yguy

Oh, all right...if I HAVE to. <sulk>

Principia

I see, so I was right that you were trying to obfuscate my point. I was interested in the odds of a unicellular zygote forming a multicellular organism. You attempt to side-track the discussion by asking your own unrelated questions. Interesting tactic.
Is that right. Are you claiming to be psychic? Or are you simply dictating my beliefs for me?
In case you don't know, yguy, I don't care which fairy tale story you hold dear to your heart. Actually, by this time, I think I don't care much about what you have to say at all.

Happy Wonderer

Aha, here is a misconception that is easy to clear up:

Cells divide much more rapidly than once per year, I have a discusson on that in my last post. We are talking 17 generations a day.

One thing I sense is that you think 5 billion isn't that large of a number. There is a kind of interesting psychology here, somehow once we have the number named it seems tame. You know, it goes "hundred, thousand, million, billion" so billion doesn't seem much bigger than hundred.

Here is an example I just thought of that might help. (Let me know if is interesting or just weird. Hope I got the numbers right...)


A college grad student with a net worth of $10,000 takes his girlfriend out to a movie for a date and spends $10.

Next year is net worth is $20,000 and he takes his girlfriend out. Now that he is worth twice as much, she expects twice as good a time. So this outstanding fella spends $20 on her.

Ok, this guy does really well over the years. He marries his girlfriend. On their anniversary he takes her out and spends the equivalent (net worth-wise) of what he spent on their first date. He has to spend a thousand dollars on her if he is a millionaire. What does he have to spend if he is a billionaire? One million dollars! (if you use the US definition of 'billion' which is a thousand million.)



So arguments that accept that there is a pathway that could have gotten from 'microbe to man' but there "just plain hasn't been enough time" break down if you really think about what the numbers mean.

hw


Who on his first date with his wife didn't have any cash at a place that didn't take visa, so she ended up paying for it. Don't try this at home, kids...


Drat was right the first time, time to go to bed.

Eric H

Sorry I don’t have time to answer individual points at the moment, but..

Start from another point cook a turkey at big bang temperature for a few thousand years and you might assume that every last particle would end up totally sterile beyond all recognition.

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

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

Ok now single cell life appears, presumably it has no intelligence, so somehow it has to get from single cell to arrive at animals that we know for a fact existed from the fossil evidence, and also the life we see today.

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.

I looked at skeletons and bones, muscles ligaments, tendons in lots of books, the best ones for me were children’s books because they compared the working parts of the body to mechanical objects I can recognise.

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.

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.

We know for a fact thousands of species end up with a mouth full of teeth in the right place, if someone forgot to make an opening were the mouth should be, cant eat, death.

I spent about three months asking these kind of questions for myself, and trying to be as honest as I could.

Now as I said before my reasoning could be well out, so I do not want to influence anyone else.

But if you think there could be any purpose to pursue this kind or reasoning then it is better to do the sums for yourself.

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.

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. A less than perfect working skeleton would end up being weeded out in the evolutionary processes, so in a way it has the value of junk when there is competition for survival.

Even if took thousands of generations of change to arrive at this point of skeleton junk status

Richard Dawkins talks about the appearance of some sort of replicater, which has the capacity to transform simple non-intelligent life cells to something that has DNA code for an animal with four legs.



Just one more point.



-------------------------------------------
Quote Happy Wonderer,

Cells divide much more rapidly than once per year, I have a discusson on that in my last post. We are talking 17 generations a day.
------------------------------------------




Ok I quoted a billion generations make that a billion, billion, billion generation.

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

Are you saying that this could happen for a billion, billion, billion generations without death and end of species happening maybe just once?


I did this around five years ago because at the time I wasn’t to sure about the existence of a God.

Peace

Eric

pz

I've got a whole book on just holoprosencephaly. I'm amazed that I came out of that 9 month process with a face.

Godless Dave

Please reread the earlier posts. It has already been explained to you why this is not the case.

Let's start with a population of 200 animals. Only one of them has to have a trait that the other ones don't have. It mates with (let's say) one of the other ones, and they produce 10 offspring. Maybe 5 of those offspring will inherit that trait. Now, if this trait confers a survival advantage, but does not inhibit the animals' ability to mate, some of those 5 will survive long enough to mate and pass that trait onto their offspring. If the animals that have the new trait are reproducing more than the animals that don't, ultimately they will outnumber the others, and eventually the whole population will have the trait.

It only has to happen one trait at a time, and it only has to start with one organism.

But cars do not contain the instructions for their own construction, nor can they reproduce.

Godless Dave

Exactly! Now you're getting it! If an animal were born with its teeth somewhere else, it wouldn't be able to eat, so it would die before it reproduced. Thus, whatever mutation caused the teeth not to form in the mouth would not be passed on.

Meanwhile, the animals with teeth in their mouths do survive to produce offspring, so all their offspring inherit the trait that puts teeth in their mouth instead of somewhere else.

Asha'man

Ahh, teeth. Another subject near and dear to my heart right now. Do you know why? Because my teeth don't fit in my mouth. Odds are, neither do yours. I had my wisdom teeth surgically removed when I was in college, because they had no room to come in, and were therefore attempting to come in sideways. Currently, I'm wearing braces, because I still have crowding issues, and the teeth want to turn sideways to make everything fit.

I'm not alone in this problem, it seems that 1/3 to 2/3 of the human population has some sort of issues with their teeth not quite fitting their mouth. How many people do you know that have had wisdom teeth removed or worn braces at least once in their life?

If you are going to argue in favor of an intelligent designer, then you will have to explain why he appears so incompetent much of the time. It seems like he often works using trial and error, and can only make very small changes from the previous model. Which is also the exact constraints that unguided evolution would work under. Coincidence?

Asha'man

Who said anything about species never dying out? Most every species that has ever lived has died out! If you look at the fossil record, it is almost entirely filled with species that no longer exist. There have also been mass extinctions, where 90% of all species die out within a short period of time (less than a few million years).

However, out of all those species, and millions or billions of individuals, a few managed to survive, just a few. They were the ones who had some sort of advantage, some sort of adaptability, or even just a bit of luck. The ones that survived then bred, and whatever traits they had were passed on to their descendants.

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.

Teeth for example, did not just sprout from one animal in a population and then spread. One animal had a mutation, perhaps something like a bony ridge in it's mouth. Small, not very noticable, but, lets say this animal is better at eating. Now this animal, when it breeds, introduces it's new trait to it's offspring. After awhile, you have a population with a bony ridge in their mouths, and some without. If the environment in which this population lives gives those with the bony ridge an advantage, then they can be expected to outbreed their non mouth-ridged counterparts. In this way, with other animals in this population also adding their selected traits into the species, new animals emerge over time. Some may have had longer ridges in their mouths and selected for, some may have had a mutation that allowed the ridge to protrude through the skin of the mouth, making them even more sucessful. Eventually, one might have a mutation that increses the strength of this bony ridge, the animal survives longer to mate, and whammo - teeth. Now this is oversimplified, and may my betters here correct me if I'm in error, but that's my take on it. Each change is a small one. An eye didn't just sprout from a newborn. It started as a few light sensitive cells, which could give the mutant an advantage, then better cells eventually with lenses, irisis, and pupils came along. Each of these gave an advantage to it's predecessors, and here we are, the product of all these happenings.

Another thing I notice is you make mention of how various body pieces seem to fit so well together, and how each body part is for a specific purpose. Truthfully, I think if you look closely at an organism i.e. humans, you'll see that while adapted for an environment, an organism (a sucessful one anyway) is adaptable to many circumstances. The human hand for example. It has no "specific purpose". It can grasp, type, punch, etc. While it can turn a bolt, it is not as efficient as a wrench which was made for that purpose. While a wrench may be great at turning bolts, it is good for little else. This adaptability is exactly what we would expect to see if natural selection were true.