Thanks for the quick response Infinity. Let's look again at some of the things you have said.
Infinity writes:
Would you please NOT quote only PART of my sentence? If you'd read the whole piece before writing this, you would have understand that what I meant was that the chances of all the POSITIVE mutations that lead to a light-sensitive spot are nihil.
Where to begin. Ok, I'll start here. If you read thread #174 by Mammuthus you'll "see" (ha...get it...see...ha) quite a bit about the evolution of the eye, so I will not really address that issue myself (thank you Mammuthus for saving me the trouble).
I'm going to ignore mutations for the time being, and instead focus on probabilities. You keep talking about the low probabilities of "positive" (whatever the hell that means) mutations, and it has become apparent to me that you really don't understand the evolutionary processes. I think the biggest area of misconception on your part is looking at the end product (the eye, for example) and then working backwards to look at the probabilities of the needed mutations occurring. You can't do that Infinity. You seem to think that we "needed" vision, but because mutations are random (in a sense), and positive mutations almost never occur, we certainly could not have gotten them (eyes) without Gods help. Correct? In a nut shell, the difference between creationists and evolutionary biologists is that you say God wanted us to have vision, therefore he gave us eyes, whereas we say that because "the eye" did evolve, we have vision. You say that vision was the goal of God, whereas we say that vision was not a goal, but rather it was just a lucky "accident", meaning that at that time in evolutionary history a light detector gave some sort of reproductive advantage to those that possessed it and was hence passed on to subsequent generations.
Perhaps another example would help here. I once attended a presentation that was going to provide scientific evidence in support of creationism. By the way, the talk was about 4 months ago and I'm still waiting for the scientific portion of the evidence, but that's neither here nor there. I can't recall the presentors name, so I'll just call him "joe". Anyway, one of joe's arguments against evolution followed along the same lines as your eye example. Rather than the eye, though, he talked about the protein hemoglobin, a chain of 539 ammino acids arranged in a specific sequence. Alter that sequence and you no longer have a properly functioning hemoglobin molecule (sickle-cell anemia, for example). So what is the probability against hemoglobin having evolved? Let's see, there are 20 different amino acids important in protein synthesis and hemoglobin contains 539 of those amino acids in a specific sequence. So if I remember correctly, you take the number of amino acids and raise it to a power that is equal to the length of the sequence. That means you have 20 raised to the 539th power! (Actually it's 1/20 X 1/20 X 1/20... repeated five-hundred thirty nine times, but a big positive number looks a lot better). It's an astronomically huge number. According to joe it is a number many times greater than the number of atoms in the entire Universe. Obviously, hemoglobin could not have evolved by random chance mutations. God musta did it. Is that right Infinity? Creationists look at the end product and then calculate the probability of the event. Sure sounds good, and it looks nice on paper. Just imagine, the number 20 followed by 539 zeros! Holy crap...no way it coulda happened by chance...thank goodness for God, for without him we would not have hemoglobin.
But guess what...you can't do it that way Infinity. You cannot look at the protein hemoglobin (for example), with its 539 amino acids arranged in a specific sequence, and then calculate the probability of that sequence occurring. By that method, I can look at any long sequence and demonstrate that it is so complex and highly improbable that it had to be by design. For example, if, during rush hour in Detroit, you could take a snap shot of all the vehicles on all the roads, look at their specific sequence, and then calculated the probability of that specific sequence occurring, you would get a probability against it so gigantic that the only possible explanation would be that God arranged those vehicles on the roads in that specific sequence. There is simply no other reasonable explanation.
Do you understand, Infinity? So again, the creationists claim (based on deceitful statistics) would be that only God could have given us hemoglobin, whereas evolutionary biologists would say that at some point in the past a squence assembled that was beneficial to the organism that possessed it and therefore passed it on to the next generation.
Infinity writes:
The chance that a so-called light-sensitive spot suddenly is made due to some RANDOM changes in the DNA is (almost) 0.
How else can I explain this? Let me try it this way. An event is going to happen. Let's call this event a mutation. Ok, now we know that it is going to happen, this event, it's a 100% certainty. Let's say, for the sake or argument, that there are one trillion possible outcomes for this event. Ok, boom, the event occurred. The chances of getting the outcome we did (whatever it may have been) was one in one trillion. According to your logic, it could not have happened...the odds against it were too great. By following evolutionary principles, I say that the event itself was a certainty, but the outcome was unpredictable. So if we relate this back to the eyepsot mutation, you say because the chances were so low that that particular event was going to happen, that it couldn't have occurred without God. I say that that particular mutation just happened to be the one that did occur (after all, it had the same chance of occurring as any other), and had it been any another, perhaps rather than vision evolving, we would have developed telepathy. This is an enormously oversimplification, but I only offer it as a means of explaining why you cannot look at the final product and then calculate the chances of getting there.
Infinity writes:
At least you got me convinced you still have a monkey-like brain in you, but let's clear this one up for you.
Yes, and you also have a monkey-like brain. We all have monkey-like brains, in that we all share a common ancestor. I just choose to use mine to aquire knowledge and will continue to do so as we learn more and more about the world in which we live, whereas you apparently use yours to blindly follow and believe a 2000 year old book and ignore anything that goes against it.
Infinity writes:
Well, here's the buzz: the chance alone that random mutations in the DNA of some organism will create a light-sensitive spot is already as IMPROBABLE as a monkey that builds a computer out of rubbish, whithout ever having seen one.
I think I answered this in the above tome.
Infinity writes:
Understand it now?
What I understand is that you have no idea of what understanding the ToE actually entails.
Infinity writes:
And I never mentioned anything about a computer building monkeys.
I think you mis-read the sentence. Here it is again: "Is there some new aspect of the ToE that deals with computer building monkeys?" Notice that there is no letter "a" after the word "with". What I meant was a type of monkey that evolved to assemble (build) computers.
Infinity writes:
"Micro-evolution" does occur, that's right. We see various types of cats: all mutations of some sort of pre-cat. Same with dogs and a lot of other animals. But do you notice any change in upward direction (increased complexity)?
Wow! Try this simple math: Micro + micro + micro + micro +...repeated over thoudsands of generations... + micro = Macro! Also, please, go get Stephen Jay Goulds book "Full House" so you can read about complexity as it relates to evolution.
I have to stop know...my fingers are tired.
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