OK. I admit it...

[herev]

closed for a minute

 

[herev]

MOD HAT ON

STOP
BEFORE YOU POST, MAKE SURE IT IS ON TOPIC. I AM SPLITTING OFF NON-TOPIC POSTS AND REQUEST THAT YOU KEEP THINGS ON TOPIC--DO NOT HIJACK THIS THREAD OR FURTHER ACTION WILL OCCUR.

MOD HAT OFF

 

[herev]

OK, I've spent a lot of time splitting and cleaning up this thread. Please keep things on topic. That means YOU. Do not post unrelated topics, hijack the thread, or make jabs at another poster. Defend your idea against his/hers, but no personal comments.

 

[dlamberth]

Well, it's a start. Just remember there are millions of good Christians who accept evolution and believe in God.

To take this a step further, there are a lot of scientist who are Christian who have also worked toward helped us get a better understanding of evolution.

.

 

[VMOS]

natural selection isn't purposful, it isn't heading "there", it's just heading
and if where it heads to is better than where it was for any given species or group, then it stays there
imagine you have a bunch of people on an escalator going up at any given time they pick a random direction to run, those who stay where they are are fine, no change, those who run up get to the top faster and those who run backwards fall and kill themselves
it's a bit of a crap analogy, but I'm knackered

 

[c'mon sense]

Once upon a time, you had nothing to select, so what caused it?
So natural selection is not purposeful?

All natural things are an oscillation around ZERO, a state of balance. Have you noticed how copper when oxidized turns green? They are precisely complementary colours. Wonder why? It is only this, the local love affair of + and -, that amounts to the turmoil we see all around us and yet at no time is nature unbalanced in itself.

No, natural selection is not purposeful. Life and environment are coupled in a feedback-loop. Natural selection is the feedback response of the environment to different life-forms. Evolution is the net feedback response of life-forms to their environment. They involve the here and now and there is no foresight. Environments and life-forms that fit each other well, coexist. Life-forms that are no longer a match for their environment go extinct.

I expect some reaction from certain posters, but the situation resembles the coupling of electrons with opposite spins. They coexist because they amplify each other; the ones that spin in the same direction deplete each other's momentum and cease to exist.

As an analogy to the electrons, imagine trying to gear two wheels that both spin clockwise: impossible! Instead, one has to spin clockwise, the other counter-clockwise. Now their total spin amounts to zero. Violation of this zero-balance-policy of nature is punishable by "death." In the case of the gears, by the impossibility of motion.

 

[HairlessSimian]

STIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIL!!!

There are two L's in STIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIILL.

 

[HairlessSimian]

excerpted:
All natural things are an oscillation around ZERO, a state of balance. Have you noticed how copper when oxidized turns green? They are precisely complementary colours. Wonder why? It is only this, the local love affair of + and -, that amounts to the turmoil we see all around us and yet at no time is nature unbalanced in itself.

...

I expect some reaction from certain posters, but the situation resembles the coupling of electrons with opposite spins. They coexist because they amplify each other; the ones that spin in the same direction deplete each other's momentum and cease to exist.
...

Your knowledge of chemistry is astounding. Astoundingly mistaken, that is. Copper oxide is green because it absorbs parts of the visible spectrum of light, but leaves behind other parts that impart a greenish hue. This has to do with the energy levels of the copper orbitals which are affected by the oxygens in the oxide. Not to mention that in the oxide, the copper is missing a couple of electrons and is not comparable to copper metal.
Electron spins tend to pair precisely for the opposite reason you give: they extinguish each other's magnetic moments (not momentum) when paired; they do NOT "amplify" one another. There is no depletion, as depletion implies a time-dependent decay. The spins are or are not paired - timelessly.

 

[And-U-Say]

Natural selection and mutations will never produce a code.

- Man will never go faster than 60 mph because the wind would take his breath away.
- Man will never fly
- Man will never go to the moon
- Rockets cannot operate in a vacuum
- Wireless communications will never work
- All that can be discovered has been discovered

Please, join the rest of your ilk in the dustbin of history. Ignorance and dogma have never been a valid substitute for reason.

 

[theFijian]

Heres a good song, Dear God by XTC covered by Sarah Mclachlan.

http://home.comcast.net/~aronra/Sarah_McLachlan_-_Dear_God.mp3

'Generals and Majors' was better.

 

[HairlessSimian]

My point exactly. It's limitless.
Once upon a time, you had nothing to select, so what caused it?
So natural selection is not purposeful?

Natural selection does not think or maintain a goal. Natural selection is not a living, thinking thing.
Natural selection simply occurs. But you can't see it with any eyes. What you can see is that some individuals have more reproductive success than others, and their genes come to populate the genetic pool to a greater degree than others'. If individuals possessing those genes happen to have an advantage over others in reproductive success because of those genes (either because they are able to survive to sexual maturity more often, they appeal to the opposite gender to a greater degree, they produce more offspring, or some such), then the genetic pool will include a greater and greater proportion of those genes. We look at the variation of gene content over time and say that natural selection for those genes that confer some advantage in reproductive success has occured.
Natural selection can also have counter-productive consequences in the face of a sudden (geologically speaking) change in circumstances, climate or food availability or predator population, etc.. For instance, if natural selection has been operating for generations on sexual attractiveness, the population may find itself less fit for surviving an ecological change.
However, natural selection operates only on the existing variation in a population. It is NOT limitless.

 

[theFijian]

My point exactly. It's limitless.
Once upon a time, you had nothing to select, so what caused it?
So natural selection is not purposeful?

I think I see what you're getting at here TRS. Are you trying to suggest that Natural Selection is the Naturalists 'God'? A bit like Hovind claiming that Time is the evolutinists God?

 

[c'mon sense]

Your knowledge of chemistry is astounding. Astoundingly mistaken, that is.

Don't bet money on that just yet.

Copper oxide is green because it absorbs parts of the visible spectrum of light, but leaves behind other parts that impart a greenish hue.

Cool! I really didn't know that...
You could as well have said that copper oxide is green because it's green and copper is reddish-orange because it's reddish orange.

My point was in trying to correlate energetic trade-offs between the reactants to the change in the color of the (oxidized) copper. I'm not convinced I was so mistaken in proposing that the complementary colors (which are in direct relationship to energy levels) reflect the idea that a chemical reaction is all about achieving a state of balance.

Electron spins tend to pair precisely for the opposite reason you give: they extinguish each other's magnetic moments (not momentum) when paired; they do NOT "amplify" one another. There is no depletion, as depletion implies a time-dependent decay. The spins are or are not paired - timelessly.

O.K. Here I admit I pushed my argumentation. I misused a term but I still you are a wrong to say that electron spins tend to pair precisely for the OPPOSITE reason I give. My emphasis was on: in nature, the sum of everything is zero.

Actually, I think my gears analogy was brilliant. I'm quite disappointed you failed to appreciate it.

 

[kingreaper]

Please nail down for me a hard definition of natural selection. The darn thing cannot be falsified.

Of course it can't, it's a matter of statistics, a form of math, and mathematical models cannot be impossible, merely irrelevant

You could falasify NS happenning if you could prove:

A) There is no variation in creatures which affects their likelihood of reproducing successfully
or
B)There is no limit to the number of any organism on the planet, and all will continue to expand their populations continuously and indefinitely

Seen as neither of these are possibilities, NS is pretty much a certainty

As for the definition: In any given population those that have the highest probability-average of descendants will generally have the most descendants and thus their traits will become more common until fixed, while those that are least likely to reproduce will have least descendants making their traits less common until the traits vanish entirely

 

[HairlessSimian]

Cool! I really didn't know that...
You could as well have said that copper oxide is green because it's green and copper is reddish-orange because it's reddish orange.

Yes. If you cut off the quote at the point you did, you make me sound kinda stupid. Which was your point, obviously. If you had read and understood what follows, however, you might not have done that and you might have learned something. Let me conclude from your juvenile behaviour that you're not actually interested in learning anything if it means you're shown to be wrong.

Be that as it may, I can try again. My point was that the colour has an electronic origin which knows nothing about complementary colours which, in asserting that there is a relationship between the colour of a metal and its oxide, makes you sound stupid. What colour is mercury? Silver. What about its oxide? Yellow. Or red. How about chromium? Silver. Chromium oxide? Green. So much for your theory.
Why limit yourself to oxides? Sulfides are more colourful.

My point was in trying to correlate energetic trade-offs between the reactants to the change in the color of the (oxidized) copper. I'm not convinced I was so mistaken in proposing that the complementary colors (which are in direct relationship to energy levels) reflect the idea that a chemical reaction is all about achieving a state of balance.

The most generous thing I can say about this is that there is indeed an indirect link between the colour of a metal-containing compound and the colour of the metal itself, and that link is that it involves the same metallic element.That's all.

 

[Physics_guy]

This was the modus aparandii of current thought among the physics community before Dr. Steven Hawking showed them all wrong by his work proving the first three words of the Holy Bible in 1976. He proved what we knew all along. The book of Genesis has stood the test of time. Einstein's worldview did not. I shall stand by the truth; not flawed worldviews.

Aargh! It hurts my poor physicist ears to hear people say so many things that are so wrong. One quick thing: the Big Bang Model was well known well before Hawking!

 

[vajradhara]

This was the modus aparandii of current thought among the physics community before Dr. Steven Hawking showed them all wrong by his work proving the first three words of the Holy Bible in 1976.

i suppose that you have some literature that you can cite for this claim, yes?

metta,

~v

 

[c'mon sense]

Yes. If you cut off the quote at the point you did, you make me sound kinda stupid. Which was your point, obviously.

I apologize if this is how it came across.

Be that as it may, I can try again. My point was that the colour has an electronic origin which knows nothing about complementary colours which, in asserting that there is a relationship between the colour of a metal and its oxide, makes you sound stupid.

I AM stupid. I am entitled to sound like one.

I am also aware that not all oxides are the complementary colour of the metallic element. But in the case of copper they are. And there is a deep reason for that which is found in the energetic trade-off achieved when copper is oxidized. The colour is a reflection of the "compromise" they achieved. Forgive me if I am being a little poetic but don't be so brutal!
In addition to that you will find that in many flowers or animals (and not only) the colour scheme is often complementary. (There has to be a good reason for that also.)
Even if copper and its oxide know nothing about complementary colours, as you know, such colours when superimposed cancel each other out. My point with the copper->copper oxide reaction was to illustrate that chemical reactions are about achieving states of balance. In this particular reaction the colours ARE important because not only because they are the far (visible) reach of what goes on at the intimate level of the electrons, but also because the transition from red to green illustrates in colourful terms the principle of energy conservation.

The most generous thing I can say about this is that there is indeed an indirect link between the colour of a metal-containing compound and the colour of the metal itself, and that link is that it involves the same metallic element.That's all.

You make it sound like a sacrifice. I realize you have struggled to be generous and I appreciate that. Nothing else.

 

[HairlessSimian]

<off-topic>I hope Romania has recovered well from the floods.</off-topic>

I am also aware that not all oxides are the complementary colour of the metallic element. But in the case of copper they are. And there is a deep reason for that which is found in the energetic trade-off achieved when copper is oxidized. The colour is a reflection of the "compromise" they achieved. Forgive me if I am being a little poetic but don't be so brutal!

More than poetic. Mystical.

In addition to that you will find that in many flowers or animals (and not only) the colour scheme is often complementary. (There has to be a good reason for that also.)

'Coincidence' comes to mind. 'Differential reproductive success' also.

My point with the copper->copper oxide reaction was to illustrate that chemical reactions are about achieving states of balance.

If by balance, you mean equilibrium, I agree.

In this particular reaction the colours ARE important because not only because they are the far (visible) reach of what goes on at the intimate level of the electrons, but also because the transition from red to green illustrates in colourful terms the principle of energy conservation.

But, but, but. The oxidation of copper does not conserve energy. Nor does every other reaction, except on rare occasions. They're either exothermic or endothermic.

I think we've hijacked this thread enough. The mod will scold us.

 

[madarab]

c'mon sense, why materials have the colors they do and how their atoms bond is a matter of very basic quantum mechanics, not supernatural causation.