What does the big bang have to do with evolution? They deal with two completely different things. As for living organisms surviving the Big Bang our best understanding is that there were no living organisms at the time of the big bang. The Big Bang is the theory that explains the creation of matter and energy in what we call the Universe. Living organisms are composed of matter and use energy so there couldn't be living organisms, as we know them, prior to the Big Bang. As for how life came about evolution doesn't explain that. There are several hypothesis out there on that but none have reached the level of a widely accepted scientific theory. THe problem that I see with you line of argument is that you are trying to attack evolution as an all encompassing theory. It isn't. It is about how there happens to be a diversity of species and nothing more. Evolution doesn't discount the God and I don't know why people try to frame it as such. It only discounts the existence of God only if your view of God is extremely literal and dogmatic. Evolution doesn't prove or disprove God. For someone arguing that evolution is all about faith to bring up the argument that people realized the World isn't flat is a funny argument considering that it was a faith community that for a long time enforced the belief that World was flat. Just to consider your analogy though consider how the idea that the world is flat was disproven. It was disproven through a scientific process what you are missing though is that same process is what has led to evolution. From your own vantage point sitting on the ground the World certainly seems flat just like from your own vantage point it might seem impossible to consider that species evolved. If you can expand your vantage point then it makes sense just like expanding your vantage point will show you that the World isn't flat. Nobody is asking you that you take evolution on faith. Study the science.
lets clear this up - the fungi became sponges, the sponges became sea worms, the sea worms became fish, the fish became sharks and the sharks became sharks and the sharks became sharks and the sharks became sharks... Just add 300 million years and it all makes sense. Never mind how one species gradually changes into a new more complex species just take my word for it new species developed by evolution. And adaptation has nothing to do with the formation of species, especially in the evolutionary tree. I thought we were smarter than a Fifth Grader! Just think about it. The more you think about how simple species could evolve into more complex species the smarter you are than a Fifth Grader. And evolution theories are all about just that. Simple species evolving into more complex species... complexity based upon physiology; significantly brain structure and intellect. BTW sharks are not smarter than a Fifth Grader.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/97/9/4463 Evolution of increasing complexity can be fairly easily modeled from random perturbations inherent in genetic transcription.
I do - they are dumb. They need to get smart. <object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/yN8uUZZWtSk"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/yN8uUZZWtSk" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>
How else did humans and other contemporary species naturally come to be on this planet after it formed? What is your scientific explanation?
I could go back and forth on this a long time, although it doesn't really involve evolution, unless you include our two kids, and the impact we all make on humanity, in one form or another. She was in a relationship when we met, and wasn't intending to break it off. I met him... a really nice guy about to graduate in architecture. She wasn't consciously "looking for someone." One could endlessly parse something like this and construct a "web of reasons." She happened to get together with a crew of girls who were going to college and they found this huge duplex in front of my house. I was just in one of two garage apartments behind it. Blind chance. If someone else had lived there, she very possibly could be with the guy she was with at the time. Or not. If someone else had moved in, I might be living with her, instead. Heck, I was having a bit of fun with a lovely Hawaiian chick going to Rice University at the time, that was living across the hall from me, in the other garage apartment. Think Kramer, but the opposite sex, great looking and with benefits. Impeach the Fool and His Puppeteer.
See, you are giving many reasons why it happened. There are countless. The countless reasons why something else didn't happen also made it happen. The inside contains the outside. A speck of dust contains the universe. It doesn't make it chance. Chance does not ULTIMATELY exist. It may look like chance on the surface, but it is only chance when you can not fully explain it or predict the phenomena. There are reasons why the Texas lotto numbers are what they are every day, if you knew them before hand you would be very rich. Ever hear of the chaos theory? In mathematics and physics, chaos theory describes the behavior of certain nonlinear dynamical systems that under specific conditions exhibit dynamics that are sensitive to initial conditions (popularly referred to as the butterfly effect). As a result of this sensitivity, the behavior of chaotic systems appears to be random, because of an exponential growth of errors in the initial conditions. This happens even though these systems are deterministic in the sense that their future dynamics are well defined by their initial conditions, and there are no random elements involved. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory Recent advances in physics and systems theory have far-reaching implications for individual and social karma. In science, the mechanical worldview of Newtonian determinism is being challenged by a holistic orientation exemplified by the systems theory. To quote Anna Freifeld Lemkow: "This is a karmic rebalancing in the realm of human thought." In the systems view, the universe is self-organizing, dynamic and intelligent. This approach has spawned sciences of complexity like the Chaos Theory, which shows that there is a hidden order even in chaotic processes. It illustrates the truth of the karmic dictum that the world is intelligent, orderly and creative. In the karmic context, current social problems stem from acting against the good of the whole. The chaos in the world has a hidden order. It points to the karmic truth that different dimensions of existence-spiritual, mental, moral, emotional and physical-are interconnected and interdependent. The challenge is to integrate them. As George Linton says, we should consider more closely the implications of aligning ourselves with various groups and their respective karma because we will have to assume accountability for the karma of the groups we belong to. http://www.purifymind.com/WorkingKarma.htm
Again, it doesn't always result in complexity. You're still thinking the mold from your bread can do algebra in 2 million years. Well, if there's plenty of bread-like food, then the mold is happy to be mold. What does foster great change is a higher competition in resources, an event that limits the population's number through segregation or elimination, or a drastic change (meteor) in the environment that triggers two conditions. These changes aren't predictable, though they can be similar, such as the skin of cactus plants and aloe vera, which individually evolved from different places of the earth. Or species can pose different solutions, such as the wings of a bat and a bird's. So brain size is just another optional upgrade, like GPS for your minivan. You don't need it. You might get it, but it's optional. Darwin's Origin of Species is still a critically relevant book. I'd recommend it just to compare his thoughts with the people in his time.
On the fundamental level of existence this is not true. Things only exist as probabilities and possibilities. See Schrödinger's cat.
Of course I've heard of chaos theory. I saw Jurassic Park! And saying that something unexpected happened because "it was karma" was widely used during the hippie era. I used it myself. (Lennon gets far too much credit because of that damn song) I simply don't buy into everything being explained that way, especially when it comes to human beings. Perhaps I've lived too long, but I've seen too many things happen that could only be explained by chance. You can call it karma, I might have in the '60's, but I still think blind chance governs much of what happens in human interaction. Not all, by any means. I'm not totally disagreeing with you, but I firmly believe we live, and sometimes die, because of blind chance. One can call it fate, or karma, or the summation of the interaction of countless events over time producing a certain, inevitable result, but to be coarse, sometimes... **** just happens. Impeach Doofus and His Dildo.
To complement such an approach, we have developed a tool to study evolution in a computational mediumthe Avida platform (6). The Avida system hosts populations of self-replicating computer programs in a complex and noisy environment, within a computer's memory. The evolution of these "digital organisms" is limited in speed only by the computers used, with generations (for populations of the order 103-104 programs) in a typical trial taking only a few seconds. Despite the apparent simplicity of the single-niche environment and the limited interactions between digital organisms, very rich dynamics can be observed in experiments with 3,600 organisms on a 60 × 60 grid with toroidal boundary conditions (see Methods). As this population is quite small, we can assume that an equilibrium population will be dominated by organisms of a single species, whose members all have similar functionality and equivalent fitness (except for organisms that lost the capability to self-replicate due to mutation). In this world, a new species can obtain a significant abundance only if it has a competitive advantage (increased Malthusian parameter) thanks to a beneficial mutation. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/97/9/4463 These are pretend organisms in a computer program, they are programmed to replicate organism evolution using digital organisms that can replicate and mutate. This is computer modeling of the theory of evolution. Hardly any actual organic evolution. I read the entire paper and they state in the paper that other than writing a program there is no scientific model for organic evolution much less complexity of species. They only say because the computer program is complex and they can write the program to replicate within the memory in increasing complex programming that it should be analagous to the same application to beneficial mutation in organisms. But whoever wrote that Avida Platform is definately complex and intelligent.
No I do not believe mold will ever evolve into anything but mold. A higher competition in resources leads to extinction not evolution that can be scientifically observed. Similar plants means nothing. Birds and bats are two different species without any transitional forms. Evolution is not observable, testable and it isn't logical.
The inexorable mathematics of the drunken walk towards increasing complexity is entirely the same. The mathematics is fundamentally is the point. The information theory that underlies the process is independent of the expression of the process. But more importantly, given that you will only accept real-time tracking of a process that takes millions of years as sufficient proof to make you consider the possibilities, I have no doubt that you will never have anything shake your ordered little cage. Demanding the impossible as the only sufficient evidence makes your worldview unassailable, at least as long as you are around to have is assailed. If that isn’t rigging the game I don’t know what is. Congratulations, I guess. Actually they don't say that at all, so you must have misunderstood or misread. This is a very false tautology along the lines of "If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, then it doesn't make a sound." And the paper I provided fundamentally shows the logic of it, even if it is counterintuitive to you.
Yes, there is extinction for the species that can't cut it and reproduce. That doesn't disqualify species that can adapt with favorable traits/characteristics and can pass it on to their children. Again, your perspective assumes there's an end result for everything. Bread mold is a "dead end" species in your book. Plants and other lesser forms, as you reply later, are also dead enders because they've already been created.... They mean enough to discount the Lazy God factor that was used in the old Creationism idea- Where God in this idea just made every living thing appear at once with disregard to history, geography, and climate changes. The plant example tells you that plants are more related genetically if they're on the same continent rather than plants with similar traits. The bat/bird example tells you that wings can be lost earlier in the genetic ladder, only to be rediscovered or reinvented in another form....thus furthering the notion that complexity can be arbitrarily determined. Also, you're going to need some scientific sources to back up your explanation of "transitional forms" because these assertions run against all commonly held thought on biology. Since I've debated with people who share your perspective, I'm assuming you mean speciation when referring to Evolution. Because there's tons of observable proof for evolution with logic as its backbone (genetics, fossil evidence, physiology, protein diversity, and geography). Evolutionary research is a multidisciplinary field that requires a good understanding of mathematics, biology, chemistry, ecology and other fields. Unfortunately, teaching it has been watered down when taught in schools to the point of story telling rather than fact finding and detective work.
You've claimed before that those who advocate evolution are dogmatic but this is the most dogmatic and unsubstantiated statement I've seen. Evolution is observable, testable and happening around you all the time. You can prove evolution yourself. Get a few thousand cockroaches and douse them with Raid. Most of them will die but a few will survive. Let them breed up to a few thousand douse those with Raid and the same thing will happen but more will survive. After a few generations you will have a whole population of cockroaches that are Raid resistant. Right there you've proven selective adaption leading down the road to new speciation.
Some very interesting and high level stuff from you and Meowgi. Some good ways to stretch your brain. From my own understanding, limited, if you take the Copenhagen view of Schrodinger's Cat the idea of determinism isn't wrong. While the dead cat and live cat exists as equal probabilities when you place the cat in the box when you open the box you can observe only one outcome that has taken place. From your viewpoint as the observer you have now as fact a dead cat and can trace a line of causality to causing the death of the cat. That wouldn't seem to rule out the many world's interpretation but as he observer you're not aware of the live cat. Determinism or positism seem to me to be relative depending on your viewpoint.
I don't mean to be condescending with this cartoonish child’s video, but it explains the strangeness of the issue via the double-slit experiment. In very practical ways it can be proven that things exist as actual wavefronts of simultaneous potential, and it isn't just a metaphor. All of the options genuinely exist at once in this universe until they resolve themselves. There is a also theory of consciousness that I don't understand very well that defines consciousness as a standing quantum wavefront, like a quantum soliton that collapses other wavefronts. This effectively relegates cognition to the rules of the quantum realm. And to be honest, at the moment I can't quite figure out how determinism or positivism would be applied to a muti-worlds interpritation where every possible option is played out. Is a multiverse deterministic or positivistic? <object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/DfPeprQ7oGc"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/DfPeprQ7oGc" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>
