Chance is not a creative force.

Discussion in 'Science' started by bricklayer, Nov 12, 2019.

  1. bricklayer

    bricklayer Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Evolution is the theory that things become more complex by chance; in the case of life, via chance mutations.
     
  2. rahl

    rahl Banned

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    No it isn’t.
     
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  3. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    The primary problem you are having here is that you very clearly do NOT know the throey of evolution, even in broad and generalized strokes.

    If you want to poke holes in evolution, you're going to have to stop and figure out what it actually IS.

    Until then, what you say won't make sense.
     
  4. Meta777

    Meta777 Moderator Staff Member

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    Um, there's actually more to it than that. I'm sure others have mentioned it,
    but while evolution may indeed involve chance mutations, the key part of
    the theory is that "natural selection" (not chance) picks which of those
    chance mutations actually stick around over time, leading to the ones
    most conducive to extending/maintaining life (the good'uns) stacking up.
     
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  5. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    The "folly in their mindset"???

    Please clarify.

    And, YES. Science is a process of improving our understanding over time.

    Humans can't do better than that. We are not omniscient. We have to learn. Some of those you undoubtedly don't know the name of actually created scientific method, to organize how we move forward. We created universities in order to disseminate what we know - but, more importantly, how we know it and how to go about increasing human knowledge. The objective of our education system is to create life long learners.

    BTW, you can not count the people who have moved our understanding of this universe forward. There are millions. upon millions. And, the line goes back to those living many, many centuries ago. We use Arabic numerals. We use algebra and algorithms - named after ancient Persians. Mankind knew the size of Earth hundreds of years BC - though that was seen as offensive by various religions.
     
  6. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    Yes - you do NOT know the theory of evolution.

    I pointed that out a few times to you in earlier posts.

    And, many others have done so as well.

    Until you know the theory, you won't be able to argue against it.
     
  7. yguy

    yguy Well-Known Member

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    I don't. I think your evident belief that I can be educated by the repetition of a tautology like this implies you think I'm an idiot:

    But then has been my point from the beginning, science is not equipped to deal with questions outside the remit of science.
    So go buy yerself a medal, already.
    Staff would take that as a rule 2 violation, in case you're unaware.
    Swell, but that's beside the point, which is what scientists in general ought to reflect on, not you.
    lol
    Hell if I know what this has to do with anything I said.
    Which is why you are exactly as qualified to make that call as a first year algebra student is to say the Schroedinger Equation is overly complex.
    Color me unrepentant.
    As it's news to me that "science" uses the term at all, I have no idea what you're talking about.
    And you can be sure I will, the minute I encounter a reason to.
    No sense playing Hector to my Achilles, as this is how the y-man rolls.
    I did nothing of the sort, obviously.
    Congratulations on upping your intellectual game, if only for a fraction of a second, I guess.
     
    Last edited: Dec 6, 2019
  8. Monash

    Monash Well-Known Member

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    See post under 'Self Awareness' in the Religion Forum.

    And BTW 'Staff would take that as a rule 2 violation, in case you're unaware.' FFS if I really thought you were an idiot do you think the 'rules' would matter? I would say so regardless. The fact I haven't after all these posts should be enough to indicate I don't.
     
  9. bricklayer

    bricklayer Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I'm well aware of evolution. You claim complications to something that can be described quite simply. Evolution is the theory that chance mutations accumulate into ever increasing functional complexity. Natural selection (extinction by degrees) chooses from among the ever evolving panoply of choices and tends to favor the new choices who's new complexity out competes the others.
     
  10. bricklayer

    bricklayer Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Natural selection contributes nothing to what it has to select from. Natural selection selects after the fact.
     
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  11. bricklayer

    bricklayer Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    You're touching on something very important here. Our knowledge is contingent. We don't know anything necessarily.
    Indeed, we are, in every way possible, contingent in our being. In fact, all matter, and therefore space/time as well, is contingent in its being. Don't skip over your primary observation too quickly. The implications of material contingency are metaphysical, meta-spatial (spiritual) and meta-temporal (eternal). I am in complete agreement with your primary observation. Contingent being does exist! If contingent being exists, by definition, necessary being must exist.
    It is exactly the existence of contingent being that has left me to believe that necessary being exists.

    The difference between a liar and a fool is that the liar knows that they're lying whereas the fool believes it. "Everybody plays the fool sometimes. There's no exception to the rule.", as the old song goes; but the hard truth is that we're actually far more likely to make fools of ourselves than we are to have others fool us. You see, to be a liar, one needs to not only remember their lies, they must also remember that they're lying. At the moment that one forgets that they're lying, they cease being a liar and become a fool. This becomes a problem because of how very, very, very little we actually remember. Of all of the thoughts and emotions and sensations and sights and sounds and tastes of all of the moments of all of the days … You get my point? We remember very, very little, but we must remember our lies, or we'll make fools out of ourselves. The longer one remembers a lie, the more often one tells a lie, the more passionately one defends a lie, the more likely that one is to forget the truth and have the lie become their memory.

    The idea that all of this happened by chance is, in my opinion, the most ridiculous idea ever (no hyperbole implied).
     
  12. Meta777

    Meta777 Moderator Staff Member

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    It does mean that positive beneficial mutations are more likely to stack up.
    That's where the complexity comes from. When you only have one positive
    mutation, this isn't complexity. Complexity comes in when you have two or more.

    And if you're just combining everything randomly, you may get some complexity,
    but high levels of complexity will be rare. By getting rid of non-beneficial mutations via NS
    it becomes that more likely that multiple positive mutations end up combining together. Right?

    Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning works along a lot of the same principles actually,
    though obviously on a much smaller scale/shorter time-frame...

    -Meta
     
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  13. bricklayer

    bricklayer Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Where else does the complexity come from if not from those mutations?

    Natural selection selects after the fact. It contributes nothing to what it has to select from.

    Random (chance) mutations cannot accumulate into the complexity we observe.

    Natural selection selects from what there is not from what could be; that would be direction not selection.
    Natural selection is extinction by degrees. I can affirm extinctions by degrees, but I cannot honestly and logically affirm Darwinian-evolution.
     
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  14. bricklayer

    bricklayer Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    A mutation is not positive or beneficial, and the idea that enough mutations to be beneficial happen all at once is perhaps more absurd than the idea that they could somehow accumulate into the complexity we observe. This, all of this, did not happen by chance.
     
  15. yguy

    yguy Well-Known Member

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    As if either is separable from the other.
    To you? How the hell would I know? I just gave you the courtesy of an FYI. You're welcome.
    <shrug> Wouldn't make me no difference one way'r t'other.
     
    Last edited: Dec 8, 2019
  16. bricklayer

    bricklayer Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I affirm natural selection, but I do not affirm natural direction. Selection is not direction. Selection contributes nothing to what it selects from. The selection proposed in Darwinian evolution comes from chance mutations. The mutations affirmed in Darwinian evolution are not directed or guided by anything before they occur. Selection only occurs after the mutations have occurred. Darwinian evolution attributes to natural selection a knowledge aforethought.
     
    Last edited: Dec 8, 2019
  17. Diablo

    Diablo Well-Known Member

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    A mutation may be positive or beneficial, or it might not. Beneficial mutations don't happen all at once, but peridically. The non-beneficial ones do not persist because the host dies before it can breed and pass on the mutation so only the beneficial ones are carried forward. Over long periods the complexity accumulates, by the selection of beneficial mutations created by chance. I hope this explains it for you.
     
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  18. Meta777

    Meta777 Moderator Staff Member

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    -Chance mutation results in small individual benefits.
    -Different organisms can have different beneficial mutations.
    -Complexity comes about when multiple individual benefits combine.
    -Natural selection makes it more likely that different beneficial mutations will combine due to organism surviving to reproduction.

    After the fact of what?

    Why not?

    -Meta
     
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  19. Meta777

    Meta777 Moderator Staff Member

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    Ah, I see. You're whole point here is that Natural Selection chooses the best of a set of preexisting traits,
    but that it/random mutations cannot (or shouldn't be able to) create new traits... That about right?
    Or to put it another way... you feel that mutation can only lead to different combinations of
    preexisting core building blocks, and that NS subsequently chooses between those
    combinations, but that neither mutation nor NS can create new building blocks?
    Right?...

    Think about it this way though, the traits themselves are not the core building blocks here...
    traits are merely an expression of the combinations found within DNA,
    DNA itself is merely a particular combination of molecules (comps),
    those molecules formed by specific groupings of elements,
    which are composed of what we call atomic particles.
    https://www.rsc.org/Education/Teachers/Resources/cfb/basicchemistry.htm

    To rearrange or combine anything at any particular level takes a certain kind of force.
    Its different at each level. But there is no force (that we know of) that can create for instance,
    a new type of atomic particle. But just by recombining the existing atomic particles in different ways,
    we can get a whole periodic table's worth of different elements, and new combinations are discovered all the time
    (5 just since 2000). Now, you might argue that rearranging particles in this way doesn't really count as creating something new.
    That really depends on what your definition of new is... in the end though, whether one calls it new or not doesn't really matter;

    Bottom line is, atoms can combine in different ways to form elements, some of which have never been observed before.
    And likewise, those elements can be combined into an even larger set of molecules, and they into a variety of other things etc. etc.
    At the DNA level, which is where we'll want to stick around for matters of evolution, there are really only a small number of different types of molecules in the equation here... but the number of different ways they can be combined is immense. Note though that every single combination is built up of the same set of core building blocks. We have not yet seen every single potential combination, and we likely never will, but they are out there to be discovered...or to be randomly arrived at through chance mutation+NS. And if that happens, note once more that the core building blocks of that combination will be the same as every combination we have today.

    So, why am explaining all of this?... Before, you stated that,
    "Natural selection selects from what there is not from what could be"...
    What I'm saying is that you're basically right about the 'selection' portion of Natural Selection only choosing from what already exists... but there is a set spectrum of potential DNA combinations, and the way to arrive at previously unseen ones is through the processes of mutation and recombination. You seem to imply elsewhere that neither of these processes should be able to create something from nothing. My point here is that, at least on a core building block level, they aren't creating anything new, nor do they have to... Simply forming a unique combination of preexisting elements in a DNA sequence is enough to express a high-level trait that hasn't been seen before.

    -Meta
     
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  20. Meta777

    Meta777 Moderator Staff Member

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    It is if it helps you stay alive and or reproduce.
    Positive/beneficial to the ongoing survival of the host species that is...

    Who said they have to happen all at once?
    In fact, the idea of Natural Selection means that they don't have to happen all at once.
    They can accumulate and form those higher levels of complexity gradually over long periods of time.

    -Meta
     
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  21. bricklayer

    bricklayer Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    A sequence of beneficial mutations accumulating into an eye is absurd. Having each of the innumerable mutations be beneficial each step of the way is even more absurd. Having each of those mutations happen by chance is unthinkably ridiculous.
     
    Last edited: Dec 8, 2019
  22. bricklayer

    bricklayer Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    What you address at some length above is well summarized in the law of increasing entropy. Although matter integrates and disintegrates, it does not integrate in such a way as to increase functional complexity by chance. By chance, material entropy increases. By chance, everything goes from a less stable and more complex state to a more stable and less complex state. You can dump a pile of bricks every second for a trillion years and you will never get a true, straight, plumb column, let alone a double helix. And those are just bricks. I am quite certain that the complexity that I can observe did not happen by chance.
     
    Last edited: Dec 8, 2019
  23. Diablo

    Diablo Well-Known Member

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    We don't seem to be getting anywhere with this guy. Either he's not listening or deliberately misunderstanding....
     
  24. bricklayer

    bricklayer Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    That is even more ridiculous. To think that each little mutation in that sequence was of benefit is perhaps even more absurd than the idea they evolution somehow leaps ahead from time to time. And all by chance, give me a break.
     
  25. jay runner

    jay runner Banned

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    Okay, but the domestic dog, especially the pure breed with so many weaknesses in a lot of cases, is sheltered from survival of the fittest.

    But if it is said that the domestic dog is able to entice man to protect it, then maybe that is survival of the fittest.
     

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