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Ready, Steady, Evolve
Stront writes "New Scientist is reporting that plants and animals can 'bottle up' evolution until they need it. A certain protein 'hides away' mutated genes acting like a genetic valet, however in extreme environments, such as high temperature or noxious chemicals, the cleaning process breaks down and the mutations are released all at once. This goes some way to explaining examples that are considered to defy standard evolutionary theory, such as the Bombardier Beetle."
Doesn't this kind of go against the theory of natural selection? I mean, if the mutated gene is hidden, then there really isn't a difference between the inferior and superior versions, so the gene pool won't be improved.
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
According to evolutionary "thinking" there must have been thousands of generations of beetles improperly mixing these hazardous chemicals in fatal evolutionary experiments, blowing themselves to pieces. Eventually. we are assured, they arrived at the magic formula, but what about the development of the inhibitor?
Never trust any arguement that has to resort to putting thinking in quotes! Especially if the word 'god' is on the same page!
You can't "defy" a theory. That's why it's called a theory. Theorys "evolve" (heh) until they finally fit all the available facts, and then we can be fairly sure that that is what is really happening.
It's a bit difficult to comment on a story, when the story requires subscription to the print edition of a magazine to view it! That, or wait a week until the story is released to the masses.
it's the 'features' cover story, and requires a paid subscription to the magazine to view it. Wayda go /.
A simple proof of evolution is to look at genetic programming (for example here, here and here).
Just look at the classic example of ants collection food. It is beautifully described in John R. Koza's great books (1, 2 and 3) on the subject.
Just imagine adding a fermone layer to freeciv and let the random search for a superior player begin.
Only if you're a creationist.
debunkingOf course, the mutations are also released when your Pokemon hits a certain level (depending on the Pokemon), or is exposed one of several rare stones, or even becomes extremely attached to its trainer.
Shredder has many vials of a substance called "Mutagen" that can also release these mutations.
If you want to be seen, stand up. If you want to be heard, speak up. If you want to be respected, sit down and shut up.
> This mechanism is so subtle, it is surely proof of an intelligent designer
OTOH, we are so dumb, this is surely a proof that there is no designer.
Furthermore, people are so dumb, that the universe must be a bad dream I'm having, and other people are just an imagination or representations of myself.
I must stop talking to myself.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
All these examples where the standard theory failed showed the basic flaws of the evolution theory. Now they bring up a extremely complicated theory to get the "standard theory" right. Ironically it contradicts itself the evolutionary theory by such plants and animals with "hidden genes" are more prone to get gene-defect diseases like cancer etc. So that's basically a huge evolutionary drawback which should have eliminated by evolution.
Sorry pals. The standard evolution theory by Darwin is basically flawed. I'm not one of these air-heads who doubt carbon dating etc. But we have record in all older human of a superior alien power interfering which life on this planet. Why should this be in fact wrong ? The acients surely saw something and misinterpreted it, without having much knowledge about the world. However humans are not cracked up such much as they seem to be so it's very unlikely that this is all made up.
You guy defending the evolution theory so keenly are in fact a new kind of religious zealot - you just replaced the trinity with natural sciences.
I wonder when the first fires will burn and the whitchhunts start.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
There's no great mystery; all of the chemicals are common, other beetles exist that excrete them separately; and the temperatures and pressures are not really that great (only just above boiling). So what?
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Ignoring all the people who want to get into a creationist vs. evolution debate, I find this very interesting. (For the record, I'm a Christian who is interested in science.)
I've always been curious about evolution, but have found a problem in it that I havn't been able to get around.
We can see natural selection at work withen a species before our eyes in a matter of generations, but have yet to see any dramatic jump that evolutionary theory supports.
Could this be the answer? Could these stored up Genes have enough in side of them to not only modify a breed of species, but create an entirly new one? I'd love to see more research on this.
If so, we have discovered the final missing link in evolutionary theory.
The Internet is generally stupid
To date, there has been no observed beneficial mutation. Clearly then, organisms that receive a mutation are less likely to survive than (already healthy) organisms that don't, so perhaps this is just a mechanism to protect the organism against mutations.
And I think the protein breaksdown under the conditions stated simply because not many creatures have evolved to live in volcanos or toxic waste dumps.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to we
This type of topic on Slashdot always creates lots of posts bashing Creationists. Because of this, I would like to give you a rational, logical expanation about the beliefs of Creationists, to dispel the ignorance displayed here on Slashdot.
What is a Creationist?
A Creationist believes that living things were designed and created by God, rather than a process such as evolution.
So God is a designer and creator?
Yes, this is fundamental to the beliefs of Creationists.
What is God? An old man with a big white beard?
That's just silly. God is everywhere, he is a spirit. You can't see him.
You said God was a designer and creator. Why?
Sorry?
What's he do it for?
Erm. What? Oh I know this one! You mustn't question the doings of God, they are unexplainable by mere mortals?
So this invisible and unexplainable thing you call God created all living creatures, but you can't explain why?
You must have faith.
And you think that's a more sensible explanation of life on Earth than evoluton?
I've got my faith. I don't have to question it.
So what about the fossil record? Did God create that?
[Hands on ears] La la la la la la la la...
I'm not entirely convinced that the Bombadier Beetle is a good argument against evolution, even before this theory.
There are many organisms that use what would be lethal chemicals to disorient, disable and/or kill their prey and/or predators. If you think of the squillions of beetles in the world (and there really are billions and billions of them), then look at the amount of time they've existed (a very very long time), is it really that surprising that such a feature could evolve?
Something as advantageous as being able to secrete chemicals that predators don't like gives you such a massive advantage over your defenseless peers that natural selection is going to promote that feature very aggressively, then one beetle arrives that has slightly too powerful secretion methods that squirt the chemical rather than simple secreting it onto their exoskeleton. Now you have an even bigger advantage, you can deter your predator before it has you in it's mouth. Again, natural selection is going to promote that quite aggressively because you're less likely to be injured and unable to reproduce further.
I admit that the leap from there to squirting two different chemicals so they meet at a precise point and react is a little greater, but it only has to happen by random chance once, after that natural selection (less other random chances of death) will take care of making it the predominant feature.
Given the incredible amount of specialisation nature displays elsewhere, the bombadier beetle doesn't seem to be too out of the ordinary. I would suggest that something like bioluminesence is equally impressive/unlikely.
Chris "Ng" Jones
cmsj@tenshu.net
www.tenshu.net
The story deals with what happens to the human race when those genes come out for the first time since we took over from the Neandertals. (Probably not the best summary, but God it's early.)
Not a bad book -- I wasn't too compelled by the first half, but now that I'm on the downhill stretch I'm more and more engrossed. A neat idea, and one that looks like it may have some basis in fact. (Scary thought, given the human race's reaction in the book to what happens...)
Carousel is a lie!
All I can say is if the defense mechanism of the beetle was created by an intelligent designer, with blueprints and all, like Slartibartfast or something, S/he/it must be having a ball. "Ok, we/I create these things that eat beetles, but on the other hand lets make the beetle so it squirts hot crap in the predators face so it really has to work for it's dinner!! Won't that be a rip!!! Hehehe. Then let's make these humans have to toil away for their food also, and blame all their troubles on, hmmm, SIN! Yeah, that's the ticket, they used to live a life of eternal luxery in a fantastic garden but because of this 'sin' thing the now have to slave away to get food, shelter and clothing. Then we'll make those who beleive that stuff work against those who are trying to alleviate suffering, yeah, this'll keep those 'humans' hopelessly confused, just the way I designed it!!"
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
You're confusing two different meanings of the word theory. One meaning is of hypothesis or conjecture, as in a suggested explanation yet to be proven right or wrong.
Another meaning is of governing principles as in "theory of operation". I have a book at home call "Loudspeakers: Theory and Design". The author does not offer hypotheses about how speakers work; he has no doubt as to whether they work and how they work. He's not writing conjecture - he's writing science and engineering - the general body of rules governing the operation of loudspeakers, which the author collectively refers to as their "theory of operation". This second sense of the word can be defied.
In the days of Darwin, the word "theory" in "Theory of Evolution" probably may have refered to the first sense of the word, as a hypothetical explanation of the origin of all species, including ours. But talk to a biologist or naturalist today and he'll tell you they have no doubt but that evolution is a fact; how it works, its principles of operation, is something they're still exploring and trying to explain.
This confusion between the meanings is something the Bible-thumbers love to exploit (I'm not lumping you in with them, though). They jump up and down and shout about how evolution is just a "theory" and that their half-baked Creation Science theories deserve equal consideration in the schools. Don't buy it. Evolution is a fact. We're sure of the big picture; it's just some of the details that we haven't worked out yet.
--Jim
In the description of the bombadier beetle, they make a huge deal about each muscle, and valve that has to be there to have this happen. If you think about it, how many muscles, and valves and widgets do we have inside just so we can rip a good fart? Really, that's not a troll, it's a serious question. They say it like the beetle has to think about throwing switch A, and mixing chem B, when it probably thinks about it as much as you do when you cut the cheese.
"This goes some way to explaining examples that are considered to defy standard evolutionary theory, such as the Bombardier Beetle."
OK, I'll bite. Time to feed the Trolls...
The bombardier beetle never defied standard evolutionary theory. It may have defied belief, but that's a different matter entirely. If anything, the bombardier beetle, and countless other amazing species, show the awesome power of something as simple as random mutation and selection.
I am a Karma Library.
however in extreme environments, such as day before the deadline, the manager process breaks down and all the kludges are released all at once.
If you doubt the theory of evolution just take at your friends (I am addressing geeks on this one). Their bodies are already adapting to their environment:
- the most highly tuned muscles in their bodies are their hands/fingers (how many geeks have "hardbodies"?)
- most wear glasses (what is there to see more than 18 inches away?)
- they do not use vocal speech effectively (excluding expletvies that are equally applied to machines and other humans)
- have you seen the children of real geeks!
Wait! you complain - I know some exceptions to these observations. Of course you do - they are by definition not real geeks, or will be culled from the herd over time.
I can't wait to see what people look like 1000 years from now - extra fingers?, permanent near sightedness?, no legs?
KK4SFV
Yeah. Creationists are always quick to point out
what they percive as "intelligent design".
On the other hand, they completely ignore that nature is far more abundant with "unintelligent design" - especially at the molecular level.
Intelligent design would be to use the same enzyme in all animals. Today, you have the same enzymes, but they have differences, not in function, but in all kinds of non-important ways.
Strangely (for the creationist), these differences are larger between, say a human and a bacteria than between two different types of bacteria.
Oh, and that beetle example is bulls**t. Read some non-biased information somewhere
instead of that pseudoscientific creationist crap.
(someone linked to a faq at talk.origins, probably a good place to start.)
The linked article quote Duane Gish, one of the premier proponents of Creationism. Before anyone puts too much stock in what he has to say, it should be noted that Gish has a record of misrepresenting facts.
TheFrood
If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
You've probably elevated yet another bit of creationist propaganda to the top of google. Of course, most of the Google results for "bombardier beetle" appear to be creationist tripe... I imagine those guys have never read the story of the Babel fish, or they'd stop looking so hard for "proof".
Ho ho.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
I think they were put there by the guy who designed the planet. Didn't he get an award for Finland (help me out here) or something? Lots of fjords I think?
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings
For your fear of evolution, I suggest Darwin's book, The Voyage of the Beagle. You can find it in wiretap if not your local library.
As for the sanity argument, you're both right and wrong. I've decided myself that I must assume my own sanity for anything else to follow. If I don't, I can't do anything at all. I don't pretend to be able to prove my sanity, and indeed, I sometimes question it.
There is a fantastic angle to one's sanity that you should consider. Read Go"del, Escher, Bach by Dounglas Hofstadter. Page 191-192 even, the argument between Prudence and Imprudence. They discuss something much simpler than evolution; propositional calculus (aka. basic logic): the theory that given "if P then Q" AND "P" always means Q. Imprudence ends with "You want a proof. I guess that means you want to be more convinced that the Propositional Calculus is consistent than you are convinced of your own sanity...."
This is the problem with trying to argue these points when science and religion collide. Both sides believe that they are correct based on their own dogma. The religious side is correct because the bible is correct - end of argument. The science side is correct because this is the prevailing paradigm.
There is one interesting piece in the article:
We should remember God's admonition to Job, 'Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?' (Job 38:4).
It is interesting to note that this argument cuts against both sides!
> In related news, Ga. school board OKs teaching
> creationism
> *Weeps*
Go ahead and mark this day down on your Return to the Dark Ages timeline.
Before long, we'll be teaching kids not to have their pictures taken because their souls will be stolen away and that Baby Jesus cries whenever they touch themselves *there*. Then we can continue with the whole War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength policies.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Too bad Gould didn't live just a few more months to see this. I haven't read the article, but the idea would certainly seem to support Punctured Equilibrium. I would hope that he at least had access to some of the data before publishing.
You are incorrect about the standard atheist argument: "I don't understand something, and I will TRY to understand it. Furthermore I will do myself and humanity a grave disservice but ascribing what I don't understand to an unknown god and failing to try to understand."
And it's been a theory for a good twenty years at least in evolutionary biology. It explains why we find a lot of fossils of different species, but very few fossils that qualify as a "missing link" between species. This just gives a reasonable explanation for the mechanism which produces punctuated equilibrium.
Do not confuse duty with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different.Duty is a debt you owe to yourself.
The DNA of rocks and chemicals ISN'T stored away...!?!
crazy dynamite monkey
I realise that this is going to get modded down, but it frustrates me that so many people who pull this "I'm a Christian therefore I believe in God not evolution" crap are actually simple drones of the right. Think for yourself, will ya?
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
I've always wanted to believe that a true scientist does not care what the truth is just so long as he knows that he's got it. Find the answer, deal with the ramifications later. I've also liked to believe that any intellegent person will evaluate an idea on its own merits rather than pick from whatever popular ideas are currently available.
Enter evolutionary theory. It seems that to show any skeptisism is to be labled a creationist. Who decided that those were the only options? Regardless of the validity of any other ideas out there, modern evolutionary theory does have trouble neatly explaining some observations. As a result, the theory is continually becoing more complex (There is really not sufficient room to go into detail so I apologize). At some point, skeptisism is appropriate.
Years ago, people widely believed that the Earth was the center of the universe and anyone who didn't think so was automatically labled a heretic. Rather than concede that the Earth was moving, planets were plotted as moving in epicyclic patterns. This was a real mess to explain in the context of known physics. As far as I know, Gallileo was not an atheist yet I believe he was excommunicated for suggesting that the Earth moved.
Now it's the opposite problem. To challenge evolutionary theory is to be labled a creationist, even though evolutionary theory is looking more and more like planets moving in epicycles everyday.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
What's funny is that the CNN article is an excellent example of how news organizations *don't* have a liberal bias. This article is pretty pro-right wing/fundamentalist Christian -- it's important to realize that moderate Christians and other religious people don't have a problem with teaching science; it's the fundamentalists that have a problem with it.
1. The article seems to intentionally mistake "theory" with "Theory". In general, a "theory" is the same as a conjecture, while a scientific "Theory" is a scientific term for a falsifiable explanation that describes facts. From this perspective, evolution is a fact, but natural selection is a Theory.
2. In the call out box "An explanation of the origin of life theories", I was expecting a description of modern Theories of evolution, like punctuated equilibrium or neo-Darwinism. Instead, it (mistakenly? intentionally?) sets up a false science/religion dichotomy where either you believe in Darwinism or you believe the Christian God manipulated human beings by hand. The interesting part is that pure Darwinism focuses too much on natural selection, while biologists today tend to believe that mutation plays a greater role. But from the CNN article, a layman would think its Darwin or nothing.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Most of us have thought for ourselves; hopefully by reading some material from both sides of this argument and deciding based on the evidence presented whether they too believe in the theory of evolution or not.
The thing that draws most scientifically minded people to evolution is the scientific observations presented to back it up, and the difficulty in refuting it for the most part. Christianity on the other hand, while having the difficult to refute part down REALLY solidly, has only a series of assumptions based on "faith" for its defense. No offense to anyone's religion, but religion not only is not equal to science, but it doesn't even WANT to be like science. You're not SUPPOSED to test your God. You're just supposed to believe. Nothing wrong with that, but when you start putting up faith in the face of scientific data, it's a bit silly.
Your philosophical argument about thought is very interesting, but I don't need faith in my own intelligence either. I believe what I see with my own eyes; i.e. thinking for myself.
Or, you're just part of my altered reality that is reflecting back to me what I have been thinking all along, that all you people are just part of some experiment, of which I am being analyzed.
*creepy*
Live web cams
If your existence came into being based on totally random events, then your brain also was the result of a random event.
One line of thinking is to believe that God set it all up: the Big Bang, evolution, killer asteroids all to get to this point. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, there's no reason to believe God couldn't have figured out exactly the starting conditions to create humans. And in so doing, God not only demonstrates that ability, but also gives us li'l children of his a world with all sorts of clues about how it works and how it came to be how it is. And now our task, should we choose to accept it, is to create a universe where we have defeated the Four Horsemen and our own flaws because it's the Right Thing To Do.
To me, God starting with the Big Bang and getting to here is a lot more impressive than doing a little sculpting in 4004 B.C.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
What is a Evolutionist?
A Evolutionist believes that living things were created by chance, rather than an intelligent creator such as God.
No, evolutionists do not believe that living things were created "by chance". Evolution is a process. If you fill a jar with marbles then where they fall is random, but symmetrical and seemingly intelligent patterns will emerge. But you don't need a God to explain those patterns, nor do they have anything to do with chance.
So evolution is a designer and creator?
Yes, this is fundamental to the beliefs of Evolutionists.
No. See above.
What is Evolution? A random sequence of low probabilities scattered over a long period of time to make them seem plausible?
That's just silly. Evolution is everywhere, it is a process. You can't see it.
You demonstrate your lack of understanding of evolution here, but I'm not going to bother explaining it. Get a textbook. And yes, to an extent you can see it, at least at the microevolution level, and we have some records of it at the macro level.
What's it do it for?
Erm. What? Oh I know this one! You mustn't question the doings of Science, they are unexplainable by mere mortals?
The whole point of science is to try to explain the world around us. Blind faith is completely the opposite to that.
Rather than responding to my joke dialogue by mistrepresenting the views of evolutionists, you might like to answer the points raised by it.
I read the article about the bombardier beetle and it made me wonder:
...and to the ecosystem in which it lived? If so, why design a defense against predators when one could just as easily design predators that would not want to sup on our poor beetle?
If this little fellow was the product of intelligent design, would not that same intelligent design extend to the other creatures around it?
Or did the "designer" just want to sit back and guffaw at the pain and suffering inflicted on one of his creations by another?
-Eldurbarn
Let me preface this by saying that I do believe in God (after thinking everything through and deciding for myself)
:) ). This was all because I felt a bond to my common man, not because I feared reprisal in the afterlife. How were my morals any less real than the morals of those who 'do right' because their God tells them to? Belief in God in no way equates or even implies morality or ethics. Look at the Sept. 11th hijackers. They most likely believed very strongly in God. You could argue that they didn't follow God's teachings, but the point is that they believed they were.
Just because evolution was taught as truth in high school and college, and it allows you to live your life any way that you want without concern for life after death or accountability to a higher power doesn't mean that you should buy it.
It upsets me that so many people who believe in God imply that simply because someone does not believe in God they cannot have any true morals or ethics. I did not believe in God through most of high school and college, yet (I believe) I was a very moral person. I did not drink, did not do drugs, worked hard, tried not to lie (though I was somewhat less successful in that regard
I realize that this is going to get modded down, but it frustrates me that so many people who pull this "I'm an intellectual therefore I believe in evolution not God" crap are actually simple drones of the left. Think for yourself, will ya?
(Note, I have moderator access, but I think responding is much better to this than modding down)
I am sure there are just as many drones on the right who simply believe in God because it is easier. Most Christians (the majority of religious people in America) have not read the Torah, Koran or Bhagavad Gita. Why is this? Is it because they know after reading the Bible that nothing else can possibly be correct? They may say that to themselves, but I doubt it is the truth. I find it much more likely that the Bible is what they were brought up with, and it is simply easier to follow what they already know as opposed to working to figure out what they can truly put their faith in.
I find it perplexing that many people take the time to diligently study the religion they were brought up to know, yet few take even scant moments to study the countless other religions in this world. Well, no, it doesn't really perplex me. It saddens me.
--David
I've always read Genesis with an eye towards the original audience. How would YOU describe the creation of the universe to an aboriginal tribe cut off from the modern world and all its scientific understanding?
It seams to me that Genesis really answers the what, not the how. Even the timeline is fuzzy (what is a day to God? How do you measure the length of a day before there was a sun?).
science is a religion
Everyone, please read this article at Scientific American: 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense . It states 15 common statements/questions that creationists pose to try and discount evolution, and answers them all quite nicely.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
This Bombardier Beatle "problem" linked to fromt he article is ludicrous. For those who cant stand reading the whole thing, the gist of it s this beatle mixes two extremely volitile chemicals, along with an inhibitor, in its body. When threatened, the beatle shoots them out, sans inhibitor, to create an explosion designed to twart off its puruser. The article then goes on how this is "impossible" to explain using standard evolution.
Bzzt, wrong. How do you know the "inhibitor" didn't dveelop first? Evolution is a complex process, with millions of tiny steps. The "inhibitor" could have developed beforehand, for some other purpose we do not now know about, and which may not even exist in the insect anymore. Only the pre-existance of this inhibitor allowed the other mechanism to evolve. Hence, natural selection.
The rest of the article just goes on and on using this flawed arguement to jump to incredible conclusions, such as "But what would be the motivation for such disastrous, trial and error, piecemeal evolution? Everything in evolution is supposed to make perfect sense and have a logical purpose, or else it would never develop". This is totally wrong, anyone who knows anything about evolution and natural selection knows it is not always totally logical. If it were, then why do humans still have the remains of a tail after X million years? Surely the *logical* solution would be to reject it. However, until that mutation develops, and people gain an advantage from it (I don't see how a person with that little bit less of bone would have any advantage, sexually or otherwise), there will be no changes.
From what I can see, although the first article s interesting, it certainly doesn't "defy" any theory, and the second link is just ridiculous.
Since evolution doesn't have a designer, how is evolution supposed to "know" what is going to be useful later? There could be billions of possible mutations. How is it supposed to test what is a useful mutation and what is not? And how is it supposed to "know" when to activate the mutation?
How can you trust eyes (created through a series of random events) to see anything correctly? How do you trust your brain's (again, created through a series of random events) interpretation of what your eyes see?
Well, you shouldn't. Anyone who says their eyes are 100% "truth" is wrong.
That said, we can get by because we can. Our eyes are honest enough for day to day use only because if they weren't we would all be dead. That said, don't trust your eyes if they tell you a surface is hot or cold -- you might get burned. You'll be much better off trusting your sense of touch, even though it isn't anywhere near as sensitive as a cat's whiskers (and come to think of it, their eyes are better than ours, too!)...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
It's pretty damn obvious, other plants and animals do it all the time, it's called "I'm poisonous! Don't eat me!" and works very well as a method of helping the species as a whole propogate, so i see no problem with the beetle accumulating one of the chemicals.
Once that's been accomplished, then random mutation can cause it to start producing the other chemical and storing it as well. So what happens when some animal catches the beetle and eats it, crushing the body and allowing the chemicals to mix? "This is great! Now not only am I poisonous, I _explode_ if you eat me!"
So you've now got the two chemicals stored away safely in your body, and a very clear evolutionary advantage for doing so. "Of course, it would be really great if i could actually scare away or injure my attacker without blowing myself up in the process."
So now starts the evolutionary search for a way to safely mix the and eject the chemicals without killing itself in the process. The mixing chamber may have been an intermediate step that was originally used during death throes to insure a proper mix of the chemicals for a final suicide explosion, rather than depending on the chemicals getting mixed up while the animal chewed the beetle up.
It is a difficult process to evolve i'm sure, just not as impossible as creationists make it out to seem. As a rule them seem to have difficulty understanding the benefits of intermediate stages.
Note that there are probably thousands (or tens of thousands?) of posinous plants and animals, but only the one Bombardier Beetle. Anyone know if there are any creatures that have reached the intermediate stage and just explode what they're killed? Finding such a species would pretty much be the death knell to this case for the creationists, unfortuantly finding the right combiantion of chemicals may be so rare that the Bombardier Beetle is the only one currently alive that has accomplished it.
(And yes, i'm anthropomorphizing quite a bit, but that doesn't affect the basic validity of the idea)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
> How can you trust eyes (created through a series
> of random events) to see anything correctly?
Someone's seen Dark Star!
Doolittle: Now listen,listen here's the big question,how do you know that the evidence that your sensory apparatus reveals to you is correct? What I'm getting at is this: the only experience that is directly available to you is you sensory data,and this sensory data is merely a stream of electrical impulses that stimulates your computing center.
Bomb: In other words,all that I really know about the outside world is relayed to me through my electrical connections.
Doolittle: Exactly!
Bomb: Why,that would mean that I really don't know what the outside universe is like at all for certain.
Doolittle: That's it! That's it!
-- Rick
The whole of Christianity (or any other religion) cannot be proven...THAT idea is actually a tenet of Christianity (it wouldn't be a religion if that wasn't the case)
I think you're misunderstanding the role of faith in religion here. It's not a tenet of Christianity that it cannot be proven true -- if tomorrow we were to uncover the fact that the decimal expression of pi turns out to be an encryption of the Bible, for instance, Christianity would do just fine.
Most religions simply say that shared, physical proof (or scientific proof) that their religion is true isn't necessary to justify belief. They usually go on to say that this is because they have an internal form of subjective, nonphysical proof (spirituality) which justifies belief. Some religions believe that this spiritual truth trumps mere physical truth, while others (like the apologetics you mention) believe that the two should be in accord.
It's important to keep this in mind, I think, because when you're discussing science and the world with someone who believes that they have access to a separate, higher truth standard that trumps physical reality, you really need to probe how well they're aware of this. Some people aren't, and will find the idea odious upon reflection. Some people will find it right and comforting. Unless you can agree on a standard for truth, there's no point in arguing with someone.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
I find it hard to believe that any evolutinist would be shaken in the least bit or be sheepish about this argument in the least bit. So much of evolution is fundamentally based on allowing for flukes that are extremely rare, yet extremely useful. If by some slim chance a beetle is born with this highly unlikely combination, that beetle would kick some serious ass and mate, and thus the progression.
Sure it is an unlikely fluke to happen, but so much about every species consists of unlikely flukes. I'm sure every species has a lot of traits which if not developed at the same time would either not make sense or be lethal. To say the inhibitor, for example, could not develop first, simply because it doesn't make sense, is stupid. If it isn't lethal or otherwise impacts selection, then it is a moot trait and would be ignored. Lethal dominant traits are rapidly filtered out, and Lethal recessive traits will persist pretty much indefinitely under nature.
There are many different ways the beetle could arrive at it's final form. Could have all happened spontaneously, it is a valid chance. It could have the inhibitor first for no good reason. If the energy required to produce the inhibitor is low enough to not impact selection, there is no reason why the inhibitor could exist before anything else. Same goes for the delivery system. And as others point out, it could be a gradual progression in amounts, or utilized in different ways before the agent could be released (blowing up and hurting predators helps the species survive, altruism is not too uncommon, especially among insect species).
I don't see why some people think religion and evolution are exclusive propositions. Why wouldn't God start off with a very basic setup and put in rules to let it change and let it go to see what happens, or even shape and work through the system to arrive at the desired vision. The bible may say a week is the period of creation, but also says that time in God's terms and people's terms is entirely different, so perhaps Creationists are more blasphemous for having the audacity to think they are on a level with God in terms of their interaction with time?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Wow, you sure are good at making 50,000 assumptions based on one sentence. Too bad I wasn't discussing philosophy - we were talking about science. You ARE supposed to just believe in the existence of God. I was not using this statement to say that all Christians are completely blind to the facts. Your philosophy seems reasonable; however, you're not taking your religion and using it as if it's a hammer with which to smash science fact, either.
I attended a Jesuit high school. I was a Catholic for 20 years. Despite the fact that the Jesuits' instruction always encouraged us to think critically and believe what we logically observe to be true, they, like all Catholics, pushed the Catholic church's idea of the "Infallibility of the Pope". This is the idea that the definite statements of the Pope can not be refuted by the Cardinals. Not a bad idea, really, but the belief behind it is that the church speaks for God, and the head of the church CAN NOT be wrong or else God is wrong. At least, that was my interpretation.
I stopped attending church when my Archbishop circulated a letter (an encyclical) to the parishes explaining the Church's stance on a handful of issues: homosexuality, abortion, and women in the priesthood. It was made known that these stances were the official church stance, that they were not to be argued with, and that anyone who attempted to debate these issues with the church in any way could never hold any office with the church. I have no idea whether this letter came from a higher office - perhaps it was just my Archbishop, which would be even more disturbing - now the Archbishop speaks for Church law as well! So, in conclusion - the Catholic Church, my former church, DOES NOT WANT YOUR PHILOSOPHY, no matter what you and the apologetics have to say about it. Admittedly, the issues in question are all subjective, but so is the lion's share of Theology.
I studied Catholic Theology for four years. It was NOT scientific, though it was very well thought out - a lot of thought has gone into it for TWO THOUSAND years in fact, but this does not change the fact that the material is all subjective and open to continued debate. (Except for "reserved" subjects such as the Immaculate Conception and Women in the Priesthood).
My "pathetic" assertion that in the end, you're not really supposed to test God is based on twenty solid years as a Catholic. What I know about Protestant denominations (I have Protestant friends) and the history of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation suggests that the philosophy of debate, but not TOO much applies to most of them as well. I won't even talk about the fundamentalists - they don't want to talk about your "facts" at all!
Once again, my simple statement was based on what I see as the VAST majority of Christian philosophy. Yours is based on a small group I've never heard of. Are you still going to tell me that I know nothing about this subject?
> How can you trust eyes (created through a series of random events) to see anything correctly?
Who sez they do?
> How do you trust your brain's (again, created through a series of random events) interpretation of what your eyes see?
Maybe you've noticed that the brain doesn't always interpret the retinal image correctly?
> The ridiculousness goes on and on.
You certainly got that part right!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Because God isn't an idiot.
As a Christian who isn't an ignorant Fundie, here is how my worldview works:
1.God is Perfect,
2.God created the Universe,
3.God would not create shoddy piece of crap with holes in it
4. It follows that everything in the Universe will fit together with every other thing in the Universe in some way that makes sense. It may not be readily discernible to us right now, but it is possible for us to discern it.
5. Our purpose in the Universe is to discern as much about it as possible before we die so as to become closer to by increasing our knowledge and understanding of His Creation.
That's where I stand.
God just wouldn't make a Universe with big holes that REQUIRE the existence of God.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
A step-by-step evolution of the bombardier system is really not that hard to envision. The scenario below shows a possible step-by-step evolution of the bombardier beetle mechanism from a primitive arthropod.
1.Quinones are produced by epidermal cells for tanning the cuticle. This exists commonly in arthropods. [Dettner, 1987]
2.Some of the quinones don't get used up, but sit on the epidermis, making the arthropod distasteful. (Quinones are used as defensive secretions in a variety of modern arthropods, from beetles to millipedes. [Eisner, 1970])
3.Small invaginations develop in the epidermis between sclerites (plates of cuticle). By wiggling, the insect can squeeze more quinones onto its surface when they're needed.
4.The invaginations deepen. Muscles are moved around slightly, allowing them to help expel the quinones from some of them. (Many ants have glands similar to this near the end of their abdomen. [Holldobler & Wilson, 1990, pp. 233-237])
5.Some invaginations (now reservoirs) become so deep that the others are inconsequential by comparison. Those gradually revert to the original epidermis.
6.In various insects, different defensive chemicals besides quinones appear. (See Eisner, 1970, for a review.) This helps those insects defend against predators which have evolved resistance to quinones. One of the new defensive chemicals is hydroquinone.
7.Cells that secrete the hydroquinones develop in multiple layers over part of the reservoir, allowing more hydroquinones to be produced. Channels between cells allow hydroquinones from all layers to reach the reservoir.
8.The channels become a duct, specialized for transporting the chemicals. The secretory cells withdraw from the reservoir surface, ultimately becoming a separate organ. This stage -- secretory glands connected by ducts to reservoirs -- exists in many beetles. The particular configuration of glands and reservoirs that bombardier beetles have is common to the other beetles in their suborder. [Forsyth, 1970]
9.Muscles adapt which close off the reservoir, thus preventing the chemicals from leaking out when they're not needed.
10.Hydrogen peroxide, which is a common by-product of cellular metabolism, becomes mixed with the hydroquinones. The two react slowly, so a mixture of quinones and hydroquinones gets used for defense.
11.Cells secreting a small amount of catalases and peroxidases appear along the output passage of the reservoir, outside the valve which closes it off from the outside. These ensure that more quinones appear in the defensive secretions. Catalases exist in almost all cells, and peroxidases are also common in plants, animals, and bacteria, so those chemicals needn't be developed from scratch but merely concentrated in one location.
12.More catalases and peroxidases are produced, so the discharge is warmer and is expelled faster by the oxygen generated by the reaction.
13.The walls of that part of the output passage become firmer, allowing them to better withstand the heat and pressure generated by the reaction.
14.Still more catalases and peroxidases are produced, and the walls toughen and shape into a reaction chamber. Gradually they become the mechanism of today's bombardier beetles.
15.The tip of the beetle's abdomen becomes somewhat elongated and more flexible, allowing the beetle to aim its discharge in various directions.
Yep, it's Friday on Slashdot, you can tell by the article that was clearly posted to incite the Creation/Evolution debate once again.
How does the concept of Creation a la Genesis and a global flood explain the presence of kangaroos in Australia, and nowhere else? They had to have been on the Ark. How did they get from Mt. Ararat to Australia without any of them staying somewhere in between?
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
So someone who disagrees with you on evolution is actually automatically a simple drone for the right in your opinion, and you are concerned **THEY** are not thinking for themselves??
My question isn't creationism vs evolution but why creationists can only see God working like some Las Vegas magician causing things to pop out of thin air. Why can't they believe that evolution is God's mechanism for creation? Creation didn't stop 7000 yrs or so ago (when bible literalists believe the world was made) but is an ongoing process.
Hundreds of years ago these same people would've been saying that "There's no proof that planets orbit the sun" or that "The surface of the earth isn't slowly moving". As more scientific knowledge comes in they are forced to drop dearly held beliefs and move on to new ones. Eternal "truths" don't work very well when they are based on the current temporal world. Instead of tying their faiths to the physical world they should focus on the philosophical and spiritual worlds where they should've been all along.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Basically it comes down to you forcing me and my family to accept the bible as the literal truth, which I will never do. And me trying to get you to understand that given billions of years Evolution is not only possible but probable.
Funny use of words. I already am pretty sure, as far as the evidence is concered, that evolution is both possible and probable.
That is a conclusion based on logic, despite trying to be 'forced' to belive that it's true (I went to a public High School!).
I don't think I, or anyone else in this thread has tried to force you into beliveing that the bible as a literal truth. You can form your own conclusions.
The Internet is generally stupid
The catolic church did murder in the medieval times and it was all right. The United States goverment do murder people (death penalty) and it is all right. what is moral and what is not is just a matter of culture and culture changes. The highjackers of 9/11 murdered thousands of people, and I have no doubt that they think that this move were rigth thing to do. Shure in my opinion all those are incredliby wrong and moraly inaceptable, and I am an atheist. I do not fear that a god will punish me if I kill a person, but I do believe it is wrong.
Just because I don't believe there is a "god" watching over me this does not mean that all those things my parents, my family, my teachers and my friends have tought me are sudenly invalid. Religions do impose a moral, but it is not the only way. If this were so people who are jews or budist should have a diferent law then cristians or muslins? After all the laws reflect, or at least should reflect the morals of a culture.
And you ask what is the utility of morals beside avoid being punished? Why do you think the world is not a chaotic place? If there were no morals, people would kill each other because they steped on your feet. Every society have a moral, and it is dinamic, the hole point is that it changes slowly, in terms of generations. Your morals are diferent from those of you father and even more then of your grandfather. why do you think it was all right to have slaves before and now it is a crime? If morals weren't dinamic, we would still be slavaring people and buring witches in public places (maybe live in CNN).
People are moral not to avoid punishment, but because they do believe that folowing those rules they are doing the right thing. And if the olnly reason a person don't kill others is because you believe there is a "supreme being" that will punish you if he did, I do hope never to meet with that person, because when he or she overcome the fear of this "punishment", then he or she would most likely become a serial killer.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Or alternatively, someone's read any one of the hundreds of philosophical texts that have existed for a very long time that this movie is based on.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
It would be interesting to see if old copies of Genenis use if it is ambiguous in the original text, i.e. absolute references to days vs. ordered references to days.
science is a religion
I'm doing the traditional /. thing and not actually reading the article, but I assume it's the old news on heat-shock and chaperone proteins being shown to be a general case.
This isn't "saving up" mutations. This is a system for supressing aberrant mutations breaking down in stressful environments. The True Believers out there would like to phrase this to illustrate the cleverness of natural selection, but this is the failure of a beneficial system leading to a honking buttload of mutants appearing. Nothing more. Yes, throwing a bunch of random solutions at the problem may find an answer and allow a population to continue living in a stressful environment, but it's a bit assuming to try to say the system has evolved to break down in this manner (though it is a rather elegant failure mode).
As for the bombardier beetle...
Hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide, when mixed, turn brown over the course of a couple minutes and won't taste very good. Various beetles besides the Bombardier Beetle use the chemicals, uncatalyzed, merely for the foul taste. Evolution can work in as many steps as it likes increasing the foulness of the taste without any delightful imagery of exploding beetles occurring to anyone.
Of course the page linked to is slow to abandon such delightful imagery so, while it is kind enough to mention that nothing very exciting happens unless you add a catalyst, it likes to give the impression that without that catalyst (or "anti-inhibitor", if you please) the beetles would die a horrible death in the manner of a piece of popcorn, though not quite as tasty.
Let me let you in on another "secret". There can be huge ranges of activity in classes of closely related proteins. This is especially true of the enzymes responsible for catalyzing naturally occuring reactions between simple chemicals. This is a bit of a problem for the Creationist because their idea of the beetles stumbling across a highly efficient enzyme and blowing themselves to bits for generations is very useful. Having them stumble across a weak version that merely made them taste a little worse than their competitors when an attacker mixed the chemicals together is hardly an exciting idea. Nor is it exciting for this weak enzyme to follow the same path of increasing the foulness of the taste that the parahydroxybenzene glands went through.
Of course, once this enzyme reaches a certain level it does get to be dangerous to the beetles. Chance encounters with learning predators that may have only have caused injury become fatal due to the beetles' own defense mechanism (though, because the added foulness of taste deters predation, this is still beneficial to the species, though not to the individual). Any solution is beneficial, as the alternative is death. The apparent winner is to excrete the chemicals, which isn't surprising as some of the other Brachinus species do this without the fun of superheating. Coevolution of improvements to the catalyst and to the ejection system gives us what we have today.
Unfortunately, answering one set of Creationists' call to provide an explanation is met with catcalls of "just-so-story!" from another set. It's really best to ignore them as a group... which, hey, is what I'll be doing.
Simple Machines in Higher Dimensions
The thing that really got me riled up though, is that he assumes that if you are taught and accept evolution in school, you can't be religious. Personally, I think we've got a 12 billion year old universe and evolved from monkeys. I also believe that this is because God is patient and brought us into existance in a slow, elegant way.
Anyway, I just wanted to say good job with your response and there are plenty of folks out here who feel the same thing. I'm curious about your feelings with regards to evolution though.
How many generations of any creature have you monitored? 10? 20? Try hundreds of generations a year for millions of years (insects). Plus you'd have to monitor all of the population, not just one lineage. Even more complex organisms (people, horses, etc) can change over millions of generations, or even faster when subject to critical pressures (ice ages, droughts, disease outbursts). Sudden changes can also occur when species close enough to breed mix (dogs and wolves). Even people can be selectively "culled" by extreme pressures. Some think that polynesians tend to be fat since their ancestors who gained weight easily tended to survive the long risky trans-oceanic trips to new islands (studies of shipwrecked sailors from the air of sail tend to support this theory).
Some processes are too subtle for the limited human lifespan to observe directly. If you need to see something occur during your lifetime then you probably wouldn't believe in plate tectonics if it weren't for the extremely sensitive measuring devices that can show spreading of 1cm/yr of the Atlantic mid oceanic rift. Similar measurement of evolution is limited by the technical challenges (try monitoring every member of that species on earth for a few thousand years).
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
You should read Descartes. You're halfway there to deduce "cogito ergo sum" on your own.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
The scientific evidence for MicroEvolution in no way supports MacroEvolution.
To quote the Borg Queen from First Contact: You imply a disparity where none exists. What is the difference between micro-evolution and macro-evolution? One is small random changes to DNA over time, the other is big random changes to DNA over time. What do you think happens when you've had 50 or 100 or 100,000 small changes? It adds up to a big change.
I see a lot of blind faith on the part of 'scientists' trying to "prove" evolution.
Blind faith? We're talking about a theory which has huge amounts of supporting evidence and explains the current state of the world very well. The mechanisms by which it works have been discovered and are being researched (with possibly huge benefits to humanity waiting to be uncovered - what is 'creation science' doing for us?). Blind faith would be rejecting the overwhelming evidence in favor of evolution because it disagrees with the worldview of the people of forty centuries ago.
todate, I have never heard of a new species that was capable of reproduction ever being evolved.
I've never seen the tree in my front yard grow. If you take measurements of it ten years from now, I'll tell you that the ruler shrank, because this book my mother gave me says trees don't grow.
This is the kind of logic creationists use. Despite all the fossil evidence of common ancestry, current evidence of small evolutionary change over the limited time frame we've been observing, and a known mechanism by which evolution takes place, they keep saying there's no 'proof' of evolution. They refute all the evidence you can possibly present, coming up with all kinds of outlandish theories to explain it in the context of their little book.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Silly, silly, silly. That was back when the continents were all one great land mass, and the earth was crawling with kangaroos and plants of all types. Noah need only pick up the animals, plants, and things in between that were close by.... Then again, this raises the question of what happened to all of the marine animals. (Unless it was raining salt water. But then what about the freshwater animals? It must have been raining fresh water. But...)
Maybe a lot of things were created, like bombardier beetles, and when they got off the ark they evolved into the animals of today. (Except for the dinasours, they didn't fit on the ark and drowned.)
Your odds are 1. Your sequence implies an infinite repetition of the events, so not only will you draw the card, you will draw it an inifite number of times. If each card has a letter of the English alphabet on it, you will also draw the complete works of Shakespeare an infinite number of times.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
I too have struggled against those pointed-headed purveyors of immorality, SCEINTISTS!
While many are familar with thier athiest theory of godless "evilution", others, including many of my fellow creationists!, have fallen prey to their more insidious "theory"(and it is JUST a THOERY!)...
the "Theory" of Gravity.
More like the "Theory of Gravi-Sodom and Gomorrah."
As you all know, the Earth represents our morality. God holds us down to the earth just as he holds us accountable for our actions. Many scientists do not dispute this FACT.
But some(meaning "most" or "all") sceintists don't believe in morality. They think that things "fall" ON THIER OWNwithout an intervention from God.
This THEORY is being tauight in public schools to our impressisonable young people. Thanks to these godless "Gravilutionists", they are being tuaght that God's moral laws just aren't the same everywhere in the universe. They're being taught that morality is "different" on Mars or Venus... and that it SIMPLY DOESN'T EXIST IN OUTER SPACE.
Our children, our future, our most improtant resource, are being told that "Murder isn't okay here, but it is elsehwere!"
This is just part of the gravilutionist conspiracy to take us off God's paradise and into the realm of Satan.
Like my fellow Christians in the Scientific Creationism community, I have attempted to publish papers on this subject, but the scientific establishment has STOPPED me at every turn. They are obviously AFRIAD of what I have to say.
I am not some "crankpot". I hold a doctorate from the highly respected University of Ediacara, but the scientists ignore my obvious qualifications.
But just as sceintists laughed at Galileo, laughed at Newton, laughed at Einstein and laughed at Duane Gish, so they laugh at me. But history will prove me right, just as it proved those brave men correct.
And don't even get me started on the THEORY of "Electromagnetism". THat's just a THEORY too, you know.
I find it interesting, reading these comments. I think a slashdot poll would give me some understanding of where people stand. Here is the poll I would suggest:
We evolved from a random chance under natural laws (No God).
God started the evolutionary process and created the natural laws.
God helped the evolutionary process along the way at various points in time.
God step by step was involved in the evolutionary process.
God created it all without evolution.
It is CowboyNeal's fault.
Every so often, a biological/evolutionary/ecological topic comes up on Slashdot. Now, folks here are mostly engineers of one sort or another, not biologists, and it shows.
:-) As someone who has way more than dabbled in both fields, I can say that a hard engineering mindset does not lend itself to understanding the biological sciences in general, and ecology/evolution in particular.
I have an MS in ecology and population genetics, but have also made my living in the CS field for years (to pay the mortgage, you understand
Evolution (and I've taught college courses on the subject) is not engineering. To understand it, you need to understand ecology, genetics, biochemistry, lots of general biology, etc., etc. There are few topics with more misunderstandings, by people who think they understand it all, and don't. Including some people in the field, har har.
Finally, regarding the Creationists and the "irreducible complexity" thing. As the Theory of Evolution got traction in the intellectual world, the Creationists always pointed out something we didn't understand as proof of a Creator. As more and more became understood, they retreated to the next thing. This was called the "God of the gaps" approach - if we don't understand NOW what's going on, it must be GOD!
That's how I feel about "irreducible complexity". It will be found to be reducible. Well, maybe, mabye not. Where is it written that talking monkeys should necessarily come to understand the Cosmos in all its glory? That's what we are, boys and girls. For all our wonderful accumulated knowledge, there's an infinite ocean of subtlety out there... there's no guarantee that it's all accessible to our brand of cognition or any other computation either.
We return you now to your regularly scheduled trollfest...
some people bashed /. for posting this, but i think it comes at a perfect time. first, because of the recent ruling in georgia, and second, because it's always good to have a refresher of what evolution IS. lots of good posts clearing up the myth that it is just random deformed offspring superceding their parents.
i also want to point out to any highschool kids that even HS texts can get it wrong. i recall in highschool learning that man evolved from chimps, which is totally wrong! now today i know that the book MEANT to say man and chimps shared a common ancestor which was chimp-and-human-like, and we diverged 5 million years ago. just wanted to point out that even with a century old science, textbooks can still blow it! check out this page for more fun fuckups in school texts.
Science Hobbyist Misconceptions
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
You don't give atheists enough credit.
Who cares if a fetus is a baby? I mean, people
have always killed or "exposed" (left to die)
children they couldn't care for. Nobody wants to
do it, but people always have.
We're just organisms, and organisms all die sooner
or later. What's the big deal if some of us die
before ever getting to breathe? It's not like
there's any shortage of babies in the world.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
I just saw Susan Lindquist (as far as I know, the woman who came up with this whole idea) give a talk on Hsp90 (the protein in question) yesterday. Since NewScientist isn't exactly forthcoming with the article, here are a few alternate resources.
4-star general in a one-man army.
You don't have a problem with stoning? Burying someone up to their neck and then throwing rocks at their head until they die? I guess you think that would be a lot of fun, assuming of course that the person deserved that kind of punishment. Our Christian ancestors didn't have a problem with it. Check your bible.
I do have a problem with it - I think it's cruel, and immoral , regardless of the stonee's offense. I think most people, Christian or otherwise, agree with that statement.
Morality does change. The alternative is that either most every sane compassionate person today is wrong about stoning being immoral, or (gasp) the Bible is wrong about stoning being an appropriate punishment.
include $sig;
1;
Hey buddy, Christianity isn't 100% proven either. In fact, the only proof you've got is the Bible, and all it does is assert the correctness of itself. That's what's called "begging the question". And if you're going to get all semantical on the "theory" of evolution, I'll have to ask you to look up "faith" and how it's compared to "proof".
Science is the quest for knowledge. Religion is the opposite. Did you know that people used to think that the weather was caused by gods? That sounds pretty crazy now that we discovered pressure systems and cold fronts, doesn't it?
So there's this big question we all have: where did we come from? Science tries to figure it out using all the available data. You try to think of a plausible theory to explain all of the data and then see if you can use it to predict things. If the prediction is right, you make a little check mark on a clipboard. If the prediction is wrong, or new data shows up to invalidate your theory, you change the theory.
With religion, you're supposed to continue to have faith despite being proven wrong. Religion is intellectually bankrupt. You ask why we're here and religion says, "Because of God. Go pray and stop asking questions." Why do you want to take the easy way out? That kind of reason barely even works on little kids; even they know that "because I said so" is not a good reason. And even if you play along with the whole God created Man thing, you're in for it when you ask where God came from. Because, it turns out, He's always been here. Well, golly, I guess I'll just stop trying to figure stuff out and let others just tell me what to think.
If you want to talk morality, maybe you should read some Nietzsche. And I can tell you that my morals are just fine without an invisible superhero friend in the sky.
> Or alternatively, someone's read any one of the
> hundreds of philosophical texts that have
> existed for a very long time that this movie is
> based.
The argument has been done to death, and it's about as silly as the presentation in Dark Star. How can we trust eyes that aren't "designed"? The aswers fall along these lines: They work most of the time, but we're right to question something only one/a few people sees because we realize they don't work reliably *all the time*.
Also, the whole argument of evolution says that the eyes DIDN'T come about through a series of purely random events anyway. They were shaped by natural selection. What works is more likely to survive.
-- Rick
Almost 500 posts in response to a non-existent (?!) article!
Never before in history have so many said so much about so little.
The relevant passages are not to question that he did put everything together.
My belief is that after our first mistake of eatting of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Man that sentence uses "of" a lot) we can never go back to the blissful ignorant innocence of our childhood as a species. So we have to go forward and learn as much as possible.
The Tower Of Babel was more related (in my opinion) to humans trying to invade Gods realm before they had acquired enough knowledge to be ready. To me it is a goad to learn more so that we will be worthy to sit with God (This is a situation entirely different from individual salvation and the heaven/hell issue).
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Well, wasn't that a smooth trick the authors of the Bible pulled? "Hey, guys, ummm, you have to do all this stuff because, ummm, God said so. And if you ask why, He'll punish you because He is all glorious and stuff."
I clicked on this thread, expecting to see discussion about this "burst of evolution" article, only to find just another creationist vs. evolutionist free-for-all. There's not even a link to the original article on New Scientist, just a link to a page that seems designed specifically to set off the ol' flame wars. Does the poster even care about the article he's posting, or just getting another flamefest started?
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
Religion is only part of the equation for a "good person." In many religions, zealotism breeds people who are immutable to outside suggest, and often hostile towards those who do not share their beliefs. In other cases, indeed in many cases, they simply view themselves are "better people".
This is not to say that relgion does no enhance life. I see many religious people who do good things for the world/community based on their beliefs.
I've also seen many non-religious people who also do a lot of good, not out of any believe in heaven or an afterlife, but simply because they believe in doing good. The contrast to this is ina a few people I know, we can take a few friends of mine.
Friend 1: Found little point in life, was quite constantly depressed. Verged on very drastic negetive consequence. She became "Christian" (though many other religions are good as well, I won't say Christian is the best) and was embraced by her church, found love and certain amount of peace in herself. She seems a lot happier lately
Friend 2: Was raised as an athiest, by athiests. She has not only no religion, but also background reason for life, or a strong basis for doing anything. She seems wholly unsatisfied at most times, and care little for many of her actions. This isn't to say that she's done strong harm to anyone else, but she lacks a fundamental goal in life, doesn't believe in having children (world sucks too much to raise them in), and often enough has a "what's the point attitude."
Friend 3: Has no real religion. Was raised by a supportive and loving family. Believes she has a future, and wants to propogate children. She often helps others, and is a caring, giving individual.
I've met a lot of other people who are quote religios" but do wholly bad things. They tend to have a good regard for their church circle but little for those outside.
My point. Relgion doesn't always define a meaning in life, but it often helps. The fundamental teachings and upbringing behind it are what is essential. If a church is teaching you how to be a good person, and not teaching you intolerance of others, then the church is doing a good job. If your parents raise you with the same values, then your parents are doing a similarly good job.
Often, it's the basic teachings (play nice, be a good boy Vs care for others, be a good Christian/other) that are important.
I have no name for my believes. I disagree with a large part taught by my family's religion, but agree with many of the basic tenets of goodness towards others. I also believe in evolution, but also in a higher power, and yet don't find a conflict. I'm definately not a bible banger, but I'm happy in my own purpose in life, which is what I think really counts.
Contradictions and agreements are welcome, but remember to think before you post - phorm
In case you need a reference: the law of Moses says stoning's just groovy: Deuteronomy 21:21
include $sig;
1;
...and the difference between "hypothesis", "theory" and "law" is mainly who you knew in the world of academia in the 1800's and 1900's. We have plenty of theories that have been proven more rigorously than laws, and vice versa, etc. We've found exceptions to lots of scientific law over 50 years old, thanks to technological advancements. The nomenclature of theory vs. law has held little to no relationship in terms of scientific rigour for longer than any of us have been here (unless you happen to be like 140 years old, in which case, GO YOU :) !!)Creationists and Anti-Evolutionists like to harp on the fact that Evolution is often referred to as a theory. Regardless of whether creationism or evolution is correct, this holds about as much significance as saying, "Evolution is spelled with an 'E', therefore my kids shouldn't have to learn it.*"
*That goes for Economics and English as well!!
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
THe problem is that drones like you derive your worldview from something that was intended to be scientific only in nature.
Are you saying it's better to "derive your worlview" from something non-scientific with little or no evidence to support it?
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Why is it so hard for anyone to imagine that God created life to be capable of evolution? I mean, it's not like the bible says "Then God created the bombardier beetle, fully capable of farting acid."
c-hack.com |
I do not read the Koran or the Bhagavad Gita because the Bible claims to be truth and I believe what the Bible says. The Bible teaches that there is one way to the Father, and that is through his son Jesus Christ. (John 14:6) It would be going against what I believe to be truth to read these other texts in search of 'some other truth'.
So, if you had read the Koran first, and it said it was the truth, would you have believed it and never read the Bible?
If you say yes, does that mean all the books are the same, and whichever one you read first trumps the others? If so, how does that mesh with your belief that only believers in the Bible will receive salvation - does God accept or reject people based on which book they read first?
If you say no, what is it about the Bible that makes you believe that it is true, and how do you know that same "something" isn't in the Koran if you've never read it?
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
An animal doesn't just one day decide "today, I'm going to evolve." One post talks about how the Bombadier Beetle could have evolved, but describes the process as if the beetle is making the decisons--"today I'm going to make these vaginations deeper, tomorrow I make this special chemical."
Nathan
> Not at all. I am saying though that leftist
... BIG CORPORATIONS!
> viewpoints are accepted without question, whereas
> anything that has to do with true capitalism,
> corporations, or wealthy people is portrayed as
> bad for the country.
Who controls the media? Oh, that's right
-- Rick
When one says "I have morality", a valid question is "where did you get it?". The theist says, "It was given to me by someone of superior understanding".
:)
Any discussion of morality tends to be very vague and messy, but for once a piece of it has just snapped into crystal clear focus because of your excellent answer "It was given to me by someone of superior understanding".
I pretty sure I'm reading it the exact opposite of how you meant it however
Where do our morals come from? I realized your answer was right - they were given to us by people of superior understanding - because to a large extent we form them as children. We get them from our parents, and from society at large. Our understanding of morality IS dynamic and changing because each generation builds upon and hopefully supercedes the understanding of our ancestors. Someone may have a new insight or superior understanding, and it may spread.
If rape and murder were legalized tomorrow, the atheist has no recourse by which to claim that rape and murder are immoral.
I reject that claim with this simple moral:
Might does not make right, nor do superior numbers.
Neither superior strength nor superior numbers implies superior understanding.
I think it is fairly obvious that at times some people influence others through means other than knowledge and understanding. They can do it through fear, hatred, patriotism, religion, lies, ignorance, the suppression of knowledge and understanding, or a million other means. They even can do it with the purest of intentions and loyaly, faith, admiration, even love.
Superior influence does not imply superior understanding.
This can lead to the tyrrany of the majority. The burning of witches. The extermination of jews. The lynching of blacks.
What's the utility in being moral other than to avoid punishment?
I find great utility in living in a society without theft, were disputes are not resolved through violence, where people are free to live as they wish so long as they harm no one.
That which benefits everyone benefits me.
I obviously do not live in the described ideal society, but neither is my behavior ideal. Society influences my behavior, and my behavior influences society. To the extent I can, I do so towards that ideal.
You don't quite say it directly, but many of your statements appear to express a prejudice that atheists are not / can not be moral. I understand you may be explaining a position you do not hold, but it does lead to a good point...
Prejudice is immoral, born of inadaquate understanding.
I am an atheist, and I defy you to find fault with any of the nuggets of morality I have placed in bold.
I presume you intended "It was given to me by someone of superior understanding" to mean that your morals come from God. (That was interesting, I typed 'god', and without thinking went back and changed it to 'God'. Pause. Think. Why? Because *I* write 'god', but I was saying where I think *you* belive they come from, and I think you believe they come from a capital 'G', grin)
I would dispute that interpretation. Unless you're going to claim that you've been hearing the voice of God, I'd say they come from people telling you what god says is moral and from books telling you what god says is moral. Well, all of the recent books have been re-written, revised, and translated many times by many people. In order to get back to God as the original source you'd have to go back to some ancient text and claim it did not derive from man. Yet this fails as well. Even if we accept that the ancient texts do indeed derive from God, I'm pretty sure the ancient texts of ANY religion would severly clash with your current morals. Those texts advocate anything from treating women as cattle to chopping off body parts and pre-teen marriages.
At it's best, religion can promote greater understanding, but in the main it relies on blind faith, obedience, rejection of reason, a rejection of understanding of other religions, and a concentration of influence in the people instilling these traits. And at it's worst religion has been responsible for some of the most immoral acts in history. The Inquisition, the World Trade Center, and the Crusades (don't forget the Children's Crusade), merely highlights contuinous evils in the name of religion.
P.S.
I'd also like to point of one of the most severely flawed pieces of "popular morality", the golden rule - Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
A polar bear would no more wish you to place him on a tropical beach than you would wish the polar bear to place you in the arctic ocean.
A better revision would be:
Do unto others as others would reasonably have you do unto them.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Also, the whole argument of evolution says that the eyes DIDN'T come about through a series of purely random events anyway. They were shaped by natural selection. What works is more likely to survive.
Err not exactly. Shaped implies direction, it implies choice, it implies decisions. IF evolution resulted in eyes, it is from random events. Anthropomorphizing is not an accurate way to describe it.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
The poster mentioned:
"Most people (Christians included) have little problem with suggesting evolution is the path by which the world, as we know it, was created."
The theory of evolution doesn't cover how the world was created, it simply covers how species evolve from other species.
There has to be at least one species already there before the theory of evolution has anything at all to say.
Guys...
Don't give us believers a bad name, okay? This creation science stuff is just embarrassing.
This is God's universe, He can do whatever He wants with it.
That includes building a mechanism whereby critters can change and evolve. A lot of folks get indignant because they don't want to be related to monkeys. Hey, God loves monkeys too. "Not a sparrow falls", eh?
To the Bible: remember the audience. The ancient Hebrews didn't know jack about DNA, they couldn't handle an explanation of evolution. You can.
God gave you a brain, He expects you to use it. Most reasonable Christians today see Adam's naming of the beasts as a symbolic mandate for science to understand God's own world as best we can.
There shouldn't be any conflict between religion and science, anyway. Religion explains Why We're Here, science explains How We Got Here. In the past the Church has ignored this, and suffered for it.
So get with the program: Try to understand the world God put you in; accept that God made you out of an ape, not clay, and that this is a PROVISIONAL promotion if you're not careful; admit that you ARE a monkey's nephew, if not uncle; and don't waste people's goodwill towards Christians on this stupid argument.
So because the bombardier beetle is hard to explain, the creationsists think that we should instead accept that a omniscient, omnipotent creator-being made the universe and the Earth, and populated it with designed animals, and also with humans who were designed to fail to live up to the standards set by the creator-being. But this creator-being requires his creations to repent of their designed-in flaws before they can dwell in paradise in the afterlife with the creator-being. So the creator-being assumed human form and sacrificed himself to himself, to pay off the "debt" that was owed to himself. This is the alternative we are to accept because evolution allegedly hasn't explained the bombardier beetle's defense mechanism.
Let me tell you something: evolutionary biologists are not the ones who have some explaining to do! Why did the creator-being make creatures that have to eat each other to survive in the first place? If predation had not been established by the creator-being, there'd be no need for elaborate defense mechanisms by the bombardier beetle or any other creature. But creationsists have no explanation for this, except to say "God moves in mysterious ways."
If this is what it comes to, it is more parsimonious to simply assume that evolution works in mysterious ways. If we are to be satisfied with the "mysterious ways" conclusion (I can' call it an explanation), then there is no need to invoke the extraneous creator-being to do so.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Call me a heretic but...
Who is to say that God didn't create the mechanism of evolution? It goes along with my belief that God wouldn't create a creature that couldn't adapt.
Also, the idea that form follows function fits nicely into the idea of niche.
A definition of niche from AP Dictionary:
the unique position occupied by a particular species, conceived both in terms of the actual physical area that it inhabits and the function that it performs within the community.
It is plain to see that life adapts. To suggest otherwise would be to deny the very truth. The finches on Galapagos are one of the first and most pristine examples of both adaptation and niches.
Furthermore, I believe that many, including myself, study science because it is the search for truth and meaning in the physical world. As such, you could consider it a religion of sorts. As for me, such a scientific search for the truth is merely a parallel path to the search for God, like orthodox christianity, because truth is what God is all about.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Wow, that's great. Here, read this:
What? You don't believe me? But it says right there that you should.
My point, in case you missed it, is that you can't use the Bible as evidence of the Bible's validity. That's called circular reasoning and makes you look silly as well.
What is New Zealand's policy and how has it hurt them?
I suspect that he was referring to the Maori (prolly horribly mis spelled) people who lived there before Europeans came over to settle.
I don't know much about them at all, but if they had such a philosophy, then it would make kicking their asses and taking all their stuff much easier.
im an atheist whos pro-life because for me, "greater good for the greatest number" includes fetuses.
Oh wow. I really hope you follow this and respond.
I have just got to know how you can rationalize this. I can't see any possible way that forcing an unwanted child to be born and raised provides any good to anybody with the possible exception of the child if he manages to have a happy life and causes no harm to others. The fact that every new body on the planet makes it just a little bit worse for everybody else (not counting any good things they might do during their life) due to scarcity of resources, overcrowding etc.
Seriously, I can see the "god told me it was bad argument". I can see the "well all human life is precious because....well just because" argument.
The greatest good for the greatest number argument clearly goes directly against your stated position.
Please explain how this is reasonable.
(* Programming itself implies, no, requires a programmer. So I ask you, who did the genetic programming? *)
While genetic programming does *not* provide a complete, perfect simulation of the first living thing clear up to humans (or whatever you consider the pennicle), it does show that selection alone can increase complexity. The *resulting* complexity was *not* put in by a human programmer.
This is something that creationists have denied is possible. IOW, "only an intelligent creater can create or increase complexity".
Yes, human programmers "primed the pump" if you will in these experiments, but selection alone *increases* complexity. Agreed, it did not go from point A to point Z, but maybe from say H to L.
IMO, genetic algorithms may not "prove" evolution in it's entirety, but do knock some important bricks out of the creationists wall. It shows that at least some of their traditional but heavily used arguments are weak or broke.
Survivle and/or reproductive selection alone *can* increase complexity. This is what GP and GA have shown.
(I hope this does not degenerate into a debate about the definition of "complexity".)
Table-ized A.I.
By the way, since pi is a supposedly infinite string of numbers, somewhere in there you will find the Bible.
Obviously, you make a good point here, although infinite and non-repeating are not the same things.
This does bring up an interesting question, though: what other forms could a scientifically grounded proof of Christianity (or Islam, or any other religion) take? Fulfilled "prophecy" doesn't cut the mustard, since it may be self-fulfilled.
It seems to me that the only way would be to find some sort of message encoded in one of the fundamental constants of the universe, but are there any other ways?
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
The Monkeys on Typwriters is a poor analogy for evolution for at least two reasons:
1. There is no feedback mechanism. If a monkey comes close, it is not rewarded nor has more children then a monkey that keeps missing.
2. It assumes just *one* "proper" solution. The jillions of life-forms all about us show that there are multiple "solutions" to life. There may likely also be multiple solutions to "intelligent life".
Table-ized A.I.
how do evolutionists explain the "polystrate" fossils and petrified trees found all over the world?
Read the ploystrate fossil FAQ
This is the problem with trying to argue these points when science and religion collide. Both sides believe that they are correct based on their own dogma. The religious side is correct because the bible is correct - end of argument. The science side is correct because this is the prevailing paradigm.
Actually, religion is more a victim of dogma. A religion asks that you accept its statements based on faith alone. A person NEVER needs to prove that God exists because faith is enough to sustain his/her belief. Faith then becomes a rubber stamp explanation for EVERYTHING, while predicting nothing. It contributes nothing to the real understanding of the physical world. Creationism depends on literal biblical interpretation, which most main-stream Christians do NOT subscribe to. It ignores the belief systems of non-Christians. It does not predict anything new, nor does it offer explanations for anything (other than the rubber-stamp "God did it" variety). THAT is dogma.
Science on the other hand, demands PROOF - and not just any proof. It demands verifiable and reproducible proof. It does not hang onto paradigms because they sound good or are fashionable. If something comes around that demonstrates a need for a paradigm shift, then science adjusts its stance. It deals with cold, hard reality and embraces knowledge from a variety of sources. It weighs arguments on the basis of evidence and invites others to openly support and challenge those arguments. There is NO ROOM for dogma in science.
If the creationism belief is going to spread as science, it should concentrate on producing a God. If one exists, then surely there is direct physical evidence of Him/Her no matter what the Bible says. It's not enough to look around you and say: "Explain the complexities of life." Others do this either through science or other religions. There needs to be unquestioned, verifiable, reproducible direct, physical proof of God in order for creationism to be taken seriously.
I am far more interested in the analyzing the geosocial implications of people who say "Ready, Steady" instead of "Read, Set" (or vice versa).
[o]_O
Good response. Incidentally, has the Pope not also endorsed evolution as the official doctrine of the Catholic church, albeit with the caveat that God still endows humans with an individual soul?
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
LIberal bias in the media, like Dan Rather, come into play when Dan slips Cythia Mckinney's loss into a segment about about US bias against muslims. Among many others.
Gee, I wonder if the vast resevoirs of Jewish money that flooded McKinney's opponent's coffers had anything to do with that perception? McKinney had also received a lot of Arab money, not surprising considering her pro-Palestinian views.
Anyone who had been following the race knows that it had turned into a sort of proxy "Jews vs Arabs" battle.
That's the central problem with attempting to divine evolution from the "fossil record"
Good thing we don't do that then. The fossil record is maybe the weakest evidence for evolutionary theories. If we didn't have a single fossil, evolutionary theories would still be the only reasonable way to explain DNA similarities between species, structural similarites, the results of selective breeding, etc.
Does this explain the Troll Gene?
Table-ized A.I.
That's not Biblical. That's certainly church-ical, though. Sheep want 1 shepherd. They don't want other sheep to lead. But the Bible itself has the Lamentations as basically a huge guide on how to shake your fist at God. Obviously, knowing that an unexamined faith is weak, the Bible wants to promote a stronger, examined faith. But the byproduct, of course, is that some who question their faith will abandon it. That's NOT what a church trying to expand its membership and win converts wants. But I suspect God would just want tested, strong believers. Hence the difference between the Bible and the church.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
There appear to be many design mistakes in current humans. These include:
1. Testicles that need to be on the outside of the body to be cooled. Other animals have solved this with different chemistry.
2. Urine tube passes through the middle of the prostrate instead of around it. This blocks the flow of urine if the prostrate swells.
3. Improper regulation of weight when food is plentiful.
4. The blood vessles in the eye are on top of the retina rather than behind it, limiting our vision and requiring "muscle wiggle". Octopuss eyes did it right.
5. We don't really need seperate toes and toenails. (This is not the same as not needing seperate toe bones.)
If the creator is perfect, he must have been drinking a little too much sacramental whine when making us.
Table-ized A.I.
Enterprise encounters a race of hostile humanoids who have evolved explosive farts.
Don't laugh it off, it would make a great show IMO. Sure, some would cringe, but they are probably not the kind of people who watch Trek anyhow.
Give "strange new lifeforms" a more literal interpretation for once.
Table-ized A.I.
I wonder of these bugs are related to the bugs on StarShip Troopers ??
*--- Sometimes a majority only means that all the fools are on the same side. ---*
Okay. I just want to know something. Do you, on any level, realize how silly this whole God thing is? Here, read this.
Allow me to belabor the point: The Old Testament of the Bible is a collection of myths and metaphorical stories that ancient people told each other before they had exciting things like "writing" or "TV" or "a working understanding of physics and biology". After generations of retelling (during which they were undoubtably altered) these stories were written down and subjected to editing, mistranslating, and even politically motivated wholesale cuts. Did you ever wonder why the "Literal Word of God" has a fucking census in the middle of it? Who really cares how many goats Eliab sacrificed this one time?
The New Testament is a collection of memoirs and letters by some guys who used to hang around with a fellow who said he was the son of God. I know that sounds like a big deal, but he wasn't the first and he was not the last.
So what I don't get is why you have this absolute faith in book that is, at best, only interesting to historians of early Middle Eastern civilization. I don't want to hear that it's "because the Bible tells me so." I can write an internally consistent account of an invisible pink unicorn by tomorrow. I don't want to hear that it's because there are other Christians; there are plenty of Muslims, too, so you'd better have a good reason for rejecting all the other popular religions in favor of Christianity. And if you're one of those people who've felt God speak to them, well, that's never happened to me, and I'd like to know how that's different from just being another crazy with a chemical imbalance.
I promise I'm almost done. You have an invisible friend. It's cute, but I grew out of that phase.
"The non-theist or atheist however, can only say, "morality is determined by man"."
I disagree. As a non-theist, I find most of Morality to be simple logic. Morality is universally obvious, much like 1+1 = 2 is. It's that obvious, at least for me. Much like our understanding of mathematics, our understanding of morality has improved over the ages. For people who lag behind in the brains department, I sure am glad there's the authoritarian organization called the Church.
YAY! GO YOU!
> I wish we the public could watch a news source
:) )
:)
> that JUST reported the news and then let us
> decide for ourselves.
Ahh, but then you get into debates on what exactly *is* news. After all, someone has to decide what it newsworthy. And that person will ALWAYS be accused of bias. The "right" accuses the media of having a "left wing" bias, while the "left" accuses the media of a "right wing" bias.
Back to the creation/evolution issue in Cobb County - reading the actual policy change, they actually changed *from* a policy which appeared to actually NOT allow evolution (after all, teaching evolution wouldn't "respect [...]family teachings") to a policy that actually allows evolution to be taught. (The real purpose is, of course, to wedge religion into science class. After all, who wouldn't want the credibility of a field of study - science - that has produced all of the technology we use?
I think creationism should be taught in schools - as part of a comparative study of the various religions in the world - NOT as part of a science class. It quite simply isn't science.
I finsd it fascinating that Michael Gray (a junior in one of Cobb's high schools) claims to have disproven evolution. Where's his term paper published?
-- Rick
beneficial
wrong
non-harmfull mutations
closer
mutations that wouldn't end up killing off the mutants
Ding ding ding, we have a winner.
Sorry for my oddball post, but I just got fed up with numerous posts, even from the evolutionist side, that assume only good mutations get advanced. Harmfull mutations can be passed on for arbitrarily many generations, so long as it's not so severe as to kill it, or prevent it from breeding.
Sheer diversity of genes, even if it means some of them are harmful, is itself beneficial. Predators, pathogens, and parasites evolve to target the most common prey/hosts. Merely being different is an edge. And there is also the lottery ticket factor. Say you get a mutant bird with deformed wings and you have a couple of bountyful seasons. The bird manages to get by on the ground, and even lays a few eggs. You have a few of these birds that manage to squeek by while the healthy bird poulation booms. Then there's catastophic event that wipes this island's population of the healthy birds. Maybe they get infected with a new tree-rot bacteria. Maybe only the healthy birds could migrate and they all died to an event somewhere else. Now the deformed birds are the entire population. Without competition from the healthy birds they manage to survive and breed. At this pount they ALL have the bad mutation, and could either evolve the wings into something new, or could re-evolve flight with a bunch of new mutations that incorporate the "bad" mutation in a totally new way that makes it a "good" mutation.
The bad mutation hit the lottery and "won" anyway. Over billions of years with all sorts of populations all over the planet there WILL be all sorts of lottery events.
Then there's the hitch-hicker effect. If 2 geens are on the same cromosome they either both get inherited, or neither does. A mutation can easily disrupt 2 adjacent genes at the same time. If one of the changes is very successfull it could carry the defective gene along for the ride as completely dominates the population.
I've written and run genetic evolution programs. You get crap restults of you kill off the bad and mediocre genes too fast. You need to give them time to re-combine a bit before dying out. Sometimes you need to get 2 or 3 "bad" genes together to combine into a big improvement.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I think that any mention to Creationism in a discussion about Evolution here should be modded as a trool. We have wasted enough time and /. have wasted enough space and bandwidth to this particular form of ignorance.
Just a term of comparison, think about someone posting claims that the Earth is flat to any discussion about space missions. I believe the same moderation should apply to other supertitions.
> Shaped implies direction, it implies choice, it
> implies decisions.
No it doesn't. Stalagmites and stalagtites are also shaped by natural forces. How you get "decision" or "choice" out of that, I don't know.
-- Rick
Perhaps this concept of JITE (just in time evolution) could be used to explain this article:
9 99 92844
.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns
Then again, its kind of hard for me to tell since The ORIGINAL ARTICLE is for SUBSCRIBERS ONLY
Slash-DUH
How you get "decision" or "choice" out of that, I don't know.
Very easily, you contrasted shaping against being created by randomness. Thus direction and choice.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
No, the reason evolution is such a hot-button issue is because it conflicts with the Christian explanation of human origin. (Or, to be more specific, it conflicts with a literal interpretation of that origin.)
It's not science that's on trial here. Most Christians believe in and even support the scientific method in areas where it does not actively conflict with their doctrine.
I sympathize with Christians who feel that they must make a choice between their religion and science, but I wish they'd find the strength of character to admit to themselves and to others what they're doing: denying the most workable, parsimonious scientific theory we have for explaining our origins because they're afraid it's true.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
I agree, but what do you expect for something that claims to be the very Word of the creator of the universe
Something a little more clearly understandable.
God himself says "I am that I am"!
But then, so does Popeye.
Yeah, okay, sure. If facing the facts causes too much cognitive dissonance, just repeat those feel-good lines until it goes away.
About a year ago, some Jeezer stopped me on the street with his healing gospel. He had all his lines memorized, so my arguments fell upon deaf ears. So I decided to let him enlighten me with the glory of God. He called upon the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to show me the Way. I'm still waiting for it.
God knows that my heart is as sincere as it's going to get and he still hasn't shown up. He knows that I'm not going to accept any sign that can be explained by natural means. Yes, I recognize the wonder of the universe and my existence. But I don't need to worship an invisible, omnipotent, egotistical sadist just to be happy and amazed by all that surrounds me. Through patient application of the scientific method, I understand how I fit in with the rest of the universe. I'm made from the same elements as everything and I share a common ancestor with every living thing on Earth (which is just a huge rock flying through space and taking us with it). Why do I need to imagine something that I can't perceive just to enjoy the ride?
I know how my little monkey brain works. I introduce chemicals into my body and I feel euphoria. Sometimes the chemicals in my head do something special by themselves and I transcend existence. It's magnificent, but it's all in my noggin. I know it would be totally cool if God did exist, but wanting it doesn't make it true.
I'm happy enough with this life. I don't need to believe that there's something better waiting. Especially when there is no proof of an afterlife. If I believed that the CIA was trying to beam instructions into my brain you'd think I was a lunatic. But you believe something that can never be demonstrated and you're enlightened? Fuck that. Fuck God, fuck faith. Faith is something that makes con-men rich. Faith misleads. Faith is when you want to believe but have nothing else. Faith is a character on Buffy. Faith is the last refuge of the lost. If you don't have proof, I don't want to hear it. Why should I have faith in God and not Dr. Oyibo, who is evidently able to transfer the sum of THIRTY ONE MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS out of Nigeria, as soon as I fax him a copy of my passport and Social Security card?
So, pray for me. All of you. Pray that Jesus saves me. But as far as I'm concerened, he's in the mythology section, between Indra and Kokopelli.
But then, that depends on what one considers reasonable, doesn't it?
You're right. By reasonable, I mean 'scientific'.
Oh come ON... don't tell me I was the only person who saw this article and immediately thought of the speech given by Patrick Stewart's Xavier at the opening of X-Men: "Every so often, evolution takes a giant leap forward" or something like that... :)
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
The objective of modding down as trolls all Creationist comments is twofold:
a) Let people exachange ideas freely without have to deal with/respond to crackpot pseudo-scientific garbage.
b) Make all Creationist folk see the Slashdot users as a hopelessly intolerant scientific-minded group, so the Creationists will find other sites to drop their nonsense.
Yes, I believe it may even work.
Who is to say what will come of any particular life? Does a baby have to be wanted by its biological mother to enjoy life? to contribute to society? Is a life only to be valued IAW its utilitarian return? If you view people primarily as resource consumers, and not as individuals with the capacity to love and be loved, then your perspective is rather limited and dim.
;-). And the last point in that paragraph. I don't.
My point in this wasn't to debate the pros and cons of abortion per se. Just that I don't see how the greatest good for the greatest number argument applies to this. To answer your questions in order:
Nobody,No,No,Assuming you're not trying to trick me with an unknown acronym No
This still doesn't in any way demonstrate that it provides the greatest good to everybody to have another unwanted child in the world.
Sure they might make some world changing discovery, but they might also rob and kill you.
Of course, nobody can say beforehand, but the latter is statistically much more likely.
If you are just absolutely opposed to it, then I don't think you can probably fairly address the question I raised.
Do unto others as others would reasonably have you do unto them.
And the correct version of it is the one given by Hillel (75BC - 15AD, give or take a few years): "Do not do to others what is hateful to yourself."
Phrasing it as a negative makes it possible and moral.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
thats easy -- i include fetuses in the set of people in society. thus the rationalization.
I still don't see how this works. It isn't necessarily a good thing for that particular person to exist either for them, or for anybody else.
It could well be, but not necessarily.
new people on the planet also don't make it worse for everybody else, they make it better. if we didnt have the people behind our huge economy, we would still be spending most of our time trying to get food.
Only up to a point. Will you agree to this, even if you don't think we've passed this point yet?
I should think that this is pretty clear. The extreme case would be if there are so many people that everyone has to hold their arms in the air just so we can fit.
I think we passed this point some time ago. the food issue is moot with far fewer people than we have now. Technology has made it so fewer people have to farm than ever and we have more people than ever.
Continual growth doesn't work forever, and we will hit the limit, so we do need to start thinking now about how to function with static or negative population growth.
Also I don't think people are "designed" to live in conditions as crowded as in the major cities. Just look at how people regularly ignore rapes and murders right in front of them.
Anyhow, even if it doesn't make it worse for everybody to have even more people, it certainly doesn't make it better.
And the correct version of it is the one given by Hillel (75BC - 15AD, give or take a few years): "Do not do to others what is hateful to yourself."
Interesting variation, but it suffers the idential flaw. It assumes that everyone is identical and wants to be treated the same way. Some people enjoy being whipped.
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"That's how I feel about "irreducible complexity". It will be found to be reducible. Well, maybe, mabye not. Where is it written that talking monkeys should necessarily come to understand the Cosmos in all its glory?"
Actually, Evolution is reducible to a process that could be replicated on a universal computer (a turing machine), and our minds, made of neural nets, can mimic a turing machine program. Therefore, theoretically, given enough time, yes any mind capable of running a turing machine can also run evolution and a good deal more.
-Ben
Well... WRT evolution, there are actually three basic world-views:
- It was organised accidentally (evolution)
- It organised itself (Gaia/pantheist)
- It was externally organised (creation)
Within those, there are divergent views (e.g. punk-eek vs gradualism, old-earth vs young-earth). I'm pleased to say (born stirrer that I am) that there are many observations for which all extant theories are unmistakeably inadequate (-: yes, including all of the tinfoil-hat ones that I know ofVery true, and amazingly opaque to most people.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The choice to make is not between science and religion, but between dogma and data. Evolution, ironically, is the dogma in this case. I can show you many data which completely cross evolution as an idea IF you don't start with materialist assumptions that would prohibit you from accepting the data as they stand. As soon as you reinterpret the data, you have left the realm of science and entered the realm of philosophy, and it doesn't matter whether that philosophy is Atheism, Gaianism or Christianity, it is still philosophy.
I can also show you data that scare both long-age gradualist Atheists and young-earth creationist Christians. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The following text was pasted in to bypass slashdot's braindead lameness filtering, but hey, it's informative as well: Talk.Origins is very hard to target-a fact that may be so by design. For example, if a person disagrees with TO on the 'fact of evolution', these people will employ a definition of evolution ["Biological evolution is a change in the genetic characteristics of a population over time"] that makes it impossible to disagree and, if one does argue, then that person comes across as being uninformed or irrational or fanatical. This might be acceptable if only it remained right there. But it doesn't! That statement about evolution (which happens to be accurate, i.e., genetic characteristics of populations do vary over time) is subsequently modified / extended throughout TO's many articles and feedback responses so that not only is the person to accept the (empirically corroborated) fact of change, but also that this change is the sole causing agent for the diversity and complexity within an organism (internal organs, cellular structures, etc.) as well as outside of the organism including Earth's entire flora and fauna. The metaphysical extrapolation of the data that is required to accomplish this feat is somehow missed by TO-either by ignorance or by design. What's more, if we are to remain exclusively within the natural (material) realm then the term 'evolution' must somehow be further extended to include life from non-life, i.e., the emergence of life itself must also be accounted for by the ever-stretching definition of evolution. There's more. The origin of the basic materials that make up all objects (living or not) must also somehow be accounted for so yet other forms of evolution enter the scene-chemical, stellar and planetary. In fact, the universe itself must also be accounted for by evolution. Thus, whether they hypothesize a Big Bang, a quantum fluctuation, aliens from another dimension or some other natural explanation, the universe began and has 'evolved' to what it is today. Few would argue with the notion that 'things change.' But to take the step from 'things change' to 'and therefore, that's how it all got here' is a leap of blind, irrational faith that would send even the most fanatical snake worshipper reeling. The bottom line to all this is that the fundamental concept of evolution is clearly a manifestation of a metaphysical-not a scientific-worldview and, just as with any other religion, the facts must continually be interpreted and adjusted to fit with this belief. We return you to our regularly scheduled program.
No it doesn't. It bullshits its way around the issues, step by step. And I quote:
Said invaginations, as well as collecting poisons, would also collect pollution. This would have multiple effects, including blocking of any putative ducts (insect suffers infection, and/or pollution encourages parasites, and/or dilutes/osmoses out the poisons), increasing the risk of epidermal rupture, increases the risk of adhesion or impalement causing direct damage, makes the insect easier for a predator to hold.
Yeah? How? It's all very well having a slowmo movie in your head of that happening, but what prompted it? What caused them to get deeper and not shallower? What drove the `deeper is good' message into the genes? What decided that deeper `was' good?
Oh, yes, `appear'... again, out of thin air? How many different possible chemicals can a mutation produce without killing or impairing the insect? Wouldn't a mutation be far more likely to smash the existing mechanism than to refine it, or add a whole new mechanism to make a different chemical without touching the existing mechanism?
So... which came first, did the unnecessary channels soak up valuable resources for aeons, or did cells produce poisons first but no way of safely transporting them?
What here distinguishes between common design principles and gradual development?
Here we go `appearing' again. How? Did the beetle wave a wand? Stop in at a GE lab and ask for a batch of those new catalase cells, please?
...and up to this point, the unfortunate beetle just goes `pop' when it lights the blue touch paper, and spreads itself all over the landscape? In an earlier stage, it might have got away with burning it's own backside off.
No, they didn't. The entire page is just a flight of fantasy! Nowhere is any driving mechanism explored, nowhere is any reason given for any of these things.
Only when wearing your heirarchy-coloured glasses. Anyone taking an unprejudiced look would see a matrix of features, rather than a heirarchy.
Classic example: microbats have a completely different vision system (eyes, brain, the whole nine yards) to macrobats, yet share identical wing structure. Macrobats have a vision system like that of rats, or us. An evolutionist is forced to cry `parallel evolution' (i.e. the miracle of furry flight squared) but really the evidence says that there are overlapping features, incompatible with a heirarchical development schema.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I think it would be more accurate to say that generational application of the principles of morality is dynamic and not morality itself.
:) The person doing this could be secular-based or religious-based. The problem is that religion is a great tool for manipulating people to behave irrationally or immorally (of course they are told that it is the moral thing to do).
;)
an absolute code of morality
To say that there is an absolute code of morality, ideal, unchaging, is to say claim a morality seperate from any person or group of people.
I submit that morality is entirely meaningless outside the context of an interaction between people. There is no morality or immorality in the absence of a person, or even for a single person in isolation.
Morality is also a function of the people involved. It is not immoral to whip someone who enjoys being whipped. It is immoral to place a claustophoic person in an elevator. The concept of theft is meaningless in a society with no concept of private property (yes, they exist). The term "person" should be read broadly enough that to some extent it can include an animal. In the case of an isolated person and an animal there can be be morality, yet it is grossly different. Cruelty would still be immoral, but little else is has any meaning.
And here is a deep one - can an action truely be immoral if the person doing it has literaly no concept of it being immoral? Since so many concepts have pretty much already been shared and spread globally it is difficult to come up with suitable examples other than small children. When a toddler "steals" a hundred dollar bill, is it immoral?
For example, when can we say it is right to steal?
If you find yourself in an isolated group of people ALL of whom continously steal indisciminantly, then "theft" ceases to be meaningful. You may not know which 5 people stole your food, but you have contributed it to the group (unwillingly, yet still contributed). It would be perfectly moral to survive and function in the group by "stealing" food from someone else. If the person you took it from wasn't the person who stole from you, it is quite possible that they will get food from the person who did steal from you.
I'd certainly don't claim it would be a good social system, it would be a disaster. I was merely saying that being moral does not imply you have to starve to death if you found yourself in that society. I was giving an exaple where "stealing" would be moral (meaning not immoral).
When one attempts to justify actions contrary to an absolute righteous moral code
what happens if there is imperfect understanding
Do you claim that your "absolute righteous moral code" is somehow immune to difficulties caused by imperfect understanding?
Why do you instinctively not capitalize it[god]?
Because I rarely use it as a proper noun. I often use it as a generic noun (this god, that god). If you try to say it's all the same god (you just thought that, didn't you?) that is just a monotheistic assumption. The greeks had many gods. Saying it is a proper noun also assumes that "god" is necessarily personified. Some religious beliefs take god as some ultimate force in the universe without personifying it, it would be no more capilalized than "wind" is. Or I use it as a pure abstract (covers the above plus much more, such as the universe itself).
To capitalize "god" when talking genericly about religion is an error of false assumptions. That may be why it stuck out in my mind when I went back to change it.
In the context of your usage, "God" is a proper noun
Yes, in that particular case there was enough context to indicate his specific diety, and that he personified it, proper noun was correct.
>At it's best, religion can promote greater understanding, but
Here you indict yourself of the same prejudice
Prejudice? Care to be more specific, or was that just a generic attack because you didn't like my critique on religion?
I said that religions have good effects and bad effects. I observed that they rely on faith, they expect you to follow their rules, they reject rational argument where they conflict with religous beliefs, they reject other religions, and they have concentrated influence. I implied that those things have the potential to actually impede morality.
imply that belief in God generates more immorality than otherwise.
Not exactly. I don't think "belief in God" causes any problems. I said religion. All major religions are a package-deal of all sorts of beliefs. Some are good "it's a bad idea to kill people", some are bad "people of another religion are evil and going to hell, so it's good to kill them", and some are just silly (how many angels can dance on the head of a pin). A big problem is that religions don't take kindly to discarding the harmfull or silly bits.
But this is obviously error.
I dissagree so it obviously isn't obvious. We don't have another earth without religions to make a comparison, so it's kind of hard to prove things would be better or worse. We are left with a pair of differing oppinions.
You fail to give merit to the immeasurable contributions to society given by not only religious organizations, but their followers as well.
To assume I ignored those people's immeasurable contributions to society is to assume they would have sat on their thumbs without religion.
Not so incidentally, the worst of these attempt to motivate conflict amongst and between uneducated religious in order to achieve their own selfish desires.
This was actually one of my points
To the contrary, religion appeals to common sense
Religions contain large portions that flat out violate common sense. They insist to their followers that it's all true, believe it all. They teach people how to believe things that are blatantly false, to reject/ignore anything to the contrary.
it holds to moral principles that contain value proven over time.
Yes, religions certainly do contain / promote positive things. Are you saying that the time proven principles cannot exist outside of religion? I think it's silly to tell people not to steal because the'll burn in hell and get jabbed by devils with pitchforks for eternity.
I'm saying you CAN have all the positive things that religions promote. You just accept them and promote tham because they ARE good and positive, not because God Says So.
It's fine to believe in god, but anyone who tells you What God Wants is manipulating you. That manipulation may be used to to do good things - "don't kill people", but it can be abused - "kill the sinners".
the golden rule is essentially a summary of a set of Christian moral commands. When groups of people attempt to live according to the entire code of morality, they don't find themselves in conflict.
LOL, do you have any clue what you just said? Essentially: If everyone lived by the entirety of my religious code then everything would be perfect. The obvious collary is that all confict is caused by all the damned (pun intended) people who don't follow my religion.
This could be said of most any religion
Heheh, that rescues the previous statement from being a complete disaster
any religion based on God
Ah, I assume you are using the interpertation that Christian God is the same god as Jewish God is the same as Protestant God. I'll even give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are also including Islamic Allah(Y?/N?). Just for fun lets take Satan worshipers. They worship God (capital G proper noun). Now you want to claim their God isn't your God? So you want to pick and choose which religions are to your liking?
since for the most part, they teach the same morality
Then what's wrong with cutting morality free of the religion? It's all pretty much the same, but you can't have it without religion? And atheists can't have it?
Most problems arise between groups who hold fundamentally different beliefs
And religion generally makes for a bloody mess (figuratinve and literal) resolving those differences. You can't pick and choose the best of each because everything Comes From God. Atheists are free to gain morals from all religions.
people who mis-understand or distort their faith.
Those are differences in religious beliefs, no more or less valid than any other differences in religions. Those terms merely express a bias in favor of one side over the other. How many splits or changes has your religion had in the last 1500 years?
Do unto others as others would reasonably have you do unto them.
So if the norm of a particular culture accepts that it is OK to engage in selfish pursuits as it is expected that others will naturally attempt to exploit
While they would reasonably have me exploit them, they would also reasonably have me co-operate with them, which they would preffer. Either choice would be moral. Remember, morality also mean FAIRNESS, and subjecting yourself to one-way exploitation is both unfair and stupid.
I for one would not wish to participate in or be subject to them.
Neither would I. The system you made up is a bad one. That has nothing to do with my "revisionist" rule though. My rule describes what to do in any situation.
The un-revised rule is bad for two reasons. #1 in the situation you described it would probably leave you dead. #2 the unrevised rule is IMMORAL. Why? Because it implies I should want the same things you want. Guess what! I don't want to be a clone of you. Maybe I don't want a 9-5 job. Maybe I don't want a house with a white picket fence and 2.6 kids and a dog. Maybe I want to join the circus, or live alone in the woods. You should treat people the way they want to be treated. I think you missed that point.
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The former encourages people to do things to someone else "for their own good." This is the root of much of the evil in the world (the path to hell being paved with good intentions). The latter encourages people to leave each other alone. Personally, I'll take the latter.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
The latter encourages people to leave each other alone.
:)
Yes, that is definitely a good thing, chuckle.
It still leaves open doing things that would hurt other people, so long as it's something that doesn't bother you.
So lets try the negation of the version I made up...
Do not do unto others as they would not want you to do unto them.
With an optional "reasonably" after "they". In the negated version the "reasonably" is less necessary than before, though I can still think of exceptional cases where dropping it leads to a problem. Obviously a criminal would not want a policeman to arrest him, but that is unreasonable
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I can show you many data which completely cross evolution as an idea IF you don't start with materialist assumptions
If you have to discard materialism, it's not science.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
If I saw a giant vision of Thor or Osiris in the sky, I'd be more likely to think someone was trying to trick people into believing in Norse or Egyptian mythology than I would be to fall down in worship. And Revelations, I think, is too vague to be proven by coming to pass. There are too many possible interpretations. (What does it mean, for example, to say "the moon became as blood"? It turned red? I saw one of those last weekend, at moonrise.)
If the Rapture happened, I'd find that worth investigating, but it would depend on the evidence. Do we have people on camera disappearing? How many? Did they know each other? Hoaxes aren't anything new.
Ultimately, I think events just aren't strong enough for me. They can almost always be faked. Even if astronomers saw John 3:16 spelled out in clouds on Jupiter, I'd still need something that couldn't be faked, even by people smarter than we are. I'd need that message in one of the fundamental constants of the universe. Maybe not everyone would, but I would.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
What irony, something braindead posted to bypass something braindead.
For example, if a person disagrees with TO on the 'fact of evolution', these people will employ a definition of evolution ["Biological evolution is a change in the genetic characteristics of a population over time"] that makes it impossible to disagree and, if one does argue, then that person comes across as being uninformed or irrational or fanatical.
That IS the definition of evolution, no matter how much you want to extend it to anything and everything under the sun.
What's more, if we are to remain exclusively within the natural (material) realm then the term 'evolution' must somehow be further extended to include life from non-life, i.e., the emergence of life itself must also be accounted for by the ever-stretching definition of evolution. There's more. The origin of the basic materials that make up all objects (living or not) must also somehow be accounted for so yet other forms of evolution enter the scene-chemical, stellar and planetary. In fact, the universe itself must also be accounted for by evolution.
This is completely idiotic. That would be like saying that quantum mechanics has to explain ballroom dancing because they are both natural phenomena. Evolution is a biological observation, nothing more. The various theories about evolution are attempts to explain the apparent diversity and progression of biological organisms, nothing more. Abiogenesis, stellar formation, and the beginning of the universe are completely independent of evolution. There is no reason for evolution to have to explain those things because evolution is still valid no matter what explanation for those things is correct.
But to take the step from 'things change' to 'and therefore, that's how it all got here' is a leap of blind, irrational faith that would send even the most fanatical snake worshipper reeling.
Yes it is, fortunately no one is making it. Rather what they are doing is going from "things change" to "this may be how and why things change" and that is not a blind leap of faith because it is based on evidence and there are competing theories, such as natural selection vs. punctuated equilibrium.
The bottom line to all this is that the fundamental concept of evolution is clearly a manifestation of a metaphysical-not a scientific-worldview
Yes, but it is a worldview that you are injecting in there as a straw man, not something inherent in the theories of evolution.
Yeah? How? It's all very well having a slowmo movie in your head of that happening, but what prompted it? What caused them to get deeper and not shallower? What drove the `deeper is good' message into the genes? What decided that deeper `was' good?
A mutation doesn't have to be "good" to stick around, it just has to be neutral. It could even be slightly harmful, as long as it wasn't harmful enough to cause it to be selected out before a mutation that was beneficial but dependent on the harmful mutation came up. Whether or not that specific mutation actually is neutral or better is a different question, and as I am not a biologist, it is a question I cannot answer.
For the entire post you seem to believe that mutations need a reason (other than the physical reason for the change in the DNA, such as radiation or whatever) to occur. I don't know how you got this ludicrous idea, but a simple examination of it shows it is obviously false. You also don't seem to understand that the proposed chain of mutations is only one of the many chains of mutations that would have been happening in the beetle population. In short, you have completely failed to understand evolution, and I don't blame you for not believing in it.
I'm a New Zealander, and the Maori (your spelling is fine) were about as warlike as they come pre-European arrival. They didn't have their butts kicked too seriously by the Europeans (and did some some seriously butt kicking themselves in places like Gate Pa (link).
The original poster may be refering to an event like Pirihaka, where a tribe of Christian Maori adopted a theory of non-violent resistance (similar to Gandhi's) in 1881. However, the colonial authorities brutally destroyed the community.
Warning: Some ideologies on the Net are smaller than they appear.
Actually, DNA is quite an embarassment to the evolutionary argument, too. (Turtles are a particular problem, stubbornly refusing to let their DNA fit into the primitive places evolution claims it must go.) Similar problems beset other reptiles, flowering plants, etc. If DNA analysis has done anything to evolutionary theory, it has shattered the notions of an evolutionary heirarchy.
For more info, see this article, "The DNA Dilemma" describing just a few resons why DNA does *not* correlate with what evolution predicts and still maintains.
A short excerpt from that article, showing the serious problems DNA research was causing for evolutionary theory in the 12 months before the article was written, is included below - these are not exactly Creationists raising this ruckus, you'll notice:
Bottom line: DNA does anything but validate evolutionary theory, and changing the cladograms to reflect the DNA evidence eliminates nearly all animals that might be considered even remotely "transitional". From the reading I've done, the DNA evidence does, in fact, make it look more like perhaps all living things were created individually. This a one more area where science is solidly against evolution.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Might I suggest that a solid, rational approach to Chrisitanity might well let you find both the Truth therein as well as acknowledgement that we must *think*, and are in fact, "to think God's thoughts after Him." (I will also submit this is far different than "testing" God, which is wrong.)
:-) If that's a bit too ambitious for you, try Jonathan Edwards, or any of several excellent current writers at sites like antithesis.com (Warning, requires IE - yuk), or Credenda-Agenda. You may not like these(or even agree with them), but you can't argue they're not thoughtful and well-reasoned. These sites drive some of my Baptist friends to absolute distraction...
I'd suggest starting with John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, the clarity of which should more than make up for any wooly thinking your upbringing might have left you with...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
my claim is that Christian morality is necessarily absolute for all of humanity.
:)
Because we were not created soulless animals, nor were we created for life in a bottle.
Even if that weren't a circular argument, it still wouldn't be valid. You prove that your Christian moral code is perfect and universal by assuming Christain religious beliefs. Even if we accepted the listed assumption as true, there are other religions with the same assumptions that do not have an idential moral code. That does not demonstrate any "absolute morality". It's just re-assuming your own religion as the absolute.
How many people do you know enjoy being whipped? I realize your statement is purely hypothetical;
At least one, and far from a pure hypothetical. Besides, that was just a vidid example that not everyone should be treated as identical.
>can an action truely be immoral if the person doing it has literaly no concept of it being immoral?
Absolutely
What the heck, I'll use a religious counter. Before eating of the tree of knowledge Adam and Eve only knew "do not eat of this tree". They were incapable of any other sin because they lacked knowledge.
going along with the norm of sinful culture... could never break it.
False. You can still try to improve it. You are also assuming that any society that does not match your precise code must be bad. As I mentioned there are societies where all objects are owned communally by everyone/noone. "Theft" would be completely meaningless. There are also societies known as "gift cultures" with very different codes.
>"absolute righteous moral code" is somehow immune to difficulties caused by imperfect understanding?
Absolutely not.
Glad we agree. I was responding to your comment "When one attempts to justify actions contrary to an absolute righteous moral code... what happens if there is imperfect understanding on our part or the part of a secondary/tertiary/... observer?
Would it be more accurate to say that you have a general grammatical weakness in recognizing and thus capitalizing proper nouns?
I noticed my sentence was not phrased as "my" statement, it was phrased as someone else's statement. The "change" was a half second mentally jumping from me speaking, to me speaking as someone else. If it was simply me speaking it would have been structured such that lowercase would have been correct.
>Care to be more specific, or was that just a generic attack because you didn't like my critique on religion?
I deemed that position objectionable
Therefor you called me a bigot. Ok, thanx for clearing that up.
The Christian concept of faith is not meant to be divorced from reason.
My observation is that it often is. If your faith and reason come in conflict do you dismiss that portion of your faith? Or is it "impossible" for faith and reason to conflict? (Impling that the reason could only be in error if that happens.)
And following religious rules is bad because?
Because not all religious rules are good. Simple proof: There are many religions. Some of their rules conflict - severely. Simply claiming your religion is uniquely correct is circular.
None of the major religions promote irrational argument.
I submit that creationists (for one) have promoted severely flawed and irrational arguments.
>they reject other religions
I suspect this too is most often a byproduct of the layperson
However you wish to justify it within your own religion, I submit is is common across religions in general.
>"people of another religion are evil and going to hell, so it's good to kill them"
What religion teaches this?
It was merely a graphic example of a bad beleif, but most religions have been guilty of that one at some point or another. Or have you forgotten about the Crusades? Choose any belief you dislike from any religion you dislike to proove my point. Not everything religions teach is good.
shown to be a fictitious account originated by yet another anti-religion propagandist
Angels dancing on a pin was a throw-away-example. Every religion has beleifs that would be considered silly by people of some other religions. Examples later.
>religions don't take kindly to discarding the harmfull or silly bits.
This is a broad and unsupported accusation
I'd submit that there are plenty support. There have been numerous wars prompted wholely or in part by religious differences.
Historical record indicates that secular authorities have committed the vast majority of such offenses.
Even if we assumed it is always secularly based, it still supports my point that religion results in influence that can impair morality.
Normally those who commit offenses in the name of religion are not "religious based"; rather they operate in opposition to the principles of their faith.
You can't say they are going against their religion merely because you don't like their beliefs. Which goes right back into the previous item, religious people you dissagree with using religion to influence people.
Religion has proven to be a rather poor tool for manipulation into immorality.
You reject my examples of the Crusades, Inquisition, Witch burning, and the 9/11 attack? Oh yeah, I forgot, those were all people being "false" to their beliefs. (Laughing hystericly) Those people were quite earnest in ther religious beliefs, no matter how much you dissagree with them.
[religion] is often attacked by the wicked
Ah, I'm "wicked". Cool. Can't wait to tell my friends
Another broad and unsupported statement; provide examples.
You don't think other religions are filled with silly beliefs? How about Greek mythology? Or OT III from scientology. 75 million years ago the president of the Galactic Federation solved his overpopulation problem by murdering billions, freezing them, shiping them to earth, dumping them in volcanoes, setting off an H-bomb in each volcano. Then brainwashed them. Now they infest us and their brainwashing controls us.
I never said that things would be perfect, only that they would be able to avoid conflict.
If you wipe out all other religions (which IS what you suggest entails) it will avoid a lot of conflict. That also applies to religions you dislike.
The devil is not a god
He's not Your God, but he certainly is so to Satan worshipers. Capital G proper noun God. Any arguement to the contrary is no more than chanting "I'm special, my religion is special".
and certainly would never teach a moral code of conduct anywhere near that of [my]God.
In your oppinion. I'm certain Satan worshipers would dissagree with you.
You seem to be intent on cutting religion out of society.
In case you forgot, I was intent on disputing the claim that Atheists cannot be moral.
Do you think that man can create a system that effectively counters human nature any better then God does?
No, I think religions are systems created by man. Unless you want to claim that Satan worshiping is not a religion, or you want to claim that Satan worshiping is not flawed, then you must admit that religions contain flaws.
I'm saying that religions get in the way of improving the system. You are ready to jump on flaws in other religions, but refuse the possibility that your own is less than perfect. An atheist recognises that all systems are flawed, and therefor has no irrational impediment to improvement.
Christians already have the means to adapt their faith in the Church. It is the Church's responsibility to 'keep up with the times'
To toss your words back at you, each time that is an example of "people who mis-understand or distort their faith".
They are perpetually destructive. And following your rule would do nothing to prevent their growth.
Then you clearly still do not understand it. My rule never forces you to do anything your rule considers immoral. N-E-V-E-R. You can certainly work to change the situation. In some cases my rule opens options that I do not consider immoral, in other cases it blocks actions I do consider immoral. I am not you, and what I want people to "do unto me" is NOT the same as what you want people to "do unto you". Just because your religion tells you to fast on some holy day (example of a silly beleif) and that's fine unto you does not make it ok for you to force that unto me.
Believe in repaying evil with evil? Believe vigilante justice is moral?
I never said either of those things, as much as you would like to paint me that way.
Setting aside those examples of bad situations, a system can be DIFFERENT without it being evil. That is a concept religions often screw up on.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
But you did try to refute it by asserting that they would be a drain on resources in an overcrowded world. And my point was that you were making predictions about the future state of society that might or might not occur. If I want to prove that banning abortion provides the most good to the most amount of people all I have to do is show that the person is likely to make a net contribution to society.
;-) I still do it, but it's magicaly not a sin anymore.
;-) different views on what is good and bad, doesn't mean that I'm the negative one. Nor does it mean that you are.
I wasn't making predictions, I was making a statement about the present state of the world which in my opinion has already occurred.
Well, showing that someone is likely to make a net positive contribution to society is harder than what I was looking for, but if you can do either, then full speed ahead.
Even criminals can be used productively.
I hope that was just a very unfortunate choice of phrasing. If not, I think your startements about my supposed utilitarization of life pale in comparison. I don't see any people as things to be used. I just feel it is important to assess all the facts before deciding to create another one.
The ultimate judge of the value of any particular life is the person who lives it.
Certainly.
People who start life up for adoption or live in a state funded institution normally have nowhere to go but up. Even so, it does not mean that they can't enjoy life.
Sure.
People should give God a chance.
Arrggghh Must control flame fingers...
This is such a criminally evil attitude. "I can't afford a child, I'm emotionally bankrupt, addicted to crack, and have never spent more than 5 minutes around a child without wanting to strangle them. I got raped and got pregnant. I could do the responsible thing and terminate the pregnancy... no, wait... I'll just have the kid and let god figure it out."
This is the attitude of a child, not an adult. Ignore the consequences of your actions and expect daddy to clean up after you.
This is one of the reasons I continue to discuss things with you. You are at least rational enough to recognize that it is not religion itself that causes problems, but *people* who claim to be acting IAW their religion
Well, I don't 100% agree with you on this. I think it will be a great day for humanity when we finally grow out of religion. I think it's Bertrand Russel who I'm about to misquote, "Religion is the primary enemy of moral progress in the world".
Obviously, it's a quote, not a proof of anything, but I think it makes a lot of sense.
The old testament was written by a bunch of desert nomads thousands of years ago, and the new testament was written by people not much more civilized. The major religions have taken these as the absolute word of god which has put a major hurdle in any changes or improvements since.
The day religion (in any form, I'm not picking on yours particularly) dies off the face of the earth will be the day that humanity enters it's adult hood. We will have to look at our actions in the face and own up to the responsibility for them now , in this lifetime without having the ultimate copout, "well god can always make it right later".
Now, I do agree that a Christian acting in accordance with Jesus's teachings is, in general, going to be nicer to live around than someone who claims to be one but clearly isn't through their actions. Even better though in my opinion would be someone who is a good person because they feel that it is the right thing to do rather than because some old Hebrew wind demon threatens to spank them. This is the way most people seem to be initially exposed to god, so please don't take that as an attack or me stating what your motivations are.
You're right I haven't.
Come on now. The Crusades, selling keys to heaven, the burning of the Library of Alexandria, The Salem witch trials, The KKK, Aryan Nations, The enslavement, murder, and torture of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the tacit support of the holocaust, godhatesfags.com, murdering doctors, hiding away relevant scriptures in the vatican vaults which are contemporary with the current text of the bible etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.
These are all cases where Christianity went wrong. Sure, it's easy for you to say, well they weren't Christians because they did ( or didn't do ) 'X'.
But your missing the point. Most of those things were done by the Church, the sole source of Christian teachings for many centuries. The bible doesn't even really count since almost nobody could read it even if they could get ahold of a copy. The other things in my (very brief) list were still done by ( in the following, feel free to prepend "people who claim to be" to "Christian") Christians, in the name of god, with backup pulled right from the bible for their actions. Now just because you can pull other quotes that contradict theirs, doesn't necessarily make you right and them wrong within that context. That is what I was saying much earlier about the problems with inconsistencies in the bible.
You're assigning blame to God for things better assigned to the devil, or individuals themselves. Free will and life after death go a long way towards explaining why God allows evil to act in the world, but there are more reasons than these.
Blame the devil?!? God made him and he made him precisely what he is. Now correct me if I'm wrong ( I picked up this from watching "Dogma", so I could be completely off), but isn't it true that angels do not have free will? They were created as servants and we were given free will? That blows away your "blame the devil" argument if true. Regardless, it is irrelevant to the fact that *god created all evil.* The most free will can do is let us pick whether or not to do something. The evil action itself was still created solely by god.
First, you are focusing only on the bad.
Not really. I am pointing it out. You seem to be focusing on the good to the exclusion of the bad. In fact you claimed to not even see it (or agreed with my guess to that affect to be completely honest). Which of these is more dangerous?
However, the contributions far outweigh the harm done.
That is going to take more than an unsubstantiated statement for me to swallow. The harm done is totally irreparable. The cultures and knowledge destroyed will never be recovered. Thousands and thousands of years of records, history, stories, and knowledge from all over the world burned. Gone forever. Can you really put a value on this? Can you honestly claim that the church's contributions to society outweigh this act alone ignoring all of the others? I'm sorry, but I don't see it.
Second, all religious and all secular institutions have 'bad' in their history. But what has been the cause, and what institutions have the best records?
Probably true. Absolutes are dangerous, but I certainly can't think of any.
The Catholic Church has the worst record I would say. A lot of evidence exists to bear this out. Other branches of christianity are pretty bad too, but they don't have the membership or the age of Catholicism to be able to compare.
The best? Well, Tibetan Buddhism seems like a likely candidate. but if you're going to claim Christianity is even in the running, that will take a lot of evidence.
Third, I don't think I am unrealistic in my belief that it is people who love themselves and who love sin and not God that's the problem.
I love myself, I love to sin in some people's definition of sin although I can't engage in my favorite sin anymore since I'm recently married
I don't love god. I don't even believe he exists.
Are you claiming that I'm part of "the problem"?
I know you don't know me well enough to point out examples or anything like that, but I think this attitude is extremely misguided. Now, it might not be true in your particular case, but there are a *lot* of people out there who wouldn't give me the time of day if they knew I wasn't a Christian, yet will send scum like Jerry Falwell amd Jim Baker etc. their last dollar that they should have spent on money for their children because they claim to be and tell a good story. This is again a very serious danger of religion. Not that those fools (the particular ones mailing checks, not Christians in general) wouldn't necessarily fall for something else that came along, but it's an inherent danger of any such power structure. Ignoring that because this is the "right one" isn't a very good idea
My point is that it is your nature to see things mainly in the negative that gives you this perspective.
No, it isn't. I am a very positive person. I am not idiotically optimistic either though. I tend to take a very realistic viewpoint. I certainly don't think having a kid I'm not ready for and expecting god to take care of everything is either positive or realistic.
Realize that negativism is degenerative and self-fulfilling.
I am well aware of this. Probably much more so than you are even. At one point (more of a line segment actually), I was about the most negative hate filled person you've probably ever met. I eventually came to the conclusion that this wasn't doing shit for me and I dropped all of that baggage. Now this doesn't mean that I can no longer recognize bad things for what they are. It also doesn't mean that I have to like everything. I think it actually gives me a much better perspective to recognize evil behind a pretty mask than most people who haven't been where I have.
If you see something you don't like then do something about it,
I do whenever possible. That's part of why I'm still in this discussion. Just because we seem to have slightly
don't blame God.
That's really too funny. Again, I don't at all in any way blame god for anything. I don't give him credit for anything either. I take complete responsibility for my own life and actions. Now, if I did believe in him, I would most certainly blame him for a lot of screwed up things in the world. I wouldn't waste my time walking around blaming him though which is a very important distinction. This world is totally inconsistent with a god who is omniscient, omnipotent, and good.
Pick any two and it could work. All three, not possible not even for god.
Get out and do something you like instead of watching that crap on TV
I do, all the time. I watch very little TV and the only reason that that's "very little" rather than "one half-hour a week" (South Park) is that I'm currently on the road for my job in a hotel and I can't do half of the things I normally do out here. I've made quite a few friends, so my TV watching is tapering off.
don't get caught up in unproductive speculative gossip
This has never held any interest for me.
Go to church,
No thank you. I'd much rather watch crap on TV
find new friends,
I have lots of good friends, most of them back home, but I'm doing quite well in that respect out here as well thank you very much.
do anything to get you out of that situation.
I'm not in any such situation. Just because I don't have any love for your god doesn't make me a bad hateful person. Similarly, just because you do doesn't mean you are not. There are too many examples to even start on this.
Quite the opposite, it's making decisions about someone else's life presumptively.
OK, then you are making decisions presumptively about *two* people's lives. And you're making this decision without the perspective of the one who is directly involved.
The time for that decision is before having sex. If someone isn't ready to have children, they shouldn't have sex. If they do anyway, they can give the child up, but they should never kill it.
Hmmm... I see you ignored my comment on this already so I'll repeat it:
Please don't bother with the old tired abstinence approach to this. Sex has many benefits for mental and physical health and well being completely seperate from reproductive purposes.
Sex is a natural, beautiful thing. People have always had it and will always continue to have it.
It is healthy, and it is good for you.
Telling people, "don't do that" is stupid. I'm not saying you're stupid for thinking that it's the right thing to do. I'm saying expecting it to work when it never has throughout all of human history is very stupid. You're not actually against birth control are you? Reducing sex to a mechanical act of reproduction lowers us to the level of animals when we are supposed to have risen above that.
Waiting until marriage is not realistic either. For some very few people this might actually work, but to try and force this is not only stupid, but very evil. People are getting married much later in life than they once did and this is a very good thing. They are much better equipped for it when they have gone out and lived their lives, learned what they are all about, loved and lost and gained the strength to love again, made mistakes and learned from them than they are when they are 18.
To enter into a life long commitment when you have never experienced physical intimacy and the emotional whirlwind this creates is not, in general, a very bright idea. To expect it to last when both of you have sooo much personal growth to go through (even more than those who have been around a bit) is crazy. If it works for you, congratulations, but you are in a very very small minority.
Worse than non-religious people at walking the walk? The record proves otherwise.
You say this, but I think we must be looking at different records.
All I have to do is turn on the TV and I can see the immoral crap promoted and done by non religious sources.
There is moral and there is moral though, isn't there.
All I have to do is turn on the TV and I can see the immoral crap promoted and done by religious sources.
Let's see televangelists, People getting blown to pieces rather than loving each other. What's that you say? Those are from the non-religious? Look at it again my friend, the religious right is so concerned with censoring god's own freaking creation (the human form) that having boobs on TV is illegal, yet explosions murders, beatings, and so many other things are let through. Do you see the blatant stupidity and hypocrisy of these sickos?
Physical expression of love is *worse* than brutal murder to these people. Even the human form that god himself created according to these people is worse to look at than a human head being blown apart?!? I mean seriously, I don't like banning anything, but given the choice between the two it's pretty obvious to anybody who isn't trying to make people ashamed of their own freaking bodies.
The churches effectively counter these influences.
In the interest of promoting their own power. And they're quite selective about which immoral influences they are most concerned about. Of course there's nothing immoral about claiming god is broke and needs your cash, now is there?
You must be talking about hollywood churches and TV evangelists.
Nope I was speaking about The Catholic Church. I was under the impression that "The Church" generally referred to this one.
The major churches are strictly non-profit organizations.
Bwahahahahah LOL ROFLMAO
Dude, you're killing me.
Do you have any clue whatsoever how freaking rich the Catholic Church is? Richer than most countries. They make a very healthy profit.
Where did it come from? Some from tithing, but a lot and I mean *a lot* of it came from plundering temples and churches of other religions, the crusades, murder, torture, and enslavemant.
What you meant to say was that they have non-profit status which means they don't get taxed, so they can pick and choose which segments of society they want to contribute back to. Now, smaller local churches are a different story and I'm not talking about them. I'm sure there are good and bad ones and I'm not qualified to discuss any of them in particular.
These things blemish the church of the past, but they are not "the history of the church".
These things are what got them where they are and they were SOP for the majority of the Church's history. There are good things scattered among them, but really, look it up. Do some research. You will be surprised.
. I should point out that all governments and human institutions have these marks on their record. But considering how old, large, and resilient the church is, it is amazing how little can be said against it in comparison to other organizations.
All organizations etc., that I know of have black marks, but none of them have continued to propogate their evil ways for as long as the church.
There isn't anything other thing in the history of the world that I've ever heard of that is even in the same ballpark as the Catholic church.
Forgive me, but you must have a serious case of doublethink if you can even make a statement like that.
My perspective is different. That evil which does exist exists because people ignore God, not because of God.
If he created everything, where did the evil come from then?
The oppressors themselves design systems to keep oppressors in power.
No, I was speaking of the system where by if you're "good" in this life you are rewarded if you are "bad" you will be punished. If you are "good" you will turn your cheek to what the bad people want to do to you.
This was designed by god.
The fact that this is also the perfect system if you happen to be an evil bastard was what I was pointing out. Of course after they're dead they'll get theirs. Somehow that just doesn't give me a warm feeling.
Well, I do appreciate the time you've spent on this discussion and I understand if you don't have yet more time to spend on it, but at least say bye before you finish up if you don't mind.
Take care
My belief is that after our first mistake of eatting of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Man that sentence uses "of" a lot) we can never go back to the blissful ignorant innocence of our childhood as a species.
What I don't really understand (well, I can see some of the argument but not the logic) is how the action that allowed for the rise of sentience and a knowledge of good and evil (the beginning of morality) can be considered a "mistake" or "original sin". Who thinks that being an ignorantly blissful child is a superior mode of existence?
+&x
I'm very much not sure about this, but I believe the Pope suggested that it might be a possibility. I do remember that Italian headlines exaggerated things a bit as they said, "Pope says we come from monkeys!" Gotta love 'em.
Plain, ordinary degeneration falls under that definition. What you're saying is that if a colony of rats take up residence on a toxic waste dump, and they start to be born with defective or missing limbs, patchy hair, blindness etc, this is evolution; this is progress.
And before we start writing off the example against, say, the fossil record... you'd need to explain how `changes' like Trilobite -> Crinoid represent progress, since Trilobites generally precede Crinoids (generally precede most things) in the fossil record. Trilobites are extremely complicated and well-developed animals, yet they appear right near the start of `progress'. You coud argue that Trilobites degenerated, but you would still have to show how they arose in the first place, and why other species did not degenerate.
Um, no?
Ballroom dancing is not a prerequisite of quantum mechanics, nor vice versa. Actually, we might be close to the key to your abberration: ballroom dancing is not natural. Ballroom dancing is highly stylised and artificial. If you can regard it as natural, it seems certain that you will have mistaken other artifacts as natural too.
Mr Montag, are you having a lend of me? Where has biology observed evolution? Can you name any situation in which genuine developmental improvement has been witnessed, let alone witnessed to be a result of evolutionary processes?
Wrong, and I quote:
No, it isn't. It's based almost entirely on surmise, and what evidence is available for its support is invariably better explained by a competing perspective. Not only that, but you started off with `things change' as an axiom, and it's a pretty useless axiom unless it carries the riders `by themselves' plus `and become increasingly complex'. IRL, they degrade and degenerate. That is an observation, not an inference.
Er, what? Because they compete, one of them must be factual? Come off the grass!
Snake worshipper theology competes with Sun worshipper theology, therefore at least one of these cults must be right? Wanna buy a bridge?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
They certainly do. Every mutation has a price. If a mutation is to survive, it must propagate. Propagation implies competing with nearly identical organisms that don't have the mutation. What that boils down to is that for every mutated survivor, a non-mutated creature must die - unless you postulate unlimited resources, which we don't have and have never had. What motivation does nature have to pay this price? Is not the tendency of mechanistic nature toward survival? And if so, why? If nature is truly impartial, an organism has no more motivation to live than to die.
On top of this, the vast majority of mutations are highly destructive, so they kill off the organism (in some situations, the entire species), and there is no principle to counteract this destruction in mechanistic science.
Finally, unlike in frauds like Mr Dawkins' weasel, selectivity is very weak, and the natural tendency observed in biology is for novelties to become de-selected again rather than to propagate.
Selectivity, as you are so careful to point out, has no real idea of what to select for. Naturalism's watchmaker isn't just blind, he's deaf and has no sense of touch, and no brains. Good luck keeping the time.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing