Why is biological evolution impossible?

Question

Please confine answers to the subject of biological evolution and do not address origin of life or cosmology.

Answer 1

I see that the intellectual inheritors of Moronicus (least-respected of the ancient Greek philosophers) are out in-force tonight.

It's NOT impossible... but there are a few important things to know...

* DNA DOES NOT evolve... it experiences mutations.

* Organisms DO NOT evolve. Organisms are essentially the 'proxies' for altered DNA, playing out the 'game' of survival/procreation in 'meat space'. DNA whose proxy organisms manage to procreate get to move on to the next round... kind of like Jeopardy.

* It is the genetic makeup of POPULATIONS of organisms (the 'gene pool') that 'evolves' (changes, over time).

In science, 'theories' occupy a higher level of importance than mere 'facts'... theories EXPLAIN facts. The Theory of Evolution provides an explanatory framework for the OBSERVED FACT that the genetic makeup of populations of organisms changes over time (evolves). The theory identifies two (2) mechanisms which account for such changes:

** Genetic drift... statistical variations in allele frequency within a local population, over time.

** Natural selection... the non-random replication of randomly varying replicators.

There may be OTHER mechanisms in play which have not yet been identified and accounted for, and various scientists continue to quibble about that... but NONE of what I have described above is in dispute within the scientific community. Claims to the contrary by creationists are nothing more than a red herring, designed to bamboozle their scientifically-ignorant constituency... which is VERY easy to do. That's what happens when your 'trusted' sources are professional liars whose livlihood depends on keeping their 'flock' (sheeple) steeped in gullibility, self-delusion, ignorance and irrationality.

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Answer 2

I like to think that anything imaginable is possible. Probable is another point and is subjective. Proven fact is yet another and requires a high standard of scientific evidence which can be observed and duplicated. We really cannot argue that evolution is impossible. We can argue whether it is probable, since our perspectives and interpretations are incomplete and varied. We also cannot argue logically that evolution is proven and thus factual. The two extremes of this debate are logically and scientifically vacuous. The place we should approach for discussion is not "impossible vs. factual" , but rather probable or improbable. Until we have proof one way or another, this is where the debate should lie. I personally do not think we will have Proof one way or another, but who knows.

Answer 3

This will be good, I'm going to get a beer.

I find even more laughable the christians who do accept evolution. If god used evolution to get to us he is grossly incompetent or he has been staring in to a mirror forever admiring himself and satan really did all this. Inteligent design to me was a better "argument than" god used evolution, which only came up after ID was completely debunked.

Answer 4

i thought that biological evolution was pretty much a proven fact? you know with all the genus research put into it, the fruitfly experiments and fossil catalogization...

at the very least microevolution is certainly a proven fact, the HIV virus proves this already, or bacteria growing resistant to antibiotics.

Answer 5

"the scientific evidence points to a young earth, and debunks the old earth idea."

ROTFLMAO!

OK. Post some. We'd be happy to dismantle it for you. Of course, that's already been done, decades ago in many cases.

ADDENDUM

"How do you define "absurd?" "

Your "answer".

Answer 6

Let's first determine whether biological evolution impossible. If you can supply any information in support of that notion, that would be very helpful. Verifiable information would be most appreciated.

Answer 7

Starring this one...
This should be a good show...
I agree with a previous poster... time for a beer! Maybe some pretzels.

Answer 8

Evolution just isn't happening. What would you expect to get from biological evolution, what could you start with? How would you get it started???? You don't have nothing here.

Answer 9

Evolution within a species can be proved. The idea that all of the complex coded information that exists in a single living cell could arise by the formula of time + chance + natural selection culling out mistakes falls into the realm of statistical impossibility.

At the moment of conception, a fertilized human egg is about the size of a pinhead. Yet it contains information equivalent to about six billion "chemical letters." This is enough information to fill 1000 books, 500 pages thick with print so small you would need a microscope to read it!

When events are characterized by a high degree of certainty, we call them "scientific laws," such as gravity, etc. Most events, however, are characterized by some level of uncertainty, and the exploration of their likelihoods occupy the attention of statisticians, businessmen, and professional investigators dealing with the circumstances in the "real world."

When we encounter events that are extremely improbable - that is, highly unlikely to have occurred by unaided chance alone - we attribute them to deliberate design. If we walked into the kitchen and found a scattering of alphabet soup letters on the floor that spelled out a meaningful sentence, we would recognize that it was the deliberate handiwork of someone doing the spelling. Cryptography is also an example of exploring discoveries which are highly improbable to be attributed to chance as the rival conjecture.

The discovery that our DNA codes are three-out-of-four, error-correcting codes, which are stored, retrieved, copied, and processed to instruct machines to fabricate the complex proteins that make up living organisms, has rendered any attribution to unaided chance as absurd in the extreme.

"Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, each is in effect a veritable microminiaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up of 100,000,000,000 atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world."

The "simple cell" turns out to be a miniaturized city of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design, including automated assembly plants and processing units featuring robot machines (protein molecules with as many as 3,000 atoms each in three-dimensional configurations) manufacturing hundreds of thousands of specific types of products. The system design exploits artificial languages and decoding systems, memory banks for information storage, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of components, error correction techniques and proofreading devices for quality control.

All by chance? All without a Designer? (How do you define "absurd?")

Answer 10

It's not impossible. It's quite possible, as it actually happened.