Oolon Colluphid

Nope.

I’m going to say something now that may surprise you. Ready?

You can have your god create the first self-replicators, if you want. “Let there be self-replication!” And there was self-replication. There. You may have it. It’s fine with me if your god formed the first replicator from the clay crystals of the earth.

Because evolution doesn’t give a flying fruitbat how the first self-replicating entities got started. Evolution is simply what you get once you’ve got them. Evolution has nothing whatever to do with the origins of life. Period.

While the origins of life is a lively area of research, and while there’s plenty of chemists and biochemists who might disagree (with evidence as to why they do), it is possible that some designer got it going.

Since the probability of abiogenesis seems to be your stumbling block, I take it, therefore, that you are happy to accept the evolution of everything after that, then?
Ah, there’s the rub. Evolution has nothing to do with getting life from non-life. So the question is, where did the intelligent designer leave off? Did it just set the first -- impossibly improbable, allegedly -- cells loose... or did it also get involved with further developments: all the stuff that also seems designed, all the immensely integrated bits of bodily designs, and all that too-neat-to-be-chance fitting of form to function?

I’d be really grateful if you could answer that one question at least. Specifically for example, do you believe that the intelligent designer created eyes... or did it just start life going and then bugger off?
I dare to call them unscientific because they do not do science, nor operate by its rules. I also call them arrogant ignoramuses*. But feel free to prove me wrong.


(* that’s using the precise meaning from my Chambers dictionary, ‘one pretending to knowledge that they do not actually possess’.)

TTFN, Oolon

Lobstrosity

Allow me to lend credence to Oolon's statements through repetition. This is something I typed elsewhere with regards to this same error of confusing evolution with abiogenesis:

Abiogenesis has absolutely nothing to do with the theory of evolution. Creationists like to conflate the two issues in an attempt to produce a straw man argument against evolution itself (since abiogenesis has far less evidentiary support), but it's still just a straw man. Evolution does not require a naturalistic/non-intelligent origin of life--God could have made the first life for all evolution cares, or perhaps our planet was seeded by aliens (not a very satisfying answer, but one permitted by evolution nonetheless). The theory of evolution simply details the mechanisms by which existing life will change over time. It is true that most evolutionists believe in abiogenesis (as scientists, they see absolutely no reason to invoke a priori a supernatural explanation just because we're talking about something that happened in the distant past), but that doesn't mean that evolution requires abiogenesis. Most physicists believe in evolution but that doesn't mean physics requires evolution. Evolution simply cares about the origins of life because those origins, once known, can be plugged into the theory to provide us with a better understanding of how life has progressed on Earth. Evolution is interested in origins because they provide a set of initial conditions (and evolutionists, who believe that life did likely start abiotically, will thus support research into abiogenesis), but evolution does not hinge upon the specific way in which those origins came about. Analogously, Newtonian physics details the manner in which matter interacts independent of considerations of how that matter was first formed or came to be in its current position.


What I want to know is why it's not "ignorami," damnit!

Oolon Colluphid

Sorry folks. I really hoped to get a reply. In fact, before posting most of the above, I emailed him to point out that most of the replies he was seeking were turning up on the public board, so he wouldn't miss them. I have had no reply.

Maybe we're just being too hasty, and he's formulating detailed rebuttals right now...

(with thanks to pz for that line of thought )

Cheers, Oolon

Edited to add: actually, on checking my hotmail again, turns out that I have had a reply. Very polite; the gist of it is that he's still learning this message board business, and will get the hang of replying shortly.

Oolon Colluphid

Uh-oh. Bellman's fallacy!
Because it's a fourth delension gerund, via Middle English polyquantitative inflection.

Oolon

Taffer

I think what Suburban means here is that if something is that improbable, you might as well dismiss the possibility of it happening if no further evidence presents itself.

Let's say I wish to write a short story, and decide to do so by mashing my keyboard randomly. Assuming that the possibility of me creating a literary masterpiece this way is exactly 10^51 to 1 then I might as well give up the notion as impossible, since the odds of me wrecking a perfectly good keyboard are significantly higher (and thus in the "possible" realm).

The rest of his argument is of course cacky, but, er, he tried. Even if it looks suspiciously like a CTRL-C+CTRL-V job.

Herman Hedning

The odds may be unfavourable, but you still could get it right on the first try. Just because the probability is ten to the umpteenth power to one doesn't mean that something needs a lot of attempts before it happens.

Doctor X

Oolon:

Unfortunately, once that is granted, some will interpret it as PROOF that everything else they attach to their deity--dogma, tithes, stoning you, hellfire, televangelists--suddenly has EQUAL credibility.

Now . . . you have to concede a "divine" direction in evolution to create its pinical . . . pinikal . . . summit . . . in DIVINE IMAGE . . . the form HIS SON chose to take . . . this guy Earl with three teeth and dangerous digestion. . . .

--J.D.

Oolon Colluphid

Yup. The odds of me flipping ‘heads’ on this ’ere tuppence are exactly 50%. But hey, look, it happened first time.

Probability is a measure of likelihood, and is an average. It means that something with a probability of 1 in 100 is expected to happen, over millions of tries, to average one time in each hundred.

So you might get three in a row, then nothing for a few thousand thousand. But it will average out at 1:100. You might try 100 times, and not get it, or it could happen anywhere in 100 iterations.

And, I think, this means that if something is certain to happen once in a hundred, that the chances of it actually taking 100 goes to get it is 1:100, whereas the chances of it taking anything less is actually 99%. In other words, even if Suburban’s numbers were correct, it needn’t take anywhere near as many goes (though conversely, it might take many more).

Oolon

Worldtraveller

Only Oolan would know this...
And I just thought it happened to be ironic? fun coincidence? what would you call it, that I happened to be listening to Wierd Al's "Everything you know is wrong" as I started this thread....

There is a god, and he is Wierd Al!!

Cheers,
Lane

scombrid

By this, you imply that all species coexisted at some point. Why doesn't the fossil record support your position?

Have you any understanding of general ecology and population biology?