Questions For Which Evolutionists Have No Answers

It's been mentioned many times before, but creationists don't seem to get it.

When people rely on poofism to answer all the unknown questions about our environment, they can "relieve" their minds from challenging why we exist, and where we came from.

At the Field Museum in Chicago, they have exhibits that show that homo sapiens are descended from the primate family. I wonder what the parents are telling their children about evolution when they see that exhibit?

I'll say it again. There are some finite number of "poof" or miracle stories in the bible, probably between 30 and about 100 in the whole book.

Evoloserism on the other hand requires an infinite series of probabilistic miracles and zero-probability events.

ANY religion is better than evolution, and that includes Voodoo and Santeria. You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine of each of the existing religions and even that would be infinitely better than evolution.

Poofism in the bible ended with the bible; there's only one conclusion to arrive at this by simple logic. Those miracles never happened, and the men who wrote those comic books with the knowledge they had at that time didn't have much "science" to rely on. They were relegated to their small world; a very small part of earth we see shrinking with science almost daily today.

And I'll say it again too... that statement is incorrect. It is an invalid representation of evolution.

Obviously the bible is right. I mean, after all, the world is flat, isn't it?

USAF, That's the kind of mental gymnastics they have to live with in order to believe in "creationism." It seems to work for many - even my siblings.

You have just demonstrated you lack any understanding of evolution.

Just because something is improbable does not mean it is impossible.

If life on a planet had a one in a billion chance of happening... given the likely number of possible planets out there to choose from... we HAVE to be one of the places that it happened.

Just because one can't wrap their mind around the sheer time involved in evolution doesn't mean it isn't a plausible explanation.

Every real expert who has taken any sort of a look at it has flatly started that abiogenesis is impossible, number one.

Other than that, if somebody had a theory which required one or two probabilistic miracles in the entire history of the world, I might be willing to listen. But not something which requires billions and quadrillions of them.

Evolutoin stands everything we know about probability theory on its head. Even the simplest one-celled animals are vastly more complex than anything man has ever built and involve information codes which do not just happen, and every sort of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth represents some sort of an endless progression of zero-probability events.

You can see this easily enough in the case of flying birds. A flying bird requires a baker's dozen highly complex subsystems, any one of which would be antifunctional until the day the entire thing came together: wings, flight feathers, the system for turning flight feathers so that they open on upstrokes, specialized tails and balance parameters, beaks (since you won't have hands to feed yourself any more), highly efficient heart and lungs which are totally different from any other living creature, flow through designs, specialized light bones etc. etc.

The odds of any of those things evolving is an infinitessimal and the ods of them all evolving is a tenth or twelth order infinitessimal since in probability theory to compute the odds of multiple events, you multiply the individual odds together.

Moreover in real life, were any one of those things to miraculously evolve on a non flying creature, then by the time another 10,000 years rolled around and the second such feature were to evolve, the first, having been anti-functional the entire while, would have devolved and/or become vestigial.

Again, the same logic applies for every kind of complex creature which has ever been seen in the world.

The dialectic is not between evolution and religion; it's between evolution and mathematics. That's an easy choice sine mathematics is actually useful.

You're assuming another 'poof'. Birds just didn't 'poof' appear fully winged and winged-tipped. Wowser. birds are complex, no kidding, they have been evolving to their present state for the past 450 million years.

Joe(one peep at a time)Nation

Care to try actually addressing any of the points I made there, Joe??

Yet, here we are, with evidence out the gazoo regarding evolution, and there you are with nothing that even remotely backs up your storybook.

Multiple piles of evidence compiled from disciplines remote to each other , collected independently have all conspired to create the underpinnings of evolution. It would only be a miracle if there were no basis in fact for the data and , like the Creationists storybook, the writings of origins had to be wrung out of obscure phrased myths compiled in about 3 total text pages.
Even when a Creationist explains the series of supposed events, he must interpret the Bible texts in amanner that is convoluted and without logic. Science, on the other hand, merely has merely tokeep searching the strata or the genome for compelling evidence and be actually able to "test" their hypotheses in a manner that has , so far, not disappointed/
For example, when Deschler and Shubin said that there should be an intermediate "fishopod" that links fish and amphibians, they stated that, rom their knowledge to that point, the fishapod should first appear in Mid Devonian Rocks. SO they went to Mid Devonian rock outcrops and began looking. ALmost 5 years later they came up with Tiktalik from the Devonian section of Upper Canada.
Since Creationists dont go out and study anythiong to suuport their hypotheses, its difficult to get their stand on just about any point they try to make.
They claim that Evolution is a losing science and being defeated , yet they dont have anything to counteroffer, besides some old tired Bible verses. NO SCIENCE.
i think theyre both afraid to get out in the field because of wat they may find and are unable to know where to begin anyway.

Think Im wrong here?.
Gunga protests much but offers absolutely nothing in response. He tries to critique some scientific methodologies (like K/Ar) but he fails to propose any thing to definitively support his own views.
Why he hasnt even made any inroads into supporting a "flood myth". Both he and rl are trying to have us believe in their gussied up myths as scientific fact, yet the curious lack of any evidence for their side , or the lack of any attempt at gathering any supportive evidence is troubling and rather "unscientific".

Just because youre an ignorant bstard, dont hate me cause Im informed

You are not willing to listen.

Because the actual theory of evolution (the one which you don't seem to understand) does not require any probabilistic miracles at all. Given the combination of random mutation and natural selection, evolution is an unavoidable. It's a virtual mathematical certainty.



You are imagining irreducibly complex situations which don't exist. Your examples of the process of evolution demonstrate that you do not understand evolution at all.

You have constructed an erroneous vision of the way evolution works, and you are complaining that your erroneous vision doesn't (and wouldn't) work. And we agree. If evolution were what you thought it is, we would object to it also, but it's not.

Your entire base of objectios are arrayed against your imaginary misinterpretation of evolution.

Essentially, you are objecting to yourself.

What is your reference for this? Evolution wasn't thought up and isn't studied by 3 or 4 idiots. It is a nearly unanimously accepted theory on the origins of life. I imagine your "real" experts are the nutjobs who went to a community college for a few years and proclaimed themselves experts. Or more likely, they are bible thumpers with just enough education to fool the lesser educated populace.



Maybe it just stands everything you know about probability on its head. I'm fine with it. Then again, I've actually studied many types of math - to include probability.



Just because you can't understand why an animal might have a certain feature, don't make it useless to that animal. It makes it useless to you.



See above.



Speaking of usefulness... What use is religion? All it ever seems to do is get people killed or keep people in the dark about their world. The bible tells us to kill our neighbor should he plant more than one crop in a field. It tells us the world is flat. Yes... terribly useful. Thank dog we have it.

Ros and USAFHokie are crackin' me up here . . . seeing them demolish Gunga Din reminds me of the expression about bringing a knife to a gun fight . . .

BANG!

I've always loved the term "abiogenesis." It's calculated to suggest that something improbable has occurred. It is also a disingenuous term, because it has to assume what constitutes "life." Prions and virii demonstrate that there are parasitic protein combinations which can replicate without neucleic acid, which throws into question just what should be a reasonable definition of life. Both prions and virii are acellular, and do not metabolize--they are completely and ultimately parasitic. Because of the ambiguity, not all scientists are certain that virii should be considered living organisms, and most don't consider prions to be a form of life. All of which helps to beg the question of abiogenesis.

In fact, the formation of proteins which will join in long chains is something with high probability. Chemically speaking, proteins are complex, being long chains, but not complicated, forming from only four elements--carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen--all of which were present abundantly in the early atmosphere. Free oxygen was then almost non-existent, and iron, as well as non-metals such a sulfur, rapidly "cleansed" the environment of free oxygen. (Geological evidence of iron bonding with free oxygen billions of years ago is abundant.) Estimates of the amount of carbon dioxide in the early atmosphere range from ten to thousands of times the amount which is currently present. Nitrogen and hydrogen were abundant in the early atmosphere.

About 2 billion years ago, cyanobacteria first appeared. What life was present (and it likely was abundant, even if relatively simple in comparison to subsequent life forms) was anaerobic--the prokaryotes (cyanobacteria) dumped huge amounts of oxygen into the atmosphere, a good deal of which dissolved into water, and in greater quantities than iron, sulfur or other elements or compounds could remove. This was the probably the first great environmental disaster for living organisms, as anaerobic life forms were initially the most common, having formed in an environment without free oxygen. The modern cells from which almost all life is now formed very likely formed when anaerobic life forms combined with mitochondria or chloroplasts, cyanobaterial forms which were endosymbiotic.

Without the incredibly lethal (in terms of life as it was then) environmental pollution resulting from the production of free oxygen by cyanobacteria, the animal life forms now on the planet which respire oxygen would not be possible. But this is not a matter of chance, nor is in an order of highly improbable events. The formation of the proteins which became RNA and DNA, as well as forming all the other structures of the cell, and cell walls can form from glycoproteins and polysaccharides, both of which can readily form in the absence of life, all were by simple, and under favorable circumstances, chemically inevitable processes. (Glycoproteins are formed from polysaccharides in combination with proteins, which will inevitably be free and abundant in the conditions prevailing on the surface of the ancient earth.)

Not only is all of this not of a low order of probability--it is all of a high order of probability, and not at all the product of "chance," nor is it random. All these chemical compounds form as a result of the immutable laws of chemistry. Selenium is essential, in trace amounts, to the survival of almost all animals. Without it, we would sicken and slowly die (it is crucial in the formation of many enzymes without which we could not live). In too large a quantity, it is poisonous, and would rapidly kill us. This is, once again, the product of immutable chemical reactions. It is not any kind of spooky, cosmic serendipity which makes these things true--it is not the product of some goofy "intelligent designer" which dishonest people will not name because they don't want to be laughed out of court. These things are all true because chemical reactions assure that nothing else can be true.

Life is inevitable under certain circumstances, and that those circumstances obtain on this planet is proven by the simple fact of the existence of life.

Hey- they've got Gunga in their sights again.

They love it.

A pyramid of tin cans at three feet with pillows and the prize worth half the ticket price and a doxie who knows no better.

Wink,wink!