h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This is beginning to get a bit out of hand...

It is true that the universe is amazingly complex. Anything else would have been strange... If the universe was a simple thing, containing, say one Earth, one Sun, a few humans, one nation and a (perfectly spherical) firmament whith small pinprick of light, I might agree that it all was created. That would have made sense; one world for one human race. It's not like that though... the universe is complex.

Science is trying to explain the universe through testing, hypothesizing and observing. What we have discovered so far, is that basically everything can be put into formulas to predict it's behaviour. Problem is that we don't know all the formulas. Evolution is a formula whith a host of variables (food, sources of food, natural enemies, climatic variations) where the most important thing (I think) is spontaneous genetic variation, mutations. It's the explanation that seems to fit the observations best. It does not fit perfectly: we lack some data to set Evolution in stone as absolute truth, but then scientific philosophy states (through logic) that absolute truth cannot be found through todays scientific methods.

Intermeditary stages? Basically every living specimen is at an intermeditary stage, as long as it procreates. There is a fish in the Amazon jungle that uses it's fins to crawl from pond to pond during the dry season, and it's tail to jump from the ground to eat bugs hanging round on low branches. I'd say in a few thousand/million years (granted the jungle still lives) that fish has legs.

Lately evolutionist have begun talking about jumps in evolution: Sudden and drastical changes in a species genetical make-up. I don't know if that is an ad-hoc hypothesis or if it's grounded in serious research, but I kid of assume the latter. Most scientists are more interested in finding the truth than defending a flawed hypotheis.

Please, point at the chasms. Maybe we can fill them, or even question the authoreties on the subject to get answers...

What can't be compared:

Creationism is a part of religion, which is based on feelings leading to beliefs.

Evolution is a theory gained through science, which is a prooven method to collect knowledge about nature in a well defined manner. (You doubt that? Your computer works, doesn't it?)


About probabilities:

Let's take the number of big bangs. Infinite. Multiply that with the number of planets. Plenty. Multiply that with the number of possible situations in a big ocean. Many. Multilpy that with millions of years. What do you get? Infinity. Or a little bit more. Whats infinity compared to the propability level you need to have your first primitive cell!

And:

What is the propability of a god creating itself out of nothing, to do the creation thing afterwards? Yes, even a god must somehow have come into existence.


About evolution at work:

Dogs. I personally don't like them. But they are here, created by evolution (man doing the selection part), descending from wolfes.

It's wonderfull how math can do that; prove everything I mean.. And dogs? They should be fed to the cats, the lot of them..

And the cats to the lions, so they won't eat giraffes any more.

What? nonono.... that would be cannibalism... The lions can have the wolfs.. That way both giraffes and sheep go unscathed.. 'Cause sheep are nice animals too.

But we're digressing... Evolution vs. Creationism should be the topic...

Dogs Rule !

I might look that up in a second....

http://www.h2g2.com/A136351
Cats Vs Dogs...

Never trust cats. They just attack without provocation.

I can see I'm not going to get my work done today...

"I am not saying that you just stick feathers to things! They evolve from hair folicals that become feathers."

Easy to say, totally unproven. I'd love to read the article that explains exactly how this hair became a feather. Feathers are aerodynamically amazing. One of the reasons why no one can explain how a hair could become a feather is that the intermediate stages would be useless, so how would it evolve as an advantage? More on that later...

"These are not people who believe what they are told."

People believe what they want to believe. I believe in God. Some people don't. If you don't, you *have* to believe in evolution -- even if the evidence doesn't fit, your whole motivation will be to make it fit. And that is often what scientists do.

"What we have discovered so far, is that basically everything can be put into formulas to predict it's behaviour."

Precisely the opposite is true. One of the astounding contributions to mathematics in the last century was by Kurt Godel, who proved that there are things, both true and false, that cannot be proved. It's a little humbling, but perhaps not surprising!

"Lately evolutionist have begun talking about jumps in evolution: Sudden and drastical changes in a species genetical make-up. I don't know if that is an ad-hoc hypothesis or if it's grounded in serious research, but I kid of assume the latter. Most scientists are more interested in finding the truth than defending a flawed hypotheis."

I said I'd come back to the point about intermediary stages. Because of the astonishing lack of fossil evidence for what should be countless forms making an evolution continuity, and because some biological mechanisms cannot develop gradually, some evolutionists now propose extremely dramatic evolutionary jumps, i.e. one day a bird emerges from a lizard's egg. This is a serious proposal by evolutionists.

"Please, point at the chasms."

Other than those already mentioned, how about ape to human. We've all seen the pics showing ape, man and stages inbetween. But where's the evidence? And a word of warning if you go looking, make sure you cross check -- one person's missing link is another person's pig's tooth (a story you may well come across).

"What is the propability of a god creating itself out of nothing, to do the creation thing afterwards? Yes, even a god must somehow have come into existence."

Ah, I feel you're on the right track! I have no problem with this -- God is the Creator, not the Creation; He has neither beginning nor end. He was not created. He has always and will always exist.

If you have a problem with that, you're gonna love explaining where the universe came from. This will tie you in knots, especially if you're particularly intelligent. Prof Stephen Hawking has famously tried to propose a model for the universe that explains how you can have a big bang. If you can understand his theories, you'll be doing very well.

I'd also like to say that it's nice that the tone of this thread, like most of h2g2, is cordial and friendly.

You are beginning to win me over but...

A couple of things are still not clear. What is the creation story?


Did God produce your Pentium 3 or did it evolve through several improvements generation by generation? Perhaps each time something better / faster & more reliable was discovered it was kept in the design. How on earth did those clever fellows at Palo Alto come up with the CD Writer because it is amazingly complicated? (even the CD on a simple $100 HiFi is incredibly sophisticated). I have a feeling that one day they just created a CD Writer and the next day your computer could burn CD's with microscopic precision.

If you look in a rubbish bin and find that there are three newspapers dated 10th ,11th 16th does that mean that dates 12-15 were never printed. I would guess that they were printed but perhaps they didn't get chucked into the same waste paper bin.

I have seen Lucy the first human skeleton (with my own eyes) and it predates any book references for Creation by about 3.5 Million Years. I am not saying that your god(s) do not exist, but perhaps the stories of creation were simplified for the benefit of 500 BC Human literature.

Einstiens theories were wrong but that doesn't change the fact that we used them as a principal formula to create nuclear bombs that are very real.

I'm not sure Einstein's theories were wrong, just fudged. He looked at his data, which suggested that the universe was expanding and thought it was too bizarre an idea to publish, so he fudged the mathematics. Most of his theories have been borne out by observation.

You're beginning to win me over? I hope that was a joke. The fact is that none of the creationist arguments in this (very long) thread have really advanced the case for the creation theory. Most people just rely on blind faith. God is perfect, he has no beginning to end. So what was their before God?
God did not create man in his own image, it was the other way around.
On the question of hair to feather: it make a lot more sense if you go from scale to feather and then on to hair. Scales (if you squint a bit) look a little like feathers, and lie in a similar way. Feathers, in turn, have a single strand stem (which could become a folicle) down the centre. This would be quite consistant with dinosaur to bird evolution.
The real problem creationists have with evolution is not that it disproves the Adam and Eve theory (it soo obviously does and only the most blinkered won't see it), but more fundamentally it take humans away from being the centre of the universe, something which is implicitly promised in the phrase 'and God created man'. The length of time that massive evolutionary change would take, so called deep time, also screws up the history according to the bible.

Okay, let´s get one thing straight. Creationism isn´t a scientific theory as it doesn´t live up to the definition of a scientific theory. It is a religious theory. So you can believe if in your church if you want, just keep it in there.

Now, if you don´t believe in Creationism there are plenty of other things to believe in. Both scientific and religious theories. But none of them comes close to Evolution in explaining so much. Of course there are some things it can´t explain, but that doesn´t mean it never will. About the bird coming out of a lizard egg, if they have seen signs that it has happened then they must believe it. Even though it seems crazy. But I think it is just a mix-up of the new idea that evolution happened pretty much in leaps. That instead of a lot of minor mutations there were a few big ones. Caused by natural disasters.

About the eye, I´ll come back to that later.

No, no, no. When I said Muhammed said God is everything, I meant monotheism taken to the nth degree. As in there is nothing that is NOT God. Although admittedly, I am much more well versed in Christian theology.
But on another track. About the whole issue of homosexuals and religion. I would not presume to know how that can be reconciled. I personally abhor the notion of hating anyone because of who they love. HOWEVER, again, that whole persecuted minority (Judaism, for a while, Chrisitanity until Constantine) thing does come up. The whole point was to create enough of them to stop being persecuted. In the case of the Christians, they did a bang-up job. Is it right?! NO. Is the persecution of ANYONE somehow Biblically ordained? Absolutely not. What seems to be missing here is that the folks who wrote all of those restrictive things were HUMAN, i.e., they had their own hangups. Paul, the misogynist xenophobe that he was, is a classic example. He is speaking to a group of Christians, a serious minority, not to mention only one of many different mystery cults floating around the area. Someone down the line added a time and place specific letter to canon. Thus, we are stuck with someone who didn't even KNOW Christ telling us what he said. I again refer you to the red concordance bible.
Frankly, folks, I think evolution happened. I also think that if God is omnipotent, who knows how long a day could have been? An eternity, really, if God wanted it to be. I don't label myself as one religion or another, but I don't reject out of hand the idea that creation happened. Perhaps it is still happening, and we just call it life. Okay, 'nuff said.

"Ah, I feel you're on the right track! I have no problem with this -- God is the Creator, not the Creation; He has neither beginning nor end. He was not created. He has always and will always exist.

If you have a problem with that, you're gonna love explaining where the universe came from. This will tie you in knots, especially if you're particularly intelligent. Prof Stephen Hawking has famously tried to propose a model for the universe that explains how you can have a big bang. If you can understand his theories, you'll be doing very well.
"

Yes, I am on the right track. I once was a big Jesus fan, and live according to his humanist principles. People are always astonished that I'm an Atheist, they say: You are the one who lives the good parts of the Bible.

But back to evolution. You mix two things: Lifeless matter (universe without life) and life.

Right now we are at a very crucial point.


Science has it this way:

0. ?
1. Universe (without any life on Earth)
2. Life on Earth (by itself through chance and Evolution)


You have it the other way round.

0. ?
1. ???
2. Life (your god lives, does he?)
3. Universe (you know, parting darkness from light and so on ...)
4. Life (animales and mankind ...)


"He has always and will always exist."

Simple, sounds good. Nothing to argue with. Wy do we have so many people involved in science when it's that simple: god did eveything, lives forever and, huh, my words are fading is shier wonder.

BUT, this is the topic: How did life start?

Science has an explanation: The Evolution Theory.

Religion has nothing.

It has to be said that I don't believe in God.

Why should I. Either he/she is very cruel or very lazy. I do, as most, athiests follow a moral code of ethics.

I agree with Xanatic's great genetic leaps forward. He/she sounds like he/she has been reading "Science of Discworld" because there are many interesting thoughts related to simliar topics. In which case you can consider my generalisations as "Lies to Children". Now that I think about it the "Scales to Feathers" is clearly the way hair evolved and any creationists may ignore my earlier reference.

(Einstien was as good as right, but missed the delta on E=mc2 as I am sure you all know.)

No wait... Didn't Einstein deliberatly leave the delta out it, because it made for such extremely improbable things like correlated light-particles? A theory his colleague Niels Bohr ventured and which is now being strengthened by experiments in USA and Germany...

"Did God produce your Pentium 3 or did it evolve through several improvements generation by generation? Perhaps each time something better / faster & more reliable was discovered it was kept in the design."

Promising! Was the Pentium created, or did it evolve by itself without the aid of a creator? Of course, human beings created it. And there was no Pentium 2.5! All those items you mentioned were made by people, none of them evolved by themselves. Now, if we leave your Pentium 3 and come back aftyer however many millions of years to find it has become something better by itself, I'll be impressed.

"I have seen Lucy the first human skeleton (with my own eyes) and it predates any book references for Creation by about 3.5 Million Years."

Human skeleton? Lucy, or AL288-1, is classified as 'Australopithecus afarensis'. 'Australopithecus' means 'Southern ape'. 47 of her bones were found (out of 207). She belongs to an extinct species of ape, similar to some apes today. Her cranial capacity was slightly smaller than a modern chimpanzee.

So why did people think that she might be a human ancestor? Partly because of a now discredited reconstruction of her face from only the mandible and five skull fragments (indeed, her whole body was 'artistically' put together); and partly because some evolutionists tried to claim she walked upright like humans, not like apes. But extensive research by anatomists has concluded that she and all the other Australopithecines are quadripedal. In other words, they have no links with humans.

"The fact is that none of the creationist arguments in this (very long) thread have really advanced the case for the creation theory. Most people just rely on blind faith."

I take issue that this is a very long thread!

I would say that 'blind faith' is a driving force behind belief in evolution. Very great, strong faith. Based on a romantic but erroneous idea that it is well grounded in science. I refer you now to the writings of the evolutionist Solly Zuckerman. Apart from his renowned studies of fossils, an interesting contribution he made is his 'spectrum of science'. this ranged from what he considered scientific to unscientific. According to him, the most 'scientific' fields -- i.e. depending on concrete data -- are chemistry and physics. Then come the biological sciences. At the other end, we get telepathy and, finally, human evolution, which he explains thus:

"We then move right off the register of objective truth into those fields of presumed biological science, like extrasensory perception or the interpretation of man's fossil history, where to the faithful anything is possible -- and the ardent believer is sometimes able to believe several contradictory things at the same time."

As for advancing the Creation theory, we can thank evolutionists for providing the support there. The paleontologist wrote regarding 'transitional forms':

"There is no need to apologise any longer for the poverty of the fossil record. In some ways, it has become almost unmanageably rich and discovery is outpacing integration... The fossil record nevertheless continues to be composed mainly of gaps."

The evolutionist paleontologist Mark Czarnecki comments:

"A major problem in proving the theory has been the fossil record; the imprints of vanished species preserved in the Earth's geological formations. This record has never revealed traces of Darwin's hypothetical intermediate variants -- instead species appear and disappear abruptly, and this anomoly has fueled the creationist argument that each species was created by God."

Mr Evolution himself, the zoologist Richard Dawkins, was forced to admit:

"For example the Cambrian strata of rocks, vintage about 600 million years, are the oldest ones in which we find most of the invertebrate groups. And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists."

Boy, this is tiring! I hope I'm not sending you all to sleep -- sometimes it's difficult to be brief!

As to where the universe came from, I really enjoy the cocept of the total energy content of the universe being zero...

the ultimate free lunch.

as to how the eye came along...as a resonspe to the question how much use is half an eye Richard Dawkins says its more use than 49% of an eye and less use than 51%. He goes on to discuss the intermediate steps in eye evolution in which each one creates a better eye which increases the survival chances of its owner fractionally. the book is "River out of Eden " I think...though far too lazy to check now..

I think some interesting points have
been rasied but I think it is wroung
to diferencate religious hypotosis
and scientific ones.
By that I dont mean the vale jugements
that religion tells use to make science
cant make these.
What I do mean is that The creation theory
is a scientfic theory and thus should be
treated as one.
And there are a huge amount of gaping holes in it
far more then evolution.

"Why do we have so many people involved in science
when it's that simple: god did eveything,..."

There's nothing wrong with science; trying to understand, trying to make, trying to heal. The history of Islam is rich with science. (I think a problem here is that the old religion vs. science stuff is, in reality, religion vs. Christianity.)

Indeed, in Islam although it is clear that God created man, rather than man evolving from an ape, there is nothing I know explicitly against the evolution of animals.

No, the argument against evolution is in science itself. And if evolution is disproved (at the very least it is unproven, and in many aspects already disproved), then we are left with creation.

Richard Dawkins is prone to advancing theories that have no supporting evidence whatsoever. I think he should spend some time with an optometrist! The trilobites that appeared suddenly in the Cambrian period have an extremely complex eye structure, consisting of millions of honeycomb-shaped particles and a double lens system. It is the same eye structure we see in bees and dragonflies today. (I refer the interested reader to 'Eye and Brain: The Physiology of Seeing' by R. L. Gregory, Oxford University Press, 1995.)

I feel that someone has decided to spend his day browsing the search engines for the word creationist. Try "Evolution" it returns far more sites and the quality is generally better.

People (scientists) think that Lucy is one of the links in a long chain of possible species and more importantly it proves that there is the possibility that the other links are buried in the ground. If however you expect a whole skeleton to stay in the same place for 3.5 million years then I suggest that you read the sites you browse more carefully. More over the link to Chimpanzees or other similar apes is not expected to be found lying around in the ground. What is far more likely is that several similar branches of the same successful group of apes will turn up. Some may be dead-end species others will branch into the Gibbon, Gorilla or Homo sapiens.

Scientists think that evolution is currently the best answer, and are spending time thinking of untraditional ideas to see if they can come up with a better suggestion every scientist will consider the creation concept and the vast majority will decide that is it probably wrong.

I still have not managed read a description of Creationism on this thread. All we have proved is that Evolution is a theory that will evolve as better evidence is provided. Creationism on the other hand is an idea that will slowly deteriorate as evidence is provided.