darwinists:
what do you suppose caused the cambrian explosion if not the hand of god?
bacteria floated around for billions of years, just being bacteria, not changing. then all of a sudden the complexity of their dna gets orders of magnitude larger and more voluminous. then it stopped accelerating so fast. why?
wheres a paper like this that has the theory that darwinists have to explain how they overcome the incredibly excessive improbability?
if they dont have a theory, why dont they shut the hell up already?
the hole i just found is that the large scale structure of a new organism is determined in part by its genetic code, and also in part by the structure of the fertilized eggs it was given by the previous generation, and all of the structures that are found in it. theres nothing in the genes that makes the proteins go and make a dorsal/ventral split for example, that comes from the shape of the egg that the genes happen to be in.
so is it possible that the shape of the egg is more likely to change than the shape of the genes? because the problem that this paper has with purely relying on chance to describe the variations in time is that the random variations that happen to genetic material are incredibly unlikely to produce useful characteristics, but they say nothing abot the random changes in the other thing that defines the shape of the new organism, the shape of its mothers egg
it doesnt look like anybody knows exactly what that is, or what the incredibly low odds of it changing correctly are. so thats where your argument is darwins.
as far as i know or can see, the shape of the egg has no bearing whatsoever on the shape of the organism it produces.
can you prove it does ? or at least suggest how it could ?
on the matter at hand, the following could be speculated :
suppose i flip a coin 50 times in a row. the chances for the coin to fall all 50 times on the same side are ofcourse 1in 2^50, or roughly 1:1,000,000,000,000,000. however it is entirely possible that i sit right here in this room and flip a coin 50 times and it always falls on the same face. its just not likely.
so even if it is very unlikely that the cambrian explosion did in fact happen as a result of random search on the dna chains as the darwinian theory suggests, it is still no proof that things did not happen exactly that way. to conjecture the existance of god, or whatever intelligent designer is still a matter of personal choice, not more valid or invalid than nep-darwinism.
consider alternative science fields. the chances that the universe was at some point a singularity that exploded later on are, based on our own present experience, dismal. it is however what MUST have happened, for we lack any better explanation that is at least as coherent
in the same way, the mutation and selection is what MUST have happened, because we lack and better explanation that is at least as coherent.
in this sense i can understand the claim of many scientists that this entire intelligent design theory is not in fact science. because instead of offering (to my knowledge) an alternative, at least as coherent explanation for the matter at hand, it satisfies itself by showing that the current explanation is relatively unlikely.
so, the reasonable thing to be asked of it is not, and never was, to manage to get published, but to manage to make sense.
Actually, everytime there is a large scale disaster there’s a genetic ‘explosion’. When the field gets levelled genetics throws up all sorts of weird and wonderful things which disappear once resources get scarce again and the survival conditions get stricter. A massive genetic explosion is actually expected in Natural Selection everytime the presiding order is toppled, rather than being a suprising thing.
thats not a cause for why evolution happens, thats saying that it also happened at other, similar times. theres no reason to say that god/the man controlling the suns gamma ray distibution didnt aim at and shoot that dna to make life on earth keep on flourishing back to normal more quickly than the old, pre-disaster guys would have.
theres no reason the darwinists give. probabilities do not lie like you say.
the genome will have a sequence of 20 base pairs that make an amino acid that make a protein that very slightly change the processes of an organism.
mutations occur one base pair at a time as far as science has ever seen. if new genes are created from old ones, then when one base pair is changed, that entire bodily function is destroyed until all of the base pairs have modified into the new, useful gene. until that happens, the orgnisms carrying modified, currently defective genes are designated for extinction thanks to natural selection, and therefore, their continued evolution is RIDICULOUSLY unlikely, according to darwins own theory.
if new genes are created from the useless pile of extra crap laying around, then the paper derrida refers to talks slightly about how other, simultaneous changes are also required in order to make use of the new proteins that are provided by the genetics.
the paper talks about how ‘body plans’ really arent connected to genetics at all. im reading a book about genetics that extolls the virtues of genetics like only a career geneticist could, but also admits that many things have nothing to do with the code in the nucleus, like large scale structure.
ive never seen anything so lucky. or heard about it happening so often. you darwinists admit that its a leap of faith to say that probability can be violated. its also a leap of faith to say god did it. one has a real reason behind why probability is violated. one not.
is there real evidence showing that every single facet of embryonic development, indlucing large scale structure, is controlled by the building of amino acids that genes do?
future man, nobody proposed he can prove god didnt do it. wether you belive god did it or not is a matter of taste.
the fact that we dont have a good reason to explain for holes in one of our teories that we have to explain for holes in our everyday experiences doesnt prove anything about god. it just proves there’s still work to do.
What nonsense, who told you that? That’s just one of many types of mutation, called a point mutation. A mutation can even add a whole new chromosome (check out the cause of Down’s Syndrome if you’re still skeptical).
We don’t, there’s no ‘faith’ about it, there’s nothing violating probability in a Darwinianist stance. You’ve got the wrong end of the stick somewhere.
The whole point about evolution and mutation is that it has to be low, the process has evolved into one where mutation happens infrequently in order to ensure that the genes involved are able to adapt through mutation if need be, but don’t ‘break’ too often to ensure that the reproductive cycle isn’t needlessly inefficient (as most mutations have a negative impact on survival ratings. I said most).
there are certain genetic changes that would require a large amount of change to happen all at once. if only part of the change happens, then the animal is inferior and will be naturally selected to extinction.
so the only way to change your species so that it has a huge, all new function with little machines that run around your pipes and clean out specific chemicals and bacteria and not others and also many other ridiculously complex things, you need to get it all in one shot, not bit by bit over a billion years, all at once with one kid. if its not one shot, the kid is inferior and will die.
i believe there are numerous complexities that, according to gene changing processes we see today, in all likelihood should not have happened for the entire time the universe has existed. thousands upon thousands of these kinds of changes all happened in a short time frame and then stopped.
darwinists are just like atheists. they hate the idea of god for unrelated reasons and therefore they cling to the possibility that the thing that lies around the scientific corner will prove that he doesnt have a hand in the process. thats never happened regarding the answer to “why is life” or “why is anything” and it wont 
. and at the very least, the current reliance on randomness being violated doesnt cut it at all.
unless of course you believe that low probability means nothing solid at all, and that ridiculously unlikely things CAN happen. hey youre right they can, and i can quantum leap through this wall and have my winning lottery tickets get struck by lightning and meteors five times each. i do believe that certain genetic mutations are less likely than that zany benny hill sequence.
this is dumb, nobody has scientific facts. enough.
Name just one. If you can, you’ve proved evolution completely and utterly wrong. But you will not be able to.
You’ve got evolution all wrong, the exact point is that we don’t have huge leaps at any point, you have gradual changes. However in terms of the fossil record there can be comparitively huge leaps, that’s when the survival pressures are low and so features which are normally a hinderance are ‘tolerated’ in that they don’t affect survival chances enough to be a hinderance.
If we had huge leaps we’d all have telescopic eyes with 100x zoom, hearts that can restart themselves, bodies immune to any disease within one generation, that’s a huge leap that can’t evolve normally. What’s not a huge leap is a gradual build up of photo-respondant cells → detection using said cells → more and more complexity → the wonder that is the human eye. Evolution works by small incremental steps, not huge bounds. Each step in itself must either provide a positive or no benefit, but cannot provide a negative impact which would affect survival ratings.
One of the chief tenets of evolution is that it is gradual. However a ‘burst’ in complexity in one period of history can’t be regarded as a huge leap, that period of history is long. Think that Wolf - Poodle takes a very small amount of time, the first evidence of domestication of wolves is 14,000 years ago, or roughly 4,000 generations (and I’m being very generous there). Now think of the life cycle of a simple DNA molecule, minutes at top. You’re talking about a change that can happen in a matter of 1000s of years once it has commenced.
ok lets talk about the invention of the immune system. what was the first small step? the creation of little bodies that float around clogging up your blood doing nothing usefull? the creation and production of chemicals that kill bacteria but dont have any vehicles to carry them around out of the cell that created them? a one molecule difference in the amino acid that most closely resembles the one that kills bacteria?
if you do any of those things, your body is defective. i am under the impression that a change in one piece of dna means that you changed one molecule of one amino acid which is one of 20 that make up a protein, or you change one of the amino acids used to make a certain protein thats already established, or you change the place where a certain protein goes. all of those things, if not beneficial, are detrimental.
if new genes are not a product of old, then my question is this: how does the body suddenly realize that vast tracts of genetic material are now useful, unlike the past billion years when they have been empty filler? my theory is that we will never discover the exact tiny little connection between dna and the body, it will forever remain behind heisenbergs uncertainty. we can quantify the effects of the chemical reactions all we want, but we will never have a full explanation of them.
i am under the impression that currently we do not know what makes dna jump around and start making proteins any more than we know what turned the first pile of AGC and T into a bacteria.
Evolution is a fact. How it happened is a theory.
Denying evolution just because it helps someone hold onto their faith is absurd and arbitrary. its like ptomely’s geocentric earth…no evidence for it…it was totally convoluted just to dispell the fact that the earth revolved around the sun and was indeed not the center of the universe which deep down the church must have known but denied just for the sake of their own belief system.
Not believing in evolution is really like believing in a geocentric universe or a flat earth. Those ideas have been void and false since day one and established in being so a long time ago. I think its safe to say evolution has proved valid. Sure there are some things scientists are still learning about it but they know as any intelligent person should know that is a fact.
Scientists have the geological, anthropological, and biological evidence which does more than prove that evolution was likely and is likely to have and is still occurring. It really is fact. But the only reason it may be referred to as a theory, is because its a healthy process of science to always allow the possiblity of new evidence, although in this case they have more than they need.
For those of you who don’t know what that evidence is, here is some of it:
Biological evidence in terms of vestigal organs.
Ever wonder why you have an appendix, even if it doesn’t do anything?
If we want to keep things really simple, evolution is just change in an organism that’s passed on to the next generation. So, a mutation occurs, and the organism is better built for survival because of it, therefore the mutated organism thrives in its environment, and passes its traits onto the next generation.
Deduction:
-The fact that evolution has been observed in time makes it a fact and a theory.
-We must remember the original evidence and justification of the evolution theory/fact: we can trace our family tree to all different places of the earth using the method of geographical placement.
-The universe is full of natural order. This is a factual truth. Evolution is part of this natural order.
natural selection is a theory about how changes are propagated throughout an existing species. it is a fact, it is correct. nobody could possibly argue with natural selection.
evolution is not a theory, it doesnt say anything about how new genes are created. there is no material in the freaking theory.
all it says is that mutations happen when dna is replicated or at other various random times. and it also says that changes have happened in the past due to something.
thats IT! there is no connection whatsoever between the kinds of changes that we see and the changes that we know have happened. THERE IS NO THEORY except
- probability is completely violated like me being struck by lightning and a meteor at the same time, except much more
or - god zapped the dna on a level we cant see and continues to zap it with a force that will remain invisible
both have the same supportng evidence: none!
my theory about god REQUIRES that he give us no evidence of his existence. science, on the other hand pretty much always finds proof for the things it states. so until science tells me how 1:20^999 is violated, my theory sounds more consistent to me.
yeah the whole universe follows 4 laws beautifully and symmetrically and virtually without variation. except life, which isnt like that at all.[/i]
We now use the basic algorithm of natural selection to solve all sorts of difficult design problems. We call the field that uses this “Genetic Algorithms”.
For example: Airfoils. Suppose you start with a cone, a cube, and a few other arbitrary shape instances.
If you have a certain set of flight condition requirements and an artificial flight “environment” in which you test and measure the performance of various random shape-instances, you can evaluate them, rank them against a set of peers, and get rid of the ones that don’t measure up. Then you apply random perturbations to the remaining instances. You average a few to create new instances, apply a few perturbations to those, spawning yet more instances, and run them back through the evaluator.
Set a maximum population, keep the successive generations cycling, then in a few thousand generations you get some shapes (some of them counterintuitive, yet functional), most of which are adapted efficiently to your design requirements. You have just used an algorithm and a set of requirements to generate well adapted solutions to your design problem.
Of course these are ridiculously expensive in terms of computations, so they are very slow and you have to use simple models at present. But we have pretty much demonstrated that Darwin’s natural selection algorithm does what he said it would do.
So you can’t claim that natural selection wouldn’t work the way that evolutionists claim over the timescales involved.
I believe that God does the things he does for a reason. If he wanted the universe to behave in an arbitrary manner with invisible incomprehensible forces, then we should observe an incomprehensible and arbitrary universe, rather than our comprehensible and causal on.
More info on this: www-2.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/ … doc-2.html
ASEI: That was fascenating about the Genetic Algorithms. Truely informative, and weighty for thinking how the world runs.
Of course, in human culture we may not follow the Law of Nature in our selections; but as Neit. says, wonam know whom to choose ( – and the rest of us can be ever puzzled what wonen want.)
I don’t want to hijack the topic, but contemporary gene theory makes me wonder: How does the change in a chemical, one for another type, make a change in an animal’s shape? One might say in return, the DNA is a “code” that tells the animals’ body what to be; but isn’t a code interpreted from one form through meaning, into the uncoded form? What does this translation?
It seems to me DNA by itself is not a full answer at all.
un chevalier mal fet
yeah MRN, it seems to me that DNA is recipe for creating amino acids and proteins and how much of each. but it doesnt seem to be able to explain how they know where to go and which paths to choose in that long journey. until it does anything besides indentify which damaged genes lead to observed disorders, i will withold ultimate faith in the fact that it “created life”
sure i can. how accurate would your wind tunnel experiments be if there were millions of tiny complex differences that could completely throw your deisgn proces out of whack. what if i told you that the small, incremental steps in the process of finding the right cone were not actually determined by a force that knew what happened,
but by complete randomness. when genes change in a vast stretch of unused dna, nobody is looking at whether or not those genes are useful or not (except god). so when a new useful gene is created from un-useful ones, not only is it a completely random generation equivalent to a monkey typing a few pages of dickinson, but this forming sequence is only furthered once every few months or years, and it is extremely (1:20^999) more likely that it will be disrupted than it will be furthered.
your argument describes how easy it is for something imperfect to evolve when somebody is watching and modifying from the outside
i agree. and even if im wrong and it was random or whatever, intelligent designers decided that certain limits would be set on how much the code varies and what kind of things are ‘intrinsically good’.
Future man, you missed the entire point of ASEI’s post, the very thing he is saying is that in those random perpetuations there is NO human control. In other words they are the “millions of tiny complex differences” that you are talking about. That is the whole POINT about evolution.
Humans set the conditions which determine what is a successful shape and what is not (in the case of this example, a ‘good’ shape has low drag, a bad’ one has high drag). The only control in the system after it has been initiated is that the worst performing shapes are removed from the group, perhaps by human hand, but all that is happening is that they’re acting like the grim reaper. Those shapes didn’t run fast enough and were caught in the Lion’s jaw.
Yes, someone is ‘looking’, the resulting organism is! When reproduction occurs the resulting organism will use the new DNA (with a random mutation or two for arguments sake) to ‘build’ itself. The useless ‘noise’ in the DNA will be ignored and if the mutation happened there, nothing will happen. If it happened somewhere else it will affect the construction process.
First, where did you get such a rediculous number from? Secondly you don’t seem to understand basic genetics, it is nothing like a monkey doing that. Most gene mutations just mean the protein gets changed slightly, usually for the worse. To create a whole new gene doesn’t just happen in one step.
Your objections to natural selection seem to be based on your misunderstanding of the very concept coupled with a distorted view of how genetics, DNA and RNA work.
The DNA unwinds and produces messenger RNA in a similar manner to what it does when it replicates. There is some specific sequence in the long DNA chain that marks the end of an RNA chain. So these RNA chains then float around in the cell until they get to a ribosome, (I think that is what they were called), and they wind through the ribosomes. While a specific sequence is in a ribosome, only a specific amino acid can bond to it, so an arrangement of the amino acid chains eventualy becomes a functional protein. The proteins are the catalysts and reactants in chemical activity in the cell. The cell behavior is controlled through these proteins. Some can be extrodinarily large and complex molecules.
The proteins are the executing product of the DNA “code”. Cell growth, grouping, and therefore the ultimate shape of organs,bones, and animals are controlled through the protiens.
They now think that some RNA chains also can replicate and pass from cell to cell as well as DNA.
Well, if things mutated completely at random, it would be amazingly improbable to get anything able to sustain itself. However, the selection algorithm, is the key to the process. The selection algorithm constantly makes sure that of the hundreds of possible random variations, only the favorable ones survive. It would be like a million monkeys on a computer typing letters, and the computer only accepting real words, only allowing grammatically correct sentences to be built, only accepting the sentences which expressed coherent concepts to add to the final structure being built. Of course reasonable works would eventually result, because most of the gibberish is rejected. Natural selection rejects the gibberish that results in unsurvivable animals.
In any case, if it didn’t work, then what designed our airfoil in the GA example?
Some initial questions:
(1) Are genetic adaptations (i.e. acquired immune resistances…) a
display of survival intelligences? (Example: certain insects becoming
resistant to certain pesticides, such as DDT, and passing on such resistance to offspring.);
(2) Is it conceivable that somewhere/somehow with each species’ genome (located perhaps nucleically somehow) that a master premutational/pre-adaptational ‘archive’ or blueprint is retained? In other words, in the insect example above, how did the genome go about the trial and error process of adapting to the new toxic mutagen (DDT) unless it had a messenger means of communicating with a central orthodox authority? Doesn’t it stand to reason that despite all the various adaptive layerings…that access communicatively to a path leading to original genotype must be present? Further suggesting that a pre-adaptive component is somehow retained.
Feedback on this appreciated.
G-man
There are many problems concering the Intelligent Design Argument as a basis of proving the existence of a god, or supernatural being.
First of all, it relies on a weak analogy. It takes for granted that there is a significant resemblance between natural objects and objects which we know to have been designed. These arguments rely on there being a strong similarity between two things that are being compared. If the similarity is weak, so will the conclusion be correspondingly weak. Creationists argue that there as an intelligent eye by comparing a human eye fulfilling its “purpose”, but this is a vague similarity. Does not a watch (artificial object) fulfill its “purpose” as well?
The existence of a god is not the only possible explanation of how everything seems so perfectly adapted and tuned to their envrionment. The evolution theory states that animals and plants, through the process of the survival of the fittest, those animals and plants are best suited to their environments. Later scientists have been able to account for the mechanism of evolution in terms of inherited genes. This explains how animals and plants adapted marvelously without introducing the need for a god. Of course Darwin’s theory of evolution in no way disproves god’s existence
Thirdly, Intelligent Design does not prove the existence of a unique, all-powerful, all knowing, and all good god. It could plausibly be argued that the universe has a number of ‘design faults’: for instance, the human eye has a tendency to short-sightedness, and to cataracts in old age-hardly the work of an all-powerful Creatrix/Creator wanting to create the best world possible. Finally, on the question of whether the Designer is all-knowing and all-good, many people find the amount of evil in the world counts against this conclusion. If, as the Design Argument suggests, we are to look around us to see the evidence of god’s work, many people will find it hard to believe that all the evils is the result of a benevolent Creator.
Intelligent Design only seems to assume that efficiency and neatness are the only criteria upon which the quality of biological design must be judged. This world, in all respects, all the way from ‘‘natural evils’’ (hurricanes, tornadoes, typhoons) to physical imperfections (plagues, illness, predisposition to disease) and even mental handicapness suggests that this is more of a ‘‘poor design’’…