Evolution?

sfs · Oct 26, 2018

stevevw said:
Because God is a creator God which is a foundational part of belief in God and existence does not come from nothing.

If a miraculous event was required for the universe to exist, that says nothing about divine intervention in the history of life.

The Barbarian · Oct 26, 2018

Barbarian observes:
A few scientists do. Behe, for example, acknowledges the fact of evolution, but thinks God has to step in every now and then to make it work.

stevevw said:
The scientists do but the science itself does not. Behe stating that there are some events during the evolution of life that were supernatural is no different to someone stating that God did it once supernaturally.

Pretty much the way plumbers do, but the plumbing itself does not.

That's why I said by nature as in materialism or spiritualism. Science cannot have an opinion but its method does not work with the supernatural. It deals with material/physical causes. Whereas belief in God includes believing in spirituality, something beyond the material that defies the scientific method.

Right.

I did not know Darwin believed this.

The last sentence from "The Origin of Species", 1872 edition:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

But despite evolution being indifferent to how life began it does make a difference.

It makes a difference in many ways; it just doesn't make any difference so far as evolutionary theory is concerned.

Because it means that if God created the first ingredients for life or the first life itself then the instructions were already there. In fact, if people say for example chemical evolution led to life I would say there was something that led to chemical evolution and so on and so on right back to a beginning.

In other words, God created a world, in which life could emerge from the Earth and evolve to produce the variety of life we see. But it makes no difference to evolutionary theory how that happened. Suppose God had just poofed the first living things into being. Nothing changes as far as evolutionary theory is concerned.

Doesn't evolution include chemical evolution?

No. Evolutionary theory is about the way living populations change over time. There is stellar evolution, which is about how stars form, and there's abiogenesis, which is about how life formed, and so on. But Darwin's theory and all the modified theories that came from it, don't concern the origin of life at all. And as you see, Darwin realized this. He had no explanation for the origin of life at that time, and he just supposed God did it.

Today, of course, the evidence now strongly indicates that life was brought forth by the Earth. Which is what God says.

I don't mean evolution as a theory but as a process like the evolution of a car or the evolution of music.

Yes, there are other theories. "Evolution" just means "change." So maybe you would rather use Darwin's term; "descent with modification." It's not as catchy, but it's maybe more accurate.

Because that would be accepting something on faith and asumption still.

Evolutionary theory assumes life began somehow. Seems like a safe assumption to me.

stevevw · Oct 27, 2018

sfs said:
If a miraculous event was required for the universe to exist, that says nothing about divine intervention in the history of life.

Depends on how a person views this. Did that initial miraculous event have any bearing on later events ie set the right parameters for all else to follow? Or was it just a beginning that allowed natural random events to take over and somehow this produced the universe we have with life in it. This is where people bring in the fine-tuned universe for intelligent life and say that there is some creator behind things that enabled this to happen.

So when applied to how life began on earth the same criteria may apply. If planet earth is in the sweet spot due to non-random events where God intended this to happen then it is not entirely undirected. It may still work within the material naturalistic processes but its trajectory was preset. This can also be applied to evolution itself in that the conditions on earth would not have been right for the life we see today unless first intended and directed towards what we have today.

A purely random process without direction could have produced a multitude of end results and not guaranteed what we have today and would have also produced many other results that we should see around the place. That's why some scientists pose the multiverse because it allows millions of alternative possibilities that account for our finely tuned universe for intelligent life.

That's why I think if we look we will find some direction in how living things change. This fits the evidence better as it does not need extraordinary explanations of very complex and detailed occurrences to be explained through blind and random events like the modern synthesis.

stevevw · Oct 27, 2018

The Barbarian said:
The last sentence from "The Origin of Species", 1872 edition:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

Wow you learn something new every day. That is amazing.

It makes a difference in many ways; it just doesn't make any difference so far as evolutionary theory is concerned.

It does in the sense that as you go back to the beginning there is less for evolution to draw upon. Less variation, less DNA, less of everything which makes it hard to understand how things evolved. This seems to be a problem for evolution (the explanation problem).

Because like I said it is easy to use simple examples for explanations but harder to explain in detail when it becomes more complex or when there is a need for multiple events to occur at once and be orchestrated. When you consider the level of complexity in life at an early stage in evolution it begs the question as to how did this occur through naturalistic processes when there was little to draw upon. Why did it appear relatively suddenly?

In other words, God created a world, in which life could emerge from the Earth and evolve to produce the variety of life we see. But it makes no difference to evolutionary theory how that happened. Suppose God had just poofed the first living things into being. Nothing changes as far as evolutionary theory is concerned.

For me, it is not just about the physical presence of life. It is the code, programming that is what produces that physical being. So it is where did the blueprint for life come from, was it randomly invented or was it something God intended and put there.

No. Evolutionary theory is about the way living populations change over time. There is stellar evolution, which is about how stars form, and there's abiogenesis, which is about how life formed, and so on. But Darwin's theory and all the modified theories that came from it, don't concern the origin of life at all. And as you see, Darwin realized this. He had no explanation for the origin of life at that time, and he just supposed God did it.

It understand this, but evolution is primarily based on natural selection and some like Dawkins like to use this concept for how many things came about or evolved. As some had said it was more of a mathematical idea that was applied to the development of life on earth. In that sense, it is nothing special or new. But I do understand the difference when applied to biology as it then incorporates others disciplines.

Today, of course, the evidence now strongly indicates that life was brought forth by the Earth. Which is what God says.

Yes and this is another problem I see. Scientists say that life was brought to earth for good reason. They look for life beyond earth because the logical conclusion is if evolution can do it once it can do it again and possibly many times in a massive universe. So if there is more life in the universe how does this fit in with salvation. Unless earth is the only planet with intelligent life.

But the point is the logical extension of evolution is that it is a naturalistic process and therefore does not need any special interventions so could repeat itself over and over again and produce humans in other worlds. The multiverse comes to mind agains.

Evolutionary theory assumes life began somehow. Seems like a safe assumption to me.

So it appears the only difference between believing and non-believing is the way it began.

The Barbarian · Oct 27, 2018

stevevw said:
Wow you learn something new every day. That is amazing.

Darwin didn't become a deist/agnostic until long after, when a beloved daughter died as a child. He was, at the time he was gathering data for his book, a rather orthodox Anglican. He records being kidded about it by the officers of the Beagle.

(regarding the idea that the beginning of life is an issue for evolutionary theory)

It does in the sense that as you go back to the beginning there is less for evolution to draw upon. Less variation, less DNA, less of everything which makes it hard to understand how things evolved.

It seemed so to some people. Much as Wegener's theory of continental drift seemed hard to understand. He could only, like Darwin, show that the evidence overwhelmingly said it happened, even if he couldn't understand how. Later, plate movement was understood and made it all clear. In a like manner, the rediscovery of Mendel's work in genetics cleared up the "how?" for Darwin. And then paleontology discovered the initial simplicity of life that took nearly a billion years to move on to eukaryotic single cells. And that issue wasn't an issue any more.

This seems to be a problem for evolution (the explanation problem).

Evolution is the only thing that adequately explains what we see. For the reasons you mention.

Because like I said it is easy to use simple examples for explanations but harder to explain in detail when it becomes more complex or when there is a need for multiple events to occur at once and be orchestrated.

It must have seemed that way to Adam Smith when he first realized the way free markets efficiently allocate goods, services, and prices. From a distance, it looks magical. Then, when you look carefully at the micro level, it's not magical at all. It's just the way people behave economically.

Evolution is like that.

When you consider the level of complexity in life at an early stage in evolution

We actually don't know that much yet. We have some hints in various things we've found, but it's still largely unknown. There is a huge hint in this: name the cell organelle that is most simple chemically and structurally.

it begs the question as to how did this occur through naturalistic processes when there was little to draw upon.

God says that He created the Earth, and waters, and air with everything necessary to bring forth life. From what we've found so far, that's what happened.

Why did it appear relatively suddenly?

How suddenly do you think it happened?

For me, it is not just about the physical presence of life. It is the code, programming that is what produces that physical being.

That's the result of several billion years of evolution. It almost certainly wasn't like that at the beginning. I'm inclined to think that nucleic acids replaced something more simple. We know that there are other possible self-replicating chemical systems.

So it is where did the blueprint for life come from, was it randomly invented or was it something God intended and put there.

The answer is "yes." As Aquinas says, divine providence only requires that something happen. It can happen from contingency as readily as it can happen by necessity.

It understand this, but evolution is primarily based on natural selection

Biological evolution is. I can't see stellar evolution involving that. But maybe there's something. Seems to me, it's more of the way God made it all work, and it applies to lots of complex systems.

Yes and this is another problem I see. Scientists say that life was brought to earth for good reason. They look for life beyond earth because the logical conclusion is if evolution can do it once it can do it again and possibly many times in a massive universe.

Seems like a rather wasteful thing to create all that, for no purpose but to decorate the skies. And even then, we can only see a tiny portion of what actually is. So I'm inclined to think that life is elsewhere. Or maybe it's so stupendously unlikely that it only happened once. Or maybe God just poofed the first living things here, as Darwin suggested.

So if there is more life in the universe how does this fit in with salvation.

C.S. Lewis wrote science fiction about that. We can only speculate, but he suggested other planets might not have yet had a fall.
Perelandra - Wikipedia

Unless earth is the only planet with intelligent life.

We really don't know, but by now, signs of our activity should be 112 light years out there. If there's anyone out there like us to about 66 light years, we should have heard from them by now. Have you read Sagen's Contact? The movie gets a lot of Sagan's book wrong. The book features a good man who happens to be an evangelical preacher, and at the end, the non-believing protagonist (acting on a hint by the aliens) discovers that there is a message hidden in a universal constant for us to find.

“Deep inside the transcendental number, was a perfect circle, its form traced out by unities in a field of noughts. The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle — another circle, drawn kilometres downstream of the decimal point. There would be richer messages farther in.”

Sagan's message, is that the Universe is not accidental; his aliens tell Arroway, "we too, have the numinous."

Yes, the people making the movie messed it up badly. And Sagan was not pleased. Neither was I.
'Contact' and Carl Sagan’s faith

But the point is the logical extension of evolution is that it is a naturalistic process and therefore does not need any special interventions so could repeat itself over and over again and produce humans in other worlds.

Might be so. Or Darwin could have been right, and there was a miraculous origin to life on Earth. Doesn't matter to evolution, which only describes how existing populations change over time.

So it appears the only difference between believing and non-believing is the way it began.

Maybe so. These are things we all should keep in mind. It's deep and difficult and requires much knowledge. Fortunately, our salvation does not hang on it.

Job 33:6 · Oct 27, 2018

stevevw said:
Depends on how a person views this. Did that initial miraculous event have any bearing on later events ie set the right parameters for all else to follow? Or was it just a beginning that allowed natural random events to take over and somehow this produced the universe we have with life in it. This is where people bring in the fine-tuned universe for intelligent life and say that there is some creator behind things that enabled this to happen.

So when applied to how life began on earth the same criteria may apply. If planet earth is in the sweet spot due to non-random events where God intended this to happen then it is not entirely undirected. It may still work within the material naturalistic processes but its trajectory was preset. This can also be applied to evolution itself in that the conditions on earth would not have been right for the life we see today unless first intended and directed towards what we have today.

A purely random process without direction could have produced a multitude of end results and not guaranteed what we have today and would have also produced many other results that we should see around the place. That's why some scientists pose the multiverse because it allows millions of alternative possibilities that account for our finely tuned universe for intelligent life.

That's why I think if we look we will find some direction in how living things change. This fits the evidence better as it does not need extraordinary explanations of very complex and detailed occurrences to be explained through blind and random events like the modern synthesis.

Regarding planet Earth being in a sweet spot with a preset trajectory,

Even without considering multiverse theory, we have a practically infinite number of stars and planets in the universe. I don't think the distance of a planet from it's star or it's trajectory through space is necessarily something that would indicate that earth itself was part of a particular plan.

The Barbarian said:
Darwin didn't become a deist/agnostic until long after, when a beloved daughter died as a child. He was, at the time he was gathering data for his book, a rather orthodox Anglican. He records being kidded about it by the officers of the Beagle.

(regarding the idea that the beginning of life is an issue for evolutionary theory)

It seemed so to some people. Much as Wegener's theory of continental drift seemed hard to understand. He could only, like Darwin, show that the evidence overwhelmingly said it happened, even if he couldn't understand how. Later, plate movement was understood and made it all clear. In a like manner, the rediscovery of Mendel's work in genetics cleared up the "how?" for Darwin. And then paleontology discovered the initial simplicity of life that took nearly a billion years to move on to eukaryotic single cells. And that issue wasn't an issue any more.

Evolution is the only thing that adequately explains what we see. For the reasons you mention.

It must have seemed that way to Adam Smith when he first realized the way free markets efficiently allocate goods, services, and prices. From a distance, it looks magical. Then, when you look carefully at the micro level, it's not magical at all. It's just the way people behave economically.

Evolution is like that.

We actually don't know that much yet. We have some hints in various things we've found, but it's still largely unknown. There is a huge hint in this: name the cell organelle that is most simple chemically and structurally.

God says that He created the Earth, and waters, and air with everything necessary to bring forth life. From what we've found so far, that's what happened.

How suddenly do you think it happened?

That's the result of several billion years of evolution. It almost certainly wasn't like that at the beginning. I'm inclined to think that nucleic acids replaced something more simple. We know that there are other possible self-replicating chemical systems.

The answer is "yes." As Aquinas says divine providence only requires that something happen. It can happen from contingency as readily as it can happen by necessity.

Biological evolution is. I can't see stellar evolution involving that. But maybe there's something. Seems to me, it's more of the way God made it all work, and it applies to lots of complex systems.

Seems like a rather wasteful thing to create all that, for no purpose but to decorate the skies. And even then, we can only see a tiny portion of what actually is. So I'm inclined to think that life is elsewhere. Or maybe it's so stupendously unlikely that it only happened once. Or maybe God just poofed the first living things here, as Darwin suggested.

C.S. Lewis wrote science fiction about that. We can only speculate, but he suggested other planets might not have yet had a fall.
Perelandra - Wikipedia

We really don't know, but by now, signs of our activity should be 112 light years out there. If there's anyone out there like us to about 66 light years, we should have heard from them by now. Have you read Sagen's Contact? The movie gets a lot of it wrong. It features a good man who happens to be an evangelical preacher, and at the end, the non-believing protagonist (acting on a hint by the aliens) discovers that there is a message hidden in a universal constant for us to find.

“Deep inside the transcendental number, was a perfect circle, its form traced out by unities in a field of noughts. The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle — another circle, drawn kilometres downstream of the decimal point. There would be richer messages farther in.”

Sagan's message, is that the Universe is not accidental; his aliens tell Arroway, "we too, have the numinous."

Yes, the people making the movie messed it up badly. And Sagan was not pleased. Neither was I.
'Contact' and Carl Sagan’s faith

Might be so. Or Darwin could have been right, and there was a miraculous origin to life on Earth. Doesn't matter to evolution, which only describes how existing populations change over time.

Maybe so. These are things we all should keep in mind. It's deep and difficult and requires much knowledge. Fortunately, our salvation does not hang on it.

And regarding the question of how this would fit in with salvation, even if other planets did experience a fall, it wouldn't take away the value of salvation for us on earth with respect to our own fall.

Regardless of if there were or were not sin elsewhere in the universe, it wouldn't change experiences for us here and now, nor would it change a need for salvation.

stevevw · Oct 31, 2018

KomatiiteBIF said:
Regarding planet Earth being in a sweet spot with a preset trajectory,

Even without considering multiverse theory, we have a practically infinite number of stars and planets in the universe. I don't think the distance of a planet from it's star or it's trajectory through space is necessarily something that would indicate that earth itself was part of a particular plan.

There are many more conditions that need to be in place to allow the earth to sustain intelligent life. The trajectory I was speaking about was from the beginning, the big bang or inflation. From this point, there had to be specific parameters in the early trajection from which inflation happened to end up with planet earth. So specific that it would seem improbable to be an accidental occurrence.

There are many parameters that make the earth suitable for intelligent life other than the sweet spot. The sweet spot also entails a number of other conditions to allow this to happen. When you consider all this it does make the earth seem special and part of a plan. In fact, I believe that the universe itself is fine-tuned to accommodate the earth.

And regarding the question of how this would fit in with salvation, even if other planets did experience a fall, it wouldn't take away the value of salvation for us on earth with respect to our own fall.

Regardless of if there were or were not sin elsewhere in the universe, it wouldn't change experiences for us here and now, nor would it change a need for salvation.

But if there were other planets with intelligent life then that life would also need salvation. The Bible tells us that Christ died once for all sin. So I cannot see how Christ would be going around to other planets and getting crucified and resurrecting from the dead over and over again. So that would mean there is no other intelligent life on other planets that need saving unless they are some sort of soulless animals.

The Barbarian · Oct 31, 2018

stevevw said:
There are many parameters that make the earth suitable for intelligent life other than the sweet spot. The sweet spot also entails a number of other conditions to allow this to happen. When you consider all this it does make the earth seem special and part of a plan. In fact, I believe that the universe itself is fine-tuned to accommodate the earth.

We are now discovering that there are a number of planets like Earth, even in our immediate vicinity;

Discovering the first true "alien Earth" is a long-held dream of astronomers — and recent exoplanet discoveries suggest that their dream will come true in the not-too-distant future.

Scientists have found nearly 2,000 alien planets since the first such world was confirmed orbiting a sunlike star in 1995. More than half of these discoveries were made by NASA's Kepler space telescope, which launched in 2009 on a mission to determine how common Earth-like planets are throughout the Milky Way galaxy.

Kepler's observations have shown that small, rocky worlds like our own are abundant in the galaxy, and some of them may be capable of hosting life as we know it. [‪10 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life]

To qualify as potentially life-friendly, a planet must be relatively small (and therefore rocky) and orbit in the "habitable zone" of its star, which is loosely defined as a location where water can exist in liquid form on a world's surface. When telescope technology improves, other factors will be considered as well, such as the planet's atmospheric composition and how active its parent star is.
The 6 Most Earth-like Alien Planets

Given that physics remains the same everywhere as far as our telescopes can see out in to the billions of light years, it appears that the universe was created in such a way as to generate life. On the other hand, it's unlikely that there's another planet that's precisely us. After all, there are billions of us here, and no two of us are exactly the same.

But I don't think it's because God fools around with the genes to make it so. Nature (which He also created), makes it so.

stevevw · Oct 31, 2018

The Barbarian said:
God says that He created the Earth, and waters, and air with everything necessary to bring forth life. From what we've found so far, that's what happened.

I guess if you believe the big band is the beginning then all else followed to create time, space, matter, laws that created earth and put if so perfectly in its place then it is not a big step to also believe that an extension of this is the creation of life through the continuation of this process. So in some ways, if you believe in evolution of life then you also have to believe that everything that there is (the universe and all it contains was also the result of natural causes. That is a big ask for some as it basically reduces Gods part to a quantum vacuum or something like that.

How suddenly do you think it happened?

I don't think it happened in an instant as some imagine with supernatural creation. It may have happened over a long period but too quick for the naturalistic process of blind and random evolution. In other words, there was some direction to evolution that was inevitable to happen the exact way it did. This can explain events like the Cambrian explosion for example. Some say that if you repeated evolution it would never travel the same path and may end up not producing the life we see today.

This is where the multiverse comes in because those who believe in the materialistic worldview know that for our planet to have ended up with the universe and conditions to end up with planet earth and intelligent life like we have there had to be billions of other tries that missed the mark. That's because our situation is too perfect to have happened just once by chance. So there had to be some setting of the controls at the very beginning to ensure the outcome we have. Maybe that is Gods part in creation. That is why I do not necessarily support the idea of blind selection and random mutations as the main engine room of all life's creation. There has to be some direction inherent in the process.

That's the result of several billion years of evolution. It almost certainly wasn't like that at the beginning. I'm inclined to think that nucleic acids replaced something more simple. We know that there are other possible self-replicating chemical systems.
The answer is "yes." As Aquinas says, divine providence only requires that something happen. It can happen from contingency as readily as it can happen by necessity.

Then this means if God did not have any influence from the beginning which would ensure what we have today then he was taking a mighty big gamble because as mentioned there was no guarantee that it would produce life as we know it or life at all according to evolution theory.

Seems like a rather wasteful thing to create all that, for no purpose but to decorate the skies. And even then, we can only see a tiny portion of what actually is. So I'm inclined to think that life is elsewhere. Or maybe it's so stupendously unlikely that it only happened once. Or maybe God just poofed the first living things here, as Darwin suggested.

Or maybe our situation on earth as intelligent life is so unique that there needed to be a universe to produce it. If there is life on other planets then this creates certain problems like did Christ die for them also. Why would Christ be made to repeat his crucifixion again and again?

C.S. Lewis wrote science fiction about that. We can only speculate, but he suggested other planets might not have yet had a fall.
Perelandra - Wikipedia

It doesn't make sense for the above reason. The Bible tells us Christ died once and for all.

Maybe so. These are things we all should keep in mind. It's deep and difficult and requires much knowledge. Fortunately, our salvation does not hang on it.

The Barbarian · Oct 31, 2018

Barbarian observes:
God says that He created the Earth, and waters, and air with everything necessary to bring forth life. From what we've found so far, that's what happened.

stevevw said:
I guess if you believe the big band is the beginning then all else followed to create time, space, matter, laws that created earth and put if so perfectly in its place then it is not a big step to also believe that an extention of this is the creation of life through the continuation of this process. So in some ways if you believe in evolution of life then you also have to believe that everything that there is (the universe and all it contains was also the result of natural causes.

A God that powerful and wise, scares a lot of people, who would prefer something less omnipotent.

That is a big ask for some as it basically reduces Gods part to a quantum vacumn or something like that.

You think that some kind of pre-natural stuff could result in all this? Seriously? The more I see of creation, the more I see that only God could have done it.

I dont think it happened in an instant like some imagine with supernatural creation. It may have happened over a long period but too quick for the naturalistic process of blind and random evolution.

A "blind and random" process wouldn't have done it. Darwin's big discovery was that it isn't random.

In other words there was some direction to evolution that was inevitable to happen the exact way it did.

And your argument is that God is not capable enough of using contingency as well as necessity in His divine providence?

This can explain events like the Cambrian explosion for example. Some say that if you repeated evolution it would never travel the same path and may end up not producing the life we see today.

The probability that it did go this way, however, is 1.0. Which was the point Aquinas was making.

A brilliant engineer, Adrian Bejean, has argued that a replay would have different details, but that the world would have trees, fish, quadrupeds, and intelligent bipeds precisely because the fundamental way that flow and energy works would dictate living systems and that they would function and look as things do in our world.

Which is entirely consistent with a loving God Who had us in mind. Bejean is not a creationist or IDer in any way; he merely came to his conclusion by studying the way flow works in the world.

This is where the multiverse comes in because those who believe in the materialistic world view know that for our planet to have ended up with the universe and conditions to end up with planet earth and intelligent life like we have there had to be billions of other tries that missed the mark.

We've now found a lot of planets, and your "billions" is a bit pessimistic. Turns out the Universe produces Earthlike planets more often than you think.

Thats becuase our situation is too perfect to have happened just once by chance.

So are you. So is a deck of shuffled cards. I don't see the point.

So there had to be some setting of the controls at the very beginning to ensure the outcome we have.

No, I think it goes back a lot earlier than that. Back before there was an "earlier."

Maybe that is Gods part in creation. That is why I do not necessarily support the idea of blind selection and random mutations as the main engine room of all lifes creation.

God says He made the Earth to bring forth life. And it did. That seems far more wonderful and awesome than some little Middle Eastern nature deity prancing around making a rabbit here and a tree there.

There has to be some direction inherent in the process.

There is, as Bejean pointed out. It's inherent in nature, there in the first principles. Why? We can't say. It just is.
Constructal theory is the view that (i) the generation of images of design (pattern, rhythm) in nature is a phenomenon of physics and (ii) this phenomenon is covered by a principle (the constructal law): ‘for a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to live) it must evolve such that it provides greater and greater access to the currents that flow through it’. This law is about the necessity of design to occur, and about the time direction of the phenomenon: the tape of the design evolution ‘movie’ runs such that existing configurations are replaced by globally easier flowing configurations. The constructal law has two useful sides: the prediction of natural phenomena and the strategic engineering of novel architectures, based on the constructal law, i.e. not by mimicking nature. We show that the emergence of scaling laws in inanimate (geophysical) flow systems is the same phenomenon as the emergence of allometric laws in animate (biological) flow systems. Examples are lung design, animal locomotion, vegetation, river basins, turbulent flow structure, self-lubrication and natural multi-scale porous media. This article outlines the place of the constructal law as a self-standing law in physics, which covers all the ad hoc (and contradictory) statements of optimality such as minimum entropy generation, maximum entropy generation, minimum flow resistance, maximum flow resistance, minimum time, minimum weight, uniform maximum stresses and characteristic organ sizes. Nature is configured to flow and move as a conglomerate of ‘engine and brake’ designs.
The constructal law of design and evolution in nature

He wrote a rather accessible book, intended for the general reader:
https://www.amazon.com/Design-Nature-Constructal-Technology-Organizations/dp/0307744345

Then this means if God did not have any influence from the beginning which would ensure what we have today then he was taking a mighty big gamble because as mentioned there was no guarentee that it would produce life as we know it or life at all according to evolution theory.

As the Bible says, the world brought forth life as He intended.

Or maybe our situation on earth as intelligent life is so unique that there needed to be a universe to produce it.

The more we look at nature, the more we are struck at how elegant it is. The idea that the universe was created just to have an Earth, seems faulty.

If there is life on other planets then it comes with certain problems like did Christ die for them also.

Do you think a Fall is inevitable for any intelligent beings?

The Bible tells us Christ died once and for all.

Click to expand...

I don't see how he didn't.

Job 33:6 · Oct 31, 2018

stevevw said:
There are many more conditions that need to be in place to allow the earth to sustain intelligent life. The trajectory I was speaking about was from the beginning, the big bang or inflation. From this point, there had to be specific parameters in the early trajection from which inflation happened to end up with planet earth. So specific that it would seem improbable to be an accidental occurrence.

There are many parameters that make the earth suitable for intelligent life other than the sweet spot. The sweet spot also entails a number of other conditions to allow this to happen. When you consider all this it does make the earth seem special and part of a plan. In fact, I believe that the universe itself is fine-tuned to accommodate the earth.

But if there were other planets with intelligent life then that life would also need salvation. The Bible tells us that Christ died once for all sin. So I cannot see how Christ would be going around to other planets and getting crucified and resurrecting from the dead over and over again. that would mean there is no other intelligent life on other planets that need saving unless they are some sort of soulless animals.

Regarding your first response, we look around the universe and we see a practically infinite number of planets and stars that do not appear to have life on them and/or cannot sustain life. I suppose we could just disagree on the idea that the universe has blatently obvious, specific parameters that are fine tuned for life in the universe, earth included.

We can speculate.

And regarding the second point, you said "So I cannot see how Christ would be going around to other planets and getting crucified and resurrecting from the dead over and over again.".

This just sounds like...personal incredulity.

Christ died for our sins. Everything about the Bible is specific to our experiences. All events described are specific to those here on earth or pertain to figures that act here on earth. There really isn't discussion about foreign planets, let alone potential life on them. But that wouldn't mean that it automatically doesn't exist.

There are countless stars and planets, far beyond any number we can even perceive. I think it seems implausible to suggest that there isn't any other life out there.

stevevw · Oct 31, 2018

The Barbarian said:
You think that some kind of pre-natural stuff could result in all this? Seriously? The more I see of creation, the more I see that only God could have done it.

What I mean is if we are to believe that God created a process that made the universe to produce earth and life on it then this would reduce Gods part in creation down to an act that produced a quantum fluctuation that began it all. That's because if we keep going back in time it gets to that point where there was a beginning.

A "blind and random" process wouldn't have done it. Darwin's big discovery was that it isn't random.

It is random in that the variations produced by mutations are random and do not produce what is needed and also produce what is not needed most of the time. In that sense, Darwin's theory does not ultimately have direction. Blind natural selection does not necessarily produce what is ultimately best. It only allows for life to survive and reproduce. For every successful branch of the tree of life, there are many unsuccessful ones.

Random mutations can also allow harm to enter the creation of life and therefore sabotage things. Though selection will filter out some of the harmful effects it still causes damage and a lot of defective genetic material can hang around. Complex life has a history of extinction whereas single-celled life has been way more successful.

Scientist now thinks there was more direction in the way life produced variation through development programs. Living things are connected to each other and their environments and this has an influence on what changes are produced. The right sort of changes can be made for an environment through the influence a creatures surroundings have on its development programs. In this sense change is more directional and pre-set.

And your argument is that God is not capable enough of using contingency as well as necessity in His divine providence?

God is capable but this is not what the modern synthesis states. It states that all creation of life is contingent. It happened by chance and not by some need to create from God to have fellowship with. So in that sense, theistic evolution has a different premise inherent in its process and therefore is not the same as the worldview of evolution.

The probability that it did go this way, however, is 1.0. Which was the point Aquinas was making?

A brilliant engineer, Adrian Bejean, has argued that a replay would have different details, but that the world would have trees, fish, quadrupeds, and intelligent bipeds precisely because the fundamental way that flow and energy works would dictate living systems and that they would function and look as things do in our world.

Which is entirely consistent with a loving God Who had us in mind. Bejean is not a creationist or IDer in any way; he merely came to his conclusion by studying the way flow works in the world.

We've now found a lot of planets, and your "billions" is a bit pessimistic. Turns out the Universe produces Earthlike planets more often than you think.

So the logic would mean that if there are more than billions of earth-like planets and this increases the odds of there being life on those planets. If there is life on these planets then this increases the odds that there is intelligent life because as you have pointed out if evolution was re-run on earth or another Earth-like planet it would produce the same result we have today.

If there are other intelligent beings who can think divinely then do they need saving. If so did Christ have to go and die again and again for their sins? Seems to contradict the Bible in that Christ dies once and for all sinners here on earth.

So are you. So is a deck of shuffled cards. I don't see the point.

If there are many other earth-like planets then according to Adrian Bejean view there should inevitably be many more people like us.

No, I think it goes back a lot earlier than that. Back before there was an "earlier."

Yes the "Word" in the beginning was the word. But I am talking about the point at which existence began time and space etc. We can only try to measure this from that point.

God says He made the Earth to bring forth life. And it did. That seems far more wonderful and awesome than some little Middle Eastern nature deity prancing around making a rabbit here and a tree there.

yes, that is true.

There is, as Bejean pointed out. It's inherent in nature, there in the first principles. Why? We can't say. It just is.
Constructal theory is the view that (i) the generation of images of design (pattern, rhythm) in nature is a phenomenon of physics and (ii) this phenomenon is covered by a principle (the constructal law): ‘for a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to live) it must evolve such that it provides greater and greater access to the currents that flow through it’. This law is about the necessity of design to occur, and about the time direction of the phenomenon: the tape of the design evolution ‘movie’ runs such that existing configurations are replaced by globally easier flowing configurations. The constructal law has two useful sides: the prediction of natural phenomena and the strategic engineering of novel architectures, based on the constructal law, i.e. not by mimicking nature. We show that the emergence of scaling laws in inanimate (geophysical) flow systems is the same phenomenon as the emergence of allometric laws in animate (biological) flow systems. Examples are lung design, animal locomotion, vegetation, river basins, turbulent flow structure, self-lubrication and natural multi-scale porous media. This article outlines the place of the constructal law as a self-standing law in physics, which covers all the ad hoc (and contradictory) statements of optimality such as minimum entropy generation, maximum entropy generation, minimum flow resistance, maximum flow resistance, minimum time, minimum weight, uniform maximum stresses and characteristic organ sizes. Nature is configured to flow and move as a conglomerate of ‘engine and brake’ designs.
The constructal law of design and evolution in nature

He wrote a rather accessible book, intended for the general reader:
https://www.amazon.com/Design-Nature-Constructal-Technology-Organizations/dp/0307744345

Very interesting, I will have to read this.

The more we look at nature, the more we are struck at how elegant it is. The idea that the universe was created just to have an Earth, seems faulty.

I think that maybe there is no other life in the universe. Reason being that to even get a life there needs to be a specific situation and this only happens to be earth. But to get earth in that specific situation the entire universe had to also be in a certain situation, state, position to produce earth. This may have been set from the beginning just as scientists say about how the parameters for producing the type of Universe that would produce the laws, time, space, physics, matter and life that we have needed to be set at the point of the first split seconds of the big bang (inflation).

Do you think a Fall is inevitable for any intelligent beings?

I don't know but if we as complex life could evolve to a point where we could think about religion, life beyond our material world etc it would seem strange that other life could not evolve the same and therefore be in the same position. It would be like allowing other life all the same conditions but holding back on the most important part. I think part of why we have a relationship with God is our intelligence in being able to be aware and understand this.

I don't see how he didn't.

If there is intelligent life on other planets that need salvation then I don't think Christs being Crucified on earth will save souls on a planet far away in another part of the universe. So, therefore, Christs would have to go to their planet and be crucified again. I don't think this would happen. So, therefore, there cannot be other intelligent that need saving on other planets.

stevevw · Nov 1, 2018

KomatiiteBIF said:
Regarding your first response, we look around the universe and we see a practically infinite number of planets and stars that do not appear to have life on them and/or cannot sustain life. I suppose we could just disagree on the idea that the universe has blatently obvious, specific parameters that are fine tuned for life in the universe, earth included.

We can speculate.

If they were not finely tuned then I guess we would not have intelligent life. That to me speaks of something more than just allowing the natural course of events to happen. All else in life tells us that when left to the chances of cause and effect no specific outcome is guaranteed. if there are millions of possible settings and the odds showed that we got the right ones for the conditions to produce intelligent life then logic tells us there either must be other worlds out there that missed or someone meddled with the settings.

And regarding the second point, you said "So I cannot see how Christ would be going around to other planets and getting crucified and resurrecting from the dead over and over again.".

This just sounds like...personal incredulity.

Christ died for our sins. Everything about the Bible is specific to our experiences. All events described are specific to those here on earth or pertain to figures that act here on earth. There really isn't discussion about foreign planets, let alone potential life on them. But that wouldn't mean that it automatically doesn't exist.

But the logic would tell us that intelligent life could not exist. Unless that intelligent life did not have a soul. Are we to believe that God was having some other creation experiment with soulless humanoids. When does an ape become a child of God? Is there a planet of apes.

If we are not in a special place to produce intelligent life then according to the worldview of evolution the chances of intelligent life happening again in other places is high. If it is true as scientists say that there are plenty of other planets similar to earth out in the universe once evolution takes hold on another planet it will inevitably produce intelligent life. If this happens than how are these people saved.

I agree everything about the Bible is specific to us and Christ only had to die once for all. So this negates any chance of there being intelligent life with souls to be saved on other planets. Yet if what scientists say is true that there are other Earth-like planets and evolution can happen on these planets then according to them, there is a good chance of there being intelligent like.

We know intelligent beings have abstract thought and therefore can think of divine concepts. Would God create intelligent beings who could think divinely but yet not have the need to be saved. Are we in some sort of matrix where we ended up on the wrong planet as far as sin is concerned.

There are countless stars and planets, far beyond any number we can even perceive. I think it seems implausible to suggest that there isn't any other life out there.

Maybe some sort of alien life but do you think there is intelligent life like ourselves that need salvation.

The Barbarian · Nov 1, 2018

stevevw said:
What I mean is if we are to believe that God created a process that made the universe to produce earth and life on it then this would reduce Gods part in creation down to an act that produced a quantum fluctuation that began it all.

So if He was sufficiently powerful to make it all happen with a single command, you'd think that diminishes Him? I don't see how. Keep in mind, this is not deism. He didn't create and walk away. Every particle of creation depends on his attention.

Barbarian observes:
A "blind and random" process wouldn't have done it. Darwin's big discovery was that it isn't random.

It is random in that the variations produced by mutations are random and do not produce what is needed and also produce what is not needed most of the time.

And yet, in a population, fitness tends to increase. It puzzled people a long time. Because natural selection is directional, random changes move a population toward increased fitness. This is not a random process at all.

In that sense, Darwin's theory does not ultimately have direction.

And yet it increases fitness over time. How can a random process do that? It can't. One of the elementary rules of systems is that a random process, acted upon by a non-random process, is a non-random process.

Blind natural selection does not necessarily produce what is ultimately best. It only allows for life to survive and reproduce.

Which turns out to produce organisms of optimal fitness for their environment. Pretty much the way that individuals, allowed to act entirely on their own economic self-interest, tend to produce the maximum wealth for all in an economy. It's an amazing world He created, isn't it?

For every successful branch of the tree of life, there are many unsuccessful ones.

Yes. For people, too. Ecclesiastes mentions this. It's the way He does it.

Random mutations can also allow harm to enter the creation of life and therefore sabotage things. Though selection will filter out some of the harmful effects it still causes damage and a lot of defective genetic material can hang around. Complex life has a history of extinction whereas single-celled life has been way more successful.

prokaryotes had a billion-year head start on us. So not surprising if their fitness is better than ours. They've been improving it longer than we have.

Scientist now thinks there was more direction in the way life produced variation through development programs. Living things are connected to each other and their environments and this has an influence on what changes are produced.

Such interactions evolve rather rapidly, in many cases. Again, He clearly used the best way to do things.

God is capable but this is not what the modern synthesis states.

It doesn't speak of God at all, any more than market economics does. And yet it all depend on God, because He made the world in which these things appear and work.

It states that all creation of life is contingent.

No. It makes no claims at all about creation of life. It merely notes how existing life changes over time.

It happened by chance

No. No claims about the creation of life.

So the logic would mean that if there are more than billions of earth-like planets and this increases the odds of there being life on those planets. If there is life on these planets then this increases the odds that there is intelligent life because as you have pointed out if evolution was re-run on earth or another Earth-like planet it would produce the same result we have today.

Not the same result. For example, if things had played out differently, intelligent bipedal organisms might have descended from dinosaurs instead of therapsids. But as Bejean points out, they would look and function very much like we do. For all sorts of physical reasons, intelligent tool-using organisms are constrained to a number of things. Size, for example, because we need to be strong enough to fashion things, but mobile enough to do other things. Bipedalism, because we need hands free for manipulation.

If there are other intelligent beings who can think divinely then do they need saving.

Do you think all intelligent beings must have a fall?

If so did Christ have to go and die again and again for their sins? Seems to contradict the Bible in that Christ dies once and for all sinners here on earth.

The statement is "for all men." But "here on earth" would also work. Should it apply for other beings, not of Earth?

If there are many other earth-like planets then according to Adrian Bejean view there should inevitably be many more people like us.

Likely very different from our perspective, but I think in general form, much like us. Unless we are wrong in assuming only our general sort of world can have intelligent beings.

Barbarian observes:
No, I think it goes back a lot earlier than that. Back before there was an "earlier."

Yes the "Word" in the beginning was the word. But I am talking about the point at which existence began time and space etc.

So was I. C.S. Lewis's deep magic before the beginning.

(Barbarian cites constructal law)

Very interesting, I will have to read this.

I think that maybe there is no other life in the universe. Reason being that to even get a life there needs to be a specific situation and this only happens to be earth. But to get earth in that specific situation the entire universe had to also be in a certain situation, state, position to produce earth. This may have been set from the beginning just as scientists say about how the parameters for producing the type of Universe that would produce the laws, time, space, physics, matter and life that we have needed to be set at the point of the first split seconds of the big bang (inflation).

It might be so. But it seems like a huge waste. One thing I've learned over a half-century of studying His creation is that He is very elegant and efficient in His creation. So it seems stupendously wrong that all of that out there, was necessary for us.

I don't know but if we as complex life could evolve to a point where we could think about religion, life beyond our material world etc it would seem strange that other life could not evolve the same and therefore be in the same position. It would be like allowing other life all the same conditions but holding back on the most important part. I think part of why we have a relationship with God is our intelligence in being able to be aware and understand this.

You're onto something, I think. What if intelligent beings evolved elsewhere, but He didn't give them a soul as he give us a soul? That would be horrifying to me.

The soul is not a mere epiphenomenon of the mind, but I think that is one of the things it is. I think that given soul is in some way, a consequence of a mind potentially capable of knowing God.

If there is intelligent life on other planets that need salvation then I don't think Christs being Crucified on earth will save souls on a planet far away in another part of the universe. So, therefore, Christs would have to go to their planet and be crucified again.

Assuming God is limited to saving one planet of people at a time, and assuming that a Fall is inevitable for all sentient beings. I have no way of being sure of either of these assumptions.

I don't think this would happen. So, therefore, there cannot be other intelligent that need saving on other planets.

If your assumptions hold. I do not know if they do.

stevevw · Nov 3, 2018

The Barbarian said:
And yet, in a population, fitness tends to increase. It puzzled people a long time. Because natural selection is directional, random changes move a population toward increased fitness. This is not a random process at all. And yet it increases fitness over time. How can a random process do that? It can't. One of the elementary rules of systems is that a random process, acted upon by a non-random process, is a non-random process.

Not in smaller populations which happen to represent complex life. The effects of genetic drift tend to encourage deleterious mutations and discourage beneficial ones. There may be a stabilizing effect but this is only because of the proteins ability to tolerate mildly deleterious mutations. But once that threshold is reached there is a fitness cost. If we assume that adaptive evolution is the sole cause of increased fitness through mutations which are primarily changing what is already working well then it runs into problems. If life already has mechanisms that allow it to adapt through non-adaptive processes then the role of mutations and selection are reduced and this makes more sense in the light of the evidence.

Which turns out to produce organisms of optimal fitness for their environment. Pretty much the way that individuals, allowed to act entirely on their own economic self-interest, tend to produce the maximum wealth for all in an economy. It's an amazing world He created, isn't it?

This has proven wrong in both cases as stated above with evolution via the Modern Synthesis. Neoliberalism or individualistic economics has created a small number of haves and a growing number of have-nots. This has been seen in the recent GFC.

It doesn't speak of God at all, any more than market economics does. And yet it all depends on God, because He made the world in which these things appear and work.

It may not speak of God but it goes about explaining how there is no need for a creator. Most of the main promoters of evolution even state this ie Dawkins-the God delusion & Blind watchmaker. As many have stated "Darwin’s Greatest Discovery: Design Without Designer".

Not the same result. For example, if things had played out differently, intelligent bipedal organisms might have descended from dinosaurs instead of therapsids. But as Bejean points out, they would look and function very much as we do. For all sorts of physical reasons, intelligent tool-using organisms are constrained to a number of things. Size, for example, because we need to be strong enough to fashion things, but mobile enough to do other things. Bipedalism, because we need hands free for manipulation.

So regardless of how it evolved if intelligent life is on another Earth-like planet and it has the ability to reason and have abstract thought so that it can contemplate God would these people have the need to be saved and the chance to have a relationship with God. If so how would they be saved if Christ could not come to their planet in the flesh and go through the same experience as he did with us so that we could know God.

Do you think all intelligent beings must have a fall?

I am not sure, but if we follow the logic that evolution claims then intelligent life has the ability to contemplate God, to maybe write about divine concepts and have a history of religion. Evolution claims that religious thought and the idea of God is something that we have made up to help us contemplate our place in the greater scheme of things. So intelligent life would have been able to think this way so why would they be able to think this way and not have a chance to redeem themselves. It's like being created to know there may be a God but never having the chance to have fellowship with him by the luck of ending up on the wrong planet.

The statement is "for all men." But "here on earth" would also work. Should it apply for other beings, not of Earth?

The problem is part of why I think salvation works for us here on earth is that it happened here on earth. I cannot imagine something that happened on another planet let alone being able to hear about it. We have not heard anything as to what has happened on another planet because of the distance.

It might be so. But it seems like a huge waste. One thing I've learned over a half-century of studying His creation is that He is very elegant and efficient in His creation. So it seems stupendously wrong that all of that out there was necessary for us.

Maybe but you could also look at it the same as some say all the conditions that are needed to allow intelligent life to be on earth are just right so the earth is the perfect planet in the perfect place with many features that are conducive for life that has been created for us. The universe has the just right conditions with everything in its place to produce the earth. Looking at it like this is sort of like looking at a clock where all the mechanisms are needed and have to be in their right place to produce time.

You're onto something, I think. What if intelligent beings evolved elsewhere, but He didn't give them a soul as he gives us a soul? That would be horrifying to me.

Yes, it would be like wondering all the time if there was something beyond what we see and never being able to have the chance to ever know.

The soul is not a mere epiphenomenon of the mind, but I think that is one of the things it is. I think that given soul is in some way, a consequence of a mind potentially capable of knowing God.

This is the big question. Many scientists are looking at Consciousness and some say this is our soul. That consciousness is not just a product of the mind but something that is separate.

Assuming God is limited to saving one planet of people at a time, and assuming that a Fall is inevitable for all sentient beings. I have no way of being sure of either of these assumptions.

I think it would make a mockery of Gods word and Christs sacrifice. If Christs had to do it over and over again I can hear his words on the cross saying, "Oh well here we go again". Sort of ground hog day.

If your assumptions hold. I do not know if they do.

Well, I guess we will know sometime in the future if and when they find any life on other planets. Finding any life is a possibility for further complex life somewhere in the universe.

The Barbarian · Nov 3, 2018

stevevw said:
Not in smaller populations which happen to represent complex life. The effects of genetic drift tend to encourage deleterious mutations and discourage beneficial ones.

No. It merely fails to encourage or discourage any mutations.

There may be a stabilizing effect but this is only because of the proteins ability to tolerate mildly deleterious mutations.

In fact, most mutations don't do much of anything. Humans have dozens of them for most gene loci, and very few of them have any measurable effects at all.

But once that threshold is reached there is a fitness cost. If we assume that adaptive evolution is the sole cause of increased fitness through mutations which are primarily changing what is already working well then it runs into problems.

Nope. In fact, it fits the observation that well-fitted populations tend to evolve very little. It fits the adaptionist theory, but not the "genetic load" theory. Why this happens is still somewhat unclear, but that is what we see.

If life already has mechanisms that allow it to adapt through non-adaptive processes then the role of mutations and selection are reduced and this makes more sense in the light of the evidence.

In any reasonably-sized population, there will already be many, many alleles for different genes. So there's a large pool of potential variation in a population, and some of these have epistatic effects. So it's not as simple as counting the fitness of each gene locus.

So regardless of how it evolved if intelligent life is on another Earth-like planet and it has the ability to reason and have abstract thought so that it can contemplate God would these people have the need to be saved and the chance to have a relationship with God.

Do you think that, before the Fall, Adam and Eve needed to be saved, and that they didn't have a relationship with God? Are you assuming that all sentient beings must have had a fall? If so, why do you think so?

I am not sure, but if we follow the logic that evolution claims then intelligent life has the ability to contemplate God, to maybe write about divine concepts and have a history of religion. Evolution claims that religious thought and the idea of God is something that we have made up to help us contemplate our place in the greater scheme of things.

(Barbarian checks)

Nope. Nothing like that in evolutionary theory. Some people have claimed so. Others, like Darwin, assumed a Creator. But that isn't in the theory, either.

This is the big question. Many scientists are looking at Consciousness and some say this is our soul. That consciousness is not just a product of the mind but something that is separate.

Mind is a real thing. But it's not a physical thing. How that works is a mystery.

sfs · Nov 3, 2018

stevevw said:
Not in smaller populations which happen to represent complex life. The effects of genetic drift tend to encourage deleterious mutations and discourage beneficial ones.

Most complex organisms have populations that are plenty big enough for natural selection to be quite effective.

stevevw said:
There may be a stabilizing effect but this is only because of the proteins ability to tolerate mildly deleterious mutations.

No maybe about it: natural selection is highly effective at eliminating deleterious mutations. There is a range of very mildly deleterious and very mildly beneficial mutations that natural selection doesn't effect in species with smallish populations, but they've long since reached equilibrium.

stevevw said:
But once that threshold is reached there is a fitness cost.

What threshold? What fitness cost?

stevevw said:
If we assume that adaptive evolution is the sole cause of increased fitness through mutations which are primarily changing what is already working well then it runs into problems. If life already has mechanisms that allow it to adapt through non-adaptive processes then the role of mutations and selection are reduced and this makes more sense in the light of the evidence.

I'm aware of no non-adaptive mechanisms for adaptation, and am unclear on what that might even mean.

stevevw · Nov 5, 2018

The Barbarian said:
No. It merely fails to encourage or discourage any mutations.

As far as I understand things. According to Lynch who is a top populations geneticist because drift is a random effect, it can overpower selection and therefore encourage slightly deleterious mutations and minimize beneficial ones in small populations.

However, the effects of mutation and recombination are non-random, and by magnifying the role of chance, genetic drift indirectly imposes directionality on evolution by encouraging the fixation of mildly deleterious mutations and discouraging the promotion of beneficial mutations.

Multicellular species experience reduced population sizes, reduced recombination rates, and increased deleterious mutation rates, all of which diminish the efficiency of selection (13). It may be no coincidence that such species also have substantially higher extinction rates than do unicellular taxa (47, 48).
http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/104/suppl_1/8597.full.pdf

In fact, most mutations don't do much of anything. Humans have dozens of them for most gene loci, and very few of them have any measurable effects at all.

As far as I understand things as mutations accumulate, they can have a negative effect through epistasis. Even beneficial mutations can have negative effects when pooled together with other mutations. The more mutations accumulate the greater the chance of there being a negative effect as mutations interfere and reacted with each other. Mutations can be tolerated up to a certain level but there is a threshold and once reached the deleterious effect is fully realized and can affect fitness.

Diminishing Returns Epistasis Among Beneficial Mutations Decelerates Adaptation
Diminishing Returns Epistasis Among Beneficial Mutations Decelerates Adaptation

Negative Epistasis Between Beneficial Mutations in an Evolving Bacterial Population
Negative Epistasis Between Beneficial Mutations in an Evolving Bacterial Population

Nope. In fact, it fits the observation that well-fitted populations tend to evolve very little. It fits the adaptionist theory, but not the "genetic load" theory. Why this happens is still somewhat unclear, but that is what we see.

It seems for humans at least that they are suffering from the accumulated effects of slightly harmful mutations. It seems as we are able to sequence the genome better scientists are discovering that there are hidden deleterious mutations within our genomes. Also, according to these papers’ humans have accumulated slightly deleterious mutations which have an effect on fitness.

Harmful mutations can fly under the radar
Now that genetic sequencing and other technologies have made it easier to recognize mutations that occur in only a subset of cells, researchers are finding more and more harmful mutations hidden among unaffected cells.
Harmful mutations can fly under the radar
Nonetheless, the signature of strong purifying selection against high-confidence LoF variants as a class, and the discovery of numerous known and predicted severe recessive disease alleles, indicates that many LoF alleles with large effects on human fitness exist at low frequency in the human population. Large sequencing and genotyping projects will be required to uncover the full spectrum of these variants and their effects on human disease risk.
A systematic survey of loss-of-function variants in human protein-coding genes

Do you think that, before the Fall, Adam and Eve needed to be saved, and that they didn't have a relationship with God? Are you assuming that all sentient beings must have had a fall? If so, why do you think so?

Well yes because I think the creation story is speaking for all existence and not just us and reserving certain parts for some other life somewhere else. The fall affected all existence not just earth and changed the way things operated. When the Bible speaks about after the fall things changed from perfect to imperfect, I think this was regarding all existence. It seems to have changed how we experience things and how everything is measured. Things began to decay including the universe itself. Unless there is intelligent life in another dimension like a multiverse, I cannot see how everything was not affected.

Nope. Nothing like that in evolutionary theory. Some people have claimed so. Others, like Darwin, assumed a Creator. But that isn't in the theory, either.

You have to remember that all areas of human life being studied by scientists will be traced by to evolutionary origins. The theory of evolution has been extended to include sociology and psychology.
The most common reason given by evolutionists for religious thought was because they say ancient humans attributed the rustling of grasses from a possible predator to being unknown creatures which later evolved into supernatural thought. It is the same for human morality which is said to have grown out of primate socializing.

Cognitive scientists underlined that religions may be explained as a result of the brain architecture that expressed in early Homo genus, through the history of life. However, there is disagreement on the exact mechanisms that drove the evolution of the religious mind. The two main schools of thought hold that either religion evolved due to natural selection and has selective advantage, or that religion is an evolutionary by-product of other mental adaptations.[

Such mechanisms may include the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm (agent detection), the ability to come up with causal narratives for natural events (etiology), and the ability to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions (theory of mind). These three adaptations (among others) allow human beings to imagine purposeful agents behind many observations that could not readily be explained otherwise, e.g. thunder, lightning, movement of planets, complexity of life.[32] The emergence of collective religious belief identified the agents as deities that standardized the explanation.[33
Evolutionary origin of religions - Wikipedia

The Origins of Religion: How Supernatural Beliefs Evolved
The Origins of Religion: How Supernatural Beliefs Evolved

That is the thing about the MS of evolution is that it will try to explain just about every human behaviour through adaptive evolutionary terms. If you believe that human thought is a product of evolution then all that goes with it, language, culture, society and religion is also a product of evolution.

The Barbarian · Nov 5, 2018

stevevw said:
As far as I understand things. According to Lynch who is a top populations geneticist because drift is a random effect, it can overpower selection and therefore encourage slightly deleterious mutations and minimize beneficial ones in small populations.

This is why bottlenecks usually mean extinction. When it doesn't, it often means speciation. The Founder Effect works both ways.

However, the effects of mutation and recombination are non-random, and by magnifying the role of chance, genetic drift indirectly imposes directionality on evolution by encouraging the fixation of mildly deleterious mutations and discouraging the promotion of beneficial mutations.

If it's by chance, then it merely reduced the role of natural selection. It doesn't "encourage" fixation of mildly deleterious mutations; it reduces the likelihood that they'd be eliminated. Likewise, it doesn't "discourage" the spread of beneficial mutations, it merely reduces the likelihood that they will become fixed. The real effect of a small population is to reduce the generation time in which alleles become fixed.

Once through the bottleneck, the population may grow, but the effective population size will remain small because lost alleles will not be regained. The real danger is then extinction when the population changes and there is little genetic variation by which the population might adapt.

Multicellular species experience reduced population sizes, reduced recombination rates, and increased deleterious mutation rates, all of which diminish the efficiency of selection (13).

When metazoans have greatly reduced populations, extinction is a possibility. Interestingly, many small vertebrate populations that survive are those that commonly inbreed. Do you see why that would increase chances of survival?

As far as I understand things as mutations accumulate, they can have a negative effect through epistasis.

Or a positive effect.
Combining growth-promoting genes leads to positive epistasis in Arabidopsis thaliana | eLife

But, particularly in a well-fitted population, negative epistatsis is more likely than positive epistasis. So how do individuals with negative epistasis not come to fill the population? They might, if the deleterious effect was small enough to not matter in terms of living long enough to reproduce. Shouldn't such epistatic effects then gradually pull down a population?

It could, but it's not likely. Remember "fitness" only counts in terms of environment. And subtly harmful mutations in some environments often are beneficial in others. If they are harmful enough to be acted upon by selection, then the alleles involved may well remain in the population, but aren't frequent enough to become fixed, since that event would tend to remove such an individual before reproduction.

And often sign epistasis will actually result in a slightly harmful mutation becoming useful. Reciprocal sign epistasis will result in both becoming useful.

People suspect that human fitness has declined since we have found so many ways to compensate for harmful genes. But of course, natural selection continues, it just continues in the current environment, which includes things like glasses, modern medicine, and the like. The fact that intelligence has been rising, and human physical performance is higher now then even a few decades ago, suggests that the genetic load concerns are not an immediate problem.

If human civilization collapsed and we all went back to stone age technology, you'd see a huge die-off of humans unfit for that environment. And then the population would very likely stabilize at pre-civilization levels we had before, and natural selection would make its adjustments.

Well yes because I think the creation story is speaking for all existence and not just us and reserving certain parts for some other life somewhere else. The fall affected all existence not just earth and changed the way things operated.

Seems unlikely that if intelligent beings exist elsewhere, Adam and Eve made the decision for them as well. On the other hand, there is this:

God seems to have been particularly concerned about Adam becoming able to understand good and evil. He told Adam not to eat from the tree that would give him that understanding. And after Adam did so, God acknowledges that Adam then is like God, understanding good and evil, which caused all the trouble.

If one does not accept the reality of Adam and Eve (and I do acknowledge that reality) then this could be understood as an allegory for the evolution of a nervous system capable of knowing good and evil. If so, then your idea would certainly work.

Perhaps there's a way it could be true in the context of two original ancestors. Haven't thought about that. Maybe I should.

When the Bible speaks about after the fall things changed from perfect to imperfect, I think this was regarding all existence. It seems to have changed how we experience things and how everything is measured. Things began to decay including the universe itself. Unless there is intelligent life in another dimension like a multiverse, I cannot see how everything was not affected.

I do not see any way that human disobedience would cause God to harm other beings. To what purpose? He is just. There would be no justice, particularly in harming other intelligent beings for the disobedience of others.

You have to remember that all areas of human life being studied by scientists will be traced by to evolutionary origins. The theory of evolution has been extended to include sociology and psychology.
The most common reason given by evolutionists for religious thought was because they say ancient humans attributed the rustling of grasses from a possible predator to being unknown creatures which later evolved into supernatural thought.

It's the capacity of brains to infer things from incomplete information. It's a skill that lets us put in the missing pieces of a puzzle. There was, of course, a very high survival value in that. In small amounts, it's useful.

In large amounts it's screaming paranoia, and "the Mexicans are invading us!" Not surprisingly, political inclinations can be reliably found by the relative size of two brain structures, one of which mediates fear and threat assessment, the other involving social cognition:

Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults
Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults

And so inferences of a boogyman or a good fairy causing things outside our understanding, could come from that. But that doesn't quite explain our search for meaning outside of ourselves, a longing for something greater than we are.

It is the same for human morality which is said to have grown out of primate socializing.

Would it be disturbing or wonderful if God created a universe in which Godlike creatures emerge as a consequence of creation?

Cognitive scientists underlined that religions may be explained as a result of the brain architecture that expressed in early Homo genus, through the history of life. However, there is disagreement on the exact mechanisms that drove the evolution of the religious mind. The two main schools of thought hold that either religion evolved due to natural selection and has selective advantage, or that religion is an evolutionary by-product of other mental adaptations.

Yep. And what if? If He's the Creator, why not?

That is the thing about the MS of evolution is that it will try to explain just about every human behaviour through adaptive evolutionary terms. If you believe that human thought is a product of evolution then all that goes with it, language, culture, society and religion is also a product of evolution.

Maybe so. As Pope John Paul II remarked, the mind is not merely an epiphenomenon of the brain. But perhaps that's one of the things it is. The connection between our body and our soul is a mystery and likely to remain so.

I can only suppose that He got it right.

sfs · Nov 5, 2018

stevevw said:
As far as I understand things. According to Lynch who is a top populations geneticist because drift is a random effect, it can overpower selection and therefore encourage slightly deleterious mutations and minimize beneficial ones in small populations.

Drift can and does routinely overpower selection. What of it? Selection also routinely causes adaptive mutations to fix in populations.

stevevw said:
However, the effects of mutation and recombination are non-random, and by magnifying the role of chance, genetic drift indirectly imposes directionality on evolution by encouraging the fixation of mildly deleterious mutations and discouraging the promotion of beneficial mutations.

If you read Lynch's paper, you'll see that he's talking about directionality in DNA -- mutation favors certain bases over others at certain places in the genome. It imparts no overall direction in phenotypic evolution.

stevevw said:
Multicellular species experience reduced population sizes, reduced recombination rates, and increased deleterious mutation rates, all of which diminish the efficiency of selection (13).

Quite true. It is also true that multicellular organisms have been spectacularly successful for hundreds of millions of years. The possibilities opened up by mutlicellularity (and by other novel forms of complexity) mean that organisms can be quite successful even if they have to carry a load of mildly deleterious DNA around with them. An important thing to recognize is that most of these mildly deleterious mutations have long since occurred and been fixed in our ancestors, and the successful species we see are doing fine anyway.

stevevw said:
It seems for humans at least that they are suffering from the accumulated effects of slightly harmful mutations.

That's true, in the sense that every human has a substantial number of deleterious variants and is much less fit than a human with an ideal genome. We don't compete with ideal humans, however, but with real humans, who all have about the same number of deleterious variants as we do, and most humans do just fine with the number we've got. So again, what's your point?

stevevw said:
Now that genetic sequencing and other technologies have made it easier to recognize mutations that occur in only a subset of cells, researchers are finding more and more harmful mutations hidden among unaffected cells.
Harmful mutations can fly under the radar

These are somatic mutations, not germline mutations, and they have nothing to do with evolution. Why are you introducing them here?

stevevw said:
Nonetheless, the signature of strong purifying selection against high-confidence LoF variants as a class, and the discovery of numerous known and predicted severe recessive disease alleles, indicates that many LoF alleles with large effects on human fitness exist at low frequency in the human population. Large sequencing and genotyping projects will be required to uncover the full spectrum of these variants and their effects on human disease risk.
A systematic survey of loss-of-function variants in human protein-coding genes

These are not the kind of mildly deleterious mutations that you were talking about earlier, ones that escape natural selection because the population size is too small. These rare deleterious mutations are rare because of natural selection, which is suppressing and eliminating them. They keep recurring, though, so there is always some number of them present -- a state known as mutation-selection balance. (Huh -- I see that I'm technically an author of this last paper.)

Evolution?

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