@kellyjay saidYou don't understand how evolution works, if you did you would see that your post is a load of self - contradictory nonsense. How can something change without anything changing?
There is NOTHING in the mechanisms of evolution that creates something new that has specified functional complex systems, there is nothing in it that can check and correct issues that arise in life. If you only look at a materialistic universe with nothing guiding it all, nothing arranging it all so everything to fall into place, but also maintains itself over time. A tweak ...[text shortened]... whole into something new. There you have nothing but a cleverly devised story that fits your bias.
@indonesia-phil saidPlease if you could answer the question I have been asking you would have, you do not have a stinking clue! The theory is not workable from a common ancestor to modern-day life, if you think it can then you should be able to speak the mechanics of it, but you cannot. There isn't anything that explains the complex nature of how life works, you suggest it does without producing anything, except evolution of the gaps, we don't know, therefore evolution did it.
You don't understand how evolution works, if you did you would see that your post is a load of self - contradictory nonsense. How can something change without anything changing?
@indonesia-phil saidKellyjay is part of the Christian Creationists who are deliberately ignorant to anything , and I mean anything , which contradicts their fantasy belief in their nonsense religion .
I'm not going to explain the mechanisms of evolution to you, you're old enough to be able to read about them for yourself.
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@caissad4 saidHome schooling, and a catastrophic failure of error checking ...
Kellyjay is part of the Christian Creationists who are deliberately ignorant to anything , and I mean anything , which contradicts their fantasy belief in their nonsense religion .
I don't know how else to account for how someone can think a talking snake seems more plausible than laws of physics.
@moonbus saidYou have not given a single answer to mindlessness related to physics, is this one more time someone simply gives a one-word answer to questions without being able to actually give reasons for it that have anything to do with reason, logic, or science? Did you grow up being told what to think instead of how to think?
Home schooling, and a catastrophic failure of error checking ...
I don't know how else to account for how someone can think a talking snake seems more plausible than laws of physics.
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@kellyjay saidI grew up having been taught to think critically about claims made in defiance of massive evidence to the contrary.
You have not given a single answer to mindlessness related to physics, is this one more time someone simply gives a one-word answer to questions without being able to actually give reasons for it that have anything to do with reason, logic, or science? Did you grow up being told what to think instead of how to think?
You confuse several issues routinely.
1. how life got going initially.
2. how different complex life forms arise, once life gets going.
3. how minds, consciousness, and self-consciousness arise.
The explanations are different because the mechanisms are different. Yet you routinely jump from one to the other in mid-sentence and demand a single simple explanation for all three of them.
Two facts must be conceded to account for any of those three different theses: a.) deep time (meaning that the universe is billions of years old, not merely thousands), and b.) that the first life forms which appeared were very primitive (much simpler even than cells or bacteria, the very first life forms were self-replicating molecules), and that complex life forms appeared later (much later, hundreds of millions of years later, not a few seconds or days later).
How life got going initially is basic chemistry. Organic molecules have been discovered in deep space, on comets and asteroids in our solar system, and on one of Saturn's moons; this proves that the basic chemistry of very primitive life forms is neither supernaturally mysterious nor improbable. This has been explained to you numerous times and you refuse to accept it, you immediately jump to 'but how does chemistry explain MIDS?' Chemistry does not explain minds, that's a separate issue which requires a different sort of explanation.
You said you would grant any amount of time, but object that even deep time would not explain how the 'right combination' of chemicals would ever fall into 'the right order' to make life, no matter how much time is granted. This is false. Time does indeed matter: given only six days to deal a deck of 52 cards, the odds of drawing a royal flush, in order (ace of spades, king of spades, queen of spades, etc. in that order), are very slim. Given billions of shuffles, the odds are 100% certain that not only 'the right chemicals' but even 'in the right order' will be dealt. That explains how complex molecules get started--simple probability stirs the soup.
What keeps complex molecules in the right order once they are stirred up in the soup, is dynamic kinetic stability. Dive posted a wonderful article which explains this principle. In short, what DKS means is that a more complex state of matter has a wider repertoire of capacity to adapt to environmental changes than a simpler state of matter, and that is what explains how complex molecules stay complex once they occur. At this point, we are still not talking about life forms with eyes and noses and minds; we are talking about chains of molecules which self-replicate.
"Evolution" is to you apparently just a word. In fact, it covers quite a complex range of natural processes encompassing chemistry, genetics, environmental factors (such as climate and competition among species for food supplies), and natural selection. The common factor in all of them is the repeated operation of natural laws (such as genetics, chemical bonds, laws of physics, and so on); there is very little random about it, except for occasional random mutations at the genetic level.
A brief summary of how evolution works is this: let us suppose that there is a soup of molecules in the depths of the ocean near a hot geyser, the most likely place where all the conditions obtain for very primitive life forms (self-replicating molecules, not FISH with eyes and brains) to get started: there are abundant chemicals, a constant stirring through currents, and energy (heat from the Earth's core shot up through geysers). So, we may assume through random stirring over billions of years, at some point the chemicals bond to form self-replicators (it's the royal flush metaphor, given a deck of about 100 known chemical elements and billions of shuffles). Self-replicators have been produced in labs; they are neither supernaturally mysterious nor improbable. Not all of these self-replicating chains of chemicals are going to be identical; there will be minimal differences in their compositions, through random shuffling of the stirring process. As the ocean continues to churn, some of these self-replicating molecules drift farther away from the local heat of the geyser. The lower temperature farther away will cause some of the self-replicating molecules to fail to continue self-replicating, they will fall apart into their constituent elements, because that's just the way the chemicals are bonded. Whereas other concatenations of self-replicators will continue to self-replicate unaffected by the lower temp. Some others again may find the lower temp conducive to replicating more or faster, just because that's how the chemistry works. Still other self-replicators will, through random couplings, have merged with slightly different self-replicators and formed still more complex self-replicators which thrive and replicate in a wider range of temperatures. Of course, some concatenations will fail altogether and drop out of the class of self-replicators (becoming 'extinct' ). Those which continue to self-replicate in the widest range of temperatures will be the ones which spread out through larger and larger portions of the environment. This explains how complexity both arises and continues to spread out: through ability to continue replicating in a wider range of environments.
You have often objected that purely natural processes do not account for what you call error checking. There is no such thing as an error in nature, and therefore no such thing as error checking either. Error checking is what computer programmers do, not nature. Suppose some self-replicator replicates itself twice, once identically and a second time not-quite identically. Which one is correct and which one is the error? Neither. There are simply copies, we'll call them copy-1 (identical) and copy-2 (not-quite identical). If the environment changes such that copy-1 fails to continue replicating, then it drops out of the class of replicators (it becomes extinct); whereas, if copy-2 continues to replicate in the changed environment, then it replaces copy-1. This may occur many generations down the line; that is, if the environment stays the same (within tolerance) for both copies, then they will co-exist, for so long as both copies can replicate. Now suppose that copy-2 is carried away into a slightly different region (by currents or whatever) which would be inimical to copy-1, and copy-2 continues to replicate in the distant region. Copy-2 then replicates, sometimes identically (copy-2v1) and sometimes not quite identically (copy-2v2). Continue this process for hundreds of millions of years (damn, there's deep time again!) and you eventually get 'speciation' whereby some copy of a copy of a copy is so different to the original copy-1 that we call it a different species (like cats and dogs, not merely a different 'breed' of dog). That's evolution, in a nutshell.
The most ancient life forms died out long ago, they are no longer with us; there have been 5 mass extinction 'events' (I put that word in single quotes because, except for the meteorite strike which led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, none of the events was sudden; they were due to very gradual changes, over millions of years -- damn, there's that deep time again! -- in the atmospheric composition and the global temperature). There is massively coherent fossil evidence for these mass extinction events, proving that simple life forms came first and that complex ones came later, millions and millions of years later. If you don't accept these two basic facts about nature, then there is no point in continuing the discussion. For someone who is convinced that all life appeared suddenly, only a few thousand years ago, both simple and complex forms simultaneously, with minds and self-awareness, no scientific theory is going to appear plausible.
If you've read this far, you can probably figure out for yourself that no natural process guarantees that intelligent life with self-awareness will develop. We are a happy fluke, nothing more. I guess that is what really sticks in your craw. You want to believe you are something so special that a God created a whole universe just for you to play in. God 'harry-pottering' everything from nothing by speaking a 'power word' ("let there be light" ) is not an explanation; it is utter defiance of explanation. But if it makes you feel special, then by all means cleave to that belief.
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-Removed-Origin of Life Science distinguishes the historical question (whether a chicken or an egg came first) from the theoretical question (how eggs in general and birds in general arise), and proposes to answer only the theoretical one. Kelly, I think, is fixated on the prior (Adam came first) sort of question, because he interprets the Biblical account as history.
EDIT: eggs came first, birds came later. Then came omelettes.
EDIT-2: I recall a conversation with RJHinds, who claimed that humans and dinosaurs co-habited on Earth. His 'evidence' for it was the legend of St. George and the dragon.