Maths will kill the evolution of every biological structure.

[Punchy]

Romans 1:20
For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse

If the attributes of God are clearly seen in the Creation, then the Creation itself cannot lie. All empirical evidence for evolution and the antiquity of the earth should be accepted, unless we are to assume that God deceives with His creative work.

29+ Evidences for Macroevolution
The Scientific Case for Common Descent
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

A distinction should be made between the fact and theory of evolution. The fact is true regardless of our explanation for how it occurred.

 

[Amora]

Nope. The twin nested hierarchy still stands as the strongest piece of overwhelming evidence in support of evolution. A nested hierarchy is the exact opposite of what you would expect from intelligent design. For instance, man made designs do not fit into a single nested hierarchy and organisms designed by humans regularly violate the nested hierarchy.

Theistic Evolution ftw.
Man is no Creator.
We dont know why our creator pushed evolution in the current way, that led to twin nested hierarchies. (that the morphology trees and genetic trees match - in very very short)
I answer my increduly (and I am not embasired by that word at ALL) with a creator. I accept more or less the mechanism he used.

However you alluding the idea that a creator would design things differently than you would. You are taking an example from humans, and how THEY design things, and pointing out that therfore a creator did not do this.
We dont know if there is a better option. I am not talking about simply transfeciting a gene from yeast into a mouse and the gene works. Small examples abound. We cant know what would happen were there NOT the way it is.

This also answers the question evo's like to raise regarding flawed design.
This universe and planet is working pretty well, and I dont see anyone designing anything better. we lack the experemental capability to observe whether indeed there truly ARE flaws.

 

[us38]

Theistic Evolution ftw.
Man is no Creator.
We dont know why our creator pushed evolution in the current way, that led to twin nested hierarchies. (that the morphology trees and genetic trees match - in very very short)
I answer my increduly (and I am not embasired by that word at ALL) with a creator. I accept more or less the mechanism he used.

However you alluding the idea that a creator would design things differently than you would. You are taking an example from humans, and how THEY design things, and pointing out that therfore a creator did not do this.
We dont know if there is a better option. I am not talking about simply transfeciting a gene from yeast into a mouse and the gene works. Small examples abound. We cant know what would happen were there NOT the way it is.

This also answers the question evo's like to raise regarding flawed design.
This universe and planet is working pretty well, and I dont see anyone designing anything better. we lack the experemental capability to observe whether indeed there truly ARE flaws.

It doesn't require omniscience to figure out that the appendix is bad design.

Verwirrung

-- D

 

[FishFace]

<Math nerd>I don't think e^(i&#952 = 0 has a solution for &#952; in the complex numbers.</Math nerd>

You're correct, |e^(ix)| = 1 for real x. (No idea about complex or imaginary) since:

|e^(ix)| = |i sin x + cos x| = sin²x + cos²x = 1

 

[graph]

You're correct, |e^(ix)| = 1 for real x. (No idea about complex or imaginary) since:

|e^(ix)| = |i sin x + cos x| = sin²x + cos²x = 1

it doesn't hold for imaginary numbers.

 

[Sal1981]

It doesn't require omniscience to figure out that the appendix is bad design.

Verwirrung

-- D

You don't need to allude to human anatomical knowledge. We know that the eyes of squid are better "designed" than the human eye.

 

[WhiteMageGirl]

For any computer science geek the math for evolution is:

1=1

also known as a true statement.

 

[Maxwell511]

You're correct, |e^(ix)| = 1 for real x. (No idea about complex or imaginary) since:

|e^(ix)| = |i sin x + cos x| = sin²x + cos²x = 1

For complex numbers the function approaches zero as the imaginary part approaches infinity.

e^j(a+bj)=(e^ja)(e^-b)

lim(b->infinity)(e^ja)(e^-b)=(e^ja)lim(b->infinity)(e^-b)=(e^ja)*0=0

*Sorry that it looks messy I don't know how to but equations on this forum*

 

[us38]

For complex numbers the function approaches zero as the imaginary part approaches infinity.

e^j(a+bj)=(e^ja)(e^-b)

lim(b->infinity)(e^ja)(e^-b)=(e^ja)lim(b->infinity)(e^-b)=(e^ja)*0=0

*Sorry that it looks messy I don't know how to but equations on this forum*

Electrical engineers lol

 

[[serious]]

As long as we don't start tossing around H bar. Man I hate H bar.

 

[arunma]

OK, I'll attempt to answer the OP. Jlerollin, you're probably not going to find mathematics to be very creationist-friendly. Believe it or not, there are mathematical analyses of evolution out there, and none of them preclude or even diminish the truth of evolutionary theory. Mathematics can actually be used to analyze the energetic and chemical stability of certain evolutionary pathways.

Back in college, I took a math course on biological networks as part of my math major, and this topic was actually touched on briefly. I'll try and dig through my notes to see if I can find specific references to papers. But for now, you might try looking up John J. Tyson on Google Scholar. He's a scientist who's written many papers on mathematical biology; I remember his name because I wrote my final paper on some of his work. I don't know if he personally has written any papers on mathematical analyses of evolution, but if you search for him and for some of his collaborators, you're likely to find what you're looking for.

But again I remind you: it won't be creationist-friendly.

As long as we don't start tossing around H bar. Man I hate H bar.

What? You don't like the fundamental unit of angular momentum conservation?

 

[Punchy]

If you are really concerned about mathematical probability, watch this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2SVMKZhV2g

 

[Chalnoth]

As long as we don't start tossing around H bar. Man I hate H bar.

Meh, h-bar is just equal to one if you choose your units appropriately

 

[jlerollin]

I am not expecting the stuff you guys give me to be creation friendly but to be honest I dont expect there to be very much in the way of calculated evolutionary pathways, i mean darwin basicly posited the theory of evolution which has become dominant without any. he didnt even have a decent mechanism that could be scientificly verified. so the maths has been out for a long time since the beginning and basicly it will never come in on side. that stuff about mount improbable being scaled by a weasel doesnt hold rigourous water after only a brief analysis. no way to determine fitness without end IRREDUCIBLY COMPLEX answer in the computer.

 

[Chalnoth]

I am not expecting the stuff you guys give me to be creation friendly but to be honest I dont expect there to be very much in the way of calculated evolutionary pathways, i mean darwin basicly posited the theory of evolution which has become dominant without any. he didnt even have a decent mechanism that could be scientificly verified. so the maths has been out for a long time since the beginning and basicly it will never come in on side. that stuff about mount improbable being scaled by a weasel doesnt hold rigourous water after only a brief analysis. no way to determine fitness without end IRREDUCIBLY COMPLEX answer in the computer.

You're approaching the problem from the wrong end. Biological evolution becomes extraordinarily simple if approached empirically: the mere existence of a phylogenic tree, for example, demonstrates the theory of evolution to be valid. Biological systems are just too complex to approach from the pure theory end and attempt to do the calculations that way (at least, not fully...some calculations can be performed).

 

[Maxwell511]

Electrical engineers lol

Someone's gotta do it.

 

[Tiberius]

Life appeared on Earth about a billion years after the earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago. Now, how long is a billion years? It's a thousand lots of a million, but even that doesn't really put it into perspective. So let's put it into perspective now.

Let's imagine that time has been sped up, and is now passing 31,536,000 times faster than normal. That's thirty-one and a half million times faster than it is now. Everything has been sped up except for you, who still percieves time normally. How would time pass at this rate?

• At this rate, a year passes in one second.
• The oldest people are born, grow old and die in less than two minutes.
• Australia was settled as a convict settlment less than five minutes ago.
• An entire millenium passes in just over a quarter of an hour.
• Jesus (if he ever existed) lived only half an hour ago.
• Modern man first appeared just two days ago.
• Dinosaurs died out more than two years ago.
• The first reptiles appeared almost eleven years ago.
• Animals first emerged from the water in the form of amphibians almost twelve years ago.
• Plants appeared on land twelve and a half years ago.
• The first multi-celled animals appeared more then twenty one years ago.
• Eukaryotes (the first true plant and animal cells with a nucleus) appeared almost forty six years ago.
• The first bacteria (the first life on this planet) appeared one hundred and twenty years ago.
• The earth was formed almost one hundred and forty three years ago.
• The universe was formed four hundred and seventy five years ago.

So, you can see that a billion years passes very slowly. At this rate, it would take almost thirty two years for a billion years to pass. Plenty of time for even random chance to get things done.

Let's do a little thought experiment. Let's go back to the formation of the Earth and try different combinations of amino acids, let's see if we can get the right combination to make the DNA for a simple bacteria (remembering that the earliest bacteria had no organelles). From the formation of earth to the appearance of bacteria is about 700 million years. That's 255,500,000,000 days, or thereabouts. If we tried only one combination a day, we could still try more than 250 trillion combinations. And that's if we just tried one at a time. When we remember that amino acids were combining all over the planet,, many different combinations being tried at the same time, the number of possible combinations that can occur gets even higher. If it only occured in four places, the number of different combinations rises to one quadrillion (that's the next one after trillion). If it occured in only one hundred places around the world, the number of possible permutations rises to 25 quadrillion.

Now, given that the scale of these events are absolutely tiny (after all, a DNA strand is microscopic), the chances are that this could have taken place in one hundred different places in a small puddle. That's 25 quadrillion permutations in a small puddle in the time evolution allows us. When we multiply that by the sheer number of puddles that existed all around the world (and lets not forget the oceans as well) there are trillions upon trillions of possible permutations that could have occured.

And that's if we only do one permutation a day at each location. Granted, some permutations would have been done more than once, but that in no way reduces the massive number of different combinations that would have been tried. So, even random chance indicates that somewhere, the right combination would have come about in that billion years that life had to get started.

In short, natural selection and random mutation had plenty of time to get it right, and that's only to form the most basic life forms we know of in the fossil record. It's had three and a half times that time period to get to the life forms we see around us today.

So don't tell me that mathematics says that we haven't had enough time for life to evolve naturalistically. It's had plenty of time for it to happen by random chance, and evolution doesn't occur randomly, so it could get the job done even faster.

 

[Loudmouth]

Theistic Evolution ftw.

What about theistic lottery theory? Does God also nudge the ping pong balls so that certain people win? The problem with post hoc probabilities is that it involves a sleight of hand. Instead of shooting an arrow at a bullseye the bullseye is painted around the arrow.

Man is no Creator.

But we are designers, and ID "theory" bases it's claims on the way in which humans design. For instance, irreducible complexity and informational systems are said to be designed because all known irreducibly complex systems and information systems are due to intelligences (namely, humans). Therefore, ID has based it's claims on human intelligence as a model. Therefore, if humans are the model then the non-nested hierarchy that human designs fall into must also be part of the model. Humans have never been constrained to a nested hierarchy when designing. I can not conceive of an IDist who would claim that their "intelligent designer" (ie God, nudge nudge wink wink) would be constrained more so than humans.

I answer my increduly (and I am not embasired by that word at ALL) with a creator. I accept more or less the mechanism he used.

That's fine, I just don't see any need for incredulity to begin with.

However you alluding the idea that a creator would design things differently than you would.

Quite the opposite. IDists claim that the "intelligent designer" (ie God, nudge nudge wink wink) would design like us so they use human design as the model.

We dont know if there is a better option.

Yes we do. Ever heard of "genetically modified foods"?

This also answers the question evo's like to raise regarding flawed design.

If humans could design it better what does this say about the designer? In fact, humans have to go in and fix the design on a regular basis. Appendectomies on asymptomatic patients is now recommended for people who are going to spend large spans of time away from medical help, such as in rainforests or doing missionary work in secluded regions.

This universe and planet is working pretty well, and I dont see anyone designing anything better.

Read a medical journal sometime.

 

[Lucretius]

Hah, I was reading this book my sister's friend gave her called "The Skeptics Search for God". It was a piece of crap, but what angered me most was the fact that he threw some stupid probability into every one of his claims without showing the math behind it. He somehow calculated the odds of life forming on his own using knowledge he gained from old science textbooks and Scientific American articles...

Regardless, now that I have access to the peer-reviewed journals via my college, I checked out some of his more readily testable claims (such as the lack of a source for homochirality or the impossibility of RNA synthesis) which turned out to be flat lies. He couldn't find ONE source of homochirality and said scientists couldn't either. Maybe he should have looked in the peer-reviewed journals instead of Scientific American seeing as the articles were published before he published his book.

But yeah; these probability calculations are full of crap. You got guys like Fred Hoyle throwing in a bunch of random numbers and the average layman respects him because he used some differential equations in his calculations and a lot of average joes don't know what differential equations are (I just learned about them in my Integral Calc class). Hoyle's, and the other's claims, are just a lot of big numbers with no basis in reality. Besides, probability doesn't dictate the outcome of something after it's already happened. You can flip a coin a million times and write down the result. The odds of getting that again are about as small as these people claim the origin of life by chance is. It doesn't change the fact that we still got the exact string of coin flips already!

 

[flatworm]

For instance, irreducible complexity and informational systems are said to be designed because all known irreducibly complex systems and information systems are due to intelligences (namely, humans).

That isn't necessarily true- although Behe's examples (the flagellum, the immune system, the blood clotting cascade) appear to not be irreducibly complex, there is no reason why evolution cannot produce such systems.

Behe has already admitted that "Irreducibly complex" does not equal "unevolvable". He and other creationists are just using the term to play on the popular misconception that evolution builds up life forms one part at a time. In my book, playing on someone's known misunderstandings in order to create another false impression in their mind is lying, pure and simple.