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

"You might think a single celled animal is as complex as us but I think everbody else knows differently."


GN, you might wish to try: http://www.newleafpress.net/details/0892214228.htm
which is a Christian site siting various reasons for believing in god. Quote:

" The ability of DNA to store information is incredible. The amount of
information in DNA needed to design every organism that ever existed
could be held in less than a teaspoon, and there would still be enough
room to hold the information contained in every book ever written.18
Even a single amoeba's DNA has enough information storage capacity to
contain the information stored in a thousand sets of encyclopedias."

'You are offensive in the extreme, Good News!'

Calm down dear, its only a discussion.

Seriously though, there is no need for that. I think you over-reacted just a tad.

oh Deakie, that is too good. Yeah why not? If you're going to be levitating sheets of ice (or any form of ice) with a magnetic field, why not throw in animals to boot?

Hey- anybody else got anything else they need levitated to make a theory work? I'm going to claim that Olympic high jumpers are imbued by God such that the magnetic field of the earth makes them lighter.

anhaga

I have just re-read what you wrote and I actually am very offended. No matter what my opinions are, there is no excuse for that kind of language or vitriolic nastiness. I must admit, I sense a light degree of hypocrisy that people such as yourself condemn me as hate-filled.

'Calm down dear, its only a discussion.'

Yes, and you're only an ass. An extremely offensive ass. Thanks for calling me 'dear'. Maybe could stop spending your time ignoring legitimate questions and being an insulting ass and have some good old humility.

'I think you over-reacted just a tad.'

I think I was far more calm and civil than you deserve. But then, you're always right and everyone else is always wrong.

GN - have you ever moved a piece of ice with a magnet?

Ohh, I noticed that web site made the 'eye' mistake creationists seem so happy to repeat, even though it has been demonstrated to be in correct

"For a simple organism to develop a mutation which
could create an eye is unthinkable. It is difficult to comprehend how
thousands of random mutations could coincide to make such a miracle
possible, yet thousands and thousands of such miraculous mutations are
needed to make evolution possible."

I used to have a computer program, can't remember what it's called now, and it was great. It takes a basic light sensory function, such as that found in plants and many 'inferior' life forms and adds/takes away basic features/functionalities/mutations on a random basis and checks to see whether the sensor is now more efficient or less efficient and if it's better it keeps the mutated version and if it's worse it loses it and goes back to the last version. What you tend to end up with is effectively a type of eye

<>

No, but you have created room for more information.

The real question, I suspect, is about *useful* information. You can change the information in your "biology book" bit by bit, at random,and you can make copies. And you can discard the least useful, and make extra copies of the most useful (natural selection). Eventually you could end up with a book on mammalian anatomy and one on beetles. The books don't have to be perfect, just to be better than other books.

Noggin

<<'Calm down dear, its only a discussion.'>>

I think GN thinks you're a woman, anhaga, just like Sam thought I was a man . . . haven't we been here before?


az

anhaga

I think I will just leave this discussion now. I have not said anything remotely offensive and you should look back at what I said. However, I don't enjoy being insulted and slandered in my free time so I am just going to go.

Thank you very much everybody else. A very interresting discussion. Goodbye.

or to put it another way, if you had a book the size, in characters (letters, numerals, punctuation marks and spaces) of the works of shakespear and started with it as the letter a repeated and then started to randomly change letters untill bits started to match there euivalent bits in shakesspear then you would eventually end up whith his complete works. That's not the best analogy as it doesn't leave room for expansion, but it is still a very good 'lies to children', and if you don't know what that is I can explain, way of demonstrating how evolution by the process of natural selection works.

< In this country, Israel is made out to be a monster which has siezed Palestinian land. But history paints a very different story.>

I guess you're in England? I wonder how many people know that British troops led Arabs to fight against Isrealis [not all were Jews nor are they all Jews now] during the war of 1948. That when the British weenies ran away they left weapons and supplies to the Arabs. This after pushing for the mandate so the Jews being massacred all over Europe could have somewhere to live in peace, and then trying to limit and then prevent immigration to appease the Arabs.



You can disagree all you like but that will not alter the facts: prior to the Balfour declaration the whole area was under Ottoman rule for several hundred years, during which time immigration was not hampered nor limited. After the declaration immigration was limited by the British, insipidly, while pogroms [massive exterminations] continued all over Europe.



I have a suggestion for you: if you're bored then you should try a self induced cranial suppository, but please do this elsewhere.

< Oral-send-me-8-million-dollars-or-God-will-strike-me-down Roberts University...... I'm-gonna-hold-God-for-ransom University>

Too funny, but true.



Someone in the OT allegedly lived for 900 years [smirk], I can't recall who; but providing that the plumbing still functions a man can create lots of ankle biters in that time.

<That is called the canopy theory. It stated that there was water above the atmosphere in the form of ice held up the earth's magnetic field...:

Ok, time to trash a theory: humans are mostly water and IF there was a magnetic field that could affect water and IF it was powerful enough to hold water in the upper atmosphere THEN any humans living at that time they'd also be up in the air.

I actually dealt with expansion by saying that sections of the book could be duplicated (ie abgh could become abghabgh), but I probably wasn't very clear. It's also important to remember that one is not "aiming" for a particulr book, but rather that the most readable books are the ones that get duplicated.

I'm not any sort of expert on the technicalities, but "lies for children" are often a good way of overcoming conceptual blockages.

Noggin

This is the most entertaining thread i've read in ages

Isn't it just?

It's certainly controversial.

FYI some of you might want to google Michael Behe, he claims he is a biologist, a Christian, and that he believes in both Creation and evolution. That should raise some neck hairs on this thread. He's also written many articles and at least one book on what he feels are facts that point to "an intelligent designer", though he does NOT claim that God is this designer. The one book I am familiar with was written in the late 80's and it's caused a lot of chatter. It was called 'Darwin's black box' if I recall and he goes into great detail about the 'irreducible complexities' of some organisms and organs and how they could not have arrived through evolution. Fascinating. Judge for yourself; there are loads of articles available online that contain bits of the book as people who are purportedly experts try and bash his statements and he bashes right back. What I found most interesting was how plainly infantile the nay-sayers and bashers tended to be.

Interesting that 'evolutionists' have been grouped into one category in this thread when there are many 'flavors' of evolution out there.

To insinuate that an amoeba is even remotely as complex as any multi-celled organism - much less any mammal - is incredulous, and to quote one poster, "When you make a statement like the above, you are simply holding your ignorance up like a banner." The fact that some single celled organisms have more or less dna than humans is meaningless: they're all still single celled organisms. More dna does not translate into more complex, for with all the extra dna in the most extreme example there is nothing for [this would be a list of every organ and system in the body but that would take up a tad too much space]. Think quality, not quantity. And isn't it odd in all the
years the amoeba's been floating around that it never developed any further? No light sensitive spots much less eyes, no brain, no mouth, ears, nose, legs...not even a second cell to keep it company.

One poster pointed out that there has been no additions to dna as one flavor of evolution demands. This is fact. Not in any organism yet studied. There have been cases where there has been less dna found in what are presumed, but not proven, later generations of similar or related species. This is not proof of evolution. I'm not sure it can be proven, or disproven, though Behe takes an excellent swipe at doing the latter.

One poster recalled having some software that would play around with mutations, then it, "...checks to see whether the sensor is now more efficient or less efficient and if it's better it keeps the mutated version and if it's worse it loses it and goes back to the last version. What you tend to end up with is effectively a type of eye."

This is not how evolution operates. In order for a mutation to remain it must serve a useful purpose, perform some necessary function. If an amoeba -for the purposes of explanation here- suddenly developed a working eye it would be useless: there's no brain to interpret the information the eye captures. It could not 'know' that moving towards the light was dangerous for it could not comprehend danger.

I also find it odd that one would send someone to an obviously biased web site such as "asnwersingenesis.org" for true, unbiased scientific explanations.


Hey, bored one, how's that cranial suppository feeling?

Dr Jeffreyo wrote:

"And isn't it odd in all the
years the amoeba's been floating around that it never developed any further?"

That ignorance / banner thingy, Doc.

Your evidence for that extraordinary claim that amoebae have stopped evolving is....

Incidentally, they don't float, and there's many a species, not just the one.

The wean.

From http://www.etsu.edu/philos/faculty/niall/complexi.htm

quote; 'While there is much that we do not know about the biochemistry of living systems, it would appear to be premature to claim that there is a principled objection to the claim that the biochemical level of the biological hierarchy is itself a product of evolutionary processes. Behe claims that biochemical systems and processes manifest a species of complexity -- irreducible complexity -- that could not have evolved and must have been intelligently designed. We have shown, first, that systems satisfying Behe's characterization of irreducible biochemical complexity can arise naturally and spontaneously as the result of self-organizing chemical processes. Second, we have argued further that evolved biochemical and molecular systems exhibit redundant complexity -- this kind of complexity simultaneously accounts for the stability of evolved biochemical systems and processes in the face of even quite radical perturbations, for biochemical and metabolic plasticity, and, mainly as a result of gene duplication, for extant structures and processes to get co-opted in the course of evolutionary time, to serve novel functional ends.'

<>

Whether one claims this or not one is already postulating an entity that is able to do the designing, and this raises questions about where such a designer comes from. And, really, one has to postulate an entity that comes into being by means outside the laws of nature (ie a supernatural entity), because to postulate a designer that comes into being in accord with the laws of physics is to agree that evolution is possible within those laws - a self defeating argument.

Amoebas (and more simply, bacteria) are still around because they're successful, and evolution is not about producing more complexity (though it does that too), but about being successful.

What is actually meant by an "irreducible complexity"?

Noggin

'What is actually meant by an "irreducible complexity"?'

"irreducible complexity" is any naturally occuring phenomenon for which an individual's intellect is too small to conceive of a natural explanation. The unfortunate individual's intellect is unable to "reduce" the "complexity" of the phenomenon into the "less complex" ancestral phenomenon. The classic example is the eye, for which a clear evolutionary development from zip to what we got, usefully functional all the way, has been demonstrated by science, yet many sad individuals cite the eye as an example of a structure for which there is no conceivable developmental chain: the eye, they say, is irreducibly complex. They do not realize that the irreducibility derives from the limitations of their intellect rather than any specialness of the eye.

It's really rather sad.