The Ignorance of Creationists

Originally posted by oozyism
reply to post by MrXYZ

 

No I just proved that Evolution can be created, you suggested no.

That is why I stated Evolution and Creationism is synonymous

Nice try deflecting.

Us giving robots the means to replicate isn't the same as nature taking its course!! No one gave us the stuff we needed to evolve, whereas the robots got everything they required. What's more, if we stop giving them anything, they can't replicate anymore.

Natural things don't have the luxury of someone giving them anything...at least we have no proof of such a "thing".

Just because we create things doesn't mean nature required a creator. I know you really wanna make that HUGE leap of faith, but scientifically, what your'e attempting is total hogwash.

reply to post by oozyism


Well, evolution could also be the result of Thor's hangover vomit from his wild night at the mead hall....but that doesn't mean that it's anywhere near probable or reasonable to think that.

The key word in your statement is can.

If you cannot provide evidence for such a claim, there's no point to it.

reply to post by oozyism


This thread has nothing to do with the belief in any deity, it's a thread about scientific illiteracy. Stop trolling about such concepts.

reply to post by MrXYZ


It really doesn't make a difference mate.

I just proved to you that evolution can be created.

I can't believe you are still trying to argue

reply to post by oozyism


Where was that? Oh wait, you didn't actually prove anything....and it still has absolutely nothing at all to do with this thread which has to do with scientific illiteracy though I guess I'll throw in simple definitions of words like 'proof' 'prove' 'evidence' and 'fact in there as well.

You proved nothing, you just simply stated something.

Originally posted by madnessinmysoul
reply to post by oozyism

 

Well, evolution could also be the result of Thor's hangover vomit from his wild night at the mead hall....but that doesn't mean that it's anywhere near probable or reasonable to think that.

The key word in your statement is can.

If you cannot provide evidence for such a claim, there's no point to it.

reply to post by oozyism

 

This thread has nothing to do with the belief in any deity, it's a thread about scientific illiteracy. Stop trolling about such concepts.

Yes there is a point, the point is, that Evolution and Creationism is synonymous. I proved Evolution can be created.

Yes the key word is can.

If Evolution can be created, then Evolution and Creationism is synonymous.

I have already provided evidence for GOD. Do you want me to copy and paste it again?

This thread has nothing to do with the belief in any deity

Then why did you mention creationists in the OP? Creationist believe in GOD, and I for one also believe in Evolution, and believe that Evolution can be created, which I proved.

My point is proven.

Ta Ta

Originally posted by madnessinmysoul
reply to post by oozyism

 

Where was that? Oh wait, you didn't actually prove anything....and it still has absolutely nothing at all to do with this thread which has to do with scientific illiteracy though I guess I'll throw in simple definitions of words like 'proof' 'prove' 'evidence' and 'fact in there as well.

You proved nothing, you just simply stated something.

Go to the previous page, read my evidence which clearly proves Evolution can be created.

and

What does that have to do with the OP?

The OP mentions Evolution and Creationists.

I posted my opinions in regards.

I provided my evidence in regards.

and

am finished with this thread.

Die thread Die !!

Jokes.

Hope the thread achieves something .

Originally posted by oozyism
reply to post by MrXYZ

 

It really doesn't make a difference mate.

I just proved to you that evolution can be created.

I can't believe you are still trying to argue

But we have no evidence of it being created, none, nada, zip. There is NO evidence that would support the claim that evolution has been created by anyone or anything. Just because we can create stuff isn't proof that evolution was created. In fact, like I said numerous times before, we have no evidence that evolution was created.

If you disagree, show me direct evidence that evolution is the result of a creator intervening. And before you start, consider that us creating stuff, or semantics aren't proof. So think for a second before posting another blunder

reply to post by oozyism


It didn't prove anything. Your claims are invalid because they refer to things that are not alive. To create life you have to have a self-contained, self-replicating system.

And where is the design of genetic drift, natural selection, sexual selection, and genetic mutation? I didn't see how you accounted for those in your 'proof'.

And once more, I beat my head against my desk and ask "What does this have to do with the title of this thread?"

reply to post by oozyism


All you have proven is that you

a) dont know the difference between Creationism (creator = origin), Abiogenesis (natural processes = origin) and Evolution-Theory (doesnt mention any creator, doesnt need one, isnt about one at all and really doesnt give a shat about one!)

b) probably believe in so called "progressive creationism" or "theistic evolution" which means, you believe in a biblical God as the creator, according to a holy book... which you dont really believe in

c) didnt read the title of the thread... though you somewhat made yourself the perfect example for its topic.

3...2...1...until:

1) There are laws from unknown (natural causes).
2) There are laws we create.
3) There's laws from ...

reply to post by oozyism

People have been believing in GOD for a long time now, and they will continue to

Believed? Are you taking back your claim to have proved His existence, then?

I know that hurts you, but it is OK.

You know nothing of the kind. You are making an assumption--one that happens to be completely false.

Everyone can play that game

What game? Making idiotic assumptions?

Garrett Lisi on his theory of everything

gl['s poster
~GAIA~
I distrust camels

buh bye...

Originally posted by sara123123
This is a free country and people are allowed to believe whatever they want to believe. No one is king over the other. Isn't that a bummer for those ot the leftist "educated" class who think they are royality. They are not even in control over what one another think and believe. Hahahahahahahaha The beauty of America!

This is fascinating.

Aren't "rightists" educated in America?
Is this a cultural phenomenon, discrimination, or do right-wing Americans choose to stay uneducated?

Is believing in biblical creation also right-wing phenomenon?

Do you see a link between creationism and lack of education?

Originally posted by Kailassa

Originally posted by sara123123
This is a free country and people are allowed to believe whatever they want to believe. No one is king over the other. Isn't that a bummer for those ot the leftist "educated" class who think they are royality. They are not even in control over what one another think and believe. Hahahahahahahaha The beauty of America!

This is fascinating.

Aren't "rightists" educated in America?
Is this a cultural phenomenon, discrimination, or do right-wing Americans choose to stay uneducated?

Is believing in biblical creation also right-wing phenomenon?

Do you see a link between creationism and lack of education?

Certain groups are systematically programming people to mistrust "education"...why you ask?

George Carlin described the dumbing down of the nation the best:



And that's why we have people trying to argue for a creator by linking studies about robots, or people who believe we've only been on earth 6035 years, or people who believe evolution is wrong. Welcome to stupidity land!

I just came home from a party and im pretty drunk, so this post isnt really thought out and I probably shouldnt write anything at all

Anyways...

It really is fascinating and George Carlin has a good point...

Not the first time I hear right-wingers cry about the "leftists" being so shamelessly educated
I wouldnt consider myself a leftist... Im more of a libertarian, but I guess that actually is a leftist from the american point of view, since the USA today are pretty right-wing-ish (and that is from a German point of view!).

If you were to rule a country, what would your favourite minions be like?

Educated people, questioning your every move, second guessing your decissions, bugging you with rational reasoning?

Or uneducated right-wing christians, trained in believing whithout any doubt, unable to understand complex political coherences, willing to obey without bothering rational reasoning?

How would you school your nation to be the perfect slaves?

I'll rather go to bed... this gets way to scary

Originally posted by MrXYZ

Originally posted by Kailassa

Originally posted by sara123123
This is a free country and people are allowed to believe whatever they want to believe. No one is king over the other. Isn't that a bummer for those ot the leftist "educated" class who think they are royality. They are not even in control over what one another think and believe. Hahahahahahahaha The beauty of America!

This is fascinating.
Aren't "rightists" educated in America?
Is this a cultural phenomenon, discrimination, or do right-wing Americans choose to stay uneducated?
Is believing in biblical creation also right-wing phenomenon?
Do you see a link between creationism and lack of education?

Certain groups are systematically programming people to mistrust "education"...why you ask?

It's puzzling to see people attacking posters for being intelligent, or educated, and I'd noticed that particularly happening in creation/evolution threads. And those criticisms seem to be an American phenomenon. Don't they see that the wealthy will always be educated, and they don't want our kids educated because that means our kids can be rivals to their kids? And seeing the sons of the wealthy are so often of "Dubya" IQ levels, that frightens them.

In Australia we don't have that hatred of education, or pride in being undereducated.
As a dropout single mum, I fed my family from supermarket dumpsters and home-grown food, so I could put the pension towards education and get a career. When local schools were bad I taught my kids at home and put pressure on the schools to improve. I've got a son with an IQ of 60 who buys papers and brings them for me to read to him because he wants to understand the world. He is always asking questions, - good questions, wanting to learn. He loves learning about American presidents for some reason. I think that started when he realised Bush Junior was so like the handicapped kids he works with. I've got a daughter with dylexia and dyscalculia who dropped out after year ten and became a single mum. Studying was frightfully difficult for her, but she persisted, cleaning during the day and studying at night. It took till she was 30 to land a job with real advancement potential, but now she's moving up.

For an Aussie, valuing education like this is not unusual, so you can see why the attitude of anti-education posters has me mystified.

And the problem is compounded by the fact that many of right-wingers who are proudly educated have been to "Christian" schools, in which science and logic don't appear to be being taught. They are taught god gave man dominion over the Earth, but not taught that you must understand the world if you want to care for it wisely.
Instead, they are taught that dominion means license to blindly rape and pillage our planet, believing what they do to it is not important, because some fantasy figure is going to come and miraculously give them all a new home.

Perhaps this is behind the pressure to disbelieve evolution. Perhaps it's important to those who profit from raping and pillaging "Mother Earth" that people don't understand enough to want this short-sighted madness moderated.

And have you noticed how many people misunderstand evolution to the extent that they believe it doesn't matter what we do to the Earth, how we change the environment, because we'll just "adapt"? People were even saying in a thread after th BP oil leak that sea creatures would adapt to the oil, and those which didn't deserved to die. Such people have no concept of historical time, and the numbers of generations needed to significantly change a species. But what can you expect, when so many are taught we've only been here for 6000 years, and significant numbers even believing that is the age of the universe?

George Carlin described the dumbing down of the nation the best:

I listened to George Carlin years back, and didn't like him, and never listened to him again.
- my loss, I was probably too dumb to appreciate him back then.
Thanks for reintroducing me to him. That video is brilliant, and now my whole family is going to have to watch the rest of his stuff with me.

And that's why we have people trying to argue for a creator by linking studies about robots, or people who believe we've only been on earth 6035 years, or people who believe evolution is wrong. Welcome to stupidity land!

It makes me want to cry, seriously. People are so hung up on the idea of heaven, and they don't realise this whole earth could be heaven if the human race could be bothered pulling together and working at it. Creationist tell us so often that there is only one chance in umpteen billion of us living on a planet like this, but most of them ridicule people for being "leftie greenies" who want to look after the place!

I wonder, are people who don't believe in an afterlife more likely to look out for our lovely planet?
- perhaps looking after the future wellbeing of humanity as their way of finding hope despite believing in eventual oblivion?

One ignorant comment I've seen a lot of on here has to do with probabilities. I made a nice thread addressing probablities here.

Originally posted by madnessinmysoul
I hear a lot about people talking about how 'improbable' it is for evolution to be true, so let's take a look at something.

Get a standard deck of playing cards. Shuffle them.
Now deal yourself 5 cards.

The probability of the hand you just dealt yourself is 1/ (52 x 51 x 50 x 49 x 48)%
OR
1 in 311,875,200

That's just the chance of getting a hand of any 5 cards, but it doesn't preclude it from happening.
Shuffle the cards back into the deck.
Now deal yourself another hand, it's also a 1 in 311,875,200 chance.
But now that you've dealt yourself TWO hands the chances that you would get them both in that sequence is 1 in 97,266,140,375,040,000
And so on for each and every other hand you're playing.
It gets exponentially worse when you're playing with multiple people.

So the chances of that happening are so exponentially small, so why does it happen? Well, all the other possible options have an equal chance of happening, do they not? And are people not playing with cards all over the world? Eventually someone is going to get ten hands in a row in the exact same way you were dealt ten cards.

And hence there's really no logic in saying that probability is the reason why evolution cannot be true. Something being improbable doesn't mean it is impossible, only that it is very unlikely that it will happen.

reply to post by madnessinmysoul

Yeah. Ignorance about natural selection. There are probabilities in the process of evolution, but natural selection sorts it out, right?
Its trial by error... the "trial part" is way underestimated here... genetic variation is vaaaaaast

edit: Uhm... actually what I meant is that eventually is the key here... its all about the vastness of trial till success

reply to post by ACTS 2:38


First I have to say that I have NOT yet read the entire forum, I was just doing so when I saw your post and felt compelled to reply. If someone else has already covered this, sorry.

The major issue which a lot (and I do mean a lot) of people have with understanding evolution comes not only from people [prats] like Richard Dawkins who vocally pan religion as non-scientific, which understandably gets religious types riled (and actually, rejection without evidence is the unscientific approach: there is no evidence that there is no god, and therefore to say that there is no god is an unscientific approach, etc.), but also from the current classification system itself.

Current classification is based on the HIDEOUSLY limiting Linnaean classification of animals, in which he grouped them - for convenience, himself firmly believing that every creature was created perfect by the creator - into discrete groups.

The problem is that a species does not "become" another. While progress may occur within a species, speciation is not (typically) by a "lizard giving birth to a chicken", it is by the divergence of one population (not even specifically lineages) into two, and over MANY GENERATIONS, each population accumulates its small changes and adaptations, and become GRADUALLY distinct from one another. Sometimes, the specifics of these adaptations limit the re-combination of the two (or more) populations, and when this happens, you have two species.

As a hypothetical model for how this could happen, using vertebrate evolution, because it's generall the most straightforward, lets say that you started with a goby type fish:

Say these goby-type fish were living originally living in fairly deep see, some way off the shore. As they are fairly successful gobies, their population grows and members of it spread out until some of them end up in tidal waters. Eventually (fish weren't the first creatures in the sea so it seems a safe enough assumption that there was something in it to eat them), a predatory species that usually lives somewhere else turns up and starts eating the gobies in this new population, but it is quite big and so avoids going into the shallows where it can be trapped by a change in the tide. The gobies that go into the shallows escape the predator, but themselves risk being trapped in small pools, which rapidly lose oxygen, when the tide goes out.

Those which get trapped in pools may eventually include some which can process the oxygen from air while the oxygen in the water itself depletes, and thus not suffocate while they wait for the tide to come back in - obviously, these ones will have more offspring than the ones that died, and those offspring are also able to stray further into the shallows, avoiding predators and also collecting their own food (e.g. light-loving micro-animals). If their populations get big enough, competition may favour those who can even get out of the water a little way to reach valuable food that has been moved out of their normal reach by the tide, and, through a series of lucky accidents, some of them become semi-terrestrial.

On the land, there is a lot less competition for everything, and so if you can stay out, you can exploit a whole new range of foodstuffs and have more energy to put into food. This is not particularly different from the mudskippers of mangrove swamps at this point, and while they are not in the ancestry of the amphibia, they have started along a similar path.

Anyway, as these animals are successfully exploiting this new niche and breeding like, well, mudskippers, they soon come into competition with one another. An individual who is lucky enough to be less dependant upon moisture can access resources that aren't so heavily competed for, and so increasingly terrestrial populations arise, and spread inland. They still, at this point, have to go back to the water to breed, but if one so happened to develop a water-tight membrane for its eggs, then any eggs that happened to be washed out of the water would not be doomed. Any individual losing the 'go to water to breed' response, if it had the water-tight egg genes, would not remove itself from the gene-pool by doing so, and its offspring could gradually diverge from the water-breeding population (partially because combined the "don't breed in water" gene with the "not-water-tight egg" gene could lead to disastrous results, so those that were selective in their mate choices would be better off)

So now we have our hypothetical reptilian, worlds apart from the ancestral hypothetical goby-type fish, not the same family at all, but still gotten do to quite reasonably - I think. Of course, this would probably happen over a massive timescale, and a whole bunch of other changes (=mutations, which if beneficial or just lucky can go to fixation (be omnipresent) in the population) would doubtless have occurred.

From reptiles to mammals is fairly simple - eggs are vulnerable to temperature changes, and so while some (modern) reptiles have eggs which are relatively insensitive to these, or lay their eggs at times or in places where temperature remains optimal for the eggs to hatch, where constant environments are rare, some reptiles keep their eggs inside them and move into warm places. Big eggs are cumbersome, and embryos start out small, so anyone who happened to provision their developing young gradually (through a placenta type thing) rather than all at once (a shell-enclosed egg) would be more able to avoid predators when carrying their young. Newborn young, with smaller bodies, are more susceptible to poor-quality environments than adults, and so if parents provision these young in some way (e.g. milk), they will survive more reliably even when conditions are not favourable, passing on the genes for provisioning to another generation.

Fur is just one of the many alternative approaches taken to allow activity/survival in colder climates: blubber, fur and feathers all keep heat within a body, dark colouring and areas where blood vessels are particularly close to the surface allow heat to be absorbed more readily. Fur and (early) feathers are both based on fairly straightforward mutuations of the DNA responsible for keratin production, which originally formed scales...

Most - and to my mind all - of what I've said so far could be considered 'micro-evolution', but when put together it can take you across the biggest leaps in vertebrate "macro"-evolution. How is it difficult to understand that a change in time scale is the only thing required to bridge the gap?

Oh, and for humans (and remember both above and below are purely a hypothetical attempt at explaining it, and my intention is not to match up with actual evolutionary patterns, but merely to suggest to those who feel otherwise that evolution could quite feasibly produce a variety of the forms that we see today):

Once we've got our prototypical monkey, small bellies are all very well for digesting nutrient rich foods such as meat, but not so great for cellulose-high plant material. A large gut is required to get the best out of relatively poor foods without resorting to coprophagy (like rabbits), and for a large gut, you need a large body. Note that most herbivorous (excluding seen and fruit eating species) primates are quite large.

Once large, the prehensile tail that was so useful to small primates as an extra limb is no longer particularly useful, and so anyone losing it isn't going to be particularly disadvantaged - to hold you on a branch if you fell, it would have to be a lot bigger, and it's not likely to get that big fast enough to cope with the evolutionary requirement to stop relying on your tail to keep you from falling to your death.

Being large is alternatively useful to allow you not to starve: if you eat fruit, for example, and there are certain periods of the year where no such fruit is around, being over a certain size means that you will survive until the next fruiting season.

So anyway, we have from apes to our big - and resultingly tailless - ape.

These apes are primarily arboreal, and when on the ground, move on all fours, which doesn't offer a great field of view but when you spend most of your time up trees, this isn't really an issue. Anyway, along come elephants who like grass, that spindly little plant that typically grows up only where trees can't or don't block out the light - and the elephants are happy to knock down trees to let their grass grow. Suddenly, there is a new habitat, one which offers neither a vantage point nor a retreat: open grassland. As the big, frugivorous apes that live in the forests around these spreading grasslands are dependant on getting a lot of fruit when it is available, they either have to change their diet, keep away from elephants or get good at crossing grasslands. THose that do any of these will persist - those that don't go extinct, so we don't really have them to talk about any more.

So some of these now starving big, tailless apes start making regular trips across the grasslands to get to other food sources. They CAN go up onto their hind feet, allowing them to see over the tall grass and tell whether any of their predators are in the way, but moving in this position is slow. They are faster when on all fours, but they can't see so far across the open space, and so any predators that are lying in wait remain unseen until it is too late, and so being able to move faster while upright will be selected for until we have an upright ape.

As the climate changes, and fruit trees become scarcer, living entirely on fruit becomes difficult for our plains apes, so they supplement their diet - maybe by going to the water for slow moving invertebrate (shellfish) prey which are easy to catch, maybe by working in teams to bring down animals that are too fast for an individual alone to catch. Of course, their upright position is not only good for watching out for predators, but also, whenever they happened across the idea of throwing things at either predator or prey (which, trust me on this, is not unique to humans or even apes... baboons are disgusting animals...), also meant that they had greater leverage and could throw harder. If they do start spearing the local wildlife, however, they create a selection pressure on the local wildlife to stay further away from the upright apes, and so migrating away from their homelands to places where the wildlife hasn't picked up on their throwing abilities is favourable if they are to continue supplementing their diet with meat. To move further north, they need either to grow thicker fur (takes a long time if you don't have the genes for cold-responsive fur) or start wrapping up warm. Otherwise they freeze.

So now that they have clothes and spears, do I really need to go on?

It is no longer beyond the realm of possibility that there was a creator when we look how far scientists have come,
that doesn't mean once created things don't evolve.
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