What are we?

[AV1611VET]

Me winner, I picked plant option.

Let me guess? banana?

 

[Ophiolite]

The probability argument against abiogenesis and/or evolution is nothing more than a giant red herring.

You make that assertion with confidence, yet you avoid any commenton where the red herring came from! Do you maintain it also evolved? Don't dissemble, the public want to know. They demand to know.

 

[Ophiolite]

Francesco Ayala a Nobel prize winning Evolutionary Biologist, (who is some kind of Catholic monk or priest but a theistic evolutionist) calculated the chance of Evolving "from Bacteria to Man" as some really incredibly low number, its beyond Billions or Trillions to

Interesting. While Ayala is adept at probability analysis this claim is in distinct contrast with what I understand his position to be. So can you please provide a link or citation? That will let us see the calculation in context.

What it would be consistent with is something along these lines: "The odds of a bacterium evolving over time into a human are astronomical. However, that is not how evolution proceeds. The genius of Darwin lay in recognising the role of natural selection in removing a substantial amount of the chance." (That's my interpretation of how your assertion about the calculation can be matched with his thinking.)

I think the following three quotes more accurately reflect his views. They are from his 2007 paper published in PNAS, Darwin's Greatest Discovery: Design Without Designer.

" Biological evolution differs from a painting or an artifact in that it is not the outcome of precon-ceived design. The design of organisms is not intelligent but imperfect and, at times, outright dysfunctional."

"Natural selection accounts for the ‘‘design’’ of organisms because adaptive variations tend to increase the probability of survival and reproduction of their carriers at the expense of maladaptive, or less adaptive, variations."

"This is Darwin’s fundamental discovery, that there is a process that is creative although not conscious. And this is the conceptual revolution that Darwin completed: the idea that the design of living organisms can be accounted for as the result of natural processes governed by natural laws."

 

[Phred]

If abiogenesis kick-started life on this planet, which did it kick-start first? plants or animals?

If it kick-started plants, are we plants?

If it kick-started animals, are plants animals?

You don't really care. This is just more of an attempt to create fog around scientific theories and thus give a wider crack for you to insert your beliefs into. It's what Christians aren't supposed to do.

 

[klutedavid]

Let me guess? banana?

Your learning.

 

[Ponderous Curmudgeon]

You don't really care. This is just more of an attempt to create fog around scientific theories and thus give a wider crack for you to insert your beliefs into. It's what Christians aren't supposed to do.

What about belligerent Poes?

 

[Bungle_Bear]

Your learning.

His learning is a banana?

That would explain a lot.