Steve's thoughts on evolution (Creator, Earth, Abiogenesis, beliefs, creation)

[Heracles]

Originally Posted by Seyorni

ID and evolution are entirely different things, Halcyon.

ID is the proposition that a God started and designed everything by magic.

Evolution theories explain the mechanisms whereby extant organisms change over time and adapt to new environmental conditions.

ID/Creationism assert who. Evolution explores how.

Asserting that a car was created by Ford vs a discussion of the market forces behind a Ford design or the automotive engineering involved in a particular model are very different things. Who vs How.

I think that this is a VERY important point in this discussion. Who vs. How. Really, because of the nature of this battle, it cant really be won by anybody, science will always try to methodically and rationally explain phenomena, and religion will always point to a deity.

I think another big problem occurring in this discussion is a mixture of Confirmation bias, and Hasty generalizations. By confirmation bias, I mean that alot of your arguments, Steve, seem to ignore the evidence being provided to you, such as the polyploidy one. You seem to be only accepting the "scientific " information provided by answers in genesis, and this is where the hasty generalization comes in. Its not wise to use only ONE or very few sources for your argument or belief. You are making assumptions about evolutionary theory that are mainly derived from that website, and Im fairly certain that Answers in Genesis is not a very reliable source for evolutionary theory and valid scientific evidence. If you want to go against the thousands of scientists involved in researching evolution, you should seriously try to fight fire with fire, not with a bunch of biased information.

[logician]

Sorry, but you're beating a dead horse, evolution is as much fact as any hard science such as physics or chemistry. The exact mechanics of how evolution occurs is still open to some debate, but the FACT that it occurs remains unquestioned by scientists.

[anders]

I find it mainly amusing the way creationists argue about the amount of information involed, but stubbornly refuse to define their terms. And there is a word, which netiquette forbids me to use, for their tactic to switch to mentioning abiogenesis as soon as they feel they can't prove their point.

[sandy whitelinger]

Originally Posted by Bright-ness

The probablity is 1.0 when abiogenesis is proved.

And the probability of creation is 1.0 when God is proved...which would prove abiogenesis as well.

[Seyorni]

Some thoughts on this thread's obsession with more or less genetic material; adding or deleting information:

Genetic information gets added and deleted all the time by ordinary mutations. We, for example, ordinarily have genes in pairs, however, simple copying errors frequently delete or add whole genes, producing everything from completely deleted genes to monoploid, triploid, quadruploid, &c forms. Generally these are lethal or produce defective organisms, but, conceivably, they could produce a better environmental fit and be reproduced in subsequent generations.

Generally, though, the amount of genetic information has nothing to do with the nature of the organism. Addition or deletion has nothing to do with anything and I don't understand why one poster continually brings it up. A simple organism can easily have 'more DNA' than a complex one.

DNA is an alphabet. Different words/organisms are formed not by the number of letters, but by the arrangement. A "dog" is more complex than a "cyanobacterium" but look -- the latter took more 'information' to produce!

If I dump a scrabble set out on the table I can, with the same amount of 'genetic letters' spell out just about any animal or plant you could think of -- all with the same total number of letters.
No! -- ( I know what you're thinking!) There is no requirement to use all the letters. No organism uses all its DNA. Most use only a small fraction. Most of the DNA is just scrambled, reduplicated "junk DNA" anyway, coding for nothing. Much of the rest, even though it codes for useful proteins, is never "turned on" or expressed in genetic-ese.

It's not the number of letters you're working with that's important, it's what's spelled by the ones that are turned on.