Subject:
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Re: One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Fri, 5 Jul 2002 17:15:33 GMT
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Viewed:
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4411 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, David Koudys writes:
> Micro evolution can be best explained this way: There was this white moth
> in Brazil.
I thought it was somewhere in the UK.
> The reason why our wisdom teeth are redundant now is 'cause we don't rip
> flesh off bones for eating and therefore don't need the strong teeth and/or
> jaws for that kinda eating.
Our wisdom teeth are primarily for mashing grains and tough fiberous roots.
> In this world where both Physics and Chemistry both
> talk about entropy--that every reaction loses something that cannot be
> gained back, that everything naturally tends towards disorder (like my
> bedroom), that how can something become more complex and structured which
> goes completely against chaos and entropy.
Chaos accounts for the existence of cells of spontaneous order in a chaotic
system. If you add heat to a pan of water -- increasing the entropy, cells of
orderly movement arise spontaneously. The same thing happens in complex baths
of amino acids. And in A-Life simulations. And in lots of things.
Your rationale would suggest that our society should have been degrading over
the past 10,000 years while it is quite clear that we have done the opposite.
We are bringing order out of chaos and we are just a seed element in a chaotic
equation.
> If I were to have a dump truck full of all the parts for a house, and I
> drove to an empty field and dumped it, in my life all those parts would
> never form a house on their own--it takes an intelligence, a rationale,
> something smart, to assemble them into a structure.
It does not take intelligence, nor even purpose. Wind forms interesting
geometries out of straw during a tornado. The line of shells on the beach is a
periodic function.
It is true that you can't liquify a person, stir it up and expect a fully
functional person to arise from your mass of goo, but the requirements for
the situation needed for gradual evolution of prokaryotic life are _much_
simpler than that. And simpler too than your house building example. The
forces that allow atoms to form complex molecules is inherent in matter. There
are no forces that would drive nails into planks as you dump the truck. It's
not a valid comparison. And even then, it's not absurd to suggest that
somthing like a house would form if you dumped that truck a million times each
day for a billion years.
> However, in our reality, the universe is not infinite and does tend towards
> chaos if left on its own.
The universe moves toward chaos with or without being "left on its own." It's
just that from certain very small perspectives, we think that intelligence and
purpose are defeating entropy.
> Therefore something intelligent must have casued
> that to happen. Causation is something I should have pursued :)
You say this as if it clearly stems from your words above, but it isn't so.
> There are no absolutes when it comes to this. Saying that Creationism takes
> more faith than Evolution is also farcical. One you have to accept God, an
> intelligent being who made the heavens and hte earth, and made us in his
> image, the other you have to accept a theory that has so many holes.
I don't see the farce. There is zero evidence for a divine creator and some
evidence to suggest spontaneous evolution. Connect the dots.
> Why only 2 forms of life? (sure people can say 3+ with bacteria, viruses and
> whatever...) but only plants and animals--why not more? If the universe is
> prone to chaos we should have lotsa different things going on (at least ,
> lots more than the millions we have now ;) )
No, the ecosystem keeps paring the number down. And there are five kingdoms of
life not including viruses and the more hypothetical life-like things.
> Why do we have distinct
> differences between the species?
We don't. _We_ call them spiecies in our ongoing attempt to bring explanatory
power to bear on the natural world. But our best efforts at classification
keep being refined and redone. We still have "species" that can interbreed.
> I mean niches are not absolute so why are
> the species? Why no 'missing links'--If this evolution thing took place
> over millions/billions of years, there should be evidence *everywhere*. We
> have the dinosaurs, a distinct species in their own right.
There is evidence everywhere. And the dinosaurs consist of many many species,
not one.
> Dinosaurs fit
> into my theory just as well as they fit into yours. Except mine says they
> died out, not evolved into something 'new and improved' when the climate
> changed.
Mine doesn't say that they (for the most part) evolved into anything else
either. My (as if I could call it mine) theory suggests that other stuff alive
at the time of the dinosaurs continued to evolve and resulted in what we have
today.
Your theory makes as much sense as the one where the ancient easter bunny
hopped around the planet placing easter eggs of life here, there, and
everywhere whenever the ecology started to stagnate. I can't exactly disprove
it, it's just that such a theory has no evidence to support it and doesn't
provide any power of prediction.
> I also have this little pet theory that dragons and dinosaurs are pretty
> much the same thing--every legend and/or myth has some grain of truth in it.
> Mayhaps, passed down from story telling thru the ages was the story of the
> big beasts which roamed the earth, and eventually the creature in the story
> evolved into the dragon--y'know, to scare kids at night.
Who started telling these stories...mice?
Chris
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