superstport #fundie

superstport #fundie christiandiscussionforums.org

[Thread title: "ToE = Dumb and Dumber"]

Quoting Sir Fred Doyle: "No matter how large the environment one considers, life cannot have had a random beginning. Troops of monkeys thundering away at random on typewriters could not produce the works of Shakespeare, for the practical reason that the whole observable universe is not large enough to contain the necessary monkey hordes, the necessary typewriters, and certainly not the waste paper baskets required for the deposition of wrong attempts. The same is true for living material."

Do you evos get this logic? He's talking about the origin of life, but the random origin of a new body part is no different, at least in theory: If there are 10s of thousands of different pieces of anatomy in humans, for every 1 selectable part that arose in the right place at the right time, there must be literally thousands (or more like millions) of misfits for which selection would have to dispense with....either that or we should be seeing all sorts of weirdo, massively-freakish animals walking/swimming/crawling around.

[Then he/she rambles into the sunset with the "eye argument"]

41 comments

old comment by Horsefeathers

"Quoting Sir Fred Doyle: "No matter how large the environment one considers, life cannot have had a random beginning. Troops of monkeys thundering away at random on typewriters could not produce the works of Shakespeare, for the practical reason that the whole observable universe is not large enough to contain the necessary monkey hordes, the necessary typewriters, and certainly not the waste paper baskets required for the deposition of wrong attempts. The same is true for living material." "

Give the monkeys nearly 20 billion years, specific rules as to what they can and cannot type, how often they may hit the keys and throw out anything that's not an actual word and you'll have a better analogy to physical and biological laws and processes that give us our current universe and the life you see on this particular planet. Hell, you could probably do it with just a single monkey if the hypothetical monkey were immortal.

"Do you evos get this logic?"

Sure do. What little of it there was to get. Doyle was using a straw man argument since nobody is claiming that life "randomly" came about. As I pointed out, there are very specific rules that the universe has in place.

"He's talking about the origin of life, but the random origin of a new body part is no different, at least in theory:"

Not quite.

"If there are 10s of thousands of different pieces of anatomy in humans, for every 1 selectable part that arose in the right place at the right time, there must be literally thousands (or more like millions) of misfits for which selection would have to dispense with....either that or we should be seeing all sorts of weirdo, massively-freakish animals walking/swimming/crawling around."

Your understanding of evolution is mind-boggling.

old comment by cui bono

"...there must be literally thousands (or more like millions) of misfits for which selection would have to dispense with....either that or we should be seeing all sorts of weirdo, massively-freakish animals walking/swimming/crawling around."

Yes there are millions of these freaks of nature ; they are found in the Mid West and Southern States of the USA and a heavy concentration of them in the Middle East and Parts of Africa, In Europe good hygiene & education keeps the numbers in check, though you have to keep your guard up or they will come back or some overseas exotic species will try to establish a colony. Oh yes, these freaks of nature are called fundies, you can see one in your mirror.

fundamentalists delenda est

old comment by antichrist

Quoting from here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/1/l_011_01.html

Here's how some scientists think some eyes may have evolved: The simple light-sensitive spot on the skin of some ancestral creature gave it some tiny survival advantage, perhaps allowing it to evade a predator. Random changes then created a depression in the light-sensitive patch, a deepening pit that made "vision" a little sharper. At the same time, the pit's opening gradually narrowed, so light entered through a small aperture, like a pinhole camera.

Every change had to confer a survival advantage, no matter how slight. Eventually, the light-sensitive spot evolved into a retina, the layer of cells and pigment at the back of the human eye. Over time a lens formed at the front of the eye. It could have arisen as a double-layered transparent tissue containing increasing amounts of liquid that gave it the convex curvature of the human eye.

In fact, eyes corresponding to every stage in this sequence have been found in existing living species. The existence of this range of less complex light-sensitive structures supports scientists' hypotheses about how complex eyes like ours could evolve. The first animals with anything resembling an eye lived about 550 million years ago. And, according to one scientist's calculations, only 364,000 years would have been needed for a camera-like eye to evolve from a light-sensitive patch.

Now please shut up about the fucking eye.

old comment by FMG

Lying for Jesus?

Quoting Sir Fred Doyle: "No matter how large the environment one considers, life cannot have had a random beginning. Troops of monkeys thundering away at random on typewriters could not produce the works of Shakespeare, for the practical reason that the whole observable universe is not large enough to contain the necessary monkey hordes, the necessary typewriters, and certainly not the waste paper baskets required for the deposition of wrong attempts. The same is true for living material."

Fred Doyle is not a scientist. Infact I cannot even find a scientist. The chance of a spontaneous mutation in a human being is 1 in billions. Yet plenty of people die of cancer which is a mutation. Why? Because we have billions of cells on top of a fair few humans. Just because its not a very likely incident does not mean its not possible. Otherwise no one would gamble.

Do you evos get this logic? He's talking about the origin of life, but the random origin of a new body part is no different, at least in theory:

So he is not talking about evolution. He is talking about abiogenesis. When we ran the experiment it turned out a lot of human proteins within a couple of weeks. Imagine running it with real lightning (a stupid amount of power) and over a few million to a billion years on a surface the size of the earth with a variety of different conditions. Gotcha...

If there are 10s of thousands of different pieces of anatomy in humans, for every 1 selectable part that arose in the right place at the right time, there must be literally thousands (or more like millions) of misfits for which selection would have to dispense with....either that or we should be seeing all sorts of weirdo, massively-freakish animals walking/swimming/crawling around.

Evolution... DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY! You are assuming we somehow got our heart spontaneously... Along with every single animal. We got our heart via a long series of processes. From a simple water pump to a single chambered heart to a double chambered heart to double heart to a single heart with four chambers. Roughly... There is a slow progression and all these hearts are found in the wild. Each provides a benefit over the other.