Slashdot Mirror
Drake on Drake: ET Life A Certainty
astro writes "Frank Drake, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the SETI Institute applies Occam's Razor to his own Drake equation: 'Life should appear very frequently on other Earth-like planets. There will be microbial life nearby the solar system.' The simplest scenario is that 'Not Life' has a nearly identical number of assumptions as 'Life.' The contrasting view is that experimentation can prove it--but how many times did life independently create itself while the Earth changed through the whole spectrum of what biological forces might conjure up elsewhere. A sample size of 1 is in fact an experimental sample size of many--just here during Earth's climatic history."
A sample size of 1 is in fact an experimental sample size of many--just here during Earth's climatic history
Ummm....Im sorry, but I thought that there was, perhaps many singular events where life was formed billions of years ago, but simple evolution and extinction dont "scale" to be equivalent to non-life becoming life.
Furthermore, I recall reading a book..."Probability 1", that spend several chapters mucking around before submitting a "proof" that there must be intelligent life elsewhere...As I recall, it hinged on one instance of life, which is us.
William of Ockham - "One should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything."
Francis Drake - "My whole life's work, from SETI to the Drake equation to the 1970's Arecibo radio transmission, depends on their being aliens somewhere in the Universe, so I'll pop up every year or so and assert that ET does exist so I won't be a failure.
---
I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
I'm always leery of the term "Certain" when a key premise is time on the order of billions of years.
The assumptions presented in the article cannot be proved or disproved. What does it help us to state "Not Life has as much chance as life" or "Consider our existence as proof".
Although I tend to believe there is intelligent life in the universe outside of Earth, I'm not sure this argument serves as proof or even a good starting point for a proof.
I think we ought to just be content saying there might be a chance that other intelligent life exists and we'll get to proving it through empirical data. Then if everything checks out we can go applying theory, probability, and predictions. Until then, this stuff is simply philosophy - the earth was flat until we found out it was not.
If you play it by the numbers, then yes, life should occur frequently. By even the paltry data we've already collected, life should be abundant and soon even reachable.
This has a unintended but frightening implication, however.
Humans have existed as a sapient, technological species for approximately 30000 years (and that's generous, really). That means that in the cosmic equivalent of a the beginnings of a heartbeat, we've gone from caves to extraplanetary exploration, and our technology curve will only accelerate from here on out.
Considering that it took almost no time to get here, it will take even less time to get to point where we would be leapfrogging across the galaxy, colonizing everywhere. Within the next 30,000 years we'll have had more than enough time to have distributed explorers to every inhabitable/explorable planet in the galaxy.
The question, then, is why hasn't anyone found Earth yet, if the probability for life is so high? Either every civilization gets wiped out long before they can begin galactic exploration (without exception--a pretty difficult thing to imagine, unless you're an apocalyptic environmentalist), or, perhaps more frightening in an indirect sense, there simply aren't any other intelligent civilizations in the galaxy.
You'd think that even if ancient astronauts had found Earth, we would have uncovered at least SOME sort of artifact. After all, playing the probabilities, if one civilization found us, it would be overwhelmingly likely that many, many others would be able to, and would. So far we've got nothing.
It's a difficult reality to accept, but it may very well be that we're alone in the galaxy, and perhaps even in the universe.
I am always amazed at the extent of humanity's arrogance, or at least our blind optimism, when I read about the logical arguments about the likelihood of intelligent life outside the solar system.
Perhaps there is, but I can't imagine limiting ourselves to looking for multicellular, carbon-based, or RNA-based life, or for that matter any form of life patterned upon that on Earth. It seems to me astronomically more likely that highly organized or self-conscious matter found elsewhere would not be recognizable to us as what we would call "life".
I have slowed down my participation in the SETI@home project because I have become increasingly skeptical that other life forms would happen to care enough about radio frequency communications to build a transmitter. I consider it at least equally likely that extraterrestrial life forms are more interested in gazing at their own navels than evolving the means for the complex physical arrangements of materials necessary for instrumentalities designed to emit radio signals.
The yearning to communicate with other beings is both honored as a deeply "human" characteristic, and asserted as a likely goal of extraterrestrial life, but I think we have to choose one or the other, and get realistic about the chances of finding other societies sufficiently similar to us that we could detect each other.
That either FTL (faster then Light) travel is utterly impossibly, or that civilations that discover FTL are few and far between.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
We have a sample size of only one, and that this sample resulted in intelligent life is a given (else we wouldn't be here to make observations on it.) We do however have some timing information. From this we see:
1) Life evolved on Earth pretty much as soon as conditions were stable enough to allow it. This suggests that bacterial life is highly likely.
2) It took at least hundreds of millions of years to develop Eukariotic life (big cells with a nucleus, such as we are made of, as opposed to bacteria.) This means that this step might be rare.
3) It took about 3 billion years to evolve differentiated multicellular life. This means that this step could be exceedingly rare.
4) Multicellular life evolved into a vast array of designs in a just a few million years (the 'Cambrian explosion'.) This means that once multicellular life starts, it will quickly produce complex forms.
5) From the Cambrian explosion to us is something like 500 million years. This is an intermediate time scale that makes it hard to judge how likely intelligent life is.
Disclaimer: I'm not 100% sure of some of the timescales above. It is all from memory.
Disclaimer 2: The Edicara fauna complicate the picture above on the origin of multicellular life, depending on how you interpret them.
Disclaimer 3: All the above is merely probabilistic. E.g. if the evolution of bacterial life is very rare, there is still a 5% chance that it will have occurred during the first 5% of the available time. Therefore we can't strongly exclude the possiblity that the evolution of bacterial life is hard.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Why would intelligent life want to talk to earth? Indeed, why would it want to talk to anyone? If there is other intelligent life out there that managed to survive more than a few thousand years, maybe they just figured out that staying home taking care of their own planet is a lot more pleasant than traveling around the universe in tin cans or holding conversations with hundreds of years of lag.
When it comes to Drake related wonderings.
There's the thought that its almost an absolute certainty that intellegent life has evolved elsewhere, and probably in vast numbers of individual civilizations.
On the other hand, the theory goes that within a few hundred years, we'll have the ability to (and therefore probably will) send generation ships to other solar systems. If we are to assume that 500 years after each colony is settled, it launches its own generation ship to the next solar system, the entire galaxy could be colonized in a matter of a few million years. This is of course assuming that most of the colonies don't manage to kill themselves off.
The point being, since a few million years is a cosmic blink of the eye, if any intellegent life DID exist, either it should be everywhere already, or all previous incarnations have wiped themselves out before they've had a chance to travel beyond their home world. Either that, or they're leaving us alone. After all, we ARE rather far away from anything. Its possible that a 4.3 lightyear stretch is too far to consider useful. And its also possible that we're the result of such a colonization project and everyone forgot about it, or were dumped here without knowing to begin with. Or maybe they knew and simply never passed it on. Its not like a lot of folklore has lasted for 30K years.
So, to recap this rant. Assuming there IS intellegent life, its already everywhere it wants to be, and either we're a part of it, or it's decided to completely leave us alone.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Personally, I find it hard to get worked up about ET algae or whatever. I mean, it's a good thing in terms of implications for habitability of other worlds, terraforming, etc. But every time someone trots out an argument about how easy it is for life to arise in the universe, people assume that once you have life at all, you have intelligent life.
If life has arisen independently on Earth multiple times, how many times has it produced humans? And by this I mean, how many times did humans evolve, from scratch, our of distinct gene pools? I would have a hard time believing any answer greater than 1 (or less than 1, for that matter). So the more times life has formed and *not* evolved into sentience, the worse the odds are that it will have done so in other environments.
And even if sentient life has evolved on some reasonably nearby planet, what are the odds that we'll inhabit the same slice of time as them? Human beings have been a technological species for an infinitesimal time slice compared to the age of the galaxy, and at the rate we're going that time slice may not last much longer. If this is representative of sentient species in general, it would be very rare for two species to chance upon the necessary coincidence of space and time to actually meet each other. Sad but true.
My deviantArt site
I am not at all convinced that there are such things as "natural" rights, especially inalienable ones. Constitutional rights are another issue and far more deserving of defense. On the other hand, as a statment of an ideal of equality, then "rights" become essential in understanding just how equal an idealist thinks we should be.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
It has been brought up several times that an advanced civilization would have propagated throughout our galaxy. It is important to keep in mind the size of our galaxy. I have been brought up believing in the unlimited nature of technology, but what if it really is impossible to travel at speeds greater than or close to c? Using the technology from our sci-fi it is easy to spread throughout the galaxy; but if warp drives and jumping through wormholes isn't feasible, how far is it worth exploring? Another interesting thought, if another civ has advanced to the point of interstellar travel, then clearly their tech is WAY beyond ours. Its pretty cocky to think that we could detect them, we just got to the point where we can detect radio waves (just a little over a hundred years) Perhaps they don't want us to detect them, maybe they don't want to interfere. Maybe they do interfere and we just aren't aware. Just a long shot analogy here, but are ants cognizant of our lawnmower or if we dropped food. We may only be ants in comparison to a an alien race that has mastered interstellar travel.
Unfortunately it's hard to find on /. :P
However, a lifeform that engages in exploring, propogating and conquering (aka rape, pillage and plunder) would be effective at replicating their genes.
Would it not be likely that these traits would appear in alien evolutionary environments? Many examples exist of evolutionary convergergence traits such as wings (birds, bats, insects).
When these discussions about probability of life come up, I always think of the massive amount of parallel processing that is provided by the surface area of an entire planet, and the large amount of processing time that is available for the task.
Especially regarding the probability that life will start in a puddle... Or in some wet clay, just as well... but taking puddles as an example:
Take a square mile of earth. Picture a kind of primordial earth, the surface seething with puddles. Maybe, say, one square foot of puddle for every four square foot of earth. That's
6,969,600 puddles per square mile. There are 197,000,000 square miles on earth; assume 1/10 of these are land, so multiply 6.9 million by 1.97 million: 13,730,112,000,000 puddles. Oh, then multiply that by 365 billion or so days, to yield the number of daily heating/cooling cycles provided by the rising and setting of the sun. That's 5,011,490,880,000,000,000,000,000, right? So maybe I've overestimated the surface area, or the number of viable puddles. OK, divide that by 10 to the third or fourth; it's still a pretty darn big number.
Next time some Creationist lectures you about how improbable it is that life started in a puddle, be sure to multiply whatever probability they provide by that number.
Of course there's that detail about cells, and multiple cells, and the "sudden" leap to intelligence (forgetting a few billion years here and there). Well, that would require... evolution! But then, this is starting to look like a troll, and I didn't mean it that way.
Gravity is described as f = m(1)m(2)G/r^2. Einstein's theory of relativity is described as E = mc^2. F=ma, D = 1/2at^2 + vt + d(0), PV = nRT etc. etc... All seemingly complicated things described by very simple formulas. The vast majority of phenomena in physics are described by relatively simple equations. (major exceptions being any form of turbulence or a result of turbulence)
Then again, Occam's Razor doesn't apply very well to life sciences, which is what this is about.
I believe that your numbers are suspect in several ways. First, there is no guarantee that faster than light travel is possible. If it isn't, then the human exploration of this galaxy will take far longer than 30 ky. Next, while life may be very likely, there is nothing to say that "intelligence," as we know it, is common, or even an adaptive advantage over evolutionary spans of time. Piers Anthony IIRC suggested in The Macroscope that most intelligent life simply failed to survive the industrial period. The book was fiction, but the suggestion is appropriate.
Cultural and technical changes - progress if you will (but I won't) - require lots of head space. "Traditional" cultures are traditional because they are stored solely in the heads of their carriers. Traditional cultures are extremely vulnerable to the loss of members, if the society is too complex. Thus simple cultures survive by redundant storage of the essential information that defines the operational aspects of the society. Once the ability to store information "extrasomatically" comes along (i.e. writing) more complex civilizations become possible and technical change can occur more rapidly because a literate civilization can support intellectual as well as craft specialization.
If you consider it, it is fairly obvious that population growth rates and technical advances heterodyne on each other. The problem that can affect the number of intelligent species (as we understand intelligence) that can make into space comes as the growth of population passes the "knee" in a yeast growth type curve. At that point we have entered a race between environmental degradation, technological advance, and the exhaustion of critical resources. If and only if technological advance can establish a population off planet, if and only if technological advance can offset environmental degradation and resource scarcity can species then start to really explore space.
You can imagine from this that some intelligent species with very slowly growing, or stable populations probably have little reason, except perhaps curiousity, for leaving a planet. More might reach the yeast growth stage, fail in the technical-environmental-resource arena and become extinct or under go drastic reductions. Another few may actually make it off their home planet and into interplanetary or perhaps intersellar space.
Probably on a majority, nothing we could recognize as intelligence ever appears.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
It seems logical, that any intelligent alien life, which came across us, would take note, that we are moving along quite quickly with our technology, and who are they to come in and say "You've got it all wrong!" Leave us be, and wait for us to catch up. If these aliens are there, they're simply employing a trait my father taught me years ago.
Give a man a fish, you've fed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you've fed him for life.
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
if the civilisation is less advanced than us, then they can't.
or
if the civilisation is more advanced than us, then they have nothing to gain.
I think.
Yours isn't a silly explanation for the great silence, but consider this. Several proposed solutions to the Fermi paradox assume that the aliens build utopias, or destroy themselves, or have a 'prime directive' preventing them from contacting our primitive world. The problem is, any one civilization could sweep through the entire galaxy on a time scale of millions of years. So any behavioral explaination of the aliens' absence requires that ALL the alien civilizations in the galaxy have one of these reasons for not spreading through the rest of the galaxy. If there are hundreds of thousands of other civilizations in the galaxy (which some 'optimistic' Drake followers have calculated) then the odds that NONE of them had the drive to have colonized, explored, or, heck, even eaten Earth (for you Greg Bear fans out there) Earth is very very low.
I personally believe that the development of tool-using, communicative intelligence is very difficult in evolutionary terms, and is thus exceedingly rare. Remember how quickly unicellular life developed on earth, and how late intelligent life arose. At most, there may be only a few civilizations scattered through our galaxy; but it is very possible that we are the first, the only technical civilization in the galaxy.
I recently rewatched "V - the series" and "V - the final battle". For those few here that haven't seen it, a bunch of seemingly humanoid aliens come to earth. However, these aliens end up being lizards who wear human skin to disguise themselves. A group of partisans realize the intent behind these aliens (to steal our water and use us for food).
One of the partisans makes what I consider a pretty good point (and makes this whole post on-topic). He notions the idea that unlike Earth, where some sort of disaster (meteor) wipes out many of the reptile species, the alien planet had no such disruption and the reptiles were free to evolve into sentient human-like beings.
Perhaps this is far-fetched. However, it is possible given our current idea of evolution. Why couldn't reptiles evolve into conscious beings? I'm not very knowledgable about the physiology of the human brain, but I do remember that temperature may have been a big factor in our evolution. The again, the word may implies that no one really knows exactly how evolution occured, and until we do I would say it is possible that reptiles may very well have been a predominent life on this planet if not for the meteor or whatever that wiped out all the dinosaurs.
That's why my CPU utilization is always 100%!
Ob OnTopic Tie-In: Because I'll get cancer long before you'll chat with aliens.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Look, this is an old argument that has the informational gene for immortality -- it just won't die, but it should (or at least hibernate until truly new data shows up).
... perhaps our philosophy about the SETI will also change.
The Earth radiates like a small star in the radio region, from our civilization's emissions. Yet we don't hear a peep of anything like that out of the rest of the universe, and there's no obvious evidence of stellar engineering to be seen either. Where are other forms of intelligent, information-exchanging, perhaps macro-engineering life? Well, it could be they aren't macro-engineers, or that they don't pass information like we expect them to.
But it could also be that there isn't any other life at all, or just low-level forms that we won't be talking to.
We only have one assured point of data to answer the Life question, and that's not good enough. One point doesn't "trend"; it has an infinite number of slopes; you can fit any curve to it. You can hardly expect to win your case for universal life without evidence of detecting anything outside of the Earth. Even other planets in the same system show no evidence of engineering or biochemical activity, and we've been looking at them for decades with some pretty good instruments.
We must keep looking, sure, but the evidence is pretty well on the side of a lifeless galaxy. Be scientists for once, and ditch that superstitious need for alien races and galactic empires. The facts are overwhelmingly against alien life, and until we expand our methods of searching, that's how we must judge it if we are to pay any due respect to logic.
On the hope side of things, our methods and assumptions can change with more data. For instance, it was taken for granted (although well-enough thought out) that if aliens existed, biochemistries between two such races would almost always be dissimilar. One race might settle on carbon, oxygen and sunlight, and another on silicon, hydrogen and geothermal energy. But recent theories and observations suggest that cosmic gas clouds harbor molecules that can start biochemistry upon planets. Since such clouds are large, it could be that this seeding process could produce similar biochemisty across different star systems. Hence, across the lightyears, biochemically-similar lifeforms might be able to arise if the seeding process has the potential we theorize. So the basic philosophy about alien differences has changed
Myself, personally, I figure we will need Jodie Foster {tm} to take up radio astronomy before we get the signals we are looking for.
[also misbehaves on Kuro5hin as Peahippo]
First, I noticed some discussion as to Quantum Physics being far more complicated than Classical Physics, so Occum's Razor doesn't really apply -- well, actually it might not be. It turns out there are many relationships that exist between current string theories and 11-dimensional supergravity, suggesting that these various theories (Heterotic 0, Heterotic E, I, IIA, IIB) are all expressions of the same thing. Perhaps a single M-theory exists that can describe our universe. Second, I'd like to mention that this talk about FTL travel is futile. Besides the problems with mass and energy and time slowing, there are plenty of other options that actual physicists such as Stephen Hawking (i.e. not ones holding up a lightbulb they call "The Doom Machine") have discussed. For example, there is the bending of space-time fabric to move quickly from one point to another. There is even the possibility of so-called wormholes or Einstein-Rosen bridges being constructed and prevented from being closed by a negative energy force such as that is present in the Casimir effect. Of course, this is predominantly theoretical, and at least a couple hundred years off in this author's humble opinion. Oh, and anyone interested in Drake's Equation (a.k.a. the Sagan equation), you can try Eric Weisstein's World of Physics at: http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/astronomy/DrakeEqu ation.html [scienceworld.wolfram.com]
- Entropix
I know Karate, Kung Fu, and 47 other dangerous words!
So why's there no tragedy of the commons with these brains? They're advanced remember; we're just ants in comparison. :-) Just like how the richer/smarter nations on Earth tend to have lower population growth, so too might the MBs have achieved a virtual zero population growth zen.
Anyway, give Bradbury's paper a read, but fair warning: it might be a bit harder to suspend your disbelief when it comes to far-future hard sci-fi with conventional humans at the helm (Star Trek doesn't count). It's only human to anthropomorphize the future I guess...
--
Power to the Peaceful
Is in Toolmaker Koan. Lousy book, interesting premise. The premise is that progress comes through conflict, and that any society with the social drive to achieve the technology necessary for space travel is - axiomatically - so conflicted that it always bombs itself back to the stone age.
It's hard to argue against. We haven't destroyed ourselves - yet - but then again, we haven't achieved space travel either. I don't count holding our breath while we dash out, touch the moon, and dash back. That's proof of concept. When we get a self sufficient and growing colony on another planet, get back to me.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
This assumption that life must have evolved elsewhere if it did on earth is utterly ridiculous. Consider the chances of the simplest possible single celled life being created. Now try and imagine this happening twice in the same universe. Ridiculous. (and natural selection plays no role since we are talking about the simplest life):
c ie nces39.html
"To claim life evolved is to demand a miracle. The simplest conceivable form of single-celled life should have at least 600 different protein molecules. The mathematical probabilitya that only one typical protein could form by chance arrangements of amino acid sequences is far less than 1 in 10^450. To appreciate the magnitude of 10^450, realize that the visible universe is about 10^28 inches in diameter.
From another perspective, suppose we packed the entire visible universe with a "simple" form of life, such as bacteria. Next, we broke all their chemical bonds, mixed all atoms, then let them form new links. If this were repeated a billion times a second for 20 billion years under the most favorable temperature and pressure conditions throughout the visible universe, would one bacterium of any type reemerge? The oddsb are much less than one chance in 10^99,999,999,873. Your odds of drawing at random one preselected atom out of a universe packed with atoms is about one chance in 10^112--much better. "
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/LifeS
Intelligent life has clearly evolved many times on earth, from dinosaurs to dolphins, octopi to owls.
Is there any strong evidence that no technological intelligence ever evolved on earth before America was born (irony)? I mean before humans came along?
If we all died tomorrow in an asteroid blast, what evidence would there be of our existence in a mere million years?
There was good article on this in New Scientist once which concluded the answer was 'little'.
Just a weird thought.
Given our tendency to blow the daylights out of each other at the slightest provocation, I don't blame any sentient alien species for keeping quiet.
Either that, or they could just have a "Prime Directive" law of their own, which would also make sense. When considering ET contact theorems, who says that the aliens in question actually want to talk to us?
<!-- DHTML / JavaScript menu, popup tooltip, Ajax scripts -->
> Occam's Razor, that 'The simplest answer is most often the correct one.' has no actual logical value behind it.
The value of Ockham's Razor isn't "logical". The value of Ockham's Razor is that it keeps special pleading from getting a free pass.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
-1 Offtopic, in a good mood, karma running over my dogma.
Hitler, he only had one ball,
Rommel, had two but very small,
Himmler, had something sim'lar,
But only Goebbels, had no balls, at all.
--heard this was a British infantry bit in WWII
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
There are quite a few chilling ones out there...
One of the standard arguments against the existance of ETI are 'von-Neuman' probes - self reproducing probes that go to a star system, use local resources to make more of themselves, then head off to other systems. Repeat until you've explored the whole galaxy. This can take as little as 15 million years. The absence of von Neuman probes in the solar system was used by Frank Tipler to argue against the existence of ETI.
A simple change to this idea leads to 'Beserkers' - von Neuman probes that don't just look for life, but hunt it out and destroy it, to remove competition for their builders. This idea was originally described in Fred Saberhagen's Berserker books, and something similar comes up in Greg Bear's Forge of God and Anvil of Stars, Alistair Reynold's Revelation Space and other recent work, and elsewhere. This also could explain the failure of SETI to detect radio signals - if you make yourself obvious, you get wiped out.
An alternative to this is that its not the probes that kill you, but colonising aliens, who use up all the resources in a part of the galaxy and then expire, making way for a fallow period and then another round of colonisation. Stephen Baxter's Space addresses this idea.
The basic message of these theories is that the galaxy may be like a quiet forest, but its not quiet because there's nothing there, its quiet because there are wolves in the forest.
And that's quite scary...
Those are the assumptions of the Drake Equation. That all you need is a sun-like star and an earth-like planet and POOF life. And on all those life-bearing planets theres bound to be quite a few that evolve complex animals and eventually intelligent life.
The Rare Earth Hypothesis that they are arguing about looks at those assumptions a bit more critically. It does not assume that there is no other life like ours out there but that it is VERY rare. That the life-friendly atmosphere and climate our planet enjoys is the result of a fairly large number of low-probablity chances.
The authors contend that on our planet at least life is dependent on being a certain distance from the center of the galaxy (too much radiation) but not on the outer edge (too little metal for a planet the right size to form). That cuts down significantly on the number of stars in our galaxy that can support life. We also need an unusually large moon (to stabilise tilt, create tides). We need plate tectonics (for a host of reasons) which also means the planet has to be a certain size and have a particular make-up and peculiar history.
After meeting all these conditions your potential planet with it's evolving life must avoid having that life wiped out by a mass extinction event. It helps to have a Jupiter sized planet to "clean up" all those comets, asteroids, planetoids etc. that would otherwise bombard your planet from time to time, periodically vaporising the oceans. But if that Jupiter is too close, or in an eliptical orbit (as all the extrasolar "jupiters" we have so far found orbiting other stars) it's gravitational effect will either drive your earthlike planet into the star (not healthful for life) or knock it right out of the star system (also not healthful for life).
Now your very rare earth like planet must simply avoid some bad luck, nearby magnetars, supernovas etc., getting hit by the chance comet that your friendly jupiter didn't clean up for you. etc.
Certainly starting with a large enough sample even these very stringent, and unlikely requirements will be met from time to time. But they will be rare and spaced far apart. Out of the billions of stars in our galaxy only a handful (hundreds, maybe only dozens) will meet those conditions, not the millions of advanced civilisations originally suggested by Sagan and Drake.
The rare earth people aren't arguing that it doesn't exist, only that it is, well... rare. (thus the name of the hypothesis) Sagan and Drake hypothesisized that not only was life common & that advanced life was fairly common but that there were MILLIONS of advanced civilizations in our galaxy. The rare earth hypothesis doesn't say there are NO other advanced civilisations but cuts down the estimated number by a few orders of magnitude.
From another perspective, suppose we packed the entire visible universe with a "simple" form of life, such as bacteria. Next, we broke all their chemical bonds, mixed all atoms, then let them form new links. If this were repeated a billion times a second for 20 billion years under the most favorable temperature and pressure conditions throughout the visible universe, would one bacterium of any type reemerge? The oddsb are much less than one chance in 10^99,999,999,873.
Like most creationists, you assume that atoms form molecules completely randomly. However, this is most definitely not the case. Basic organic chemistry, the seeds of life, has been seen throughout the cosmos - vast clouds of acetic acid, alcohol, and of course water vapor have been detected in outer space. These don't form randomly; they are an inevitable result of the atomic structures of the basic elements.
More complex things like amino acids also appear to be readily formed when their constituents are put together and energy is added. And, the recent synthetic polio virus experiment seems to indicate that very simple life forms just naturally fall into place. If atoms truly arranged themselves randomly, the experimenters would not have gotten a complete functioning virus.
The "tornado in a junkyard assembling a 747" argument is one tht creationists pop up quite often, but it simply doesn't hold water. All the parts of the 747 of life seem to fit together only in a few ways, and automatically snap together correctly when two parts came close to each other. Correct your analogy for this fact, and remember that there are trillions of trillions of junkyards and trillions of trillions of tornadoes. Life might or might not be common in the cosmos, but it's not the impossible event creationists make it out to be.
Besides, to me, the idea of a God who intricately designed all these individual parts and set up the parameters and laws of the universe in such a way that life was inevitable, is far more awe-inspiring than the idea of God just saying "poof" and the universe popping up in six days. Maxwell's electromagnetic field equations seem a far cry more stunning testament to a Creator than a simple "let there be light". Don't constrain God and His Creation to the simplistic fables of people thousands of years ago.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
It would be regarded as quite out of the question to study the movements
m bryonicCosmo.html
t ml
of a magnet-needle on the Earth's surface in such a way as to try to
explain these movements solely out of what can be observed within the
space occupied by the needle. The movements of the magnet-needle are, as
you know, brought into connection with the magnetism of the Earth. We
connect the momentary direction of the needle with the direction of the
Earth's magnetism, that is, with the line of direction which can be
drawn between the north and south magnetic poles of the Earth. When it
is a question of explaining the phenomena presented by the magnetic
needle, we go out of the region of the needle itself and try to enter,
with the facts that have been collected towards an explanation, into the
totality which alone affords the opportunity to explain phenomena, the
manifestations of which belong to this totality. This rule of method is
certainly observed in regard to some phenomena, - to those, I should
say, the significance of which is fairly obvious. But it is not observed
when it is a question of explaining and understanding more complicated
phenomena.
Just as it is impossible to explain the phenomena of the magnetic needle
from the needle itself, it is equally and fundamentally impossible to
explain the phenomena relating to the organism from out of the organism
itself, or from connections which do not belong to a totality, to a
whole. And just for this reason, because there is so little inclination
to reach the realm of totalities in order to find explanations, we
arrive at those results put forward by the modern scientific method in
which the wider connections are almost entirely left out of the picture.
This method encloses the phenomena, whatever they may be, within the
field of vision of the microscope; while the celestial phenomena are
restricted to what is observable externally, with the help of
instruments. In seeking for explanations, no attempt is made to consider
the necessity of reaching out to the surrounding totality within which a
phenomenon is localised...
(Rudolf Steiner, Lecture Lecture X, January 10th, 1921)
http://home.earthlink.net/~johnrpenner/Articles/E
--
Suppose someone looks at the needle of a compass, finds it pointing from
South to North, from North to South, and then decides that the forces
that set the needle in the North-South direction lie in the needle
itself. He would certainly not be considered a physicist today. A
physicist brings the needle of the compass into connection with what is
called earthly magnetism. No matter what theories people evolve, it is
simply impossible to attribute the direction of the needle to forces
lying within the needle itself. It must be brought into relation with
the universe.
In studying organic life today, the relationship of the organic to the
universe is usually regarded as quite secondary. But suppose it were
indeed true that merely on account of their different positions the
liver and the brain are actually related quite differently to universal
forces outside the human being. In that case we could never arrive at an
explanation of the human being by way of pure empiricism. An explanation
is possible only if we are able to say what part the whole universe
plays in molding the brain and the liver, in the same sense as the earth
plays its part in the direction taken by the needle in the compass.
Suppose we are tracing back the stream of heredity. We begin with the
ancestors, pass on to the present generation, and then to the offspring,
both in the case of animals and of human beings. We take into account
what we find -- as naturally we must -- but we reckon merely with
processes observed to lie immediately within the human being. It hardly
ever occurs to us to ask whether under certain conditions in the human
organism it is possible for universal forces to work in the most varied
ways upon the fertilized germ. Nor do we ask: Is it perhaps impossible
to explain the formation of the fertilized germ cell if we remain within
the confines of the human being himself? Must we not relate this germ
cell to the whole universe?
In orthodox science today, the forces that work in from the universe are
considered secondary. To a certain limited extent they are taken into
consideration, but they are always secondary. And now you may say: "Yes,
but modern science leads us to a point where such questions no longer
arise. It is antiquated to relate the human organs to the universe!" In
the way in which this is often done, it is antiquated, but the fact that
generally such questions do not arise today is due entirely to our
scientific education. Our education in science confines us to this
purely sense-oriented empirical mode of research, and we never come to
the point of raising questions such as I have posed hypothetically by
way of introduction. But the extent to which man is able to advance in
knowledge and action in every sphere of life depends upon raising
questions. Where questions never arise, a person is living in a kind of
scientific fog. Such an individual is himself dimming his free outlook
upon reality, and it is only when things no longer fit into his scheme
of thought that he begins to realize the limitations of his conceptions.
http://wn.elib.com/Steiner/Medicine/19221026p01.h
--
The galaxy may have been born roughly 14 billion years ago (I thought the universe was roughly 14 billion, not the galaxy, oh well), but I doubt all the planets and stars were fully created, much less life. Our own planet (which, last time I checked, was in the galaxy) was only formed a couple billion years ago. Life didn't start until a little while after that, and intelligent (to understand the concept of even primitive space travel) life has only recently come about.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
What's that most universally observed and verified law? I think it's the law of biogenesis:
;)
"Spontaneous generation (the emergence of life from nonliving matter) has never been observed. All observations have shown that life comes only from life. This has been observed so consistently it is called the law of biogenesis."
To the best of my knowledge, God has never been observed popping planets into existence either.
Before you answer that we weren't there to see it, remember that we weren't there to see the origins of life on earth either.
As far as I was aware, life has NEVER been created, even in a laboratory. Life always comes from life - this is universally observed and has never been proven false.
No, but then again, most laboratories are much smaller than the planet Earth, and most experiments have much less than a billion years in which to produce results. Probably the closest is the polio virus thing, but of course synthesizing DNA and RNA isn't really life from lifelessness because the reagents involved have to be obtained by biological processes, as well as the other proteins and such to complete the virus. It's something like the old quip about a scientist finally shouting to the heavens "I've discovered the secrets of life! Take that, God! I can create a man from dust just like you now." To which God replies, "Ok, but you'll have to make your own dust, you can't use mine."
Concerning amino acids, I was of course referring to the Urey-Miller experiments as well as some others. Here is an interesting tidbit concerning the possible formation of amino acids in deep space ice. There's even a bit of discussion of handedness, one of the major problems creationists have with any of these sorts of experiments. See, I read your link, even though I had to cut and paste and remove the space.
I don't like God being constrained by the simplistic fables of today - evolution.
First, evolutionary theory is hardly in the same category as creation mythology. There is a large amount of evidence that indicates it gives a reasonable explanation of the origins of life. From it, you can make general predictions about the fossil record which observations have agreed with many times. Reference the near-complete fossil record of whale evolution, the diversification of reptiles and mammals, the progress from Eohippus to the modern horse. Even humankind has an ancestral record - I'm sure if you're at all interested in the topic you know of the recent find in Kenya. It probably raises more questions than it answers, but that is the nature of science.
Sure, you can explain all the fossil evidence by saying "God did it", and answer the following "Why?" with "Because he wanted to." But, you haven't explained anything by that. Scientists can't use that kind of explanation to do any real work. Without some sort of testable theories that make useful predictions, we would never have had modern medicines, pesticides, or any sort of biotechnology (yes, some is good and some bad).
The same can be said of any sort of advance. If humans had just taken for granted that God created lightning, we'd never have harnessed electricity. In the process of understanding electricity, we've discovered the electron and come to a theory of how static electricity builds up in clouds and discharges. In the process, we've had to discard the idea that Thor throws his hammer down, or God creates it to strike down sinners. But, we've come to a new understanding of His universe that we can put to great use. I think the tradeoff is worthwhile. The same sort of tradeoffs are being made in biology. I can still say "God created life on earth" just as surely as I can say "God creates lightning", it's just that we now have a greater understanding of the process by which He did/does it.
Evolution is not a new idea. It has been around as long as the hills, I think, and will always exist in some form.
Well, even according to Genesis the hills existed before Adam did, so that can't be true.
There are so many amazing things to be observed and contemplated, especially under a creationist model. It is useless to say what you just said - it's merely the subjective emotions of one man/woman.
When do you really appreciate a fine watch? Watching the hands go around the face is pretty, but you really have respect for the designer when you open it up and look at the finely crafted gears. But you're right, that's sort of an opinion thing. It's pretty undeniable, though, that if you want to learn anything about watch-making, you have to open the watch. This is why scientists tend towards evolutionary theory - it's not because they want to disprove God, but because the information they need to do their work just isn't in Genesis.
I think this has turned into the longest post I've ever put up here, and I've probably rambled far too much. I hope you don't get too bored reading it to give it a bit of thought.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
I got this from a post above, I think it is the exact wording of it:
"One should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything."
Which I think is a bit more solid then, "The simplest answer is most often the correct one".
Umm, I still think it *is* relevant.
The example of it making little difference whether a Spanish ship traveled at 2 knots or 20 isn't a good analogy.
When you scale the distance traveled up as high as is required when you're talking about colonizing a new planet - you run into the issue of the travel taking longer than a human's lifespan.
Theoretically, yes, you could construct a traveling "world" of sorts - where generations of people live and die, but the man-made "planet" continues on a slow course towards a new plant to colonize. In reality, it seems like this would raise quite a few issues and stumbling blocks.
For starters, by the time the ship makes it to the new world - will the people on board know what to do? Will they care? After all, you're talking about many generations of humans that made this ship their home. Will there really be incentive to disembark and risk death trying to colonize some other planet?
By contrast, if the people *do* long for colonization of a new world - I'd argue that it would only happen if they were lacking a number of things on their ship that couldn't be simulated/recreated. If that's so, it's questionable whether man would even survive for the thousands of years required for the ship to reach its destination in the first place. (EG. Issues of malnutrition because of the limited types of food and drink available on board.)
4. POPULATION: None.
It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefor, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
Before any of this changes, a lot of taxpayers somewhere have to be convinced of the need to commit the resources in question. That'll make for an interesting societal debate - NOT! There's so little interest in this kind of thing in the general population of Earth, that an interstellar exploratory mission is effectively impossible - let alone a colonization mission. Committing funds today with a miniscule chance of receiving a return hundreds or thousands of years from now is just not a concept that any politician who wants to get re-elected is likely to support.
I'm not arguing that this is right, but it's realistic. The only way interstellar travel is likely to happen is if the necessary technologies reach price points where an group of mega-billionaires can get together and do it privately. Maybe that could happen in a few hundred years time, but I wouldn't count on it.
It's a problem that may be too tough for natural selection to solve. In this comment, I explain why humans aren't likely to expand beyond their planet. Similar logic applies to any species. For a species to expand beyond its planet, it would need the ability to direct a substantial fraction of the resources available to it towards interstellar colonization. That's likely to require a great deal of cooperation. (Imagine a debate about this in, say, the US Congress!)
Natural selection favors competition, and only favors cooperation when there's an overall competitive benefit to the organism's direct reproductive success - often measured in terms of how many grandchildren it has. Natural selection doesn't apply here because the motivation to take actions with goals measured in centuries is non-existent, except possibility amongst very highly evolved intelligent creatures of a certain kind. There certainly aren't enough such creatures on Earth.
The overall logic of natural selection still applies, of course - you're correct when you say "Only the life forms that breed from planet to planet are likely to survive in the long run". But you can't assume that it's possible for life forms to reach this level of success. Intelligent life may be quite common in the universe, but they're all too busy dealing with their own petty day-to-day concerns and survival to fund credible interstellar colonization attempts.
"universal forces"
Umh, yeah. May the force be with you as well.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It's interesting that most people assume that intelligent life has to be a sack of water, and that independant human-style thought is the way to go. It also is a much closer fit for observed data.
..don't panic
I am someone who has to know the truth about everything - so I search for answers. If that truth happens to be that God created the world merely 6,000 years ago, then so be it.
:)
:)
The only source of that truth is in a book, written by people who had virtually no scientific knowledge. Other books, some written before and some after Genesis, give different numbers. Traditional Hindu cosmology indicates that the universe is trillions of years old. Why should an impartial scientist give the Torah/Bible more credence than the Koran or the Rig Veda?
It is the truth, so it must be logical, and therefore we can study and learn the intricacies of the "watch" and appreciate the amazing work of God.
What happens when you study the watch and find contradictions? Ice cores indicate an Earth well over 100,000 years old at an absolute minimum.
Also, did you read my reference about proteins tending to break down into amino acids, the opposite of what is necessary for evolution?
Yes. Proteins were (probably) not formed before the first self-replicating molecules. No self-respecting scientist believes that all the proteins required for modern life spontaneously appeared before the earliest life forms. There are a few tidbits on abiogenesis probability calculations that you might find interesting.
God would have had to have performed a miracle a minute for billions of years for evolution to have occurred - that seems far less logical and unrealistic than the creation approach.
Actually, they both seem equally unrealistic, although good old Occam would prefer the 'couple miracles a day for six days' version. Neither is really necessary to explain the origins of life, and taking the miraculous aspect out of it in no way changes the true spiritual meaning of the first few chapters of Genesis. Anyway, I tend to believe God did have a hand in guiding the processes of evolution, just as I believe He has a hand in the events of everyday life. It's just that I think He works through the natural processes we study in science, rather than around them.
On the website link you provided, a little bit through it talks about handedness of amino acids, so you may be interested in this.
From the site:
No known natural process can isolate either the left-handed or right-handed variety. The mathematical probability that chance processes could produce merely one tiny protein molecule with only left-handed amino acids is virtually zero.
True. But, scientific abiogenesis theories don't require chance generation of complex proteins. The earliest self-replicating molecules were probably simple peptides. Incidentally, the ideas of natural selection can explain pretty well why everything is right-handed now - all it takes is for the right-handed peptides to outnumber the left-handed by a small margin, and their offspring will eventually drastically outnumber the lefties and drive them to extinction by competition for resources.
Because evolution favors slight variations that enhance survivability and produce more offspring, consider how advantageous a mutation might be that switched (or inverted) a plant's handedness.
The right-handed DNA of the parent plant couldn't replicate into a left-handed version of itself even if the left-handed nucleotides were present, which they aren't. That's not exactly a 'slight variation', it is complete restructuring.
Totally off the topic of evolution, but interesting nonetheless: There are a few molecules that exist in both left and right handed versions in life forms. Limonene is one of them. The left-handed version is found in oranges, the right-handed version in lemons. Have you ever had an artifical lemon flavored tea that had a bit of an orange taste? It's because you can't separate the two molecules chemically or mechanically. Good artificial lemon flavor must be derived, or at least filtered, by a process similar to the way taste receptors work, involving molecules of a specific handedness.
Amino acids look pretty simple, and that improbability statement I showed you, when you are doing something a billion times a second for 20 billion years, I think that amino acids would be formed more than once
Of course, that isn't an issue anyway, amino acids can form far more rapidly than that, even in the constraints of a lab experiment, let alone the oceans of Earth or however other similar planets exist. Only one planet in the universe has to end up with life for that life to then wonder how it got there, right? Hey, I managed to get this post back on-topic for the original thread, sort of.
I think if we considered that amino acids naturally formed into that equation (if it wasn't already) then the chances would probably still be insanely high.
It's not just the formation of amino acids, it's the formation of any organic molecules. If all the interactions were random, life would be impossible. The interactions are not random though - thanks to the structure of the atoms involved, fairly complex carbon-based molecules are inevitable. Over enough time, more complex molecules can form which start acting as catalysts which cause copies of themselves to form. Once this happens, any idea that all the interactions are 'random' in the sense of probability calculations have to be thrown out. Also, there are innumerable different sets of proteins, nucleotides, etcetera that could have wound up as the basis for life. Only one had to evolve for life to exist, and to point out its improbability after the fact is meaningless. Like in poker - the odds of drawing any particular set of cards are very poor, but the odds of drawing a 'winning hand' are not.
To my mind, it's the ability of the simple carbon atom to form such complex structures that points to a Designer. Deeper than that, the interactions between subatomic particles and the relationships in strength between the four forces of nature seem to be perfectly laid out for life to exist(I'm really more a physics person than a molecular biology person). I'll also agree that the complex organs in modern life form do seem to me to be evidence of Design. It's just that I believe the design process was guided, not 'miracled', and that it took place in a natural, physical way that we can understand if we study it.
One other quote from the page you linked to that caught my eye:
Similarly, why are there not more poisonous plants?
The best answer is, most plants don't need to be poisonous, they survive to reproduce just fine without it. A plant which mutated to become poisonous is at a disadvantage due to the metabolic energy spent to produce the poison. Since a plant can still reproduce after being half-eaten (or more), most of them gain little to no advantage by being poisonous to predators.
Asking 'why' to evolution almost always yields the answer 'because it helps them reproduce'. Asking 'why' about creation almost always yields the answer 'because it is part of God's plan'. That's just the different nature of scientific reasoning versus religious reasoning.
'Why' isn't really a question that science is equipped to answer, because there's always another level. Why do things fall? Because of gravity. Why is there gravity? It's produced by massive objects. Why is there mass? Well, it might have something to do with the Higgs boson, but physicists don't have the tools to explore that currently.
That's what the purpose of religion is - to give an answer to the 'why' we all have asked since we could speak. For Christians, John 3:16 is a nice summary, and the rest of the Bible provides the background of the story of salvation. Treating it as a science textbook, when that is obviously not its purpose, seems unwise.
For instance, the Bible tells us what rainbows are, but I haven't seen anyone trying to debunk the sciences of optics and meteorolgy that explain it in more detail. Optics, you'd obviously have a lot of trouble with, because it's easy to experimentally verify and reproduce. Meterology is more akin to evolutionary biology in that you can't reproduce, you can only observe the evidence and build a theory that explains it. Still, no one seems to dispute that the weather has scientific explanations beyond 'God made it'.
There's another thing that strikes me as odd about the really vocal creationists. If they spent as much energy trying to live according to the teachings of Jesus as they do trying to prove science wrong, imagine the positive impact they could have on people's lives. Don't take that the wrong way; there's a big difference between discussing creationism and evolution on Slashdot during lunch hour, and making a life's work out of attacking science.
I've enjoyed the site you provided - I think I've seen it before but never explored in great detail. I wish they had a search function, because I couldn't find an answer to the ice cores there. If you know where it is, let me know.
I've found some other interesting tidbits on there. Some really aren't good arguments, or are based on theories or measurements that the scientific community has already revised or discarded. Some of them raise legitimate questions, for which I am still trying to find answers. I hope you find the site I linked to every bit as fascinating.
Gee, looks like I've rambled on too much again.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Since no one else on slashdot is contributing to the discussion, if you'd like to continue it in email feel free. My address is bsmith3 at charter dot net.
:)
Anyway...
Tell me why I should expect an atheist scientist to give credence to creationist theories if they had supporting evidence? Everyone has biases, and a discussion of origins is inherently philosophical and will include people's biases.
Well, not all scientists are atheists. They come from all religious backgrounds and have beliefs as varied as anyone else. You might find a slightly higher proportion of atheists among scientists than the population at large, because science and atheism both tend to attract people with strict, logical minds.
This also seems like a convenient place to point out that Pope JP II has gone on record as saying the theory of evolution is not necessarily in conflict with Catholic theology. Not knowing your faith more than that you are Christian, I have to hope you're not one of the sort who refer to the Pope as the Great Satan of Rome, otherwise you won't give a whit about that.
About the dating methods mentioned on creationscience.com, I'm going to do more reading on some of them. The primarily geological ones (sediments, volcanic debris, continental erosion) don't seem to account for the massive geological changes that the Earth has gone through in its lifespan. The continents weren't always where they are now, many things which used to be sediments a few million years ago are mountaintops now, and so forth. Obviously, if you reject an age > 6000 years for Earth in the first place, those aren't good explanations. But if you're going to try to find inconsistencies in geology, you have to make sure that the theories already there don't easily explain away your evidence. Some of the other stuff there isn't so easy to dismiss, so I'll be doing some more reading later on.
Question: is there any mechanism known (and I am ignorant) by which molecules may be created initially in order to form amino acids?
Well, if you've got carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, you've got all the building blocks in place. Stuff like methane, ammonia, and of course carbon dioxide and water can form naturally, and these can form the amino acids.
You demonstrated that some amino acids form naturally, but what about the molecules they are formed from - do all 20 amino acids naturally form, or only some?
There are now 22 known amino acids actually. As far as I know, not all of them have been shown to form outside of biological processes. That, of course, doesn't constitute proof that they can't form naturally.
Really? Some questions for evolution:
* Why do humans shun rape as a sickening act?
* Why do humans practice self-sacrifice for the love of another that is not necessarily their own offspring?
* Why do humans sometimes feel prone to compassion towards the weak and unpriviliged?
Three quick guesses that might not necessarily be all that great....
Rape: Females should tend to seek the fittest mate, having another forced on them goes against their genetic best interests. The males don't want to see it happen because that female might have chosen them as a mate instead. Incidentally, the male's genetic prerogative is to fertilize as many females as possible. This might explain why men don't appear as sympathetic to rape victims as other women, and also why you almost never hear of a man being raped (or at least, you don't hear them complain). These different approaches to reproduction can also be used to explain the different attitudes of men and women towards consent - the "men are pigs" phenomenon, you might call it.
Self sacrifice: Say you have two groups of bunnies. One bunny stands up to the marauding fox and saves his mate and cubs at the cost of his life. Another bunny runs away and his cubs are eaten. The first bunny has passed the test of natural selection and his offspring have a chance. The second bunny has not. He's survived to try again, but any number of things may stand in his way. The first bunny's offspring aren't guaranteed survival, but they're obviously more likely than the dead ones.
Compassion: This one is harder. Compassion is in general beneficial to the species as a whole, but it's harder to specifically state why.
Note that none of these three traits is confined only to humans. Plenty of animals want to choose their own mating partners and become plenty upset when another attempts mating with them. Animals risk, and often lose, their lives all the time providing for their own offspring or protecting a flock/herd/what-have-you.
Of course, the words "love" and "compassion" indicate emotions, and suggest that a purely scientific analysis isn't what you're after. And I don't think science alone can explain them either. I'm just pointing out that those emotions don't necessarily run counter to what evolution might suggest.
And why would God use one method to create His masterpiece (murder, rape, greed, selfishness, cruelty, etc) and then later declare these attributes to be sickening and morally wrong? It is obvious that those things happened and were necessary for natural selection, yet under evolution you must presume that they were natural and good processes (Genesis 1:31).
Obviously God has higher expectations of us than of the animals. There has never been a revelation to even the chimpanzees or dolphins, who appear to have very similar physical capacities for thought. God calls his whole creation good; we have to assume that includes carnivores which must kill for food. Or were they all herbivorous before sin entered the world? That's not meant to be trite or insulting; I honestly don't know the consensus among literalists about what the carnivores ate before Adam and Eve sinned and brought death to the world.
I think that evolutionists don't fully comprehend the creation theory and consider it. When reading creation information they must think with the mind of a creationist so they can see how everything fits together. I have to think like an evolutionist to fully appreciate their arguments when I read their websites - and I feel that evolutionists often miss this.
I agree. Here, I was going to write a bit about the biblical story, with some questions and some insights about my point of view as a decidedly non-atheist person who believes evolution is a valid scientific theory. But I quickly realized it would get too long. So, I'll finish it up later and, if you choose to continue the conversation, I've love to have your opinions and views on it. Again, bsmith3 at charter dot net.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Aliens might know lots of stuff. But how would
they no about human biology and its failings without already being here. Aliens might send us
warp drives. But its up to us to fix our human
failings.