Lying - now on the banned list!

geoinmillbrook

Sorry for length of posts - in our world of soundbites it is hard to convince people that sometimes value may come in larger packages.

Awesome comment and questions. Again, I bring you back to the definition of "proof" that I used - proof can simply be enough information to convince others of what "is". Even proof can be subjective and is often argued is my point. Yes, rivets are "proof" of purpose but also are a simple tool built by man to hold to pieces of material together. Purpose is no more proof of a supreme being than randomness. And yes, since Darwin is dead, there are many things maybe still hidden from him, but I get your point...

So - Irreducible complexity (IC) is the argument intended to support intelligent design creationism[1] and refute evolution that certain biological systems are too complex to have evolved from simpler, or "less complete" predecessors, and are at the same time too complex to have arisen naturally through chance mutations. <-- Couldn't have said it better so I just cut and pasted from Wikipedia.

What is so awesome about the scientific method is that it's premise is based on an ability to openly query, test, observe, inspect and tear apart a theory or hypothesis into elements, or taken as a whole, and see if the assertions can be reproduced, or verified by others, usually by experiment -- in order to provide proof - support of said hypothesis.
IC is an interesting assertion and it is preceded by the question: "Which came first, the chicken or the egg ?" Has anyone ever answered that question ? Since none of us were here when life began we cannot bring forward any direct observation of what actually happened "in the beginning". We can only hypothesize and then test those assertions to the best of our ability to corroborate them using all the tools we have to do so. I am not an expert on evolution but based on all my random collections of information and formal training in chemistry, physics, electronics, material science and general science, -- the physical evidence associated with life on earth shows there is a definate and verifyiable trend in the complexity of life forms on earth as a function of time. Yes, one celled animals and plants are complex, but viruses are less so and multicelled life forms are more so.
What Darwin proposed based on macro observation has been verified by studying the forms of DNA that different life forms have, and that only small perturbations in the DNA molecule can produce very different genetic patterns and characteristics in life forms. Yes DNA, RNA, mRNA all are complex molecules. But we know through carbon dating that bacterium lifeforms came early in earth's history and humans came later. Genomes (an organism’s complete set of DNA) vary widely in size: the smallest known genome for a free-living organism (a bacterium) contains about 600,000 DNA base pairs, while human and mouse genomes have some 3 billion.
Just because they are complex doesn't mean that they could not have evolved over billions of years from something simpler - and this timeline data tends to support the theory of evolution. A billion years is a really really long time - alot can happen. Now, it could still be that carbon atoms, hydrogen, oxygen, etc (the atoms that organic molecules are made from) were put in the universe by some supreme being as part of a grand design to allow life to evolve... who the heck knows. But there is now evidence of course that even these, once thought to be elemental building blocks, have "evolved" from combinations of sub-atomic particles and "forces", and that they may be nothing more than collections of packets of energy waves (so what is energy/force broken down in it's most basic form ?? - sheesh can go on for ever)...

So - Since carbon based life form evolution has been going on for so long, and is effected by so many things beyond random chance (environment, nutrition, competition between organisms, mutation through energy - like UV light, etc etc ) it really is difficult to trace back changes in genetic code any further than the physical trails lead (and there are many). Have you ever heard of the Human Genome Project ? It traces back all human existence to a single region in the middle east. This by itself supports both creationism and evolution, but taken with other information (the study of other life forms on earth and the timelines of them) you can get different "proof" that supports evolution more fully.
The birth of "supposition" comes from the trails of evidence growing cold or sometimes taken out of context with other information.
Lack of physical evidence, logical inference, and verifyable material leads to all sorts of assertions. I like to think that a real scientist or just anyone interested in the truth about anything will keep an open mind and follow the "data" once it becomes available.
This is true for religion as well - I think religion should not be afraid of inspection by a scientific method. If something is true, it is true - it will stand up to scrutiny and criticism and will someday be known, religions evolve based on popular belief, that is known as well simply through historical record and will continue to do so out of these iterations and reconciliations with what is generally known as "the truth".
The very notion of heresy smacks against this belief. One should not be labelled a heretic or infidel or enemy simply for asking questions and disagreeing with religious supposition based on facts. The response "agree with me or I will cut off your head" is barbaric. We have hopefully evolved to much more than that as a species.
The fact that scientifc debate exists is also a gratifying thing. It needs to happen as part of the process of discovering truth - and agreeing on what is "proof"... the fact that there are lots of open questions --- what is life, what is consciousness, why does life as we define it exist are all great ones. Maybe someday it all gets figured out -- but then again , hopefully not, we still need reasons to wonder and speculate it makes life fun.

Anyhow enough bits and bytes used up here by me. Have to go to work ...

George

geoinmillbrook

I love it !!!!!! Not to belittle any belief at all , but simply to beg the question - it makes an elegant point !!

Bob Ross

Google "Stanley Miller". I thought everyone learned about this in junior high school?



Huh...sort of like how if a fetus is aborted and does not continue to live after being removed from the womb, it was not truly alive in the first place, right?

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Originally Posted by Don Quijote
You have an attitude that rubs me very bad, I do not like you, and I also wish you to banish from my thread.

Bro Deal

Yes. Unlike Christianity, which lost the originals of its sacred documents thousands of years ago, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has all its original docs. They have been scanned in and posted to the web for all to see. A scan of one of the seminal documents is:



Yes, in fact he has. The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster holds that the number of pirates is inversely correlated with global warming. So far empirical evidence has shown this to be true. A graph of the two shows a remarkable pattern that is undeniable.

RAmen

__________________
"You are like the wind and I like the lion. You form the tempest. The sand stings my eyes and the ground is parched. I roar in defiance but you do not hear. But between us there is a difference. I, like the lion, must remain in my place. While you like the wind will never know yours." -- Mulay Hamid El Raisuli, Lord of the Riff, Sultan to the Berbers, Last of the Barbary Pirates

geoinmillbrook

Holy you-know-what Bro man I almost peed myself laughing. We are all going to h-e double hockey sticks. I know it.
For any more of those ready to stone the scientists, maybe go to this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science

azul_fahrrad

You are very articulate, I respect you and your opinion. I have one question for you, where are the eveloutionary links between species?

azul_fahrrad

The experiment used water (H2O), methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3) and hydrogen (H2). The chemicals were all sealed inside a sterile array of glass tubes and flasks connected together in a loop, with one flask half-full of liquid water and another flask containing a pair of electrodes. The liquid water was heated to induce evaporation, sparks were fired between the electrodes to simulate lightning through the atmosphere and water vapor, and then the atmosphere was cooled again so that the water could condense and trickle back into the first flask in a continuous cycle.

At the end of one week of continuous operation Miller and Urey observed that as much as 10-15% of the carbon within the system was now in the form of organic compounds. Two percent of the carbon had formed amino acids, including 13 of the 22 that are used to make proteins in living cells, with glycine as the most abundant. Sugars, lipids, and some of the building blocks for nucleic acids were also formed. Nucleic acids (DNA, RNA) themselves were not formed. As observed in all consequent experiments, both left-handed (L) and right-handed (D) optical isomers were created in a racemic mixture.

The molecules produced were simple organic molecules, far from a complete living biochemical system, but the experiment established that the hypothetical processes could produce some building blocks of life without requiring life to synthesize them first.

So far it has not been done. Damn! Those pesky details! Why has it not been done? If someone did it they might have a chance at making all of us believers shut up for once. That alone would be incentive enough I would think.





You are comparing apples to oranges here. A fetus starts out with living cells that continue to grow and form a human. That is no where near the same as pumping electricity through inorganic matter to force a chemical/molecular change to create another building block of life.

nns1400

I like that. Very clever. (I will have to blame you guys for the fact that I keep thinking the words "noodly appendage." It does have a ring to it. Dave Barry would want to name a rock band The Noodly Appendages.)

Do the FSM documents written thousands of years ago, on notebook paper, give any information about the history of the universe? Like, what is the FSM creation story?

Is it that once there was nothing; then BANG there was something?

Then the next section puts the order of astronomical and evolutionary events in the correct order, right?

Or is that the Bible?

Does the FSM theology explain why man is a self-aware, creative, contemplative being capable of reason and believing in a creator, instead of a plate of noodly appendages? Why isn't spaghetti the dominant life force on this planet? Fettucine? Linguine? Did the FSM send a meatball to live among us to teach and demonstrate that meatballs have a future and a hope beyond this life, that meatballs don't just go into that black hole, ceasing to exist as fully meatball? Is there spaghetti in heaven?! (I hope so.)

You seem to have enough free time and creativity to answer these questions. I wait patiently....

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This stuff is just crap...Hitchy

nns1400

I only have a minute today, but can I point out that y'all keep dropping little comments about people being ready to stone the scientists, chopping off heads, repressing the truth. I don't see any of the believers in this conversation saying anything threatening or hateful to any of you. It's a casual conversation, with fair questions being asked and everyone freely presenting their views.

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This stuff is just crap...Hitchy

nns1400

from "the cranks" at reasons.org
Few textbooks as yet acknowledge, however, that most origin-of-life researchers now consider Miller’s experiments irrelevant. The consensus view of atmospheric constituents has changed since the 1950s. Then they were thought to be hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water vapor.[2] Now, scientists believe early Earth’s atmosphere was composed of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water. This gas mixture does not yield organic compounds in prebiotic simulation experiments (hence, no primordial soup)—a devastating blow for the naturalistic origin-of-life scenario.[3]

In response to this blow, Miller and collaborators recently appealed to CO-based atmospheres as a possible matrix for the production of prebiotic materials.[4] According to this alternative scenario, CO, not carbon dioxide, was present in the primordial atmosphere. Miller and his team maintain that if early Earth’s crust were in a more reduced state than today, and if cool temperatures prevailed on the planet’s surface, their scenario makes sense. These researchers also think that comets may have delivered CO to early Earth.

Miller’s team showed that gas mixtures comprised of CO, nitrogen, and water do produce organic compounds, including amino acids, when bombarded with high-energy protons (a component of cosmic rays). On the surface, this finding seems to indicate that if CO were present in the primordial atmosphere, cosmic rays could have stimulated the production of primordial soup ingredients.

However, no evidence exists to indicate that CO was ever present in the primitive atmosphere. Even if CO were introduced through cometary delivery or through the outgassing of the crust, Earth’s water vapor would have removed it. Further, the flux of cosmic rays to the Earth (necessary to break apart CO’s highly stable chemical bond) is insufficient to produce the levels of prebiotic materials necessary to keep up with their subsequent chemical decomposition in any primordial soup.

Despite such extensive and intensive efforts, origin-of-life researchers have again (and consistently) failed to identify relevant sources for prebiotic compounds.[5] Without prebiotic materials, there can be no primordial soup, and without a primordial soup, naturalistic origin-of-life scenarios remain “dead in the water.”

[1] For example, see Richard Cowen, History of Life, 3d ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Science, 2000), 5-12.

[2] Stanley L. Miller, “A Production of Amino Acids under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions,” Science 117 (1953), 528-29; Stanley L. Miller, “Production of Some Organic Compounds Under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions,” Journal of American Chemical Society 77 (1955): 2351-66.

[3] François Raulin, “Atmospheric Prebiotic Synthesis,” presentation at the 12th International Conference on the Origin of Life and the 9th meeting of the International Conference on the Origin of Life, San Diego, CA 1999; Stanley L. Miller, “The Endogenous Synthesis of Organic Compounds,” The Molecular Origins of Life: Assembling Pieces of the Puzzle, ed. André Brack (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 59-85.

[4] Shin Miyakawa et al., “Prebiotic Synthesis from CO Atmospheres: Implications for the Origin of Life,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 99 (2002): 14628-31.

[5] For example, see Fazale R. Rana, “Sea Vents Closed As Life-Origin Site,” Connections vol. 4 no. 2 (2002), 1,5.

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This stuff is just crap...Hitchy

mitosis

archaeopteryx
eohippus
monotremes
Homo erectus, H. habilis

nns1400

archaeopteryx has already been abandoned by evolutionists......

report on the rest later. kinda slim list

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This stuff is just crap...Hitchy

Bro Deal

The problem with believers is that when when a link is found to fill a gap they just claim that there are now two gaps.

__________________
"You are like the wind and I like the lion. You form the tempest. The sand stings my eyes and the ground is parched. I roar in defiance but you do not hear. But between us there is a difference. I, like the lion, must remain in my place. While you like the wind will never know yours." -- Mulay Hamid El Raisuli, Lord of the Riff, Sultan to the Berbers, Last of the Barbary Pirates

mitosis

lobe finned fish - coelacanths

I'm not aware of any Biologists here abandoning archaeopteryx as an evolutionary link.

There are endless examples from the fossil record, but, as I'm sure you are aware there are examples in front of us today of evolution occuring right before our eyes. Of changes in species that have been introduced to other environments (rabbits in Australia) of resistance developed by insects to insecticides, of changes in populations of Peppered Moths during the industrial revolution in England.

You would also be aware, I'm sure, that conditions needed for fossils to form are rare, yet still there is a good fossil record for some present day species. eg the horse.

There is also evidence from DNA sequencing and Amino Acid sequencing that supports much of the classifcation and evolutionary relationships that have been concluded based on structural similarities.

I don't have time for a long detailed debate but the information is out there to give solid support to the Theory of Evolution. It is accessible to everyone. You can choose to ignore it or attempt to discredit it if you want.

LIke all scientists I assess new information and change my views if necessary. At least there is solid evidence to support evolution and no matter how slim you might think it is it is better than the zero evidence to support the existence of a god.