arguments against evolution

[Gary88]

after the 'well that proves it' thread i had a look around 'God Tube' and watched some of the videos (very very funny) and i just thought this one in particular was a prime example of two things

1. these people dont understand evolution or even science
2. annoying people always use the argument that because something doesnt make sense to them or they cant understand it it cant be true

please watch this with a hearty chuckle.



(i imagine even creationists hate this ******** too)


EDIT
my god this one is brilliant too
http://www.godtube.com/view_video.ph...e=&category=tr

how weak are these arguments

[Ragabash]

Moved to Athenaeum.

[Cúchulainn]

Ok that was just funny.

Someone who things that a rock will come to alive
or who doesn't understand the Laws of Thermodynamics.

Way to go Charley

[Curtana]

'well that proves it' link again because it is funnier still

Good links G88. Ha ha.I laughed lots. Arguments against evolution or arguments for improving educational standards...you decide.

[NaptownKnight]

Someone care to explain thermodynamics? Do evolutionists really think that a non-living thing turned into a living thing? I will need these things clarified before I respond.

[Curtana]

wiki on 2nd Law Thermodynamics
Darwin barely touches on the problem of the origin of life. So technically evolution is not concerned with it. There are many scientific theories on the origin of life (wiki again). Take your pick.
The 2nd law of T problem is essentially how do you get something as complex as life forming de novo when everything in the universe tends towards the lowest energy, highest entropy state. Water flows downhill not up. The list of non religiously inspired theories on how to solve this problem are as long as....my arm. I could list a few but is there really any point in meeting dogma with evidence?
Personally I tend towards the view that it is not a problem at all. When 'life' started it was probably so simple that it was a small step – a chemical fluke. Followed by a long line of other tiny steps over an unimaginably long time. Individually each step could work within the laws of chemistry and physics and chance. We often have difficulty accepting this because of the time scale involved. We have literally billions of years to play with so is it really that hard to imagine?

Do evolutionists really think that a non-living thing turned into a living thing?

So the short answer is yes. The long answer is not over night no. Not sure if I've just muddied the waters here - we'll see.

[William the Bastard]

So the short answer is yes. The long answer is not over night no. Not sure if I've just muddied the waters here - we'll see.

The major problem for the creationists with evolution is that they believe the world is only 7000 years old! So when a scientist says "over many 100 thousand years" Creationists simply reply that it is impossible because God hadn't made the world yet so there wasn't enough time for this to happen.

No offence to any Americans here but I do find it rather hard to take any educational/scientific lessons from someone with an American accent. I don't know whether it is due to the religiosity of most of what is said or something else. I find it hard to imagine here in Britain having a large sect of our society believing in Creationism.

When the single Super Power of the world has a large majority of it's citizens believing in this I do find it quite worrying.

@ Chris - What?????

[Curtana]

The major problem for the creationists with evolution is that they believe the world is only 7000 years old!

The age of the earth is proof enough for anyone.
Americans aren't as dumb as they are painted. Not all of them. Be nice.

[William the Bastard]

The age of the earth is proof enough for anyone.
Americans aren't as dumb as they are painted. Not all of them. Be nice.

Oh no please don't get me wrong I love the alliance the UK and the US has in not just military and economic means but as friends too. All I find is a little disturbing is that there are many US religionists who perhaps maybe only have loud mouths but in general the US is a very Christian nation. When religion and politics are entwined and religion becomes one of the main keystones of society I find it worrying (That's all really). The first US citizens were afterall the Quakers and Pilgrims leaving in the name of God to the new world. So modern America is partly based on that.

Ah Will, take a physics degree my friend. It's the most rewarding thing you can do ever in the world ever (yes EVER).

What I love about this world is that there are many people better at things than I am. Even better than that is knowing that they are as fallible (sometimes) as I am too. For myself I am glad people take Physics Degrees but I very much doubt I have the brain skills to understand most of it. Keep it up though Chris we need more scientists here in the UK if the US is not going to lead us in this section of our modern world.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I am afterall someone who tends to ignore long posts on TWC and prefers the short and silly ones! I don't think that is a good trait for someone taking a degree in a topic which perhaps has a lot of reading in it.

[DisgruntledGoat]

The major problem for the creationists with evolution is that they believe the world is only 7000 years old! So when a scientist says "over many 100 thousand years."

I think its more than simply that. People can't comprehend the time involved and so they simply see it has happening over night. For example, whats 4.3 billion years mean to you? Absolutely nothing its impossible for anyone to comprehend it, but in terms of evolution its the time from the first microbial life on earth to show up and then evolve into large organisims. 4.3 BILLION years of nothing but microbial life on earth developing. After that we are talking about millions of years of evolution (not hundreds of thousands) that eventually gave rise to modern species. Heck modern trees didn't even show up until 200 million years ago (another number that means absolutely nothing). mammals didn't become the dominant species on the planet until 65 million years ago. The scale is just unimaginable. And so its hard for lay-people to wrap their heads around it.

Then theres the problem of people thinking that over night a fish walks out of the water and lives on land. When of course its nothing like that. First our ancestors developed lungs and probably lived in shallows and ponds to avoid the big predators. In these environments they started used their fins in different ways (from fossil records we see species that developed fingers in their fins) and after millions of years they eventually were forced onto the land and further evolved. But the image of the fish walking out of the water is the persistant image in many peoples head.

Btw, I recommend a great series to everyone. Miracle Planet produced by The Film Board of Canada and Japan. Its a great series (although it has some controversial stuff in it like life coming from mars and the snowball earth theory) and goes into great detail regarding the evolution of life on earth. I highly recommend it.

[William the Bastard]

I think its more than simply that. People can't comprehend the time involved and so they simply see it has happening over night. For example, whats 4.3 billion years mean to you?

Exactly!!! Only you went into more detail than I did . On evolution one of my favourite oddities is that Whales have hips. As they are also Mammals we can see that they are descended from land animals (they probably fancied a dip and couldn't be bothered to get out ). I believe I would be right in saying that Hippos are the nearest living relative of the whale.

[chris_uk_83]

Someone care to explain thermodynamics?

Haha, you don't want much do you? You may as well ask someone to explain electromagnetism; it's a truly huge topic and you need a quite detailed understanding to fully appreciate it.

However I'm a nice guy and I'll indulge you

In the video, Charlie refers to the second law of thermodynamics, which, according to Wikipedia, is 'The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium'. Don't mind my Wiki quoting, because as I've said before, Wikipedia is great for physics, it's also easier to find stuff on than trawling the web!

So, you ask, what is entropy? Entropy is effectively the measure of disorder of a system (actually it relates to the number of possible 'states' of a system). The higher the entropy the more disordered the system is. This is where a brief discussion of the physics meaning of disorder comes in: 'disorder' means 'random', not simply 'messed up'. So the more truly random a system is, the greater its Entropy is. For example, if you have 100 dots on a piece of paper, what configuration is the most random? You might expect it to be an equal spacing of dots covering the whole page. You'd be wrong; in fact that's extremely ordered. A truly random spread of dots will naturally have clumps all over the place because that's the nature of randomness. It does what it likes, not what we think it should. Incidentally, the human brain cannot draw a completely random selection of dots on paper without a lot of help.

In thermodynamics (the study of hot things as far as you're concerned ) entropy relates to the transfer of heat. In this case it means that a hot body in a cold environment will gradually dissipate its heat to the surroundings, but cannot draw in heat energy from them (as this would decrease the entropy of the overall system, this is becasue of maths).

Now what our Charlie is trying to say is that a human is a far more ordered structure than a microbe, and this means that entropy has decreased as evolution has progressed (entropy is higher with more disorder remember). As the second law states that entropy always increases, this seems to pose a paradox. Therefore evolution must contravene the second law of thermodynamics and is therefore wrong (before you ask, there's no chance that the laws of thermodynamics are this vastly wrong).

What he completely fails to do is have any understanding at all of what he's talking about. For a start, this law only applies to jiggling molecules being in different energy states and not to an evolutionary system, in which there are mechanisms for change (mutation), ways of keeping things that work (natural selection), and most importantly an external energy source (the sun). Look back at the wiki definition of the 2nd law, it applies only to a closed system. If you add energy then you can pretty much do anything anyway, since the entropy of the sun will increase more than the entropy on Earth decreases.

The following links may be useful to you in making your own mind up:

a refutation of the argument in layman's terms

A Wikipedia article on entropy don't worry about the maths if you don't understand it.

Oh and as for the, "the mousetrap could turn into a mouse" argument, errm no. Both the mousetrap and the mouse came from the same origin (hydrogen in space), but no, you can't turn one to the other. Just like you can't turn a monkey into a man, but you can trace their ancestry back to a common point.

Check this wiki article for a discussion on how experimental evidence suggests that life may have arisen from non-living things.

Hope that helps

[chris_uk_83]

Ah Will, take a physics degree my friend. It's the most rewarding thing you can do ever in the world ever (yes EVER).

[chris_uk_83]

Even better than that is knowing that they are as fallible (sometimes) as I am too

What are you trying to say? That I'm not always right and that I sometimes make mistakes? How dare you!?

Haha, I know what you mean though, it's great when you manage to catch someone out who knows a lot more about the topic at hand than you do.

Physics is more about having an aptitude for maths than reading. In fact it's probably the degree you can take with the least reading involved, no essays, no long textbooks, no novels, just learning facts and derivations. There are some textbooks, but most of it is taught in lectures.

The reason I love physics is that it opens your eyes to the world around you in a way that I suppose a lot of religious people can relate to. You see everything in a different way; it's the same but it goes deeper because you know how it works, how it formed, where it's going. It's kind of like how Neo from the matrix can see the code. You can look at a sunset and think "that's beautiful" just like everyone else, but you can also look at the same sunset and appreciate just how amazingly clever all the mechanisms are that bring it about, the way the light scatters off the atmosphere through to the way the sun fuses hydrogen and emits EM radiation.

This isn't an easy thing to explain, but it is why I intend to become a physics teacher, because I want to help others to be able to share this someday.

[William the Bastard]

Physics is more about having an aptitude for maths than reading.

That's what I meant. Reading numbers (For myself I award a )

The reason I love physics is that it opens your eyes to the world around you in a way that I suppose a lot of religious people can relate to.

Would I be also right in saying that if ever a new theory/discovery is made that turns many current ideas on their heads you and the rest of the scientific community will not trash it (the way new religious concepts are by the older ones) but endorse it and perhaps have an orgasm over it? Of course after multiple practicals and experimentation.

This isn't an easy thing to explain, but it is why I intend to become a physics teacher, because I want to help others to be able to share this someday.

I applaud anyone who wants to go into the teaching "trade" (even PE teachers to an extent ). All I can hope is that you will be an interesting and lively teacher. In this modern age all of our younger generation need stimulants to get them going. Text books can simply bore them. Throwing a text book out the window to explain how forces work is a much more interesting teaching method.

Good luck Chris I hope it works out.

[Gary88]

Just to explain the law of thermodynamics thing in simple terms. creationist are correct that a human is more complicated than a single cell organism and appears to defy the 2nd law. however they ignore the fact that just to exist we eat and 'burn' food for energy, as it potentially takes thousands of years for a single evolutionary change the amount of entropy change far outweighs any reduction in entropy because species get more complex. (using food turns nice simple chemical energy into lots of diffuse forms of energy so increases entropy). the other thing creationists dont understand is that thermodynamics is not a law in the sense of the law of gravity, not possible to break, but a statistical improbability where the chance of say a glass of water freezing and the air around it getting hotter is so small as to never ever happen.

[Gary88]

This isn't an easy thing to explain, but it is why I intend to become a physics teacher, because I want to help others to be able to share this someday.

good man physics teachers are in short supply, in the UK in 2006 only 3 people qualified as phys teacher (2 work at my school )

[chris_uk_83]

Would I be also right in saying that if ever a new theory/discovery is made that turns many current ideas on their heads you and the rest of the scientific community will not trash it (the way new religious concepts are by the older ones) but endorse it and perhaps have an orgasm over it?

Pretty much yes. There's nothing better for a physicist (any scientist in fact) than finding conclusive evidence that something they know is wrong, although you hit the nail on the head when you say

Of course after multiple practicals and experimentation.

You do have to prove it!

in the UK in 2006 only 3 people qualified as phys teacher (2 work at my school )

I'm not sure if you're taking the piss here, but you're wrong I know at least two other people who qualified as physics teachers in 2006.

In conclusion. Evolution rocks, creationism sucks.

[Gary88]

Then theres the problem of people thinking that over night a fish walks out of the water and lives on land.

thats a very good point, most scientist feel life on land actually started much more simply than even that with spores and ect leading to plant life on land. creationist also dont want to hear about the lungfish a fish with lungs and gills that can move from puddle to puddle.

I'm not sure if you're taking the piss here, but you're wrong I know at least two other people who qualified as physics teachers in 2006.

i cant believe my teacher lied to me...he will be dealt with

[chris_uk_83]

i cant believe my teacher lied to me...he will be dealt with

There is a shortage though. That's why they pay you an extra £3000 to train, and £5000 (taxable ) when you qualify

I can't really think of anything to say on topic, because there's nobody to argue with. We all just agree