I just love sitting back and watch the little school children pointlessly bicker about stupid crap.

But who or what is beca and why does she make people sound more persuasive?

Originally posted by adjensen
Actually, I think that their point (those who say that it's a theory) is to differentiate it from a law. Some people treat evolution like it is a law, when it is not.

Scientific theories are backed by evidence. Laws are measurements of forces that cannot change. A theory doesn't become a law when proven. This line of thinking is simply ignorance of scientific terminology. A good example of this is the theory of gravity and the law of gravity. We know 100% the law of gravity is true, and it is included in the THEORY of gravity. A theory is a working model of how something works. A hypothesis is an educated guess. A Law is a measurement. Get your terminology right before appealing to that fallacious argument. Theories don't become laws and I've never heard a single proponent of evolution refer to it as a law. It's a theory because its backed by evidence. If it wasn't, it would be a hypothesis.

Evolution is utterly dependent on randomness, so to say that it does not proceed by random chance is a logical fallacy.

That's not true. Evolution is "utterly dependent" on BOTH genetic mutations AND the environment. If there was no natural selection, creatures would never change beyond genetic variation and drift. If genetic mutations didn't happen, creatures would simply go extinct whenever major environment changes happened. The direction of evolution is dictated by the environment, not the mutations themselves. If it wasn't the mutations would be irrlevant and nothing would change. Mutations can add up over years and years and years but go unnoticed until a major change in environment which makes a certain species adapt or die out.

What exactly qualifies a mutation as "random"? It's such a poor description of what actually happens. It could be something like cosmic radiation that causes a genetic change. If we know the cause, and why it happens, how can it be considered random?

Originally posted by Barcs
Get your terminology right before appealing to that fallacious argument.

I didn't say that it was MY argument, I was just pointing out why people say that.

Evolution is utterly dependent on randomness, so to say that it does not proceed by random chance is a logical fallacy.

That's not true. Evolution is "utterly dependent" on BOTH genetic mutations AND the environment.

... argh ...

You're not a big one on logic, either, are you?

If something requires randomness (as we both seem to agree that it does,) then it is dependent on randomness, period. End of story. Stop arguing. I never said it wasn't dependent on anything else, I said it was dependent on randomness, which it is, and which the original article said it was not.

Evolution cannot happen without genetic drift, but it can happen in an unchanging environment -- to say that the environment need change implies that species improvement can only happen in relationship to the natural environment.

What exactly qualifies a mutation as "random"? It's such a poor description of what actually happens. It could be something like cosmic radiation that causes a genetic change. If we know the cause, and why it happens, how can it be considered random?

Because knowing how something happens is not knowing "why" something happens. If it is unpredictable, as any sufficiently chaotic system is, then the change is random.

Originally posted by adjensen
I didn't say that it was MY argument, I was just pointing out why people say that.

And I pointed out why they were wrong.

If something requires randomness (as we both seem to agree that it does,) then it is dependent on randomness, period. End of story. Stop arguing.

Dependent on randomness is not equal to driven by randomness. People make that argument to suggest that evolution is random. It's not. Besides, that argument can be made for any situation in the history of planet earth. It doesn't prove anything. "Randomness" is a factor in everybody's day to day lives. But what is randomness? It's usually a natural process that we might not fully understand. It's not like there's a random number generator determining these things. They are governed by natural processes, natural events and reactions to such events. Cause and effect. Imagine an asteroid collides with another and breaks off orbit. It eventually reaches earth and enters earth's atmosphere. It travels down to the surface and strikes a person in the chest, fatally wounding them. Was this person killed by a meteorite or randomness?

Evolution cannot happen without genetic drift, but it can happen in an unchanging environment -- to say that the environment need change implies that species improvement can only happen in relationship to the natural environment.

The improvement happens when the trait in particular becomes dominant amongst the species. Yes, it is pretty much always directly related to the environment and sexual selection.

Because knowing how something happens is not knowing "why" something happens. If it is unpredictable, as any sufficiently chaotic system is, then the change is random.

But they can predict certain things about the mutations, and they do know many of the causes. If you really want to get into the semantics of using How and Why, you need to get into philosophy. I'm talking about science, which describe the how. The why is irrelevant and may not even exist beyond an advanced description of the how.

free book on catastrophies/evolution

earth in upheaval by immanuel velikovsky

Originally posted by Barcs

Originally posted by adjensen
If something requires randomness (as we both seem to agree that it does,) then it is dependent on randomness, period. End of story. Stop arguing.

Dependent on randomness is not equal to driven by randomness. People make that argument to suggest that evolution is random. It's not.

There is no "driving process" in evolution -- that implies intelligence and direction. I'm not making the argument that evolution is driven by randomness, I don't think it's "driven" by anything. What I said was, from the first post, that it is dependent on it.

Let's do a thought experiment... imagine a planet with an environment that never changes, but is favourable to life. Some ideal temperature, distance from the sun, gravity, etc. Now, let's imagine that there is one homogenous type of life on this planet, single celled; mushrooms; cats; whatever, and that on this planet, there is no genetic drift, no random mutations... like the environment, life never changes.

Roll the clock forward a million years, and what would we expect to find on our hypothetical planet? Business as usual, of course -- the environment can't change, and neither can the life forms, so it is not likely to look any different than it did a million years prior.

Now, let's say that we have the option of adding change, but only to one side. We can either make the environment variable, or we can make the life variable, through random mutation. Make your choice, then move forward a million years... with which choice will life still exist?

Opting for genetic drift, there's no telling what life might look like, but it is highly likely to still exist. Opting for natural selection through environmental change is almost certain to result in a planet wide extinction.

Because knowing how something happens is not knowing "why" something happens. If it is unpredictable, as any sufficiently chaotic system is, then the change is random.

But they can predict certain things about the mutations, and they do know many of the causes.

Everything that I've seen on this end have been attempts to "intelligence up" natural selection (and not always by the ID types -- I've read articles by evolutionary biologists who clearly are attempting to add some level of intelligent direction to natural selection,) and I've never been impressed by the rationale behind any of it.

It has been a long time since I did much research in complex systems and chaos theory (one of the things that I studied in Graduate School was meteorology and I wandered off into chaos from that,) but I'm of the mind that, while it is possible to make absolute predictions that remove the concept of randomness from complex chaotic systems, the computational needs to do so are likely beyond the abilities of anything now or in the future.

"Large part of the reason why Creationist arguments against evolution can sound so persuasive is beca"


is this the title of this thread [what's beca?]? ... or is this it ...

"Large part of the reason why Creationist arguments against evolution can sound so persuasive is because they are both wrong".

Have any transitional fossils been discovered yet? Also theres a few more questions if you search. Such as this one.

HOW DID SEX ORIGINATE? Asexual reproduction gives up to twice as much reproductive success (‘fitness’) for the same resources as sexual reproduction, so how could the latter ever gain enough advantage to be selected? And how could mere physics and chemistry invent the complementary apparatuses needed at the same time (non-intelligent processes cannot plan for future coordination of male and female organs).

Id like to know the answer to this.

I may be way off-base here, as this is not a subject I spend a lot of time looking in to, but why can't Evolution and Creationism co-exist?

Is it possible to have been "created" and then left to evolve over time through the same process' adjensen described?

Originally posted by sheepslayer247
I may be way off-base here, as this is not a subject I spend a lot of time looking in to, but why can't Evolution and Creationism co-exist?

Is it possible to have been "created" and then left to evolve over time through the same process' adjensen described?

That's effectively the argument of Intelligent Design, which is treated with disdain by most radical Darwinists (as opposed to simple proponents of evolution.)