Denial of Evolution VI.

[Jan Ardena]

jan,
how do you explain an intelligence without substance?

how can you rationalize a creator in regards to "where life came from"?

Intelligence can be deduced without substance by a specific signature in it's effects. The obvious one would be Mount Rushmore versus Ben Nevis.

I'm not sure if i comprehen the second question properly, but I'll give it a shot.
It all depends on where you think life came from. It would be odd to postulate that life was created without a reason. Our experience, and understanding of life's coming into being is that it springs from other life who in turn spring from life. So life comes from life, we have no other experience or model to go off. I see nothing wrong with the assumption that a creator that creates life, has the capacity of a greater life than it's creation.

jan.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

I see nothing wrong with the assumption that a creator that creates life, has the capacity of a greater life than it's creation.

But the creator is clearly alive too. So this doesn't answer the question at all. At some point you supernaturalists have to stop ducking the question and tell us where the first life came from.

Or you can just wait. Since this is heralded as the Century of Biology (as the last was the Century of Physics and the 19th was the Century of Chemistry), we might very well crack the secret of abiogenesis within the lifetime of this forum's younger members. (Not me at 69, and I have no idea how young you are.) They've been making incremental progress at the boundaries of the problem since my high school days.

The universe was once a point of balanced and undifferentiated matter and energy--a spatially and temporally local reversal of entropy, a temporary increase in organization, as permitted by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And before that it didn't exist at all.

Prior to that instant there was no life because there was no anything--not even a space-time continuum, not even the laws of nature, perhaps not even 1+1=2, if today's macrocosmologists are on the right track. Then at some future instant life existed, rather obviously with no pre-existing lifeforms around to have "created" it.

Please be so kind as to explain how that happened, without resorting to the Fallacy of Recursion: God (or the Great Spirit, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or whatever "creator" you're postulating) exists, therefore he is part of the universe, and since he created the universe, this means that he must have created himself.

It's far more reasonable (although unfortunately not as whimsical and entertaining so it doesn't appeal to supernaturalists) to suspect that the template for creating life is one of the more elusive Laws of Nature that we simply haven't discovered yet. If we ever develop the ability to discover and explore life-bearing planets in other solar systems, the comparison of the biology of their lifeforms to ours will surely be an enormous aid in this quest.

Perhaps the Century of Biology will be followed by the Century of Space Exploration.

 

[Rav]

We've been down this road before Jan, more than once. In fact in one discussion myself and others expended considerable effort providing you with a wealth of relatively easy to digest resources that would have enhanced your appreciation of the subject to the point where you could have actually engaged in productive discussion, but you just don't play ball. All you do is come back later and complain that no-one has really helped you to understand anything because no-one has condensed the wealth of evidence that demonstrates the truth of evolution into a single short forum post for you.

In other words, nothing has changed in the 2 or so years since I said the following:

The fact is, Jan, that you're too lazy and/or biased to do any serious learning. So instead of developing your knowledge to the point where you could actually engage in a meaningful and useful dialogue about the subject matter, you try to 'logic' it all out based on nothing more than the opinions of others. Your position on evolution then is one of ignorance, and no matter how hard you try to draw attention away from that fact with pages full of responses that become increasingly emotional, repetitive and point-missing, it remains as clear as day.

 

[Aqueous Id]

You know what I mean by ''macroevolution'' don't you?

jan.

Provided you agree that macroevolution is evolution, then I would put the same question to you as before. If you disagree, it would help to elaborate, to the extent you were seeking simple terms, and say whether the explanation meets those terms. Assuming you agreed that it did, then we'd be left with the question I asked before, which is, why shouldn't anyone accept it?

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

We've been down this road before Jan, more than once. In fact in one discussion myself and others expended considerable effort providing you with a wealth of relatively easy to digest resources that would have enhanced your appreciation of the subject to the point were you could have actually engaged in productive discussion, but you just don't play ball. All you do is come back later and complain that no-one has really helped you to understand anything because no-one has condensed the wealth of evidence that demonstrates the truth of evolution into a single short forum post for you. . . . In other words, nothing has changed in the 2 or so years since I said the following . . . .

To ignore rebuttals to one's own argument, then to lie low hoping that they will be forgotten, and then to pop up at a later time to repeat the same premise, hoping for a new set of members to mislead (particularly younger members who may regard this website as a source of scientific and other academic information), is a classic case of intellectual dishonesty. On an internet discussion board it qualifies as trolling:

To halt, derail, confuse, inflame, or in other ways to block the forward progress of a discussion, in order to avoid having one's own opinion discredited without having to do the hard (or in many cases impossible) work of finding and presenting a counterargument to the rebuttal.​

This is a violation of the SciForums rules, which can result in temporary or permanent banning, although we don't always enforce it.

However, if a member complains we will be happy to consider enforcement. It's not appropriate for a Moderator to initiate the process except in the most egregious instances.

 

[billvon]

So if I call your wife pig or a dog, you would more commend me on my correct biological cslassification than see it for the intended insult it would be?

If someone called your daughter a cunt, would you commend her on her anatomical correctness or see it as an insult?

Having something be insulting is not the opposite of having it be technically accurate.

I accept what is known as ''microevolution''. I have nothing to gain from not accepting what is known as ''macroevolution'',

Hmm. Do you accept microerosion (i.e. gullies) but not macroerosion (i.e. the Grand Canyon?) Do you accept microlift (i.e. hummingbird flight) but not macrolift (i.e. a 747 flying?) Do you accept microgrowth (i.e. a child getting an inch taller) but not macrogrowth (an infant growing into an adult?)

BTW most people have nothing personally to gain from understanding science beyond the understanding itself. If you have a personal stake in not understanding it, then it will always be harder to understand it.

 

[Walter L. Wagner]

Ah, I agree in that case. In situ materials are going to be cheaper once we have the ability to process them.



Well, although the elements came from supernovas, the boulders didn't come from exploding stars. They came from a bunch of planetesimals that combined and collided during early formation of the Solar System. Thus you'd expect gold percentages roughly equivalent to universal distributions of elements once you take away the lighter elements that didn't "stick around." Which means that you'd see gold concentrations in parts per billion; on an asteroid that's mostly silicates, for example, gold percentage would be around .000001%.

There's a special case where a planet forms quickly during planetary formation and then cools evenly; in that case you can get "layering" of compounds based on molecular density. If that planet were then to be shattered into a lot of asteroids you might then see boulders that had high concentrations of one element. However that's not how our asteroid belt was formed.

Actually, there is good evidence that our asteroid belt contains shattered remnants of stratified planets/planetissimals. Earth itself, during its first Billion years, suffered through two major episodes of heavy bombardment from those remnants that strayed out of the asteroid belt orbit, and we see the results as well on the heavy cratering of the moon. The Fe/Ni meteorites (about 10%) are the result of stratification when in the molten state (i.e. the core of the planet/planetissimal), with the heavy metals sinking to the interior, and the lighter oxides floating to the top. Thus we have rocky meteorites at about 90%; the same relative abundance of Earth's mantle to Earth's Fe/Ni core. And carbonaceous chondrites would be remnants of lighter planetissimals that did not stratify from the liquid state, but rather were formed from 'snow flakes' of hot grains that clumped together under gravity. The only real question is whether elements such as gold or uranium would sink to the very interior, or be alloyed within the Fe/Ni. The very little bit left of that on Earth's surface, in its uppermost layer (the inhabited layer), does separate out slightly (veins of gold, ore-bodies of uranium), and we might expect that if it separated in the interior of planetissimals, there might indeed be rare boulders of gold amongst the billions of boulders of Fe/Ni floating about in our solar system, left over from those earliest collisions of planetissimals.

 

[billvon]

Actually, there is good evidence that our asteroid belt contains shattered remnants of stratified planets/planetissimals.

Planetesimals - agreed. However, you'd need a relatively large planet that had time to cool without turbulence in a liquid core and then stratify before it got blown apart, and it looks like that didn't happen.

Take the Earth for example. If you blew the Earth to bits right now you wouldn't get a layer of gold. You'd get a fairly well mixed liquid iron core that would cool into blobs that look a lot like nickel-iron asteroids. The Earth is well mixed because radioactive materials have kept the core molten and mixed; stratification has only occurred to a very small degree in the upper layers of the planet.

Now, if you hypothesized a large planetesimal that had a core that cooled rapidly (rapidly enough that it had time between the condensation of the accretion disk and the LHB to solidify) then you might see that sort of stratification. But I have not seen any evidence of that.

The very little bit left of that on Earth's surface, in its uppermost layer (the inhabited layer), does separate out slightly (veins of gold, ore-bodies of uranium),

Agreed, and you might well see "veins" of similar materials in asteroids. But again, that's more akin to Earth mining than coming across solid gold million ton asteroids.

 

[billvon]

Intelligence can be deduced without substance by a specific signature in it's effects. The obvious one would be Mount Rushmore versus Ben Nevis.

Or the Giant's Causeway in Ireland. Millions of hexagonal tiles paving a relatively flat road into the sea. That's got to be formed by intelligence. Right?

 

[Jan Ardena]

Fraggle Rocker,,

But the creator is clearly alive too.

If the creator is what is regarded as ''God'', then the terms ''life'' or ''alive'' do not apply to Him.
He creates life.

So this doesn't answer the question at all. At some point you supernaturalists have to stop ducking the question and tell us where the first life came from.

At some point you materialists must understand what is meant by ''God'' as The Supreme Cause of all causes the regardless of belief status.
I can tell you where the first life came from according to scripture, but if you ask for evidence I have to simply decline as I wasn't there.

Or you can just wait. Since this is heralded as the Century of Biology (as the last was the Century of Physics and the 19th was the Century of Chemistry), we might very well crack the secret of abiogenesis within the lifetime of this forum's younger members. (Not me at 69, and I have no idea how young you are.) They've been making incremental progress at the boundaries of the problem since my high school days.

Good luck to them.

The universe was once a point of balanced and undifferentiated matter and energy--a spatially and temporally local reversal of entropy, a temporary increase in organization, as permitted by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And before that it didn't exist at all.

Really?

Prior to that instant there was no life because there was no anything--not even a space-time continuum, not even the laws of nature, perhaps not even 1+1=2, if today's macrocosmologists are on the right track. Then at some future instant life existed, rather obviously with no pre-existing lifeforms around to have "created" it.

The definiition of life is as follows:

(1) A distinctive characteristic of a living organism from dead organism or non-living thing, as specifically distinguished by the capacity to grow, metabolize, respond (to stimuli), adapt, and reproduce

So I'm in agreement with you before the creation of the universe life could not have existed in the universe, for obvious reasons.n
The definition of life here, is consistent with the vedic understanding of life.

Knuckle-draggers are so cool!

Please be so kind as to explain how that happened, without resorting to the Fallacy of Recursion: God (or the Great Spirit, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or whatever "creator" you're postulating) exists, therefore he is part of the universe, and since he created the universe, this means that he must have created himself.

I don't know, and it doesn't matter. ALL we know is, we are are product of life whose symptom is consciousness, awarness, intelligence, and matter, which is by all accounts,dead. Two completely different states. I don't know about you, but I cannot imagine no being in some kind of mental state, so I hayve absolutely no idea of non-existence, and neither do you.

It's far more reasonable (although unfortunately not as whimsical and entertaining so it doesn't appeal to supernaturalists) to suspect that the template for creating life is one of the more elusive Laws of Nature that we simply haven't discovered yet. If we ever develop the ability to discover and explore life-bearing planets in other solar systems, the comparison of the biology of their lifeforms to ours will surely be an enormous aid in this quest.

Far more reasonable? Why?

Perhaps the Century of Biology will be followed by the Century of Space Exploration.

Whoopi-doo!

jan.

 

[Jan Ardena]

Provided you agree that macroevolution is evolution, then I would put the same question to you as before. If you disagree, it would help to elaborate, to the extent you were seeking simple terms, and say whether the explanation meets those terms. Assuming you agreed that it did, then we'd be left with the question I asked before, which is, why shouldn't anyone accept itI?

I'm not going to argue with you. I gave you a definition, so feel free to participate or not.

jan.

 

[Jan Ardena]

To ignore rebuttals to one's own argument, then to lie low hoping that they will be forgotten, and then to pop up at a later time to repeat the same premise, hoping for a new set of members to mislead (particularly younger members who may regard this website as a source of scientific and other academic information), is a classic case of intellectual dishonesty. On an internet discussion board it qualifies as trolling:

To halt, derail, confuse, inflame, or in other ways to block the forward progress of a discussion, in order to avoid having one's own opinion discredited without having to do the hard (or in many cases impossible) work of finding and presenting a counterargument to the rebuttal.​

This is a violation of the SciForums rules, which can result in temporary or permanent banning, although we don't always enforce it.

However, if a member complains we will be happy to consider enforcement. It's not appropriate for a Moderator to initiate the process except in the most egregious instances.

Fraggs, I don't know if you've noticed, but there is no rebuttal in Rav's response. He has never rebutted my argument because I've alway's admitted my ignorance of the subject, and sought to get satifactory answers to my question (not much different than my present presence here). Because one is ignorant of the technical details of a subject, is not a pre-cursor to accepting whatever is told to them on blind faith. If you and others feel justified in calling people degrogatory names, and having nerve to declare people in human because they don't agree with you, then what you defend must be something that is so obvious that every human once exposed to it, shouldn't be able to deny it.

jan.

 

[iceaura]

(1) A distinctive characteristic of a living organism from dead organism or non-living thing, as specifically distinguished by the capacity to grow, metabolize, respond (to stimuli), adapt, and reproduce

So thunderstorm cells are alive, and old mules are not?

Give it up - the bullshit definitions, the waste of time questions, the repetitions of long dismissed irrelevancies, the whole schtick. Running honest and well meaning people around in circles with rhetorical bs, refusing to follow repeated, essentially simple, well illustrated and completely reasonable theories about everyday stuff, does not call those theories into question. It calls your integrity into question.

There is no reason that Darwinian evolution could not produce living beings from nonliving matter - whether that's what happened, we don't know (yet), but it's certainly possible. It's the best supported hypothesis, currently - fits the timing, what record we have, and the results visible now. If you think it's wrong, it's up to you to provide argument against it.

 

[quinnsong]

Fraggs, I don't know if you've noticed, but there is no rebuttal in Rav's response. He has never rebutted my argument because I've alway's admitted my ignorance of the subject, and sought to get satifactory answers to my question (not much different than my present presence here). Because one is ignorant of the technical details of a subject, is not a pre-cursor to accepting whatever is told to them on blind faith. If you and others feel justified in calling people degrogatory names, and having nerve to declare people in human because they don't agree with you, then what you defend must be something that is so obvious that every human once exposed to it, shouldn't be able to deny it.

jan.

If one is ignorant of the technical details of what is being argued here, then it behooves them to take a Biology class. Do your research and then argue from a position that is not fraught with "well I am not going to take it on blind faith". Which is rather funny because your belief is based on nothing but Blind Faith.

 

[Rav]

Fraggs, I don't know if you've noticed, but there is no rebuttal in Rav's response.

You have so little intellectual integrity that I simply don't wish to converse with you at length. And I know that pretty much everyone here is going to understand that.

 

[Robittybob1]

Or the Giant's Causeway in Ireland. Millions of hexagonal tiles paving a relatively flat road into the sea. That's got to be formed by intelligence. Right?

Right - Produced by the amazing Laws of Nature; all in all very intelligent.

 

[Jan Ardena]

So thunderstorm cells are alive, and old mules are not?

Give it up - the bullshit definitions.......

Biology online

jan.

 

[spidergoat]

Intelligence can be deduced without substance by a specific signature in it's effects..

That is true, but life doesn't have any sign of being created by intelligence (apart from being influenced indirectly by it's own intelligence). Intelligence can make leaps of intuition, a VW bug can suddenly gain turbo power from one model year to the next. An actual bug can't redesign itself overnight. Evolution can only proceed by gradual steps, with each step being successful in it's own right.

 

[Aqueous Id]

I'm not going to argue with you. I gave you a definition, so feel free to participate or not. jan.

My definition: Macroevolution is evolution. Your defintion: Macroevolution is evolution (the wiki article). No argument there. That leads participation back to:

Can you put it into simple terms?

(Yes:
• A species is a population of organisms that interbreeds and has fertile offspring.
• Living organisms have descended with modifications from species that lived before them.
• Natural selection explains how this evolution has happened:

— More organisms are produced than can survive because of limited resources.
— Organisms struggle for the necessities of life; there is competition for resources.
— Individuals within a population vary in their traits; some of these traits are heritable -- passed on to offspring.
— Some variants are better adapted to survive and reproduce under local conditions than others.
— Better-adapted individuals (the "fit enough") are more likely to survive and reproduce, thereby passing on copies of their

genes to the next generation.​

— Species whose individuals are best adapted survive; others become extinct)
​

Can it be explained in those terms?

(Yes, as above)

f not, why should we accept it?

(That's been cleared up, leaving only the question: why shouldn't anyone accept it?)

 

[spidergoat]

Let's not fool ourselves, even if religious people understood evolution and abiogenesis, they would still believe god was behind it, because they want to.