Evolution?

Question

im a 16 year old asian kid. this is my prevalent objection to evolution. It is that it is simply too unlikely for life, in all its complexity and apparent "design", to have arisen "by chance". It is argued that the odds of life having arisen without a deliberate intelligence guiding it are so astronomically low that it is unreasonable to not infer an intelligent designer from the natural world, and specifically from the diversity of life. The idea that it is simply too implausible for life to have evolved on Earth is often encapsulated with a quotation that the "probability of life originating on earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane sweeping through a scrap-yard would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747."

LOL its funny people saying that since im 16 I wont be able to "understand"

LOL RU4REAL thats Microevolution. Retard.

Answer 1

I will have to report you to NSA... how do you come by the secret knowledge of how the US manufactures it's highest tech aircraft?!

Answer 2

The odds of life arising AS IT IS, are low. The odds of life arising is probably very high. Sentience is a little less predictable. It might well have been dinosaurs, but it didn't happen (probably).

There are numerous lies in the 747 analogy. The 747 actually did evolve. Do you think that the first prototype was made with the first design of each part? Second, it assumes a singular result. Why does the plane have to be a 747? The fact that life developed as it did does not mean it was the only potential life that could have evolved. Lastly, the analogy takes a singular event to demand a complex product. The transition from chemical reactions to life took hundreds of millions of years in the entire volume of the oceans. The tornado in a junkyard analogy shrinks the process to a few minutes and a square kilometer.

Answer 3

Okay...I'm a little surprised, actually. Being raised without a religion, I thought evolution made the most sense to me.

First of all, here is the assumption of intelligent design:

A being capable of creating everything with unlimited power had no creator and has always existed. This being created everything as it is, and evolution does not exist. So, every adaptation is really a new creation. Religion goes further by saying that this creator, which forged billions, possibly even trillions of creatures, has a special interest in man, and favors them enough to demand worship from them and judge them to go to either heaven or hell.

Evolution:

Tiny microorganisms slowly began to adapt to their ever changing environment. Over millions of years, they began to develop into more complex organisms. As things evolve, we can see clear dead ends in evolution, and we can see evolutionary steps that really put the species back a few years. However, things that work seem to stay that way, and only adapt when necessary.

I find that to make more sense...as it explains why certain species evolve in ways that do not benefit them and often lead to extinction. An intelligent designer would not literally create creatures with knowledge that his 'updated design' would end up killing the poor creatures off. This intelligent designer would be morbid and cruel, creating creatures that he knew would not survive. Or, if he didn't know, he was literally so dumb that he couldn't figure out what worked and what didn't work. For example, let's look at the dodo: it was a small, flightless, stupid bird that walked right up to humans. In addition to this, it was very slow and weak, and it tasted delicious. Would an intelligent creator create such a creature with full intention of it being wiped out since it had nothing to protect itself with?

Answer 4

Yes, if ONE hurricane swept through a junk yard you are correct. But you, and all the others in your corner, are ignoring the numbers. If you had hurricanes and junk yards in the numbers of interactions that took place in the billions of years the life process took then yes, you would get a 747 built. The trillions and trillions of interactions is beyond the abilities of the human mind to even consider. It is the same thing with the peanut butter explaination of evolution.

Answer 5

You're welcome to your opinion, but remember that Evolution is scientific fact. It's been proven. The existence of God or of a higher being may indeed be fact, but it currently stands unproven. Therefore, you will never win an argument against evolution.

The best thing about opinions about religious matters is when people keep them to themselves.

I happen to believe in God, but I don’t believe in the Adam and Eve story, and I 100% believe in Evolution, Natural Selection, and the whole Darwinian thing. I also believe that life can be created “by accident”, and evolve. That doesn’t mean that there’s no God, just that God didn’t cry “let there be life” and make it. The God that I believe in is both more and less complex than that.

If you wish to scoff at evolution, be prepared for ridicule. My advise would be to believe in what you wish, allow others to do the same, and talk about sports, the weather, and what happened on your favorite TV show yesterday.

Answer 6

Yeah, and once it was believed that the Earth was the center of the universe and was flat. It just seemed to improbable that the universe would not revolve around the Earth. There is a lot out there that we don't yet know and just because we don't know and can't explain it, that doesn't mean some supreme being just snapped his fingers and here we are. That is a weak and easy way to describe a very complex process. Plus, you are 16 and have spent the majority of your life being brainwashed by the world's major religions. It took me a long time to realize that what they are selling is bogus.

Answer 7

Isn't science great? Let me know if this is not detailed enough for you.

Claim CF002.1:

Order does not spontaneously form from disorder. A tornado passing through a junkyard would never assemble a 747.
Source:

Hoyle, Fred, 1983. The Intelligent Universe. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, pp. 18-19.
Response:

This claim is irrelevant to the theory of evolution itself, since evolution does not occur via assembly from individual parts, but rather via selective gradual modifications to existing structures. Order can and does result from such evolutionary processes.

Hoyle applied his analogy to abiogenesis, where it is more applicable. However, the general principle behind it is wrong. Order arises spontaneously from disorder all the time. The tornado itself is an example of order arising spontaneously. Something as complicated as people would not arise spontaneously from raw chemicals, but there is no reason to believe that something as simple as a self-replicating molecule could not form thus. From there, evolution can produce more and more complexity.

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Claim CB010.2:

The most primitive cells are too complex to have come together by chance. (See also Probability of abiogenesis.)
Source:

Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. 1985. Life--How Did It Get Here? Brooklyn, NY, pg. 44.
Morris, Henry M. 1985. Scientific Creationism. Green Forest, AR: Master Books, pp. 59-69.
Response:

Biochemistry is not chance. It inevitably produces complex products. Amino acids and other complex molecules are even known to form in space.

Nobody knows what the most primitive cells looked like. All the cells around today are the product of billions of years of evolution. The earliest self-replicator was likely very much simpler than anything alive today; self-replicating molecules need not be all that complex (Lee et al. 1996), and protein-building systems can also be simple (Ball 2001; Tamura and Schimmel 2001).

This claim is an example of the argument from incredulity. Nobody denies that the origin of life is an extremely difficult problem. That it has not been solved, though, does not mean it is impossible. In fact, there has been much work in this area, leading to several possible origins for life on earth:

Panspermia, which says life came from someplace other than earth. This theory, however, still does not answer how the first life arose.
Proteinoid microspheres (Fox 1960, 1984; Fox and Dose 1977; Fox et al. 1995; Pappelis and Fox 1995): This theory gives a plausible account of how some replicating structures, which might well be called alive, could have arisen. Its main difficulty is explaining how modern cells arose from the microspheres.
Clay crystals (Cairn-Smith 1985): This says that the first replicators were crystals in clay. Though they do not have a metabolism or respond to the environment, these crystals carry information and reproduce. Again, there is no known mechanism for moving from clay to DNA.
Emerging hypercycles: This proposes a gradual origin of the first life, roughly in the following stages: (1) a primordial soup of simple organic compounds. This seems to be almost inevitable; (2) nucleoproteins, somewhat like modern tRNA (de Duve 1995a) or peptide nucleic acid (Nelson et al. 2000), and semicatalytic; (3) hypercycles, or pockets of primitive biochemical pathways that include some approximate self-replication; (4) cellular hypercycles, in which more complex hypercycles are enclosed in a primitive membrane; (5) first simple cell. Complexity theory suggests that the self-organization is not improbable. This view of abiogenesis is the current front-runner.
The iron-sulfur world (Russell and Hall 1997; Wächtershäuser 2000): It has been found that all the steps for the conversion of carbon monoxide into peptides can occur at high temperature and pressure, catalyzed by iron and nickel sulfides. Such conditions exist around submarine hydrothermal vents. Iron sulfide precipitates could have served as precursors of cell walls as well as catalysts (Martin and Russell 2003). A peptide cycle, from peptides to amino acids and back, is a prerequisite to metabolism, and such a cycle could have arisen in the iron-sulfur world (Huber et al. 2003).
Polymerization on sheltered organophilic surfaces (Smith et al. 1999): The first self-replicating molecules may have formed within tiny indentations of silica-rich surfaces so that the surrounding rock was its first cell wall.
Something that no one has thought of yet.
Links:

Robinson, Richard. 2005. Jump-starting a cellular world: Investigating the origin of life, from soup to networks. PLoS Biology 3(11): e396. http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0030396

Answer 8

You understand neither probability nor evolution.

There is no suggestion that evolution is random. It is exceedingly selective, but the selection process is natural. Put simply, the fit live to reproduce, the unfit die. And death happens because genes do not confer sufficient advantage.

And to take you airplane analogy, when this natural selection process is applied to aircraft wings in a computer model, it beats intelligent human designers after just 6 generation.

There have been billions of generations of living things.

Which means the probability that evolution through natural selection will lead to the things you see around you is - satistically - precisely 100%.

Answer 9

According to your own argument, you don't have any objections to evolution. You object to the idea of abiogenesis.

If it is unlikely that life could arise without a "deliberate intelligence," how much more unlikely is it that said "intelligence" would just exist... with no explanation for its existence and no evidence of it in our world? The appeal to incredulity is faulty, hon; saying "I can't believe it could happen the other way, so it must have been magic!" just doesn't work.

Answer 10

A good science education is soooooo important...!!!
Evolution is something you can see with your own eyes during the course of your own life...
You started out a baby, evolved into a toddler, and then into a teen, and hopefully one day, will evolve into an educated adult...
Evolution states that life DID NOT arise by "chance..."
It states that the origins of life are still a mystery to us when we go back far enough, but when we study RNA, DNA, Mitochondria, and the whole messy process of reproduction (the random mixing of life's genetic information...i.e. your Mom and Dad met by "random chance," unless their marriage was arranged from infancy, which is extremely rare now days) we discover that life has, indeed, evolved through "natural selection," whose primary rule of thumb is...
Traits that arise through random mixing of genes that are beneficial in helping a lifeform survive and reproduce, are passed on to future generations, who continue to mix their beneficial traits to add further to the ever-evolving game of...
Evolution...that which has the ability to
"change" with an ever-changing environment...
Wins the day...(survival, baby...it's still all about survival...)
(And "evolving" is nature's one and only way to ensure life survives into the future...)
There might have been a time going way way back when that wasn't the case...
But all the evidence points to the fact that life is an "evolving process," and always has been...
To NOT believe in Evolution, is to ignore and deny the stark raving facts swirling around right in front of your own eyes...

Wake up, kid...

Wake up...

Answer 11

That Boeing 747 thing has been blown apart time and time again.

The main difference is - jets don't reproduce. Life forms do. They have a chance to build on their successes with each generation.

If you have a million-sided die, the chance of you rolling a "27" the first time are fantastically small. But if you have a few million years to roll that die (and each time you roll, you get to weed out the failures) the chances don't just improve dramatically. You're sure to land on that number quite a few times. Evolution is like that.

It's easy to "misunderstand" evoultion and then say "I don't believe that!" It's more difficult to really understand what it's about.