I didnt realise scientists didnt know where life came from

It's taught as fact by those who refuse to even consider the possibility of intelligent design.

I'm not trying to be snarky. It's just that when your average joe hears the word "theory" when used in a scientific context, they think it means it's still just some idea. Really, "theory" is as solid as you get in science. Unproven ideas are hypotheses, proven ideas are theories. If you don't believe in evolution, why believe in anything science has taught us? There are plenty of things that aren't immediately observable that we take for granted and don't question the scientific research behind these things.

Plenty of scientists have considered intelligent design and immediately thrown it out due to lack of evidence supporting it. I guess you could say intelligent design is a conjecture at best. It's certainly not a theory.
 
Last edited:
I always knew evolution was a theory, one I highly believe in.

I accept the fact that religion is part of society and it's often believed God played a part in human evolution.

I never realised however that scientists didn't actually know where life sparked.

*ahem* Abiogenesis (that being the fancy term for origin of life) has sod all to do with evolution.

They know where the first microbes were

No, we don't. At best we have some evidence of life that isn't terribly convincing three and some billion years ago and then proper fossils 2.8 billion years ago but by the time we have cyanobacteria we're a long way from the origin.

they can show an evolutionary journey

No, we can't. We can find occasional points, increasing in frequency as we get closer to now, which identify the major metazoan (multi-cellular animal life) transitions and demonstrate the validity of the theory as well as the countless data points from modern genetics. But the idea of a single, demonstrable evolutionary journey? There is no direct evidence of that for much of geological time.

Natural selection

In spades.

and the way creatures adapted and changed due to environmental changes.

Mmm, kinda, maybe.


What they actually found was more than the survival of the amino acids, the force had created peptides, If you're unaware. Peptides make up proteins.

But there's a big jump from proteins, to DNA and life. Scientists cannot yet fill in the blanks!!

It's actually considered relatively unlikely that proteins were involved in the origins of life at all. It's much more likely to have been some kind of catyltic nucleic acid. It might have been RNA but was likely a related chemical which later gave rise to RNA based life. Proteins followed later.
 
I'm not trying to be snarky. It's just that when your average joe hears the word "theory" when used in a scientific context, they think it means it's still just some idea. Really, "theory" is as solid as you get in science. Unproven ideas are hypotheses, proven ideas are theories. If you don't believe in evolution, why believe in anything science has taught us? There are plenty of things that aren't immediately observable that we take for granted and don't question the scientific research behind these things.

Plenty of scientists have considered intelligent design and immediately thrown it out due to lack of evidence supporting it. I guess you could say intelligent design is a conjecture at best. It's certainly not a theory.

My favourite reply, whenever someone says evolution is "just a theory", is "mavity is just a theory too - how about you test it by jumping out that window?"
 
Evolution has lots of evidence in its favour. The evidence for intelligent design is non-existent.

Well, although I do prefer evolution to a story about intelligent design myself, the former is not exactly watertight. For example - it relies too often on the advanced elements of the chain self evolving on demand to "tech" it couldn't possibly self invent. Some sharks, for example, evolved from proto sharkie at some point, not much brain on that fish, but it managed to self develop fast "nose". Ocean was vast, there wasn't enough food, it had to be fast, so it evolved its body. That's fine, happens all the time in nature apparently.
However, soon enough after the nose grew, it turned out, sharkie (a specific kind, swordfish protoplast) made a bit of an error and overdid focusing on the whole "speed" issue as all of the streamlining of the frontal details had a bit of a side effect in its natural habitat - the fishy suffered from frosty vision and brain freeze in cold waters when moving so fast.
So instead of spending next few thousand years widening its head, or becoming slow moving vegetarian, the shark/swordfish protofish managed to wish special tech into life - heated windscreen. It wanted to see well so badly, that at some point one of the muscles that moves its eyes started produce heat by warming up the blood that flows through it and diverting it towards the eye and the brain. It kept on tweaking it until it reached optimal value of 15 degrees celcius above the rest of the head.
Now, you see, it could have gone about it so many different ways. Develop new organ, or change shape, like before. It didn't improve overall blood circulation, or move to warmer waters, close to the surface. It didn't develop special scale, or eyelid, or extra layer of fat under the skin. It literally just modded existing part to a new thing. No other ocean animal had it, the proto shark-o-swordfish couldn't see it anywhere else, so it just simply flipping hotrodded the tech out of nowhere. And then spent the next gazillion years being just as stupid and "unevolved" as before.

And that's all right. It doesn't surprise us. We have parts inside of our own body, that we are not 100% certain of what they do and what exactly they control in the complicated system, we couldn't observe them at work in other animals, without biolabs, gene mappings and microscopes but we are fine with the notion that our ancestors felt so much unexplained need for them, that at some point, the code carried between generations just opened another tab, started another branch of development and eventually after some time we grew a specific part inside of us. Usually one we didn't know even existed up until some 20-30 years ago and we had to spend few decades to reverse backtrack what it actually produces for what else to work. But we want it to be our decision. Like losing monkey tail or re-encoding ourselves to keep hair in most unwanted places of our body for no other reason but to stink, while in the same time, involuntarily losing hair where we would actually prefer to have it always. Evolution, in those cases, just feels like a better explanation than someone screwing around with the code every few million years to change or improve it. And all of that, mostly, because believing otherwise, would involve some magical Jew or old bearded man stretching his index finger in act of creation, or worse yet - a flipping Erich Von Daeniken telling you porkies about ancient space pilots landing in Nazca.
 
Last edited:
Well, although I do prefer evolution to a story about intelligent design myself, the former is not exactly watertight. For example - it relies too often on the advanced elements of the chain self evolving on demand to "tech" it couldn't possibly self invent. Some sharks, for example, evolved from proto sharkie at some point, not much brain on that fish, but it managed to self develop fast "nose". Ocean was vast, there wasn't enough food, it had to be fast, so it evolved its body. That's fine, happens all the time in nature apparently.
However, soon enough after the nose grew, it turned out, sharkie (a specific kind, swordfish protoplast) made a bit of an error and overdid focusing on the whole "speed" issue as all of the streamlining of the frontal details had a bit of a side effect in its natural habitat - the fishy suffered from frosty vision and brain freeze in cold waters when moving so fast.
So instead of spending next few thousand years widening its head, or becoming slow moving vegetarian, the shark/swordfish protofish managed to wish special tech into life - heated windscreen. It wanted to see well so badly, that at some point one of the muscles that moves its eyes started produce heat by warming up the blood that flows through it and diverting it towards the eye and the brain. It kept on tweaking it until it reached optimal value of 15 degrees celcius above the rest of the head.
Now, you see, it could have gone about it so many different ways. Develop new organ, or change shape, like before. It didn't improve overall blood circulation, or move to warmer waters, close to the surface. It didn't develop special scale, or eyelid, or extra layer of fat under the skin. It literally just modded existing part to a new thing. No other ocean animal had it, the proto shark-o-swordfish couldn't see it anywhere else, so it just simply flipping hotrodded the tech out of nowhere. And then spent the next gazillion years being just as stupid and "unevolved" as before.

And that's all right. It doesn't surprise us. We have parts inside of our own body, that we are not 100% certain of what they do and what exactly they control in the complicated system, we couldn't observe them at work in other animals, without biolabs, gene mappings and microscopes but we are fine with the notion that our ancestors felt so much unexplained need for them, that at some point, the code carried between generations just opened another tab, started another branch of development and eventually after some time we grew a specific part inside of us. Usually one we didn't know even existed up until some 20-30 years ago and we had to spend few decades to reverse backtrack what it actually produces for what else to work. But we want it to be our decision. Like losing monkey tail or re-encoding ourselves to keep hair in most unwanted places of our body for no other reason but to stink, while in the same time, involuntarily losing hair where we would actually prefer to have it always. Evolution, in those cases, just feels like a better explanation than someone screwing around with the code every few million years to change or improve it. And all of that, mostly, because believing otherwise, would involve some magical Jew or old bearded man stretching his index finger in act of creation, or worse yet - a flipping Erich Von Daeniken telling you porkies about ancient space pilots landing in Nazca.

By what you've posted there, it sounds like you don't understand how evolution works at all. The sharks didn't just decide on their "heated windscreen" as you call it. The ones that couldn't survive died, and the ones with minor genetic mutations (like, for example, a partially heated windscreen, via whatever mechanism the sharks use) were better suited for the environment, and survived more often, thus passing on those genes to their offspring. Repeat that over a long enough time period, and you get animals which are incredibly well adapted to their surroundings.
 
Well, although I do prefer evolution to a story about intelligent design myself, the former is not exactly watertight.

so true man... same with mavity... while I prefer the theory of mavity to 'Intelligent falling' the former isn't exactly watertight... there is that total breakdown between Newtonian mechanics and Quantum mechanics for a start... tis a 'theory in crisis' really...
 
Fish story

If you think about evolution as a random process it's not too hard to understand. You're writing like there is a specific process that guides evolution - a constant improvement from one fish to the next. It's not like that.

A random mutation in the genetic make-up of the fish made one of it's muscles slightly warmer. And it could then move a little faster or see a little better. All that mutation has to do is give it a slight advantage over fish without the mutation. it might be 1% less likely to die than fish without the mutation, so more of the mutated fish survive than others. These breed and now the population has a bigger portion of fish with the mutation. It's easy to see that once the advantage came about, quite soon the entire population would have the mutation. Then another mutation comes along that causes the muscle to have a slightly higher temperature and therefore a slightly better chance of survival/breeding rate. The mutation takes over.

At some point having too high a temperature becomes a slight disadvantage and the fish is more likely to die because of it. Maybe it now doesn't have enough stamina to swim for as long as the new brain freeze stopping gland will allow it, due to the energy going into keeping the gland heated. This mutation dies out and the speed a fish can travel using this new "invention" reaches an equilibrium. There you have an extremely fine-tuned temperature that seems as though it was perfectly set. It's really just the result of millions of years of trial and error, supported by positive feedback.
 
The sharks didn't just decide on their "heated windscreen" as you call it. The ones that couldn't survive died, and the ones with minor genetic mutations (like, for example, a partially heated windscreen, via whatever mechanism the sharks use) were better suited for the environment, and survived more often, thus passing on those genes to their offspring.
That's the great part, right? It wasn't the examples that migrated to warmer waters, hunted closer to surface, got fatter or stopped running fast across vast distances all together to munch on a bit of a plankton. Like other fish would, The entire swordfish species and their predatory habits as we know them are purely down to a statistically super rare model with a case of chronic twitchy eye. Plus mutation of the blood circulation that could benefit from that twitchy eye. In both eyes. It does not feel far fetched at all. Certainly not as much as ID alternatives.
 
Six. Duh. :p

Even as a kid, that struck me as weird after I looked up what 'omnipotent' means. Why would an omnipotent god need to rest? Nothing would require any effort.

Now I realise that the relevant question is "Why didn't they make up a 7 day creation story instead of a 6 day one?" The 7 day week comes from the number of moving lights you can see in the sky from Earth with the naked eye, so it would have made much more sense to make the creation story 7 days rather than 6 days and a nonsensical rest day.
 
[..] If the big bang theory is correct and all the matter in our universe was created in an instance and that nothing existed before it then one wonders and questions where the big bang happened.[..]

It's stranger than that.

If the big bang created space, then the question of where it happened is meaningless - before the big bang, there wasn't anywhere for anything to happen in. Which leads on to the next part - if time was created with space (which does seem to be the case), then "before the big bang" is equally meaningless for the same reason.

So the universe has existed everywhere since the beginning of time, apparently.
 
Just as a quick pointer, mutations are random, evolution is distinctly non-random.

Apologies for being a jerk, it's just a pet peeve :p
 
I'm not trying to be snarky. It's just that when your average joe hears the word "theory" when used in a scientific context, they think it means it's still just some idea. Really, "theory" is as solid as you get in science. Unproven ideas are hypotheses, proven ideas are theories. If you don't believe in evolution, why believe in anything science has taught us? There are plenty of things that aren't immediately observable that we take for granted and don't question the scientific research behind these things.

Plenty of scientists have considered intelligent design and immediately thrown it out due to lack of evidence supporting it. I guess you could say intelligent design is a conjecture at best. It's certainly not a theory.

Exactly this. Too many people get confused by the most basic of things in every day life as it is so I guess thinking they'd understand the difference between a scientific theory and one of the standard sense was probably too much to ask for, even when informed which is which!
 
Just as a quick pointer, mutations are random, evolution is distinctly non-random.

Apologies for being a jerk, it's just a pet peeve :p

Both are random the non-randomness is natural selection that prunes most of randomness out of evolutionary process as useful traits will make them more able to survive, reproduce and their offsprong to survive.
 
Last edited:
As in:

Life = Evolution
Skin colour = Mutation (lighter skin colours are the mutations oh snap!! :p)

:cool:
 
Even as a kid, that struck me as weird after I looked up what 'omnipotent' means. Why would an omnipotent god need to rest? Nothing would require any effort.

If God is omnipotent, can he create a rock so heavy that he can't lift it?

If he can't create it then he is not omnipotent, if he can create it but can't lift it again he can't be omnipotent either. ;)
 
What happens when the unstoppable force hits the unmoveable object?

The unmoveable object sits their pretty whilst the force travels through it.
 
Back
Top Bottom