Question Evolution! 15 questions evolutionists cannot adequately answer

[El_Machinae]

Trev, 'life' might need those things. Self-replicating macro-molecules don't, though

 

[brennan]

Amino acids which are created in those sorts of experiments are also quickly destroyed in those conditions.

No they are not, the experimental apparatus originally used in 1952 was retested fairly recently, and there were still amino acids present:

After Miller's death in 2007, scientists examining sealed vials preserved from the original experiments were able to show that there were actually well over 20 different amino acids produced in Miller's original experiments. That is considerably more than what Miller originally reported, and more than the 20 that naturally occur in life.[7] Moreover, some evidence suggests that Earth's original atmosphere might have had a different composition than the gas used in the Miller–Urey experiment. There is abundant evidence of major volcanic eruptions 4 billion years ago, which would have released carbon dioxide, nitrogen, hydrogen sulfide (H2S), and sulfur dioxide (SO2) into the atmosphere. Experiments using these gases in addition to the ones in the original Miller–Urey experiment have produced more diverse molecules.

 

[Trev]

Trev, 'life' might need those things. Self-replicating macro-molecules don't, though

But self-replicating macro-molecules are not life, and there is no evidence they can become life. Also many multiple macro-molecules of various combinations are required for life and again there is no evidence they can combine and remain combined in forms useful to life. The creation of more diverse molecules through the addition of other ingredients is logical, but unless they can combine and remain combined in forms useful to life it is also meaningless

 

[brennan]

there is no evidence they can become life.

You don't think laboratory synthesis of amino acids and RNA is evidence of this process?

 

[Trev]

You don't think laboratory synthesis of amino acids and RNA is evidence of this process?

It is evidence that under specialized laboratory conditions tightly controlled by intelligence that RNA can be produced. But it is not proof that RNA can happen without the input of intelligence under conditions which may be found in nature. It should not surprise you that I believe RNA can be created by intelligence along with the other essentials of life.

 

[El_Machinae]

But self-replicating macro-molecules are not life, and there is no evidence they can become life. Also many multiple macro-molecules of various combinations are required for life and again there is no evidence they can combine and remain combined in forms useful to life. The creation of more diverse molecules through the addition of other ingredients is logical, but unless they can combine and remain combined in forms useful to life it is also meaningless

Maybe, but (more importantly), there's no suggestion of the opposite, either. There is no reason why self-replicating molecules cannot become contained in selective environments, or that the self-replicating process will not select for increased ability to augment its environment for replication. There's no reason why these environments cannot evolve to become what we consider 'life'. The only barrier is probability, really, which is something not worth really arguing about, because both sides will agree that it's "tremendously improbable". At that point, the anthropic principle dominates.

So, abiogenesis really can be about probability. Self-replicating molecules that diversify sufficiently to create environmental conditions are (necessarily) selected for, it's just a question of whether they survive.

After abiogenesis, evolution dominates. Again, the anthropic principle comes into play. But evolution after abiogenesis is certainly sufficiently parsimonious. And evolution itself doesn't have the problems that the website in the OP thinks it does.

 

[velosepappe]

IMHO it all boils down to evolution just being an emergent behavior of particles interacting with eachother. Us calling it evolution is our way to make sense of this higher level phenomena. True, it is possible that something set things up to lead exactly to the state of the universe it is in now, but I dont believe that.

 

[brennan]

specialized laboratory conditions tightly controlled by intelligence

I don't think a bunch of chemicals stuffed into test tubes and zapped with electricity counts as 'specialised' or 'tightly controlled by intelligence', the whole idea of it is to encourage randomness.

 

[Trev]

So, abiogenesis really can be about probability.

It is about probability, yes. There is zero probability that even 1 of the essentials for life could develop to a level where life is possible without the input of intelligence, the removal of amino acids from one specialized environment to another specialized environment so that a RNA chain can be formed. However as I showed in my first post there are 5 essentials without which life could not live and replicate. If you fail on one essential, then you will fail even more completely on all the others too without the involvement of intelligence.

 

[brennan]

Your first post is erroneous, you are apparently unaware that there are different structures in plant, animal and bacterial cells. Your assertion that there is no possibility that various things need to or can happen is totally unsupported by any evidence that I am aware of.

 

[Leoreth]

Important lesson about stochastic: "it's highly unlikely" isn't the same as "zero probability", and events with a very low likeliness are very likely to happen at least once over a sufficient number of tries.

 

[Dirichlet]

It is about probability, yes. There is zero probability that even 1 of the essentials for life could develop to a level where life is possible without the input of intelligence, the removal of amino acids from one specialized environment to another specialized environment so that a RNA chain can be formed. However as I showed in my first post there are 5 essentials without which life could not live and replicate. If you fail on one essential, then you will fail even more completely on all the others too without the involvement of intelligence.

That's claim you failed to support. While we do not know yet how life originated (maybe we never will, as we may find different mechanism that could cause and don't know which one actually) did, there are some good ideas being developed.

Just to link one :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world_hypothesis

This is one of the better Wikipedia Entries and links to an interesting article which talks about an self-replicating RNA Enzyme.

DNA isn't needed for replication and mutation, though it has advantages.
RNA does ok on it's own as shown above.
ATP is not needed for RNA self-replication.
Error correction is not needed until errors occur to often for sucessful replication. Which is to say, not at the beginning.
Cell walls are not needed for self-replicating RNA.

 

[Midgard Eagle]

“Question evolution!” is off to a great start. The Traditional Values Coalition (TVC), which is one of the largest non-denominational, grassroots church lobbies in America and speaks on behalf of over 43,000 churches, is promoting the campaign.

This is wonderful. Finally the churches are catching up with the scientific ideal of seeking answers to questions about the world instead of revelling in dogma and superstition...

With so many churches involved, there is going to be a whole lot of questioning of evolution going on! Get involved yourself and get your church involved as well—let us work together to spread the truth.

...oh.
Well, pardon my wishful thinking, then.

Students certainly should question Darwinism in their schools and encourage others to do it too—after all, don’t teachers urge students to “question everything”? Students have a right to question the evolutionary pseudoscience peddled to them.

Yup, that's how science moves forward, by closely scrutinizing everything, from the tiniest hypothesis to the most fundamental theories and laws. Unlike religion, which prides itself on encouraging and rewarding unquestioning dogma known as "faith".

You can also get shirts, hats and caps, bags, mugs, stickers or badges printed with “Question evolution! / Creation.com” or “Evolution—The greatest hoax on Earth? / Get the facts at Creation.com”.

What are the odds I would get them signed up for a "Question Christianity" campaign?

How did life originate? How did life with hundreds of proteins originate just by chemistry without intelligent design?

How did the DNA code originate?

How could such errors (mutations) create 3 billion letters of DNA information to change a microbe into a microbiologist?

How did blind chemistry create mind/intelligence

How did multi-cellular life originate?

How did sex originate?

How did new biochemical pathways, which involve multiple enzymes working together in sequence, originate?

Through a process of natural selection and evolution.

What other coding system has existed without intelligent design?

None that I'm aware of. Why?

How can scrambling existing DNA information create a new biochemical pathway or nano-machines?

I'm sorry, I don't understand the question.

Why is natural selection taught as ‘evolution’ as if it explains the origin of the diversity of life?

Natural selection is a big part of evolution, so I'm not sure if I understand the question.

Living things look like they were designed

This is a subjective opinion. It's no different from me saying that my watch must be living because it looks like something formed by evolution.

so how do evolutionists know that they were not designed?

There are these things called "evidence" and "the scientific method". Your mistake (or the mistake of whoever you copy-pasted this from) is to look at science the way you look at religion. Science isn't about cherry-picking ancient texts for then to "have faith" in the verses that makes you feel good, or which help you promote your chosen cultural or political agenda. Science is about about discovering how the world actually works. It isn't based on faith, tradition or dogma any more than maps or measuring instruments.

Why should science be restricted to naturalistic causes rather than logical causes?

Again, I don't understand the question.

Why are the (expected) countless millions of transitional fossils missing?

Either in the dirt awaiting discovery or lost forever. Fossils are extremely fragile, and we're lucky to have the few we have. Not that it matters, they're not the basis of evolutionary theory in the first place.

What is a "transitional" species, though, and how are the current species living on earth today not "transitional"?

How do ‘living fossils’ remain unchanged over supposed hundreds of millions of years?

Because that's how natural selection works. If a form is well-adapted, then new "versions" of that form will not have increased survivability.

[How did blind chemistry create] meaning, altruism and morality?

It didn't. Evolution and human beings did.

Why is evolutionary ‘just-so’ story-telling tolerated?

It isn't. Evolution is science, it's held up by evidence. You may be thinking of Creationism.

Where are the scientific breakthroughs due to evolution?

In countless ways. It's the foundation of all modern biology, for starters.

Why do schools and universities teach evolution so dogmatically.

We don't, any more than we teach "dogmatically" that the Earth is round. Again, evidence and the scientific method.

Why is evolution, a theory about history, taught as if it is the same as this operational science?

Why do you not want theories (such as atomic theory and germ theory) taught as the scientific achievements they are? Where would you prefer we learned about them, in History class?

Why is a fundamentally religious idea, a dogmatic belief system that fails to explain the evidence, taught in science classes?

This hasn't been my experience at all. Creation myths are typically kept to religion classes.

If “you can’t teach religion in science classes”, why is evolution taught?

Because it has nothing to do with religion.

That was easy. What did I win?

 

[Nick Carpathia]

Absolutely nothing, because look! The goalpost have suddenly shifted 20 feet to the right and are now upside down!

 

[Midgard Eagle]

Just noticed this little nugget at the end of the OP:

Feel free to answer these questions, btw.

Pure comedy gold! "I hereby give you permission to defend your view". Creationism in a nutshell.

 

[emzie]

Error correction is not needed until errors occur to often for sucessful replication. Which is to say, not at the beginning.

I hit on this in my post, but perhaps it needs to be expanded upon.

Error correction is not needed until a mutation rate is larger than a genome. By that, I mean that if you have a million nucleotide, your error / mutation rate has to be greater than one-in-a-million -- actually the math is a bit more complex but I'm trying to be illustrative not technically precise.

If your error / mutation rate is too high, then statistically, the majority one's offspring will not be identical to one self. Even the ones who are, or who have mutations that are actually beneficial, will not reliably pass on that trait. You quickly spiral into information degradation and replication ceases.

RNA has an error rate of roughly 1-in-1,000,000. The only replicators that use RNA over DNA are viruses, some of which have genomes as small as 2,000 nucleotides.

 

[Dirichlet]

I hit on this in my post, but perhaps it needs to be expanded upon.

Error correction is not needed until a mutation rate is larger than a genome. By that, I mean that if you have a million nucleotide, your error / mutation rate has to be greater than one-in-a-million -- actually the math is a bit more complex but I'm trying to be illustrative not technically precise.

If your error / mutation rate is too high, then statistically, the majority one's offspring will not be identical to one self. Even the ones who are, or who have mutations that are actually beneficial, will not reliably pass on that trait. You quickly spiral into information degradation and replication ceases.

RNA has an error rate of roughly 1-in-1,000,000. The only replicators that use RNA over DNA are viruses, some of which have genomes as small as 2,000 nucleotides.

Well, if we look at very simple organism even a larger error rate is acceptable. If a single-celled organism (or just an enzyme) replicated itself every 5 minutes and has a lifespan of 24h then it wouldn't even matter much if only every 10th attempt to replicate was sucessful.

It obviously gets more complicated with multi-celled organisms, since a wrongly-replicated cell can cause problems like cancers or just being in the way. At that point the error-rate has to be decreased by a large amount. Which can be achieved by switching from RNA to DNA

 

[brennan]

But, but.. we could test that by observation and evolution has no evidential base! My brain hurts.

 

[warpus]

It is evidence that under specialized laboratory conditions tightly controlled by intelligence that RNA can be produced. But it is not proof that RNA can happen without the input of intelligence under conditions which may be found in nature. It should not surprise you that I believe RNA can be created by intelligence along with the other essentials of life.

It is evidence.

Do you have any evidence to support your side?

 

[El_Machinae]

It is about probability, yes. There is zero probability that even 1 of the essentials for life could develop to a level where life is possible without the input of intelligence, the removal of amino acids from one specialized environment to another specialized environment so that a RNA chain can be formed. However as I showed in my first post there are 5 essentials without which life could not live and replicate. If you fail on one essential, then you will fail even more completely on all the others too without the involvement of intelligence.

I don't think so. Or, at least, it's not 'obvious' in any way that there's zero probability. In fact, I am willing to bet that there will be a cornucopia of abiogenesis models within your lifetime. We won't know how life started (any more than we know what Plato ate on his 13th birthday), but we will have more and more simple, self-sustaining, scenarios.

Calling it 'zero probability' is too low of a probability, since each of the individual components have a non-zero probability. It's merely unlikely. At that point, we're quibbling about orders of magnitude. 1 in a gazillion? Or 1 in a gazillion gazillion?