Why you should think that the Natural-Evolution of species is true

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TMC said:
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John10:
That does not disprove my point, which is being successful by chance many times is very unlikely, unless a super intelligent being is over seeing the whole process.
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I think this misunderstands how “chance” works. Let me describe a somewhat common business school demonstration because it illustrates my point.

Take a class of, say, thirty-two students. Have them pair off with coins. One person calls the coin flip, and whoever “wins” advances to the next round. Repeat in single elimination tournament fashion until there is only one winner. If you started with 32, the winner will have been on the “right” side of the coin flip 16 straight times. The chance of getting a 50/50 “bet” correct 16 times in a row is about one in 65,000. But the fact is that one of them must be the one left standing. The chance of one of them winning is 100% - not 32/65,000.

Business students do this to learn two lessons. 1. That unusual success is not always the result of unusual skill or unusual effort, and 2. that stats and probability are both more complicated than they first appear.

I think the same idea applies to evolutionary theory. When looking back at an evolutionary tree that yielded a given result, it seems natural to say that it could not be mere chance - look at all the low probability events along the way. But that is looking at it from the wrong direction. Similarly, it sure seems like the winner of the coin flipping contest must be “better” at coin flipping than the others in the class. But he is not.

Reading this back, I’m not sure it is helpful. Its a bit of a complicated point and I have neither the room or the time (or maybe the talent) to explain it better.
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Now, multiply those odds from 1 molecule to the 10 million different plant and animal species we have today.
 
Techno2000 said:
What caused the them to fail and go away?
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I think you know the answer, but I will play along. If an organization evolves in a way that reduces fitness, it fairs more poorly over time. A significant reduction in fitness will cause an organization to fail to thrive. It can happen in a single generation for a particular unfavorable mutation, or more slowly for others.

The purpose of my post was not to explain evolutionary theory - I assume everyone in this long conversation is reasonable conversant in that or they would not be still here. I am simply pointing out that the math does not work out the way most people think - probabilities, particularly observed post-hoc, often don’t match with our initial intuitive impressions. Long times frames and high “n” exacerbate this tendency.
 
Techno2000 said:
Now, multiply those odds from 1 molecule to the 10 million different plant and animal species we have today.
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Yes, the numbers are daunting. But no more daunting then, for example, the chance that our particular star will have the right characteristics to support life, or that our earth will have the right magnetic field and atmosphere to allow our kind of life, and so forth. Post hoc the chances look impossible, but that is considering the problem from the wrong end, and not taking into account the even more astounding size of the universe. Given the size of the universe it is not surprising that there is a planet like ours. It seems statistically impossible that we would be on that one rare planet that can support our life, until you realize that is looking at the problem from the wrong end. Given that there is life like us, it has to be on a planet like this.

None of this means that God was not involved in creation - but the fact that helpful mutations are relatively rare, or that life is complicated, does not preclude creating life in an evolutionary process. I constantly hear YEC folks claim that the math precludes evolution - that is just not true.
 
TMC said:
Take a class of, say, thirty-two students.
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I think your math might be wrong, unless I misunderstand the game. 32 students would only yield a 5-time winner. To have a 16-straight-time winner you’d have to start with 65,536 students. But the concept is the same either way. Though much more complex, the universe could be set up in a way that guaranteed an outcome over time. It all takes care of itself. Pretty elegant if you’re a designer.

For me it’s been helpful to think of the physical universe as a bubble of stuff. God is outside and snaps the bubble into existence. The bubble grows and the stuff inside takes form. From the explosion of a singularity he knew what would happen. Does he have to reach inside and move pieces around to get it just so? Did he make a mistake and some parts didn’t jell right so he had to rearrange them to get it like he wanted? Wouldn’t you expect an omnipotent God to get it right from start? So he snapped the bubble into existence knowing the pieces would arrange like he wanted. Time. Gravity. The stars would form. Life would begin. Evolution is God’s creative power on display! I suspect he didn’t have to intervene at all until free agents (us) started making choices for him to react to.
 
Thanks, Ed. Please explain how the Catholic understanding differs from what I wrote.
 
TMC said:
If an organization evolves in a way that reduces fitness, it fairs more poorly over time.
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There is no organism now, in this day and age that is faring poorly over time.
There is only speculation as to why some animals went extinct in the past.
 
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Techno2000 said:
Deforestation and poaching by man has nothing to do with evolution.
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Of course it does. The habitat is changing, species that can’t adapt die out. Whether the change in habitat is due to natural or artificial events makes no difference.
 
TMC said:
All natural processes are a system of probabilities. Many of them are shockingly small. If you look at each post-hoc, it seems impossible - just as the one student’s victory in the contest seems impossible.
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But there is no evidence of the huge amounts of missteps in the process. Even if you killed off the students who flipped tails, they did exist. Let’s say 50% of fertilized eggs don’t make it to maturity, having a half-formed eye would not preclude life, yet would be necessary for the final form to exist.

Where are apparently useless organs in the body. Perhaps the appendix. But, we don’t really know what it does predominantly because it does not exist in the domestic mammals we experiment on. From what I understand, at an embryonic stage it produces hormones utilized in development. It is involved in our immune system, where as a reservoir of bacteria, it allows us to develop antibodies. It also allows for the regrowth of bacteria which have a mutualistic relationship with us, by defending us against pathogens and supporting the epithelium of the gut. This is necessary, for example, should toxic strains take over, such as when we misuse antibiotics.should they be replaced by more.

Therfe are no organs becoming something else in our bodies, although we do suffer from many genetic malformations.
 
TMC said:
The purpose of my post was not to explain evolutionary theory - I assume everyone in this long conversation is reasonable conversant in that or they would not be still here.
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I wouldn’t be so hasty to jump to that conclusion - plenty of people still demonstrating a lack of understanding of what evolutionary theory actually is!
TMC said:
Yes, the numbers are daunting. But no more daunting then, for example, the chance that our particular star will have the right characteristics to support life, or that our earth will have the right magnetic field and atmosphere to allow our kind of life, and so forth. Post hoc the chances look impossible, but that is considering the problem from the wrong end, and not taking into account the even more astounding size of the universe. Given the size of the universe it is not surprising that there is a planet like ours. It seems statistically impossible that we would be on that one rare planet that can support our life, until you realize that is looking at the problem from the wrong end. Given that there is life like us, it has to be on a planet like this.
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Indeed. Dawkins makes this point well in shhh - that book.

I have found a useful analogy to be this:

If I stand at the top of a hill with a rock, and then roll the rock down the hill, there are hundreds of thousands - perhaps even millions - of ways that rock could bounce and change direction before finally coming to rest. The odds against the rock coming to rest in precisely that spot, to within a hundredth of a millimetre; and at precisely that orientation in three dimensions, to a hundredth of a degree, are astronomical.

Yet nobody bats an eyelid when the rock stops at the bottom of the hill. Nobody says, “Somebody must have put that rock right there because the odds of it happening by chance are too small.”
 
Hobgoblin said:
I think your math might be wrong, unless I misunderstand the game. 32 students would only yield a 5-time winner. To have a 16-straight-time winner you’d have to start with 65,536 students.
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Yes, this is what I get by doing math on the fly.
 
Aloysium said:
But there is no evidence of the huge amounts of missteps in the process
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Of course there is. There is arguably more evidence of “missteps in the process” than any other aspect of evolution. Every time a creature is born with some negative mutation or variance from its parent - which happens often - that is a “misstep.”

Your example of a “half formed eye” or organs “becoming something else” is either disingenuous or misunderstands evolution. Evolution does not go from one form to a completely different form in that manner, and every step along the way generally has to aid fitness. That does not mean that “half formed” structures are required in the process.
 
Techno2000 said:
Deforestation and poaching by man has nothing to do with evolution.
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Deforestation and poaching (i.e. predation) are both changes to the environment. Changes to the environment have an effect on evolution through natural selection. For example poaching and elephant tusk size.
 
rossum said:
the Sumatran rhino
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It’s a kind of animal that we call a rhinoceros. The departure of this species, meaning that there will no longer be individual creatures bearing its particular genome, is an example of microevolution, demonstrating how natural selection works, with the death of organisms incompatible with their environment. The key environmental element, in this case, is human “civilization”.
 
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