Probability of evolution

Originally posted by Jenyar
Nobody is denying that it did happen, but it's a strange premise to work from since all our other variables are X leaning towards infinity.

I guess this is where you say "not yet", and this is where you are also being asumptive.
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The chemical precursors for life are ubiquitous throughout the Universe. The remaining conditions are simply appropriate environment and time for the precursors to develop and both of these seem to be quite high (there seems to be nothing exceptional about the Sun or the Earth). That we have not been able to observe life elsewhere is not at all surprising. We are just barely at the point where we can detect the presence of extra-solar planets, much less discover if there is life on them or not.

The question is simply whether or not you accept that certain chemical precursors and conditions can develop into life. I find the watch analogy turned around to be appropriate in this context.

The analogy is usually that life arising naturally is akin to finding a functional watch on a beach and assuming that it was created by natural forces.

A more appropriate analogy would be finding a functional watch on a beach that is comprised of watch parts, where we observe that natural forces cause these parts to be combined in various ways and grow in complexity and function over time. On such a beach, finding a watch would not be quite so surprising.

I do agree that attempting to calculate any probability is assumptive. Yet, what I find most interesting in this thread is that the counter argument is simply to call the natural occurrence of life improbable, not impossible. Which IMO, fails utterly to be convincing as vastly improbable events occur constantly. If you admit that life could occur naturally (no matter the probability) you must admit that it might have done indeed done so.

~Raithere
 
I have another analogy - baking a cake in a kitchen. We observe a complete cake - a whole range of different cakes, actually - and we proceed to take them apart, molecule by molecule. Lo and behold, we find that apart from every molecule being accounted for elsewhere in the kitchen, some ready-formed ingredients! Here we have oil, suger, flour... everything we need to bake a cake. Since we don't see the baker, we have to assume that these ingredients - in fact, the kitchen itself - exist elsewhere as well. And not just elsewhere - everywhere. Logically, there ius a high probability that there are so many kitchens (all of them of course possessing the same ingredients required to bake at least a simple cake) that it is "actually quite likely" that a fully baked cake would exist in at least one of them, vis a vis - this very one we are living in.

Genesis describes God as forming man from the ingredients of the earth - "from dust you came and to dust you will return". Yet nowhere do we have evidence that life started of its own accord. That is just as strong an assumption to me as a Creator is to you.
 
Originally posted by Jenyar
Genesis describes God as forming man from the ingredients of the earth - "from dust you came and to dust you will return".
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You call Genesis "evidence"? :bugeye:
Yet nowhere do we have evidence that life started of its own accord.
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Sure we do. Evolution and Big Bang are two notable examples.
 
Jenyars big cake analogy
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I read your big cake analogy- but the main problem with that is the cake could be anything. yes, it could be a creator, (god), but it could very well just be natural random occurence. Either is sutainable as the cake.

Genesis describes God as forming man from the ingredients of the earth - "from dust you came and to dust you will return". Yet nowhere do we have evidence that life started of its own accord. That is just as strong an assumption to me as a Creator is to you.
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Yet we have extreme evidence showing the creation story is nothing but a translation from the Sumerian 'epic of creation', (enuma elish). They spoke of many gods, which the bible itself reflects. They spoke of man being created by ingredients, including the gods blood, (which gave rise to "in our image"), so must we accept the Sumerian texts as absolute truth?

I await your answer...
 
Sure we have 9 planets, but that is nothing when you consider there are somewhere around 95 when you count all the moons.
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it's actually 128 moons and 9 planets in this solar system. also, why is anything else needed if god created the earth for humans. it makes the rest of the universe redundant.
 
Originally posted by atheroy
it's actually 128 moons and 9 planets in this solar system. also, why is anything else needed if god created the earth for humans. it makes the rest of the universe redundant.
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Are you arguing for or against other life in the universe? It seems to me that even if creation actually happen that God would not create the rest of the universe for no reason. Isn't life his ultimate creation? Wouldn't he want it everywhere?
 
i dunno. all i'm saying is, why the rest of the universe if we're supposedly "god's greatest glory" or something silly like that? the universe is as close to infinite as we'll know, i believe that other life must exist some where out there, but by definition of the the bible, the rest of the universe is redundant (don't forget the bible is "gods word") and therefore, why all the extra universe?
 
Originally posted by atheroy
i dunno. all i'm saying is, why the rest of the universe if we're supposedly "god's greatest glory" or something silly like that? the universe is as close to infinite as we'll know, i believe that other life must exist some where out there, but by definition of the the bible, the rest of the universe is redundant (don't forget the bible is "gods word") and therefore, why all the extra universe?
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Maybe by "God's greatest glory" it meant intelligent life. Therefore there could be a civilization around every star since he would want to have his "greatest glory" everywhere he could.

Now back to my normal self that does not argue in the Bible's favor... How about the fact that those passages were written by people who did not comprehend what they saw when they looked in the sky (I think most people to this day still don't). They saw a black sphere rotating around the Earth that had small holes poked in it that let light shine through. They saw the sun rotating around us, and that is at their best. At worst (and if taken how Genesis is written) they saw the world as a flat place. Just read through the creation of the universe in Genesis from a fresh perspective that is not biased toward faith and you will see how ridiculous it is. Maybe it was written in that way to let people thousands of years ago comprehend it; and the seven days is an analogy to seven billion years, but I think that is grasping at straws.

Now for the redundancy comment. When I think if what that word means to me I think of a failsafe; something to replace another thing that fails. Does that mean that the universe is there for us to travel from place to place as worlds die?
 
Maybe it was written in that way to let people thousands of years ago comprehend it; and the seven days is an analogy to seven billion years, but I think that is grasping at straws.
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i'd have to agree.

Now for the redundancy comment. When I think if what that word means to me I think of a failsafe; something to replace another thing that fails. Does that mean that the universe is there for us to travel from place to place as worlds die?
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if so why make all the planets travel away from us so quickly? but your right about the planet dying, i keep on reading scary sh*t, the latest being the devastated state our oceans are in- we've basically harvested them almost to extinction. commmercial fish are being place under "extinction" classification because there are so few. scary.
 
Originally posted by Jenyar
I have another analogy - baking a cake in a kitchen. We observe a complete cake - a whole range of different cakes, actually - and we proceed to take them apart, molecule by molecule. Lo and behold, we find that apart from every molecule being accounted for elsewhere in the kitchen, some ready-formed ingredients! Here we have oil, suger, flour... everything we need to bake a cake. Since we don't see the baker, we have to assume that these ingredients - in fact, the kitchen itself - exist elsewhere as well.
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If observed laws of physics and chemistry indicated that the cake ingredients tended to combine themselves and become baked spontaneously, I certainly wouldn't see a need for a chef to explain the presence of a cake.
 
Except that you would see cakes being created all the time. If the process is so inevitable, why did it stop, and are we left with trying to preserve life and stop species from becoming extinct?
 
Originally posted by Jenyar
Except that you would see cakes being created all the time. If the process is so inevitable, why did it stop, and are we left with trying to preserve life and stop species from becoming extinct?
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How do you know that other "cakes" aren't being spontaneously baked right now? We can't see anything outside of our observable universe. And to answer your second question, if you leave the cake out long enough, eventually it will go bad. The spoiling of the cake is analogous to entropy.
 
Originally posted by Jenyar
Except that you would see cakes being created all the time. If the process is so inevitable, why did it stop, and are we left with trying to preserve life and stop species from becoming extinct?
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You don't see it happening because your lifetime is an insignificant blink of an eye in the length of time life has been flourishing. I don't know what you expect to see. Would lions growing wings in two generations satisfy you?

The reason we are fighting to keep species from dying out is because we are affecting the world faster than anything else in history. We are dragging nets through the oceans because we demand our White Albacore in a "Flavor Seal Bag".
 
We might be alive for the blink of an eye, but we are here to see the effects of apparently millions of years of evolution - we should at least be able to see the intermediate stages of some species. Why don't we?
 
Originally posted by Jenyar
We might be alive for the blink of an eye, but we are here to see the effects of apparently millions of years of evolution - we should at least be able to see the intermediate stages of some species. Why don't we?
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we do...look at the mirror.
 
Right. And we evolved from... who again? Homo erectus? Who are genetically further removed from us than chimpansees - who seem not to have evolved at all. Or have they devolved?

Why didn't the circumstances that caused one species to evolve not ensure their continual evolution? Isn't the mechanism for evolution "survival of the fittest"? That sounds like evolutionary osmosis. Did all species evolve from different places, or did they all evolve from one set of principle substances?

If we aren't fit for so many things, why haven't we developed all kinds of wings and antennae en sonar? What organises the evolutionary tree into speciation?
 
Yes. I'm just being difficult. Do you feel like a persecuted Christian yet? All I have to say is that Book such and such is mythological, based on unsound theories and questionable facts, and there you are. In the end it all depends on what book you read and which author you believe. And all I have to say is: it's your theory, you defend it.

People just spontaneously come up with the idea that hey, maybe there might be a God. And proceed to find out what people have believed about God since the beginning of time. While evolution theory depends so much on accepting certain premises that in the end it stands on very weak legs itself.

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Scientists have seen bacteria exchange genetic material. They have seen bacteria become antibiotic resistant. They have seen bacteria become bigger from mutations. But have they ever seen bacteria become anything other than bacteria? No. Have they ever seen one type of bacteria, such as E.coli, become some other type of bacteria that is not (in this case) E.coli? No, they haven't. In fact, with over a hundred years of work with E.coli behind us, (at 20 minutes per generation time, that's over 2 1/5 MILLION generations of E.coli minimum that have been witnessed), and despite forcing or encouraging mutations, they still cannot get anything but E.coli. So it's your call. Is that macroevolution? By some evolutionists' standards it qualifies.
Helen Fryman
 
Yeah ,jenyar, seriously...

I can't comprehend the genetics side of evolution but the rest is pretty easy to understand. You clearly don't get it at all yet.
Which is fair enough I suppose, but you can't attack it if you don't even know how it works.
Keep reading, or just watch animal documentaries, seriously its not that complicated.

What planet are you comparing us too? You don't seem to realise that everything with 2 eyes and 4 legs must be related.
 
Originally posted by Jenyar
I'm just being difficult.
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No. When you say things such as "If we aren't fit for so many things, why haven't we developed all kinds of wings and antennae en sonar? ", you are not being difficult, you are being ignorant. Often the remedy for ignorance is reading but, since you insist that you've done so, I'm at a loss to explain it or suggest a cure.
 
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