First of all, how about some citations for these quotations? Given that astrophysicists and biologists have radically altered their views about the variety of environments in which life can exist over the last few decades, it's easy to find old quotes from such scientists who now no longer agree with what they once said.
Ah, but creationists NEVER change their mind, and they project that onto others. So if they can find a quote from someone that indicates that he or she once believe in god or disbelieved evolution, then they must still believe that today !
That is mind-boggling. How can you say anything about evolution if you don't even know the most fundamental aspects of the theory or the observations that led to it ?
Yes and with an answer that can be very simple or very complex. Here's the simple one: copying mistakes in the DNA upon reproduction leads to changes in organisms. Some of these organisms will survive to reproduce as well, or won't, depending on the circumstances. Changing circumstances alter the types of organisms that thrive.
So? We can't even tell for sure if there's other life in our solar system. Our exploration of space isn't even in it's infancy, what we've accomplished thus far is more akin to the doctor being able to see the head. Our ignorance of life elsewhere is to be expected.
I can't find Eric Metaxas' article on a site that does not require payment, so I haven't read it, but he has been around for a while with his over the top claims. Just a sampling of this guy's world view.
During last night's "I Stand Sunday" event, organizers showed a video featuring Eric Metaxas, author of a recent biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in which he warned that if the church does not stand together against government oppression, America will follow the path of Nazi Germany. Just as Bonhoeffer tried to get churches in Germany to link arms and fight Hitler, Metaxas said, so too must churches in America rally together to push back against the government's increasing tyranny. " - See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/eric-metaxas#sthash.J6Ha4sMa.dpuf
Think about what happened to religion when the Copernican revolution occurred, or when Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published. They upset the apple cart, and forced religion to change. Most people either denied these findings and held onto their deeply-held beliefs, or used these findings to reject religion entirely.
The fundamentalist theist is impervious to certain indisputable facts or in some cases, refuses to accept common definitions of words such as "science". The OP's view that if science were to somehow prove the existence of a god is troubling to the atheist, is telling about the type of delusions that they seem to have been fed. They seem to want to inflict suffering or anxiety ("weeping, clenched fists, etc") upon those who don't believe what they do, and they thrive on any hyperbolic claims that might further this goal. What they don't understand is that many atheists have arrived at their lack of belief in a god via the same road of awareness of the lies they have been told that many of these very apologists are now walking. The search for god in science, without the proper tools for understanding that science, is a futile one.
Domestication in general....The entire fossil record....transitional fossils in particular....de Vrise' primrose experiments....speciation which occurred during Imperialism....The distribution of organisms....genetics....molecular biology.....ecology...computer programs.....
Nor does he seem to comprehend the time scales involved.
As you said DNA copying mistakes lead to either a advantage or disadvantage or neutral effect on survival. While the odds favour a disadvantage or neutral change, given time an advantage will occur. Such advantages then predominate in being passed to future generations simply by virtue of the carrier having an advantage in doing so.
Life on this planet began approx 3 billion years ago. Homo Sapiens have been around for less than 1/1000th of that time. Human civilization for about the last 1/100 of the time that H. Sapiens has been in existence, space exploration began its search by non-terrestrial based equipment only 60 years ago.
Or as nicely said by a troubadour from my home country:
Our whole universe was in a hot dense state,
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started. Wait...
The Earth began to cool,
The autotrophs began to drool,
Neanderthals developed tools,
We built a wall (we built the pyramids),
Math, science, history, unraveling the mysteries,
That all started with the big bang!
"Since the dawn of man" is really not that long,
As every galaxy was formed in less time than it takes to sing this song.
A fraction of a second and the elements were made.
The bipeds stood up straight,
The dinosaurs all met their fate,
They tried to leap but they were late
And they all died (they froze their asses off)
The oceans and pangea
See ya wouldn't wanna be ya
Set in motion by the same big bang!
It all started with the big BANG!
It's expanding ever outward but one day
It will pause and start to go the other way,
Collapsing ever inward, we won't be here, it wont be heard
Our best and brightest figure that it'll make an even bigger bang!(Well this point is in great dispute)
Australopithecus would really have been sick of us
Debating out while here they're catching deer (we're catching viruses)
Religion or astronomy, Descartes or Deuteronomy
It all started with the big bang!
Music and mythology, Einstein and astrology
It all started with the big bang!
It all started with the big BANG
Ah, but creationists NEVER change their mind, and they project that onto others. So if they can find a quote from someone that indicates that he or she once believe in god or disbelieved evolution, then they must still believe that today !
That is irrelevant, since it isn't how it happened. Why would you want to calculate the probability that Luke Skywalker beat Darth Vader on Bespin ?
That is mind-boggling. How can you say anything about evolution if you don't even know the most fundamental aspects of the theory or the observations that led to it ?
You must be kidding. It's literally everywhere. Ever heard of nylon-eating bacteria ? Or dog breeds ?
Yes and with an answer that can be very simple or very complex. Here's the simple one: copying mistakes in the DNA upon reproduction leads to changes in organisms. Some of these organisms will survive to reproduce as well, or won't, depending on the circumstances. Changing circumstances alter the types of organisms that thrive.
That's because you don't understand the theory at all. Randomness has nothing to do with it. If you understood at least that, it would help greatly.
Thats an open question. Recent studies have shown that bacteria can, under the right conditions, increase mutation rates, making it NONrandom.
That said, you are technically correct that randomness can be a factor in evolution (though it is not always). The issue is that it's rhetorically dangerous. Elf Grinder 3000 clearly has trouble differentiating between concepts in evolutionary biology, so it's better, for the purpose of teaching, to downplay the random elements and focus on the fact that evolution itself is nonrandom. We can get into the messy details later (or, more likely, we won't, but that's the goal). No need to go into 300 level stuff before EG3 has mastered the remdial information.
Elf Grinder 3000; since you seem to fancy yourself an expert on probability, what if I told you that I offered a service to subscribers where I could predict the outcome of every major league baseball game? Subscribers would receive an email (or postcard or letter or telegram or phone call) well in advance of a given game, telling them which team will win. What if I further told you that I could offer proof, from multiple long time subscribers, that I have provided them with 100% accurate predictions, not just for weeks, months, or years, but for decades? That's right, I could show you evidence from subscribers that I've predicted which team will win in every single major league game for say, the last 30 years.
What would you say the odds are of me correctly predicting, with 100% accuracy, the outcomes of literally tens of thousands of games across decades? Before you bring it up, no, this very real ability has nothing and I mean nothing to do with the following:
1. Paranormal phenomena (I include the concepts of "luck", "fortune telling", "God", "Satan", telekinesis in this. No help from anything supernatural of any kind).
2. Any form of "fixing" the games.
3. Any Science Fiction conceits such as time travel, parallel universes, hyper-advanced pan-dimensional beings, the "Matrix", etc.
4. Computer jiggery-pokery of any kind.
5. Any sort of inside knowledge of the teams or players involved.
6. Any knowledge of baseball, period. Aside from the names of the teams and who's playing who and when. I possess this "ability" and I haven't watched a complete baseball game since the 1970s.
7. Lies or misleading statements from the longtime winning subscribers. When, for example, subscriber Joe Schmo testifies that I've sent him 100% accurate predictions for every game played in the past 30 years, he'd be telling the complete truth.
Finally, what if I told you that this ability is trivially easy, something anyone with enough time and patience could do, including you? To be clear this is more or less just a thought experiment. I haven't actually done any of this, but I could (though to do so would be unethical, possibly even illegal).
If you can figure out on your own how I'd be able to perform this supposedly statistically improbable feat, perhaps someday it will lead you to a greater epiphany regarding the phenomenon of evolution. If you can't figure it out, or have to resort to Googling for the answer, that's fine, too, but in that case I only ask you to consider the possibility that there are gaps in your knowledge and reasoning abilities. Gaps that may be preventing you from understanding concepts such as evolutionary theory, standards of evidence, logical fallacies, etc.
I recently heard a podcast which discussed research which attempts to make sense of the apparent coincidence of the Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB) period and the emergence of terrestrial life about 4 billion years ago.
This article summarizes the research by a group of Czech scientists who have fired a big laser at a solution of formamide and found traces of adenine, guanine, cytosine, and uracil. The result is reported in an article in Science [From hell on Earth, life's building blocks] which is not accessible without paying.
We simulated the high-energy synthesis of nucleobases from formamide during the impact of an extraterrestrial body. A high-power laser has been used to induce the dielectric breakdown of the plasma produced by the impact. The results demonstrate that the initial dissociation of the formamide molecule could produce a large amount of highly reactive CN and NH radicals, which could further react with formamide to produce adenine, guanine, cytosine, and uracil.
Similar in some ways to the Miller-Urey experiment which simulated the presumed conditions of an early Earth, it has not produced life, but a tantalizing array of compounds necessary for life by creating a simulation of an impact by an extraterrestrial body.
I should add that I agree with the author's caveat:
It's a very large step from demonstrating that RNA bases can be made from formamide under extreme conditions to showing that their concentrations could have been high enough to make RNA spontaneously.
However, it should also be noted that even if this soup spontaneously turned to RNA and consequently little cells with DNA started swimming around and multiplying, theists could still refute evolution to their heart's content, since the origin of life is not relevant to mechanisms of speciation. In fact, religion could still appeal to a god for creation of the universe, along with man, since they are sometimes so willing to reject other well proven controversial topics such as AGW. They could still merely teach that god created animals and man, not just silly one celled squiggly things. This is why it is so ironic that religions feel they must appeal to science for their god to be accepted as real.
Elf Grinder 3000; since you seem to fancy yourself an expert on probability, what if I told you that I offered a service to subscribers where I could predict the outcome of every major league baseball game? Subscribers would receive an email (or postcard or letter or telegram or phone call) well in advance of a given game, telling them which team will win. What if I further told you that I could offer proof, from multiple long time subscribers, that I have provided them with 100% accurate predictions, not just for weeks, months, or years, but for decades? That's right, I could show you evidence from subscribers that I've predicted which team will win in every single major league game for say, the last 30 years.
What would you say the odds are of me correctly predicting, with 100% accuracy, the outcomes of literally tens of thousands of games across decades? Before you bring it up, no, this very real ability has nothing and I mean nothing to do with the following:
1. Paranormal phenomena (I include the concepts of "luck", "fortune telling", "God", "Satan", telekinesis in this. No help from anything supernatural of any kind).
2. Any form of "fixing" the games.
3. Any Science Fiction conceits such as time travel, parallel universes, hyper-advanced pan-dimensional beings, the "Matrix", etc.
4. Computer jiggery-pokery of any kind.
5. Any sort of inside knowledge of the teams or players involved.
6. Any knowledge of baseball, period. Aside from the names of the teams and who's playing who and when. I possess this "ability" and I haven't watched a complete baseball game since the 1970s.
7. Lies or misleading statements from the longtime winning subscribers. When, for example, subscriber Joe Schmo testifies that I've sent him 100% accurate predictions for every game played in the past 30 years, he'd be telling the complete truth.
Finally, what if I told you that this ability is trivially easy, something anyone with enough time and patience could do, including you? To be clear this is more or less just a thought experiment. I haven't actually done any of this, but I could (though to do so would be unethical, possibly even illegal).
If you can figure out on your own how I'd be able to perform this supposedly statistically improbable feat, perhaps someday it will lead you to a greater epiphany regarding the phenomenon of evolution. If you can't figure it out, or have to resort to Googling for the answer, that's fine, too, but in that case I only ask you to consider the possibility that there are gaps in your knowledge and reasoning abilities. Gaps that may be preventing you from understanding concepts such as evolutionary theory, standards of evidence, logical fallacies, etc.
I am pretty certain that I know the basis of your scheme project. This is a great analogy with evolutionary theory, if I am correct as to your strategy! I will only say that everything said here is accurate, and this method has actually been used successfully in the past.
On reflection though I'm not sure this is something that could realistically be maintained for decades, at least not by the exact method I have in mind. It is after all an analogy as thought experiment and shouldn't be nitpicked apart for its practicalities. The broad strokes of it hold true in any event; that what appear to be counterintuitive, even miraculous results can emerge from trivially simple, prosaic mechanisms.
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