Atheists do you think we are at the last step of evolution?

Question

One problem with thinking things get better is the Law of Entropy- "A tendency towards disorder within a closed system" Adding energy won't solve this problem unless it is being controlled. If evolution is true then this experiment should work take a frog and blend it up in a blender so all the amino acids are present to make a frog. Add any type of energy and see if you can make it come to life. It will not work but that is what Evolution is based on.

Answer 1

1) Evolution is continuing at all times. It is just a very slow process for humanity.

2) Life on Earth is not a closed system, so entropy doesn't apply.

Answer 2

No, I don't think so. I think that we'd be a very poor result, if we were. I think that we have the potential to weaken our own evolution by protecting some of nature's bad ideas, but I think that the force is stronger than you, or I, or our machinations, and that we will grow beyond what we are today into a more interdependent and intelligent species.

edit:
As for your comments. The Earth is not a closed entropic system. The earth is an open entropic system with the sun as a major source of energy. Evolution has nothing to say on the matter of necromancy, or giving life to the dead. Much less giving life to non-life, that field is called abiogenesis, and it has made some remarkable strides. We've proven that we can create micro-organisms out of the necessary raw chemicals. We can get life from unlife. So what more do you need? It's obvious that things become more complex over time with mutation, the spreading of genes, and the infection of genes by viruses, and higher-frequency radiations propensity for creating added mutation.
It all makes wonderful sense. But you would prefer to believe that a cosmic zombie, son of himself, created the world in seven days, came back, got nailed to a tree, and made the world all better.

Answer 3

There is no final step in evolution. Animals are always changing. They are adapting to fit their surroundings. That represents a perfect tendency towards disorder in a system. Besides, you are forgetting that the world is not a closed system. No ecosystem is a closed system. They are open systems that have energy and matter entering and leaving the system all the time.

Your experiment is very flawed and disturbing. First, you will need a living, breathing colony of frogs to see evolution in action. You will also need a lot of time. You put a stress on the ecosystem that the frogs are living in that affects the frogs and they will adapt to it given enough time.

Answer 4

Ahhhh, very clever, but not so complete.

Yes, you have the basic unit of evolution, but not the whole process.

Take that frog, blend it well, add jsut a dash of energy, and then repeat 999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 times, or until you get the desired result. If you crunch the probabilities mathematically, you will see that the very laws of entropy that you cite point to an eventual living frog. It just take s a ridiculously long time and an absurd amount of tries.

And evolution is an ongoing process, so there is no "last step". Just the "current best".

Answer 5

Your questions reveal that you don't have a clue about evolution. As you keep asking them, you are obviously not learning anything. I would recommend that you stop exposing your ignorance as far as biology is concerned (you might be brilliant at something else, but not natural science) and take a class instead.

There is no real last step in evolution. Evolution will only stop if nothing changes any more, that means if all life is dead. A blender is no environment in which it is practical or of advantage to evolve into a frog. Even after trillion of years. Your educational system failed you badly.

Answer 6

I have a few quick points about this question, some completely relevant, some just closely related.

The Catholic church, and some others have accepted the idea of evolution, along with believing in their biblical version of God. Of course since what the Bible says is in complete contradiction with what evolution states, then the two can not exist together the way they currently are. Therefore, a completely new image of God would have to take this place. Now, based on the idea of evolution and natural selection, and all of the implications with it, what kind of 'persona' would the "new god" have? Wellll.. the process takes a lot of time.. so god must not be very powerful if he chooses to just let things work themselves into what he wants to make. Since species are at constant war with one another to survive, then that means that death would also be promoted, instead of condemned. It is because of plague, harsh conditions, etc. that species adapt and survive, so cruelty would be god's tool. In summation it seems that this sort of god would be wasteful, careless, apathetic, weak, and selfish.

Now, if we were the end result of evolution, like what Catholics hint at by accepting the theory, then that would mean a thing or two.. it would mean that all creatures that died before us, only lived for the purpose to create us. They were expendable, as long as we were produced. Again, not a god I would want to worship.

Here's another harsh idea with this though. If we weren't the end result of evolution, that means we would be the expendable species that god wouldn't care about, and our purpose would be to create a super species. That's all. Our suffering, pain, sorrows wouldn't matter to god, he only wants the super species that we produce. I am not making up some nonsense to discredit evolution, this is just the logical conclusion made when you combine the idea of evolution with a god who guided it.

Now, some argue that humans have slowed down in evolution, that it is an ongoing process and we are not the end result. That's fine, but an interesting book I read, called PREY, brings up an interesting concept/point. (the book is about nano-bots, it contains some science aspects, I'm guessing it is relatively accurate at least, no clue who the author is its been a while now). It raises the idea that evolution/development speeds up as it goes along. If you look at the idea of evolution it actually supports this statement. Billions of years ago, nothing existed but unicellular creatures. They slowly became more advanced. But this took a very long time. Then we get some simple, multicellular structures. This took some time as well, but not quite as long. We have diversified, gotten into details, and now we are relatively complex creatures. But as the process started it took forever to get anywhere, some time to get a bit further, and less and less time to keep advancing into the next 'better' species. This is also paralleled with the achievements of man (if you believe in evolution, then you think our ancestors were simple and savage, so it is true). We took forever to make fire, and the wheel. It took some more time to work with metal. Then we got into specialized labor, then skilled laborers. We have kept advancing, getting more and better technology. Nowadays new inventions keep coming out all the time, we keep making better objects, etc. Why? Because, like evolution, we have more materials/inventions to work and tinker with, so we can make new & more advanced versions of what we already have faster and easier. So if our invention process is skyrocketing like it is, then why haven't we been evolving at the same pace? In fact, why hasn't evolution sped past what we are doing now, we've only been at it for a while, evolution has the upper hand on it. It doesn't make much sense to me.

Plus, if all it takes to create life is the ingredients that make up life (all the DNA), some energy, and some time, why can't we take the make-up of some creature (a frog), take its components and break them down into a 'goo,' then build it back up into a living creature? Surely we have enough time and energy to do this? Or better yet, why can't we organize a bunch of unicellular creatures (sure we got plenty of those) into a simple, multicellular creature? Wouldn't those be great experiments to prove evolution is true?

Answer 7

1) This is not a closed system
2) The energy does not need to be controlled, just available for use.
3) The means of energy use in the biosphere is photosynthesis. You can actually pull off your frog experiment with plants. Many plants can be cloned from a single cell.
4) The thermodynamic arguments are just gibberish. If there were no means of using the energy, life could not exist. If you don't eat, you die. That's thermodynamics. Evolution is a consequence of reproduction. That's life.

Answer 8

You are one of those people who like to make up things rather than study .
This is not what evolution is based on . Yo can not put all the ingredients for a meatloaf in a blender and expect to pour out a meat loaf . There much more to it than that ! Some people can't understand too much more . They need help .

Answer 9

This is an enticing question, and one regarding which I read an intruiging article in a journal several months ago, which posited an interesting hypothesis. It said that in about 100,000 years, humans would divide into a super-species and a sub-species. The latter arising from humanity's increased dependence on techonology, and the former from the result of natural selection. It would be interesting to see what happens in the presence of both of the previously mentioned factors, to which have not coexisted before this period in time.

Furthermore, I am not quite sure why you limit the question to Atheists, and also I do not know what you are talking about in your example. Evolution is not based on the premise that you can shine light on a dead animal and it will come to life. It seems to me that your are fairly unfamiliar with the idea of evolution.

Answer 10

Not quite exactly, as we do have a constant source of energy in the form of the sun.

As for the small amount of amino acids in a frog, the time necessary and the conditions, who knows as these things have not yet been completely determined. I would certainly think that the "goo" that proto-life came from was probably quite massive, consider a lake size to sea size amount.

By the way, it has recently been found that space dust forms RNA like structures in certain regions of space, and in the right conditions protiens will form muscle tissue - observe this result when you eat deli meats...

Edit:
Oh yeah, no we are not anymore final than any other species. The only reason that we think we're special is that we can think that. We may not have been the first species to be able to think this way, as Neanderthal probably could.

Answer 11

Obviously you know nothing about thermodynamics. As one who has taken graduate level physics courses and worked at NASA on the Einstein observatory project. I can tell you that what you are saying is completely clueless.

It is very simple physics, for every useful high energy photon we receive from the sun, we radiate about 20 relatively useless low energy photons. This maintains the earth's average temperature, providing a net gain of about 19 units of order. Basically if the creationist argument were correct you could never clean your house and it would continue to get more cluttered, but we increase the order in our house by throwing out useless garbage, and that is essentially what the sun allows the earth to do allowing the surplus of relatively useless low energy photons to be released into space.

Evolution itself is essentially a learning algorithm which transfers information from the environment into the biological system. Each selection event birth or death has the potential of adding a single bit of information into the biological system which is essentially learning how to survive.