The "common creator" myth

There are still some issues, but I would be a heck of a lot closer to believing in evolution.

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If you say there are no absolutes, I ask you, are you absolutely sure about that?

Well, let'ssee if we can address that for you.Do you agree that there are random mutations happening all the time?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

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Frankly, the probablities involved are so huge that it seems impossible that it could have occured.

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The probabilities of you being born on the day you were born, at the place you were born, and the parents you were born to are astronomical. However, it happened. The probability of winning the lottery is astronomical, yet people win it all of the time. Probabilities are another topic that creationists distort.

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Then the probabilites that random mutation would create useful traits instead of messing up the organism.

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Natural selection keeps to good mutations and gets rid of the bad mutations. So, do you still have a problem with random mutations?

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Then the issue of how DNA information was added, not just changed.

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The information found in DNA is derived information. The information is there because that is how humans model things, by creating information out of sequences. Information is not a molecular or physical property, instead it is a result of human modeling.

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Perhaps God used evolution to create life? That could help explain how the first cell, for example, was formed - God made it and then let evolution work... but it doesn't quite seem to square with the Bible.

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This really depends on how you interpret the Bible. Most christians have no problems squaring evolution with the Bible, so the problem seems to be yours.

What would you say the probablity is that a cell would randomly form? I get that part... but it seems more likely that a random mutation has a huge chance of messing up the organism and an extremely small chance of improving the organism. In order to create all of life, hundreds of thousand of good mutations (each of which has a very small probablity) would have had to occur over the course of the time on earth. Even though a billion years seems like a lot, I don't think there would have been enough time to randomly produce all the good mutations.Plus, what if an organism finally achieved a really important mutation, and then all of a sudden it got killed in a rock slide or eaten by a predator? This makes the probablities even lower. Semantics. How did sequences get longer and more complicated by mutations? I thought that mutations just change the sequence instead of making the sequence substantially longer? Not sure about that part hmm... what caused mutations in the first cell? radiation? Most Christians I know don't believe in evolution.One problem in squaring the Bible with evolution is when it talks about the animals being created in their "kinds." In evolution there is no clear kind, only a gradual blurring from one to the next.

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If you say there are no absolutes, I ask you, are you absolutely sure about that?

The idea that a complete modern cell sprung from randomness is not what abiogenesis suggests. The more important probability is that of a self-replicating molecule (RNA is the leading hypothesis now) that can undergo selection. The hypothetical evolution of the cell from these biochemical molecules has been outlined within the laws of biochemistry. But the 'bad' mutations that mess up the organism are lost, so however many occur, they don't count towards the net result, which is the result of the accumulation of neutral and beneficial mutations. DNA duplication also occurs, with an immediate result of having a simple doubling of some information. However, as the two copies accumulate different mutations, their information diverges. This is why we see "gene families" in genomes today, with many similar genes that have diverged into specialized functions. Thus DNA can increase in size, and in some cases an entire genome can duplicate, doubling the size... In Biblical literalism there is no clear "kind" either, unless you'll be the first to give a specific, solid definition.

General,The scale of the universe in size and time vis a vis our size and life span makes it difficult to almost impossible to grasp. Mathmatics allows us to model what we can't picture and that is one of the functions of math in science.Religions come from a time in human history when pretty much what we knew was what we could see in ordinary life. Science is not another religion that set out to disprove the Bible. There is evidence, phenomena to be dealt with whether that is stars, galaxies, etc, or quantum mechanics and elementary particles or at velocities close to the speed of light in a vacuum. At these extremes anyone's common sense sensory based model of what reality is begins to distort at bit sometimes becoming paradoxial or unimaginable.I think it would be hard to get a coherent understanding of the cell, genetics, and ToE from reading threads here. I learned the little I know in biology 110 decades ago. We spent an entire year studying the basics. With that background I've been able to read and understand contemporary writing. If I get to the library I'll try and find this one book that was really well written. At one point the author used an imaginary cell the size of a living room that you could picture yourself sitting in and looking at the various molecules interacting.Anyway, I suggest your library. A video might be a start and maybe some one here could recommend a good readable introductory book that you could go over and back over. See that way species are grouped and why and realize the huge biodiversity that can be put in a tree classification, like insects have things in common, as do fish etc might help picture how changes in DNA resulted in diversity. Also looking at the fossil record and seeing species flourish and then die out and die back and getting some sense of the time scale over which these processes operated might help picture how evolution works.6000 years is a human time scale. Theist claim vast powers for God why wouldn't God also have vaster time and space scales for the universe?lfen

So an RNA molecule could exist and replicate itself without help from any other molecules?What is the probablity of an RNA molecule randomly forming? Interesting, I didn't know that about DNA doubling. What would be the effect of this on an organism? Does kingdom phylum class order family genus species work for this?

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Pray for mercy from... PUSS! In boots. (Don't forget the Spanish accent)

Thanks Ifen.Yah, I need to read some books on biology... but there is so much I would like to know but don't have time to learn Thats the problem when you are interested in almost everything Just FYI, I don't believe in a young earth - the evidence supports an old earth.

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Pray for mercy from... PUSS! In boots. (Don't forget the Spanish accent)

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So an RNA molecule could exist and replicate itself without help from any other molecules?

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What is the probablity of an RNA molecule randomly forming?

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This is very dependent on the environment and conditions. We don't even know what the shortest, self replicating RNA strand is, so it is pretty difficult to answer. The best answer is highly improbable, but still possible given enough chances and enough time (which is also how people win the lottery).

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Does kingdom phylum class order family genus species work for this?

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I don't know, does it? The created "kinds" have no meaning within biology. No one has been able to define what these kinds are. The only division we see in nature is at the species level. Everything above that is a man made construct for describing common ancestory.

Yes, and self-replicating RNA has been produced in the lab.Also, RNA can have catalytic/enymatic activity - sometimes the term 'ribozyme' is used to describe RNA with such activity. Active sites in the ribosomes are RNA-based. Depends on the conditions. However, it is a heck of a lot more likely than a complete bacterium randomly forming. Again, depends on the situation. Some plants seem to do well having their entire genome duplicated. In some cases only a single gene or part of gene is duplicated, which can have a variety of effects on an organism depending on the gene product (if any) and its activity.In mammals massive duplication has quite deleterious effects - most embryos with an extra chromosome copy (trisomy) spontaneously abort (they are believed to account for 25% of miscarriages). Down Syndrome is caused by trisomy of chromosome 21 and is the most common 'sublethal' trisomy. Such trisomies are deleterious, but doubling of a gene (vs. an entire chromosome) can have little to no effect on an organism, again dependant on many conditions... I'm not sure where you are going with this... more details?

General,Next time I'm at the library I'll poke around for some readable titles. There was one fascinating book about a geneticist who did a lot of breakthrough work with fruit flies. He was a very interesting guy and the book combines biography, and reporting science histroy and theory.One of the things the fruit fly guys would do would be to expose the little flies to mutagens and look for new traits to study. The books is not written like a sceince text at all it's very readable and enjoyable and you learn some crucial science, like how old and simple the clock gene is and how the guy, I think it was Benson, discovered it by using mutatad fruit flies that didn't have the clock gene.Anyway my point is that there are really enjoyable to read books on the subject as well as the drier text books and you can get a idea how scientist are working with their data, their findings trying to make sense of the world that they find. It's a different picture than is offerred here where there is the debates of religion and philosophy.And I know the problem of having too many interests and too little time.lfen

What?!!! That is huge! Show me proof of this? Yes, I know winning the lottery is really hard, but people DO win because there IS a winning ticket. But I would like to see someone win a lottery with a couple hundred trillion tickets in it and only 1 winning ticket I would like to know more specifically the chances of RNA forming. I realize that with enough time and space it could be done, but was there enough time and space?Could you give me a good estimate for the shortest possible strand and the chances of it forming? 1 in a million, billion, trillion, more? 1 in 10^10, 10^11? Just a good estimate. Ok, then the division of species is "kinds" as seen in the Bible. Does that work?

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Pray for mercy from... PUSS! In boots. (Don't forget the Spanish accent)

Getting back to probablities.You see, it doesn't happen at once.You still have not agreed or disagreed if random mutations take place.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Sorry. Yes random mutations happen (although nothing is actually random per se things just appear to be random)

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Pray for mercy from... PUSS! In boots. (Don't forget the Spanish accent)

Okay, so now let's try to deal with odds.Let's say you want a particular number between 0 and 1,000,000,000. that's 1 in a billion.If you try guessing the number it might take you a billion tries, but that's not how evolution works.What happens is threefold.First, you have lots of critters picking numbers.Second, you have billions of years.Third, each one picks a number between 0-9. If it's right, they get to keep that digit (the live long enough to reproduce) and pick a number from 0-9 for the next digit.That means that the absolute maximum number of tries to get the number is only 91 tries. With millions and millions of things working on the problem and billions of years to do it, it is just not that improbable.Let's make it more difficult, let's make it one in a trillion. That would take 121 steps.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion