Chiron

Try here, here, and here for an explanation of chance events.
It also sounds like you're talking about "irreducible complexity," or at least "it all fails if anything fails". Well, take the arch. If you take away any stone, the whole thing falls apart. So it must have been created whole, right? Wrong: you use a semi-circular wooden construction to hold the sides up. When you place the keystone, it locks and becomes self-supporting, so you can remove the external wooden support.
To see how, say, a mousetrap isn't irreducibly complex, go here.

For an example of evolution in a simulated environment, Lobstrosity had a very good one on a thread a while back.

Eric H

Quote Chiron
Try here, here, and here for an explanation of chance events.
It also sounds like you're talking about "irreducible complexity," or at least "it all fails if anything fails". Well, take the arch. If you take away any stone, the whole thing falls apart. So it must have been created whole, right? Wrong: you use a semi-circular wooden construction to hold the sides up. When you place the keystone, it locks and becomes self-supporting, so you can remove the external wooden support.
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The arch is a good example of a static object, that you first of all place a support underneath, a sort of a scaffold or splint.

If you are going down the line of irreducible complexity I like the one about the knee joint, which needs 16 critical characteristics to work at the same time.

Now you could apply a splint to the leg and each of these characteristics could evolve independently like your arch.

But if you have a splint you do not have a moving joint, so it becomes a pointless exercise.

Sorry I am not sure how to do hyper links, so I am not sure if this will work but you can find it by looking for..

Critical Characteristics and the Irreducible Knee Joint.

by Stuart Burgess, he is a design engineer.

Critical Characteristics and the Irreducible Knee Joint.

Peace

Eric

lpetrich

Eric H:
If you are going down the line of irreducible complexity I like the one about the knee joint, which needs 16 critical characteristics to work at the same time.

And what are those characteristics?

I fail to see how a knee joint is irreducibly complex.

Duvenoy

In fact, the knee joint is a kludged-up piece of shit. Both mine are shot, and I'm not an athlete. The spine won't won't win any engineering-for-a-biped prizes, either.

Evolution takes whatever is lying around the shop and cobbles it up to work. Sometimes it would have been much better if ol' Ev had started over from scratch.

Irreductably complex. Hah!! Any decent welder could do better.

doov (with a new and vastly improved hip and a candidate for new knees. Also spinal fusions, @$#&%%!).

Fisheye

Since Eric's link didn't work, I'm providing one here

http://www.trueorigin.org/knee.asp

Go shred it

Eric H

Hello Fisheye,
Sorry I couldn’t get your link to work, but is it the same one by Stuart Burgess a design engineer who has fifty papers and patents on design.


peace

Eric

Godless Dave

That's not quite accurate, because what constitutes "the right place" isn't defined before hand. If a creature survives long enough to produce offspring, it's cells were in "the right place". If it doesn't, they weren't. There are probably millions of other possible ways life could have evolved. The way we see is the way it happened here, but it's not the only possibility. That's why the dice-rolling analogy doesn't quite work. Because in that example, we set an arbitrary victory condition of rolling all sixes. But with the evolution of life, there wasn't a pre-set victory condition, and the definition of success is not arbitrary. There were many possible outcomes; the most successful outcomes were able to reproduce and pass their DNA on, and we see the results now and call it "life on earth".

Jack the Bodiless

I have seen it (and shredded it) before.

Regardless of how many papers and patents Stuart Burgess has on design, he is ignorant of evolution, and what characteristics a genuine example of "irreducible complexity" would need in order to pose a problem.

His fallacy is that he's thinking of what human knees need. He doesn't realize that knees evolved in critters rather like modern lungfish, who dragged themselves along on their bellies with the help of stiffened fins that eventually became legs.

A proto-knee is nothing more than a piece of flexible cartilage between two pieces of stiffer cartilage. Over time, the stiffer cartilage became the leg bones, and the band of flexible cartilage lost excess cartilage until the present configuration of cartilage strips emerged.

It's just another "take this bit away, and the modern organ won't work anymore" fallacy. At least Michael Behe, in his use of the bacterial flagellum, was working with an organ that didn't have a well-known set of intermediate stages still in existence.

A classic exmaple of cretinist woolly-thinking. Presumably his assumption that humans don't have animal ancestors prevented him from looking at all those intermediate knees that still exist. It would have been easy for him to find out how the knee evolved: but he just didn't bother.

fragmentsofdreams

However, many Creationists argue that life is too improbable to have formed on its own. If one uses this point, one concedes this possibility.

fragmentsofdreams

Actually, once life is formed, something is more or less garunteed to result. Multi-celluar life may be relatively improbable judging by the hundreds of miilions of years it took to evolve, but given enough time it would arise.

One doesn't jump from bacteria to humans. Look at the simplicity of sponges and jellyfish, which are little above groups of specialized individuals.

Complex creatures wouldn't. Sponges and jellyfish are able to regenerate from such attacks.