as we are posting on guns, what about...

[Stalebread]

  kjellfrick said:

Never a doubt; evolution is the answer. Cuban tobacco (cigars) is the pinnacle of evolution!

And you could argue in a way that evolution is not random since it's the process of change by way of natural or sexual selection, but mutations are random, and they are the stuff that evolutionary change works on. Many of the things we have to overcome in order to stay in the evolutionary game are also random. Unpredictable things like climate, the number of pretty girls available etc are random...

I'm not sure I understand enough to discuss this even remotely intelligently but it seems to me that, yes, randomness plays a big part in evolution.

It -- chance -- supplies the mutations. However, natural selection itself is essentially the opposite of random chance. This may be too fine a cut.

As much as anything, I think I was reacting to what I read as making evolution and randomness synonymous. They are not.

[thechenman]

I think that Douglas Adams said it best in his book, "Restaurant at the End of the Universe": "In the beginning the Universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."

[Torontonian]

  JMH said:

Can't stand intelligent design - a political ploy to enable religion to masquerade as science.

Part of the problem is that there is nothing intrinsically 'scientific' about design. It isn't quantifiable, it can't subjected to empirical tests, and so on. Design is a philosophical rather than scientific concept.

Of course, the issue is compounded by the lack of intellectual honesty on both sides. On the one hand we have the so-called "young earth" creationists and other religious fundamentalists (oftentimes theologians unsuccessfully pretending to be scientists), and on the other hand the so-called "new atheists" and other areligious fundamentalists (oftentimes scientists unsuccessfully pretending to be philosophers).

Don't forget, many religious people are theistic evolutionists. To further complicate matters, moreover, the theory of evolution on naturalistic grounds is in (self-referential) philosophical trouble.

[Habanos2000]

I don't believe they're mutually exclusive. I'm sure God must be having a good laugh at us trying to figure out where we came from. And just because some can't figure it out, conclude that it all just happened.

In my opinion, life is so complex in so many ways, enjoyable and dispicable, joyful and sad, beautiful and ugly, that there is no way it happened by chance. I'll be the first to admit I can't explain creation, but something makes me believe it's so simple in its complexity that if we do get the chance to understand what happened we'll smack ourselves in the head and say, but of course!

The problem with religion is that it has become so corrupt, and I'm speaking of my Roman Catholic belief although I'm sure others would qualify, that there seems such little true faith remaining. You have to believe what they say or your out of the club.

Watch out for politicians and the religious. The ones that say they're out to protect us are the ones that will be the first to bring us to ruin.

[Cubanface]

  bunburyist said:

I think for the purposes of this discussion it's first important to distinguish between 'creationism' and religion.

Religions are easy animals to attack and ridicule - gods with multiple arms and heads, some guy walking on water, moving mountains, arks with 2 of each animal etc etc. Religion is really what comes after the acceptance that everything was created by a greater force, and so pretty much irrelevant to this.

The question really is whether you believe it's all random, or part of one mammoth intergalactic plan.

Empirically, much of the evidence points towards randomness, mm by mm gradual evolution over incredible periods of time thrown into the context of there being literally millions and millions of star systems and galaxies out there (that's just the one's we can see). I'd say that makes sense. We're not perfect. We have weak joints. Can't endure extremes of cold or hot. Birth is painful and dangerous as we walk upright not on all fours. We tend to be self-destructive.

That all being said, I really hope there is a big dude in the sky who lays the smack down on the bad guys and passes a cold beer to the good ones when we die. Simple fact is, nobody's going to know until it happens. We're either God's children, or walking lumps of stardust. Good enough reason for me to try and live a good life, but also smoke as many cigars as possible.

All just my opinion of course

Intelligent Design is stupid. I like to think of myself as a walking lump of space dust with an intelligently designed cigar in my mouth.

[mrmighty]

I believe that a higher power created us and the earth we live on. Many of us remember doing fruit fly experiments in college where you would breed generations of fruit flies so see for bigger wings, bigger eyes, etc. Many scientists have done thousands upon thousands of these continual tests and not one fruit fly has ever turned into a bee.

Evolution is just a change over time within a species. So yes, a bird with a longer beak that lets it get more bugs than the same type of bird with a shorter beak, will have a better chance of surviving longer, and having more offspring.

I believe we can have this type of evolution WITHIN the same species, but not the type where a dog turns into a horse. The vast majority of mutations are very harmful to the offspring, not beneficial where they will get to breed more, thus showing a significant change within the species.

[Stalebread]

  Habanos2000 said:

. . . In my opinion, life is so complex in so many ways, enjoyable and dispicable, joyful and sad, beautiful and ugly, that there is no way it happened by chance. . . .

I think this is one of the great stalemates of the topic.

One side sees life in all its complexity, joy, sorrow, beauty, ugliness, mystery, etc, and feels the need to ascribe all of it to a supernatural creator. That is, not by chance.

The other side sees life in the same way but does not feel the need to involve a supernatural creator. Evolution and all those molecules bouncing around and sticking together (in very particular ways) some 13 billion years ago will do nicely, thank you. Also, not by chance.

[kjellfrick]

  Stalebread said:

I think this is one of the great stalemates of the topic.

One side sees life in all its complexity, joy, sorrow, beauty, ugliness, mystery, etc, and feels the need to ascribe all of it to a supernatural creator. That is, not by chance.

The other side sees life in the same way but does not feel the need to involve a supernatural creator. Evolution and all those molecules bouncing around and sticking together (in very particular ways) some 13 billion years ago will do nicely, thank you. Also, not by chance.

That was very well said!

About the inevitability of evolution...chemical reactions happen both without life and within life. They started before life, chemicals became more and more complex (was there any life to break down molecules?...no), life started, and chemical reactions continued within living creatures. Evolution began. Start of story...

[fattires]

I don't see why the two theories have to be mutually exclusive. There are big gaps in the human evolution chain, but there is quite a lot of evidence of specialization in other species. Even some of the greatest minds of our time (Hawking, Feynman) admit that something had to kick the whole mess off.

There are such huge chasms in our theories of the universe little seems empirical on a grand (or even quantum) scale.

i.e. I don't have a clue...

[Leopolis Semper Fidelis]

"Transformism [evolution] is a fairy tale for adults." (Jean Rostand, Age Nouveau, [a French periodical] February 1959, p. 12.) (The late Prof. Rostand was a French biologist and a member of the Academy of Sciences of the French Academy.)

"[Evolution is] a theory universally accepted not because it can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible." D.M.S.Watson [an evolutionist], "Adaptation," Nature, Vol. 123 (1929), p. 233.

"Even if there were no actual evidence in favor of the Darwinian theory ... we would still be justified in preferring it over rival theories [creationism]" Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (NY: Norton, 1986), p. 287; emphasis in the original.