nogods4me

some of my card decks have 54 cards, the usual 52 plus 2 jokers (Kent Hovind and Ken Ham maybe?)

beausoleil

I've always thought Dawkins was a bit simplistic, like all zealots.

You don't have to weed out the others to end up with a couple of people who got eight heads (or 6 heads and 2 tails in sequence, or whatever.) Creationists look at the world around us, notice apparent improbability and deduce a God. Evolutionists looks at the world around us, notice apparent improbability, and deduce a mechanism to make it probable. Neither is justified.

They might both be like the 2 people in the audience. But because they don't see (in principle can't see until we leave this planet) the other 498 who kept tossing coins and didn't get 8 heads, they think they require some special explanation for their string of 8 heads. We have no idea whether the others were kicked out of the game.

Vorkosigan

You don't have to weed out the others to end up with a couple of people who got eight heads (or 6 heads and 2 tails in sequence, or whatever.) Creationists look at the world around us, notice apparent improbability and deduce a God. Evolutionists looks at the world around us, notice apparent improbability, and deduce a mechanism to make it probable. Neither is justified.

Thanks! I am glad you stopped by here to tell all us simpletons how the world really works.

They might both be like the 2 people in the audience. explanation for their string of 8 heads. We have no idea whether the others were kicked out of the game.

In evolutionary terms, there is a special term for the ones who got kicked out. They are "extinct."

Vorkosigan

Liquidrage

I don't see how this is unjustified.

Sure, if evolution was treated as the *unmovable object* then it would just be a belief where the evidence is forced to fit into the initial theory much like a square peg into a round hole. Then it would be unjustified.

However, like any scietific theory it is fluid in that the theory is only as good as the evidence to support it. If the evidence contradicts the theory it is the theory that must change, not the evidence. If evolution becomes contradicted by evidence and people continue to use it as a valid theory, then say it is unjustified. Until that day comes though, it is just good science.

[ May 25, 2002: Message edited by: Liquidrage ]</p>

Theli

Yes... the chance of a successfull mutation might be small, but whoever wrote this should consider the number of individual lifeforms that have existed since the "dawn of life". And how many generations?
Kind of a high number...

Philosoft

Astonishing. So people implicity understand an event's probability before they know the set of factors that caused that event?

Daydreamer

Well lets see - to max the number you min the generation times, and hence go for a roughly bacterial rate. Bacteria split, ideally, every 20 minutes, so we can cut that down to say, once in every day to account for achieving that rate and non-ideal conditions.

3 gen/hr x 24 hr/day x 365 day/yr x ~3.5 x 10^9 yrs of life = ~9.198 x 10^13 generations in bacteria (at most)

1 gen/day x 365 day/yr x ~3.5 x 10^9 yrs of life = ~1.2775 x 10^12 generations in bacteria (at least)

Or, in layman terms (by setting 1.2775 x 10^12 as 1), as low as ~1 fuckton and as high as ~72 fucktons.

Jesus Tap-Dancin' Christ

One time, for the sake of defeating "Imagine the odds against it" arguments, I counted my dice, noting each and every single numerical value that they were capable of achieving, and multiplied through.

Odds of my dice giveing a particular sequence:
1.208x10^302.
I only had 200 or so dice at the time. And yes, I DO roll them all at once just because I can.

Oolon Colluphid

How, pray, does simplifying for ease of understanding (IIRC, this was at a Royal Institution Xmas lecture, to an audience of secondary school children) have anything to do with zealotry? Perhaps you’d similarly accuse Maynard Smith and Szathmary (Origins of Life), Jones (Language of the Genes), Tattersall (Becoming Human), Ridleys Mark (Mendel’s Demon) and Matt (Genome), Atkins (Periodic Kingdom), Hawking (ABHOT), Greene (Elegant Universe) and Guth (Inflationary Universe), of being simplistic zealots in their popular writings? Dawkins is a science populariser, dimwit!

No, but that is the point: it’s an analogy to natural selection, as well as to the probability of each step . If ‘success’ is judged by getting heads, and you are removed from the game if you ‘fail’... if all you get to see are the successes because the failures are removed, then you can end up with apparently very unlikely results. Many many generations later, you don’t see all the mutations, all the ‘tailses’, that fell by the wayside, only the ones that worked. The end result looks hugely improbable, but is not, because each step was small and so not very improbable, and we don’t see the myriad failures.

Huh? The first is unjustified, sure. But how is the second not justified? The mechanism was not deduced because of, or to explain, complexity: it was deduced from empirical observations of variation and differential survival. From independent information outside the initial problem. Extrapolation from those observations -- imagining the cumulative effect of many many generations of such differential survival -- happens to explain organised complexity, almost as a side issue.

What Darwin proposed was not something to explain complexity per se, but to explain the nested hierarchies of taxonomy and the variety of life. Taking small steps down generations can turn one sort of creature into another. Explaining diversity by that mechanism needn’t have explained complexity too -- whales are just as ‘complex’ as bats, dogs and humans -- it just so happens that taking small steps is also the way to pick your way through improbability without recourse to the supernatural, by the reasoning above.

Since the mechanism was not deduced to make the improbable probable, your claim is false. And the mechanism is justified, not because of its explanatory power, but because it has been observed.

TTFN, Oolon

[ May 27, 2002: Message edited by: Oolon Colluphid ]</p>

Peez

Please explain. No, creationists start by accepting a particular story of how one or more supernatural entities are responsible for the universe, then try to find things in the universe that might be interpreted as supporting their story. Evolutionary biologists look at the evidence, deduce natural hypotheses as to how life got to be how it is, then test these hypotheses. You may have your own opinion about which approach is "justified," but creationism is not science and evolution is science. Please explain.

Peez