Topic: The Basic Stupidity of the Idea of Evolution - page 2. (Read 3048 times)

I feel sorry for you, badecker. I sincerely hope you won't live the rest of your life in ignorance.

 

Bravo! You are waking up to some of the questions of logic and the universe. It is always thrilling to see when people start to question things, and examine the things that they have formerly taken for granite.



No PhD.



Click on my handle in this forum, above, at the top of this post. Go to the bottom of the page that opens up. Click the link entitled, "Show the last posts of this person."



Nosey!



I'll look it up in the encyclopedia sometime.



Because I have a very loud voice when I choose to use it. They shouldn't listen, really, but they can't help themselves.

 

I love this, two entirely conflicting logical fallacies.

1. We found everything, and cant explain anything else, hence god.
2. We haven't found everything, hence god.

Not only ignorant, but stupid as well.

I wasn't aware we had discovered everything there is to know about everything. Please alert the world. What an idiot.

You seem quite the expert on science and being a scientist? Where did you obtain your PhD, please direct me to your list of publications.
What is your scientific education and experience?

You have about as much understanding as I have of oncology, which is little to none. Why should anyone listen to anything you have to say about anything?

That is exactly the point... well, close to it.

Scientists got sick of finding no clear results that could show God. So some of them simply suggested that He did not exist, and started looking for the spontaneity that must have started this whole thing, and that "evolves" it this way and that right up to the present.

The trouble is, science hasn't been able to find anything that they can show is true spontaneity. They have been able to find all kinds of simplicity, complexity, diversity, and a bunch of other "...ities," but no pure spontaneity.

The thing that we have found in great abundance is cause and effect, action and reaction. Cause and effect is the thing that "runs" even our most complex machinery. We, ourselves, seem to operate throughout by cause and effect. Even our decisions and thinking are determined by which neurons fire and which other neurons and chemicals determine that they fire, and which stimuli act even on these, all the way back to "the beginning(?)".

Since we are cause-and-effect people, and since this is all we have been able to find in nature (except, of course, in the things that we haven't found the causes for yet), fantastic and improbable as it may seem, this whole nature and universe must have been programmed. And whatever programmed this universe, we don't have much of a clue about. Religion might think it has, but science knows it doesn't.

When scientists are unwilling to talk about the fact that they haven't been able to find any spontaneity (no pure random "effect"), in the face of all the cause and effect findings that they readily admit to, their theories of something like evolution are extremely unbalanced, flawed, even simply wrong.

Religious people have always equaled mental retardation to me. This group believes in things like angels and it confuses you that they don't believe in evolution?

Things Christians believe:

A mistranslated book written by cave people is a reliable guide to the modern world.

There’s an invisible man in the sky who likes to watch you while you’re showering.

Two thousand years ago, an alter ego of this invisible man knocked up a Jewess whose husband wasn’t satisfying her.

The progeny of this drunken coupling was both god and the son of god.

This son of god was killed (but not really, since he’s also god, and god can’t die) and then came back to life to seek revenge, just like J.D. Walker.

His killing was a necessary sacrifice in order that we might be forgiven for the sins of Eve, the first woman in the world, who lived 6000 years ago in a magical garden, where a talking snake convinced her to eat a forbidden apple.

To show our thanks for this sacrifice, we should put special crackers and wine in our mouths, where they will be magically transformed into his flesh and blood, which we should then swallow despite taboos regarding cannibalism.

A guy built a boat out of wood large enough to hold two of every creature on the earth with primitive tools.

In the beginning there was only Adam and Eve. God punished them by making them biologically reproduce. They founded the entire world which means incest is ok. Eve had two sons Cain and Able. They went off and found wives. From where exactly?

The most retarded of all: People of the world speak different languages because a tower was constructed to reach the cloud God lives in. To punish them he made them all speak different languages.

If you don’t believe all the preceding items, then after you die you will be plunged into a lake of fire and tortured for all eternity.

If you do believe all the preceding items, then after you die you’ll get to go to heaven, which is a cloud in outer space.

Retarded.

Which part is fantasy and which part is reality and how can you tell the difference between them? People believe what they want to believe at the end of the day. Personally I don't get how religious people can shoot down the idea of evolution because beings are far too complex to have been created this way but believe a far greater being with super powers can just spontaneously exist without questioning how the hell he came into being.

OK I'll bite... This is a fair comment (even though there are subatomic processes which seem to be totally spontaneous, but that's off-topic)

Right, I think this is where you're getting confused. No-one is claiming that evolution behaves like a pre-programmed machine or anything. Stop thinking of evolution as some sort of entity/intelligent force, and think of it as an abstract process.

Most, if not all cellular mutations are totally random. But, I hear you say, how do the cells know how to become specialized? They must have been programmed to be able to arrange themselves into complex things like human eyes etc!!

Wrong. For all the specialization we see around us, there was an exponentially higher number of "fuck-ups", cells and organisms that mutated in a way which was detrimental to them (considering their environment). These "fuck-ups" were not successful in their respective environments and have disappeared/died out, giving the impression of design (as the ones that survived suit their environment very well).

Consider this: If there was a serious nuclear apocalypse tomorrow and you studied the Earth a few weeks later, very few animals would look as though they had been designed for the environment. You return a few years later, and everything has died except single-celled organisms and cockroaches. Now, it looks as though the animals have been designed to suit the environment (because you can't see all the species that have died out).


OK, what on earth do you mean by this? Evolutionary theory doesn't claim that changes happen with no cause. Greekbitcoin's post has a nice list of some of the things that cause mutations. Over time, the useful mutations stick around, and the pointless and detrimental ones disappear. The mutations themselves are totally random.


Cause and effect doesn't suggest this, you're joining dots that don't exist (much like your claims about "the machine-like nature of the universe" and how "machines must have makers, and nature has better machines than man, so they must have been made by a more advanced maker than man...") - stop jumping to conclusions. Just because nature has better machines, doesn't mean that they must have appeared by magic.

You're basically saying Evolution theory is bunk because it doesn't include programming or a God. Come on, you can do better than this.

Yes, it's my fault. I was simply trying to attack the thing from too many directions at once. So, let me restate much simpler. I hope I don't state it too simple, now. Here goes.

Change, however you call it, evolution or something else, comes about by cause and effect. We don't know of anything else that produces change.

Some of Evolution Theory attempts to assign some change to pure randomness. This is change that might occur without a cause.

Since there is no evidence that we have seen, of any change happening without a cause, and since the closest we can come to change happening without a cause, is when we don't know what the cause is, and since Evolution Theory does not state such clearly, the whole idea of evolution crashes in on itself.

Furthermore, cause and effect in everything suggests that everything is pre-programmed. Does anything in Evolution Theory even suggest this - pre-programming? Evolution, as it is stated, is close to pure bunk.

thread has nothing to do with evolution theory.

what you can learn here from badecker is a (good) use of rhetoric to persuade people about x (x seems to be mostly religious though).

some of the techniques s/he is using are described here https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/588/04/

Are you talking to me? If not, ignore this as you want. But if you are talking to me...

The point is not a question of mutation causes. We know that all mutations, all multi-trillions plus of them, happen because something causes them to happen. Call these actions and reactions anything you want. Call them evolution or something else. The point is something different than this.

The point is that, mixed in the writings about the causes that cause mutation-type effects, there is the false idea that some of the mutations come about by random chance. If the definition of "random chance" is "cause and effect," then random chance is the thing that makes the mutations - the thing that evolution is expressing - then evolution is a correct idea and word to use.

However, the definition of "random" doesn't always include only "cause and effect." Sometimes it includes changes that have no cause whatsoever. Such changes are said to have come about accidentally, in ways that don't have a cause, randomly.

There is no non-cause and effect change in the universe that we have seen. All changes, even mutations, happen by cause and effect. Some of the causes we are aware of. Others we are not aware of. Since we haven't found any changes that we know exist because of no cause whatsoever, the changes we haven't seen any cause for, simply have causes that are unaccounted for. They are not pure randomness - no cause whatsoever - in action.

Since all change has to do with cause and effect, all evolution is essentially pre-programmed. This idea isn't even found as a suggestion in the writings about evolution... although it may be in some obscure writings. Since pre-programming isn't even suggested, this makes the idea of evolution to be basically a stupid idea.

Are you even reading the stuff people write at your threads or the links the post or you just reply ignoring them?

There are dozens of ways a mutation can happen. Its  chemistry. A gamma ray from a distant star may excite a molecule therefore destroying it. Maybe UV light from our sun. Or that lead atom in the atmosphere. Maybe it is just the probability of a reaction to happen that simply doesnt create the same products 100% of the times. Or maybe that burned food full of carcinogen you ate. α particles from Radon? Or β+- particles from the potassium in the banana you just ate.

Simple chemistry....

The question remains. What is the cause of that DNA damage? There is no evidence that it is random. There is every evidence that it is cause and effect produced. Cause and effect ultimately suggests "made" or "pre-programmed" rather than random effects. What's your point?

Just because you cant grasp it doesnt mean it doesnt happen.

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

"naturally occurring DNA damages arise about 60,000 to 100,000 times per day per mammalian cell."

Herein lies the problem. The word evolve evolves independently among different groups, at different times, and in different ways. Then the groups try to apply their meaning to things that other groups wouldn't.

"Evolution" meaning "adaptation" may be absolutely correct. But "evolution" meaning "random changes" is something that doesn't happen... at least not in any evidence that we have of it happening. In fact, the greater the scientists and researchers, the more they look for cause and effect.

Evidence as adaptation means cause and effect. Lab evidence for anything other than this is manipulation. Nature has no natural evidence of anything other than cause and effect without randomness, even if we have some math that suggests that randomness is possible. This indicates pre-programming, more than it indicates anything else.

At this stage in investigations, without some tremendously great, almost miraculous, development in observation of nature, or in the methods of researching, evolution looks like programming way more than it looks like random changes.

both ideas are right

Also, another thing. Just because you don't believe in something, that's no excuse to not understanding the concept of it. For example, I don't believe in ghosts but I have no trouble understanding the basic concept of a ghost. Same goes for intelligent design/creation. So if you are skeptical about evolution, surely the best way of proving your point of view is to understand the concept, to the point that you can disprove it?

OK, you give the impression in this thread that you're purposefully being difficult, but I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you want to learn some new shit.

First off, you're confusing evolution with the spontaneous emergence of life. The theory of evolution cannot explain this, and doesn't pretend to. Some people refer to this emergence of life as abiogenesis. What evolution explains is what happened from there, and how a single (or small number of) simple single-celled organism(s) evolved into the huge diversity of life we see today. It's like how the big bang theory explains what happened since the big bang, but doesn't say anything about why/how it happened.

The sperm and the egg you speak of were both alive before they combined, and no, that wasn't evolution, and no, science books are not claiming such a thing.

It has been shown in laboratories that certain organisms do in fact evolve according to their environment. Things like bacteria reproduce so rapidly that it is possible to see changes, over multiple generations, that give the bacteria an advantage in their environment (such as evolving more efficient flagella). You admit that evolution can happen in a lab, yet you say it is impossible in the wild? Why? (also it's not "caused by a lot of difficult, heavy duty work by a bunch of lab workers". Lol, the recording of the data may be heavy duty work by a bunch of lab workers, but the actual evolution happens due to random DNA mutations on a molecular level, nothing to do with the lab workers.)

Ugg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messenger_RNA

This isn't new people.

At some point of our life we have been manipulated in our DNA to look like humans. That's all.

It seems to me you are saying, humans, plants, animals are code (dna)

But what is the compiler?