The Truth About Evolution and Religion

Ecewpt for, you know, snowflakes. You know, where chaotically arranged water molecules spontaneously arrange themselves in an organized fashion, all without violating the laws of thermodynamics?That's just one example. There are others, beginning with all other crystals, all the way up to galactic superclusters. Complexity and order are perfectly natural.

Entropy of the overall system in evolution decreases, too.But that;s the whiole point - for your assertions to have any relevance, you have to show that even localized decreases in entropy are impossible within a larger system.Evolution doesn't violate thermodynamics for the same reason snowflakes don't - their systems are not closed. Life on Earth, you see, is receiving a rather large input of energy from the Sun on a daily basis. This means that the Earth's entropy decreases, even though the total entropy of the entire system that includes the Sun increases.The same thing happens in your own body, you know. If your system were closed, consisting of only your body (with no external energy sources from food, air, or water), your net entropy would increase to the point that life would cease and your body would start to decay. Your stomach acids would begin to digest your gut, your blood would pool and coagulate, etc. Entropy would increase, and your ordered structure would begin to fall into disorder.But your system is not closed. You consume food, breathe air, and drink water to provide energy and mass to keep your body running. Even though the net entropy of the entire system is actually increasing, by respiring you cause your body to temporarily decrease in entropy.Your argument is the same fundamental misunderstanding of what the laws of thermodynamics actually say and how they apply to the real world that we see from Creationists on a near-monthly basis. Your argument follows from a false premise, and therefore your conclusions are false as well.

Define "complexity" as you mean it in this context. You appear to be using it as some sort of explanation, but the word itself does not explain anything at all. Is a grain of rice more or less complex than a human being? Note that rice has orders of magnitude more genes than human cells.If by "complexity" you mean "the total number of features possessed by an organism, including expressed and unexpressed genes," then mutation can very obviously increase complexity, and has been directly observed to do so. Mutation is, after all, nothing more than a simple copy error; where AATG was supposed to be copied, instead you get ATAG or AATCG or ATTCGG or ATG or any other combination. The cumulative effect of these iterative copy errors results in a different genetic code with more, fewer, or simply different genes than the parent organism, and these differences taken as a whole comprise a net increase in variety.Note that this does not imply that more "complex" organisms are any better or worse than less "complex" organisms. Again, rice has orders of magnitude more genes than humans do, and by the above definition would qualify as far more "complex." There is no evolutionary ladder; there is only variety.If you mean something else when you use the word "complexity," please define it, and share how you can quantify whether "Complexity" is lost or gained. Red herrings. They have nothing to do with evolution, which is a process that only occurs when life already exists, and of course life could not exist without the Universe itself. The accuracy or inaccuracy of the Theory of Evolution in modeling the process by which life changes over time is completely separate from these topics.

Appeal to anunspecified authority. THis is a logical fallcay, and your reasoning is invalid. Says you. This is an assertion. Thus far, you have provided no evidence to support it. You haven't even defined what "complexity" means as it pertains to this discussion. False analogy. Mutations are not completely random. They function within the rules of chemistry, for one thing. There are far more letters in the alphabet than there are base pairs, for another. Finally, evolution is controlled by the undirected force of natural selection.I can write a computer algorithm that will randomly generate the phrase "to be or not to be" by starting with a randomly generated set of characters, iterating one or two more random characters at a time to create a set of offspring, and then selecting those that most closely match the desired result. It will finish within moments given current processing speeds.Here's a video of a compuer algorithm that uses purely random mutation guided by selection to assemble working clocks:Once again, your assertions are simply wrong. You are contradicted by reality. What you say cannot be done, is done.

That's not a definition. You haven't explained what "complexity" refers to. Watch:"The primary structure of a protein is magic because the location of each amino acid is known. Biological mechanism are magic for the same reason a TV set is magic. There is an addition amount of magic arising from the development of a fully grown adult from a single fertilized egg. "I find that substituting the word "magic" sometimes helps me see whether the subject I'm talking about is made less mysterious by my statements.What does knowing the location of each amino acid have to do with "complexity?" If I don't look at the protein, and thus don;t "know" where each amino acid is, is it less complex?Do you mean that the occurrence of structure defines complexity? That objects that are more structured and adhere to rigid rules of standardization are more complex than those that are not structured? So that an ice crystal is more "complex" than liquid water because the placement of each particle is structured in the crystal?Again I'll ask, is rice more or less complex than a human being, given that rice has orders of magnitude more genes than a human being?

We're getting closer.Quantify "complexity" or "order." I ask once more, is rice more or less complex than a human being, given that rice has orders of magnitude more genes than humans do? What defines the "amount" or "order" in a life form? Does a granite boulder, which contains countless ordered crystals where the "location" of each molecule of the crystals are "known," have more or less "complexity" than an amoeba? Is an elephant more or less "complex" than a duck-billed platypus? Is size related to "complexity?" Is "complexity" in life defined by the number of morphological features you can count? Or is it determined by genetics? How to you gauge the "complexity" of living vs. nonliving things?I'm not trying to bombard you with questions here. I'm simply pointing out that, while you're getting closer to a definition for "complexity," you have not provided a definition that is useful - we cannot look at two examples and tell whether Example 1 is more or less "complex" than Example 2, and by what amount. So far, it seems that if I ask you whether a person is more or less "complex" than a computer or a diamond or a snowflake or a grain of rice, you'll say that the person is "more complex," but I cannot fathom the rule you are using to determine why the person is "more complex."What I;m asking for when I ask you to define "complexity"is for you to enumerate the specific rule you use to ascertain an object's degree of "complexity," and how you compare it to the "compelxity" of other objects.For instance, if you were to ask me to define how I determined the relative mass of two objects, I would tell you that I compare their gravitational attraction using the constant of the Earth as a comparison, since mass causes gravitational attraction. An object with a greater mass will be pulled to the Earth with greater force than an object with lighter mass. This can be measured using a variety of tools, the easiest of which is a simple scale, and the mass is measured in grams (where 1 gram is the mass of a cubic centimeter of water at 4 degrees Celcius). This provides a numerical representation for the mass of a given object, and that number can be compared against those of other objects to determine which is the more massive.I have no idea what tool you use to measure "complexity." I have no idea what units you use. From all appearances, you seem to be subjectively deciding what is more or less "complex," not actually comparing an observable, quantifiable property. Do you see what I'm getting at?

I'm saying that you have not given me a definition of "complexity" functional enough to make that determination at all, one way or the other.How can I say "x is more complex than y" if I have no way of measuring how complex x is and how complex y is so that the two can be compared?Let me ask you: Is John taller than Dave?The answer is "I don't know; you haven't given me enough information."So too with what you're asserting. You claiming that some things are more "complex" than other things, and you've given us some words about "complexity," but you have no rule by which you can objectively establish the amount of "complexity" possessed by any given subject. It's like asking whether John is taller than Dave, without giving any method to measure the two for a comparison.I have no idea whether "a bacteria" is more or less "complex" than "a monkey." I have no way to measure either, because you have not given it.If you cannot measure the "complexity" of a given subject, it is then impossible to say whether that subject is any more or less "complex" than anything else.You certainly seem to think that "a monkey" is more "complex" than "a bacteria." You seem to have such confidence in that belief that you consider questioning it to be ridiculous. Can you tell us why you think that "a monkey" is more "complex" than "a bacteria?"Is it the fact that monkeys are multicellular, while bacteria are only a single cell? Is it the number of genes? The number of chromosomes? The number of morphological features?I need your method of measurement for "complexity" before I can say anything at all regarding what is more or less "complex" than anything else.