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To: general_re
Evolution. Anything else?

Are you sure? I hate to sound like a broken record, but why no one has been able to point me to a resource that rigorously demonstrates probability of life being created and evolving to its current state through chance and natural selection. The arguments seem to go in circles and come back to "evolution". Well, that's nice, but not too informative.
476 posted on 08/17/2004 4:44:58 PM PDT by bluejay
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To: bluejay
To calculate the probability of something happening, you need to figure all the ways it can happen and then do a probability for each one. If you don't know anything like all the possible ways, then you can't figure the odds. Within every scenario, if you don't know initial conditions in detail (Was it an undersea volcanic vent? A tidal pool? What minerals were present in the water and rocks?) you can't figure the odds.

The only calculations you ever see are something else entirely. Creationists figure the odds of something complicated like a modern cell jumping together all at once from some sub-unit like atoms, molecules, or single amino acids. Bad model. Garbage in, garbage out. All nonsense and nothing but. Even God wouldn't make a cell that way.

478 posted on 08/17/2004 5:06:38 PM PDT by VadeRetro
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To: bluejay
Are you sure?

Certainty is for freshman logic class. In the real world, we deal with the preponderance of the evidence, coupled with our inductive skills.

...why no one has been able to point me to a resource that rigorously demonstrates probability of life being created and evolving to its current state through chance and natural selection.

I already discussed that. As I said, post hoc attempts to calculate the odds of singular events are worthless, and therefore nobody wastes much time trying. You seem to think otherwise, but any "answer" you come up with is going to be essentially meaningless, because it will be wholly dependent on whatever your a priori assumptions are, assumptions that you have no way to test, and therefore cannot really justify in any rigorous fashion.

That's your small, technical problem inherent in the thing you seek. The larger, deeper problem you have is that your question comes about because you've fallen into the same teleological trap that grabs hold of most critics. Namely, the idea that calculating the odds of prokaryotic cells arising is meaningful is implicitly reliant on the assumption that prokaryotes are the only form of life that could have arisen. But of course, evolution isn't teleological like that - it's not goal-driven, and there's absolutely no reason to think that the way things are now is the only way they could have turned out. There is nothing special about the way things are, other than that's the way things are - you have absolutely, positively no way of knowing what might have been, and therefore, how on earth can you set about calculating the odds of one particular solution, when you have absolutely no idea how large the solution space is?

The only reason having a phone number like 555-1776 or 555-1492 or 555-0911 is meaningful is because we assign it meaning. In reality, your odds of getting one of those particular "special" numbers is the same as your odds of getting any other number. In reality, the odds of life-as-we-know-it arising are basically the same as the odds of all manner of life-as-we-don't-know-it arising. With phone numbers you already know how many possible numbers there are, and so you can meaningfully calculate the odds of getting one of them at random. With life, you haven't the faintest clue about how many potential types of life there are, and therefore no way at all to calculate the odds of one particular sort arising at random. That's the piddly end of it - in truth, you got assigned 555-2647, and now you're behaving as though that number is special just because its yours. Realistically, you were going to get some number, and that number was just as likely as any other.

483 posted on 08/17/2004 5:16:08 PM PDT by general_re (Drive offensively - the life you save may be your own.)
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