Evolutionism vs creationism

[grobblewobble]

Do you believe a single celled
organism could evolve into a human-like organism in 1000 generations? OK, how about 10K?

It took hundreds of millions of years before the first multi-cellular life appeared. Since it takes a bacterium in favourable circumstances about 30 to 60 minutes to reproduce, we are looking at something like 10.000.000.000.000 generations.

But the probability is not just a function of generations! It depends on the number of individuals in the population, too. Hypothetically speaking, if the population would be infinite, 1000 generations would be more than enough to evolve a human-like organism.

An estimate of the population size: (source)

The group, led by microbiologist William B. Whitman, estimates the number to be five million trillion trillion that's a five with 30 zeroes after it. Look at it this way. If each bacterium were a penny, the stack would reach a trillion light years.

Now, considering time limits (only millions now), natural disasters, diseases, etc...

Natural disasters do not slow evolution down, but speed it up. For example, after the extinction of the dinosaurs there was an explosion of diversity of mammals.

[Grey]

> Actually people were fully aware in ancient times that the world is round

The people who wrote genesis did? This was my hanging point. I am also of the 'how did
the animals fit' kind.

It was a big ark. Indeed, the exact measurements in cubits are written in the book of Genesis, as well as the types of woods used, etc in immense detail. Very exciting reading.

As for whether the tomography of the world was known to the writers of Genesis.... I don't know. Certainly similar texts of that time period from Hindus were not aware (since they say the world is flat and carried on the back of 4 giant elephants who stand on the back of a humongous turtle that swims in a sea of milk encircled by a colossal snake). The writers of Genesis has slightly less imagination, but I'd guess they either thought the world was flat or didn't even think about it as a logical question.

[JellySlayer]

There were no computers until invented. They went from not being in the universe to being in
the universe. I'm not talking about the elements from which they are made, but rather, the
design.

I think you two may be talking passed each other a bit. From my understanding, you aren't claiming that computers came from outside the universe, but rather that for some time they did not exist, and then a bunch of stuff was arranged in such a way that the object we identify as a "computer" now does exist. He is talking about outside the universe in the sense of "there exists some other universe or multiverse that is separate from our own". In your use of language, for example, if God were "not in the universe" that would imply that God does not exist. In his use of language, if God were "not in the universe" that would mean that God could exist in some other universe or multiverse that is beyond our own.

I think I agree with you to a degree here: abstractions don't really "exist" in the same sense that you or I do. I don't really know enough philosophy to be able to really debate this on any more than a very superficial level though. The significance of the problem in this particular context isn't exactly clear to me. It is certainly possible to create an abstraction, purely within your mind. The ability to create an instance of that abstraction is another matter entirely. Similarly, I'm not sure that it would make sense to say that something that is abstract can interact with something that is physical.

I have not designed computers, but have created other things. As for how to interact with
the supernatural, I'll repeat what I've said earlier in this thread: I have never heard
voices or 'spoken with god'. You are confusing me with Jellyslayer

Well, strictly speaking I never said that I heard voices either. I felt things that I interpreted to be God. While I certainly could say that I spoke to God in some sense of the term, that doesn't necessarily mean that any information is conveyed. I mean, I can speak to my coffee cup too, but that doesn't mean that the coffee cup is in a position to hear it.

> The question then, is that why would you consider a human being a "design" if this is so? [/COLOR]

I consider human being a design do to how low the probability is, from the alternate theory. I
have been rather clear on that from the begining of this thread. Considering a probability as
being low is not the same as giving it an identity. Let me put it like this: There are people
who have won the lottery (multi-million-dollar ones) repeatedly, then suddenly stopped winning
after being investigated. Am I going to call it coincidence or foul. Remember, I have no
evidence upon which to base my decision, only my knowledge of probability.

Well, I think the problem here is that probability is very hard to deal with when you're looking backwards. In some sense, for example, it makes sense to say that the probability of the universe spitting out humans is unity, because there exists at least once instance of humans in the universe. Without being able to reproduce the system in question, it's hard to judge one way or the other. We don't really have a good idea of what the odds are that we came to be, because our sample size is so small relative both to the size of the universe and to the timescales involved.

For science we, fortunately, can work in both directions. We can say, this theory explains evidence X, Y, and Z, but this isn't very useful. If the theory also says, if we perform experiment A, we should expect to see result B, then we can have more confidence in the correctness of our theory (and similarly, if our theory says we should get B, and instead we get C, then this generally means a problem with the theory).

>> So you are saying evolution from primordial ooze to human is now on scale of 'miliards' only?

> Why yes

Excellent. It is kinda difficult to get some people to agree to that. The problem is, the less
time you have to work with, the less plausible evolution becomes, even if I grant you the
'imortal being' starting condition which is an idea I am not entirely sold on. Because some
have presented objection to this before, I'll give an example. Do you believe a single celled
organism could evolve into a human-like organism in 1000 generations? OK, how about 10K? etc...
You might not like the idea of associating a probability to each, but I do. I'll grant 100%
to infinity, but for the mere 10K generations it would be a number too small to type. Now,
considering time limits (only millions now), natural disasters, diseases, etc... and I just
don't think it is possible.

10k generations? For what? For a relatively long-lived species like humans, that's 200,000 years maybe. For bacteria that's a month or so. Given that we have found evidence of life that is at least 500 million years old, even the longest lived species that we know of would have gone through many generations over that period.

The people who wrote genesis did?

I don't think they did. I'm not sure that it matters--I think the text certainly conveys the idea that the flood covered the whole Earth, regardless of its shape.

[gut]

> It took hundreds of millions of years before the first multi-cellular life appeared.

For the record, this strikes me as the 'I KNOW' type of argument.

> It depends on the number of individuals in the population, too. Hypothetically speaking,
if the population would be infinit

It would not be. I thought I stated it clearly, but I will elaborate. I was pointing out the
aspect of evolution becoming less plausible with respect to a more limited timeframe. I
(rather generously, IMO) granted the starting condition of the 'imortal' finally becoming
a single celled organism that coincidentally also had a boyfriend evolve at the same time.
If I'm not mistaken, that was what infernovia described with his passage:

> These guys can only be defined as "the immortals," their identity simply would not disappear.

But once the organisms themselves interact with the cloning process, thats when FORCED variance appears, aka the
birth of the sexed mortal being

So rather than 'single celled', we could alternatively call them 'first sexed'. Doesn't
matter for the point that I'm making. My point is, you would start, not with an infinite
population, but with a population of 2. You would then have to produce human-like beings
in a time frame of millions of years. I don't believe it.

> Natural disasters do not slow evolution down, but speed it up.

I don't agree.

> after the extinction of the dinosaurs there was an explosion of diversity of mammals.

That makes little sense by the logic of evolution. Evolution is survival of the fittest.
The only trait that would be passed along from survivors of a catastrophic meteor hit
would be the increased likelihood of being able to survive catastrophic meteor hits,
(which I doubt would be a useful trait for the immediately proceding generations. What
you term 'explosion in diversity', I would call simple repopulation. There is little
reason to think that starting with a more limited gene pool (which is what WOULD result
from a catastrophy) would result in more fit beings.

> Well, strictly speaking I never said that I heard voices either.

I was teasing/exagerating.

> it makes sense to say that the probability of the universe spitting out humans is unity

agreed, but the question at hand is if 'the universe' includes god or not

> Without being able to reproduce the system in question, it's hard to judge one way or the other.

It's even worse than that. We'd need to ensure one universe had no god, and one that did.
Rather difficult, considering the tendancy of human-level-intelligence lifeforms to
build churches.

> 10k generations? For what? For a relatively long-lived species like humans, that's 200,000 years maybe.

I imagine the ones who just evolved beyond 'immortals' would have had short cycles, and the
cycles would increase with size and intelligence.

> Given that we have found evidence of life that is at least 500 million years old

Again, I see this as the 'I KNOW' philosophy. I rank it = with 'on the fifth day, god...'.
I simply don't believe claims of accurate measure into the 100's of milliards of years.

> I don't think they did. I'm not sure that it matters--I think the text certainly
conveys the idea that the flood covered the whole Earth, regardless of its shape.

Indeed, and that is what I found curious. I assumed since they didn't, or rather probably
didn't know the earth was a globe, they couldn't have used language to convey the concept
of a 'global' flood, yet they did.

[infernovia]

> in his intelligence, he realizes that morality cannot be justified without an eternal being validating

Nonsense, and proof that you didn't read my previous posts. I'll cite this one from dorten
vs jellyslayer, on the topic of god's morality:

I don't see how that contradicts my statement. I think that the christian god (or any god) is a way to validate your morality, and that without the christian god, you really will have to abandon any idea of "the most valid ethic" or whatever. This is not to say that people don't pretend that their morality is still the "ideal," more that morality was founded upon God and the elimination of God must necessarily mean the elimination of the platonic idea of the "truly moral," atleast for those who dare.

I'm not doing that. If you search back through this thread, you will see my responses to those
on the religious side whom I consider aren't thinking logically. I do kinda like pointing out
the flaws in both the 'evolution explains it all' and 'god just made it that way' opinions.

No, I don't really care about the little tiny details. The no-answer of God is the premise that he is eternal, omnipotent, omniscient. The question is, what thing can contain everything, and even be beyond it? Wouldn't God be within the "everything?" And how can anything within justify everything? Basic set theory.

The premise of the no-answer in god is that he is a platonic model that can only exist as a complete signifier (aka, a mere word/concept). Does the object of the signifier (the signified) have any actual effect in the current world? The questions is really quite irrelevant to believing in him. Because people still feel the effect of a pure signifier.

Do you believe a single celled
organism could evolve into a human-like organism in 1000 generations? OK, how about 10K? etc...
You might not like the idea of associating a probability to each, but I do. I'll grant 100%
to infinity, but for the mere 10K generations it would be a number too small to type. Now,
considering time limits (only millions now), natural disasters, diseases, etc... and I just
don't think it is possible.

I think that organisms have done it really fast. 1000 generations is like a week really (a month lets say). So maybe at a billion generations or w/e, we can get something more complex. (In the normal world, "complex" multi-celled organisms are supposed to have come up at around 300 million years after-wards)

And lets not forget that each organism is an individual in itself, and the more organisms you have, the more chance of variations.

Natural disasters are nothing. One of those cataclysms are estimated to wipe out 90% of the life forms on earth. Yet they seem to handle it fine and go on to create enormous monstrosities in just 60 million years of time. Yes, not every multi-celled organism died... but that is a pretty short timeframe.

Clearly, there IS a concept of god, so if it is a concept, and (according to your above
sentence) it is only possible to contemplate things that are part of the universe, that
means god is part of the universe

As a signifier, yes. Meaning as a mere word, a concept, a hallucination in your brain. Lets explain what I mean by that:

Wolf, the word, is a signifier. The word "wolf" exists. "Wolf" is also associated with a signified, a collection of cells that are lined up in a certain way that matches several sensual criteria (what it looks like, what it smells like, how it acts, its ancestors etc.), this also exists. This is the first level of simulacrum, representation (something that attempts to reflect reality but is not it). But does this mean that you can create a signifier that immediately implies a signified? No, you can address the representations themselves (and thus mask/disfigure it). Eventually, you come into a signifier that has no relation to a signified. That is what it means to be "unreal."

See, this is where your "identity=change or w/e" is a simplification of what I am not saying. Identification is a willful error that a human partakes in because it is useful. Electrons, for examples, are fictional constructions (idealized particles) that are useful to model for constructing machinery. But that doesn't mean we have constructed electrons, when we model things with mathematics, we are mostly dealing with the signifier.

There were no computers until invented. They went from not being in the universe to being in
the universe. I'm not talking about the elements from which they are made, but rather, the
design.

When we say "the universe" we really mean "everything." That means what is possible for everything, for all time. Basically what we are dealing with is logic and the basis of thought. We are eliminating things that are "outside of the universe." Aka, contradiction in the words we have chosen and modeled the universe under.

[JellySlayer]

> it makes sense to say that the probability of the universe spitting out humans is unity

agreed, but the question at hand is if 'the universe' includes god or not

Well, that depends, how exactly do you define God? If God is an abstraction, then, yes, God "exists" in some sense of the term, as in, it exists as a conception within the human mind. Or do you think God is made of matter and energy, as in God is a physical thing in the universe? If not, then the universe doesn't include God.

> Without being able to reproduce the system in question, it's hard to judge one way or the other.

It's even worse than that. We'd need to ensure one universe had no god, and one that did.
Rather difficult, considering the tendancy of human-level-intelligence lifeforms to
build churches.

I'm not sure what the statement about churches has to do with the previous statement. I'd venture too, that we don't actually have enough evidence to say conclusively that "human-level intelligence lifeforms" build churches, since we haven't discovered any other than humans. I admit, finding extraterrestial life with similar (or identical) belief systems would be very compelling evidence for those particular beliefs. As I said, even though we can't run the universe from the beginning again to see what happens, that doesn't mean that we can't deduce anything about the world around us. Quite the contrary, in fact.

> 10k generations? For what? For a relatively long-lived species like humans, that's 200,000 years maybe.

I imagine the ones who just evolved beyond 'immortals' would have had short cycles, and the
cycles would increase with size and intelligence.

So that would mean lots of generations, would it not? Many more than 10k in the timescales we're dealing with.

Again, I see this as the 'I KNOW' philosophy. I rank it = with 'on the fifth day, god...'.
I simply don't believe claims of accurate measure into the 100's of milliards of years.

Why not? How do you explain measurements that do produce these sorts of values, and why do you think that they would be all so wrong about this?

For reference:
Talk Origins on the Age of the Earth
Isochron Dating (the main technique for finding the age of really old things; a bit technical)
Age of the Sun (a non-isochron measure for the solar age; also a bit technical)

[infernovia]

So rather than 'single celled', we could alternatively call them 'first sexed'. Doesn't
matter for the point that I'm making. My point is, you would start, not with an infinite
population, but with a population of 2

Yet the biblical account of adam and eve seemed to be fine for most people? <- just humorous, don't take this too seriously.

But what if, like the virus, we are dealing with a scenario of rape? That the "male" in this case starts inteferring with multiple chemical processes? Or, it could be accidental, an organism can eat another organism, yet could not digest it's code and thus be forced to replicate with it's code too. Like, it could be a number of things.

That makes little sense by the logic of evolution. Evolution is survival of the fittest.
The only trait that would be passed along from survivors of a catastrophic meteor hit
would be the increased likelihood of being able to survive catastrophic meteor hits,
(which I doubt would be a useful trait for the immediately proceding generations. What
you term 'explosion in diversity', I would call simple repopulation. There is little
reason to think that starting with a more limited gene pool (which is what WOULD result
from a catastrophy) would result in more fit beings.

But "the most fit being" is simply an abstraction... there is no such thing. You are correct, the things that would be selected are the ones who can survive the meteor, but what happens after the cataclysm ends and an enormous explosion of available energy happens? Again, natural selection, the organisms will explode in a frenzy, and that which can take advantage of it will be picked (let it be insects/reptiles/mammals). So while the cataclysm picked those who could survive it, the renewal of energy picks those who can take advantage of it.

And this "repopulation" can and does have a completely different face, the dinosaurs could not keep up with the mammals, and the crocodilian ancestors could not keep up with the dinosaurs in this "repopulation race."

You would then have to produce human-like beings
in a time frame of millions of years.

Yes, the first sexed organism is guessed at around 850 million years ago according to a biological clock that is within the cells (who knows if it is accurate or not, but comparatively, the oldest life is guessed at around 3 billion to 3.5 billion years ago to 2.2 billion years ago at the low end). They are also guessed to be from two gene pools. Like imagine they split every 20 minute. That puts us at 26000 generations in the first year. 21024000 million generations in 800 million years. Thats a lot of splits! And we are really only modelling just one branch of the tree here. Once you started accounting for the population and the generation, we are accounting for some large numbers here!

I mean, I could make more accurate models accounting for increased time spent on reproduction, death, and everything, but forgive me for being a bit lazy here. The first year by itself can produce truly insane number of these cells (2^26000), if we assume for the sake of easy modelling that these cells are "identical" to each other in terms of life-span and that none of them have died due to hazardous surroundings. And then we start accounting for environmental pressures, climates, and all of these things will force variation in one direction or another, and really, there is a lot of chances factored in that will force a "transformation" in these trillions of trillions of cells to one kind or another. Especially once you add sex to the equation which rapidly increases variation within the population when you have a changing environment/hazardous environment.

[gut]

>> in his intelligence, he realizes that morality cannot be justified without an eternal being validating

> Nonsense, and proof that you didn't read my previous posts. I'll cite this one from dorten
vs jellyslayer, on the topic of god's morality:

I don't see how that contradicts my statement.

Then you must not have read it that time either. Step 1: you claim I think morality can't be
justified without god. Step 2: I disagree with the morality of an action that is attributed
to god. It is rather difficult to see how both your statement about how I think, and my
statement about how I think, can be true.

> I think that the christian god (or any god) is a way to validate your morality

I have stated previously that I need no religious text to validate my way of thinking. If I
find text that appears corrupted, I cast it off as easily as Jellyslayer.

> the elimination of God must necessarily mean the elimination of the platonic idea of the "truly moral

The elimination of god in your mind would be similar to the elimination of, say, racism.
Nothing more than a pattern of thought that could one day, just go away. Elimination of
god to my way of thinking would be more like, um, impossible.

> The question is, what thing can contain everything, and even be beyond it

One could counter with 'what finite mind can comprehend the infite'.

> Wouldn't God be within the "everything?"

An easier question to answer is that WE are within the everything, meaning everything we can
comprehend. Whether god is within what I comprehend or not, I can't say.

> In the normal world, "complex" multi-celled organisms are supposed to have come up at around
300 million years after-ward

It still amazes me that people put such faith in measures that reach into the hundreds of
milliards of years.

> Natural disasters are nothing

I disagree.

>> that means god is part of the universe

> As a signifier, yes. Meaning as a mere word, a concept, a hallucination in your brain. Lets
explain what I mean by that

No need to explain, I was teasing. There is some logic in what I say though, but only in a
way. Humans on every inhabited continents did form notions of god. One could say it is a
hardwired feature, not necesarily to believe, but to consider. Upon seeing miraculous
results, they have the choice, as I do, of believing said results are the product of random
crashings, or design. Most of them make the obvious choice

> this is where your "identity=change or w/e" is a simplification of what I am not saying

That was more teasing.

> Electrons, for examples, are fictional constructions

Drats, there goes years of electrical study...

> When we say "the universe" we really mean "everything."

I'm not entirely sure that is what we are saying. That would encompass all abstract and
concrete things, all we do and don't comprehend. I think when most people say universe,
they are indicating concrete things of which they are aware. At least, that is rather
the context that I used the word in the post you quoted.

> how exactly do you define God?

This is where I tend to differ with so many, as I usually don't try. I've stated I have
never heard voices, seen miracles that I believed were real (like healing kind), spoken
in tongues, or any of the kind. My belief is well summarized with the analogy of 'seeing
an imprint of a coin impies the existance of a coin'. That is logic. Believing otherwise
takes faith that I don't have.

> God "exists" in some sense of the term, as in, it exists as a conception within the human mind

But WHY does it exist in so many minds? The condescending answer is to say that they just
never discovered evolution theory, but that isn't quite enough. People know the theory now,
yet many still find more logic in creationism.

> we don't actually have enough evidence to say conclusively that "human-level intelligence lifeforms"
build churches

I disagree. We have several seperate groups of humans, while technically not different species
(excluding the irish, of course), are diverse enough to give an indication. The logical
result of mixing together a miraculous world with an intelligence capable of appreciating it
is to contemplate creationism.

> So that would mean lots of generations, would it not? Many more than 10k in the timescales
we're dealing with

I will point out that 'many generations" != 'enough generations'. Remember the task at hand,
creating humans from 2 single celled organism.

> I simply don't believe claims of accurate measure into the 100's of milliards of years.

>> Why not?

Apply your own logic relating to controls. Have one rock/fossil/whatever that you absolutely
know is 100 zilliard years old, then run your tests. The test method that gets the date
right will have value in my eyes. Unfortunately, we have no controls from which to work.
There is no item that we KNOW is exactly 1 zillion years old, so there is no standard by
which they can measure the tests.

> How do you explain measurements that do produce these sorts of values, and why do you think
that they would be all so wrong about this?

I put these tests in the same catagory as I do the tests they ran a few years (decades?)
ago, predicting ice caps will all be gone in a few years. Very complex calculations,
taking a lot of data into account, much margin for error, yet accurate predictions are
published, presented as accurate. They refactor them later (when it is apparent they are
wrong), they admit simple mistakes, but quickly follow up with 'but that doesn't mean
the problem isn't real'.

I don't think dating something to hundreds of billions of years is impossible, and 40
years from now, they will be better at it than they are now. I would be quite surprised
if the calculations they come up with in 2050 will match those we see today.

I followed your links and found no information about the possibility of these tests being
one iota wrong. From this I surmise one of two things. A) there is absolutely no question
as to the perfection of these tests from any scientist alive. B) I have common sense, and
realize they have no interest in promoting the possible innaccuracies of the tests in
which they put so much faith.

> Yet the biblical account of adam and eve seemed to be fine for most people?

They were, by most accounts, not single-celled. How these accounts came to be, I can't say.
Yes, I'm teasing.

> So while the cataclysm picked those who could survive it, the renewal of energy picks
those who can take advantage of it.

Your new theory has more problems than the old one. Instead of passing along the trait of
being better suited to survive an appocalypse (which at least makes sense), you are saying
it is more a matter of passing along the trait of being best able to exploit post-appocalypse.
The flaw is that the beings most fit to exploit the post-appocalypse may well have died
within it.

> Yes, the first sexed organism is guessed at around 850 million years ago
according to a biological clock that is within the cells (who knows if it is accurate or not

In other news, I have personally deduced the first lifeform to have been colored green, and
sported 37 legs, according to the gut-method. Who knows if it is accurate or not?

> I could make more accurate models accounting for increased time spent on reproduction, death, and
everything, but forgive me for being a bit lazy here

I would put your findings in the same context as Isochron Dating.

> there is a lot of chances factored in that will force a "transformation" in these trillions of
trillions of cells to one kind or another. Especially once you add sex to the equation

At least you are kinda admiting that there are too many factors to take into account, so
I'll give you credit for that.

[xan]

> God "exists" in some sense of the term, as in, it exists as a conception within the human mind

But WHY does it exist in so many minds? The condescending answer is to say that they just
never discovered evolution theory, but that isn't quite enough. People know the theory now,
yet many still find more logic in creationism.

It's not logic they find in creationism, it's convenience. As i see it there's 2 main reasons why people believe in a god or gods, First is that it's what they're taught from a young age and never bother to explore any alternatives, second is that it's more comforting to believe that there's some grand design, some divine loving entity that is looking after us, that we go to a magical happy place when we die, that there's a reason for life other than crude survival. This comforting lie is easier to accept than the truth that the universe is scary place, and is apathetic to our happiness and survival, that people die every day horribly and for no reason, and when they die, they're gone forever.

[gut]

> it's what they're taught from a young age and never bother to explore any alternatives

They can go through school and not learn evolution theory? Wow! Funny how they could, and
I couldn't. Funny because I live in the most fundamentalist christian area of America,
perhaps the world.

> some divine loving entity that is looking after us, that we go to a magical happy place when we die, that there's a
reason for life other than crude survival. This comforting lie is easier to accept than the truth

Yet another beleiver in the 'I KNOW' religion.

Perhaps I will catagorize the catagorizers in two catagories
There are those who claim others are emotional rather than logical, because they are afraid
of the truth, that it is logical to believe differently. Then there are those who claim
others are brainwashed rather than logical, because they are afraid of admiting the truth,
which is that they themselves are brainwashed.

See how annoying that is?