Two arguments that give the creationists the upper hand.

[Testlund]

1. Something can't appear out of nothing.

(I wanted to post a link to a video I saw about this but can't manage to find it again. Why is the thing you wants to find the most the most difficult thing to find? It's like you need something in your apartment, but nomatter where you look you can't find it, just everything else that you DON'T need. When you go to a store to buy something you often find it has everything else you DON'T want but not the thing you were looking for!)

2. The complexity of DNA and the machinery of the cell, explained in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUwitJXHjaQ

I find that after watching these two videos, trying to argue against it feels like refusing facts and just being stubborn. Unless a better explanation about the origin of life comes from the Darwinists I think we should now assume a creator is responsible, but at the same time be open to that other possibilities might be discovered in the future.
The next would be trying to solve what the creator IS. Personally I don't believe in the man with the white beard and the bible as I've already mensioned before is written by humans and sensored by humans through the ages, plus the texts have been missinterpreted by every religious society, so it ends up being little more than a fairytale, although some sections about how a human should behave makes sense wether you're religious or not.
So the concept of God must be a totally new one. It may not be an intelligent being or even self aware, but it may be a law of energy about attraction between forces and matter, that must have some kind of will to progress into complex structures. So what happens if every protein in the DNA was taken appart and just thrown together in a mixer. Would it assemble itself again? Probably not because it needs a machinery to be assembled, by machines that were assembled by machines and so on. Where's the force that started it? I'm talking about cells necessary for complex DNA structures explained in the second video (watch all 10 clips).

Also these machines need to be working together from the beginning otherwise none of them will work, which can't just appear at random.
On the other hand, once the foundation of life is there it will work by itself without any involvement from a higher being.
When I run my evosims I feel reluctant to even click on a bot that could accidently move it away, because I don't want to interfere. I want it to find it's own way. I want them to have the freedom to chose. To mess around in the sim to try and favor one bot over another would feel like a violation. The progress of the sim will find the best way by itself, otherwise it will cease to exist. There is no need for me to affect it. I just made the foundation of life with the best settings that I've managed to figure out. If it doesn't work, I will start over with something else, which could be compared with mass extinctions on the earth from time to time.
So maybe that's what God is, a founder that watch and wait, until we enters his realm by our own progress. If the suffering of humanity and destruction of the environment is not a good thing it will cease by itself.
What do you think?

And now I'm going to try starting a new zerobot sim from scratch with Eric's latest drop to see if sexual reproduction has it's place in this environment. Maybe it will take a year before it even shows up!
Another thing that's interesting is the time it takes for things to appear. Why would God wait billions of years just watching single cellular organisms before suddenly decide to create the rest of the species that exists? That makes me think God waits and let it appear by itself, like I do when I patiently run my evosims.  

[shvarz]

1. Something can appear out of nothing. It always does. It may not be something that YOU want, but it's something nevertheless.

2. That movie is way too long to waste my time on it. Can you post the gist of the argument? I'm betting it's going to have something to do with irreducible complexity, that old horse of creationists, that is actually so old that it's been dead for almost a century.

[Peter]

I would't really say the upper hand, but it are the two main arguments of creationists against evolution.

1. Something can appear out of nothing, hmm well, I gues if you take a buch of luck, some quantum physics, some random energy. And you could have air changing in gold, and so raindrups of gold.  

2. It hasn't started complicated(I think) Live has probably started pretty simple, and it has probably taken enourmous time to get a complicated system like it is now. We can't see how the organisms have looked like, if you even could call them organisms, the begining was probably simple.

It is mainly a mix between the two points. There can't appear a complicated system out of nothing. True, it couln't be that suddenly out of nothing an 'trio-quad-nano-parallelism computer' comes appearing. But as we have computers now and they keep getting better and better, there is a change it will come someday,(maybe something already exists, I just threw some computer terms within eachother  ) computers have started pretty simple, and I gues live has too.

On the other side, it could also imagine that live on earth came from an astroide or something simular. Anywhere where the possibility to begin live is bigger then on the gamma-rayed earth as it was in the begining.

[Testlund]

I'm betting it's going to have something to do with irreducible complexity...

Yes, they mension this but when you look at the animations showing how it works inside a cell, the complex structure of the flagellum, and that one part at a time wouldn't continue to assemble itself with new parts over time until suddenly it starts to work. It's clearly a goal towards a working flagellum, and there is no advantage by dragging that lifeless tail behind if it isn't working. The thought that evolution caused it is based on the probability that one piece at a time would have been usefull. But they have proven the flagellum is useless if it is not complete. No advantage with a few useless parts assembled, not to mension the investment the cell must do to create it. Better to save that energy for things that work imedeately.

[shvarz]

It's funny that they used a flagellum, because that's one of the things that actually has a pretty clear path of reducible complexity with intermediate forms alive today. I'll try to find the link to the explanation, but the point is that it did not appear as a flagellum right away but performed different functions at different levels of complexity.

[Endy]

Excerpt from Wikipedia:

Contrasting with the symbiotic models, these models argue that cilia developed from pre-existing components of the eukaryotic cytoskeleton (which has tubulin, dynein, and nexin—also used for other functions) as an extension of the mitotic spindle apparatus. The connection can still be seen, first in the various early-branching single-celled eukaryotes that have a microtubule basal body, where microtubules on one end form a spindle-like cone around the nucleus, while microtubules on the other end point away from the cell and form the cilium. A further connection is that the centriole, involved in the formation of the mitotic spindle in many (but not all) eukaryotes, is homologous to the cilium, and in many cases is the basal body from which the cilium grows.

An apparent intermediate stage between spindle and cilium would be a non-swimming appendage made of microtubules with a selectable function like increasing surface area, helping the protozoan to remain suspended in water, increasing the chances of bumping into bacteria to eat, or serving as a stalk attaching the cell to a solid substrate.

Regarding the origin of the individual protein components, an interesting paper on the evolution of dyneins[1][2] shows that the more complex protein family of ciliary dynein has an apparent ancestor in a simpler cytoplasmic dynein (which itself has evolved from the AAA protein family that occurs widely in all archea, bacteria and eukaryotes). Long-standing suspicions that tubulin was homologous to FtsZ (based on very weak sequence similarity and some behavioral similarities) were confirmed in 1998 by the independent resolution of the 3-dimensional structures of the two proteins.

Evolution of Flagella Wikipedia

Pretty conclusive, if a bit technical.

What's more interesting is that it's convergently evolved in bacteria, eukaryotes and, archaebacterium. Seems to be a better example of evolution in action to me.

[shvarz]

Here is a spunky video explaining (in easy and visual form) a lot of the research on flagellum evolution:
Link to youtube, as the board does not allow video insertion

[Testlund]

Ok, that's something worth pondering.  Found some other interesting videos through that link.  

[Numsgil]

If you're looking for crazy youtube videos about bogus science, try finding one about the expanding earth theory.  The idea is that plate tectonics is untrue, and rather than continents floating around, the earth is expanding and the ocean is where the expansion came from.  At the beginning of the earth, the theory goes, the earth was much smaller and all the continents touched each other.  Over time the earth grew in size and the continents ripped apart.

[EricL]

If you're looking for crazy youtube videos about bogus science, try finding one about the expanding earth theory.  The idea is that plate tectonics is untrue, and rather than continents floating around, the earth is expanding and the ocean is where the expansion came from.  At the beginning of the earth, the theory goes, the earth was much smaller and all the continents touched each other.  Over time the earth grew in size and the continents ripped apart.

You mean that's not really the case?  Stupid US public schools.   Next you'll be telling me the earth actaully goes around the sun or something else equally as silly...

[Testlund]

Ok, thanks once again Shvarz for that link. Found some other videos like 'Evolution made easy', which explains the step by step from the evolving of the first molecules to the living cell. Makes some sense though I can't grasp it completely in my mind. Fascinating stuff.
Sorry, Endy, but that link was too overwelming. I prefer pictures.  
I spent the whole night watching videos from both sides and came to the conclusion that the creationists are a dangerous bunch. Some of them are more crazy than others.
Still, there might be some divine force somewhere in all this, but nobody has a clue what that is.
I still believe that in a complete nothingness there can't appear something, unless nothingness in itself is a force...umm...which it can't be. So something strange is going on behind the universe and I think it's equally wrong to say 'there is no God' as saying 'there is a God'.
So I'm probably going to stand in the middle looking for answers as I always have.
 

[EricL]

I still believe that in a complete nothingness there can't appear something, unless nothingness in itself is a force...umm...which it can't be. So something strange is going on behind the universe and I think it's equally wrong to say 'there is no God' as saying 'there is a God'.
 

No offense Testlund, but this is exactly what I find so amazing.  Why do otherwise smart people such as yourself make such wild and flawed leaps in logic when it comes to weighing the probability of supernaturalism?  That there are mysteries in the universe, things we don't understand completely yet, that is no reason to give such high credence to the probabliity there is something supernatural behind them, much less one of the millions of specific tales of supernaturalism some organized religion purports is the answer.  To do so when there is incredibly compelling evidence to the contrary is a complete dismissal of rationality.   It's like saying you don't know what keeps airplanes in the air, so that somehow makes it equally probable that it may be the Bernoulli effect or it may be legions of invisible pink fairies that hold it up.  There is no evidence that pink fairies exist and mountains of evidence that they do not, so only the irrational would claim the probability of either is somehow on par.  Same with the rest of supernaturalism.

Why is it that people who seek to understand the origin of the universe or life or whatever rarely try looking for the actual answers?  Why don't they explore astrophysics or partical phsycis or string theory or Dark Matter?  My guess is that they just don't want to work that hard, which makes them suckers for the easy answers.  

Whether something can appear out of nothing, that is a scientific question.  It can be answerred scientifically.   If that's what keeps you up at night, by all means seek the answer.  But to look for it in supernaturalism, well, you might as well just say the pink fairies did it.  A more rational answer you won't find down that road.

[Testlund]

Well, as I've mensioned before I have been a non-believer most of my life, agnostic even, because of the overwhelming amount of evidence. But I'm just not sure about that anymore, because there are some things that are too much to be a random coincidence. For instance a medium that tells too much truth about people that have lived before, which he couldn't possibly guess. People can guess some things, and I've seen some fake mediums doing the guessing game, giving blurry answears that can be interpreted whatever you want to believe and how they've been exposed. But when a medium tells the truth about everything.
I have a couple of links here to some things that are quite remarkable. The first is a link to a medium that has published a book which has been written by spirits using his hand:

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbi...0Spirit%20World

Here's a link to another PDF about a laboratory experiment where they managed to heal mice with sceptical trainees.

www.liebertonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/acm.2007.7032

Now before you puke on it already, give it a try. It's too much to read for one evening though.
Maybe the guy wroting that book was high on something. Maybe the laboratory experiment is just a hoax. Maybe the guys that explains how moleculs evolve into living cells didn't actually confirm that in their laboratory. Just made it up to get research money, like some other scientists done about other stuff. We can't be sure if we haven't been there and watched the experiments. So take it for what it's worth.
So what I believe at the moment is evolution doesn't need the hand of God. But there MIGHT be a spirit world and there MIGHT be a God.

[shvarz]

Why do otherwise smart people such as yourself make such wild and flawed leaps in logic when it comes to weighing the probability of supernaturalism?

I had a post on this on my LJ, but it's in russian, so I'll translate here:

I think it's a general feature of human brain - it sucks at weighing probabilities and estimating trends. I think it has been evolutionary selected and I'm not kidding. A large part of being human is being able to find patterns and trends in the surrounding world. Early on (and probably later) humans that could find patterns and trends in the world were more successful - they could plan for the future, they could faster establish cause-and-effect relationships and so on.  Evolutionarily it is better to find a non-existing cause than to miss a real one. As a result our brain is hard-wired into finding causes everywhere, even where none exist. That's why scientists came up with statistics - to make sure that their brains were not tricking them into finding patterns where none exist.

In the case of supernatural our brain feels a huge emptiness in the way world is organized. World exists, therefore there HAD to be a cause for its existence. The fact that modern science is so complicated makes it almost impossible for people to judge its quality. Their logic is similar to this blond joke:
"- What are the chances that today on your way to work you'll be eaten by a dinosaur?
- It's 50/50 - either you will or you won't."

[EricL]

I think it's a general feature of human brain - it sucks at weighing probabilities and estimating trends. I think it has been evolutionary selected and I'm not kidding.

I agree with you.  So does Daniel Dennett.  He terms the assignment of identity and intentions to such things as the weather as assigning "Intentional Stance".  It's easy to imagine that evolution would favor the ability to outguess non-human entities such as lions and gazzelles.  It's hardly far-fetched to imagine that adaptation overexecuting and extending that to things without intentions - the wind, the rain, a forest fire, having your mate fall out of a tree.  I can totally see how evolution would favor brains whcih overassigned identity and intentions.  As you say, it beats the hell out of underassigning.

It's not just humans by the way.  BF Skinner did a famous experiment with piegons in the 50's.  He had a feeding machine deliver food at random times.  Very quickly, the piegons starting doing amazingly elaborate dances, replicating whatever they happened to be doing the last time the machine deliverred food in an attempt to induce it to feed them.  Like us, their brains are wired to see cause and effect everywhere, even where none exists.