Evolution vs Creationism

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To rip off Voltaire, If Santa Claus did not exist, we would need to invent him. Saint Nick is a perfect alias for anonymous acts of generousity that enable the fiscal year's sales figures to go out on a high note...

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I know I used to, but then again, when I came up with my best stuff back then, I was usually too stoned to post on message boards. But seriously, the impression you leave with your comments about weed leads to the impression that you toked more than just a few times a year...

 

Not exactly. While there are Atheists welcome among our numbers, most in our ranks are agnostics, and we welcome the members of all the world's religion into our community with open arms. The flying Spaghetti Monster isn't picky about who he touches with his noodly appendage, so neither are we.

 

Aldeth, they are definitely rare, and most cases these days, as Nakia said, are actually cases where neglectful parents locked children up from birth until discovered (little to no socialization occured), but there have been a few well-documented cases of children discovered in the wild at ages of 5 or 6, and evidencing no human socialization at all. I think the first one was in the 1700's in France, though my memory is iffy on this. It is, of course, uncertain as to when they were left in the woods, but the total lack of language and such would seem to indicate it was a very young age.

 

I'm resurrecting an old thread because there are enough of these threads on this board and I liked the title.

I am firmly in the "Evolution" category of this debate. However, while surfing I came across a post that fascinated me. I'm curious as to what people who are far more passionate about the subject than I am feel about it. Have at it.

 

Sounds like the Michael Behe argument about 'information' and entropy, except this time he calls it energy. I think he has problems with the idea that humans (high level) supposedly came forth from low-level single-cell bacteria. But that still has nothing to do with evolution itself, only to the context to which it is applied. Evolution is a real thing, that evolution can be observed everywhere around us doesn't automatically mean that some higher being didn't create us though.

A cool example of applied evolution in Computer Science are Genetic Algorithms. These are sometimes used in Machine Learning to come up with a 'good-enough' solutions and can show evolutionary traits like specialization and niche-filling.

 

TGS: I don't know who that moron was but he certainly doesn't understand the second law of thermodynamics.

 

That guy is pretty much... wrong.
My coffee gets cooler, so evolution does not work.


By the way, i totally agree, Morgoth!

 

I'm an accountant not a scientist. His reasoning seems perfectly plausible. Where is the flaw in the argument and hopefully it can be explained so I don't need to go back to school to understand the answer

 

It is difficult for me to specifically point out his error, because what he is saying is meaningless. He combines two concepts that are completely unrelated. One deals with subatomical physics and the other with the development of constructs in a specific context (which is what evolution can be defined as when it has been abstracted away from its biological context).
His argument will remain meaningless until he specifically makes clear how he interprets the laws of thermodynamics in the context of evolution.

I doubt he will come back though, since his comment seems to have been removed from the site.

 

If we are to interperet his version of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics literally, there would be no such thing as hot coffee. Afterall, hot coffee is a higher energy state than room temperature coffee. The reason the coffee got hot is that there was an external source of energy. Heck, life could not exist unless cells were capable of obtaining an external source of energy (from food). Neither evolution nor life itself breaks the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, simply because by breaking down food molecules (or in the case of plants converting solar energy into food), is an energy source, which is converted into lower energy when used.

 

The flaw is not fusing particle physics with the development of structures. The Second Law applies equally to both. The problem is that the second law, in all it's manifestations that I've seen (and there's at least one for every discipline), is concerned with 'closed systems'. That means, when nothing can get out. If something can get out of your system, then you need to expand it (to whatever stuff is getting out into) for it to be closed. For the record, the only truely closed system we know to exist in the entire universe is... the entire universe.

Life works with the Second Law of Thermodynamics because life doesn't decrease entropy, it just exports entropy to it's surroundings (in the form of heat and material waste and, ultimately, just heat). This allows a local decrease in entropy in an open system, while still increasing entropy in the closed system (the universe).

 

The other problem is that he assumes evolution always aims for a higher form. It really only just aims for the form that is best adapted to the current environment. If that environment changes such that intelligence and wisdom were a liability instead of an advantage, then in time they would be bread out.

 

Now that makes sense to me as a counter argument. Thanks for the explanation.

 

Wow, can't believe this thread is still going. Thought people would have hacked each other to death by now!

 

Nobody else post, this way the first and last post will be by Silvery.

Damn, I screwed it up.

 

You suck dude!

 

@NOG

Not really. The existence of Genetic Algorithms and Evolutionary Algorithms show that evolution is a computational process and is thus not bound by physical laws, but by the laws of logic.

 

errr... sure it is bound to laws of physics.. what is not?????