General Discussion

Originally posted by Torak

You mean you don't anchor yourself to the ground at all times????

Very brave.

You totally missed my point.

 

He gets your point. He's just not very good at debating.

Originally posted by Enigma

Originally posted by Rajai

 

if you're still here I know a little something about evolution. I'm also a genius if you're wondering

 

Not to toot my own horn but I have a membership with MENSA (for the last 15 years), graduated high school when I was 16 and have two masters and a Ph.D (all before I was 24) as well as an IQ of 181. I guess I would be considered somewhat of a genius. Heh, and guess what? I think evolution is a farce and a man made religion in a post humanist world to find a way to worship themselves.

Conceided much?  I am not doubting your credentials but they are worth less than nothing. And they speak for nothing. This is the web. I could claim to be a nuclear physicist specializing in isotopes, with a long 30 year record of carbon dating and estimating levels of isotopes. And it would be just as empty a statement as yours. You can only gain credibility by providing evidence.

Originally posted by Enigma

Like I said before. I am a creationist and I believe evolution to be a religion in its own right and people who do not believe in evolution is NOT dumb or wicked as some evolutionists has said in the past.  Go to a mathematician conference and talk about evolution.  They will laugh you right out of the doors.

Enigma, I've read your posts for a long time and I know you're intelligent and well informed both about life and MMORPGs, but I have say this.  You say you are a creationist which I assume to mean you believe in the Judeo-Christian creation.

Could you please help me to understand why you accept that version of creation (assuming you do) and not another religion's creation story?  What is it about the creation of Hinduism that you do not accept?  What about various native religions around the world?  What makes the Judeo-Christian story of creation the "correct" one as it were?

I will disagree with you about one thing.  We have plenty of evidence concerning the similarities in fetuses across the animal species.  You're simply wrong to suggest that textbooks use some defunct drawing as their source of comparison.  I would ask, have you ever seen or handled a human fetus?  A pig fetus?  Any fetus at all?  I'm just curious. 

I will say that I accept evolution as the best explanation we have for now.  Much of modern biology and our understanding of it derives from what we know about evolution.  The problem many people seem to have is differentiating between evolution, which is a natural process like any other, and the source of life.  Evolution does not attempt, in any way, to explain the origin of life.  Life's origin is irrelevant to evolution. 

I know you have your beliefs and I understand that you're an intelligent person, but sometimes intelligent people believe really stupid things.  And creationism is, quite frankly, very stupid.  It starts with a conclusion and picks and chooses what science it will use to prove it's preconcieved conclusion.  That goes against everything science is about.  In true science the conclusion is never completely certain, there's always room for doubt and the posibility of being disproved when new evidence comes along (with the exception of mathematical laws).  Creationism does not allow for disproval which makes it flawed in every way.

Oh, and by the way, happy birthday Theory of Evolution.  I would have bought you a card if I had known sooner.

Originally posted by Enigma

Originally posted by Rajai

 

if you're still here I know a little something about evolution. I'm also a genius if you're wondering

 

Not to toot my own horn but I have a membership with MENSA (for the last 15 years), graduated high school when I was 16 and have two masters and a Ph.D (all before I was 24) as well as an IQ of 181. I guess I would be considered somewhat of a genius. Heh, and guess what? I think evolution is a farce and a man made religion in a post humanist world to find a way to worship themselves.

Evolution takes more faith to believe in than to believe in a creator. It is mathmatically impossible to believe that humans evolved from a 24 protein single cell organism to a complex human being....even if it took 8 billion years.

Like I said before. I am a creationist and I believe evolution to be a religion in its own right and people who do not believe in evolution is NOT dumb or wicked as some evolutionists has said in the past.  Go to a mathematician conference and talk about evolution.  They will laugh you right out of the doors.

wow, just wow. you start your argument with i know best 'cos i am better than you? wow.

[edit, oops, i see it was in response to anothers assertion of authority, hmm, common guys this sort of pissing contest is pointless]

"it is mathematically impossible to believe" a fine piece of rhetoric. maths has nothing to do with faith and belief. it is a working tool to describe relationships. Now lets look at the relationship you propose "a 24 protein cell organism can not become a complex human being no matter the time frame". as a mathematical model you are correct. however there are a couple of problems with this model. the first is that there is one cell, not a set of cell that have variation,  that they reproduce, that they interact with a complex environment, and that you can not even say what the contents of the cell actually are. Not to mention the fact that simple non-linear mathematical systems quickly become chaotic and unpredictable.

Yet you know what is impossible, not only that you know what every mathematicion will say to your poorly defined mathematical model.

Wow, just wow. That's some smarts you have there, not to mention humility.

To be honest i don't care if you believe in evolution. i know i don't. It is a useful tool to understand the world around us, to predict and therefore to generate new technologies. It is that simple.

It has no moral code, it isn't asking you to do anything. It is not a system of belief anymore than a hammer or saw is.

Anyone who says you are a bad person for not believing in it is an idiot. It is a scientific tool, nothing more nothing less. If you have a problem with anything about evolution in scientific sense you can develop experiments to examine it. If you have a problem with its moral values then you misunderstand what it is.

ID on the other hand is asking for belief. That there is a supernatural, unknowable entity outside the natural order that can not be reliably interacted with. It is useless for making new technologies or examining the past as you can not reliably predict what this fickle entity will do, so all you can do is sacrifice your goat and pray.

Originally posted by nurgles

"it is mathematically impossible to believe" a fine piece of rhetoric. maths has nothing to do with faith and belief. it is a working tool to describe relationships. Now lets look at the relationship you propose "a 24 protein cell organism can not become a complex human being no matter the time frame". as a mathematical model you are correct. however there are a couple of problems with this model. the first is that there is one cell, not a set of cell that have variation,  that they reproduce, that they interact with a complex environment, and that you can not even say what the contents of the cell actually are. Not to mention the fact that simple non-linear mathematical systems quickly become chaotic and unpredictable.

Yet you know what is impossible, not only that you know what every mathematicion will say to your poorly defined mathematical model.

I also find the attempt to label evolution as a "mathematical impossibility" as rather unusual.  I've never seen anyone take that position before.

One could argue that it's mathematically impossible for all of the thousands of specific male/female pairs to have come together, had sex, produced a live healthy baby from that mating which also grew up to have sex and reproduce, all in the exact order it would have taken to produce any one of us.  Yet that's what happened, despite it being a statistically unlikely that any of us would exist.

I would be interested to hear an actual non-religious (to avoid bias) mathematician's opinion on the mathematical soundness of evolution.  Of course, we'll have to find one that actually understand evolution well enough to make that call.

Originally posted by Korusus

One could argue that it's mathematically impossible for all of the thousands of specific male/female pairs to have come together, had sex, produced a live healthy baby from that mating which also grew up to have sex and reproduce, all in the exact order it would have taken to produce any one of us.  Yet that's what happened, despite it being a statistically unlikely that any of us would exist.

this a common mistake in the use of statistics.

take the example of the change in your pocket. What is the chance that the exact combination of change in your pocket came to be? I mean the types of coins, the year they were made etc. Seems pretty unlikely, yes?

The answer is 100% likely, as there is no other possible combination for you to have in your pocket as what you have in your pocket is not variable. so 1/1=1

if the question is how many combinations of change could you have in your pocket? the answer is a very large set indeed.

Originally posted by nurgles

Originally posted by Korusus

One could argue that it's mathematically impossible for all of the thousands of specific male/female pairs to have come together, had sex, produced a live healthy baby from that mating which also grew up to have sex and reproduce, all in the exact order it would have taken to produce any one of us.  Yet that's what happened, despite it being a statistically unlikely that any of us would exist.

 

this a common mistake in the use of statistics.

take the example of the change in your pocket. What is the chance that the exact combination of change in your pocket came to be? I mean the types of coins, the year they were made etc. Seems pretty unlikely, yes?

The answer is 100% likely, as there is no other possible combination for you to have in your pocket as what you have in your pocket is not variable. so 1/1=1

if the question is how many combinations of change could you have in your pocket? the answer is a very large set indeed.

 

I'm no mathematician or statistician so I'll take your word for it.  It seems to me to be a similar argument as saying "evolution is mathematically impossible".  Of course, I'm sure I'm oversimplifying both sides of the argument.  I just don't understand trying to use math to disprove evolution.  I know there are many things that can be disproved scientifically and mathematically (most of them involving uhh...math), but I've never considered evolution as one of them. 

How exactly would one go about disproving evolution mathematically?  I'm very intrigued at this point.

EDIT:

I should qualify that by saying, in reading Enigma's argument it seems as if the sole measure of why evolution is mathematically impossible seems to be the length of time involved.  That seems specious (pardon the pun) at best.

Originally posted by Korusus

How exactly would one go about disproving evolution mathematically?  I'm very intrigued at this point.

 

to do anything with math you have to define the problem first.

So can you define evolution as a mathematical function? I am no expert in maths, nor am i an expert in evolution.  The best example of the maths of evolution that i have seen is the following video. It is open computer code, that you can get through the comment on the youtube page itself. you can see that by adding a selection criteria to reproduction you can gain complexity from a simple system.

uk.youtube.com/watch

Originally posted by Korusus

Originally posted by nurgles

Originally posted by Korusus

One could argue that it's mathematically impossible for all of the thousands of specific male/female pairs to have come together, had sex, produced a live healthy baby from that mating which also g