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Posted: Sat Nov 20, 2004 9:36 pm
by scottris
what are the chances of all those atoms coming together BY CHANCE
Firstly, the odds are irrelevant. It had all eternity to happen, and it only had to happen once.

Secondly, it's not as if separate elements came together all at once to form a human. It started with far simpler organisms. Multi-celled organisms were proceeded by single-celled organisms. Prior to that were likely even simpler organisms. Here, a quick Google search turns up this page, which explains it better than I http://mediatheek.thinkquest.nl/~ll125/en/life-2.htm

Posted: Sat Nov 20, 2004 9:55 pm
by scottris
so you have chosen to believe blindly in evolution even with all the errors and holes in it.
I believe nothing blindly. I have read and listened to theories and evidence of all sorts on all sides. From all the evidence I have gathered during the course of my life regarding the form and function of the universe I have developed my own theories and ideas. I find the theory of evolution to be entirely logical, based on solid evidence and solid reasoning. I have not found any evidence to contradict it.
first off I never said it was disproven stop skimming.
You said it was "seriously flawed" and "full or holes". "Without the so called missing link there can be no evolution"? Sounds like you believe the theory to be invalid. What am I missing?
second to say that it does not have errors in it you are lying to yourself. are there facts to support evolution? yes, but there is also a lack of facts that make me question it.
I question everything.
most evolutionists chastize the religous for believeing in something that you say is flawed. but you do EXACTLY the same thing. it has in effect become your religion.we will agree to disagree on this subject. I will not believe in evolution till the 100% prove it. just as most of you will not believe in creation till you see Christ riding in on a Great White Stallion
No. There will never by 100% proof of anything. To expect such proof on either side is foolish at best. I believe theories which I find to have sufficient evidence, until or unless new evidence contradicts them. I don't not-believe in creation because it isn't 100% proven. I don't believe it because I see no evidence that logically leads to that conclusion. I don't start with a theory, and then work to prove it. I start with no theory, and look for those theories which most directly address the available evidence.

Posted: Sat Nov 20, 2004 10:04 pm
by scottris
but you do EXACTLY the same thing. it has in effect become your religion
Religion starts with a theory. True science does not. Science starts with only questions, while religion starts with answers. They are not exactly the same.

Granted, it is possible to take more of an "answers before questions" approach to science too. People do. Some people do blindly believe scientific theories without ever questioning them. But that is not true science.

Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2004 1:16 am
by Sirian
CUDA wrote:Sirian you TOTALLY missed my point.
I responded to the point that you made, not the one that you may have intended. You forwarded an analogy that did not make your point effectively. How does that hurt your position? You end up distracting from what you intended to say.

Analogies sometimes fail. You may still have a valid point, but you have to back up and express it some other way.

CUDA wrote:what are the chances of all those atoms coming together BY CHANCE to form what is now know as a homosapien
We know of one universe. In that universe, homo sapiens exist. Using -only- empirical data, the odds would appear to be 100% chance that homo sapiens will appear.

Homo sapiens HAVE appeared. Therefore, something has occurred to bring them into existance. Either this has occurred as a conscious act of a creator, or it has not. Either this has occurred unconsciously, by random chance, or it has not. For either side to declare that the other side's vision "could not be true" due to Reason X is pure vanity.

There exists no evidence either way to DISPROVE either assertion. Where does that leave us? It leaves us with nothing more than our powers of reason to consider the possibilities. There are some possibilities that we can exclude. That's about as far as the "proof" can go. The rest depends on what you choose as your base assumptions, your postulates.

CUDA wrote:you cannot have evolution up to a point. then another evolution after that.
Why not? You offer no reasoning.

To me, that is precisely the kind of evolution that makes the most sense. Evolution is responsive.

How do you explain dolphins and whales? These are mammals who live in the sea.

Evolution offers an explanation. Fish moved on to the land for part of their life cycle, becoming amphibians, developing legs instead of fins. Amphibians moved all the way on to the land, becoming reptiles. Reptiles take to the air and become birds. Reptiles and/or birds evolve into mammals. Some mammals move back into the sea and develop fins to replace their legs, but they retain their lungs, develop blow holes on their backs for breathing at the surface, and develop blubber to insulate their body heat in the water rather than going back to scales and cold blooded life. Why stay warm blooded? Maybe that is better for a more powerful brain.

Clearly cetaceans are NOT fish. If there is any logical explanation, it would lead to the type of evolutionary journey I laid out.

So here's the big question, and to my mind, the one that science has failed to imagine. HOW can the chicken come before the egg? That is what evolution argues, that the chicken precedes the egg. Why would a fish develop a mutation (lungs) that can breathe air? If a fish developed lungs ALONGSIDE its gills, wouldn't we see vestigial gills in amphibians, reptiles, and so forth? We do see vestigial tails in human beings. Where are the "no longer useful" gills hiding? If gills mutated directly into lungs, instead of lungs growing alongside the gills, then amphibians would had to leave the sea and move on to the land. Yet what are the odds of them finding land before they starved? What are the odds of even being near enough to land to make it onto the land? And what are the odds of enough of these mutations making it to the land at the same time, so that they could procreate and spawn a new phylum?

I agree that there are holes in evolution, but the holes do not lie with the "what", but with the "why".

Why would any mutation prove useful? If instincts develop in reaction to successful behavior, such that some animals "figure out" a behavior that works for them and that behavior is repeated enough times to burn itself into the very genetic code, then instinct is not a function of imagination, but of memory. How does an animal mutation survive long enough to allow for that? Life cycles are too short. Evolutionary leaps must of necessity occur in very small windows of time. A mutation must occur, then must reproduce itself to survive. That's less than the life span of a single organism to bridge the gap between arrival of mutation and survival of mutation via procreation.

If mutation is a gradual process, one genome at a time, then there would have had to have been missing links galore. Otherwise, we're talking about radical mutations, which seem less and less probable, the more I look at them -- assuming that cause precedes effect.

But what if we don't assume that? Why does the cause have to precede the effect? Why does evolution have to start with a mutation? Why must evolution be a shot in the dark? Why must the success rate of mutations be extremely low, a scattershot approach where only the lucky and the few survived?

What if the effect precedes the cause? What if an organism has imagination? What if the organism has a known range of behaviors, of possibilities, but comes upon a new possibility and IMAGINES a way to make use of it?

Did random evolution of thumbs lead us to develop tools to use? Or did imagination of using tools lead to the evolution of our thumbs? The latter seems to make more sense to me. It may even bridge the gap between the two theories.

In fact, if the effect precedes the cause, then we are looking at BOTH. Both in one package. Creation and evolution. Imagination, vision, thought, an idea, a concept, a birth of something new, leading to the will, the desire, the urge to realize this new possibility, leading to a response from the body to reshape itself to meet the "request", to fill the imagined need. This process might take generations to fulfill, where the genes of one organism begin the process, but the vision is not completed in one leap. What if there is a form of consciousness to the species as a whole, which may have limited capacity to capture a signal, an idea, imagined by one of its members? Perhaps the call for mutation is not even coming from a single organism, but from a higher level of consciousness not contained within a single animal's brain?

What if cells have consciousness? Not "upper level" consciousness as humans show, nor even subconscious thinking that animals show, but an even lower level of consciousness that is sensitive to the will of the brain, of the higher consciousness.

This might mean that fish imagined walking on the sea, and so the urge to walk led some to turn their fins into feet: not instantly, but through trial and error, the body attempting to adapt what it already had to perform a new function, and sticking with it until it got the job done. Then the walking fish walked to the shore but could not exit the water, so imagined the ability to breathe air instead, so that they could explore on to the land.

This would be a cellular level process not unlike the human organism -- I speak not of people, but of humanity as a whole. If human beings are to humanity what single cells are to a human being... If humanity is to human beings what a single human being is to its cells...

What if there are layers of consciousness that operate on different scales, different time frames, different kinds of senses and perceptions? What if some basic forms of communications are possible between the layers?

Why couldn't the cells of a body capture some form or essence of an idea or concept and code this into the genes? We see an example in instincts. Instincts are specific responses and behaviors in specific situations, hard wired into the brain, hard wired into the DNA that offers the blueprint for growing a brain that will hold true to the instincts. Are these behaviors merely the survivors from among countless "shots in the dark"? Or are they survivors BECAUSE the organisms in question had some kind of vision of what they wanted to make possible, and the evolution continues until the breakthrough is made?


If imagination precedes evolution, then evolution is itself an act of creation -- but not creation brought down from on high, instead creation generated by the self, as life grows tired of its current limitations and seeks to expand its range, its possibilities. In reaching for something previously impossible, to make possible the impossible, a vision bridges the gap. A form of consciousness first creates an image, an idea of what else might be possible, and then the body responds, to reshape itself to match the vision.

This process might be slow or it might be quick. It might be both slow or quick, and yes, it may involve dead ends, if what was imagined turns out not to work as envisioned. Some niches may dead end, with no new possibilities for growth from those paths. Others may open more and more new possibilities, where several layers or instances of evolutionary leaps build upon previous gains, just as reptiles may have built upon the gains of amphibians, with the leap from fish straight to reptile simply too large a gap to cross in a single leap.


There is one catch to what I have offered here, however. If imagination is the essential ingredient, then the original creation must also have been an act of imagination. This would require that imagination, and thus consciousness, precedes evolution, and not the other way around. My concept only works if there was a Creator there in the first place. For if consciousness was formed up out of nothingness or by random chance, then whatever created the first consciousness must have repeated itself to create more, and therefore the consciousness itself must be superfluous to the process, and imagination would therefore also be superfluous.

It's one or the other. Cause precedes effect, or the effect is imagined and desired, leading to the genesis of a cause, which creates the physical effect.


Why would a creator use evolution as a process for its creations? To answer, let's compare to how we operate. Why do we debate? Why do we attend school? Why do we experiment? The Creator may be the ultimate believer in scientific method. Conceive a hypothesis, test it by evolving a form that will live out that imagining, see how well that works, revise the hypothesis, rinse and repeat until all the possibilities have been explored.

Sounds like a pretty cool game to me. 8)


- Sirian

Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2004 1:43 pm
by Hahnenkam
/me waits for Drakona's inevitably eloquent post, giving all of as an intellectual butt-kicking. :wink:

Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2004 2:42 pm
by Tyranny
Why should she have to? This wasn't intended to spark a flame war between either side on which belief is right and which one is wrong. It was meant to simply inform and perhaps receive comments on it. Instead it has become yet another religious debate.

I think Drakona and Lothar know better. They would recognize what this post was about and knowing them be truely interested in the discovery for what it actually is.

It got all blown out of proportion by Stryker and now CUDA has just added to it. Nobody need defend or preach their beliefs here. Thats not what this thread was for.

Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2004 2:58 pm
by Bet51987
Hahnenkam wrote:/me waits for Drakona's inevitably eloquent post, giving all of as an intellectual butt-kicking. :wink:
What for?, Sirians post is factual, meaningful and eloquently written. I'm showing it to my teacher tommorrow because he likes good work too. Why is it so hard for a Creationist to see what's in front of them instead of trying to disprove, twist, and bend everything to fit there god model.

I still want to know if the creationists on this board believe that africanus and neandertal man created and used stone tools to kill, prepare, and eat food.

Bettina

Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2004 3:45 pm
by Genghis
I'll agree that Sirian's post is eloquent, but be careful about calling it factual or meaningful. I don't think Sirian's purpose was to try to explain evolutionary processes. Instead it appears that he's just having fun speculating about an alternative theory of evolution, employing anthropomorphisms and the idea of genetic memory. I enjoyed reading it, too; it felt like an excerpt from a David Brin novel.

Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2004 6:11 pm
by Hahnenkam
bet51987 wrote:What for?, Sirians post is factual, meaningful and eloquently written.
Yes, it's an interesting read and creative thinking, but it's not factual. As far as I can tell, Sirian wasn't presenting it as such, but rather, proposing an alternative theory.
Tyranny wrote:Why should she have to? This wasn't intended to spark a flame war between either side on which belief is right and which one is wrong.
I didn't mean to imply that Drakona had to post. I'm not really sure where that came from. Anyway, I'm aware that this thread didn't start out as a debate. However, it has evolved into a debate/discussion. Bet posted something interesting, Stryker (perhaps being a bit oversensitive about it) made his opinions known, and here we are. Don't fight it . . . roll with it 8)

I don't post very often on the board, but I do read it, and I am often humbled by what Drakona (and Lothar) have to say. I don't always agree, but it always makes me think a little bit harder about my own position. Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought she might have something interesting to add, and cause us all to stop and ponder our position on the issue.

And Bet, as for Creationists twisting and bending things to fit their model: scientists have been known to do the same thing . . . quite frequently actually. That's why I am required to take an ethics course as part of my graduate program. There have been so many incidents of scientists/grad students falsifying data or ignoring data that don't fit their theory, that ethics training is now required of any student in a federally funded program. It's sad that some scientists need to be taught what is ethical . . . but that's a topic for another thread.

Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2004 4:44 pm
by Bet51987
Hahnenkam wrote: And Bet, as for Creationists twisting and bending things to fit their model: scientists have been known to do the same thing . . . quite frequently actually. That's why I am required to take an ethics course as part of my graduate program. There have been so many incidents of scientists/grad students falsifying data or ignoring data that don't fit their theory, that ethics training is now required of any student in a federally funded program. It's sad that some scientists need to be taught what is ethical . . . but that's a topic for another thread.
I know what you mean, and I was wrong about that. Scientists today who do that are quickly brought down by their peers. Take for example "Cold Fusion", after those two guys won an award, they were shot down as having flawed data by other scientists. They self govern themselves pretty good, and Iâ??ll admit, Creationists do too to protect what they believe to be the truth.

Evolution is one giant puzzle that has millions of pieces. Itâ??s a big puzzle but the difference between evolutionists and creationists, is that we build our puzzle out of actual pieces and not too much interpretation is needed. What I mean by that is when some of our pieces don't fit, we move them to other areas of the puzzle where we think they should be with the purpose of trying to link them to some other piece.

Eventually, when other pieces are found they will add to form a connection. It's happening every day, even right now as we type, and in time, the puzzle will be complete and we will see our path thru time from that one celled organism to our present day human. I really love this stuff a lot and coupling it with cosmology, I tend to make a pretty big puzzle. I have lots of books which are crowding out my dads boring books like â??The Effective Executiveâ?

Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2004 6:44 pm
by Hahnenkam
No worries Bet :)
As for the avatar, I hope I'm not misunderstood for an evolution-nazi (NO CREATION FOR YOU!! :P ). I will listen to any reasonable argument. I mostly like the fish-with-feet thing for the humor aspect.

I went to an interesting talk last week, by author David Dobbs. He has what looks to be an interesting book coming out in January, and I recommend it to anyone who has any interest in this thread and its subject (well, not the originally intended subject, but how scientists come up with their ideas and try to support them . . . subjectively and objectively). The title is "Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral." It centers around the argument in the (late?) 1800's as to the origins of coral reefs.

Mr. Dobbs is a writer, not a scientist, and has an interesting perspective on the scientific process and some of the personalities involved. He seemed well-informed, and researched his topic extensively (as evident in the question/answer session following his talk). Good storyteller too.

scienc is the art of learning how things function

Posted: Wed Dec 15, 2004 5:17 pm
by Ain't Skeird
Ever since our brains EVOLVED above the level of instinct, we have been asking abstract questons{what the hell is that?/whats going on here?/why?}Any phenomena that couldnt be explained was usually attributed to supernatural powers,{read:religion} never ignorance,which is a natural step in social evolution. Thankfully, we have moved beyond sacrificing to the sun,although in my personal view, todays socialized religions are only slightly less ritualistic.Progress in Science is due to "My research seems to indicate this,tear it down if you can" I'm much more comfortable with this approach than "Believe this or burn forever,to question doctrine is blasphemy."I submit:to question, is fundamental to our nature.
Chemistry began as alchemy, astronomy, from astrology
{although today there are "practicing" astrologers
who exibit an astounding collective inability to learn anything since the 17th century.}AS we learn, our questons are answered.As to the question of creation/evolution, I recommend a recent national geographic article "Was Darwin wrong?"
Ask your own questons, seek your own truths.If they bring you comfort,i'm happy for you. I personally exist in a comfortable place where nothing in religion or science conflict with the validity of the other,but thats just MY interpretation. "The beginning of wisdom is, I DON'T KNOW"
Works for me. :?

Posted: Wed Dec 15, 2004 6:07 pm
by Tyranny
ImageImage

Posted: Wed Dec 15, 2004 6:16 pm
by Tyranny
EDIT: Stupid DBB hangups forced a double post. roar!

Posted: Sun Dec 19, 2004 4:21 pm
by Shoku
Back to the skeleton thing:

All conclusions, while based on factual findings, are the result of two things: the evidence, and the bias of the investigator. Conclusions that are extrapolated from limited evidence, should be viewed with skepticism; real science should encourage skepticism.

I remember in biology class the day the professor had brought in 6 skulls for the class to examine. He wanted each skull classified as part of an in-class quiz. When done, he went through each of the papers and drew a chart on the board for each skull. The variety of classifications were minor, considering the number of students in class. But the most amazing thing was this: all the skulls were modern gorillas, and not one student had been correct. The variety even within a species is amazing. The point was this: Classification of any species is not a simple matter, especially when all you have are bones - even complete skulls. Findings, which may be rather unpretentious, can gain much more attention and prestige for the discoverer if they are labeled unique, or a â??missingâ?