lpetrich

Eric H:
Did the temperature of the big bang sterilize all matter that came out of it.

Yes, and it was sterile to begin with. And so what?

Would the matter in all planets in all galaxies start of sterile?

Yes, and so what?

(comparison of bones and muscles to familiar mechanical objects...)

I started of by studying the amount of detail between just two leg bones until I had a reasonable understanding of how this works, and then I tried to apply this same attention to detail to other parts of the skeleton.

However, one does not need all that fancy detail to build a joint -- just a high-performance one.

Just another daft question what are the odds of 20 or 30 teeth ending up in the mouth were they should be, if there is no design, you could attach 20 teeth to 20 different parts of the body.

Teeth are likely specialized scales; shark teeth continue to resemble enlarged shark scales.

So some scale-growth system would get a mutation that says: if you see rim-of-mouth growth factors, then grow big.

That?s how I look at a skeleton, the vast majority of components have to works pretty well together or you reduce it to junk status.

Except that skeletons have not originated in an all-at-once fashion. Later skeletons are modifications of earlier skeletons, and the ancestral skeleton was likely something simple, like a notochord, a simple cartilage rod that's present in vertebrate embryos and in the Amphioxus.

(Cells dividing rapidly...)
As I see it that makes your argument more fragile, because every generation has to successfully pass on bits and improve the next generation.

However, 100.000000% success is NOT necessary; all that's necessary is a reasonable degree of reliability.

Happy Wonderer

LOL! Matter is sterile. Nobody (that I know of) claims that life evolved from microorganisms that survived the big bang. If they did, they would be begging the question of where those microorganisms came from. Most planets and stars probably are completely lifeless -- without even a bacterium to their name.


That is explained well by the process of random mutation and natural selection. I can't see what point you are trying to make. Some subset of the decendents of particular individuals of the ancient single-celled family are still single-celled creatures. A tiny minority of those decendents are multi-celled. An even tinier fraction are vertabrates.

If you can't understand biology, then it is difficult for you to make assertions about biological processes. I really think that you can understand biology if you try, and there are patient people here to explain it to you. (Not me, I'm a computer programmer...)



What laymen frequently miss is the incredible flexibility of biological processes and mechanisms. There was a woman in the Soviet Union who made Stalin a pen inlaid with intriciate pattern of tiny gemstones -- with her feet! She had lost her arms in the war.

My point is that even fairly major changes can happen to the skeleton and the organism can continue to function. If the changes happen to make the organism function better in its environment, there is a good chance that those changes will be passed along.


This line of reasoning makes little sense to me. A trillion generations means an even larger number (googelplex?) of individuals. This lessens the chance of extinction rather than
increasing it!

Certainly death will happen, it happens to most individuals. Even extinction happens to most species (as another pointed out.) That is how species change -- it is called "Evolution", I think...

hw

Late_Cretaceous

Eric,

you cannot compare things like the number and spacing of teeth in a mouth, or skeletons to mechanical objects.

Mechanical objects are assembled with a number of complete pieces. Organisms devolop, they are not assembled. Things like bones, teeth, limbs, eyes all come from clumps of slightly differentiated cells.

As far as your questions about the big bang producing sterile galaxies. All I can say is "huh", it makes no sense. You may as well ask "what color is the number seven?', then use the fact that nobody can answer your question to dismiss all of mathematics.

Go to your local librarry and read up on cosmology, embrionic development, evolution, biology and such. If you claim that you are not interested enough, or don't have enough time to do this - then why bother comming here to debate? How do you expect to have a meaningful and intelligent discussion if you are so obviously ignorant of basic facts.

There is a reason that I, for example, do not get into heated discussions about the game of cricket with cricket players/ fans. The simple fact that I know nothing of the game - have never even watched a game - would make it a worthless endeavour.

Majestyk

If, I understand that statement to mean that you are now sure of the existence of a supreme being that is responsible for all of creation then, what I am about to say may fall on deaf ears.

The key to understanding the world around us is to never be sure of anything. That is not to say that we can't assume that certain things will behave as they have in the past, given the same conditions but if, evidence presents itself to challenge those assumptions, we must include that evidence and the uncertainty that it represents in our conception of reality. This is true of even the most fundamental principles that science has established for itself.

It is not the easiest thing for most of us to accomplish, though. We like knowing the answers. There's evidence to suggest that it is an inherent quality of one of our mental functions to assign a probable solution to a problem, based on our experience, for another of our mental functions to evaluate.

I only mention this because it influences how we view the world around us. We take concepts that are familiar to us and transpose them on our environments. One of the concepts most familiar to us is ourselves. The term is called “anthropomorphizing”. We assign human qualities, such as motivations, to non-human entities that do not actually possess these qualities. A rather mundane example is when a person, who has just stubbed their toe on a chair, will kick the chair in frustration but, part of them will believe/hope/think that the chair is to blame and that it even cared that it was kicked. Sounds silly yet, most of us have done something similar at least once in our lives.

Even people who "know" the mechanics of random mutation, which is the backbone of evolutionary theory, will occasionally slip wording into their discussions that give evolution the property of intent. Not because they think that it has intent but, because it is easier to conceptualize a complex ongoing process in human terms rather than strictly objective terms of the field in question. This is especially true for people like me, who have not made a career of the field, or people, who have made are career of the field, talking to people like me.

Now if, we can agree that the preceeding are reasonable statements that do not conflict with contrary evidence (btw if, they aren't let me know because they are the basis of a number of my conclusions on a variety of subjects), lets apply them to what you have posted here:
"I am a simple person and look at things in a simple way, I can’t understand biology, but I do have an understanding of fairly basic mechanical functions."
and
"You could look at the intricate parts in an old style clock, but if it doesn’t work you just have a heap of junk."

First, don't sell yourself short. If, you can understand the workings of a old style clock then, you can understand biology. Biology is chemistry. And understanding the way gears mesh in a spring-loaded clock is not that different from understanding the way chemicals mesh in biology. The real difference is that when you get to an organism as complex as a worm, you already have a whole lot of clocks operating in a way that maintains the worms coherent structure.

However, having had so much experience with and understanding of, things that were designed for a specific purpose your brain will, as a reflex, use that as the source for its initial attempt to answer the problem with which it was presented. Thinking in the manner of design rather than the manner of coincidence.

Add to that our proclivity to assign human characteristics to even inanimate objects and phenomena and we can easily convince ourselves that there must be an intent to the design and therefore a designer.

Which brings us to science, “a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge about any and all aspects of the universe, obtained by examination of the best available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon discovery of better evidence. What's left is magic. And it doesn't work”. – James Randi. Science doesn’t say there is no designer. Science says there is no evidence that suggests that a designer is a more reasonable conclusion than chance. And just like everything I wrote here, it is open to revision.

The fact that you ask the questions is a good sign. Enjoy the journey.

I hope this is semi-intelligible. I've been repeatedly called away from it and had to regain my train of thought.

Eric H

Quote braces_for_impact
It seems to me Eric that your reasoning is a bit off. It appears to me that you're talking about the placement of various body parts throughout the body, and you seem to be stuck on random chance and it's effect on survival of the fittest. I think you're going from point A to point Y and missing all the steps in between.
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Yes I am talking about the placement of parts on random parts of the body. You could stick legs in at least a combination of a hundred places, evolution must then place them all in the right place. You could angle the joints on the four legs, in a combination of a hundred directions, evolution will sort it. This great scale of error seems logical in the earliest stages because there are no blue prints to follow.

In fact if there was not the possibility of error on this scale in the early stages, then I could compare the theory of evolution to magic………


Define the starting point A, are we talking about single cell life on Earth with no intelligence that may even be compared to cells that could grow into crystals.

Does the first cell life on Earth compare in complexity to DNA.

I am getting the feeling that some of the early cells on Earth are being compared to male sperm and female eggs.




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Quote yguy
Summoning forth the Probability Boogeyman to account for evolution is somewhat understandable, but it makes quite a bit less sense when applied to the transformation of a zygote into a mature animal.

Eric H, I don't understand how evolution developing these creatures over millions of years is any more difficult to believe than the observed fact that all of these features can arise from a single cell. What does your mathematics tell you about the odds of a single cell assembling all these moving parts of a lean racehorse in the right
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To me it seems that comparing simple cell life and DNA is bit like comparing a wheelbarrow to a space shuttle.

I can live fairly comfortably with the idea that the first cells were simple and with no intelligence, I can understand and accept the principle that these could multiply in vast numbers to become mega billions in a few years.

I can accept the principle that there would be a percentage of cells that would stick together and increase in size to become bigger individual units.

I can sort of accept that maybe it could increase to the size of a golf ball and become slime, a crystal substance, jelly maybe.

I can reasonably accept the theory about the start of life up to this point, beyond this however we start moving forward in the areas of complexity, this is my sticking point which I am having troubles progressing with.

Up to this point it is just a mass object, somehow there may have to be thousands of these objects because they still have to increase in size and become not just one rat but maybe a hundred rats, each with two hundred bones, ligaments, tendons, and muscles.

It is getting from A to this stage of first rat generation that I believe is to big a gap for evolution to handle.


Simple single cell life is under no obligation to anything to pass on its information, it could die out, it is accountable to nothing.




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Quote Majestyk
The key to understanding the world around us is to never be sure of anything. That is not to say that we can't assume that certain things will behave as they have in the past, given the same conditions but if, evidence presents itself to challenge those assumptions, we must include that evidence and the uncertainty that it represents in our conception of reality. This is true of even the most fundamental principles that science has established for itself.

It is not the easiest thing for most of us to accomplish, though. We like knowing the answers. There's evidence to suggest that it is an inherent quality of one of our mental functions to assign a probable solution to a problem, based on our experience, for another of our mental functions to evaluate.
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I am with you all the way on the first part, never be sure of anything, I am only fairly sure that God exists.

However the debate is evolution, and I feel that I can only ask questions in an area that I have a chance of understanding answers, cell biology is beyond me at this stage, working skeletons I can sort of relate to from a mechanical point of view.

Getting late, goodnight John boy, goodnight world, I am away for 48 hours now, catch you all later.

Peace

Eric

Happy Wonderer

I'm not sure what you are trying to say here -- the smallest single-celled organism contains DNA. Every multi-celled creature began as a single cell (in sexual reproduction the sperm donates DNA to the egg cell.)



Why is there anything special about where the legs of a particular mammal ended up? I think that this is the crux of your argument -- it seems incredibly improbable that the exact collection of flora and fauna that we see today could have evolved. You are correct -- just as the exact layout of any particular junkyard is improbable.

But there is nothing special about this particular configuration of the world. We are sort of particular to mammals, but he world was getting along just fine before any mammals existed. People with four legs would look kind of funny to us, but those legs would work just as well (and in some cases better) than ours.


hw

Eric H

Ok start from single cell on a young Earth increase in size to say golf ball size, or whatever size you like, introduce, one or two bones of any shape you like.

If they serve no purpose to this blob, they just add weight, maybe restrict movement, and maybe this blob could react to these bones in the way that our bodies today act to unwanted growths, or tumours.

Selection might want to remove these in future generations.

I’m out of here

Peace

Eric

RufusAtticus

Umm, Eric, bones came much later in the evolution of life, after fish evolved in fact.

Jobar

Eric H, I want to direct your attention to a thread we had here a couple of months ago- Why is the goal survival? It's very long- 17 pages- but perhaps the excellent explanations of evolutionary mechanisms you will find there may make things clearer for you. I also urge you to learn a lesson from Keith, in that thread; do not close your eyes and your mind in the way he did.

Happy Wonderer

Perhaps appropos of nothing, but a chicken egg is a single cell, which is a good bit larger than a golf ball...

hw

Bonus question: is a fertilized chicken egg a single cell?