Discussion (53)¬

1. J.P. says:

   Thursday, 26 September 2013 at 21:23

   Come on Larisa, everybody knows Homo Superior is next! XD

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2. EG says:

   Friday, 18 October 2013 at 17:59

   Melkior wrote:

   Evolution as the origin of life

   Evolution doesn’t describe the origin of life. That is a different problem (one which is unsolved, ie, we don’t know what the first life form looked like and how it came to be. We have some ideas, but no proof.).

   requires simple, dead matter to spontaneously become complex, living matter without any intelligent direction.

   False dichotomy. It would become simple living matter. Or perhaps the first step wouldn’t even be recognised by us as a lifeform.

   Science has proven that this doesn’t happen (Second Law of Thermodynamics, for example).

   The second law of thermodynamics applies to closed systems. The Earth is not a closed system.
   Even if it were, the second law of thermodynamics is really a statistical law: it says that changes that decrease entropy are (exponentially) unlikely, but not impossible in a strict sense.

   You need either stored direction (such as DNA or RNA) or direct intervention by an intelligent being ( whether that’s God or a human) before excess energy can be used to reverse entropy.

   Evolution is not a random process. More precisely: what drives evolution is the non-random survival (reproduction) of random variations (or mutations). Natural selection is one way to do this, sexual selection is another.

   Evolution by mutations in DNA or RNA requires mutations to cause an increase in genetic information, but science has proven that mutations always lose information and never gain information, so mutations can only produce devolution, never evolution.

   Wrong.
   It’s possible for mutations to duplicate entire sections of genome, which does nothing at first but offers the possibility of changing the duplicate information so it encodes something new.
   By the way, “devolution” isn’t a word.

   Evolution by mutation is frequently quoted as the foundation of evolution but since it’s beyond implausible, I choose not to believe in it.

   Evolution is defined as the ability to pass genetic mutations on to offspring. This you can test in a lab very easily, and has been measured.

   Beyond that it’s really just statistics: if I’m better at surviving than you are, I will probably have more children, who will (possibly) inherit the traits that make me a better surviver. Such beneficial mutations can spread through a population very quickly.

   Every time someone has come up with an argument which seems to support evolution, I’ve always discovered a (sometimes glaringly obvious) scientific reason why the argument must be false.

   You know, I question your authority to identify “glaringly obvious” scientific reasons why an argument is wrong. Especially so because the “reasons” you just gave are awefully misinformed.

   It seems to me that a lot of people who insist evolution exists are basing their belief not on science but on the precept that “God doesn’t exist therefore evolution must exist since life couldn’t exist any other way”.

   False dichotomy.
   Whether god(s) exist or not has nothing to do with whether evolution occurs or not.

   Do you know that North Sea fish are getting smaller because the smaller individuals are more likely to survive due to fishing boats preferentially catching larger fish? Do we need to bring up the peppered moth again? Evolution is a fact. It happens.

   Anyway. About Larisa being the first member of a new species: seems unlikely; typically parents and their offspring belong to the same species and you can only distinguish species if their common ancestors are far enough apart (typically in time, but geographically works too, see ring species).

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3. superwag12 says:

   Tuesday, 10 December 2013 at 03:15

   @ EG:
   The peppered moth has been both black and white the whole time and the trees just changed which changed which was more common for awhile and they are rarely if ever found naturally on trees and all the pictures in textbooks are dead ones stuck to a tree so no proof there. And you expect one celled organisms to change into multi-celled and multi-tissues organisms based on mutation and breeding, that is so unlikely it would take so impossibly long it couldn’t happen within the timeline described by evolutionists. Plus a mutation losing information is the only known beneficial mutation.

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