Evolution Opponents Lose Kansas Board Majority

[Confed999]

I don't think you're getting the probabilities involved here.

I get it.

But we don't know any reactions yet that have this probability.

I'm in the boat that says there is a lot more than random chance going on in the universe, and we've only been looking for answers for a few thousand years.

So far all the reactions we know of, or that I am aware of, have probabilities of, oh, say 70 zillion to the 70 zillionnth power. In other words, impossible.

Actually it would be one in 70 zillion to the 70 zillionth power.

Unless, of course, there is actually infinite space and time, in which case even the absurdly improbable becomes certain.

Not only would it be certain, it would have happened an infinite number of times. I love infinity, such a neat concept.

[ArmchairGeneral]

Sounds good to me.

[Bill]

No. Evolution does not include abiogenesis. We're talking definitions here.

It must IMO. IMO it really should include a "And this is how it all started" chapter. We may not be able to mathematically prove the big bang, but we can at least point to a DEFINITIVE point in time where it occured, and we can predict/confirm how that bang propagated.

The evolutionary 'from the goo' theories for the moment of creation strike me as little more than a believe in Voodoo, because to date it's entirely unproveable.

I'm so sorry. But you have said a few things that were complete nonsense in this thread. If you want me to laboriously go through the thread and find them, well, sucks to be you. Anyhow, I do respect your doubts concerning evolution. I attend a college with a bit of a reputation as far as intelligent design, and I have quite strong doubts myself.

Y'know einstien said a few things in his career that were total nonsense too(Cosmological constant anyone?).

If he can be ignant, then my excuse to also be ignant is airtight.

First off, you need to define "life." What, in your view, makes something living?

See websters dictionary.

Secondly, on the random and unplanned. Not exactly. If, and this is a big IF, there are conditions where there is a chemical tendency toward life, it would still be random chemical reactions that led to life, but the probabilities would be vastly reduced.

Thirdly, on the man-made life issue. If, and again, it's a big if, abiogenesis is possible, it should be possible to recreate the starting conditions in the lab and produce life. Unfortunately it could take a very, very long time. But it might be possible to speed up the process while retaining the essential experiment. Perhaps eliminating the organic molecules that the theory doesn't require from the soup. This would reduce the usefulness of the experiment, as it might be that all those chemicals would interfere with the process and make it invalid, but if we are able to use standard chemical processes to generate life from inorganic molecules, I would consider that a strong evidence that abiogenesis is POSSIBLE. Not that it must have happened. Of course, using Occam's Razor, we could then say that the simplest explanation avoids unknown outside interference (God, aliens, whatever), and thus abiogenesis is the most likely explanation.

I would state that little green men bringing life here is much 'simpler' than abiogenesis(or whatever crawled from the goo theory one wants to adhere to), and therefore it is improper to come to the conclusion that abiogenesis is the most likely. I would say this primarily because scientists now believe that it is EXTREMELY likely(based on the laws of probabilities) that there is intelligent life beyond earth, and because the core systems in our galaxy are old enough to have developed highly advanced life by the time the earth cooled into a solid body.

Secondly, i feel it foolish to automatically assume there is no intelligent force at play. Certainly if one applied Occum's Ravor to steel ore one would be fed with an erroneous explanation for the existence of said steel if one automatically excluded intelligent creators.

Note that I am highly skeptical of the whole theory. I like playing devil's advocate, though.

This has been a fantastic debate. No complaints here except for people tossing the occasional barb my way.

That may very well be, because our science education sucks. And I really don't care too much, because those who do care will find out, and for those who don't care it really doesn't matter. But regardless of what it suggests to you, you better make sure you're talking about the same thing when you're talking to somebody about evolution. You can point to speckled moths and say, "that's evolution," and you're correct, using one definition. But if you extrapolate to, "thus, everything evolved from a single celled organism" you're switching definitions midstream, and thus making a bad argument.

I have never seen any scientist that believes in 'contemporary evolution' offer any theory other than the primordal goo being the origin(or at least the spark) for life on earth. It is one of the real weaknesses of the whole line of thinking because the primordal goo explanation is totally statistically ridiculous as far as i'm concerned.

Yes, it is well defined, and it is irrefuteably logical. And we seem to observe it in nature. But it is by no means "one small aspect of...evolution." There are two main elements to evolution, both are vital. One is natural selection, and the other is heritable variation. That's all there is to evolutionary theory. All the rest is elaboration. That's why evolution is so elegant. It's remarkably simple. The only problem is whether the mechanisms of evolution actually do all they are supposed to be able to do, i.e. generate new structures in an organism.

I'm sorry, but i was actually TAUGHT in school during my science classes that life originated in the goo spontaneously. That sure as hell seems to me like it is therefore being rolled into the broader topic of evolution. No distinction was made between the two.

This is i think part of the reason why so many people(like ann coulter) are up in arms about the subject.

Actually, there's nothing in the article that I can see that suggests that he does not believe in evolutionary speciation. Not many creationist/intelligent designer/evolution-doubting-whatevers deny speciation anymore. It's too obvious. You have an island. It has several closely related species found nowhere else on earth. The nearest mainland has a species extremely similar to the island species. The obvious explanation is that the mainland species migrated to the island, and various descendents of that species adapted to various ecological niches. There is no reason that I can see that one species of elephant would not evolve into another. My doubts come when we say that all elephants are descended from a small shrew like creature that in turn evolved from a lobe-finned fish that in turn evolved from a sea-squirt that in turn...you get the picture.

Let's say we have two birds. Seagulls say. One moves to an island, the other moves to a different island.

Evolution suggests they'll morph into specialized birds more optomized for their environment.

But one problem....birds can fly, and therefore will always continue to have the possibility of co-mingling(and mating) with other birds from the other islands. If that's the case, unique adaptations should be very hard to manifest.

Also, how do we get several species of big cats in africa all dwelling in the same area. Does not evolution suggest that only the most succesful of these lines should continue? Clearly that's not been the case.

One final problem i have is if animals adapt to better defend themselves and their unique line, why is it that prey animals are so utterly defenseless to so many predators. Seems to me there should be at least ONE prey animal on earth that has adapted such fantastic natural defenses that it's become nearly invincible to it's predators, yet said animal does not exist(that i know of).

Just observations, but they seem to present some problems to evolutionary theory.

I think we're talking at cross purposes here. When I say speciation, I mean that wolves and coyotes probably had a common ancestor at some point. As I said above, I have serious doubts about macroevolution, which is what a fish evolving into a tiger would be.

But back to devil's advocate. There are plenty of similarities. I would bet that the genetic code of a Siberian tiger has at least 70% commonality with a fish, probably more. They both have four paired limbs. They both have a backbone with a dorsal nerve cord running through it. Much of the rest of their skeletal system is similar. Ditto musculature. Ditto nervous system. Ditto most other systems.They use many very similar enzymes, and all the basic biochemical processes are nearly identical.

[QUOTE=ArmchairGeneral]Yet fish have extra 'limbs' (Dorsal and tailfins), they're cold blooded vs the tigers warm bloodedness, they cannot breather air, whereas the tiger can, and the tiger cannot breather water, whereas the fish can. What's more, most cats typically hate being wet even a little bit, and will freak when you put them even in knee high water.

Did Mars have goo? I didn't know that.

One would think that before it cooled entirely into a solid rock that yes, it must've had goo at some point. Also, NASA scientists seem to think they're gonna find water there, which is the main ingredient for life.

No. The idea with the mitochondria and chloroplasts is that they were once independent organisms, which were engulfed by predatory cells. The engulfed cells somehow avoided digestion, and developed a symbiotic relationship with the predatory cells. Far from random.

That would be akin to me eating a frog and it continuing to live in my belly until death.

How do you know what the odds are? It's a matter of certain organic chemical reactions, which may or may not be probable, depending on the conditions. Me, I don't know enough biochemistry to say what the odds of abiogenesis are. Of course, it's pretty ridiculous to talk about the odds of something happening when we don't even know exactly what that something is. So who knows?

I'd say feel free to ask a statistician to put together some figures, but i'll bet ya $10 bucks that the odds are MANY MANY times greater than winning one of those 100 million dollar lotteries in the US.

The only problem is that this scenario simply displaces the entire problem to another planet. Where did the aliens come from? If they are organic based life, either they evolved or something else made them. And that something else would have to be something entirely out of our present ken. I.e., something supernatural, or within spittin' distance of supernatural at least.

I can deflect that question very easily by pointing out that we're unable to point to the definitive 'start point' for the universe(when you get very close to the big bang via mathematics you are confronted with irreconcilable infinities).

Yet the universe exists despite anyone being able to explain why, or how it happened, and i exist without anyone being to explain why, or how it happened. Gives me an automatic 'out' from having to answer where the aliens came from.

But if you want a theoretically sound WAG(wild assed guess, lol), they came from the 9th dimension.

PS: Im not trying to argue with anyone here, im trying to get what i feel are huge holes in evolution filled, and i am very curioius as to why people just KNEE JERK reject the very real possibility that extra-dimensional/terrestrial intelligences were behind life on earth.

Again, especially considering the 'crawled from the goo' alternative that is usually advanced in it's place.

[Bill]

Oh please. Even if the "imported" concept were true, it just moves the origin a step further back to "how did life emerge on Alpha Ceti VII?" or something similar.

You have jumped the border into fantasy at this point Snipe.

-dale

PROVE IT DALE.

You can't, no one alive can.

So please, save your unfounded insults for someone that actually deserves to be insulted, ESPECIALLY since i merely advanced the 'life on earth was sent here from elsewhere' theory as a POSSIBILITY, not a belief.

You CANNOT prove that life did not come from elsewhere, so you have ZERO sound scientific ground upon which to accuse me of living in fantasy. Not to mention the fact that there are serious scientists that actually feel that the building blocks for life came into town on an asteroid.

Asteroid, spacecraft....what's the difference?

PS: While you're at it, prove to me that the big bang occured, and that it was that incident that was the genesis for our universe.

You can't prove that EITHER....yet no one considers it to be fantasy.

Just to balk at the possibility of aliens planting life here because it does not explain where THEY came from is silliness. I can't explain where YOU came from(i dont know where you were born or who your parents are), but yet you are here. For all i know you came out of a test tube.

The proof that we exist is proof that OTHER intelligent life can exist(and indeed, scientists predict it does exist somewhere in this universe, and that it's likely fairly plentiful on a universal scale), and there is no reason to suggest that any alien species could not have existed 4-5 billion years ago when the earth was forming.

Again, science predicts that intelligent species will likely develop in MUCH different timeframes, so it's entirely plausible that an advanced extra-terrestrial civilization existed 4 billion years ago but has since vanished into extinction.

Look at the kingdom of minos on Crete(long since vanished and believed by many to be the 'real atlantis'). They were doing things in 3500 BC that were not replicated elsewhere in the world for over 5000 years(like using lighting rods, for instance).

I think you're just going to have to accept that people can LOGICALLY disagree with current scientific thinking on this matter and still stay wholly within the realm of accepted theory.

M theory is accepted theory, and so are all the string theories. They both predict a possibility of extra-dimensional life/creation, and wail as you will....you cannot disprove that theory.

Hell i can PREDICT that life can be formed and than transported to a different climate and still survive just by taking a pod of penguins from the south pole to the north and dropping them off.

Further, if it was in NASA's mind to do so, i have no doubt that they could transport a lifeform to mars via spacecraft that could survive in that environment. Might take thousands of tries, but they could do it.

If that was done(and it could be IMO if we wanted to and spent the time/money to make it happen), it would irrefutable prove the POSSIBILITY that there was an extra-terrestrial creator that transported life here.

[dalem]

Hah, I just caught this:

Sorry to nitpick, but you mean aerobic, don't you dale? It's the non-mitochondrial glycolysis that is anaerobic.

Woops! Typo. Thanks for the correction.

-dale

[Bill]

Not at all. The goo existed for eons, with all manner of energies acting on it, heat, UV light, immense electrical fields (lightening), ionising radiation etc. Molecules were interacting in ways we can't reproduce exactly, a billion to the power billion times. The more stable compounds survived, to combine further. Any compound that could duplicate itself would have an enormous staying power. The dice are loaded for this to happen eventually. Self-replication: the origin of life.

You make it sound easy and inevitable, rather than an EXTREME mathematical implausibility(which it is).

Feel free to prove it via experimentation. Cause you'd be the first, and it would get you a nobel prize.

Life coming from goo?

Now THAT'S fantasy IMO....

[Bill]

And you get to roll those dice on every rock orbiting the estimated 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the known universe.

I'd say that's a real good number for the possibility of any one of those rocks ever developing life from goo. A 1:70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

If anything that's a charitable number considering that we can't even prove that life can EVER emerge from goo, regardless of conditions.

I feel that until we have a TOE we will never know any of the really mind-warping questions out there, hence the overriding desire to get one.

[dalem]

PROVE IT DALE.

You can't, no one alive can.

So please, save your unfounded insults for someone that actually deserves to be insulted, ESPECIALLY since i merely advanced the 'life on earth was sent here from elsewhere' theory as a POSSIBILITY, not a belief.

You CANNOT prove that life did not come from elsewhere, so you have ZERO sound scientific ground upon which to accuse me of living in fantasy.

PS: While you're at it, prove to me that the big bang occured, and that it was that incident that was the genesis for our universe.

You can't prove that EITHER....yet no one considers it to be fantasy.

Just to balk at the possibility of aliens planting life here because it does not explain where THEY came from is silliness.

The proof that we exist is proof that OTHER intelligent life can exist(and indeed, scientists predict it does exist somewhere in this universe, and that it's likely fairly plentiful on a universal scale), and there is no reason to suggest that any alien species could not have existed 4-5 billion years ago when the earth was forming.

Again, science predicts that intelligent species will likely develop in MUCH different timeframes, so it's entirely plausible that an advanced extra-terrestrial civilization existed 4 billion years ago but has since vanished into extinction.

Look at the kingdom of minos on Crete(long since vanished and believed by many to be the 'real atlantis'). They were doing things in 3500 BC that were not replicated elsewhere in the world for over 5000 years(like using lighting rods, for instance).

I think you're just going to have to accept that people can LOGICALLY disagree with current scientific thinking on this matter and still stay wholly within the realm of accepted theory.

M theory is accepted theory, and so are all the string theories. They both predict a possibility of extra-dimensional life/creation, and wail as you will....you cannot disprove that theory.

Snipe.

I mean no insults, I'm just trying to point out the characteristics of your arguments, and where they fail your conclusions.

Science is, at its heart, NOT about the proof you are hyped about, it is about the process of testing assumptions and evidence.

Your M Theory, your extra-terrestrial biogenesis, your Intelligent Design, are all fine posits, but they are in no sense scientific in the same sense that Evolutionary Theory is.

M theory is mathemetically sound within its own context, but has not been tested per se. If tests can be designed, M theory may pass them with flying colors, or it may not. I don't know. But it hasn't happened yet.

In contrast, the Big Bang theory has been tested, and has, until recently, passed all of its tests. It remains to be seen if the current challenges to it are valid and conclusive, but rest assured that if they are, the Big Bang will be abandoned or modified appropriately by scientists everywhere.

ET origin of life has been a fringe theory for years, but is a weak theory. There is no evidence that life could NOT have originated here on Earth (given the simple conditions of goo, energy, and time), no evidence that it originated anywhere else, and even if such a thing were definitely proven it would simply move the question to another place and time, as I said above.

ID has its own problems, and the satire of the Flying Spaghetti Monster contains all the details one needs to put them into the light.

ID may be interesting, but it sure isn't science.

And thus my label of fantasy.

-dale

[Bill]

Snipe.

I mean no insults, I'm just trying to point out the characteristics of your arguments, and where they fail your conclusions.

Science is, at its heart, NOT about the proof you are hyped about, it is about the process of testing assumptions and evidence.

Your M Theory, your extra-terrestrial biogenesis, your Intelligent Design, are all fine posits, but they are in no sense scientific in the same sense that Evolutionary Theory is.

M theory is mathemetically sound within its own context, but has not been tested per se. If tests can be designed, M theory may pass them with flying colors, or it may not. I don't know. But it hasn't happened yet.

I already stated how to test M theory. Find some 4 dimensional dark matter or equivelant, and you scuttle the whole idea.

In contrast, the Big Bang theory has been tested, and has, until recently, passed all of its tests. It remains to be seen if the current challenges to it are valid and conclusive, but rest assured that if they are, the Big Bang will be abandoned or modified appropriately by scientists everywhere.

Unfortunately, Big Bang thoery under relativity collapses into infinite calculations as we approach the actual event(even einstien knew this decades ago).

It's one of the reason's we've kept looking for more answers/ideas/truths.

ANd then there's the matter of ole' cosmological constant(or some phantom particle) being needed to explain why the universe is what it is.

And of course there's the whole question as to WHY is the universe's expansion accelerating?

Big bang doesn't explain any of those things for us, which suggests it is an entirely incomplete theory, which it is.

ET origin of life has been a fringe theory for years, but is a weak theory.

There is simply no proof that it's a 'weak theory'. The laws of probabilities seem to favor it over all other possibilities IMO.

What is most likely: That life science BELIEVES DOES EXIST elsewhere came here and planted the first lifeform(s) here, or that a puddle of goo spontaneously created life from random reactions in a fluid(as in constantly changing due to atmospheric conditions) sludge?

There is no evidence that life could NOT have originated here on Earth (given the simple conditions of goo, energy, and time), no evidence that it originated anywhere else, and even if such a thing were definitely proven it would simply move the question to another place and time, as I said above.

The fact that no one can replicate the process despite our advanced command of chemistry is pretty compelling evidence that there's a very real possibility that theory is completely bonkers.

The statistical improbabilities are overwhelming, even IF it can be done.

ID has its own problems, and the satire of the Flying Spaghetti Monster contains all the details one needs to put them into the light.

ID may be interesting, but it sure isn't science.

And thus my label of fantasy.

-dale

So i guess man-engineered species of animals and plants are also fantasy?

There is direct, compelling, and irrefutable evidence that intelligent creation exists, because we can do it ourselves(just not entirely from scratch).

Further, if we DO manage to deliberately manipulate goo into life in a lab at some point(which we've been trying to do for decades), it will be ABSOLUTE PROOF that intelligent design is AT LEAST a co-owner of the law of the land wrt the formation of life from lifelessness.

And what about when we create the first machine with true AI and send it to another world to explore? If something happens to us, will it someday wonder if it suddenly sprung up from out of a pile of goo, or will it look favorably to the very real possibility that it was DELIBERATELY CREATED by an intelligent species that it cannot prove exists, and that it has never seen?

We're going to create sentient life in machines, it's merely a matter of time.
When we do(or when we create life from goo from scratch), i wonder what you'll say then....

I'll tell you what is fantasy. It's fantasy to think that it's a waste of time to seriously consider all possibilities, ESPECIALLY the ones we cannot disprove and that there is strong evidence already exists here.

Ie, intelligent design.

[Bill]

"Give it enough time and space, and anything can happen", is pretty good though.

Except that it's an obvious falsehood.

As one deliberately extreme example, I can give you 10,000,000 years, and you will still never be able to turn helium into hydrogen without additional ingredients.

Some things are just impossible.

[Confed999]

without additional ingredients.

"and space"...

[bandwagon]

And you get to roll those dice on every rock orbiting the estimated 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the known universe.

Yeah, and this is even more relevant if you consider the possibility of an exchange of material between rocks within a star system, and even between star systems. In fact polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons have been discovered in other star systems. I can’t think a creator would have wandered round the universe arbitrarily sprinkling some Homo sapiens and Candida albicans here and just some naphthalene there (unless he just stopped there for a smoke of course).

I don't think you're getting the probabilities involved here. It could certainly be that the probabilities are within 1 in 70 zillion. But we don't know any reactions yet that have this probability. So far all the reactions we know of, or that I am aware of, have probabilities of, oh, say 70 zillion to the 70 zillionnth power. In other words, impossible. Unless, of course, there is actually infinite space and time, in which case even the absurdly improbable becomes certain.

Where are these figures from. What reactions are you talking about.

If you accept goo, you accept at least the formation of basic molecules like water methane, ammonia, phosphate, CO2 and hence the possibility of amino acids, purines and possibly other monomers. That’s not hard to see. So you must be doubting spontaneous condensation or polymerisation. The chances of that happening is dependent on conditions, particularly concentration. If conditions were right in isolated rock cavities near hot volcanic vents for monomers to form they could from in high concentrations, and then polymerise as volcanic activity reduced and the water cooled down. I reckon the chances of that are higher than eradicating Hizbollah by bombing Lebanon (so better than 1 in 70 zillion). In fact, good enough to bet on.

[Confed999]

Yeah, and this is even more relevant if you consider the possibility of an exchange of material between rocks within a star system, and even between star systems. In fact polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons have been discovered in other star systems. I can’t think a creator would have wandered round the universe arbitrarily sprinkling some Homo sapiens and Candida albicans here and just some naphthalene there (unless he just stopped there for a smoke of course).

And that's assuming carbon based life is the only way life can exist.

I reckon the chances of that are higher than eradicating Hizbollah by bombing Lebanon (so better than 1 in 70 zillion).

That would actually depend on what type of bombs.

[Bill]

Yet some here want to dismiss intelligent creation despite the fact that it's all around us, and has been for millenia(cause we do it ourselves- though we're modifiers and enablers only at this stage).

And getting back to the theorm that a universe that is infinite in time will eventually produce all possible outcomes, that by neccesity would include intelligent creation.

Does anyone here really dispute that in say 200 years mankind could land on and introduce life on mars?

This is really not even a very imaginitve possibility, in fact, i believe it's a certainty.

So if we could do it on mars why could Centaurins not do it on earth? Of course they could. The only hard part for any advanced species should be getting there in a timely fashion. But an unmanned probe with tens of thousands of different yet inanimate/suspended types of simple life forms aboard we could send to Alpha centauri NOW(assuming we had some suitable planet to aim at, which i suspect we don't).

It'd just take milllions of years to get there. No big deal on a cosmic scale.

Think about it, we build landers in clean rooms to be TOTALLY free of earth based life so as not to introduce earth based life on mars or where ever else. Obviously someone at NASA thinks that inintentional contamination could take hold and cause a problem with false readings or some ecological problems on other worlds.

[Bill]

Yeah, and this is even more relevant if you consider the possibility of an exchange of material between rocks within a star system, and even between star systems..

Not really because the VAST majority of those 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 are surely utterly incapable of supporting any form of life(as we comprehend it), even if deliberately introducted.(like pluto or mercury or venus, etc, etc or gas giants like jupiter, or planets/moons with no atmosphere at all like our own moon).

Even still there is still a huge remaining number of systems whereupon life could form.

And the more i think about it we can forget an exchange of rocks as being the source of a life form or some neccesary amino acid or complex chemical, because utterly massive KE/heat releases will utterly obliterate any form of life known that could be carried on/in those rocks when they either impact a planets surface or burn up in the atmosphere.

But a probe with re-entry shielding and a braking system. Any of the mars landers would be ideal as a means of transporting these things(or imo much more likely complete simple life forms) you're talking about, even if our propulsion technology means it'd be really slow.