The butterfly effect is an assertion about the limits of predictability in complex cyclic systems. It’s why we cannot even in theory predict specific weather events more that a few days ahead. These systems exhibit highly sensitive dependence on initial conditions to the extent that attempting to improve measurements give diminishing returns in predictive outcome.
It does not say that butterflies cause storms unless you are basing your understanding on the words of Geoff Goldbloom in Jurassic Park. That would be stupid.
Your motorcar self assembly analogy is badly formed. Nobody is making assertions about anything remotely like what you are saying there. Evolution is NOT random. It is an incremental, cumulative and selective process. No magic required. When you blithely ignore that, you lose credibility.
But if you blithely ignore laws of logic and physics you gain credibility?
I repeat: a thing that does not exist cannot cause itself to exist no matter how deviously you assert or imply otherwise. Speculative, cumulative, selective, incremental, purely imaginative “processes” do not change the Laws of Nature no matter how far back or out into a purely conjectural time or place you export them; even if you export them into a deliberately un-examinable fantasy land.
The physical sciences are a study of physical reality… not a fantasy of wild ideological conjectures.
You don’t need credibility in science. But you do in faith. In science you just needs data that is measurable and repeatable. Which evolution can and creationism / intelligent design cannot ever by definition. It is impossible to ever say that intelligent design or creationism are scientific without misusing the definition of science.
Your not as smart as you think you are, but I suspect are used to being told by a lot of even less capable people than you that you are very smart.
Repeat that all you like, but it won’t make it a thing I asserted. You are misquoted me. I make no claims about getting something from nothing. I do make claims about evolution being a non-random, incremental, cumulative and selective process that creates complex things out of simple things over long time periods. It’s quite observable, experimentally repeatable and can be shown to work in simulation too. I’ve done it myself.
I quite happily ceded earlier, that the distinctly different question of how we have a universe at all rather than nothing, is in the really hard to know basket, but I don’t think that a “God did it” answer contributes anything of value to human affairs. It’s certainly not a basis for morality, and effectively explains nothing, so has no scientific value either.
Which really means that simple things, then complex things, create themselves out of less simple things all the way back to nothing with the magical ingredient of time.
Do tell us of the observable, experimentally repeatable, instances that you claim.
No, not all the way back to nothing.
Start with hydrogen. Lots of it. That will do.
I don’t know why you keep wanting to squeeze this ‘nothing’ back into the discussion. When you do, we’re not talking about evolution any more.
No magic required for evolution.
No absolutes, no something from nothing.
It makes no claims about original creation from nothing.
I don’t state any irrational assertions, because none are needed.
Has many well cited examples.
There are thousands more examples that are only a Google search away.
Try it yourself, breed some dogs. Apply your own selective pressure and see what happens, and don’t make out that selective pressure wouldn’t happen without the guiding human. It does. Even in the wild, selection is based on those that survive and reproduce the most.
Or in simulation, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm,
Here are examples of evolutionary processes operating in code to solve complex problems by applying selective pressure on artificial entities to move up the value gradient.
The algorithms don’t know how to go directly to the solutions. They just know how to rate potential solutions on some good/bad scale, and let evolution do the rest.
It’s a mathematically describable process.
No magic.
I come from a long line of farmers and sheep breeders. We know, along with thousands of generations of farmers and stock breeders (animal and horticultural) before us that we cannot create a new animal or plant. Our only option is to try to eliminate “undesirable” characteristics in the fond hope that (if you’re lucky) in doing so another previously hidden, or recessive, characteristic will be revealed.
No sane farmer would imagine that his selection could turn a sheep into an elephant or a wheat plant into a mango tree. It’s only those egomaniacally and ideologically detached from reality who would espouse such incomprehensible detachment from reality.
Of course not. There’s an issue of time scales.
Farmers only get to see a few generations of farm animals. Not much happens on such short time frames, unless you’relooking at species with very short lifespan like bacteria. With those, you can quite quickly see evolutionary adaption to achieve things like antibiotic resistance.
We have, over just a few thousand years, produced chiwawas and great Danes from wolves. These are barely compatible and look nothing alike.
Speciation takes longer and generally involves some extended geographical separation such that a subgroup of one species eventually drifts over many generations, so far from the progeny of the original group that they are no longer genetically compatible.
Not going into where it came from. I already covered my position on something from nothing.
As to it’s turning into everything, that’s reasonably well understood.
Starting with A LOT of hydrogen, scattered widely in space, it is drawn together under the influence of gravity. The closer it gets together, the more gravity affects it. Eventually, it gets tightly packed together in huge balls of hydrogen that, at their cores, experience enough heat and pressure to drive a hydrogen fusion reaction. This is a star. Look up, you may see many of them.
Hydrogen fusion produces newer more complex elements like helium, but as the hydrogen begins to run out it will also undergo other forms of fusion, producing heavier elements up to the scale of iron. Some of these stars, if they are large enough will explode violently around the point where they transition from hydrogen to heavier fusion reactions, in an event called a supernova. Several such events have been observed by astronomers and the remains of many others are quite visible.
Supernova explosions are the source of most of the heavier elements above iron. They also tend to scatter a lot of matter around.
Subsequently, all this mess tends to converge back together under the force of gravity to form new or secondary star systems. Now with heavier elements around, they also form planets.
Most of the elements that make up out bodies, apart from the hydrogen in the water, was fused in a supernova.
This is why Carl Sagan famously said “We are all made of star stuff”.
Star systems in all stages of this process can be observed with relatively straightforward astronomical equipment. We can tell which elements are present in a star my the telltale spectroscopic signature of each element.
Is that enough for you?
I’m typing this on my phone.
Andrew - “he” is either a troll, some kind journalist baiting for statements, or has a bad case of religion. Either way none of those options mean reasoned arguments will work. As you can see they only interpret statements you make as opportunities to prove you wrong by misrepresentation of what you say.
Like I said at the beginning of this post, reason and rationality does not stop them from taking control. This right here is why politics matters.
Just imagine if this person was in charge of science funding or the science curriculum at schools. What is scary is that people just like this are in America and are supplying money and knowledge here to try make it happen.
Present best guess about what’s in a star (using the Sun as a model because it’s close enough to observe) is that it is composed of a liquid plasma (disassociated sub atomic “particles”) and the only Hydrogen and Helium present is in its atmosphere. Not only that but the absorption/emission spectrums of H and He are nowhere near the complete spectrum of EM radiation from the Sun.
Also, far from accumulating H2, the Sun is belching out a “Solar wind” consisting of billions of tons of Alpha particles (He nuclei), Protons (H nuclei), and electrons (Beta particles) that all dissipate into space and become part of the low density plasma that seems to occupy all of interstellar and intergalactic space.
You bods should not rely on popular sci-fi speculations unless your intention is to simply self-justify your superstitious ideology.
Anyhow, my suspicions are confirmed. The Pirate Party is just another incarnation of politically correct ignorance with no potential to be any kind of influence in a renaissance of integrity in politics, society, morality or science.
It can be important to verify and validate ones perception. In the example above where the educational, scientific and mental capacites of this group are called into question by someone obviously vastly more skilled and knowledgeable in matters scientific and possibly metaphysical than the 99% of sheeple who rely upon their science from mere science journals and university.
Unable to comprehend the science being discussed, my response however is focused much more so on the maturity and political correctness and being wrapped up in popularism. The response is this:
Ok, wow, your ability to take a perfectly valid explanation, then ignore parts of it that are inconvenient to you and scatter shit around to make yourself sound superficially credible, is just remarkable.
I did not say that the sun was accumulating H2. That occurs during star formation, and yes, the sun has more than just H and He in it, because it is a second generation star, just like I described, with plenty of other elements around forming a planetary system as well as there being more diversity of elements in the sun. There is definitely fusion going on in the sun. That’s what’s generating all the heat, radiation and plasma and driving the solar wind that you described.
So yeah, it’s a little messier than I described, but that mess is beside the point you asked me to explain. You wanted to know how we get the complexity of everything’ from hydrogen, and I described it for you. Fusion produces complex elements from more simple elements, they get scattered throughout space, cool down and then we get chemistry for even emergent complexity.
All of this totally flies in the face of your assertions that complex things do not emerge from simple things. They obviously do, but that’s inconvenient for your creation story.
Superstition is when you believe things that are untestable and unprovable, and is generally driven by fear.
Science is the opposite. It’s a process for arriving at the best explanations that we can find by challenging every detail to edge ever closer to the best explanations. It is an avoidance of ideology and superstition.
‘God did it’ is not an explanation. It adds nothing of value to either understanding or morality, but it does encourage more superstitious nonsense. We ain’t going there, so I doubt you will be comfortable coming along for the ride with us.
Science should be the opposite; but there is much in popular belief, flogged to the credulous as “science”, that has no basis in observation or logic… (i.e. reality). Such is a superstitious ideology.
Not only will I not be comfortable riding with you lot… I will not even get on your bus.
With twenty two replies to this thread in the last four days, I think it’s pretty safe to say you’re already on the bus. You are of course welcome to get off any time you like.
