You had better be careful because, since our cells are distantly related to single celled organisms, bleach can be very destructive to them if it gets in contact with them.
As to the unlikely part. All events that are selected in advance are unlikely but events take place all the time.
Suppose a family starts out from Darien, CT to drive to California. They get somewhere in Nebraska. As they are entering the town a local woman decides to go to the store and gets in her car, starts it and drives to the mall. The Darien driver is distracted by the kids arguing in the back seat and misses a stop sign thereby colliding with the woman’s car. Can we agree that the probability that those two particular autos, selected in advance, would be at the same place at the same time is nearly zero. Therefore some supernatural force must have been operating, right?
After something has already happened, a miniscule probablity for that event, computed in advance, has no meaning.
Can we be sure we’re not brains floating in jars fed by stimuli?
Can we be sure we’re not just a very complex dream that god’s having and we’ll vanish when he wakes up? (I made my sunday school teacher turn pale when I asked this in third grade)
Can we be sure god didn’t make everything last tuesday and gave us false memories and history?
No we can’t be sure once we start peeling the thin layers of reality away and accept any possiblity as plausable. But I can say it’s unlikely and I for one will accept reasonable evidence backed up by systematic research as ‘reality’.
Well yes. Being Christian does not mean you give up your reasoning ability. As for being sure, I rather you suspect you do things on much less evidence than there is for evolution. The first time you asked your wife out, were you absolutely sure she was going to say yes? When you asked her to marry you?
As for the unlikelihood argument, you don’t even have to consider evolution (though all that is true.) Are you aware of the amount of sperm in one ejaculation? That the one with your genes (or half of them) beat out all those other millions and millions. That if the phone rang, if dinner that night didn’t go well, if one of your parents was sick, even probably that your mother didn’t move exactly he way she moved, you wouldn’t be here? We are all the result of chance that dwarfs getting two royal flushes in a row. Yet you believe in yourself, right? Think about how you came to be, and you will understand how humanity came to be.
bodswood, have you heard of babies? They’re these things that come into being from the meeting of two tiny little cells, too small to be seen by the naked eye, and they ultimately grow into adult people. So why is it such a big leap to believe that we all once evolved from a little cellular thingy? We start out that way as a matter of fact. That is, unless everyone in your family spung fully formed from the head of Zeus.
But then, that’s a different creation scenario altogether.
How does one explain the apparent fact that most animal groups appear abruptly in the fossil record, and that there is scant evidence that there were transitional forms among these groups?
There was also, as I recall, a research study based on the fossil of a fish that suggested that vertebrates existed in the Cambrian period, thus placing every major animal group at that period. Though this doesn’t disprove evolution, isn’t it remarkable that the process appears to have been so accelerated at that time?
Snag, I may be being crass but when my daughter was produced it was as a result of two *human * cells meeting. So long as that’s the case, I don’t think size matters.
That is explained by a theory of evolutionary history known as “Punctuated Equilibrium,” populated by the late Dr. Stephen Jay Gould, as well as by the incompleteness of the fossil record. As for the Cambrian vertebrates, cite?
Hi there Bods’. You’re latest question takes you into the realms of Punctuated Equilibrium. It’s sufficiently interesting that someone else will enjoy explaining it to you. Or perhaps link you to a site. I thought I’d let you know though, that there is a straightforward answer to your question.
On the probability thing; mainstream creationism seem rather fond of calculations as to just how probable was the origin of life (a rather different topic to biological evolution, anyway…), but they tend to get a few things wrong:
-They tend to assume that the process would have had to be complete and instantaneous - a bunch of dissociated chemicals one moment, a single cell the next. There’s no reason why this would have had to be the case.
-They tend to ignore chemical affinities and aversions, instead making calculations as if every calculable permutation of combination were feasible for a given set of chemicals.
-In any case, such calculations are not a measure of whether things should be as they currently are, but rather, a measure of just how improbable that things should be repeated verbatim a second time. Consider:
I step out of my house into the rain; a single drop of rain falls upon my head; the pre-calculated probability that this exact set of water molecules (and impurities) should fall on my head (not somebody else’s), at this precise moment in time (not any other point in the history of the universe), is near to zero and yet I still get wet when it rains.
Add any number of arbitrary items to the list to make it even more improbable; not only did a specific set of water molecules fall on my head, right there, right then, but also when I was wearing odd socks and thinking about bagels - what are the odds of such an unlikely event?
You haven’t forgiven me for calling you Sevvie, have you?
Seriously, though, I’ve read a bit about punctuated equilibrium and my initial reaction was that the notion sounded rather convenient. That’s still my reaction.
The Cambrian vertebrate was found in Wyoming or the Dakotas and written up in ‘Nature’ or something like that. I’ll try and track it down.
More convenient than God waving his metaphorical (metaphysical? metacarpal?) arms and having the universe srping into existance fully formed?
Science is predicated on the idea of formulating hypotheses that best explain current evidence and generate falsifiable predictions to test those hypotheses. Punctuated Equlibrium stands up to these repeated tests, as does every other currently accepted scientific theory.
I ask you whether you accept that humans (whatever you say is human, from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens) appear “abruptly” in the fossil record, rather than throughout it for billions of years.
From my understanding, yes. But I wonder if this might not have anything to do with where they were living, climate, burial/cremation practices. If punctuated equilibrium’s in the frame, then isn’t this a possibility too?
I fear that all this talk about punctuated equilibrium has been giving this statement too much credit. The “apparent fact” is not actually a fact. See the Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ from Talk.Origins.
You are comparing the perfectly reasonable hypothesis that speciation might occur quickly on a geological timescale amongst isolated groups to the hypothesis that humans prevented every human corpse becoming fossilised for billions of years??
The ‘possibility’ of puntuated equilibrium being correct is very high, in my opinion. The ‘possibility’ of humans being around for billions of years is, like a 6000 year old Earth, so close to zero that it might as well be zero.
Do you not agree that your explanation for why there are no human fossils beneath the very top strata is absurdly, ridiculously unlikely?
In any case bodswood, do you accept that almost all other modern species (which of course do not follow any kind of burail practise) appeared “abruptly” in the fossil record and thus did not exist in the previous billions of years?
Artifacts: blades & flints are far more durable & more numerous than organic remains.
Yet here aren’t any such artifacts in the timeframes of bodswood’s conjecture. No flint, obsidian, bone or any other artifacts older than the current homonid evidence.
Finding one outside this evidence would be a scientific coup.
