wdog

sk8...more blather form me, im on my third cup of coffee and am rather active this morning... If the gentleman's point was that it would be impossible to put together a bunch of chemicals and add a little lightning, then out pops a human... then I would agree. The earliest life forms were postulated to be very simple self replicating units though and then it becomes more thinkable. So the only life can create life argument probably does apply to us humans (that is how life works, I still don't see his point on that), but maybe not to very simple self replicating systems. there are so many excellent people in here on this subject, i hope they reply here

Stu

You call that a religion based thread on a tech forum?

<a href="http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/forum.asp?cat=ge&top=18185&pg=1120" target="_blank">THIS</a> is a religion based thread on a tech forum...

It's at about 1200 posts at the moment, but is practically dead because of the effect it was having on the server (hence, I probably shouldn't be posting here, but oh well...).

The main person on the creationist side is someone going by the name of Ned Flanders, and actually comes across as fairly intelligent, despite a curious insistence that the fact that atoms cannot have free will would imply the existance of a god. I probably should have come here earlier for some pointers, as most of my responses (my name there is IPU - three guesses where I got that ) are fairly weak compared to some of the razor sharp posts to be found on this forum... not that I was the main defendant of evolution, but I think that there were quite a few points that I missed.

Feel free to check it out, or at least the last couple of pages (admittedly not great stuff, but it would save sifting through 50+ pages of posts)...

sk8bloke22

haha. that link is quite funny. well on the forum im debating on, its really only between me, a 13 year old muslim (who as nice as he is, cant argue for shit) and one or two others addingg their comment, usually on my side. but then came along a bloke called medical-guy who i think really is a doctor or something. and can actually agrue against me. and considering i dont really know waat im talking, as in i understand wat i type, im just not gonna be good at responding.....well i just wanna make sure he doesnt win the arguement.

so cheers ppl. and keep it coming if theres anymore info, ill post any replies.........and ill try not to completely steal ur responses (although i hav once, hehe). theres too much stuff on this board.....its better than reading a book though.

Orpheous99

No, they aren't or else they wouldn't break down over time. After one reaches first maturity, for most this is in their mid-20's (That is why it is incorrect to say that a child is a certain age, the correct term is that they has so many years of growth.) the error checking ability of our cells stops and errors begin to creep into each cell when it tries to repair itself. This is what we call ageing and death occures once the number of errors becomes to great for the body to handle.

If the human bofy were truly a closed system there wouldn't be anything we could do to stop this, but with advanded medical care we can greatly increase our lifespans and health. Also, if it were a closed system we wouldn't need air or food either.

[ January 06, 2002: Message edited by: Orpheous99 ]</p>

sk8bloke22

ok i get ya.

the bloke posted again.

"Quote from sk8bloke22:
"found this, it helps explain why entropy can decrease locally. hence, why the body can be ordered where a decrease of entropy occurs, rather than an increase of disorder"
Excellent, u have just admitted that the human body is of a lower entropy due to it's complexity and not a higher one. This is what i have proven so far, u first said it was of a higher complexity and entropy, which means we have moved ONE step in the right direction.
Now the new thing u r trying to explain is how could we have a decrease of entropy in an open system, with increasing complexity without the aid of GOD. Well, i actually know very well that there are other factors that contibute to a reaction to occur other than entropy, and that is what chemical reactions are ALL about.
Now it comes basicly to this point, is the extra ordering that is SO HUMUNGUS in the human being, either is made by energy sources like lightning and the sun, or by GOD. This is what i need to prove with other points like what i have just said about the eye above, so please read it carfully. It shows u how the process of evolution needs so much time, that it may exceed the age of this universe.
Secondly, we are missing a VERY IMPORTANT POINT, that the theory of creation explains and evolution does not. What created this universe. The universe is supposed to be a closed system. it could not simply create itself by itself. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. All forms of matter are condensed types of energy. So if matter cannot be created nor destroyed, how could energy of a closed system such as the universe be created by ITSELF.
I will alwyas thank u sk8bloke22 for a nice argument. But i showed u many ways of even chalenging such a point of view. So far evolutionists are struggling to show that their theory is plausable , while creationists have no point against them exept that a human simply wants to get rid of the idea of a SUPER POWER. Please read my argument about the eye and reply to it."

in relation to the eye. i used another arguement from evoaeithist:

"The Eye
Creationists just love the human eye. It is an amazingly complex organ with hundreds of parts all working together, and our bible thumping friends like to cite it as an example of something that evolution could not have produced. The argument consists of two parts: the eye is too complex to have formed randomly, and natural selection does not apply to it because the eye is useless until fully formed, and would not have been favorable in beginning stages. The creationists are right about one thing. The eye is too complex to have formed randomly. The odds of one forming without any direction are incredibly small, and no one in their right mind would claim otherwise. Fortunately, evolution does have direction. Evolution is not random, because of natural selection. That brings us to the second part of the argument. According to the creationists, natural selection would be of no help because the eye can't be used (and therefore cannot be an advantage to an organism) until it is fully formed. Let's examine different types of eyes and see what exactly "fully formed" means.

When we hear the word eye, we usually think of the large white sphere like objects inside of our skulls. What we don't realize is that complex animals such as humans, frogs, and lizards aren't the only ones fortunate enough to have the ability to see. Frogs, I believe, have the best eyes out of any animal. It is believed that their eyes can actually detect single photons of light. What is important here, though, is whether or not simpler forms of eyes exist. If we find very primitive eyes on ancient organisms, then we know that intermediate stages in the development of the eye would be prone to natural selection because they do work, unlike what the creationists are telling us.

Fish have simpler eyes than us, and they work perfectly fine. Arthropods have simpler eyes than us, and they work perfectly fine. Many mollusks have eyes which are far simpler than ours (except for cephalopods -- they have advanced eyes), and they work perfectly fine. However, the furthest away you can get form the standard definition of an eye, in my opinion, is the eye of a planarian. Planarians are members of the acoelomate flatworms. Flatworms are one of the oldest species of animal, and were the very first to have tissues organized into organs. These tiny creatures, as incredibly simple as they may be, have eyes. Actually, they aren't even called eyes. They're called eyespots. These eyes, really, are just a collection of light sensitive cells connected to the incredibly tiny brain of the planarian. They can't form even the simplest of images. They can only detect large differences in light. The eyes can't even move. They're stationary. These eyes are incredibly simple and underdeveloped, yet they serve a purpose that is definitely prone to natural selection. The same applies to all of the other primitive sight organs in organisms. There are plenty of fully functioning intermediate stages of the eye for natural selection to act upon.

So what does it mean, exactly, that natural selection can aid the evolutionary process? It means that the incredibly tiny odds of eyes as complex as ours forming shoot way up into the range of the probable. Creationists love to say, "The odds of random mutations forming a human being through evolution is quite like a monkey accidentally typing an unabridged dictionary". Actually, it's not at all like it. Natural selection lets organisms develop one helpful trait, then pass it on, rather than having to form that same trait over and over again with every generation by random chance. Imagine a monkey randomly punching keys on his type writer. What are the odds of the monkey typing the word "Hello"? There are twenty six keys (twenty seven if you include the spacebar), and there are five letters in the word hello. That means that the odds of the monkey accidentally typing the word correctly are one in twenty seven raised to the fifth power. My calculator tells me that is one in 14,348,907. The problem with this calculation is that it does not take three things into account: natural selection, several monkies, and alternate possibilities. Now, since we are using this as an analogy to demonstrate the evolution of the eye, and the eye is a helpful organ, let us use natural selection to pass on correctly punched letters. Suppose the monkey types the letter M. That is an incorrect letter (or a harmful mutation) and will be thrown out. The monkey tries again. S. Again, that is incorrect. The monkey tries a third time. H. Bingo! Now, in the real world, helpful mutations (or in this example, correct letters) are passed on to offspring. Without natural selection, the monkey would have to type E after H. If he screws it up, then he has to start all over again. If, by some miracle, he manages to type HE, he still has to type the L. If he misses it, he has to start all over again, and it might be a very long time before he punches HE again to win another shot at it. You can see that typing the word HELLO without natural selection can be a very, very long process.

With natural selection, however, the monkey only has to get the right letters once. When he types H for the first time, that's all he has to do, because natural selection lets him pass the H down. If he screws up the next letter, it's no big deal because he'll just go back to H again. The monkey type HE. Now, for L. After several misses, the monkey hits L. Again, after several more misses, our friend hits another L, and finally, an O. This process with one monkey would probably take no more than five minutes. It's really just the amount of time would take for you to hit every letter on the keyboard five times. Actually, it could be a lot less than that because you would only have to hit each key five times until you hit the right letters. A monkey, with natural selection, can easily type the word hello. Unfortunately, we're talking about dictionaries, not single words. One monkey using this method to type a dictionary would take centuries. Luckily, in the real world, there is not just one monkey. There is also not just one mutation a day. There are thousands. Imagine thousands of mutations every day of the year for ten years. For a hundred. For a thousand. A million. A hundred million. How about three and a half billion years? (The oldest fossils ever found have been dated to about 3.5 billion years.) The odds are dramatically more likely now, but that's still not the end of the story.

Creationists make the very false assumption that the way that life is now was the only path is could have taken. They think that after 3.5 billion years of evolution, in every possible scenario, the newest result would be humans -- tall, bipedal organisms that have no hair and the ability to speak. They also think that these organisms would have evolved from chimpanzees, and chimpanzees from simpler primates, and primates from monkeys, and monkeys from other mammals, and mammals from reptiles, reptiles from amphibians, amphibians from fish, and so on. They act as if this evolutionary scenario is the only one that would have worked. They cannot be more wrong. There is an astronomical amount of possible evolutionary paths. The one that we see today is just one out of the radically different possibilities. There is nothing special about it. What does this have to do with the formation of complex organs? Let's go back to our example with the monkey and the typewriter.

Assuming that the word "hello" is the only word that the monkey can type is exactly like assuming that the evolutionary path that we see today is the only one that could have happened. To make things a bit more realistic, let's lengthen the word hello to "hello my name is dave" (for simplicity's sake, I took out punctuation and capitalization). It's going to take a little longer for the monkey to type this sentence because it's significantly longer. But what if we take into account that this is not the only sentence that the monkey could type? The earliest parts of the sentence will remain the same in different scenarios, just as the earliest organisms in different evolutionary paths will be very similar. All life forms are carbon based and all life forms need energy, so the basics won't change much. But as life evolves, a huge multitude of possibilities open up. While the first organisms in different paths will probably all be single celled prokaryotes, the organisms several billion years later will be dramatically different, allowing for more workable paths (and correct words for the monkey). Let me give some examples of what else the monkey could type instead of hello my name is dave.

hello my name is davi
hello my name is davr
hello my name is dklr
hello my name is fiem
hello my name jb dufk
hello my nafu uf gjkn
hello mb jfhu fh ijwn
hello jm dfjh efuhfeu
hello sdfkjiu ehufugg
hello fjigjenbufpwkjdf
hello fhigjkdswjfdioef

And so on. The very basic forms of life (the word hello in our example) will remain the same, while more complex organisms can be completely different. This increases the monkey's chances of typing a correct sentence dramatically, and speeds up the process by enormous amounts. The chances of the monkey typing one specific combination of letters of those examples are small, but the chances of the monkey typing any of those combinations is actually a very easy task.

Between natural selection, the fact that so many mutations occur each day, and the astronomically huge number possibilities, the evolution of complex organs such as the eye is a very easy task for evolution. Once again, creationist attacks fall flat on their face."

and this was his response:

"the eye, well, i toled u before that i have many other proofs in medicine that evolution is impossible, but i rather wanted to use the simpler law of entropy, the entropy did decrese, ths evolution breaks the second law of thermodynamics, so please reply to this point or agree with it, u can't just say evolution did cause that specific arrangment by natural selection if it is LESS likly to occur by thermodynamics.
Now to the eye which in my point of view, appears to be more used by evolutionists than creationists, molecular biologists estimated that the number of bases that contibute to the formation of the eye is about 100 million bases (in human being), and it is also proven that during the assumed course of natural selection, life tends to go to the better form, this can only logicly occur by the process of mutations in the dna bases during DNA replication. Now it is well known that mutations in the line of species for a certain age change by 1 base every 400 years. This means that after 400 years, human beings of that age will most likly have a GENERAL one base diffrent from us.
However ,in a flat worm, the nmuber of bases estimated to make the eye are about 13 million base, ONLY 10 thousand bases resmble what a human has to make his eye, this means that the number of bases that change from flat worm to human is almost a bit less than 100 million bases, if general mutaions take 400 years for 1 base to change in almost all of the species line, then the time it would take for the eye to change from a flat worm to a human is about 400 *100 million= 40 billion years!!! that is more than the age of the WHOLE universe. And this time is calculated without taking into consideration the possibility of the faliure of a mutation to cause a change to the better form (i.e. faliure of natural selection)
This is only one of the examples in medicine that rule out evolution. SO just as u said creationists fell on their faces, well i guess now evolutionists really fell on their faces this time.
If u wish more medical examples i am ready to give to u more. .

Ted Hoffman

I think the idea of trying to marry the 2nd law of Thermodynamics with evolution is a misdirected effort. Its a misapplication of a Law of Physics to a biological system. Granted, even biological systems "obey" some physical laws e.g. Homeostasis.
For startes, I believe the definition of what a system is would differ in Physics and Biology. In Physics, the main thing is a distinct boundary, while in Biology a system would require some input, processing and output.
Its oversimplifying matters to expect the same laws that apply to non-living "systems" to apply to living systems. Maybe its worth trying but its important to bring out very clearly all the "forces" involved in both cases.
And another thing, when people die, without bacteria, there would be nothing to break down the structures that keep the cells and organs together.
And soil is largely made up of products of rock erosion.
For what its worth, good luck.

Kosh

I guess the question is why you're debating such
a thing with someone who purports to be a doctor
but has the spelling abilities of a 2nd grader?

If he's a doctor, I hope I'm never sick in is
office....

Hell, even Metacrock can spell better than that!

sk8bloke22

hehe. nah i think english ISNT his native language. but still funny...

E_muse

So are you arguing that you would refuse treatment from a doctor who happened to suffer from dyslexia?

I know of at least one bank manager who struggles with his spelling for this reason. Perhaps I shouldn't bank at his branch any more.

Isn't it wonderful how we can all grow in tolerance and understanding in the context of reasoned debate!

hyzer

Poor spelling does not automatically suggest dyslexia.

You have created a straw man argument to accuse Kosh of intolerance.