Topic: Religion is a plague - page 4. (Read 11811 times)

Actually, your DNA fucks up CONSTANTLY. Little known fact, people get cancer, which is a malevolent mutation, ALL THE TIME. It's just that their white blood cells quickly recognize it and destroy it. It's one of the big reasons people with AIDS or lowered immunities die; they get cancer like everyone else, but their immune system can't keep up with cleaning it. Big type of cancer is either due to same DNA fuckup being too aggressive, or just small enough to not be recognized.

Well, first of all, entropy applies more to physics than evolution, and second, entropy exists in an enclosed space with no outside influences, such as a sources of energy. Earth does not exist in an entropy space, since we have a rather large source of energy nearby.
As for DNA, there's no self-replicating when you only have one half in the sperm and one half in the egg. If they join, and there are quirks, mutations, or some other changes, that's all that DNA has to start with. Nothing to correct from. Besides, if it was completely self correcting, we'd all look exactly the same. Ever notice how some people have bigger eyes than others, and some people have better sense of taste than others? Those little quirks, taken out to the extreme, would help those people survive in darker places, or places with a lot of poisonous plants.



Who says platypus had to start as an aquatic animal? They may have been very adapted for living on the beach, or walking around on 4 high legs in shallow water, using their beaks to dig at the underwater mud to look for edible stuff buried underneath. Evolving limbs designed for swimming may have happened along with evolving those other things you mentioned. Main point is that it doesn't all happen instantly.



A little less magic than Zeus. I mean Ra. I mean Jesus.

Because the self-correcting code is NOT perfect. It regularly makes mistakes.

So according to your logic, it should be impossible for diseases and viruses such as H1N1 to jump species.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H1N1

And when it's not 'friggin airtight' we get cancer. Or a mutation.

And sometimes, that 'new garbage' turns out to be helpful.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution

Quoted because you ignored it yet again.

information certainly can be added during a mutation...

chromosomes may be added (such as in the case of down syndrome)
dna sequences may be added (over-replicate) or may be missing (dna insertion and deletion) 
dna sequences can arrange differently than they normally do (expression)
or there may be simple errors at single/multiple points of the sequence (point/frame shift)

any of these occurring in an organism can make drastic changes (but not necessarily so). some of these changes may be beneficial, some detrimental, some neutral. how these changes affect the organisms ability to survive and reproduce determines whether the mutation will be passed on.

this is how the process begins. a simple mutation. the mutation gets passed down to subsequent generations. in one of these subsequent generations, another organism or two has a mutation.....if that mutation allows it to eat and reproduce succesfully, then the process continues......this happening over and over again, for millions of years, will give you an extremely diverse gene pool (one in which the organisms look, act, and function differently, though they are all made of the same fundamental building blocks).   

this is the driving force behind evolution.

 

Faith? You must be joking. Your body produces 10 trillion copies of your DNA daily just counting white blood cells. That replication code has to be friggin airtight.

Genetic disorders are the result of lost/scrambled information. That is not new information, its new garbage. Information comes only from intelligence. Randomness it the total absence of information.

Despite your vaunted faith in the self-correction capabilities of DNA, it still fucks up, as evinced by the numerous genetic disorders that plague humanity.

How can new data be appended to a self-correcting code?

WRONG, wrong, wrongedy-wrong.

Mutations are adding instructions to DNA all the time. Some of them are beneficial, and add to the creature's survivability. Others are detrimental, and reduce it. Some are flat out lethal, and the organism dies before spreading that mutation.

That breaks the laws of entropy. In one of your earlier points, LeFBI said we almost lost the cecum because we heat our meals. Unused or undeveloped features will tend to die off, not develop into new features.

The entire building instructions for a platypus are encoded in all its cell DNA. DNA is self-correcting (3 out of 4 bits), any errors that are introduced are discarded by the self-replicating code. No new instructions can be added through random chance. Disprove that, if you can. Any genetic traits that appear later, were pre-existing but not active.


Sounds like a good way to starve to death fast. Not really a land animal. Sucks at swimming. The platypus needs to eat about 20% of its own weight each day. This requires the platypus to spend an average of 12 hours each day looking for food.


Yup. Magic. There's no science here.

Just remember that we all begin as 1 cell so small you can't even see it with your eyes.

We didn't just pop into existence as adults though given enough time that will happen, as a platypus perhaps.

Please let me know which one of these is not a fact:

1) when two groups exist in the same place, the stronger group can dominate the weaker
2) living things have lots and lots of sex
3) genes, which store blueprints for life's design, exist
4) genes store all the code of the living thing's predecessors
5) genes divide and recombine when things have sex and make babies
6) accidents happen
7) environments change
groups of living things can become separated in the environment, either due to nature (flood-> new river/island) or by their own choice (migration)
9) there are obvious similarities on both macro and micro biological species, found in both concurrent living ones and in ancestral lines

The theory that explains all those things is evolution. Feel free to come up with a better theory, as long as it's supportable by facts and includes all of them

Quoted because you ignored it again.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080507131453.htm

talks about our modern understanding of the platypus' evolution based on its DNA

Neither. Evolution is gradual, not instant.


I would guess that platipy lived on land, and couldn't dive, instead using their beaks to snatch things out from under water. Eventually one of them was able to at least somewhat close it's nostrils. That one had lots of sex, and a group came out that could close their nostrils more than another group. The group that was able to close their nostrils caught more things, and outlived the group that couldn't (natural selection). By this process, ones that could close their nostrils best kept out-eating, out-living, and out-sexing ones that couldn't. By that same process, one of those nostril-closing freaks had a more sensitive nose to things swimming in the water. That sensitivity may have been while they were wading around on the surface, with their beaks submerged, or once they started diving. The evolution of the electro-deception could easily have developed in parallel with the nostril closing, and just ended up being really convenient for when they started diving, since not needing to keep your eyes open means you get fewer injuries. Plus ponds aren't exactly clear and easy to see in.
There's your answer to which came first.

Ok lets see...platypus dives and its eyes, nose, and ears fill with water and it drowns.
It also can't find food without the eletro-detection beak. So it starves too. Now its really dead.

What came first, the platypus' beak, or the electro-detection wiring? I am really curious how you think an electrical pathway can be wired into the brain after the beak structure is already there. Do you think electricians go into finished houses and wire them for lights and AC outlets? Please don't say the neural circuitry was pre-wired "by accident", or out of evolution's magical foresight.

Give me a rundown of how science says evolution built a platypus beak. This should be very easy, since evolution is "observable and provable".

scientific theory is not the same thing as a hypothesis.

evolutionary theory is like gravitational theory or cell theory or any other scientific theory; it is the testable conclusion reached based on empirical evidence and stands until disproven.

there is a mountain of empirical evidence that shows evolution to be true, including being directly observed in a lab environment. theres nothing philisophical about that. we know evolution is real the same way we know gravity, electromagnetism, or anything else is real....by testing, countertesting, and observation.

I think that you can be a genious in thechnology, but an ignorant in elemental science.

It's superbly adapted to its ecological niche. It's just ugly as sin.

I find it more telling that you completely ignored the 'breathing hole same as the drinking hole' and 'testicles danging unprotected' points, and instead, focused on the point you could refute, 'platypus is ugly'.


https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Natural_selection

Any scientist worth a can of beans will tell you, that yes, evolution is not fact, but theory.

I am asking these questions because no one can answer them, much less you.