Creationism vs Evolutionism

[otseng]

OK, give me reasons why evolutionism or creationism is right or wrong.

[Corvus]

First off, DNA is information.

Information is defined to be:

Information is a message, something to be communicated from the sender to the receiver, as opposed to noise, which is something that inhibits the flow of communication or creates misunderstanding.

http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Information


DNA is a blueprint for life, it is information for the construction of living organisms. Information can not come about from random events, so evolution can not explain the emergence of information from nothingness.


The theory of evolution violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that all things move from order to disorder. No order can naturally come from disorder. The Second Law is often called "the arrow of time" because all things progress towards less and less order with time.

Thus, DNA information can not come from random events. DNA is highly ordered information, and "the arrow of time" indicates that it will NOT increase in complexity, but decrease, which goes against evolution.

All biological systems are incredibly complex in their workings. The most elaborate machinery designed and built by human beings is no match for the most basic living cell. Irreducible complexity is a system that has several components, and for the system to function properly, all components must be present. If you look at an internal combustion engine, for example, there are hundreds of parts necessary for the engine to function. You can simplify the design only to a certain point, but there comes a point when the engine is irreducibly complex and cannot be simplified any further. Here, you will still have a few interacting parts, each of which are critical to the engine's function, and the removal of any single part will prohibit the engine from functioning. To build this engine, you need to design several parts to work together simultaneously. You cannot have a single part and have it "evolve" into a complex engine. For the engine to function, it must have all its parts that interact together. Evolution can not explain the existence of the separate elements that constitute complex living organisms. Even the basic cell has many many essential components necessary for its function.

All these questions - or rather, hypotheses - have been addressed previously. Considered every creationist who enters this thread, or any similar threads in an similar board, says "how can life come from nothing" and applies the law of thermodynamics wrongly, you can probably understand why I don't address the issue directly.

Pressing ctrl + f will bring up a find dialogue box that may help you find your answers quicker.

[otseng]

Admin note:
This was originally posted by jlamb in another thread. It has been placed here instead.

Creationism isn't just about life. It's about the cosmos as a whole.So I ask, is it possible to see any part of the cosmos as an artefact? Looking at the rocky surface of the moon, no one is likely to see that as an artificial object. It is seen as a merely natural object. A creationist will see it in the same way as a noncreationist. Hence creationists seem to be denying their own sense experience, denying what their eyes tell them. This implies that for ordinary sense experience the cosmos is not an artefact, and there is no creator of the cosmos.
From there its a short step to saying about living things that we don't actually see them as artefacts either. Who sees her pet dog as an artefact? Anyone out there?
So what is it with creationists? How do they explain their own experience? Is it a divine deception on them?

[Potato]

Corvus,

You posted:
"Why are we talking about the laws of thermodynamics anyway? Thermodynamics has to do with the behaviour of energy, not the progress of life. "

The Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to everything, not just heat. ALL systems naturally move towards disorder. In a closed system, entropy (the disorder) will NEVER decrease. The argument that the sun provides energy is highly flawed. Consider the sun within the system, and it is still a closed system. Here too entropy will increase. If you think sunlight will increase order, try standing under the hot sun for a few hours. You'll get sunburned because the sun damages your skin cells. Get sunburned too many times and you'll get skin cancer - the consequence of damaged DNA. Now you'll have me believe under this same sun DNA structured itself? Molecules organized themselves into meaningful information simply because of sunlight and energy added?

If you had bunch of wooden letters spread out on the floor randomly, and came back later to see they spelled a message "HI HOW ARE YOU TODAY?" would you assume those letters self organized, or that someone was there and organized them that way?

Everybody has opinions, scientists all have their complex, involved explanations and justification but really all it boils down to is:
A) Evolution is true
B) Evolution is false

By all that I have studied in mathematics and physics and in all my observations of this world, I came to the conclusion that evolution is false. That is all that I'm trying to show, what you do with that is up to you.

[Corvus]

The Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to everything, not just heat.

Then why is it called the Second Law of Thermodynamics?

ALL systems naturally move towards disorder. In a closed system, entropy (the disorder) will NEVER decrease.

The earth is not a closed system because sunlight (with low entropy) shines on it, and heat (with higher entropy) radiates off. This flow of energy, and the following change in entropy powers local decreases in entropy on earth.

Entropy is also not the same as disorder. Sometimes order increases as entropy increases and entropy can even be used to produce order, such as in the sorting of molecules by size. The law speaks about entropy specifically, not complexity.

I advise you to read the link from which I got the following extract:

It is only in isolated systems that entropy must increase. Systems that can exchange energy with their surroundings have no such restriction. For example, water can freeze into ice (becoming more ordered and decreasing its entropy) by giving up heat to its surroundings (this increases the entropy of the surroundings, of course). In the case of the Earth, the Sun is a major source of energy, and the Earth also radiates energy into space. One consequence of thermodynamics is that, when energy comes from a "hot" source (like the Sun) and is output to a "cold" reservoir (like space), it can be used to do work, which means that "complexity" or "order" can be produced. The main point is that, for a non-isolated system, an increase in "complexity" (to the extent one can connect that concept with the thermodynamic entropy, which is far from straightforward for living creatures) does not necessarily indicate a violation of the 2nd law. A good example is the development of a human fetus into an adult; this is the production of a more thermodynamically complex system but involves no violation of the laws of thermodynamics.

If the increasing complexity of life violates the second law, then it was violated when creation began, and with every subsequent birth.

Did Stanley Miller's experiment synthesizing amino acids never occur because it violated the law of thermodynamics?

If you think sunlight will increase order, try standing under the hot sun for a few hours. You'll get sunburned because the sun damages your skin cells.

An abundance of energy over the useable supply can hurt a fully energised construct. This proves nothing. What will be just as unhealthy is not having any sun at all.

Get sunburned too many times and you'll get skin cancer - the consequence of damaged DNA. Now you'll have me believe under this same sun DNA structured itself? Molecules organized themselves into meaningful information simply because of sunlight and energy added?

Simplifying the process so that it appears absurd does not debunk the theory. Adam and Eve would have been just as burnt by sunlight as we were, unless it was magical sunlight. The sun, though a vital process, was not the cause, but a component.

Also, although we are not capable of tolerating the sun for long periods of time, other creatures are. It concurs with evolution that the majority of us are are not adapted to nude romps through the desert. At least not without a great deal of melanin.

If you had bunch of wooden letters spread out on the floor randomly, and came back later to see they spelled a message "HI HOW ARE YOU TODAY?" would you assume those letters self organized, or that someone was there and organized them that way?

If a cloud formed a complex pattern would you think a divine designer did it? Snowflakes? Stalactites and stalagmites? We are talking about complexities arising naturally, not coherence. If I threw some matchsticks up into the air and they fell into the rough shape of a face, you would be amazed, but you wouldn't attribute it to the paranormal.

A message is the result of a process which is obvious. The origin of life is not nearly so clear cut.

By all that I have studied in mathematics and physics and in all my observations of this world, I came to the conclusion that evolution is false. That is all that I'm trying to show, what you do with that is up to you.

In all that I have studied in mathematics, physics and biology in all my observations of this world, I came to the conclusion that evolution is true. I would be impressed if it could be demonstrated to be false other than by dubious applications of the second law of thermodynamics and questionable logical comparisons. I would like to see it debunked based on evidence.

From talkorigins.org

Nothing in the real world can be proved with absolute certainty. However, high degrees of certainty can be reached. In the case of evolution, we have huge amounts of data from diverse fields. Extensive evidence exists in all of the following different forms [Theobald 1999]. Each new piece of evidence tests the rest.

• All life shows a fundamental unity in the mechanisms of replication, heritablility, catalysis, and metabolism.
• Common descent predicts a nested hierarchy pattern, or groups within groups. We see just such an arrangement in a unique, consistent, well-defined hierarchy, the so-called tree of life.
• Different lines of evidence give the same arrangement of the tree of life. We get essentially the same results whether we look at morphological, biochemical, or genetic traits.
• Fossil animals fit in the same tree of life. We find several cases of transitional forms in the fossil record.
• The fossils appear in a chronological order showing change consistent with common descent over hundreds of millions of years, and inconsistent with sudden creation.
• Many organisms show rudimentary, vestigial characters such as sightless eyes or wings useless for flight.
• Atavisms sometimes occur. An atavism is the reappearance of a character present in a distant ancestors but lost in the organism's immediate ancestors. We only see atavisms consistent with organisms' evolutionary histories.
• Ontogeny (embryology and developmental biology) gives information about the historical pathway of an organism's evolution. For example, whales and many snakes develop hind limbs as embryos which are reabsorbed before birth.
• The distribution of species is consistent with their evolutionary history. For example, marsupials are mostly limited to Australia, and the exceptions are explained by continental drift. Remote islands often have species groups that are highly diverse in habits and general appearance but closely related genetically. This consistency still holds when the distribution of fossil species is included.
• Evolution predicts that new structures are adapted from other structures that already exist, and thus similarity in structures should reflect evolutionary history rather than function. We see this frequently. For example, human hands, bat wings, horse legs, whale flippers, and mole forelimbs all have similar bone structure despite their different functions.
• The same principle applies on a molecular level. Humans share a large percentage of their genes, probably more than 70%, with a fruit fly or a nematode worm.
• When two organisms evolve the same function independently, different structures are often recruited. For example, wings of birds, bats, pterosaurs, and insects all have different structures. Gliding has been implemented in many additional ways. Again, this applies on a molecular level, too.
• The constraints of evolutionary history sometimes lead to suboptimal structures and functions. For example, the human throat and respiratory system make it impossible to breathe and swallow at the same time and make us susceptible to choking.
• Suboptimality appears also on the molecular level. For example, much DNA is nonfunctional.
• Some nonfunctional DNA, such as certain transposons, pseudogenes, and endogenous viruses, show a pattern of inheritance indicating common ancestry.
• Speciation has been observed.
• The day-to-day aspects of evolution -- heritable genetic change, morphological variation and change, functional change, and natural selection -- are seen to occur at rates consistent with common descent.

Furthermore, the different lines of evidence are consistent; they all point to the same big picture. For example, evidence from gene duplications in the yeast genome shows that its ability to ferment glucose evolved about 80 million years ago. Fossil evidence shows that fermentable fruits became prominent about the same time. Genetic evidence for major change around that time also occurs in fruiting plants and fruit flies. [Benner et al. 2002]

The evidence is extensive and consistent, and it points unambiguously to evolution, including common descent, change over time, and adaptation influenced by natural selection. It would be preposterous to refer to these as anything other than facts.

[otseng]

This thread has reached 10 pages (at 10 pages, most new people don't even bother to read through all the pages thereby repeating things that have already been said). The thread topic also is too general in scope. Therefore, this thread has now been closed. Please start a new thread to discuss specific issues of Creationism vs Evolutionism.