Creationism being taught in schools is a not all bad

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What exactly are you basing this on? Why do you not think that 545,000,000 years is enough time for that? Also, as an aside, multicellular and eukaryotic life predates the Cambrian.

I remember William LC stating some tiny fraction of a number representing the chance of unguided evolution happening to 'produce' man. I think it was a debate with Hitchens.

Reply 181

Plagioclase

Original post by champ_mc99

I remember William LC stating some tiny fraction of a number representing the chance of unguided evolution happening to 'produce' man. I think it was a debate with Hitchens.

The wonder of the immensity of geological time is that even incredibly slow processes become significant. I have no idea who William LC is, by the way.

Reply 182

Rather_Cynical

Original post by champ_mc99

I remember William LC stating some tiny fraction of a number representing the chance of unguided evolution happening to 'produce' man. I think it was a debate with Hitchens.

I think these statistics tend to get quite confused, similar to the "entropy" discussion, because it simply doesn't represent what actually happened. It was never inevitable to create man, it was simply the environmental conditions being right to favour mammalian species - including ones that develop new brain structures for advanced communication and tool use - at the time.

The geological timescales involved are hard to imagine, not to mention that evolutionary processes aren't random. The "favourable genes" are kept and the vast majority in orders of (

100 - 10^{-100}

)% die. The miniscule chance becomes reasonable when you consider these pieces of the puzzle.

(edited 7 years ago)

Reply 183

champ_mc99

Original post by Plagioclase

The wonder of the immensity of geological time is that even incredibly slow processes become significant. I have no idea who William LC is, by the way.

Well yes. But apparently there wasn't enough 'time' for man to evolve (the chance of it happening was really low).

Reply 184

champ_mc99

Original post by Rather_Cynical

10^{-100}

)% die. The miniscule chance becomes reasonable when you consider these pieces of the puzzle.

Or we could assign a number to the chance of any mutation happening by observation and sort of work from there? I'm not sure how many of the concepts of natural selection was taken into account.

I think what creationists mean by guided is the helpful mutations are brought by God quicker than they should be if unguided. Bad explanation. :/

(edited 7 years ago)

Reply 185

Rather_Cynical

Original post by champ_mc99

Well yes. But apparently there wasn't enough 'time' for man to evolve (the chance of it happening was really low).

These arguments aren't quantative in any way to come to that conclusion, it's based mostly on poor argument and conjecture. It can be safely dismissed as unsupported nonsense.

Reply 186

Plagioclase

Original post by champ_mc99

Well yes. But apparently there wasn't enough 'time' for man to evolve (the chance of it happening was really low).

I have absolutely no idea what William LC's credentials or what is methodology or rationale is but the overwhelming and pretty much undisputed scientific consensus is that there has been plenty of time for man to evolve. It is an outstanding scientific theory that does an excellent job of explaining observations and if this William LC had come up with a scientifically valid argument disproving evolution as the mechanism behind the emergence of man then he would be the proud owner of a Nobel prize by now.

Reply 187

dozyrosie

Original post by champ_mc99

I remember William LC stating some tiny fraction of a number representing the chance of unguided evolution happening to 'produce' man. I think it was a debate with Hitchens.

William Lane Craig deals in philosophy/religious apologetics, he has no science, so he is probably quoting. Of course it is easy to find scientists who will pooh pooh these kind of things. If you are going to believe what non-scientist/mathematician say about the universe then you are just regurgitating the apologetics. We have no way of determining how long it would take for an intelligent species to evolve. You are probably talking about probabilities of an uncreated universe, and we are then in the realms of philosophy not science.

Reply 188

Scrappy-coco

Original post by dozyrosie

I think he is talking about times when Craig alludes to the sheer improbability of a protein assembly naturally by random chance (mostly I think he is talking in terms of the origin of life but it think he tries to make the point for random mutation too). You look for citations and you realise its from Stephen Meyer :angry:

He should leave that crowd alone rather than try to balance a fine line between the two sides.

The typical creationist spiel tends to go something like this:
'If we assume 10^30 life forms with a fast replication rate of 30 minutes and a huge genome with a very high mutation rate over a period of 10 billion years, an extreme upper limit for the total number of mutations for all of life’s history would be around 10^43. Unfortunately, a protein domain such as Ribosomal S7 would require a minimum average of 10^100 trials, about 10^57 trials more than the entire theoretical history of life could provide – and this is only for one domain. Forget about ‘finding’ an average sized protein, not to mention thousands.'

winteryknight.com/2015/07/30/new-software-calculates-the-probability-of-generating-functional-proteins-by-chance

Unsurprisingly its not kidding anyone.