the evolution thing again

Masteroftheweb · Post by **Masteroftheweb** » Wed Jun 21, 2006 10:40 pm

My comments about religion had nothing to do with you.

The thing is... amino assics are organic, blocks aren't... that's something you seem to fail to acknowledge ever time you say it's impossable.

Your comparisons are never good ones, bombs hitting scrapyards and making cars, legos being tossed around to make a building. These are all innane.

kaos · Post by **kaos** » Thu Jun 22, 2006 12:56 am

i posted the legos directly becuase of joe comment about being lego smart

I probably should have posted somthine more like this instead

Super Goat Weed · Post by **Super Goat Weed** » Thu Jun 22, 2006 2:47 am

Bogey wrote:who said anything about shuffeling and things being random? These are extremely slow and gradual processes.

perhaps, but the fossil layer clearly shows an explosion of life, not a gradual apperance, and as you mentioned, it's NOT random, clearly showing some kind of design.

And will, i would be happy to use an organic example if one existed, but it dosn't. Hense my point.

Masteroftheweb · Post by **Masteroftheweb** » Thu Jun 22, 2006 6:35 am

Because you can't find another organis example doesn't mean you can simply ignore the organic properties. Life does what it has to, to survive. That's evolution.

I get this feelling, you think too litterally when you give your examples.

Xuenay · Post by **Xuenay** » Mon Jan 15, 2007 11:49 pm

Super Goat Weed wrote:my arguments have nothing to do with religion if that's where you're going with this, they have to do with scientific, logical fact. you can shake a box of legos all you want, the chances of getting a exact reproduction of the empire state building to scale are... well.. impossible. Evolution says that given enough time that it is possible,

If evolution really did say something of the sort, it'd be quite silly. Good thing that it doesn't - it's about a huge number of incremental changes, not one sudden huge change.

Since this seems so incredibly improbable to some people, let's play around with actual (albeit back-of-the-envelope) math for a moment, shall we? I'll use the evolution from single-celled prokaryotes (bacteria) to eukaryotes (mostly multi-celled) as an example, since it's the easiest to demonstrate in them.

According to Wikipedia, the first prokaryotes that we know of appeared approximately 3.5 billion years ago. Eukaryotes appeared approximately 1.7 and 2.2 billion years ago. Let's say they appeared 2.2 billion years ago, to give evolution less time to do its work - I'm hedging my estimates on the conservative side. That means that prokaryotes had (3.5 - 2.2 =) 1.3 billion years to evolve into eukaryotes.

Now, I have no idea of how many prokaryotes there might have been living in the primodial soup of 2.2 billion BC. Relying again on Wikipedia, I find out that there are roughly 1000 trillion (10^15) bacteria in the human body. Of course, the human body is probably considerably richer with nutrients than the average spot of 2.2 B BC, but bacteria can live in amazingly barren conditions. Let's take a number from our hat and suppose that the Earth back then could as many bacteria as could be found in a hundred thousand modern humans. This number feels ridiculously low to me, but hey. Let's be conservative.

So that gives us 100 000 * 10^15 = 10^20 bacteria at any given moment. How many generations will they undergo during that 1.3 billion years? WPedia: Bacteria growth and reproduction says that under optimal conditions, a colony of bacteria can double their number in about 10 minutes. This Ask a Scientist article says that it's difficult to estimate the lifespan of a bacteria, since they reproduce by splitting in two. However, it does provide us with this: "I guess your question regards a single cell, from division till it divides itself. Then their age can vary from a few hours to a few days. After that the cell either divides and has become two new individuals, or it degenerates and dies.". So let's say that it takes three days for that group of 10^20 bacteria to be superseded by the next generation of young, idealistic bacteria.

A year has 365 days. With a generational cycle of 3 days, there will be 365 / 3 = 121.67 generations per year. With 1.3 billion years, that becomes 158.167 billion generations. That's 10^20 * 158.167 * 10^9 = 1.58 * 10^31 bacteria during the whole time.

We haven't talked about mutations or evolution yet, so let's get to the point. This site says that "Bacteria, Archae, and Eukaryotic microbes produce about one mutation per 300 chromosome replications. For E. coli this works out to be between 10^-6 and 10^-7 mutations per gene per generation, however it is important to note that there are certain 'hot spots' or 'cold spots' for spontaneous mutations." Using the 10^-7 mutations per gene per generation figure, there will be roughly (1.58167 * 10^31) * (10^-7) = 1.58 * 10^24 mutations per gene during the 1.3 billion years.

I don't know how many per cent of mutations are, on average, beneficial. The vast majority of them are harmful. Pulling a number out of thin air, let's say one mutation in a billion is beneficial. That means that there will be an average of 10^-9 * (1.58 * 10^24) = 1.58 * 10^15 beneficial mutations during the 1.3 billion years. Per gene, not in total.

1.58 * 10^15. That's 1.58 quadrillion beneficial mutations per gene. That's five degrees of magnitude more than the the amount of galaxies in the observable universe, or six orders of magnitude more than the amount of seconds in the average human's lifespan. Heck, it's 63 billion times more than there are genes in the human DNA. For each gene in a bacteria's DNA, there were 63 billion times more beneficial mutations than humans have genes.

With these kinds of figures, life not evolving into more complex forms over time is a hell of a lot harder to believe than it evolving.

EDIT: And when you add to this the astronomical amount of planets in the universe, and think about what the odds of life *not* evolving to this stage on at least one of those worlds might be...

Post by **Chewi** » Tue Jan 16, 2007 2:27 am

I didn't think I'd understand that but I did.

I recently had a couple of old guys knock on my door to talk to me about Intelligent Design. I chatted with them for about 10 minutes. They seemed nice enough. Unfortunately I wasn't really prepared for a counter-argument so I had a fairly open-ended discussion with them. They returned a week later (they said they would) and gave me a book to read. When I get a moment, I will check some of it out just out of interest. Maybe I'll post some of it up.

Post by **Mik** » Fri Jan 19, 2007 2:29 pm

hold on, it's intelligent design that Aliens 'seeded' Earth stuff ?

Post by **Chewi** » Sat Jan 20, 2007 12:45 pm

No it's the "world is so complex and unique and just right for humans that it must have been designed by a higher power" thing.

kaos · Post by **kaos** » Sat Jan 20, 2007 7:45 pm

its just right for every other animal too tho.

Post by **Chewi** » Sat Jan 20, 2007 9:34 pm

That's probably just so we can eat them.

Bogey · Post by **Bogey** » Mon Jan 22, 2007 12:00 am

This explains where the idea of intelligent design came from.

Click here to view the YouTube video. Click here again to hide it.

Fucking magic.

Post by **Chewi** » Mon Jan 22, 2007 12:26 am

Hahaha. I saw that when it was on TV. Eddie Izzard is simply awesome.

Super Goat Weed · Post by **Super Goat Weed** » Mon Jan 22, 2007 1:44 am

Except the fossil layer shows an explosion of life, or at least several small bursts of it, not a gradual appearance.

Think about the dinosaurs for example, they all exist in periods, but when a period comes, suddenly there's a bunch of new dinosaurs. There's nothing gradual in that.

Also, if you want to know about Intelligent Design, you might find this interesting.

http://www.meta-library.net/perspevo/presmb-frame.html

Behe is the scientist who is the strongest advocate for it at the moment.

You gotta love how apparently you can go to college to learn about crystal healing, but ID and Creation are too much of a stretch to teach about in a science class

Post by **Mik** » Mon Jan 22, 2007 9:20 am

it's a bit like finding out who some is by there dental records, you can pretty much identify who there are adn that there not that guy but you have no idea how he got there or who his parents are.

It annoys me that people go to university just to learn about something anything aslong as I get a degree, I think it's a gigantic waste of time.

Post by **Chewi** » Mon Jan 22, 2007 10:07 am

Lastwolf wrote:It annoys me that people go to university just to learn about something anything aslong as I get a degree, I think it's a gigantic waste of time.

You wouldn't say that if you went. It's where I met people who actually listen to Guano Apes and there's a whole society of LARPers.