real life wrote:farmerman wrote:real life Quote: Imagine if we took your Pentium apart and put all the components in a room together . Then we create a mini tornado in the room which comes and goes at varying speeds. How long till it reassembles your computer? And it has the advantage of having all the right parts, in the right amounts, in perfect condition from the start.
Boy, this is original. Its been over 3 months since someone has dissassembled a
ADD TECHNOLOGICAL DEVICE HERE SO TO MAKE THE POINT THAT WE CREATE GADGETS
The fact that biological systems operate against a thermo gradient all the time (Thus making life after death rather problematical), or that "self assembly by mRNA/RNA/DNA polymerization is well understood and can be seen in its own evolutionary trail means absolutely nothing to the budding WJ Bryans of the world
"Dont mess mahh thinkin wiff none Oh that dere scientifical talk , we know dat somehow, someway dat God was in dere a workin away at dis, an he lef all dat dere fossil junk jess to mess up our minds"
Please real life---at least be original, youre getting to be a scratched CD. We know that you dont listen or pay any attention, but at least your posts were somewhat clever (until this oft repeated gem).
Theres at least 4 other a2K members who use the "re assembly argument" as somehow being a valid proof of something. At Least it gives them comfort that they are making a point. Now you join that august group of "ORTHODOX ANTI-ASSEMBLISTS"
Ha, I'm honored I'm sure. Though I have no idea who you refer to. Oh well.
The Tornado in the Junkyard
The eccentric astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle once famously said that evolution was as likely as a tornado blowing through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747 jumbo jet. This saying was gleefully seized upon by creationists, who have promulgated it ever since as "proof" of the impossibility of evolution producing complex, highly ordered forms.
As will be shown, this argument is not even close to being an accurate representation of evolution. It is a straw man, a ridiculous caricature of how evolution works. However, it is first necessary to establish a few things about the credentials of its author. As stated above, Fred Hoyle was an astronomer -- he was not trained in biology, paleontology, population genetics, or any other field having to do with evolution. He was no more qualified to make pronouncements about evolution than any layman, and indeed his comments demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of the theory. Nevertheless, whatever he was, he was certainly not a creationist.
"The creationist is a sham religious person who, curiously, has no true sense of religion. In the language of religion, it is the facts we observe in the world around us that must be seen to constitute the words of God. Documents, whether the Bible, Qu'ran or those writings that held such force for Velikovsky, are only the words of men. To prefer the words of men to those of God is what one can mean by blasphemy. This, we think, is the instinctive point of view of most scientists who, curiously again, have a deeper understanding of the real nature of religion than have the many who delude themselves into a frenzied belief in the words, often the meaningless words, of men. Indeed, the lesser the meaning, the greater the frenzy, in something like inverse proportion." --Fred Hoyle & Chandra Wickramasinghe, Our Place in the Cosmos, p.14
"We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia.... Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today.... Darwin's theory, which is now accepted without dissent, is the cornerstone of modern biology. Our own links with the simplest forms of microbial life are well-nigh proven." --Fred Hoyle & Chandra Wickramasinghe, Lifecloud: The Origin of Life in the Universe, p.15-16
With that established, we turn to the tornado in the junkyard. It is the purpose of this essay to show that this analogy says nothing about the validity of evolution because it fails to represent evolution on at least four crucial counts.
It operates according purely to random chance.
It is an example of single-step, rather than cumulative, selection.
It is a saltationary jump -- an end product entirely unlike the beginning product.
It has a target specified ahead of time.
The first point is the most important. The tornado in the junkyard is an example of intricate, complex and highly ordered forms being produced by nothing more than random chance. But evolution is not chance. (See here for more on this.) Rather, it operates according to a fixed, deterministic law -- the law of natural selection -- which has the power to favor some assemblages over others; it preferentially selects for those adaptations which improve fitness and selects against those that do not. The tornado, by contrast, slams parts together and tears them apart with no preference whatsoever, thus completely failing to represent natural selection, the force which drives all of evolution. To more accurately represent evolution, one would have to grant the tornado some power to recognize assemblages of parts which could serve as part of a 747 and prevent it from tearing them apart.
Secondly, the tornado analogy is an example of single-step selection -- in one step, it goes from a random pile of parts to a fully assembled airliner. This is completely unlike evolution, which operates according to a process of cumulative selection -- complex results being built up gradually in a repetitive process guided at each step by selective forces. To more accurately represent evolution, the tornado could be sent through the junkyard not once, but thousands or millions of times, at each step preserving chance assemblages of parts that could make up a jumbo jet.
Thirdly, in relation to the point above, the tornado in the junkyard is an example of saltation -- a sudden leap in which the end product is completely different from the beginning product. Evolution does not work this way; birds do not hatch out of dinosaur eggs and monkeys do not give birth to humans. Rather, species grow different over time through a process of slow change in which each new creature is only slightly different from its ancestor, the whole forming a gradually shading continuum in which any two steps are almost indistinguishable from each other, though the creatures at the beginning and end of the continuum may be very different indeed. If we sent a tornado through a junkyard once, we would not expect to see a complete airplane; but if we repeated the process thousands or millions of times, at each step preserving useful assemblages, we might see a jumbo jet gradually taking shape out of slowly accreting collections of parts. The idea is the same with living things. We do not see complex new creatures appearing suddenly in the fossil record; rather, we see them gradually forming by a process of modification from a line of increasingly similar ancestors.
And finally, the tornado analogy fails to represent evolution in one more significant way: it has a target specified ahead of time. Evolution does not. Natural selection is not a forward-looking process; it cannot select for what may become useful in the future, only what is immediately useful in the present. To more accurately represent evolution, we might add the additional stipulation that the tornado would be allowed to assemble, not just a jumbo jet, but any functional piece of machinery.
A tornado racing through a junkyard hundreds of thousands of times, at each step somehow preserving rather than tearing apart functional assemblages of parts, with the aim of ultimately producing some sort of working machine, be it a 747, a station wagon or a personal computer. This is still not a very good analogy to describe evolution, but it's a lot better than the implausible caricature of random, single-step saltation with a predetermined target the creationists put forth -- an analogy that utterly fails to represent evolution in every significant way.
The "tornado-in-a-junkyard" argument has since mutated into several variants -- one of the most common is "if I disassembled my watch and shook up the pieces in a box, I wouldn't get my watch again" -- but the basic idea, and the basic flaws, are the same.
http://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/tornado.html
P
