Is there proof of Evolution out there? help needed (page 7)

Abaddon

Tashawaa... there is nothing like having someone with an extreme and unjustifiable view to really make things obvious...

8-)

Sometimes I think back to the days, as a loyal dubbie, I BELIEVED everything in the "Creation" book. I remember having a "conversation" with a guy at the door once who knew evolution. I'm embarassed remembering how I backed up my "logic" with such reasoning as:

"Evolution teaches that we come from monkeys, so why do monkeys still exist?"

"Evolution is JUST a theory!"

"The chances of evolution happening are nearly impossible"

"Something cannot come from nothing"

UGH. The guy showed restraint (know I realize I came across as an uneducated zealot, who NEVER read anything independant of the WTBTS). I also had the arrogance to inform the householder that I too, studied evolution!

I look at those statements above and I just cringe now

Abaddon

Oh I remember defending what I now know to be absolute bollocks on the doors and at school. And 'cause I can argue like a spinning propeller (not smart, but you lose if you argue with one) and had the misfortune to never meet anyone who was a proper scientist on the doors who would talk I could argue most people to a standstill with the Dubbie line of Creation vs Evolution.

I also knew something was wrong but got conditioned into inaction.

By the age of 6 I was obsessed with wildlife programs. By the age of eight I had seen enough snakes with vestigal limbs and birds with a grasping 'thumb' on their wings, as well as been exposed to geology through a primary school study of glaciation to rememeber walking to school wondering why the TV and books I read (yup, 3" thick wildlife books, one of which (amusing) my dad got me and is more-or-less a primer for evolution) conflicted with what I was told I the Kingdom Hall.

But like a good little Dubbie I squirreled those naughty thoughts away.

By 14 or so I knew the world was way older than current Dubbie explanations (it was still the creatve day = 1,000 years age for JW's).

At, what, 16? the big blue Crapation book came out. I had resolved quite firmly I would have to 'do something' (dunno what) if that belief wasn't revised, and the bastards HAD revised it, going for a 'unspecified but long period of time', which meant in my woefully misinformed mind they had adequately resolved the issue.

Allowing each day to be eons long, to the uninformed (like not knowing there are still trees standing that were growijng before the Flood or that the Great Pyramid 'survived' the 'Global Flood' without any problems... ) solves the obvious chronology issues a child can see.

It took me ten years to get out after that, more-or-less.

trumangirl

Hi everyone! I hadn't checked JW-forum for a week or so because university semester's started up again so I can't afford any brain cells to consider this subject further right now - and I certainly need all my brain cells for this subject! I have made a note of some of the recommended literature and will follow up when my studies are over this year.

I've never heard of Hawking radiation or abiogenesis, but I guess I wouldn't have, having been immersed in JW-dom all my life.

I will say tho that the anthropic principle still doesn't make sense to me. Sure, highly improbable things happen everyday, but the difference with evolution is that the theory demands that we believe that a whole series of related and appearingly purposeful coincidences and highly improbable events happened, one after the other. And what of the mathematics behind quantum physics? Or is mathematics just a subjective concept that humans have dreamed up, a concept that doesn't exist outside our own minds? .. Now I can hear the evolutionists among you breathing a sigh of derision, please bear with me till I can understand!

Zen nudist - you really got me thinking about the nature of intelligence. I always have believed that intelligence must come packaged with a mind and a personality. The more intelligent a being, the more individuality they display in their actions and creativity. Ie, humans have more personality than cats, but cats have their own character too, and even fruit flies have been found to have variant behaviour amongst individuals, but not as much as more intelligent life forms.. But do plants have personalities? they don't have brains. Are they purely mechanical? .... This is getting really metaphysical.

trumangirl

About the Flood, what is the answer to the question I was asked once, that how could animals that were wiped out during the Flood have subsequently appeared on islands (like NZ)? Gondwanaland would have existed a long time before the Flood happened. I don't know what the WTS answer is to this question, I guess they say that the animals got there on rafts.

rem

Trumangirl,

>>Sure, highly improbable things happen everyday, but the difference with evolution is that the theory demands that we believe that a whole series of related and appearingly purposeful coincidences and highly improbable events happened, one after the other.

There is a big difference between fortunate random related events happening in sequence and:

-Random events creating millions of mutations - many bad, many neutral, few good
-Run through a filter that keeps only the good mutations
-Repeat

You see, in the later, the fortunate events don't have to come in a perfect series. There are literally millions of random mutations that can be selected from simultaneously. If only the good are passed on, then you start to understand that what we see in the fossil record isn't so extraordinary afterall. It's a building process - you don't have to be so lucky to get a good hand in the end.

Think of Yahtzee. No-one is so lucky that they would get a winning hand if they rolled the dice and entered their score sequentially on the scorecard. Only by running the rolls through a filter, or a type of algorithm - and keeping the good rolls in good spots and eliminating the bad ones do you come up with a good score.

rem - not a Yahtzee player

trumangirl

Yes but what about the refutation that some features of living things (I'm not sure what the exact examples are) have to have developed as a system, all at once, in order to work at all. It's the principle of necessary complexity or something like that. Which is quite different from Yahtzee, which is an incremental game. Besides, someone intelligent has to play Yahtzee! I'm not a big player myself but it's not purely a game of luck is it? there's some strategising involved?

rem

Trumangirl,

Intelligence is not needed to play Yahtzee. Only an algorithm is needed, which is basically what Natural Selection is - a filtering algorithm. An algorithm may not win as often as an intelligent player, but that's not the point - the point is that the results are much less probable than chance alone. Note too that there are many problems with biological organisms - Natural Selection is a decent algorithm, but an intelligent designer could probably do much better.

You are thinking of irreducibly complex features. So far no irreducibly complex features have been demonstrated. Features that some have claimed to be irreducibly complex, such as the bacteria flagellum, have been shown to be reducible.

The reason is that there is no "plan" to build a feature with a purpose. There is no plan for an eye, for instance. Different parts of the eye may have had completely different purposes before they took the form we see today.

I'm simplifying this horribly, but there is a lot of good information on the web about irreducible complexity and critical reviews of Michael Behe's book, Darwin's Black Box, which promotes this mistaken view.

rem

onacruse

rem:

You are thinking of irreducibly complex features.

Which boils down to: Look around, think, really think, and draw your own conclusions.

Is it evolution that scares us, as a concept? Or is it our own fear of considering that such a concept contradicts our preconceived notions?

Could God have created this universe of life via evolutionary processes?

Of course It could.

Is that bad?

Is there proof of Evolution out there? help needed

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