What do you know "without googling" about the reputed mechanisms for evolution?
by gubberningbody 66 Replies latest jw friends
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PrimateDave
GB, you seem like a relatively intelligent bipedal hominid, but I am not entirely sure what you mean by this statement:
"No one can even imagine a path whereby a random or an even non-random walk could take one from a so-called low form of life, like an amoeba to an American."
Are you suggesting that the path from "amoeba" to "American" or "virus" to "violinist" could have been at least partially directed by something not generally understood by the theory of Evolution? Do you really suppose that the Universe is evolving in a linear fashion? Could not the massively interactive and parallel reality of the physical universe have a nearly infinite number of outcomes? In fact, everything evolves all the time at the same time everywhere. This isn't so hard to understand, is it? Neither Americans nor violins (and violinists) appeared on the scene fully formed as they are today. None of my ancestors 10,000 years ago set out to eventually become "American," and the makers of early stringed instruments didn't imagine that someday violins would be made in their current form and played in symphony orchestras.
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inkling
gb, that Monty Python clip just might be your most insightful
contribution to this thread so far.....
[inkling]
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inkling
Naaaw, seriously, thanks for starting such a interesting conversation.
[inkling]
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Midget-Sasquatch
6. Midget - Responded as if it had received some response from someone (a straw man?) and then instead of discussing the other half of the mechanism random "mutations"...
I won't take offense at your referring to me as "it" because you're obviously taking this as a game. (you mentioned repeatedly "playing"). The response wasn't to a straw man, as you well know, but to your belittling attitude (the "it" possibly another stab?) to all the previous posters with terms like "really pathetic".
You conveniently ignored how a few posters already mentioned the role of random mutation. The oh so elusive major component that no-one supposely "got". Like you disregarded in my post:
Yes the mutations themselves are to the best of our knowledge undirected
But this less than honest tactic was to what end? To somehow stress how little reflection we put on the randomness? That we minimize this and so cannot arrive to the same conclusion that you came to upon giving so much more thought to it? i.e. That novel information couldn't arise from those processes, so ergo, some outside direction was needed? Another poster already mentioned the emergence of bacteria that can metabolize nylon. So is God still creating?
Also, your basic mechanism of evolution ignores the powerful repercussions of yet another element: symbiosis. It may not be the most prevalent factor but an important one for our particular history of life. Or did you, just out of chance, overlook the endosymbiotic theory in all that time you spent researching this topic?
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Caedes
Demons? what about fairies? Santa Claus? Perhaps no one gave you the memo but, science limits itself to the empirical.
In his defence, I think his phrase -
....what minimal things would be necessary agencies (daemons) to engineer life into various forms.
is using the greek idea of "Daemons" in a metaphorical way.
From wiki:
"Daemons are characters in Greek mythology, some of whom handled tasks that the gods could not be bothered with"
You think he got there without reference to google? or with?
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Jankyn
Without "googling," and without reading the other responses, which I'm sure have degenerated into the usual evolution-versus-creation/ID slugfest, here's what I know about evolution (my degrees are all in English...B.A., M.A., Ph.D.):
Evolution is a series of theories (in the scientific sense, meaning principles which can and have been tested and are falsifiable) based on the concept of "change over time." One of its main components is the concept of "natural selection," meaning, simply enough, that individuals with characteristics that are beneficial will have more opportunity to pass on their genetic inheritance. Evolution happens to groups of organisms, not to individuals (individuals may have mutations, but evolution happens to the entire species).
DNA tells us that all life on this planet came from the same source. Over time, groups of that initial organism evolved into new species with new characteristics in a process that continues to this day. Ultimately, we are all related, though; a chimp is cousin to a human, while a blade of grass is a thirty-second cousin twice removed (that's a metaphor...I told you, my degrees are in English). If it's got DNA, it's a relative.
PLEASE NOTE: Evolution, a biological theory, does not say anything about the origin of life, nor does it addess the origin of the planet or of the cosmos. It explains the origin and development of species. For ideas, hypotheses and theories about how life originated, see chemistry, earth science, astronomy and cosmology.
There are a lot of good reasons to be an atheist. Evolution is not necessarily one of them. However, it is helpful to remember that a bunch of nomadic shepherds living in tents in the desert several thousand years ago probably didn't know as much about biology as your average seventh-grader with a microscope, and, speaking strictly as an English major, metaphor has a lot of power.
Edited to add: And, now that I've read the thread, I see that many with more understanding of the various ins and outs of evolutionary theory have done their work; this thread was in fact troll bait; and that I'm not doing bad with my understanding of how it works, for an English major.