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Darwinism is made up

Started by Whitney, December 18, 2010, 04:28:17 PM

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JoeBobSmith

#15
:verysad:
JoeBobSmith

hackenslash

Quote from: "JoeBobSmith"I can accept evolution as a concept but not as a purpose.

That might be because it isn't a purpose. It's a process.

QuoteIt seems to me as a means but with no end

Exactly right. It's a continuum. It does have an end, but not in and of itself. It has no target, no goal, and no end point inherent. It will end, because the universe will end, but that's not actually inherent in biological evolution.

Quoteso even though i get it, I don't know what to make of it

What should you make of it, in your opinion? It just is, that is all!
There is no more formidable or insuperable barrier to knowledge than the certainty you already possess it.

JoeBobSmith

#17
 ;)
JoeBobSmith

Tank

Quote from: "JoeBobSmith"who told you the universe will end?  i have not heard this

Only the important people were on the circulation list  ;)
If religions were TV channels atheism is turning the TV off.
"Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt." ― Richard P. Feynman
'It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.' - Terry Pratchett
Remember, your inability to grasp science is not a valid argument against it.

LegendarySandwich

Quote from: "JoeBobSmith"who told you the universe will end?  i have not heard this
Read this.

joeactor

MP: thx for suggesting "Creation"

Whitney: thx for the Netflix link - it's on my queue now...

Quote from: "JoeBobSmith"I can accept evolution as a concept but not as a purpose.
It seems to me as a means but with no end
so even though i get it, I don't know what to make of it

... so, does this mean you accept that evolution occurs?

Whitney

Quote from: "JoeBobSmith"who told you the universe will end?  i have not heard this

And before that happens or even if it doesn't happen the earth will be destroyed by the Sun when it becomes a Red Giant....so either way evolution on Earth will stop some day.  Might even stop sooner if Earth gets hit by a gigantic meteor that wipes out everything instead of just part of life...lots of things can put an end to life.

Tank

Quote from: "Whitney"
Quote from: "JoeBobSmith"who told you the universe will end?  i have not heard this

And before that happens or even if it doesn't happen the earth will be destroyed by the Sun when it becomes a Red Giant....so either way evolution on Earth will stop some day.  Might even stop sooner if Earth gets hit by a gigantic meteor that wipes out everything instead of just part of life...lots of things can put an end to life.

It would have to be one hell of an impactor to sterilise the Earth now. Extremophile bacteria have been found in rock miles underground living off chemical energy.
If religions were TV channels atheism is turning the TV off.
"Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt." ― Richard P. Feynman
'It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.' - Terry Pratchett
Remember, your inability to grasp science is not a valid argument against it.

Whitney

Quote from: "Tank"
Quote from: "Whitney"
Quote from: "JoeBobSmith"who told you the universe will end?  i have not heard this

And before that happens or even if it doesn't happen the earth will be destroyed by the Sun when it becomes a Red Giant....so either way evolution on Earth will stop some day.  Might even stop sooner if Earth gets hit by a gigantic meteor that wipes out everything instead of just part of life...lots of things can put an end to life.

It would have to be one hell of an impactor to sterilise the Earth now. Extremophile bacteria have been found in rock miles underground living off chemical energy.

Ya, it would basically have to be big enough to literally destroy the planet...but it could happen.

hackenslash

Quote from: "Tank"
Quote from: "Whitney"
Quote from: "JoeBobSmith"who told you the universe will end?  i have not heard this

And before that happens or even if it doesn't happen the earth will be destroyed by the Sun when it becomes a Red Giant....so either way evolution on Earth will stop some day.  Might even stop sooner if Earth gets hit by a gigantic meteor that wipes out everything instead of just part of life...lots of things can put an end to life.

It would have to be one hell of an impactor to sterilise the Earth now. Extremophile bacteria have been found in rock miles underground living off chemical energy.

I wrote an article a while back for the sci-writing competition at RDF before it closed down that included some info on this very subject, including a small contribution from Calilasseia in the form of some calculation of the thermodynamic exchanges involved in a bolide impact of a given size. Here's the relevant bit:

Quote from: "hackenslash"Bolide Impact

This is going to feel a little like cheating, but the following is what actually inspired this essay.

Probably the single biggest threat to life on Earth, notwithstanding climate change and the aforementioned pandemic, is that which is widely regarded as having brought the age of the dinosaurs to an end.

In 2005, US Congress mandated NASA to identify 90% of large Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) by 2020. In a release yesterday, 18th February 2010, Alexis Madrigal, writing on behalf of the UK's Spaceguard Centre, discussed a report, Defending Planet Earth: Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies , released by the National Research Council, in which it was suggested that this is not an attainable goal with current technology and funding. In reality, it is not actually known how many such objects are up there, and estimating the risk to humans is problematic. Michael A'Hearn, of the University of Maryland, writes:
Our estimates of the risk could easily be wrong by a factor of two or three, I don’t think they are wrong by a factor of 10, but the boundaries, again, haven’t been explored.” [10]


He also discusses the problems of understanding the physics of an impact, saying:
The first thing we need to do is understand what the hazard is. That’s partly finding them and partly understanding what their effect is. We have to understand in more detail how we’d mitigate against them.


A few days ago on the forum, a discussion arose in which a particular poster was discussing what he thought would be the best traits granted by evolution in the event that four (count them) Texas sized bolides were heading for Earth from different directions. He was suggesting that intelligence would grant the best strategies for survival. Given that mathematics is not my strong point, I asked Calilasseia if he would mind doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations with regard to the thermodynamic exchanges involved in such an impact, and he has kindly given permission to use them here.

Quote from: "The Blue Wingéd One"The volume of a bolide the size of Texas is given by:

V = (4/3)Ï€r3 where r = 622,000 m

This gives us a value for the volume of our bolide of 1.008 × 1018 m3.

Now, to make life simpler, let's assume that we're dealing with an iron meteorite. Iron has a density of 7,873 Kg m-3 (Source: the properties of the elements table from Kaye & Laby's Tables of Physical & Chemical Constants), therefore an iron meteorite will have a mass of 7.936 × 1021 Kg, to a reasonable level of approximation. A more precise calculation would take into account that an iron meteorite actually contains around 6.7% nickel (source: the abundances of the elements table from the same source as above), and since nickel is denser than iron, leaving it out means that we're underestimating the mass, and erring on the conservative side again. By comparison, the mass of the Earth is 5.9736 × 1024 Kg, so we're dealing with a body that is 0.13% the mass of the Earth, which means that already, it's a significant mass.

Bolides typically move through space at speeds of around 20 Km s-1, and so, we can calculate the kinetic energy of such a bolide once we know its mass, courtesy of E = ½mv2. Feeding m = 7.936 × 1021 Kg and v = 20,000 m s-1 into this formula, we arrive at a value for the kinetic energy of 1.587 × 1030 Joules.

Now, if a bolide of this mass impacted the Earth at that speed, and atmospheric braking wouldn't do much to slow it down, a significant fraction of that energy would be converted to heat upon being brought to a halt in an inelastic collision. Even if we assume conservatively that only 50% of that energy is converted to heat as it impacts the Earth and comes to a halt, that still leaves us with 7.935 × 1029 Joules to play with. By comparison, the Tsar Bomba, the largest thermonuclear weapon ever tested in the atmosphere by humans, was puny - it had a yield of 50 megatons, or 2.1 × 1017 Joules. Therefore, if a bolide the size of Texas impacts the Earth, it will yield as much heat energy as 3.779 trillion Tsar Bomba H-bombs.

That amount of heat energy is going to have some significant effects to put it mildly. Let's assume for the sake of argument, again a radical simplification, that all the heat energy is dumped into the bolide mass itself, prior to transfer to the surroundings. Iron has a specific heat capacity by mass of 442 J Kg-1 K1-, which is the amount of heat energy required to raise the temperature of 1 Kg of iron by 1 Kelvin. So, to derive the temperature change T, given a specific heat capacity C, a mass m and an energy input E, we have:

T = E/Cm

Feeding our data into the formula above, we have that the temperature change of the bolide will be approximately 225,000 kelvins.[11]


Obviously, this is an extreme example, and just a bit of fun here, but the risk is very real. Cali sums up with the following, which seems a good place to leave this topic.
Quote from: "The Blue Wingéd One"I'd say that if just one bolide the size of Texas hits Planet Earth, we are, not to put too fine a point on it, fucked.

The full essay, which has some pretty good stuff about 2012, including the real meaning of the Mayan interpretation, according to archaeologists.

Edit: Broken links.
There is no more formidable or insuperable barrier to knowledge than the certainty you already possess it.

defendor

There is dissension between the idea of creation and the relative low probability of evolution.
I believe to understand Augustine

Einstein - You can talk about the ethical foundation of science, but you can't talk about the scientific foundation of ethics

C.S. Lewis

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning. If there were no light in the universe, thus no creatures

Whitney

Quote from: "defendor"There is dissension between the idea of creation and the relative low probability of evolution.

It's things like the above which are so frustrating about creationists...you all don't even research outside of the creationist propaganda.

Everyone other than young earth creationists accepts evolution...which pretty much means everyone who is not a fundamentalist christian living in the United States accepts evolution as true because it has mountains of supporting evidence and in absolutely no way does it conflict with belief in a god.  There is no actual dissension.

More than once has evolution been proven to be solid science in the US court system.

Quote2005 - In September, parents in the Dover Area School District legally challenged intelligent design after a statement read to students claimed that there are "gaps" in evolution and that intelligent design is an alternative about which they can learn from Of Pandas and People. In December, the federal court in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania issued a sweeping decision asserting that intelligent design is just another name for creationism, that it is not science, and that it cannot be taught as science in public schools.
Quote2005 - On December 20 the court in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the "Dover trial," issued its ruling that intelligent design is a form of creationism, and that the school board policy requiring the presentation of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution as an "explanation of the origin of life" thus violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. In his ruling, the judge wrote that intelligent design is not science and is essentially religious in nature.

Quote# 2007 - Pope Benedict XVI publishes Creation and Evolution, where he writes "This clash (between evolution and Creationism) is an absurdity because on one hand there is much scientific proof in favor of evolution, which appears as a reality that we must see and which enriches our understanding of life and being as such."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of ... ontroversy

Evolution happened and is happening...the entire field of modern biology rests on evolution being true.  The reason antibiotics quit working is because evolution is happening.  The reason new flu strains come around every year is because evolution is happening.  You need to educate yourself about topics before making claims, and here 's a great non-biased source (yes, it's a lot to read, but you have a lot to learn):

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/

defendor

evolution and creationism are both plausible ideas, but I think this is also the estrangement between theistic and deistic philosophies.  

When you say that a being could have created the universe in the order of a Theistic or Deistic God, you are assuming that time is a creation, for time is at the onset of the universe in motion.  So when you have an all-powerful being existing outside of time 'orchestrating the infinite', you have to make the case that the way evolution works in principles, is the way this deity has created it to be.
QuoteThe reason antibiotics quit working is because evolution is happening. The reason new flu strains come around every year is because evolution is happening.
So looking at these statements, you have orchestrated the arguments for reasons or purpose.  The reason or purpose of... is because of... pointing to the initial cause of evolution.  So if we are going to make a claim that an all-powerful God designed these natural processes to occur, it is not because of evolution, it is because the designer created it that way.  So the reason antibiotics quit working is because that is the way the creator designed it to be.  This changes the understanding of science and how it is to be perceived, thus the principles of evolution and creationism are incompatible in philosophy, but compatible within the premise of God. Evolution states itself as a principle of why outside of God, but only how within the premise of a God.  So it can be compatible but the premise of a God has to be established to further understand the purpose of evolution.
I believe to understand Augustine

Einstein - You can talk about the ethical foundation of science, but you can't talk about the scientific foundation of ethics

C.S. Lewis

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning. If there were no light in the universe, thus no creatures

JoeBobSmith

#28
:verysad:
JoeBobSmith

JoeBobSmith

#29
:verysad:
JoeBobSmith