Hai guise, look! It's an iPhone! It must have evolved naturally from the random recombination of Timex watches!

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No that actually happened, the thing is living things are the only thing capable of the the complex evolution that turns single celled organisms into beavers, the metaphorical evolution that turned a clock into an IPhone required a human hand the entire time and only resembles biological evolution in metaphor.

So if I find a complex electronic device lying on the ground, I should naturally assume it has a creator somewhere who designed it. But if I see a MUCH more complex biological organism, I should of course assume that random chemicals mixing together for no particular reason did it just because... science.

We have evidence that the biological organism evolved without an intelligent creator, we also have evidence that the electronic device DOES have a creator. If we have evidence the cow evolved but the clock was created then it's best to assume it happened that way.

Have you actually seen an iPhone being assembled by a worker at Foxconn? Or have you just read about it and trusted that the text was telling the truth because it had no reason to lie? Or maybe you've seen a book of instructions given by the iPhone's creator describing how and why it was built?

Have you actually seen god create a horse? Or have you just read about it and trusted that the text was telling the truth because it had no reason to lie? Or maybe you've seen an ancient book written by a cave man trying to understand how the world works without any prior understanding of science, math, or anything that would give him any understanding of the world outside of whats in his dreams and hallucinations?

Right. So you know something as complex as an iPhone probably had to be designed by someone, and there's a book telling you how and why it was assembled. Something even more complex than an iPhone -- a human -- therefore also probably had to be designed by someone, and there's a book telling you how and why we were assembled.

Show me the evidence humans were created.

Your iPhone. When you come across one lying on the street, do you assume that it just came together randomly from a jumble of parts randomly bumping up against each other? Or do you assume it must have a creator?

holy megapixel, batman. Could you post smaller images please? you're killing my data plan on my satphone.

>I don't understand what reason is so clearly reason doesn't exist.

Look, your religious faith in Scientism is none of my concern. But don't try to pretend that you have logic on your side.

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Alright user. I know this is a complete shitpost, but I'm going to give you an actual answer anyway cause I have no will to live.
Here's the argument for the occurrence of evolution. Find an issue with it, and we'll talk.

Here are my assumptions:
1. Something that replicates itself will become more common, in proportion to how well it replicates itself.
2. Sometimes, when a thing replicates itself, it will make small errors.

Ok. I think both of those should be obvious. Now, lets imagine a world that contains some self-replicating objects. They multiply, and as they do, they make errors. Most of those errors break the self-replicator, and so that new variation becomes less common over time, simply because it cannot copy itself as the others can. Some errors, however, make the replicator better. These strains become more common over time.

So, in the absence of a contrary pressure, we would expect that, over time, the replicators would change, and that those changes would tend to be ones that assisted in the replication process.

I think it's clear that biological entities are well described by my assumptions. Therefor, we would expect to see change over time in biological entities, and expect those changes to make them better at reproducing.

This still leaves several questions:
1. How did the first self-replicators arise? This is a separate question, which we could talk about instead if you'd like.

2. Is this process of "evolution" over time enough to explain the full diversity of life on earth? We could talk this one over too.

Hope this helps.

Look, it's a loser with no life posting the same meme on Cred Forums for 15 fucking years. Grow up

If evolution occurs as a result of superior survival traits randomly occuring, what we should see in each ecological niche is a single best strategy emerging and out-competing everything else. Instead we see the exact opposite: massive explosions of speciation. There isn't just one colour of butterfly, there are thousands. Why? The superior-coloured butterfly should eventually emerge from random speciation, but it doesn't.

This argues that evolution is directed, and if that's the case, then who or what is directing it?

>mistakes logic for reason
you're just proving my point further

You don't know what god is how do you know it needs a creator?

When two species fill the same niche, they do wipe each other out. There are a lot more niches in the world than you might expect.

What's your response to my post, though? What's wrong with the logic?

I filled your moms niche with my dick

Can you name two species filling the exact same niche? I don't think all butterflies eat the same thing/live the same places/raise their young the same way, etc. Give an example, and we can talk about that.

There's nothing wrong with it, it's just tautological. Medieval theologians used similar axiomatic sets of reasoning to calculate the number of angels which could dance on the head of a pin. Once you set up your axiomatic conditions -- in this case, that viable speciation occurs through random mistakes in mitosis, though this has never once been observed -- you can construct entire elaborate theologies based on it.

Do I think a man in a toga and sandals waved his hand and poofed a bunch of badgers and brontosauruses out of smoke? No. I mean, I have no proof if didn't happen that way, so I'm not ruling anything out, but I also don't think things happen randomly. Certainly not things as complex as humans.

See, amoebas still exist. If everything evolved from the amoeba, why are there still amoebas? We out-evolved them, didn't we? If we didn't, then there's no ecological pressure to cause things to speciate. And if we did, then why did amoebas continue to survive?

Trees and grasses fill the same ecological niche, so much so that each has countermeasures against the other. Same thing with molds and yeasts. Yet in what I am assured are hundreds of millions of years, neither has eliminated the other.

Alright, so I didn't assume anything about speciation, but you seem to be asking question (2): can small, advantageous changes over time lead to the full diversity of life on earth? If you agree that's what you're asking, we can continue with that.

As for the "randomness" argument, very complicated things can result from simple rules, and long amounts of time.

As for amoebas, though some small changes are strictly better than others, the vast majority are not directly comparable. Take, for instance, the classic case of the galapagos finches. Within that population, some individuals (randomly and over a very long time), started to develop beaks good for picking berries. Other individuals retained their original beak shape designed to crack and eat nuts. Since the mixed children of the berry eaters and the nut eaters couldn't eat berries or nuts, they died, so there was little gene transfer. Since it was disadvantageous to create such offspring, eventually, the two groups stopped mating altogether and diverged. Note: the original finches still survived. We cannot eat what an amoeba eats (other tiny microorganisms), and it can't eat what we eat. So we can both find success.

We have so many junk parts in our body at this point (wisdom teeth, random organs, etc...) that tells me whoever "designed" us is a fucking brainless retard.

Trees and grasses do not fill the same niche. Grass can live in soil trees cannot survive in. Grass can survive with relatively less light and water, and so can survive even on the forest floor beneath trees. They do compete for some shared resources, as you point out, but that doesn't mean they're direct competitors.

It's possible for grass and trees to share the same space and both successfully reproduce. Where tree dominates, grass has a harder time, but not an impossible one, and vice versa.

It's less like a race for these two plants (where only one species can win), and more akin to searching for a job. There are many spots to fill, and each one requires a very specific combination of skills and talents.

It's difficult to argue with you because you come at this from a whole set of assumptions which have to be unpacked, assumptions you can't see because you've had them your whole life. For instance, you've accepted as a given that all of these processes (for example, the random knocking around of atoms from cosmic rays) just... happen, and that the Universe just happened to be randomly set up in such a way for no particular reason that these errors in transcription would result in, say, the Sistine Chapel.

Yet we look around us and see no other signs of life anywhere in the entire Universe, where our logic tells us we ought to be seeing life swarming everywhere. And it's not just the absence of life, but odd discrepancies everywhere we look. Why is the entire Universe moving in a Dark Flow to one particular spot? Why does matter so massively outnumber anti-matter?

Yes, you can come up with explanations for everything, one by one, assigning random chance to each. Yet according to strict logic, the entire Universe is most likely to be just an illusion in the mind of a dying Boltzmann brain floating in empty space.

I look at the Universe and complex life and both my reason and my intuition say it was designed. By whom or by what, I won't venture to say.

But game theory tells us that one or the other should eventually develop a best strategy and destroy the other. That's supposedly how passive evolution works: the world is a war of all against all, and devil take the hindmost. Yet instead of a single victor emerging, we see the exact opposite happening again and again, with wild flourishes of speciation everywhere. Even in the most ridiculously extremophile conditions like ocean vents, we see astounding speciation all occupying the same unique niche.

Look. I'm not trying to explain everything. Science can't explain everything. But it can, and absolutely does, explain the complexity of life on earth.

What I'm saying is, once life occurred, no miracles are needed to explain the rest.

Given a world which contains things that reproduce, and in which small errors sometimes occur, we should *always* expect evolution. If more than one niche exists, we should *always* expect speciation.

That the world is filled with vast diversity is no surprise. It requires no waving of the hands to explain, just a little thought.

lol home schooled

>I have absolutely no scientific knowledge of the mechanism of evolution as I refuse to look into it.
>Mostly because I'm scared it'll all make sense and I'll have to face the reality that creationism is laughable
>Feel qualified to mock evolution anyway

haha okay bud

And you can just as easily say, once an all-powerful Creator exists, no randomness is required to explain diversity and speciation. It all depends on which axioms you choose as starting conditions, and by definition axioms can't be proven, simply stated. And I happen to find a Creator more aesthetically pleasing than idiot clockwork randomly smashing things together until you get gerbils and ankylosauruses.

This

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Look, there is no best species in evolution, no "most evolved", or "overall winner". The world is not a war against all. In fact, the most successful strategies have been cooperation.

Just like in the economy. We're all looking for money, largely competing. Companies exist solely to compete for this one resource. So why hasn't one corporation won? Simple: game theory doesn't work that way. It never did.

How would a tree go about "destroying" grass? Grass can grow where trees go. They can share the land and soil. Even if trees were 100% successful, and covered the whole surface of the earth, grass could still survive. It's clear they're in very different niches.

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Funny thing, turns out that a lot of that "junk" DNA is turning out to have functions no one suspected, like error correction. And the appendix serves as an emergency reservoir for friendly gut fauna. It's almost like arrogant, know-it-alls with religious faith in Scientism might not understand everything.

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>How would a tree go about "destroying" grass?
There are several species of trees that won't allow anything to grow below them.
The Eucalypt, for instance.

You just named an organ that has a use. Did you know that the heart is used as an emergency device to make sure your blood doesn't coagulate and flows to the brain?

Let me know when you come up with a reason why we have widsom teeth.

Their original design was to push teeth to fill in gaps from early tooth loss.

Here's the thing, though. Even in such a world, with an all powerful creator, evolution would still occur. Evolution is not inconsistent with a god. Instead, it requires just two axioms. They have been listed above: the existence of things that replicate, and the existence of small errors in replication.

You might notice something about those two axioms: they are testable. You can go out into the world and actually see if they're true. And so, we have. And it turns out that they are true: as you yourself are good evidence for. So it is possible, and actually relatively straightforward, to show that evolution is happening as we speak.

But what about the times before we had measurements? We can't go out and test that. Well, for one thing, we sort of can test it. All the evidence we find around the earth: fossils, the surprising similarities of animal genomes, the animals all over the world in the process of speciation; all point to evolution having happened in the past, back to the very beginning of life itself.

Still, though, you might instead postulate that a creator had chosen to set the world in order in *exactly* the right way to be completely indistinguishable from a world in which evolution differentiated all species.

The question though is: why? Take for instance, mountains. I, personally, think that plate techtonics raised the mountains. You could instead postulate that god made them to look exactly like plate techtonics made them. Or, for instance, the sun. I think that gravity caused the sun to coalesce and shine. Maybe god just made it look that way though. Or for instance, this morning I woke up, opened my closet, and found my clothes there. I think they're there since I put them there yesterday. Perhaps, though, god created the world three hours ago, and simply inserted that memory into my mind.

Why explain something that's already explained?

>original

implies change

Then why don't you accept the most logical and reasonable and likely explanation, that you are a Boltzmann brain which just materialized whole and choate a moment ago complete with memories?

And why do we have tooth loss?
And that works so well for third world dwellers, doesn't it? That is completely fabricated

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And yet, forests containing Eucalyptus also contain grass. Clearly, they aren't competing for exactly the same resources.

?? What's your point

is trolling...point is you type and get angry

Incidentally, and for the record, while I believe there is a Design, I don't necessarily believe in a Designer. I think anyone who sees the Golden Ratio understands that there is an implicit Design which underpins our Universe, whether one chooses to call it Yahweh or Tao.

My existence is completely consistent with the world being real. Why would I need another explanation?

Also, our current cosmology deems Boltzmann brains unlikely.

Find me Timexs that fuck and we can have this conversation.

A Boltzmann brain requires less energy and complexity than an entire Universe, by many orders of magnitude. It is therefore far more likely that you are a Boltzmann brain than that there is an entire Universe.

>underpin
academic
nerd
Hi!

>Design

Well sounds plausible to me. Disprove this theory faggots
>Protip you can't

I know exactly what it means. The Taoists refer to the Great Mother as that which gives birth to the Tao, the Void from which all possibility emerges. Science tends to refer to this as quantum foam. Design determines which probabilities rise to the level of perceptibility and which do not.

That's not how probability or QP works.

Look, the (a la Decarte) fact that technically "nothing can be proven" doesn't mean that you can choose to believe whatever you want and expect the results to be the same.

If you want an admission, you can have one: I assume that the universe exists. Personally, I think that's fair, but that's up to you to disagree.

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"design" denotes a designer it is integral to its definition

> while I believe there is a Design
> I don't necessarily believe in a Designer

is folly. If there was not a designer it is not a design

Entropy requires that when selecting between any two possible events, the event which requires the smallest possible fluctuation of quantum probability be selected. It requires a fluctuation of quantum probability many orders of magnitude smaller for a brain to pop into existence from quantum foam than for an entire Universe to do the same. Therefore you are a Boltzmann brain for the same reason you claim there is no Design.