posted
So I'm talking with a I-Dist and he says he has no rpobly with evolution, natual selection, big bang, formation of the universe etc etc etc.
However, he believes 2 things:
A) God created all the laws and the universe followed those laws at the big bang. (I have no problem with this since we dont know what happened previously)
B) HOWEVER, while he will believe that all the laws are being followed he believes that when the planets are being formed and life first appears this is his problem:
He believes that all the amino acids forming in the premordial soup and forming exactly in the way needed to form cells and then bacterial and then cells etc etc is so astromonically high even over 2 billion years as to be equal to taking computer parts and shacking it in a bag and expecting it to form a WORKING computer over that time period with windows installed etc etc.
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Conclusion: Does anyone have any info on this?
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posted
Most of those calculations fail to take into account exactly how many "opportunities" for combination there were.
From a quasi-theological perspective, why would God create such a universe that it can progress according to His plan without supernatural intervention, elegantly forming subatomic particles, hydrogen, stars, helium, other elements, planets, and the whole "primordial soup" but that couldn't continue on without a discontinuity in the physical processes?
It's almost an aesthetic argument to me.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
*shrug* This is pretty traditional ID. But since no one REALLY knows the odds, or the timescale involved, it's basically speculation and faith.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
Well originally I stood by an 1950's experiemnt where they took a sample of the primordial soup and gave a electric current to repesent the energy from the "sun" and voila! Amino acids were formed.
However it was determined that the experiment was contained enough or something and when they did it properly supposedly they didnt get the same results and the amino acids werent formed so I'm currently befuddled until I can find info.
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posted
That's an interesting thing about ID. Karl Popper and falsifiability, anyone?
Intelligent Design advocates make so few independent assertions. Most of their assertions are crticisms of evolution. If there are no independent assertions, then their theories are ultimately untestable. And an untestable theory is not a scientific one.
Posts: 866 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
My Oceanography class has the age of the earth at approxamitely 4.5 billion years and life appearing at app 3.5 billion years. A friend of mine also pointed out that when you're dealing with insects and similar critters, you go through a lot of generations quickly. So I suppose it's not impossible.
My problem would be more with divergent evolution leading to the creation of a seperate species. If they're geographically seperated, sure. But if they're still hanging out in the same area, what could be the biological incentive to reducing the number of organisms you can breed with? And how many would diverge at the same time in large enough numbers to keep the new species going? It just seems a bit odd.
Edit: Apparently I don't know which word is which tonight.
Posts: 2283 | Registered: Dec 2003
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posted
An old canard going right back to bog-standard creationism. Yes, the porbability of a modern cell spontaneously forming from amino acids is very small. No, that's not what we think happened.
There are any number of other ones; we do not yet have the information to distinguish properly between them. But there's plenty of plausible step-by-step approaches. After all, any crystal can replicate itself, given the right chemical environment.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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quote:Originally posted by AvidReader: My problem would be more with divergent evolution leading to the creation of a seperate species. If they're geographically seperated, sure. But if they're still hanging out in the same area, what could be the biological incentive to reducing the number of organisms you can breed with? And how many would diverge at the same time in large enough numbers to keep the new species going? It just seems a bit odd.
Hang out with a lot of illegal immigrants, do you? But cultural issues apart, there are several things that can lead to this kind of divergence. One of the more obvious is adaptedness to different parts of a habitat : Lighter monkeys (of any given species) will tend to hang out nearer to the tops of trees; their heavier cousins have to root for, um, roots. Voila, mate choice. Some species come in a right-facing and a left-facing form (like handedness in humans) where the mating organs only line up properly between individuals of the same handedness. Again, separation. Diet is another one : Some animals do have individual taste, and a certain subset might plain just prefer a different kind of berry, and consequently hang out in different places than their brethren.
Google 'ring species', it would seem to be quite relevant to this discussion.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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He believes that all the amino acids forming in the premordial soup and forming exactly in the way needed to form cells and then bacterial and then cells etc etc is so astromonically high even over 2 billion years as to be equal to taking computer parts and shacking it in a bag and expecting it to form a WORKING computer over that time period with windows installed etc etc.
Most people who think that is evidence of G-d, I don't think realize how truly huge this universe is. Anything even remotely possible in this insanely large universe is bound to happen at least once.
Posts: 3134 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
If you want a couple quick fun reads that take statistics and the possibility of us existing and runs with it read Scott Adams' God's Debris and The Religion War.
Posts: 3134 | Registered: Mar 2005
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quote:My problem would be more with divergent evolution leading to the creation of a seperate species. If they're geographically seperated, sure. But if they're still hanging out in the same area, what could be the biological incentive to reducing the number of organisms you can breed with? And how many would diverge at the same time in large enough numbers to keep the new species going? It just seems a bit odd.
Even accepting the theories that suppose periods of explosive change (on a geological scale, which is to say over tens of millions of years) evolution, or at least the successful kind, is never an individual thing. It occurs as a sort of statistical trend across a population. For a near uncountable number of generations, the individuals bearing whatever sort of mutation are still able to breed (and perhaps pass on this mutation) within the larger group.
As to why this would be beneficial, you may as well ask why there is more than one type of life on the planet. In a complex environment such as ours, there are a multitude of niches to fill. Each of these niches can support a certain size population and yeilds a certain output to strategies designed to exploit it. A variant of a species who has either developed such that they can exploit a new, unfilled niche or better exploit their current one generally has an advantage that will play out over millions of generations as increased numbers and specialization, that made lead to speciation, such that the two populations can no longer interbreed.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
Paul Davies has written a book that deals soley with the issue of abiogenesis. The Fifth Miracle is amazingly written. Davies has no ideological axe to grind or agenda to push (for the record, he is a staunch evolutionist with a dislike for appeals to supernatural explanations for anything, including ID). But he details nicely the problems with current theory on the natural formation of a self replicating biological system (including the clay theory, linked above), as well as suggesting some new lines of research.
One of the more interesting elements was his explanation that the development of DNA based information storage (including the storage of instructions, 'software' in his analogy) was a HUGE step and needs to be researched. Specifically, he used the analogy of going from building a balsa wood plane that flew when thrown (but had no control once it left the hand) to a radio controlled plane, which allowed for the transmission of control data- which means encoding and decoding of data into physical processes. He also goes into information theory, entropy and complexity and it's relation to the problem. It's been about a year since I read it, so the details are fuzzy. But it was an amazing book that few people, I think, would have a problem with. In fact, people on both sides would find things in it that seemed to support their worldview.
Posts: 1346 | Registered: Jun 1999
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quote:they took a sample of the primordial soup ...
Nice trick.
Let's not forget that they took a guess at the ingredients of the primordial soup, constructed it in a closed environment, and applied electricity to the mix. There wasn't any primordial soup lying around in an antedeluvian puddle for them to actually "sample."
That experiment is not going to convince a true believer in ID, or it would've already done so by now.
Posts: 22497 | Registered: Sep 2000
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posted
The problem with the experiments which attempt to prove abiogenesis are multitudinous. The wrong chirality of products, inhibition of subsequent steps by non-desireable chemical products, slow reaction times, short half lives and so on. While the Urey/Miller experiment is even today often cited as providing evidence of abiogenesis, the truth of the matter is that there is, as yet, no experimental evidence that abiogenesis can occur.
Posts: 4548 | Registered: May 2001
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posted
I strongly recommend that people interested in the subject of abiogenesis read "The Fifth Miracle." Very interesting and illuminating in a very accessible (but not pedantic) way.
posted
Jacare: no, there is plenty of experimental evidence that abiogenesis can occur, there is no instance of it occuring experimentall, though.
Something doesn't have to be recreated for one to gain evidence of it happening, particularly when, like abiogenesis, the thing in question required many individual components to fall into place.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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