I said that “Evolution” is impossible according to all intelligible observations and logical discernments and you presume to “prove” that it’s a law of the Universe by deriding anyone who dares to contend that science is impossible without consistent laws?
I say again; “Evolution” is a purely ideological invention completely detached from observations of reality.
The two main points Darwin made can be summed up as ‘Natural Selection’ and ‘Sexual Selection’.
Natural selection is about how species survive, or not in the face of the rest of the world. To use blatantly obvious examples, a cow dropped in the middle of the ocean would die because they are not able to adapt to the water. A dolphin on the other hand would be fine. A dolphin dropped in a paddock would die for lack of water, where the cow would be fine. Nature kills those unable to survive in it. It is why there are no sea cows or land dolphins.
Sexual selection is about how effective something is at attracting a mate and passing on their genes. A successful creature is able to mate and pass on its genes, an unsuccessful creature never manages to get laid.
To pass on genes to the next generation you need to succeed at surviving against nature (natural selection) and succeed at passing on your genes (sexual selection). That is evolution in action. How is it wrong?
Hi, this was the first coherent thing you wrote in this thread that’s worth responding to, so here goes.
I think you misunderstand entropy and it’s relationship to complexity. I’ll try to explain with a simple example, and it needs to be thought about in terms of information complexity.
Imagine you start with a glass of water and some concentrated ink, initially separate from each other. The amount of information required to describe these things is small. There is some water, uniformly distributed, and there is some ink, also uniformly distributed.
Now, you pour the ink into the water. Entropy, being as entropy does, the ink ends up evenly distributed in the water. The result is inky-water, uniformly distributed, that requires slightly less information to describe than did the separated water and ink. That is, we now just have some quantity of ink water, and we also know that it’s massively improbable that the ink will spontaneously separate from the water by chance. That’s just how entropy is.
Nothing too special here so far I hope.
What’s most interesting though, is how much information it takes to describe the state of the system while the ink was only partially disolved. It is in fact massively more complex than either the initial or final state of the system.
As it turns out, this is true of all such systems. The emergent complexity that we see all around us is the transient complexity inherent in the progression of entropy.
Eventually, it all inevitably goes away.
Entropy giveth and entropy taketh away.
If you want to understand how order emerges from this complexity amidst entropy, then you need to go read about Complex Systems Theory. Maybe start with Chaos Theory. The big clue in this is to look for recurring cycles in amongst the complexity. They’re like islands of cyclic stability (think order). Some of them reinforce the cyclic stability of others, and so larger islands of cyclic stability happen. Some of them catalyze the creation of more islands of stability like themselves. Those that do so spread. Those that do not, don’t.
It’s a short leap from there to evolution - the decidedly non-random selection from random changes in a complex system, selected on the basis of what survives and replicates.
Such processes can easily be observed in the wild, in structured experiment, or in simulation. If fact, one common approach to machine learning is the Genetic Algorithm - a simulation of evolution that actually works to find answers to real world complex problems like face recognition.
Finally, I’d like to point out that the process of evolution relies as much or more on cooperation as it does on competition. Survival of the fittest is just as likely to mean survival of those that work together well as the opposite. It does not stand in opposition to community, good will and cooperation between people or cultures. It fosters them.
Not exactly, but close.
Complex things like intellect, will and life emerge from much simpler self replicating systems evolving over very long time periods, as in “many simple things that do exist, interacting in a complex dynamic system, will produce slightly more complex things over time”.
Rinse, repeat, lots, until the system eventually reflects upon the nature of its own existence, then does solid theoretical and experimental work to establish how that most likely came to be.
Your whole reply is a verbose political double speak intending to create the illusion that nothing spontaneously turns itself into everything with a magic ingredient we call time. It is a superstitious ideological assumption simply expressed with an equation: nothing + time = everything.
Entropy is a word for the always and everywhere observed tendency for order to degenerate into randomness and for energy potential to dissipate into uniformity (no potential).
I know about chaos “theory”. It does not, in any way, support the ideological speculation that randomness can, or does, spontaneously turn itself into order. No amount of grandiose assertion or devious subterfuge will change the well known, easily demonstrable, Natural Law described as “The Second Law of Thermodynamics”.
In my facebook today. Check mate evolutionists.
Now look at this ridiculous set of lies and hidden agenda of the pro-evolution scam
Actually, I made no such claim.
I discussed how simple things in the process of entropic decay over large time scales produce complex things for a while. They don’t last. Eventually entropic decay finishes and they’re done for. Heat death of the universe and all that.
The question of something from nothing is an entirely different matter. For that, we have to look back around 12 billion years. This is still somewhat indirectly observable, in the form of things like the universal expansion of space and in the background infrared radiation of the universe.
There’s no politics in any of that. With access to the right tools, you could go observe the evidence for these things yourself.
You could ascribe some god-like creation act to the big bang that kicked things off in this universe we see before us, but it’s a really long stretch to get from that to the sort of God described in any of the usual human religions.
No. Chaos Theory describes how complex systems emerge from iteration around relatively simple interactions. Look up “strange attractors”. I do not claim that it in any way or form changes the second law of thermodynamics. It describes a transient side effect of the second law of thermodynamics. These transient side effects are also easily demonstrable.
You get the he won’t look up anything right? This is not a discussion.
I understand.
However, I don’t think this guy is a troll. I think he is a true believer, and that’s scarier but it can also be instructive to explore the depths of his broken rationale. At some point, the contradictions become unavoidable, then I want to see what happens.
Your trying to use logic to battle something far far older than logic.
Actually, in a flat infinite ever-expanding universe every non-zero chance is sure to happen. See Boltzmann brain.
Yeah, nuh.
We don’t need to go introducing infinity.
The universe is really freaking big, but not infinite.
It’s a thousand monkeys explanation which is unnecessary.
Some simple things are like latches, that can ratchet things forward. Evolution is like this. It doesn’t require infinite time or space; just quite a lot, and selection is not random.
And then? No and then. Yesss, annnnd then.
Point I was trying to make is that something can arise out of nothing. That does not relate to the assertions regarding evolution, but it does show that the idea that everything has to have a creator in an infinite universe where literally everything that can occur will occur is ridiculous.
While it’s true that observable universe is finite (and getting smaller) there’s no reason to believe that universe is not infinite as it’s curvature is flat.
The original space brain?
I dare you to prove the Spaghetti Monster is not as real as competing scientific theories.
That the Universe is expanding (at an accelerating rate) is conjecture based on the assumption that the observed “red shift” is caused by the Doppler Effect on light emitted from distant objects. There are a couple of much more credible hypotheses (possible explanations) that I know about.
You bods should do some research involving properly erudite scientists and thinkers and not the popularity junkies/sycophants who produce glib blather to feed the ideological monster.
The plain fact remains that “a thing that does not exist cannot cause itself to exist” and its corollary “an effect cannot be greater than its cause(s)”.
The trite assertion out of chaos “theory” that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon can “cause” a hurricane in the Bahamas is just plain stupid enough to capture the imagination of ideology hacks. Most basic physics tells us that the effective cause of the tremendous power in thunderstorms and cyclones is energy from the Sun absorbed in the latent heat of evaporation of water subsequently released higher in the atmosphere. Entropy prevails! energy is always dissipated.
A great deal of the efforts of engineers (electrical, mechanical, etc.) is to try and minimise the loss (dissipation) of energy from their systems so that more of the input energy is left to be dissipated in “useful work”.
You bods are trying to sell the idea that if you get all the stuff that makes up a motor car and shake it and bash it and bombard it with all kinds of radiation and lightning bolts for long enough (say 14.5 bn years) it’ll turn into a motor car! You might be able to sell the idea to a Voodoo Witch Doctor for whom everything is pure magic, but the rest of us who are hampered with commonsense will be quite sure that if you subjected a perfectly good car to that treatment it would decay into its simplest stable elements.
Even the crudest virus is vastly more delicate and complex than the flashiest motor car yet you assume that that sort of process produced yourself! Voodoo is the stuff of intellectual giants by comparison.