@TheWiseMan: I'm just going take extract your most coherent points this time. I read your post all the way through, but sometimes you don't quite make your argument clear. Feel free to elaborate on the points I do not discuss. (I am secretly hoping you actually accept evolution and are playing at being ignorant.)

You seem to be hinting at the "DNA as a language" rebuttal. See this and this.

Here, you have *not* fallen into the common trap of calling evolution (as a whole) random, for which I applaud you. But these random mutations weren't just kept or discarded willy nilly. Natural selection and other mechanisms "guided" these traits by favoring organisms that were better adapted to their environment. See this as well.

Everything is made of atoms. Every bit of *everything* has to do with atoms "in some way or another". Why single out biology? Why aren't you out decrying the horrible uncertainties in any other scientific field?

Evolution does not speak to the origin of life ("abiogenesis"). How life arose is interesting, but irrelevant. See this and this.

See the second paragraph under the heading "Common Misconceptions about Evolution".

No, we can't. But if a new theory wants come along and replace evolution, it has to explain everything that evolution explains, or else it doesn't fit the data as well as evolution does. We are merely pointing out that evolution fits the data *extremely well* and therefore, the chances of it being fundamentally wrong are very small.

This has absolutely nothing to do with evolution. But, to answer your question: nothing. This may help.

See this and this.

Enjoy!

Damn lol I was hoping nobody else was working up a long post.

As Hackle mentioned DNA is not a perfect analogue of computer code, i was using it to illustrate that the input does not have to "understand" the output. DNA doesnt have to "understand" colour, much like a computer program doesnt "understand" any of its own makeup either.

But yes, there are plenty of non-viable mutations, something like 90%ish of pregnancies are terminated within the first few days by the body because of this. Others give you a reduced lifespan or make you susceptible to diseases or physical damage to your body, others cause malformations which could be lethal depending on where they happen.



Eh? What does this have to do with anything? You stated that complex structures needed design, i gave the example of a crystal as a complex structure which did not.


That was more then a joke then anything. And if someone could be bothered doing the maths theyd find that shakespears entire works would appear after a finite timespan.
Evolution isnt random like the type writer, the mutations are, but natural selection is not, if natural selection forces intelligence, thats where it'll end up.

Our good friend shakespeare summed this one up.

The fool thinks himself to be wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.

Err? How would you photograph a particle with no spatial dimensions travelling at speeds upto near c.


But we know how they work and thats what counts.

Life started in the water, out of the water was too dangerous as ultraviolet light would have broken down any little bacterium who got washed ashore. The atmosphere needed to be oxygenated first, (firstly to allow life to breathe something, secondly to allow Ozone to form to block UV light). Life in the water was not affected by the UV as water does not allow it to pass through, much like Ozone.



Why? Evolution is merely a self-perpetuating mechanism, those that evolve stick around to evolve in the future, those that cant hack it - die.

No it isnt. The DNA does not need to understand whats going on, just like the 1's and 0's do not understand that they are making a monitor draw things on your screen.

As hackle said (and i said he said above), its not a computing language. My comparison between the two was for a different reason.


For their intents and purposes, yes. They did not know better and there wasnt anything immediately obvious to suggest otherwise.

Yes... so by definition of using the facts to gain knowledge you cant get any better then science. Unless you get a damn good guess

You cant assume it wont. The facts do not suggest any other possible outcome though. Creationism/ID go against what the facts say already so they are ruled out. If anything changes, its not going to them if thats what you were hoping.

Nothing. By pure definition:
The Universe is defined as the summation of all particles and energy that exist and the space-time in which all events occur.




Did you read what i posted? Its so unlikely to happen, itd be insanely weird if it happened even once already.


You havent been reading what ive posted. Nylon eating bacteria eat nylon, nylon is a synthetic material, before it was created, nylon had never existed anywhere on earth. Therefore this species did not exist as it had nothing to eat.

Same goes for my radiotrophic fungi, there were no nuclear reactors to feed them before the discovery of nuclear energy.


Nope, this also has no bearing on our argument.

The shih tzu is a breed of dog, lol


What are you going on about dude?


Gravity?

lol, youve still accomplished nothing other then highlight your ignorance, every single thing youve posted has been shot down at least once. All your doing is taking potshots. The worst part is none of them are hitting

I am stopping answering to TheWiseMan, he does not think about replies, he just grinds them to fit his belief. He probably did not even watch the video that was posted. I will just link back to replies that were already given. (and perhaps outside links, perhaps you should do the same)
It is laughable how he thinks the science on which every is based device, and which he uses in his life is false.

@ TheWiseMan: I'm having a hard time believing that you actually don't believe in evolution, and an even harder time believing that you are actually reading what people post. I'd like to be nice and say that you are simply not reading the other posts, as well as the various links, because the other explanation is that you don't comprehend anything related to science. You are simply stating the same thing over and over again in a weird semi-poetic manner, and most of your arguments don't hold up.

For example: We still haven't even seen a electron "INDIVIDUAL PHOTOGRAPH"
Well, no shit. The resolution of any imaging technology is limited by the beam that is used, and since an electron is the smallest thing we know how to manipulate, we can't take a picture of anything smaller. We have seen images of electron clouds, however. Where's your photograph of God?

Edit: Well Jasper, looks like we had the same thought at the same time.

@hackle: I read many of the links which you posted on here. First, if you can understand that stuff beyond surface-level, you must be a biologist. I consider myself to be very intelligent and well-educated and I had a hard time getting through that! Nevertheless, it was a good read and thanks for posting.

Honest question: Random gene variation doesn't seem to be enough to create the changes that apparently have occurred. I understand natural selection, but all it really means is that unsuccessful mutations die off. There seems to me like there should be some kind of force at play that drives the changes that would end up being beneficial. Thoughts?

That is the way most moderate believers see evolution when they know what evolution means: Species change but they are following a master plan.
Well, I disagree with you. I'm not biologist and I could be totally wrong, but I think that:

1. Most mutations die in the same specimen that they develop because they are inviable.
2. Natural selection not only gets rid of unsuccessful mutations, but also it favours specimens with beneficial mutations so it handles a double task.
3. Evolution happens through millions of years, so it's difficult to imagine for us that live less than 100 years and we are only intelligent enough to write something since a few thousands years. In the history of earth, a thousand years is not even a day for us.

I'm only half biologist, but I think it means a bit more than the unsuccessful dying off. Those changes that are beneficial succeed and multiply - look at antibiotic resistant bacteria, for example. There are very few bacteria that are not resistant to some sort of antibiotic anymore, and they are a good example of microevolution on a very short time scale. I don't think there is any force driving those bacteria to develop resistance other than the fact that the ones that don't mutate die, and the ones that do live on and prosper.

I don't see that there needs to be some sort of driving force, other than the instinct to reproduce.

I am no biologist by any stretch of the imagination, merely a college student with a surpassing interest in science. :-) Much of what I know I learned from Talk.Origins. Reading all their FAQs and articles really aided my, and I suspect a great many others, understanding of evolutionary processes.

here is an interesting (and scary) fact on bacteria while we're on the subject :
the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees dates back approx. 300.000 human generations or approx. 5 million years.
bacteria do 300.000 generations in 25 years.

(source : Genome by Matt Ridley)

OK, I realize natural selection causes the beneficial mutations to prosper once they occur. My point is that it has nothing to do with whether they occur. The change from fish to land animal is a HUGE change. Even millions of years doesn't seem like long enough for all those changes to occur randomly. BTW, I'm not really referring to an outside force or divine force. I'm just saying that there seems to be something missing, IMO. It seems plausible to me that environmental stress could cause mutations to occur a certain way. Why would fish who are happy and healthy develop feet? I'm not sure they would -- not in a million or a billion or a bazillion years. OTOH, what about fish that aren't happy and healthy? Their environment changes and something about the stress causes the body to change, which in turn affects the genes. To me, there has to be some kind of factor like that. Why would bacteria randomly develop resistance to antibiotics? One of them, maybe. But every single antibiotic we throw at it? There is no possible way that you can convince me that's random. If we think of it in terms of environmental stress, then it makes perfect sense. You introduce an antibiotic into a bunch of bacteria. Most die, but the ones that don't change. They have to change, or they will die. Their descendants inherit the changes, etc. At least, that seems plausible to me.

You have it backwards. Bodily changes and environmental stresses do not effect genes. If I cut off your left arm, your future children would still be born with both arms intact. Random mutations in the genes cause the body to change. A vast majority of these changes are bad, which in turn leads to the early death/inability to reproduce of that animal, so most bad changes don't last long.

If, by random mutation, a *good* change occurs, then that animal is *more* likely to reproduce and pass on the gene for that change because it passes through the metaphorical "filter" of the environment. The environment is not "pushing" or "stressing" organisms to evolve, it merely seems that way because the more adapted animals are the ones that thrive.

Have I answered your question?

Take a old floppy disk
WAVE A MAGNET OVER IT

that should randomize the bits
just as a new muation in DNA

does it work

NO
It fails


So you agree that even science is just guessing what an atom looks like


yet you have utmost faith in science

IT it only as good as the work that has been done before today

HAVE THEY AN ABSOLUTE TRUTH?
We know roughly how it works


ROUGH SCIENCE



The 1 and 0's work on a system
DOes Excel work on a APLLE II E
Does photoshop work on windows 3.0
BOTH ARE INFO with ALGORYTHMS

@TheWiseMan: What you don't seem to understand is that evolution *actually is* rocket science. The inanity of your arguments is surpassed only by your own ignorance. I'd be surprised if anyone bothers answering you now.

you seem to be assumeing that they occur one after the oher, they would be occuring simultaneusly in different geographical locations, that are then shared when groups meet up.
say for example a species of slug live on two sides ofa mountain, one side of the mountain is very cold, any slugs that cannot survive this cold die,
on the other side of the mountain only one type of poisonous plant is available to eat, any slug that cannot stomach this poison will also die, eventually the first side will be able to survive the cold and the other will have no problem eating the poisonous plant, after a few million years, the slug population on each side grows enough that they meet, they will interbreed creating new slugs that can eat poisonous plants AND are resistant to cold.

even withone one group there will still be non-crucial mutations, one group may be mostly quite long slugs, due to a dominant gene, in the same way that asian people dont have blond hair.

Let's ignore TheWiseMan since its clear that he's a troll.

I know that evolution cannot be forced in a way but for example, how is it that an organ that is not used gets atrophied and that change eventually passes to its descendants? Couldn't it be a mechanism similar in the creation of new organs? Something like a provoked error in the DNA replication just to promote the development of some organ. I know about the experiment with rats that had cut their tails but I mean more subtle changes provoked by the body when it "feels" that this change may be good in the actual situation.

Pretty much. You confirmed what I suspected was the going theory. I'm suggesting that the environment/gene relationship may be a two-way street, rather than one-way. I could be way off base, but IMO the evidence suggests to me that something is at work that hasn't been fully explained. We don't actually have clear evidence that the environment doesn't affect genetic make-up, do we? If so, then I'll abandon my theory with no apologies. It seems like we assume that environment has no affect on genes, and haven't really explored it with the idea that it might cause changes. Who knows?

Such things do not occur. Genetic mutations are purely random, which is why evolution takes as long as it does.

I don't quite understand where you're headed with the organ thing. Could you elaborate just a bit?

@hairyPalms: Thanks for bringing that up. I didn't think about it working like that, but it makes sense. I still don't think it's an adequate explanation.

@getaceres: Yeah. I'm thinking about something along those lines.

yes but if you did it a thousand times a day for 2 billion years, one of those floppy discs would have something intelligble on it



No, Photos of atoms have been taken many times by scientists, atoms were predicted long before they were discovered, electrons neutrons and protons are what havent been photographed, but there is plenty of evidence that they are what make up atoms (which HAVE been photographed just so u dont miss it).

this is a non-statement, everything is only as good as whats thats been done before.

noone has an absolute truth, no such thing exists nor do they claim to have an absolute truth, what they do have isnt
"we know roughly how it works" what we have is "we have observed that it works, now we are analyzing the evidence for the mechanisms that make it work"

a very poor analogy but ill work with it,
no photoshop doesnt work on windows 3.0, but thats irrelevent, if photoshop only works on windows xp but absolutely everyone has windows 3.0 then photoshop will die out because its useless to everyone.

@thewiseman: rewording the same arguement another time wont get another respnse out of me.