SCIENCE: Evolution / “Evolution Theory vs. Creation Myth”

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18 thoughts on “SCIENCE: Evolution / “Evolution Theory vs. Creation Myth””

  1. I’m a strong believer in evolution but to both sides… Who created god for him/she/it to then create the ‘physical universe’ and what created the matter that the exploded and spread out to create what we see today.

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  3. “Strictly speaking, we don’t have any proof that life absolutely requires one particular-handed type of organic molecule or the other. We only know that life as it currently exists uses only one type, and therefore any of the other type which may have formed are not part of the process from that point onward. (It is entirely possible that you could have a mirror earth where all the symmetries were reversed, as far as we know.)”

    Right…
    Mirror Earth…
    Now who’s living in a fantasy world?

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    • The postulation of a mirror earth is both (a) theoretically sound (as I say, we have no reason to doubt that it could happen) and (b) has plenty of precedent for producing valid scientific work, mostly in physics.

      You, on the other hand, want to throw out everything we actually do know and pretend that a book written by a bunch of bronze-age goat herders, which not only contradicts itself but contradicts many things we know to be true about the world, is not just true but absolutely true.

      Yes, let’s get rid of the fantasy world. And let’s start with the one where there’s an all-powerful being who amazingly seems to never communicate with anyone or leave any trace of its presence, hmm?

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  5. Strictly speaking, creationism (and this goes just as much for creationism under the name of “intelligent design” as it does for the plain vanilla sort) is NOT EVEN a hypothesis. In order for something to be a hypothesis, it has to be provable. Unless someone builds a time machine and goes back to look, how could you disprove creationism? We know evolution actually happens; we have lots of evidence and we understand, broadly, the mechanism. But what sort of test do you devise for creationism? Look for creat-on particles?

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    • Where do we find the magic, self-replicating molecule with all that genetic information that allegedly created everything? Oh wait…such molecules “no longer exist.” 😐

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      • If you’re looking for magic and some single entity which “created everything”, you’re looking in the wrong direction entirely. “Magic” is the cretinist — er, sorry, creationist — idea, not the scientific one.

        I don’t find it surprising that the earliest life would no longer be around. Not only would it need to be adapted to conditions which no longer exist (practically no free oxygen and no predators) but it would quite possibly be extremely fragile (no reason to believe that strong membranes were part of the earliest life). Heck, the stromatolites were at one time the most common form of life on earth, responsible for the initial freeing up of oxygen, and if it weren’t for the coincidence that they can survive in extremely high salinity — where their predators can’t reach them — they would no longer be around today.

        If I took you into my kitchen and showed you a cake, receipts from the grocery store for cake ingredients billed to my credit card, the wrappers and containers for cake ingredients and eggshells in the garbage can, a dirty cake pan and mixing bowl and utensils in the sink, a still-cooling oven, and a recipe for cake in my recipe file, and you insisted that there was still no reason to believe that the cake didn’t come from a professional bakery, your skepticism would be intellectually dishonest; you would be proposing a complex solution — in fact, a conspiracy on my part — where a much simpler explanation existed.

        Well, we know that complexity can increase between generations by a fairly wide range of mechanisms. We know that simple organic molecules can be created from inorganic ones under conditions which could potentially be found in nature (settled by experiment in the 1950s). We know that complex organic molecules can arise spontaneously from simpler ones. We know that evolution has been happening for billions of years. People like you are in fact proposing a complex conspiracy to explain something which is, relatively speaking, much simpler. In order for creationism to be true, after all, you not only have to have everything be created, but the creating entity had to make sure that everything looked exactly as though there had been biogenesis and evolution, with all the mechanisms working so that we could see evolution in action, and then that entity had to hide itself away and refuse to communicate for the rest of history. That’s unnecessarily complicated; Occam, bring me your razor.

      • If you are referring to the Miller–Urey experiment, this produced mostly useless, D-amino acids that could never form a protein (only L-amino acids can form functional proteins). Thus referring to this failed experiment is a moot point–and a sign of desperation on the part of evolutionists looking for proof of abiogenesis.

      • Hmmm… You’re the one saying “unless you can prove exactly how it happened, then actually it’s all a conspiracy to fool us by the god of my very specific religion who has never been observed by any credible witness and whose holy book is riddled with contradictions and definite inaccuracies.”

        By the way:

        1. The Miller-Urey experiment produced both dextro and laevo amino acids, in approximately equal amounts. Most mechanisms for assembling organic molecules without the use of living organisms do; it’s only things which are already alive which can produce (or use) just one without the other.

        2. Strictly speaking, we don’t have any proof that life absolutely requires one particular-handed type of organic molecule or the other. We only know that life as it currently exists uses only one type, and therefore any of the other type which may have formed are not part of the process from that point onward. (It is entirely possible that you could have a mirror earth where all the symmetries were reversed, as far as we know.)

        Since you clearly don’t know what the “L” and “D” even stood for, let alone the broader significance of the terms, I think you have demonstrated that you’re far too clueless to even have an opinion on this subject.

      • I obviously know more than you do because you didn’t (and still don’t know) that proteins cannot be produced with D- or a mixture of DL-aminos. The D- form of amino acids are basically useless (and even potentially harmful) artificially created amino acids. It the equivalent of claiming that “man-made” dl-alpha tocopherol can replace d-alpha tocopherol when it cannot–it is ineffective and inferior to the original.

        Just admit it–you got bitch slapped.

      • Um, could you limit your responses to what I actually wrote? That generally works better for debate.

        I never said you can plop down one in place of the other in the world as it currently is. I said you could quite possibly construct a mirror world where every single molecule of one orientation is replaced by one of the other orientation, and it would work.

        You are missing the reason WHY dextro and laevo molecules are different; they have the same chemical formula, but their shapes are mirror images. Life as it currently stands is entirely constructed around the “left-handed” forms. There is nothing inherently inferior about the others — at least, as far as anyone knows — but you have to choose one, and the laevo ones are the ones which got picked.

        It sounds very much like you not only don’t understand what you’re talking about, but you’re actually quoting and extrapolating from the writings of someone who also did not know what they were talking about.

        Oh, wait, you’re a creationist; that’s just your normal behavior.

      • “Life as it currently stands is entirely constructed around the “left-handed” forms.”

        And it always has. *pats you on the shoulder* It always has.

      • Actually, the only reason D-amino don’t readily polymerize to form protein chains is because the necessary catalysts to catalyze the repeating dehydration synthesis to form peptide bonds aren’t present, in the form of D-amino acid enzymes and for no other reason. There is no physical, or any chemical reason for D-amino acid or alpha(R)-amino acid proteins not to exist and D-stereochemistry or (R)-stereochemistry peptides and proteins are a fairly hot area of research and can be artificially synthesized. As a matter of fact, while preproproteins that are translated from RNA have all L-amino acids, some proteins and peptides have incorporated in them D-amino acids after post-translational modification in a few eukaryotic and many prokaryotic species. There is also some evidence that D-serine acts as a neurotransmitter. The abundance of D-amino acid incorporated proteins prokaryotes indicates that D-amino acids were used by ancestral prokaryotes, perhaps more extensively than is found today. However the likely hypothesis for why life continued to evolve favoring L-stereochemistry may be rooted in thermodynamics and stability or simple abundance in our solar system and primordial Earth.

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