How and why is the Evolution theory considered plausible? (purely a science question)
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LarryCoon
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 31, 2009 12:31 pm    Post subject:

re4ee wrote:
I have never heard or read any logically valid arguments supporting the premise that Evolution and so-called "Intelligent Design" are mutually exclusive.


Intelligent Design will be a lengthy post on my part (just what you're looking forward to, right?). But basically, you can't say that it's incompatible because ID isn't science. Plus some of its core tenants are based upon fallacious arguments (the entire thing is essentially one big argument from ignorance), and some of its core claims (such as irreducible complexity) are demonstrably wrong.

It's something I'll do a full post on when I get the chance. In the meantime, I'd suggest any interested reader take a look at the judge's decision in the Kitzmiller et. al. v. Dover Area School Board, which looked at ID in great detail. The judge's decision does a great job of laying out exactly what ID is, and also how it is used as a tool to push ideology over evidence. An excerpt:

Quote:
In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.

Both Defendants and many of the leading proponents of ID make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general. Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.

To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.



The decision in its entirety can be found HERE.

Quote:
I think this is a straw man, and is used to drive a wedge between those who identify themselves as religious and those who are secular. My answer to those who refuse to consider evolution as being not anti-religion is.


I'm sorry, but I honestly couldn't parse that last sentence.

Quote:
"What could be a more "intelligent design" than built in tools to diversify, and alter ourselves depending on how nature develops?"


'Cept that's not what the whole thing is talking about.
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 31, 2009 12:32 pm    Post subject:

postandpivot wrote:
NickF wrote:
re4ee wrote:
I have never heard or read any logically valid arguments supporting the premise that Evolution and so-called "Intelligent Design" are mutually exclusive. I think this is a straw man, and is used to drive a wedge between those who identify themselves as religious and those who are secular. My answer to those who refuse to consider evolution as being not anti-religion is.

"What could be a more "intelligent design" than built in tools to diversify, and alter ourselves depending on how nature develops?"


I think biblical literalists have a problem with this because if life on earth evolved over billion of years the "world was created in 6 days" is false.


it goes beyond the world being created in 6 days. for the record. i'm still not sure about the exact timeline. whats 6 days to him and to me, back then could be two different things. our days are calculated by the sun and the earths rotation.

what if you were the creator, so you sat outside of the sun and the earths rotation? where would you get your sense of time from? if you're in outer space. there are many suns(stars). So again where are you getting your time from? or perhaps it was literally 6 days.

perhaps God was trying to say, even though I stand outside of man's time. because i stand outside of earth. It took me the equivalent of 6 Full earth spins, to finish the job.


that's why I said biblical literalists
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LarryCoon
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 31, 2009 12:35 pm    Post subject:

NickF wrote:
Larry, do you know of a Gabriella Ernsberger?


No.
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 31, 2009 12:37 pm    Post subject:

LarryCoon wrote:
NickF wrote:
Larry, do you know of a Gabriella Ernsberger?


No.


She was a UCI Math, CS major a few years ago, she later taught a CS class that I took.
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 31, 2009 12:47 pm    Post subject:

Fan0Bynum17 wrote:
postandpivot wrote:
Fan0Bynum17 wrote:


Who's forcing who?


exactly.

and my question to LC's response above would be this. what if there was a Creator..... are we saying that the science behind these creations are untrue? I dont think so. or atleast not untrue with everything. some perhaps. others probably spot on.

if God is real. do i think he will tell us that the we were always wrong and water isn't H2O? no. i think he will confirm a ton of science. and denounce some all at the same time.


What's the point of mentioning this? What's the point in bringing in a hypothetical God and conjecture on what it would confirm/disconfirm about scientific knowledge? I don't think anyone here implied that theists believed all science was false.
read coons comments. and you will understand why i responded this way.
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 31, 2009 1:00 pm    Post subject:

Larry - thanks for taking the time to educate.
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 31, 2009 1:32 pm    Post subject:

LarryCoon wrote:

Intelligent Design will be a lengthy post on my part (just what you're looking forward to, right?). But basically, you can't say that it's incompatible because ID isn't science. Plus some of its core tenants are based upon fallacious arguments (the entire thing is essentially one big argument from ignorance), and some of its core claims (such as irreducible complexity) are demonstrably wrong.

It's something I'll do a full post on when I get the chance. In the meantime, I'd suggest any interested reader take a look at the judge's decision in the Kitzmiller et. al. v. Dover Area School Board, which looked at ID in great detail. The judge's decision does a great job of laying out exactly what ID is, and also how it is used as a tool to push ideology over evidence.


You could also watch NOVA Online to get a feel of the case at:
Link
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 02, 2009 11:44 am    Post subject:

LarryCoon wrote:
KobeBryantCliffordBrown wrote:
World Book encyclopedia made all the difference in my life. I still remember the day the woman came to our apartment to sell them to my mother. She was a single parent of 3, we were extremely poor, on welfare and food stamps. I was 5. There was this big poster the woman brought and it had a Sperm whale amongst others. I begged and begged for the books and somehow my mother made it happen. I read those things backwards and forwards for years. Best thing my mother ever did for me.


Wow -- it was World Book for me too! Got mine when I was in elementary school. When my Dad passed away a couple years ago, he still had that set of encyclopedias.





I forgot how World Book Encyclopedia opened my eyes as well.

I just ordered a set for my son.
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stillmatic
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 02, 2009 11:58 am    Post subject:

Hey Lare...so I talked to my Biology Lab professor to figure out why I goofed...

Humans and Primates are 96% similar in DNA, with only 4% separating them...

And to put it into perspective for others, mice and rats are 65% similar in DNA, with 35% separating them....Just goes to show how closely related we are to primates...pretty amazing.

Next time I'll have to pay better attention in class instead of reading threads on LG...
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 02, 2009 12:59 pm    Post subject:

Yep, that's one of the ways genetics confirmed common descent. We know the rate at which genetic mutations occur (if I remember right, you have about 155 base pairs that neither of your parents have -- which arose through random mutation. We know the average rate at which mutations are incorporated into the genome. We therefore can tell how much a genome should change per, say, million years. Therefore, we can make predictions like, "If species A and B diverged X million years ago, then there should be X million years' worth of accumulated genetic change." And this is exactly what we found.

The other way of using this is instead of looking at the entire genome to see how similar they are, we can look at individual proteins that are common to most/all life (Cytochrome-C is commonly used) to see how similar they are from one species to another. One of the tricky things about proteins is that it's how they fold that's important, and not which amino acids make up the protein. So you can take a Cytochrome-C molecule, replace an adenine with a cytosine, and as long as it still folds in the same way, it's still a Cytochrome-C. This means that random genetic mutations will accumulate in individual proteins like Cytochrome-C, and the more recently two species diverged, the more similar their Cytochrome-C's will be. And again, by how similar or different they are we have a good idea how long ago they diverged. This form of analysis also confirms what we see in the fossil record, and is also consistent with what we see when we look at the similarity of the genomes as a whole.
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LarryCoon
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 02, 2009 1:07 pm    Post subject:

stillmatic wrote:
Humans and Primates are 96% similar in DNA, with only 4% separating them...

More specifically, the distance between humans and chimpanzees (our closest living relative) is 1.64%; the distance between humans and gorillas is 2.27%; the distance between humans and orangutans is 3.6%; the distance between humans and gibbons is 4.76%; and the distance between chimpanzees and gorillas is 2.28%.

A chimpanzee is more closely related to us than to a gorilla!
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 02, 2009 1:20 pm    Post subject:

LarryCoon wrote:
A chimpanzee is more closely related to us than to a gorilla!


That freakin' boggles my mind.
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 02, 2009 1:37 pm    Post subject:

stillmatic wrote:
LarryCoon wrote:
A chimpanzee is more closely related to us than to a gorilla!


That freakin' boggles my mind.



When you look at their behavior, not so much. It's really amazing how much they act exactly like us.
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 02, 2009 1:47 pm    Post subject:

KobeBryantCliffordBrown wrote:
stillmatic wrote:
LarryCoon wrote:
A chimpanzee is more closely related to us than to a gorilla!


That freakin' boggles my mind.



When you look at their behavior, not so much. It's really amazing how much they act exactly like us.


It'd be awesome if humans could settle disputes more like the Bonobos ...
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 02, 2009 2:33 pm    Post subject:

Quote:
i'm still not sure about the exact timeline. whats 6 days to him and to me, back then could be two different things. our days are calculated by the sun and the earths rotation.


If "He" created the earth and us then why wouldn't we be on the same timeline?
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 02, 2009 5:27 pm    Post subject:

or "She"
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vanexelent
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 02, 2009 7:33 pm    Post subject:

stillmatic wrote:
or "She"


Now that's just insanity.
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 03, 2009 9:28 am    Post subject:

stillmatic wrote:
or "She"

...or "they"
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 03, 2009 9:59 am    Post subject:

LarryCoon wrote:
stillmatic wrote:
Humans and Primates are 96% similar in DNA, with only 4% separating them...

More specifically, the distance between humans and chimpanzees (our closest living relative) is 1.64%; the distance between humans and gorillas is 2.27%; the distance between humans and orangutans is 3.6%; the distance between humans and gibbons is 4.76%; and the distance between chimpanzees and gorillas is 2.28%.

A chimpanzee is more closely related to us than to a gorilla!




The distance between humans and celtic fans is 8.32%.
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 03, 2009 10:00 am    Post subject:

angrypuppy wrote:
LarryCoon wrote:
stillmatic wrote:
Humans and Primates are 96% similar in DNA, with only 4% separating them...

More specifically, the distance between humans and chimpanzees (our closest living relative) is 1.64%; the distance between humans and gorillas is 2.27%; the distance between humans and orangutans is 3.6%; the distance between humans and gibbons is 4.76%; and the distance between chimpanzees and gorillas is 2.28%.

A chimpanzee is more closely related to us than to a gorilla!




The distance between humans and celtic fans is 8.32%.

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PostPosted: Fri Apr 03, 2009 10:26 am    Post subject:

Im not sure if this is a comprehensible question or not, but I'll do my best.

Does our intelligence seem so vastly superior to other animals because of a building block we were given for our brain? Im confused on our ability to create, it seems like what we can do (as far as science//conceptualizing is concered) things unimaginably superior to other animals.

Is this intelligence that we posess actually leaps and bounds ahead of lets say primates? Who can use some tools and do a bit of problem solving....

Im not really sure how to clarify, im too ignorant to ask the question properly.... but if anyone gets the jist, please feel free.

Analogy perhaps = It does not seem like current animals are that much more intelligent than dinosaurs, also, some fish have been around that long, and have not gotten more intelligent. If there was not such a jump in intelligence over this vast amount of time, why from the common ancestor ape, to us?

I hope this is the least bit comprehendable lol.
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 03, 2009 10:31 am    Post subject:

SoCaLjAy wrote:
angrypuppy wrote:
LarryCoon wrote:
stillmatic wrote:
Humans and Primates are 96% similar in DNA, with only 4% separating them...

More specifically, the distance between humans and chimpanzees (our closest living relative) is 1.64%; the distance between humans and gorillas is 2.27%; the distance between humans and orangutans is 3.6%; the distance between humans and gibbons is 4.76%; and the distance between chimpanzees and gorillas is 2.28%.

A chimpanzee is more closely related to us than to a gorilla!




The distance between humans and celtic fans is 8.32%.



roflmao
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PostPosted: Thu May 14, 2009 3:45 pm    Post subject:

Quote:
Molecule of life emerges from laboratory slime

CREATING life in the primordial soup may have been easier than we thought. Two essential elements of RNA have finally been made from scratch, under conditions similar to those that likely prevailed during the dawn of life.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227084.200-molecule-of-life-emerges-from-laboratory-slime.html


Just released today, and pretty dang cool!

Another link to the paper: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7244/full/nature08013.html
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PostPosted: Thu May 14, 2009 4:15 pm    Post subject:

i think the mods were happy that this one died.. 1 week ban for DuncanIdaho for making the mods jobs harder
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 28, 2021 10:27 pm    Post subject:

Haha, let me say to Larry Coon that I appreciate your responses to my post and the posts of several others here in this thread... eleven years ago. I don't know how I came across it right now, but here we are.

Hopefully you don't mind me responding so late to some of the points you made:

LarryCoon wrote:

Points raised by joeblow

Quote:
Even 100,000 years from now, I wonder how science can literally throw out all the rules of the universe (throw away the laws of physics, throw away time, start with zero atoms or sub-atomic particles etc.) to replicate the appearance of something (anything) coming from absolutely nothing.


I’ve already covered a lot of this one in other responses, so I won’t repeat most of it here. Science doesn’t throw out the laws of physics. It’s a misunderstanding of Big Bang cosmology that the universe came from absolutely nothing, as detailed HERE.

And to repeat a central theme of this post, “did X happen?” and “how do we explain it?” are two separate and distinct questions. Even if we don’t have a complete and cogent explanation for all of the big bang (although what we do know is pretty detailed), we have a lot of evidence that the big bang actually happened.


Actually, I didn't mention the Big Bang theory at all, though it is understandable why you would assume that was what I was referring to. Instead, I'm more interested in the "something from nothing" question that I raised regardless of what is theorized to have caused it. I am truly fascinated by this issue.

Maybe it is better to phrase it in a way that gives us more of a bird's eye view of this topic... when it comes to the initial existence of literally anything, does the scientific community lean one way or the other towards one of these two possibilities?

Option A: Something has always existed (even considering the oxymoron of saying "always" when time itself is believed to have its own starting point).

Option B: The existence of nothing was once a reality (i.e., no time, no space, no energy, no matter, no multiverses, no antiverses... nothing).

I looked back and I was asking similar questions outside of the posts of mine you responded to because, as I said, I am fascinated by this issue. Nothing I've read or heard over the years really zeroes in on a "definitive" theory from scientists one way or another, but you in your response, as well as other sources I've checked out (like from Hawkings), suggests that there was likely always "something" as far as anyone can tell with the limited knowledge we have now.

For instance, the link you posted here does address the topic under "The Origin of the Universe" (though my question is open to go well beyond the universe if need be to theorize on the origin of anything/everything).

Your article describes three popular scientific models that were under consideration at the time of that writing: chaotic inflation, mirror universe, or cyclic universe.

Ultimately they say that the issue is unresolved and that there is still too much we don't know to go with one over the other (or in a completely different direction if need be), and that's OK. No doubt 500 years from now, the entire perspective on all of this could be something never even considered today.

But at this time, the possibility that there was never "nothing" as I defined above is so bizarrely interesting that I'll keep looking for more observations and comments. So going back to that quote of mine you addressed above, we may both agree on what I defined as Option A at this point, at least in the most general sense. Correct me if I'm wrong about your position.

Quote:
Quote:
Add to that his further point of everything coming together in randomly accidental ways to bring about the incredibly complex yet orderly system of the universe and life we have today for no particular scientific reason is truly beyond mind-boggling.

I mean, what is the chance that you can take all the letters of the alphabet a million times each, put it in a large container to shake them up in some random fashion, then spill them on to the ground in a way that replicates the works of William Shakespeare?

If you did that exercise a google amount of times (1 followed by a million zeroes), just forming actual words randomly is an accomplishment, but could entire plays be formed by this method? Proper spacing and well formatted? Plays with a plot, moral conflict themes, character development, a logical progression of a beginning, middle, and end?

That is just an activity involving text only, but how much more complex is the logic exhibited in our universe as well as the intricate development of the human condition? These are all questions I've come to wonder on my own, especially recently.

I know religions offer various angles on it... ok, put that completely aside because that is a wholly different topic. This is truly an area in science that (while understanding there are no answers at this point) I constantly look for some sort of logical response that can somehow bring an ounce of understanding to how it all could be possible (lol, it is possible since we are here) when it clearly appears to be scientifically IMpossible.


You’re grossly misrepresenting how evolution works, and applying a false analogy to illustrate it.

First let’s talk about evolution and why your Shakespeare analogy is actually disanalogous. You wrote, “I mean, what is the chance that you can take all the letters of the alphabet a million times each, put it in a large container to shake them up in some random fashion, then spill them on to the ground in a way that replicates the works of William Shakespeare?” This analogy is only analogous to evolution if evolution actually works that way – strictly by random processes. But evolution doesn’t work that way. Some parts ARE random (such as individual genetic mutations), but you completely ignore the effects of natural selection, which means you’re ignoring the part that makes all the difference.

If instead of just repeating separate trials of mixing up & spilling letters over and over, let’s change your thought experiment a little to make it more like how evolution really works. After each trial, instead of picking them all up and starting over from scratch, let’s save the parts that are more Shakespeare-like, and re-roll the rest. Repeat THIS process a number of times, and how long do you think it will take to end up with Shakespeare? Actually, it’s not very long.

Here’s a comparable experiment someone recently did. Instead of random letters and Shakespeare, it was random triangles and the Mona Lisa. To phrase it the way you phrased it above, it’d be “what’s the chance you can take a bunch of random triangles a million times each, put them in a large container, shake them up in some random fashion, then spill them onto a canvas in such a way that replicates the Mona Lisa?” Equivalent concept, right? Now let’s change this analogy into one that’s actually analogous to how evolution works: “If we draw a bunch of random triangles, save the mutations that make the resulting image slightly more Mona Lisa-like, and repeat the experiment from there, how many cycles would it take to form something that actually looks like the Mona Lisa?”

Take a look HERE for the results. When applying a system that actually works similar to evolution, by applying both random mutation AND natural selection, the experiment produces a very recognizable image in fewer than a million iterations. (Side note: The page I just linked to is really cool, and you should check it out in detail.)

A similar (and easier to understand) analogy can be made with coin flips. If you flipped 100 coins, what are the chances they’ll all land heads? One in 2^100, which a pretty freaking huge number – a number 31 digits long. If you repeat the experiment until the end of the Earth, chances are you’ll never get 100 heads. Now let’s change the experiment by adding natural selection. Flip 100 coins. Save the heads, and flip the rest. Save the heads and flip the rest again. Repeat until you have all heads. How many cycles do you need? Only eight or nine. A truly evolution-like process produces results in very few generations.[6]

So you committed a Strawman fallacy by describing something that DOESN’T work like evolution, and then attacking that.

You didn’t directly do it, but this sort of argument is also used to claim the odds are infinitesimal for the first cell to have evolved randomly. This makes the same mistake – it ignores that the first cells were themselves the end products of a long evolutionary process (and the same goes for DNA). It also misapplies the trial analogy. Instead of a single trial going on at a time and the experiment being repeated over and over sequentially, there were actually an ocean full of trials all going on at once.

Now, the opening paragraph of my text you quoted here seems to be something you did not dismiss. In fact, if that was all I said you appear to be in agreement in principal...
"Add to that his further point of everything coming together in randomly accidental ways to bring about the incredibly complex yet orderly system of the universe and life we have today for no particular scientific reason is truly beyond mind-boggling."

I then posted an illustration of how it is impossible for a bunch of letter tiles to be dropped from above in order to perfectly form the entire works of Shakespeare no matter how many times it is attempted, and you went on to emphatically state that what I described doesn't represent any theories in the scientific community as it relates to how complex systems and entities have evolved into what they are today.

Again I say, from a broad point of view, we are in agreement. It is impossible for complex order to come out of pure randomness. Aren't there then only two possibilities?

Option 1: Pure randomness of events over a period of time to eventually produced all of the results of life, the universe and everything that we can readily observe today.

Option 2: Non-random influences played a role in how everything became what it is today.

My letter tile illustration was to point out how impossible Option 1 is using basic common sense. You then gave some great examples to back up Option 2 by first mentioning someone set up a process for having triangles come together in a way over and over that showed eventually an image of the Mona Lisa could be formed by discarding "wrong" triangles along the way, and then you illustrated how 100 coins being flipped can all eventually show heads if along the way the ones that came up tails were re-flipped until they showed up heads.

You stated that the non-random element involved in the processes of the universe is "natural selection". Is that what how you would describe what happened in the Mona Lisa and coin flip examples you posted... that natural selection played a big role in achieving more desirable and orderly results in those cases?

I ask because don't see the correlation between those two examples and natural selection based on what I understand that term to mean. In both cases, a conscience decision was made to have the process continue until the pre-desired outcome was achieved (Mona Lisa's likeness and 100 coins showing heads).

So my follow up question would be this: how does natural selection work without conscience decision making and interatcion of any kind? This would mean ruling out "interference" from computers, humans, aliens, a deity, magic, etc., right? I mean, we agreed above (I think) that it isn't pure randomness achieving these results, so can Option 2 describe natural selection as a non-random influencer without pointing out that something about it is triggering the acceptance/rejection of small changes in outcomes over time? Simply survival of the fittest in all cases?

For instance, in another part of your post, you raised a counterpoint to an argument some have had about the the impossibility of the eye evolving to what it is today (here is the link you posted to address that).

I read the article and it really doesn't get to the heart of questions like the ones above. It says that over time across multiple generations, the eye can evolve into what we have today. But what is influencing those changes? More than simply "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest", how did the implementation of rods (120 million for peripheral vision and low light vision) along with 5 million cones (to distinguish color) come about and work its way into the process for instance?

That's one of many complex sub-systems and specific features of the eye that suggest that something is going on to produce the end result that we agreed above (I think) can't be accounted for by randomness.

You have cones and rods coming into play (as part of the retina) along with the iris (regulating light), cornea (focuses the light), blood vessels (for fuel), optic nerve (to communicate with the brain), etc. all have specific and defined purposes for everything to work in harmony, so does that mean that each component developed independently of all the other parts, or did it happen simultaneously... and how were those developmental features "steered" along the way towards what they each ultimately became?

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How can science explain a pre-science existence if science hadn't yet been invented, and therefore those scientific concepts clearly wouldn't apply?


Huh? So are you saying that we can’t use, say, anthropology to study Roman culture, because the Romans hadn’t invented anthropology? We can’t use linguistics to study ancient languages, because the ancients hadn’t invented linguistics? We can’t use spectrometry to study light from distant stars, because when the light left those starts spectrometry hadn’t been invented? I can’t use a chisel on a rock that’s older than the chisel is? If we could look at a perfectly preserved fish skeleton in a rock, we have to throw up our hands and say “I have no idea what this could possibly be!” because the fish died long before humans came along and invented science? What exactly are you claiming?

Science is a tool, and that tool is perfectly capable of being used to examine evidence that was left before science was invented. I don’t know why you would think otherwise.


In the last quote of mine here that you responded to I don't disagree with the main point you made, which I believe is that just because the scientific community hasn't figured out something yet that always was does not discount the scientific approach to explaining what is at any given point... as more knowledge is obtained, new information is added and refuted theories are discarded. Is that a fair summary?

The point I was making (going back to the origins of the universe) was broader however, and may be better stated this way that seems to be in harmony with your main points:

Beyond the question of what "was" before the origin of our universe, which is too limiting, I want to know either:
- the origin of anything (before there was anything) coming out of absolutely 100% nothing, or
- whether it is the case that "something" in any way, shape or form always existed.

In the end, if answers came about that address both of these possibilities (or opens up others not yet considered), then we both agree that this "pre-science" knowledge we simply be added to science knowledge as a whole. I was trying to point out that even going back to any origin theory of the universe and calling it science, as currently being debated, isn't comprehensive enough.

I agree that successfully expanding on any of these concepts simply adds to science overall and does not replace it, unless for some semantic reason one would rather call all the rules of our universe represents "science", and rules discovered for some other system outside of the universe that possibly break a lot of the rules of this one should be called something else to more clearly distinguish between the two.
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