Hiya NaonTiotami I believe I'm following you on twitter already, that avatar looks familiar

What it NOT random (and is the part of evolution you are totally ignoring so you can cling to your precious and holy book of fairy tales) is there *selection*. Those organisms better suited to survival will have a better chance at passing on their genetic information to the next generation – natural selection.

While these changes may be slight (leading to what IDiots call "micro" evolution), over millions of generations they build up to make tremendous changes. It's not hard to understand is it?

On this point: A million monkeys sitting at typewriters attempting to write the works of Shakespeare is STILL and incredibly bad analogy for genetics. The entire genome of an organism does not magically appear all at once – if it did it would be fantastic evidence FOR CREATION.

As NaonTiotami is trying to explain, evolution works by building the words, sentences, paragraphs, and books (if you will) of genetic information over countless successive generations.

Your analogy is better served if the monkeys received a banana every time one of them guessed the correct location of a letter. The script is then passed to the next monkey who has a guess at a few letters – the right ones are rewarded and the wrong ignored. Using such a model the monkeys can generate the complete works of Shakespeare in very little time.

Of course, this is NOT to say that evolution has a specific goal in mind. It does not begin with some ultimate end point in mind and work its way toward it. The only goal of evolution (at the genetic level) is survival.

You state "Information requires a sender, no way around it." I am interested to know if you consider god "information".

If the answer is yes, then I might well ask what entity "reads god" (whatever that might actually mean). Of course, this argument is another infinite regress which many theists use special pleading to extract themselves from – everything requires a cause, oh expect my very special and invisible friend.

If god is not information, then you have contradicted your initial assertion that "information requires a sender". In this scenario it is just as valid to assert the universe itself does not require a read, except that we know the universe actually exists. Occam's razor does not deal nicely with the god hypothesis here.

I "believe" (read: accept) evolutionary theory because the evidence I have seen supports it, not because I want to. Nobody accepts a scientific theory because they want to, especially not working scientists.

If you want to quit from this, fine. But I am not closed-mined, and it is possible that you may convince me that evolution is false. However, if I rebut all your points, don't read into it that I'm just giving ad hoc excuses, it may just be that you are simply wrong. Have you ever consider the fact that you could be wrong?

But, again, self-replicating molecules are basically the only case where I am making the claim that simple information can come out of randomness. I am not trying to apply this to evolution in general, but that's not how information comes about through normal evolutionary processes.

You seem to have redefined "information" to require intelligence. If this is definition you are using, then we are not talking about the same thing. Ribozymes self-replicate whether or not someone is looking at them, examining their nucleotide sequence or finding out how they do what they do, and it also requires no sender, as I have demonstrated: these ribozymes can form without guidance in a solution of RNA nucleotides.

Yes, I agree that nat. selec. only selects individuals, but I fail to see your point. Perhaps explaining what you mean more thoroughly next time would help point me in the right direction to what you are saying or claiming.

Do you understand the principles of population genetics? Do you understand how certain alleles can be fixed in the gene pool by nat. selec. and/or genetic drift? If not (and this is not a personal attack), you really SHOULDN'T be discussing evolution at all. Population genetics is the cornerstone of evolutionary mechanisms, and at least a basic understanding is required to fully grasp how evolution works on the population level, something you don't seem to understand.

I'll explain my point about harmful and beneficial mutations again, just so you might be able to understand a bit better. Harmful mutations, by definition, cause some drop in the organism's fitness (its ability to pass its genes onto the next generation), while beneficial ones cause an increase in fitness. Over time, natural selection, the process by which a higher fitness gives you a greater "marketshare" (if you will) in the next population of organisms, will weed out the harmful mutations that lower fitness and promote the beneficial mutations that increase it. It doesn't matter if harmful mutations are more common, because natural selection will just remove them from being introduced into the next generation. The same applies to beneficial mutations, except in reverse: it does not matter if they are rare, they will be promoted in the next generation and over time most of the population will have that mutation.

I fail to see how politician analogy has anything to do with natural selection.

I would suggest reading up on some population genetics. Perhaps then you will be able to argue from a position which understands the mechanisms I am talking about. Again, this is not an insult, just a helpful suggestion.

http://www.evolutionfairytale.com/articles_debate...

You guys believe evolution because you want to, not because of any evidence. That is why I won’t convince you and in that regard makes this a waste of my time. Hopefully someone reading this who buys in to your nonsense will find their way out of the matrix…

http://kgov.com/images/PermTOL/TrochleaKGOVchalle...

LOL! You need to get out of the matrix. Did you bother to look closely at the link you provided? The ACTUAL image from the proper perspective looks exactly like a pile of random rubble! Next time why don’t you read the full article, try scrolling down a little. There are rock formations like “the old man on the mountain” in New Hampshire that, given the right angle, kind of looks like an old man. But my 8 year old can tell the difference between this random formation and Mount Rushmore. Can you? Now again, show me anywhere in the world of any formation that looks like a Holywood star. ROTFL!

You keep talking about natural selection picking and choosing good mutations and quickly discarding bad ones. I will repeat again that NS can only select inividuals!!! If bad mutations massively outpace “good” ones (if there is such a thing), how can NS possibly filter the noise to select the good one? Evolution is like politicians, thinking it can get away with spending more than it has and come out ahead.

In fact, you can do it to any post on this site if you want to! Feel free to do so.

And, by the way, that quote means nothing. Who would expect a physicist to have any biology expertise? Not me. Wrong kind of expert.

- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19041751?ordin...
- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7646041?ordina...
- http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstrac...

2. It does not matter to evolution that gene duplication can cause disease, because harmful mutations are simply selected against and they fall out of the gene pool faster than you can blink your eye, in relative population genetics terms (ie. maybe in as little as one generation). I thought you might know this, but obviously not.

3. Err, new genes can be added quite easily and the transcription and translation mechanisms in the cell will accept them. If they didn't, genetic modification would be a nightmare and impossible. But it's not. And protein folding happens automatically, and does not require a separate system for each protein.

4. Natural selection selects things that are useful. At first, a duplicated gene is just going to be a neutral mutation, most likely, but once it changes into something new that is useful, natural selection will build up its frequency in the gene pool. It requires only one individual to have a gene duplication, and after many generations, once the new gene is useful, it can spread throughout the population very rapidly, depending on its usefulness.

And again, harmful changes are simply selected against and they fall out of the gene pool. I really don't see how that can affect evolutionary change. Do you seem to know something I don't?

Evolution has two main processes: natural selection and mutation. Your little thought-experiment includes only one of those processes, the mutation. What it lacks is something to hold back the things that actually help it achieve a "higher level of fitness", ie. in this case, becoming more like the phrase "Evolution is a Fairytale". If you had a selective mechanism that held a tile in place if it happened to be the right one in the right place, you would find that the phrase would appear much more quickly than 520 million trillion years.

You like your false analogies, eh?

That is one lab that is researching this topic of protocells.

Science does not always have the all answers at any given moment, so your claims about the progress of science are unfounded. If we do not have the answers now it does not mean we won't have them in the future, and it certainly does not mean your conclusion, God-did-it, is any more correct because of it.

You asked where the protocells are? Well, they were out competed by better protocells, and died off, leaving better ones to take their place. In other, more accurate, words, they evolved into the modern life we see today. There is no reason why we should see any protocells in nature, at least on this planet, so teeming with hungry lifeforms already, eager to gobble up anything organic, even things they may not realise were self-replicating molecules. Food is food to microbes.

I think askegg has destroyed your other argument about the faces enough. I won't go there.

You seem to have missed the point of what I was trying to say there. Did you recognise the context, which was abiogenesis, specifically self-replicating ribozymes? It seems not. I'll go over it again so you might hopefully understand by the end.

"Time + Random = Simple Info" by itself only works when you lack a system. You used analogies to computers and software to try and refute this point, but it is a false analogy, because there are significant differences between what I am talking about and computers.

So, what am I talking about? To make it perfectly clear, I'm NOT talking about the genetic code of currently living things, aka. genomes, DNA and the like. I am only talking about self-replicating ribozymes, molecules constructed of RNA nucleotides that can catalyse their own replication.

The reason that "Time + Random = Simple Info" in this specific case is that ribozymes that can self-replicate can form randomly in a solution of nucleotides with an energy source/catalyst (eg. certain types of clay), without any sort of selection or guidance. Thus, simple information, the ability to self-replicate, can form from randomness and time. Time is included in the equation because ribozymes that can self-replicate are relatively rare, but given millions of years at the start of Earth's history and any rare event becomes almost certain to happen.

From this simple beginning as a self-replicating molecule, other functions can form: mutations (copying errors in the replication) can produce new ribozymes that have other catalysing functions, while still leaving the original intact (this is because it is a catalyst, and it is not used up in the reaction, just like an enzyme in the human body). Liposomes, much like primitive cell membranes, can form around these clusters of ribozymes and protocells can form. Research in this field of abiogenesis is ongoing. You can have a look at some of it here: http://genetics.mgh.harvard.edu/szostakweb/

I acknowledge that your computer analogy makes sense, just not as an analogy to this particular type of information system. It doesn't even apply to normal evolution either, since it does not contain a mechanism akin to natural selection, the process that takes the randomness of mutation and tweaks it into something useful.