Questions on Evolution and the Existence of God and...

by ILoveTTATT 130 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  ILoveTTATT

  Since there's different hypotheses of abiogenesis, it's hard to say broadly, other than to say all of the credible ones take into account the energy input required.

  I would expect a credible abiogenesis hypothesis to take into account the second law of thermo.

  Everything tends to disorder unless there's an outside energy source. In our case, the sun. In the case of extremophiles, geothermal vents, etc... life needs energy to keep alive.

  What could have made chemicals, which tend to a lower energy state and disorder, to have self-replication and to have this "survival mechanism" that needs energy and consistently changes, just to meet the need for self-propagation and self-preservation?

  the two terms are still useful to distinguish between interactions of laregly carbon-based molecules which are commonly seen inside living matter, vs the interactions of matter outside the body...

  Correct... much like "sunrise" and "sunset" aren't technically correct, they are still used in common language.
• 

  Perry

  Adamah writes,

  See, you missed that the study's FINDINGS need to be replicable:

  So according to your own tedious definition a study is separate from its findings, and only the findings need to be replicated for it to qualify as science? Then it follows that the study of macro evolution hasn't produced any replicatable "findings", suggesting that after 160 years of study, scientists really havent found anything scientific as far as macro darwinian evolution is concerned. This is accoring to your definition, not mine.

  But the findings ARE there, they just aren't the findings Darwin expected in his grandiose slime-to-scientist paradigm. And, they are replicatable. Cats stay cats, bears stay bears and so forth. Darwinian evolution seems to me to be a very outdated 19th century theory, especially when you consider what we now know about the incredibly complex biological information strand called DNA. The amount of DNA information that can be stored in a space the size of a pinhead is equivalent to the information content of a pile of paperback books 500 times as tall as the distance from earth to the moon. Where did all this information come from?

  A single cell has been likened to the Complexity of a moderrn city with numerous parts that are irreducible complex. Nice video from Harvard University below.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJyUtbn0O5Y

  I think most people are fine with manipulating the environment in a study to try and "speed up" the theoretical macro evolution process. Likewise, artificial selection is fine too as far as I'm concerned. But even with all this, in the two studies presented in this thread, a canine still ends up a canine and a bacteria still ends up a bacteria.

  This is consistent with a biblical worldview as are thousands of other replicatable scientific "findings".

  What are the odds?

  • The mathematical probabilities against the spontaneous generation of life are sometimes acknowledged by evolutionists as a strong argument for creation. The odds in favor of the chance formation of a functional simple cell are acknowledged to be worse than 1 in 10 40,000 . [111] The scientist Sir Frederick Hoyle, a renowned mathematician from Cambridge known for many popular science works, [112] has used analogies to try to convey the immensity of the problem. For a more graspable notion of the improbability, he has calculated the odds of the accidental formation of a simple living cell to be roughly comparable to the odds of rolling double-sixes 50,000 times in a row with unloaded dice. [113]
  • As another comparison, Hoyle asks, what are the chances that a tornado might blow through a junkyard containing all the parts of a 747 and just accidentally assemble it so as to leave it sitting there all set for take-off? “So small as to be negligible,” Hoyle says, “even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole universe.” [114] Although not a creationist, Hoyle’s calculations have convinced him that there must have been some “intelligence” behind the emergence of life on earth.

  Based strictly on science, many have concluded that Macro evolution and spontaneous generation are simply elaborate fairy tales for adults. I can see no sound reason to refute this conclusion.
• 

  cantleave

  Going back to ridiculous assertion that abiogenesis contravene's the 2nd law of thermodynamics, let us not forget the earth is NOT a closed system, it is constantly being provided with energy by that big ball of energy called the sun.

  Ionic gradients such as those required for the basic process of biochemistry can be found in nature such as those found in deep sea thermal vents.
• 

  ILoveTTATT

  I did not assert it, I am just wondering about it... But I responded to my own question.
• 

  cofty

  Perry - How much have you read about the evolution of the eukaryotic cell?

  Do you know how mitochondria and chloroplasts were acquired through endosymbiosis? Are you familiar with the evidence for this?

  Which books on evolution have you read? By that I mean books by evolutionary biologists.

  Words cannot express my contempt for religious dogma that keeps people like you in willful ignorance of discovery.

  In contrast IloveTTATT is an example of somebody who is searching with an open mind.
• 

  Apognophos

  Everything tends to disorder unless there's an outside energy source.

  Who says? I'm sure you read that somewhere, but does that make sense to you personally, that everything in the universe just steadily breaks down with no outside cause? How do you explain the formation of ice crystals from water droplets, among many other such processes of increasing complexity?

  Wikipedia: "The second law of thermodynamics states that in general the total entropy of any system will not decrease other than by increasing the entropy of some other system. Hence, in a system isolated from its environment, the entropy of that system will tend not to decrease".

  All matter does not become increasingly disordered. The universe apparently is moving towards equilibrium, which means that eventually everything will even out and return to mush. But in the meantime, lots of interesting stuff still happens. Information (or "order" -- the opposite of entropy) naturally ebbs and flows, sometimes leaving a larger space and becoming compressed into a tiny area. The total amount of information is always conserved, but sometimes we end up with a more complex object in a resultingly less complex environment.

  Scientists often say that eventually the sloshing of information in the pool of the universe will settle down and everything will be quiet, homogenous, and gray, but not for billions of years. The truth is, we don't yet know what will happen to the universe. There are doubts that heat-death is the final end-state of the universe at all.

  What could have made chemicals, which tend to a lower energy state and disorder, to have self-replication and to have this "survival mechanism" that needs energy and consistently changes, just to meet the need for self-propagation and self-preservation?

  This is a better question. The answer is probably still beyond us. Since you seem fond of thermodynamics, here's a theory that life is an entropy-producing machine. In this theory, the existence of complex forms that we call "life" is a chemical method of creating entropy, which is (it's claimed) an essential property of the universe. While I am skeptical about this theory, I think that probably there is a very simple reason why the universe "wants" to produce life, something as fundamental as the universal constants like c and Planck's constant that creates complexity through simple rules. If you have studied fractals at all, this becomes much less foreign of a concept.
• 

  adamah

  IluvTTATT said-

  What could have made chemicals, which tend to a lower energy state and disorder, to have self-replication and to have this "survival mechanism" that needs energy and consistently changes, just to meet the need for self-propagation and self-preservation?

  Think back to the examples of fullerenes (which you cited earlier), which although giving the appearance of being more 'ordered', are actually a more stable configuration overall, and hence an example where a lower energy state results in the greater stability AND lending the appearance of more order. In other words, lower energy states and disorder are not mutually-exclusive.

  Same thing happens within strands of DNA, where the structure of the double-helix is stabilized due to intramolecular ' hydrogen bonding' (i.e. dipole-dipole attraction of hydrogen atoms to an adjacent electronegative atom). Hydrogen bonds are very weak forces, but there are thousands of these H-bonds within a DNA sequence which gives the structure great stability, overall.

  The benefits of sexual reproduction are greater variability and exchange of genetic information within the gene pool (you asked about factors that influence the rate of evolution earlier: sexual reproduction is MUCH faster than asexual reproduction, and it increases variability by 'shuffling the deck' more often). We see rudimentary features of sex-like reproduction in bacteria (eg exchange of plasmids, pockets of genetic material which bacteria will swap), but the emergence of sexual reproduction is clearly a winner.

  BTW, it's funny to me how those who most tout the "glory of God's creation" are often those who have spent the least amount of time learning and understanding "God's" creations. As long as I've been learning about how life actually operates, I'm still blown away by just how amazing the process of life truly is, and how it all works together as a system, with an interconnectedness that truly is mind-boggling.... Fascinating stuff! That's what Einstein was referring to as "cosmic religion", the sheer wonder and excitement of being given the privilege of living, yes, but of being given the possibility of studying it.

  Adamah said- See, you missed that the study's FINDINGS need to be replicable:

  Perry said- So according to your own tedious definition a study is separate from its findings, and only the findings need to be replicated for it to qualify as science?

  That's not just my definition, Perry: that's the commonly-accepted usage of those terms within the scientific community, which anyone who's remotely interested in engaging in a meaningful discussion of scientific discussions SHOULD already know.

  A 'study' IS the process of investigating, the process which leads TO 'findings', the results of the scientific investigation. The findings MUST be reproducible by others, since scientists don't accept 'one-offs', or accept a scientist's claims on faith ("Come on, fellas: you can trust me! It worked in MY lab, I promise it did!").

  Now, if the subject is 'evolution on Earth', it's impossible to re-run the ENTIRE EXPERIMENT, starting with the primordial soup from which life first emerged. Hence why we run slightly-less ambitious experiments, such as Lensky has done, which demonstrate the same principles at work but which rely on indirect experimentation; there's been MANY such studies done, from many different angles, all pointing to the FACT of evolution.

  Perry, do yourself a favor and check out this book from the library (my local branch has it, as should every public library in the World): "Evolution vs Creationism", written by Eugenie C Scott (she's head of NCSE). She's an excellent communicator, and explains it quite clearly.

  Here's Chapter One (the first chapter is available for free reading, in PDF format):

  http://ncse.com/files/pub/creationism/Evo%20vs.%20Creationism--2nd%20edition--Chapter%201.pdf

  Adam
• 

  Apognophos

  I haven't examined this issue in depth, but just in terms of the chemistry and energy, is life fundamentally different?

  I just noticed that this wasn't answered before. I'm not a chemist or biologist, but I would suggest that the answer is basically "no", as you seem to have already suspected. Life could be thought of as a series of self-sustaining chemical reactions. There's nothing magically different about it, nothing that defies any laws or plays by different rules.

  To see what I mean, look at the stuff that exists on the edges of the domain that we call "life", like viruses, plasmids, and transposons. Eventually you aren't even dealing with identifiable entities as much as just packets of information, as adamah alluded to. That, in one sense, is all we are. Tiny bright lights of complex information amidst a dark universe. Some bodies of information are more complex than others, and can move themselves around, eat, and reproduce. We call this kind of information "life", but it's somewhat arbitrary of a division because there's no clear line between us and much simpler organic molecules.

  Further reading (as support for this post and my previous post too):

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life#Alternatives ("life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution")

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-cellular_life ("life could have started as self-assembling organic molecules")

  -------------

  If you think about it that way, it's no stranger than nebulae coalescing into stars with planets around them, and the planets coalescing into layered structures such as our own. It's just a property of the universe to accumulate order in some places at the cost of others. This may seem amazing, but keep this in mind: this could be the trillionth universe that has existed.

  So if you were to learn that the other 999,999,999,999 universes didn't have life because their randomly-selected constants were not precisely what was needed to result in this kind of natural complexity and order, then it would make our universe a much less amazing "coincidence", wouldn't it? Sooner or later, anyone hits the jackpot if they play enough (and have lots of money to spend).

  That being said, we can't rule out the possibility of a creator, some sort of impersonal deity that made the universe work out this way. But then we have to explain how God came about, which just changes the nature of the problem rather than solving it.
• 

  ILoveTTATT

  It's just a property of the universe to accumulate order in some places at the cost of others.

  The energy of a system as a whole always decreases, and the entropy always increases. Eventually the sun will run out of fuel, the planets will stop spinning, etc... eventually all will be cold, energy-less, and life-less. (If you take the 2nd law of thermo to its logical conclusion).
• 

  Apognophos

  I hope you're actually reading my posts and not just skimming them, as I spent a lot of time on them I addressed that subject in my posts in a couple places. Plus, your reply was a non sequitur to my post.