Denial of Evolution VI.

How about one who could cook delicious recipes and bring you your food?

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Since the human mind is the push that is leading to self replicating machines with all the criteria of life, it follows the human mind defines a new path of evolution that allows departure from biological evolution. Instead of life leading to consciousness, it is consciousness leading to life. This transition is describe in the bible as the creation of the universe; tipping point. This is where mind over matter starts to lead.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

The argument can be made that this is where mind over mind starts to lead. But what could possibly be an intelligent motive to create a near infinitely large (to us) universe filled with space time and the motive beoming the extra ordinary causality for the sake of man's existence in an obscure corner on a spiral of the Milky Way galaxy, at the outer edges of the universe itself?

Consciousness implies dynamic change, true, but so does a flexible DNA structure which is able to try an infinite variety of combinations by chemical means and let nature sort out the best adapted gene, worthy of continuing the good genes in the genepool. But evolution in accordance with certain constant is a natural phenomena, which affects all living things succeeds by its number of trials and errors., and in a successful species, a refinement of the advantage only needs to be very narrow and focused.
This does not sound intentional at all to me. IMO, this supports the gradual refinement, interspersed with real mutations which expressed a new and distinctly different trait or ability than the rest. Speciation of unique adaptations to their environment.
Flowers invite many species to drink from their nectar in the hope of becoming pollinated. Very effective.

In New Zealand there is only one flying bird, a sea gull, who nests deep in the forest only to march along a narrow path who hunts fish.off the coastline. All other birds are flightless and the kiwi may carry a 1 lb egg, before depositing it, whereupon the father broods the egg for another 90 days, longer than any other specie of bird, whereupon a fully formed bird emerges ready leave the Hollow in a matter of hours., fully equipped to hunt for food at birth. That's pretty awesome adaptation.

The reason for flightless birds was the absence of predators which probably disappeared when New Zealand sank to the bottom of the ocean which wiped out most species except those who had lived at high altitudes before the sinking and did not lose there habitat from flooding. After the Island began to rise due to tectonic actions it may have rapidly reemerged and reforested and a whole new area of lush green forests without predators began where birds did not need to take to the air from threat or in pursuit of food that was laying on the forest floor for the picking. But they sure developed excellent legs for running as can been seen in the great Australian flightless birds. One of New Zealant's Penquins scaling steep cliffs to find there way down to the water and back up and into the forest.

It is estimated that New Zealand has risen some 12000 ft and instead of a small individual islands (peaks) when the island was under water, NZ now sports Alpine mountains with permanent snow . This again brought in an era of evolutionary experimentation and created a snow parrot who does not fly.. just great stuff . Ill post it if I find it again.

Madagascar is another such research gem . Lemurs are an abundand and old species and may well represent a fairly close ancestor species connection between lemurs and man.

Anyway, both New Zealand and Madagascar are remarkable natural laboratories for paleontologists. Check out some websites.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

are you referring to my statement "machines will never come alive"?
they might come alive with intelligent intervention, never on their own accord.

 

Once we recognize that living organisms are no more alive than machines are, that line of reasoning takes a turn and leaves Creationism in the dust. Let me refine that: cells are a very special class of machines. They just seem to be operating at over-unity which gives creationists the need to invent souls to explain all of that order, complexity and missing energy they can't account for. Of course the real reason for their accounting shortfall is that they are deliberately ignoring all of the science that explains what's going on in the world around them.

Creationists make God forbid certain reactions that would randomly occur. They make God sneak back into the schoolhouse and erase select permutations from the chalkboard, as if every day the class begins with a selective memory that God reprograms in our sleep. All of this is their defense mechanism, born out of intense fear that everything they've invested in their beliefs is proving to have been a waste of their time.

It was more than enough - the rest is details. All of the Creation Science they invent will never face the reality of those details. It's one thing to build a house of cards, and then quite another to try to prove it isn't made of cellulose coated in polymers.

Amino acids must precede self replicating molecules, which precede synthesis of the cell membrane. Even if all that produces is self-replicating RNA inside of a protective shell, it's enough to meet the Creationist demand for life from life. The Miller-Urey experiment isn't that big a deal to science one way or the other, but it brought Creationism to its knees. It proved once and for all that their childish oversimplifications can always be answered with methodical testing - that the truth is stranger than fiction. Of course it made for some really great sci-fi movies, too.

Spontaneously!

If you mean accidents aren't accidental then there would be no need for insurance companies. Monte Carlo and Las Vegas would be ghost towns.

If not for my interest in science I would not even know what a probability density function is. These humps in the illustration Lewin used - those are Gaussian densities. This may be another reason folks assume you are religious. Creationists (esp. fundies) are heavily invested in a formulaic world in which God outlaws random processes, but only when the Creationists are looking. Shot noise, come to think of it, would be an interesting thing for them to explain. Cells are not only not immune from stochastic events, they rely on them. Nothing would circulate inside the cell if not for Brownian motion. It's facts like these that distinguish science from Creationism. Creationists are too accustomed to patterning the world to their personal expectations, as opposed to the automaton we call expectation. Creationism is all about sweeping science under the rug and pretending the house is immaculate.

Right now we have the illustration Lewin used which is good enough for me. Obviously they never found any issues with Darwin other than tempo. 99% of the issues that came up in this thread so far are depicted in that illustration.

 

They once did; no reason they couldn't do so again. (Of course we will probably get impatient waiting for that to happen.)

 

never say never. We a mortal and as such many things are improbable but nothing is impossible because we simply can't know for sure. And as Leopold pointed out we did come into existence without intelligent intervention (at least without proof or reasonable evidence of intelligent intervention) so it has already happened.

 

Man, you nailed that. Perfect 10 all across the board. :thumbsup:

This to me is what is so puzzling about the whole Creationist argument (though I haven't researched the pat answers they have lined up for you).

This entire discussion - everything from the moment Darwin published until today - as far as the perpetuation of denial is concerned - all collapses once you bring this very graphic evidence to bear. Who in their right mind cannot see the simplest of "cut and paste" errors going on in the arrival of true humans? Besides, there are dozens of known anomalies that already plague us - and they do indeed involve cut and paste operations that presumably take place during meiosis.

Your point though makes all of the rest of their forays into Creation "Science" a complete waste of time. Once we have uncovered the "special mechanism" for creating "special primates" aside from the normal mode of mutation and gene flow, nothing else matters. Humans really did originate from the same DNA that created modern apes, and once the debate re-centers to what you just said, all of Creationism simply evaporates.

It also answers the question jan ardena has been asking, which is (evidently) that animals of one "kind" can't be born from animals of another "kind". Obviously that's a bit of an oversimplification, since the chromosomal anomaly has to take root in an entire population . . . which leaves for great remake of Altered States (overdue for a remake anyway). But that's a rather tedious detail, not at all undermining the reality of your explanation.

Once we understand that this singular genetic anomaly redefines the entire argument we get closer to the central truth that all of Creation Science is trying so desperately to ignore. Humans were not part of a "special creation" per the Creation Myth, but by the nature of the "very special kind of genetic anomaly" you are discussing. It's an error in splicing, something so easy to visualize that the Bible Thumpers are going to hate you for bringing it up again. They will soon be distracting us with more red herrings, but we don't have their selective memory. After all this fact was sealed into our brains the first time it was revealed to us in our studies.

I give you the "Best Answer" vote for the whole thread, and for the 5 incarnations that preceded us. :thumbsup: (Makes no difference if it was the first time it was said, you said it best of all.)

And I have just 2 words for the hardened denialists: SPLICE YOU!!!!

heh heh heh

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

machines aren't alive.

it wasn't enough to produce life and it appears it wasn't enough to even begin to.

it depends on what you call "life".
so far i haven't seen any definitions for life presented.

every lab test i am aware of has failed to prove what you just said.
again we need a definition before we go very much further down this road.

most "accidents" are directly caused by negligence by one of the drivers involved.
accident, something that cannot be prepared for.

BTW, you seem to be getting "creationist fever"

 

Perhaps leopold was suffering from some kind of observer bias with "humans aren't animals".

This is easy to prove wrong: humans are mammals, mammals are animals, therefore humans are animals (in fact closely related to other mammals called primates).

 

Since all living things originate from their common ancestors, even though primates may be mankind's common ancestor, this does not stop Mankind" becoming/being a class of its own.
It doesn't take a whole lot of intelligence to notice Humans have become, at least showing signs of beginning to be, a new class of living organism "Homo destructor" - the only living thing to destroy the planet it lives on!

 

You mean, not artificial machines, although that distinction gets fuzzier as time goes on. Yet cells are chemical machines. They possess no magic, no soul, and no surplus energy; all they do are the kinds of reactions any chemical plant does/would/could do.

The old definition of life has given way to our understanding that there was prebiotic life.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

​

I think the contemporary understanding of prebiotic life is full of rich evidence that makes biogenesis more solidly founded than ever before.

At some point that concept becomes fairly useless. All that really matters to a Creationist is some particular kind of evidence, and when it's found they simply hire more nuts to invent new kinds of denial against it.

Life is chemical; chemical reactions occur spontaneously as a consequence of something as basic as Brownian motion. Everything in labs involves something unexpected. The best you can do is calibrate for noise. But even the first lab classes in science concern basic measurements, with questions at the end asking students to explain why successive measurements are not exactly the same. Chemistry is highly probabilistic, whether you're dealing with pH, the equilibrium after a reaction, or spontaneous binding of a lipid barrier around a strand of self-replicating RNA--if that's how we choose to define "first life".

All you need is self-replicating RNA which has been done. I took that a little farther and added a cell wall to appease Creationists that this would be the minimum definition of "life from life" since there is no hard definition one way or the other.

Accident also means uncaused, at least in the statistical sense. Wherever the roulette wheel lands, in connection to where you placed your bet, is random. The same is true when we try to trace the exact source of genetic code of any person. It's a lottery.

This thread has been about Creation Science since the OP. I'm just reminded of it a lot as I read the posts.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Actually yes, it does. Mankind is its own species but not its own class. Our class is mammalia.

Oh, green algae did an excellent job of destroying the reducing atmosphere of the planet a few billion years back. They've done far more than we have to change this place.

 

We'll be breeding out of test tubes soon. Mammalian ancestry for sure but we've taken the next evolutionary step beyond that; we've now gone into the "Gods" for want of a better word.
As far as destroying our planet you can be fooled into thinking you are doing all right but it is an artificial heaven you are living in.

 

?? We already are. However, tricks to increase fertility hardly change even our species, much less our class.

We've cloned sheep; does that mean that sheep are now a new class of organism?

Yes, most people nowadays do live in an 'artificial heaven.' It's better than wearing a bear.

 

Sounds like you're hoping to trace life to Mercury. So far it seems like probiotic genesis requires an abundance of liquid water, a temperate climate, carbon and nitrogen sources, and a pumping of energy from source to sink. One thing that comes to mind about Mercury's proximity to the Sun is whether any primitive cells would even form under the higher solar radiation. Solar flares might prevent life from ever succeeding there, even if it ever had the necessary ingredients.

It does bring to mind though how Creationists like to point to Earth as specially situated for special creation, as if all logic is reversible.

 

artificial machines aren't alive and neither are chemical processes.

the best definition of life i can come up with is the living cell, even that fails to define what life actually is.

biogenesis, life comes from life.

who cares what matters to a creationist?
you seem to have "creationist" on the brain for some reason.

assumption pure and simple, but it does appear that life only operates inside cells.

yes,spontaneously.
don't confuse that with easily.
there are other chemical processes which must happen too.
washing of precipitates, the need for catalysts, the exclusion of certain chemicals, chirality, all of these, and more, take part.

i gave my definition of "life", maybe you can add to it.

like i said, who cares what "appeases" creationists.
remove your "additions" then repost.

can you give an example of an "accident without a cause", one that can be verified that is.

not from me.

 

You need to read the whole thread! 230 pages of it. It looks improbable when looked at it now but prior to solar flares what then?

 

We are just complex chemical processes.

 

At any one time when one species emerges from its ancestral gene pool there isn't an instant cut off from one type( species) to the other. Just the same as with Homo sapiens still having neanderthal genes and probably ape-like features at times too, Homo destructor is just diverging away from Homo sapiens.
But the damage sustained already is horrendous.