Nowhere in that record is there an instance of a trait just poofing into existence with the help of an external agent.
I’m sad that conservatives tend to be stupid. If they wouldn’t keep trying to cut taxes so we underfund education then we might be able to do something about it. But yes, we do laugh at you behind your back. Maybe that means you won’t vote for liberals because you don’t like the fact they think you are stupid. Instead you can vote for people who pretend that you aren’t stupid so that you will support measures that are not in your own self interest.
Mutation. Sadly not the X-Men kind, or less cool ninja turtle kind, but still the same idea. Random mistakes in genetic code or biological makeup leave you ending up with a fish that’s slightly different to a fish before it.
In fact, I can give a personal example of a much more complicated eye mutation; I was born with two pupils in one eye. That’s a pretty big “mistake”, a pretty big deviation from parent, and it doesn’t even have to be a big mistake like that. It can be just a small mutation that only increases or decreases something.
Because it aided the creature in surviving and reproducing. Unless it didn’t, in which case it died out, and we are related to some other fish.
Again, mutation. But you’re still thinking too big, too finished-product. We’re not talking about a non-muscled fish, and then a perfectly muscled fish. We’re talking about a small mutation that leads to perhaps a small degree of control over the eye, or that makes a lens more flexible, or that detaches a future lens from the overall eye. Random mutation.
Ah, now, this is an important question. In that generally I would say that the stuff we’ve been talking about so far is reasonable easy to get your head around (if only to me and not you, and I honestly don’t mean that as an insult). What you’re talking about here is a common argument against evolution, that being that there are some biological mechanisms which wouldn’t work unless all the pieces are there. That is to say, if advantage drives evolution, but an advantage only comes from a considerably complex product, then the creature gains no benefit from the rudimentary parts and so has no means to compete better, and the “need” is gone. The answer to that is generally that even partial (compared to “modern” mechanisms usually still provide some benefit. A creature without clear lenses still may get a benefit from one with no lenses, or with less clear ones. It’s not all one big jump, it’s a series of tiny, tiny steps which nevertheless add up to an overall advantage.
I find that odd, in all honesty. I mean, speaking about things which are hard to believe, there are relatively equal issues of faith between one thing and another? Two complex, non-interdependent points, yet they add up to a similar amount of required faith? **That **seems odd to me.
This is more a question for personal knowledge than a desire to debate, then, and you may not read it, but I may as well ask; are you yourself a Christian? I’ve never been sure.
Mark Twain’s is better. Less scientific, more entertaining.
“…The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so “slow,” so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print…”
Available here:
As a conservative I can’t defend Palin’s quotes at all. If the Republican party ends up nominating her for president it will be time for me to leave the party. I’ll probably leave anyway but that will seal the deal.
I am so craving a viable third party candidate…sigh.
Maybe evolution doesn’t disprove the existanceof some god, it unquestionably disproves a loving and benevolent god, which I believe Xians postulate. One of the most important reasons I became an atheist was that, in my youth, I had some idea of becoming a medical missionary, so I took a couple of courses of tropical medicine and parasitology. Any creator that could come up with, for instance, the botfly (http://www.worsleyschool.net/science/files/bot/fly.html) has lost any claim to benevolence. And that’s just one of hundreds of examples. Or try to explain how a loving father would (a) create mosquitoes and malaria (b) Arrange a mutation that condemns half of the children born in a malarial area to a lingering and painful death and (c) Further arrange things so that even the supposedly immune survivors aren’t really very immune, just live- with all kinds of nasty symptoms, until they can reproduce.
Of course, Xians also believe that this loving benevolent beast deliberately infected millions of people with plagues, leprosy, and poison oak whenever they behaved in a manner of which it disapproved.
Really, you didn’t cover single celled creatures who don’t reproduce sexually in biology? You didn’t cover how some of them exchange genetic material?
I’m curious as to which books on evolution you’ve read, if any. Darwin covered the eye 150 years ago. Stay away from Dawkins if you must, and read books on evolution by Catholic biologists instead. The science doesn’t care about the religion or lack of religion of the scientist.
They only believe this because their ministers tell them that it does, not because you’ll find this in any science text or paper. Dawkins only started writing about atheism out of frustration with the nasty letters he got from brain dead creationists about evolution.
One thing I’ve observed: as a creationist about what evolution actually says, and they either won’t answer or give some nonsense about dogs turning into cats. A similar level of ignorance about religion would have Abraham hobnobbing with Adam and Eve.
One problem I see is that you seem to think that a fully functioning cell popped out of the ooze. A cell, of the sort we see today, took tens of millions of years to evolve. We see somewhat living things, live viruses, doing quite well without a cell. I’ve read of the discovery that genetic material can insert itself into bubbles of material which might have led to the cell wall.
Here is a possible way for life to have evolved. All you need is a self-reproducing molecule. The existence proof of this is dna, though there might be simpler ones. Once one or several of these randomly got started, over a billion years and thousands of trillions of opportunities, it would reproduce, but sometimes the reproduction would not be perfect. Most of these errors would break apart, but some might allow the molecule to use more prevalent atoms for reproduction, or do it faster. Before long you get an RNA world, and then you get DNA. Once this gets inserted into a bubble, then you have a very primitive cell.
Of course no one can give you a one paragraph answer to all possible questions. Evolution up to this point has gone on for a billion years. Every time something reproduces it is a genetic experiment. Darwin called it descent with modification. The creatures with the features best allowing them to reproduce win, which is natural selection and is practically a tautology. Children are not like their parent. The best suited children to reproduce do so faster than those not as well suited. That is all evolution is. All else is commentary.
Why should we bother? A theistic evolutionist already accepts the parts we have evidence for, and has decided to make up an origin story or accept someone else’s made-up origin story. As long as he doesn’t try to teach the made up story in public schools and pretend it’s science, most of us are fine with it.
Why should science class teach a controversy that doesn’t exist among scientists? There is no controversy among scientists regarding the legitimacy of evolutionary theory. There is no “other side” to teach.
I wish that third party candidate would be Sarah Palin, actually. I’d hate for a decent candidate to get wasted on a third party ticket. Start agitating within your party for candidates that are not boneheaded religious wierdos, and you’ll gain a whole bunch of votes from folks who want to lower taxes and cut social programs and balance the budget and get out of war and protect gun ownership rights, but are just too damned terrified of the evangelicals to vote Republicans into power. I’m betting most of the independents would lean right if you ditched the evangelicals. Fuck 'em. Let THEM be the third party candidate that gets 4% of the votes, instead of you. It’s your fucking party, and it’s time to take it back.
This post illustrates one of the reasons why I’m becoming increasingly fed up with this place. Where in the hell did I say anything about teaching anything in schools or argue that it be presented as science…and where did I say there was controversy among scientists?
I’m not gonna quit the board so don’t get your hopes up, but I am growing more and more impatient and disgusted with the dishonest and obfuscatory nature of this place, and I’m finding it harder and harder to arse myself even to answer shit like this.