Evolutionism vs creationism

[gut]

> What does it mean for an object to have 100% order or 100% chaos? How are
> you defining these terms?

Take the RNG as an example To my mind, it is an easy thing to identify as
a product of order. It is complex and accomplishes an obviously intended
function. The function is too specific to believe otherwise. Chaotic story
would be that molecules bumped together long enough and TADAAAA, there's the
RNG. Just an extremely unlikely coincidence that isn't strange for us to
observe, as if we were further from the sun, we wouldn't exist.

> Why is an idea chaotic? Why is a brain orderly? How can a chaotic idea
> come from an orderly brain?

The RNG is capable of generating things that aren't so easily observed as
being orderly. This is a good thing, as that is what it is designed to do

>>> Is a tree more orderly than a seed?

>> Don't know, but I'm not reaching for a bar that high. I'll happily settle
>> for a tree being considered more orderly than an instance of 'nothing'
>> exploding... unless it was a very orderly explosion of nothing, that is.

> the Big Bang has nothing to do with evolutionary theory.

Didn't say it did (there anyway, but the case can be made). You asked about
the order of trees vs seeds and I told you I didn't care. That's not what
I'm debating right now. I'm trying to prove that order doesn't come from
chaos, not that order doesn't come from order.

[Albahan]

I was gonna say something but reading so many random metaphors/analogies to explain things made me forget.

[grobblewobble]

I agree with Jellyslayer on macro vs micro evolution - that is an artificial distinction. Why would a species not change into a different species after sufficient changes? Please note, it is a hard question to begin with how to decide whether two organisms belong to the same species..

The fish-to-amphibian is one of my favorite. The powers of evolution mystically endow this fish who yearns to experience the outside world with not only legs on which to walk the earth instead of flop around but also the ability to breath oxygen from the air rather than exclusively oxygen from the water. Oh, but it was just random chance that these two mutations occured at the same time and there were other such similar organisms in which to procreate with to further along this evolution.

In this particular example, there do exist intermediate forms, such as the lungfish that has both lungs and gills (and also some very primitive beginnings of legs). This has advantages, such as being able to migrate easily between pools. But if you want to migrate over land, having even such beginnings of legs will help a lot! Once this species had started evolving lungs to better survive dry periods, the ones that were best able to crawl over land had an even better advantage. These traits strongly reinforced each other - it was no coincidence they co-occured! This was a process of repeated selection, not a process of repeated coincidence.

[Laukku]

"Classical" 6000 years creationism always reminds me of the Church of "Last Thursday"ism (which champions the belief that the world was actually created last Thursday, and all evidence pointing to the contrary, including your own memories of the past, has been planted by God in order to confuse you about the truth). Both make equally little sense.

They are wrong. The world was created last Tuesday.

> with a time frame of several billion years to work with,
> there's plenty of room for a whole lot of coincidences

A few of those coincidences, yeah, but start chaining those
things together and your %'s start going down the drain. It
wouldn't just take a few coincidences to explain order
coming from chaos, it would take absurd chains.

Let's remember that the universe is infinite (or at least VERY large.) So if the chance of humans appearing on one planet over a certain period of time is only one in a billion, the chance of humans NOT appearing on ANY planet is:

one minus (one divided by one billion) to the power of infinite

=(1 - 0,000000001) ^∞
= 0,999999999 ^∞
= 0,999999999 * 0,999999999 *0,999999999 *0,999999999 *0,999999999 *0,999999999 * (and so on....)
= 0,0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000... (and so on...)

That is, there is practically zero chance for humans NOT appearing. This is, of course, assuming the universe is infinite, but any size large enough will do.

[Silfir]

If it's large enough, it will do by definition

[vogonpoet]

Evolution is not about coincidence. It is about selection.

QFT. I am not eloquent enough to argue Evolution properly. The processes involved are things of great beauty, and my poetry is, as advertised, vogonic. Damnit, I was determined to ignore this thread, but I just can't.

The origins of life and evolution are two completely different topics for discussion. Evolution does not really tell us where life came from in the first place, it tells us what happens to life once it already exists.

The origins of life, with your primordial soup oceans and your chemical melting pots and your strange mixtures of gases in the early days of Earth's atmosphere, these are used to explain the origins of life - here you need coincidence, in order to make some simple amino acids which catalyse reactions which favour the creation of themselves, and a few more coincidences to join some of these amino acids together. The origins of life are pretty much still speculation.

However, once we accept we have something we can recognise as life - the simplest virus, or a single cell organism, then evolution kicks in, and coincidence is no longer required. Evolution is the opposite of coincidence - in fact its full of positive feedback loops. Lifeforms inhabit an environment. Within a particular environment, conditions favour certain shapes/abilities of life form more than others. Those life forms which are most suited to that environment thrive, and the conditions in that environment maybe change slightly, and become even more suitable for the dominant lifeforms.

Meanwhile all these changes are made by the unbelievably accurate copying mechanisms of DNA, which are almost, but not quite, perfect. One imperfect copy of some DNA means that a bird has a slightly longer beak than its great-grandparents had, making it more successful than its peers at extracting sweet sweet pollen from some flower, and so it goes on to become a successful mother. The same gene in some other bird is imperfectly copied a different way, and that birds offspring are less successful.

There is nothing involving coincidence here. fazisi said "over the course of billions of years to come to this very point in time". But thats not how it works. Humans are not the logical end-point of the same process which has been running for billions of years. We are not at the top of the evolutionary tree, and there is no end point, nor is there a direction (or a design) in which evolution moves forward. Evolution is more like the tide of an ocean. Small steps in one direction, maybe some small steps in another direction, back and forth. A loooong series of incremental changes brought about by, and bringing about changes in the environment. The strongest survive. The definition of strongest constantly changes.

Fish didn't randomly decide the oceans were boring and that life on the ground would be more evolved. As someone already mentioned, somewhere on Earth conditions existed that made the life of a fish easier than it was for his other fish friends. This fish, whose parents DNA replication got slightly fucked up, causing it to grow a *very* basic lung as well as the more usual gills, making it capable of surviving long enough after a pool has dried up to flop over to the pool next door. This is abstracted somewhat, but eventually a fish species emerges which can survive on land for significant periods of time. There is lots of land, space, nutrients, and at first, no dangerous predators, so some members of the species start spending more time on land than in the pools, and eventually adapt to the new conditions... etc etc etc.

I am rambling on, and will stop. Evolution is awesome though. Forget the whole annoying atheist thing, ignore the God Delusion if you want, and read The Ancestors Tale and the Selfish Gene by Dawkins. The Selfish Gene is fascinating, but The Ancestors Tale... its beautiful.

[JellySlayer]

Order means predictability. Chaos means inpredictability. If I mix lemon juice and sugar, I get lemonade. This is order. If I mixed lemon juice and sugar but got a sandwich, this would be chaos.

In the same way, if I breed humans and I get a human, this is order. If I breed humans and get a sandwich, this would be chaos.

Evolution would be very orderly then, I take it? As I said before, if a fish gave birth to a frog, that would falsify evolution. Evolutionary transitions take many generations to happen, and, at least for a time, there may be intercompatability between similar species.

So how come it is an argument for evolution? I read the original post as "With our limited understanding, we can't easily comprehend how evolution truly works." Since we can't understand how God works by the exact same reasoning, is it somehow an invalid argument?

I certainly never said that. I'd argue the opposite in fact: we have an extremely good idea of how evolution works, and have an absolutely massive amount of data to support the theory. No, we don't necessarily know every step in the evolutionary chain, but we know enough that we can interpolate pretty well.

Microevolution is survival of the fittest within a species. There are numerous traits contained in the genes of the various members of this species. Members with weak traits die or fail to reproduce while members with strong traits survive or reproduce greatly. Therefore, the overall makeup of the species' collective genes will reflect that of the strong members. Outside sources can change what is considered strong and weak (such as climate, predators, food sources, etc.)

Macroevolution is the misconception that a species will change into a different species by gaining new traits (mutations).

I will direct you to the talk.origins FAQ on speciation for observed instances of new species within the last few centuries. I'd also recommend the macroevolution FAQ and the evidence for macroevolution (I note in passing that my claim that the micro/macroevolution distinction was apparently not originally invented by creationists). All of the claims in the FAQ are extremely well sourced from scientific literature and is a great resource on the subject.

[edit]I just want to point out that evolution does not require that a species have an evolutionary advantage over its parent per se. If you have two populations of the same species that are isolated from each other, and different selection pressures are applied to each, you will end up with different species over time. This is particularly common in birds, plants, and some insects.

This is why this argument is kind of difficult to debate. Are we talking about the source of life as we know it or how life as we know it has become as it is from any source? As others have stated, many accept both creationism and evolution at the same time. Some creator designed evolution to work as it does. Thread closed.

Evolution is a theory that deals with the diversity of life only. It makes no claims about the origins of life, or the origins of the universe. There are other theories (eg. abiogenesis, Big Bang theory) that do make these claims, but evolution does not stand or fall based on the claims of these external theories. Evolution simply assumes that life exists, and that the universe exists, and works from there. I understand how, to a creationist, these things are seen as interelated because the creationist's hypothesis does proport to solve all of these problems simultaneously.

[fazisi]

There is nothing involving coincidence here. fazisi said "over the course of billions of years to come to this very point in time". But thats not how it works. Humans are not the logical end-point of the same process which has been running for billions of years. We are not at the top of the evolutionary tree, and there is no end point, nor is there a direction (or a design) in which evolution moves forward. Evolution is more like the tide of an ocean. Small steps in one direction, maybe some small steps in another direction, back and forth. A loooong series of incremental changes brought about by, and bringing about changes in the environment. The strongest survive. The definition of strongest constantly changes.

Sorry, didn't want to sound like one of those pompous humans who thinks they are the greatest thing since great apes. Hell, we don't even have the word great as a descriptor for our apishness. Just meant "This observable point in time". As awesome as we are at making up fairy tales about our past, we suck balls at predicting the future.

Otherwise, completely agree.

Evolution would be very orderly then, I take it?

Yes.

Also thanks for the links, I will try to read through them all but I glazed through the first one and said to myself, "Oh sweet God, scientists have no morals. They have created new kinds of house flies! Those bastards!"

[Silfir]

What are you talking about? The best thing science could ever do is create house flies that die instantly if you stare at them. Friggin' flies buzzing up my room. Hooray for science!

vogonpoet knows what's up. That is all. Move along.

[minchazo]

One of the biggest problems I've always seen in these kinds of debates is that creation usually invokes the Chewbacca defense. Just stating that the earth is only 7,000 years old causes glazed eyes and agreement just to make the mental pain stop.

Personally, I believe that evolution exists. I've read enough scientific literature to know that there are even a couple instances where moths/butterflies have become separate species (though that hadn't been completely confirmed in the paper I was reading). That said, I also believe that Man was created by God, not by evolution.