The Truth About Evolution and Religion

You come across sounding like a Martian.It's as if you understand Martian perfectly, but do not understand a word of English. So as you read these papers in English, you look up your English-Martian dictionary, and attempt to translate each word into Martian. So you successfully translate the words, but you never do get the gist of what is being said.In its own way, it is pretty funny. Reading your posts is a lot funnier than reading the Humor V thread, because you exhibit so much misunderstanding in almost every sentence.There's a tree in my back yard. Its shape is quite complex. So I measure all of the branches, and the points and angles at which they branched off. Then I compute the probability of such a complex branching pattern. It's about one chance in a gazillion. Should I say that the tree could not have grown?The mistake is to think that there is a particular goal, that the tree must branch in a particular way that is immensely improbable. But the tree didn't have to branch that way at all. If, during its growth, it branched differently, it would still be a tree and would still be similarly complex. The probability computation has no actual relevance to the tree being complex. Likewise, your probability computations have no actual relevance to the complexity of the biosphere. The species branching could have occurred in zillions of different ways, and each of those would have resulted in a complex biosphere.

Each deck has a chance of one in 52 factorial.The real problem here is the attempt to assign a probability based on the order of the deck. What the probability mostly depends on, is the procedure used to put the deck in that order. If the procedure was one based on a good randomization, then all possible orders have the same probability. If the procedure is to just collect the cards together after playing a round, and to not apply any randomization, then the probabilities are very different due to the orderings that arose during the playing of the last hand.

If you are looking at neo-Darwinism as a thermodynamics question, then you are totally misunderstanding it.The primary driving force of evolution is biological reproduction. People don't emphasize this because reproduction is so much taken for granted. So they talk of natural selection as a filter. But it is biological reproduction that forces things through that filter. And it is those biological processes and that biological reproduction that allows for self-organization, and that makes your thermodynamic arguments irrelevant.In a strict pedantic sense, you are right that neither mutation nor natural selection explain the evolution of complexity, but only if you look at them apart from the biology and biological reproduction that drives the evolution.Your whole argument is based on taking things out of context, and missing the importance of the biological processes that drive the system.

The question is what you are intending to say. What you are actually saying does not make a lot of sense. Indeed, 2LoT is not inconsistent with Darwinism.

Shall we take you as claiming that no starlight gets in, and no energy from the sun ever leaves?Granted, starlight is relatively small. But this is mostly beside the point. Nobody is denying that the sun will eventually "burn out", and when it does then the conditions for life and evolution on earth will no longer exist. That does not support what you have been claiming. That may be the probabilty of getting a specific protein. However, it is not the probability of getting a protein, and it does not have the significance that you seem to think it has.Edited by nwr, : spelling

What you have posted in Message 326 only shows that Darwinism will stop working in 5 billion years time, or so. It has no relevance to what is currently happening.

Actually, it isn't. In fact, probabilities are at most 1, so you are way off.If we assume that you really meant 1/52!, then you are still wrong as Straggler shows in Message 345. And if we assume that you intended an additional condition, that the hands were dealt completely randomly, then you are still wrong. In that case it should be You don't much help your credibility when you make such obvious mistakes.