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To: Southack
I have found that believers in evolution HATE numbers. Trying to pin them down about testable numbers is a very frustrating exercise. This helps explain why most of their replies to your post have been efforts to change the subject or personal insults.

For the ones who say "but it is an INFINITE amount of monkies" I say, but you do not have an INFINITE amount of time to work with, nor an infinite amount of matter. The universe, as incrediably vast as it is, is FAR to brief and tiny for life to have arisen by chance. You DO NOT have an infinite number to work with. The numbers you have are huge, but are as nothing compared to the scope of the problem.

As for the crowd who insists "but it is not random, their are rules", I say this- If rules, then a Rulemaker. And if the Rules say that new Phylums, classes, orders and families can arise by chance, then we should be able to create new versions of these things BY generating those chances (inducing mutations under (intelligent in this case) selection pressure). We can't, so if there are rules, one of them seems to be that their are limits to the amount of change that can be produced by chance mutations and selctions pressures.

62 posted on 03/05/2002 2:09:00 PM PST by Ahban
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To: Ahban
The universe, as incrediably vast as it is, is FAR to brief and tiny for life to have arisen by chance. You DO NOT have an infinite number to work with. The numbers you have are huge, but are as nothing compared to the scope of the problem. As for the crowd who insists "but it is not random, their are rules", I say this- If rules, then a Rulemaker.

Actually, I agree with you-- and with Darwin. As a Jew, I believe that God created the heavens and the earth. As a thinking person, I see loads of evidence that Darwinian evolution has been working, at least since the beginnings of life on this planet, to create new species. Darwinian evolution wouldn't work if not for the laws of chemistry and physics; and I believe that God created those rules.

My bottom line is that God made us, and evolution was His tool.

87 posted on 03/05/2002 2:40:21 PM PST by Lurking Libertarian
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To: Ahban
I have found that believers in evolution HATE numbers.

No, just bogus calculations.

The universe, as incrediably vast as it is, is FAR to brief and tiny for life to have arisen by chance.

Ok, where are *your* numbers to support this claim? And don't point to the original post, it's full of errors, unsupported presumptions, and overestimations.

You DO NOT have an infinite number to work with. The numbers you have are huge, but are as nothing compared to the scope of the problem.

You want numbers? Check this out: Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations

Also read Borel's Law and the Origin of Many Creationist Probability Assertions

As for the crowd who insists "but it is not random, their are rules", I say this- If rules, then a Rulemaker.

I seem to have missed the place where you proved this assertion. Feel free to expand on it. Especially, be sure to define "rules" in a rigorous fashion, and make a distinction between "fundamental rules" and "emergent rules". I'll wait.

And if the Rules say that new Phylums, classes, orders and families can arise by chance, then we should be able to create new versions of these things BY generating those chances (inducing mutations under (intelligent in this case) selection pressure).

Speaking of numbers, Ahban, you "forgot" to look at a few before you made this pronouncement.

It takes nature at least several million generations to produce new Orders, etc., using populations on the order of hundreds of millions as grist for the mutation grindstone.

While we seldom have populations that large to work with, we could perhaps improve a bit on the overall speed with careful selection and breeding. Even if we could speed up evolution tenfold -- and that might be a stretch -- it would still take us at the very least 100,000 generations of animal husbandry to produce something as different from the original stock as a new Family, much less Order, Phylum, etc.

So when you say:

We can't, so if there are rules, one of them seems to be that their are limits to the amount of change that can be produced by chance mutations and selctions pressures.

Yeah, the "limits" are the amount of time humans have been actively breeding animals. You're making a huge mistake when you confuse our limits within historical times to that of all of nature across geological time.

Nature has been at it over 100,000 times as much time as we have, and uses the entire planet as her laboratory, compared to just a relative handful of human breeders intermittently over the past few centuries.

Don't complain about numbers when you apparently haven't bothered to check any yourself.

486 posted on 12/09/2002 2:47:59 PM PST by Dan Day
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