Nah, all evolution says is that we are the most survivable and adaptable species that exist on this planet at this time. If a gigantic meteorite falls out of the sky next week and raises a huge dust cloud that kills off all of humanity, evolution would simply push for a new, more survivable species under the new conditions given.
Evolution does not set goals or objectives; it just selects for survivability under a specific environment.
In the interest of good netiquette I’m taking this here:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=52991
Thanks, Gaspode. You da best!
In the interests of completing the GQ portion of this event, is “oops Creationism” a developed line of thought, with academic/theological champions and the whole bit?
Are there links where one can learn more about it?
Could be now. What do you say ianzin? pkbites?.
I nominate ianzin high preist, pkbites as acdemic champion and myself as theological.
Any other takers? We could have new religion here people, get in on the ground floor!
A big radiation cloud drifted over the surface of the earth, and instantly man arrived in perfect form. Hundreds of em. All intelligent, clothed, and armed. Then they killed each other until there was just one left. And he died of old age.
But the biological remains somehow evolved into the fools we are today.
Hi Gaspode, pkbites and manhattan. Being relatively new hereabouts, I’m afraid I don’t know what GQ stands for. No matter.
To answer the question, I think we can be fairly sure there is a vast amount of literature and research concerning Ooops! Creationism, not only on the web but also in the libraries of most major centres of academic learning around the world and Denmark.
The rival contention, that it’s something I just made up this afternoon, can be discredited by carefully-formulated cogent argument or, alternatively, vicious ad hominem attacks, sarcasm, flame wars and a mule-stubborn refusal to address the facts. A smirking sense of God-given self-righteousness could also come in handy.
Despite Gaspode’s kind nomination, I decline to be referred to as any kind of “priest”, on drugs or otherwise. I think Supreme Authority would be better, and if it’s all the same with you I’d rather like to be infallible as well, at least when pronouncing ‘ex Coors Beer’ on matters of faith, rock guitar and Lucy Liu. You can allocate the other titles among yourselves as you wish.
Once my acolytes, followers and adherents have formed, I think the way ahead should go roughly as follows.
First of all, we want some radical re-inventing of the whole theology to suit the interests of ourselves as the ruling gnostic elite. This should involve the wanton, ad hoc manufacture of arbitrary dogma, the less credible the better and preferably featuring some severe ‘they-believe-what?!?’ hangups about sex. Oh, and some proviso for followers to give us money, and plenty of it, or face some eternal unpleasantness.
Next, an Authoritative Text. This would ideally be something written several decades after I’m dead, and then arbitrarily mis-translated half a dozen times until it reads like fax shreddings from Planet Gibberish. However, given that I’m still around (or am I??? Note: start a conspiracy theory soon…) we can make do with some hastily patched together tenets, a few articles of faith and one or two anecdotal bits that don’t quite seem to fit anywhere but get thrown into the mix anyway. Oh, and a miracle. Definitely, a miracle. The transformation of Cheese into Celine Dion CDs perhaps?
Finally, we need some very fine points of theological dispute. The more inane and intractable the better, so long as we can get very, very angry about them. Example: which type of cheese was involved.
I reckon with a bit of effort we can probably get most of this up and running in 24 hours or so. Thanks for your support. All the others are ex-communicated bastards. Can we now knock up some “Anti-Creation AND Evolution” leaflets, please, and hand them out in malls?
Bless you all, my faithful ones.
Gaspode, where did you hear that DNA is needed for life? All you need is a molecule or group of molecules able to self-replicate, something that does not require anything quite as complex as DNA. DNA just seems to be the most successful under Earth’s conditions. And the Earth’s oceans did not hold the monopoly on water even then. You could have found plenty of stagnant freshwater pools, full of noxious chemicals and just waiting for a freak molecule to reproduce itself. The odds against it might be large but, as Podkayne said, you only need to succeed once. Finally, where did you get the idea that you can’t climb Mount Improbable with baby-steps? I read the book of that name not long ago, and it said that you could (and often would) climb it slowly unless you stumble upon a combination of environment and genetic traits conducive for fast change. Please explain youself better.
At the risk of prolonging the hijack, I have to argue this point. Random chance comes up with things every day that you’d never be able to replicate with all the conscious, directed, intelligent thought and manipulation in the world. Example: Pick 64 people at random. Group them into 32 pairs. Have each pair flip a coin. Loser of the coin toss is eliminated, winner proceeds to another coin toss with another first round winner. Continue for six rounds until there’s a final winner. OK, there’s your random chance outcome; there are 63 losers and one winner, with absolutely no salient distinction to be made among them except for the random fact that one of them won six coin tosses in a row. Unlikely, but something that most of us can conceive of easily. The thing that gives many people terminal willies and sends them running back to creationism is that you can add rounds to this little tournament as many times as you wish, multiplying the number of participants and increasing the odds against any individual to astronomical proportions, but one individual, entirely by chance and through no fault or merit of its own, will have won an extremely improbably number of consecutive coin tosses at the end of the process. Presumably there are any number of “theories” one could concoct to explain why this one rather than any other did win, but such theories would all be wrong; the only explanation is that however improbable it was for any individual to win n consecutive coin flips, that someone would do so was an inescapable conclusion of the way the contest was structured. No matter how many failures this arrangement generates, no matter how long the odds against success, someone will succeed.
This is not necessarily the case for abiogenesis, of course, but it points out that you can have a vast number of failed attempts to do something without that meaning anything about whether it is theoretically possible to do it or whether it may have ever in fact been done successfully in the past.
Manny, et al.
My apologies; I missed the message in which Gaspode noted the spinoff thread (and of course I noticed it not on previewing my post but only after submitting it).