Agnosticism and Intelligent Design

[excreationist]

I'm talking about patterns in a random arrangement with no mechanism to consistently bring about patterns.

Mechanism?
I thought we were trying to figure out if evolution required intelligence?

This is an example of patterns being produced by a non-intelligent process.

In part of this thread I'm talking about the odds of evolution or abiogenesis.

 

[bilby]

bilby:
I'm trying to show that there is a large number of valid patterns but it is still highly unlikely if there was no mechanism to consistently create patterns.

And I have shown that there IS a mechanism to consistently create patterns. And that that mechanism is so simple that it can't NOT happen - not only is no intelligence needed to make it happen, it would require active intervention to stop it from happening in all populations where reproduction occurs, but does not produce reliably and completely identical copies of the parents.

 

[Keith&Co.]

I'm talking about patterns in a random arrangement with no mechanism to consistently bring about patterns.

Mechanism?
I thought we were trying to figure out if evolution required intelligence?

This is an example of patterns being produced by a non-intelligent process.

In part of this thread I'm talking about the odds of evolution or abiogenesis.

the odds really don't matter, though.

Pick any number you want.
A million to one.
A trillion to one.
One point seven zero one gabbazillion to one against life developing under certain conditions.

Then compare that number to the number of planets in the galaxy. And the number of galaxies in the universe. How's your odds stand up?

I mean if you give something one in a million odds, and there are a billion opportunities for the event, it becomes LIKELY to happen a thousand times, no?

 

[steve_bank]

There was a great BBC series in the 80s by a man Burke called connections.

He went through history showing how advances occur.

His conclusion, a lot of it happens by serendipity and coincident random events. Unless you want to invoke a deity.

Someone threw waste chemicals into a sink and inadvertency it led to synthetic rubber.

As far as we can tell there is a common process for star formation and plants are common. A guiding hand or is it just the way universe is? To me it is the way it is. Science seeks to underhand the how. Not why reality is what it is. That is religion and philosophy.

 

[bilby]

In part of this thread I'm talking about the odds of evolution or abiogenesis.

the odds really don't matter, though.

Pick any number you want.
A million to one.
A trillion to one.
One point seven zero one gabbazillion to one against life developing under certain conditions.

Then compare that number to the number of planets in the galaxy. And the number of galaxies in the universe. How's your odds stand up?

I mean if you give something one in a million odds, and there are a billion opportunities for the event, it becomes LIKELY to happen a thousand times, no?

Evolution is an unavoidable certainty, once you have a system that reproduces itself imperfectly, in an environment where some of those offspring are more likely to survive than others.

Abiogenesis is a whole different question, and it is deeply unhelpful to conflate the two; Religionists have an irritating habit of assuming that because their tales often have the creation of the universe, the solar system, the earth, life, and species diversity all in a single brief narrative, that all explanations of any of these things must somehow form a single narrative in order to be understood at all. But the reality is that these are each effectively unrelated events, each with their own unique explanations and often separated by thousands of millions, or even billions, of years.

Biology requires cyclic chemistry, which requires an energy source, plus a supply of elements and compounds, in an environment where these can react at energies that are sufficient to maintain the cycles, but not so high as to smash everything up.

One such environment is provided by liquid water as a substrate; Water is a particularly good solvent for a very wide range of compounds, so it can support a lot of different chemical reactions at moderate energies. Carbon is also a very useful component for cyclic chemistry, as it can make up to four bonds - so it can form branching chains with a variety of groups hanging off them, and these can become very large and complex. While other solvents than water, and 'framework' elements than carbon, have been mooted as possible environments in which life could arise, it seems that the most likely environment for abiogenesis is one with large volumes of permanently liquid water, with a variety of other chemical compounds, particularly ones containing carbon, dissolved in it, and with a constant source of energy.

The absence of highly reactive chemicals and physical phenomena that tend to smash everything up, such as strong oxidizers and high fluxes of ionizing radiation, is probably also useful.

Given those requirements, only Earth and Enceladus (a moon of Saturn) are good candidates for life to arise in our Solar System; We have not yet had a good enough look at Enceladus to know whether or not life exists there, and we certainly don't yet have the technology to detect life outside our Solar System, so right now the probability of abiogenesis given only a liquid water ocean as a prerequisite is unknown - but I suspect that the probability of life, given an environment that has liquid water available for at least a billion years, is very close to one. The necessary basic chemistry simply isn't that uncommon, unlikely, or difficult, and once life gets going, evolution tends to make it good at surviving very quickly.

A billion years is a LONG time. Even very unlikely events are likely given that much time in which to occur - if you buy a Lotto ticket here, your chances of winning this week are about 45 million to one. But if you buy a ticket every week for a billion years, the chances of NEVER winning are so close to zero as to be negligible. Life on Earth arose within somewhat less than a billion years after the formation of liquid water on the planet's surface - we know it was present about 800 million years after the first water, but it might have been around for quite some time before that.

A billion is a very large number, and many people struggle to grasp just how much longer a billion years is than a million. To get a feel for the difference, consider that a million seconds is about 12 days; but a billion seconds is more than 37 years.

 

[phands]

There was a great BBC series in the 80s by a man Burke called connections.

James Burke. One of my childhood heroes. He was part of the team on a BBC show called "Tomorrow's World". I miss him.

 

[steve_bank]

There was a great BBC series in the 80s by a man Burke called connections.

James Burke. One of my childhood heroes. He was part of the team on a BBC show called "Tomorrow's World". I miss him.

I got lot out of the series.

 

[bilby]

There was a great BBC series in the 80s by a man Burke called connections.

James Burke. One of my childhood heroes. He was part of the team on a BBC show called "Tomorrow's World". I miss him.

He did three series of Connections (in 1978, '94 and '97), all of them excellent.

There's a 25th anniversary show 'ReConnections' from 2003 at: https://vimeo.com/35460984, in which he discusses the show and its impact.

I loved Tomorrow's World.

Burke is still apparently working on some projects, including a 'knowledge web' and search engine.

 

[phands]

The simple message from James Burke and all the preceding discourse is that ID is garbage and agnosticism is cowardice.

 

[steve_bank]

The simple message from James Burke and all the preceding discourse is that ID is garbage and agnosticism is cowardice.

I have forwarded your posts to the Global Christian Committee On Religious Conformity and have reserved a rack for you.

The answer to ID is simple, ask where the designer came from.

 

[bilby]

The simple message from James Burke and all the preceding discourse is that ID is garbage and agnosticism is cowardice.

ID isn't fit for purpose.

The question is "How did complexity come to be?"

ID says "A complex being designed it".

You need not be a rocket surgeon to spot the flaw in this response.

 

[steve_bank]

The universe exists. Complexity is a human subjective perception.

 

[excreationist]

bilby:
I'm trying to show that there is a large number of valid patterns but it is still highly unlikely if there was no mechanism to consistently create patterns.

And I have shown that there IS a mechanism to consistently create patterns. And that that mechanism is so simple that it can't NOT happen - not only is no intelligence needed to make it happen, it would require active intervention to stop it from happening in all populations where reproduction occurs, but does not produce reliably and completely identical copies of the parents.

That pattern is happening every time you use the vibration. Abiogenesis doesn't happen every time. I'm not saying that abiogenesis is purely random but there would be an aspect to it that requires chance so that sometimes it doesn't happen. For a given vibration there is just one possible pattern (with a bit of slight randomness).
DrZoidberg was saying:
"it would have been some other way. I could have been typing with tentacles or claws. Or something else entirely. Life might have stayed as unicellular goo"

So in my example, the pattern could have been hexagonal - or a spiral, etc. There is nothing forcing it to be a certain way like in your example. Plus there is a very strong chance that there will be no pattern like how if you did the Miller experiment (or whatever is better than that) you wouldn't create life though I guess it is possible that you could.

 

[bilby]

bilby:
I'm trying to show that there is a large number of valid patterns but it is still highly unlikely if there was no mechanism to consistently create patterns.

And I have shown that there IS a mechanism to consistently create patterns. And that that mechanism is so simple that it can't NOT happen - not only is no intelligence needed to make it happen, it would require active intervention to stop it from happening in all populations where reproduction occurs, but does not produce reliably and completely identical copies of the parents.

That pattern is happening every time you use the vibration. Abiogenesis doesn't happen every time. I'm not saying that abiogenesis is purely random but there would be an aspect to it that requires chance so that sometimes it doesn't happen. For a given vibration there is just one possible pattern (with a bit of slight randomness).

That example is analogous to evolution. It has nothing whatsoever to do with abiogenesis.

DrZoidberg was saying:
"it would have been some other way. I could have been typing with tentacles or claws. Or something else entirely. Life might have stayed as unicellular goo"

Which is also a comment about evolution, not abiogenesis.

So in my example, the pattern could have been hexagonal - or a spiral, etc. There is nothing forcing it to be a certain way like in your example. Plus there is a very strong chance that there will be no pattern like how if you did the Miller experiment (or whatever is better than that) you wouldn't create life though I guess it is possible that you could.

You cannot possibly grasp any of this until you understand the most fundamental fact - abiogenesis and evolution are totally different things.

Evolution describes how, given the existence of life, that life will produce highly complex and diverse forms.

Abiogenesis describes how the first life arose. It was certainly extremely simple. In order for something to qualify as 'alive' in an evolutionary sense, all you need is that "parents" produce "offspring" that are similar to themselves (but not identical); And that the differences between "offspring" in some way influence the probability of them being "parents" in their turn. Note that "parents" and "offspring" in this context can be things that we would not traditionally describe as 'life' - for example, the first replicators on which evolution began to act could have been chains of phosphate and sugar with a variety of bases attached, similar to modern RNA. Or they could have been bubbles of fat with water and a few other chemicals inside.

The necessary basic chemistry simply isn't that uncommon, unlikely, or difficult, and once life gets going, evolution tends to make it good at surviving very quickly.

A billion years is a LONG time. The Earth's surface is HUGE. Even very unlikely events are likely given that much time and space in which to occur - if you buy a Lotto ticket, your chances of winning this week are about 45 million to one. But if you buy a ticket every week for a billion years, the chances of NEVER winning are so close to zero as to be negligible. Life on Earth arose within somewhat less than a billion years after the formation of liquid water on the planet's surface - we know it was present about 800 million years after the first water, but it might have been around for quite some time before that.

There is no reason to think that abiogenesis is unlikely; But even if it were, given a billion years, it is almost certain to occur.

The Miller-Urey experiment ran for a minuscule fraction of a billion years, and occupied a minuscule fraction of the Earth's surface area. They bought one lottery ticket, and got a surprisingly large number of correct numbers (suggesting that it's not very hard to win), though they didn't hit the jackpot. Had they repeated the experiment a trillion times, for a billion years, with small variations each time, their chances of NOT succeeding would be minuscule.

 

[excreationist]

In part of this thread I'm talking about the odds of evolution or abiogenesis.

the odds really don't matter, though.

Pick any number you want.
A million to one.
A trillion to one.
One point seven zero one gabbazillion to one against life developing under certain conditions.

Then compare that number to the number of planets in the galaxy. And the number of galaxies in the universe. How's your odds stand up?

I mean if you give something one in a million odds, and there are a billion opportunities for the event, it becomes LIKELY to happen a thousand times, no?

Some say that according to string theory there could be 10⁵⁰⁰ universes. Let's assume that like ours there are about 10⁸⁰ atoms and that there were 20 billion years (about 10²⁰ seconds). Say that every second in each atom in each universe there was a combination - I think that's 10⁶⁰⁰ combinations. Even if each combination was 10¹⁰⁰ times per second per atom then that's 10⁷⁰⁰ combinations. Sir Fred Hoyle was talking about 1 in 10^40,000 odds. That isn't inevitable if there are only 10⁷⁰⁰ combinations.

 

[excreationist]

....You cannot possibly grasp any of this until you understand the most fundamental fact - abiogenesis and evolution are totally different things...

Ok I'm talking about abiogenesis in this case then. And I think Sir Fred Hoyle's figure of 10^40,000 is regarding abiogenesis.

....A billion years is a LONG time. The Earth's surface is HUGE.....

See my previous post about there possibly only being 10⁷⁰⁰ combinations.

 

[bilby]

....You cannot possibly grasp any of this until you understand the most fundamental fact - abiogenesis and evolution are totally different things...

Ok I'm talking about abiogenesis in this case then. And I think Sir Fred Hoyle's figure of 10^40,000 is regarding abiogenesis.

....A billion years is a LONG time. The Earth's surface is HUGE.....

See my previous post about there possibly only being 10⁷⁰⁰ combinations.

Where does that figure of 10^40,000 come from? What does it represent, and how does that figure relate to the simple chemistry of carbon compounds dissolved in water?

 

[excreationist]

Ok I'm talking about abiogenesis in this case then. And I think Sir Fred Hoyle's figure of 10^40,000 is regarding abiogenesis.
See my previous post about there possibly only being 10⁷⁰⁰ combinations.

Where does that figure of 10^40,000 come from? What does it represent, and how does that figure relate to the simple chemistry of carbon compounds dissolved in water?

Ok say that a pack of cards had 100 different cards rather than 52. There are 100! combinations which is 10¹⁵⁸. Say there are 10⁸⁰ atoms in the universe and 20 billion years with 10²⁰ combinations happening per second. That's 10¹²⁰ combinations. If there were 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10³⁸) universes that were like that first universe, on average a given combination of cards would happen once - once out of all of those universes.

That figure of 10^40,000 can be seen here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle#Rejection_of_Earth-based_abiogenesis

Since he is a "Sir" I'd assume it is a reasonably informed guess.

 

[DrZoidberg]

...Yeah, well... I've heard (and read about) the same speeches since the 50'ies. It didn't pan out then. We'll see.

Well now we have ANNs with billions of neurons. They can beat humans in a lot of things (including Atari 2600 games and chess). I agree that researchers in the 50's were over-confident.

You're just making the faulty assumption that all thinking works the same way. So if a computer can out-clever a human it must be thinking in the same way. It doesn't matter how clever a ANN gets, it doesn't prove that's how the human brain works.

This project has been going since 2007, and they're trying to replicate a mouse's brain 1:1 using computers. I've been following this. They're still nowhere. I think there's a complete dimension to brain function that we've missed completely.

http://mouse.brainarchitecture.org/homepage/

We have managed to map the entire brain of the nematode worm in 2012, C Elegans, and that's gone swimingly. We now have simulated worms that behave exactly like the real worm would. I think that's how we're going to crack this. Figuring out how evolution did it, step by step.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/c-elegans-connectome/

The problem with evolution is that the "next step" of evolution often makes little sense in hind-sight. Without the context still surviving we can't reverse engineer why it took the path it did. The path of evolution is never a straight line. It's always bizarre twists and turns. Which will be true for how our brain works.

Here's an analogue. I worked at Sweden's biggest phone company. It had a computer system that had been in operation since 1973, and now it needed replacing. We didn't have documentation on how it had been modded over the years to comply to the changing world around it. And now the last people who could program it were dying. The fact that it had worked so well meant that nobody had bothered to pressure them for documentation.

The way we mapped it was to shut it off to see what happens. Then we'd shut off selective parts, to see what happens. I think it's the only way forward. But that requires brain mapping tools powerful enough "to see what happens". We're not there yet. I remember in 1995 when new technology made us super excited that we could see certain regions of the brain light up when people had autism or ADHD. As if we now understood the conditions. 15 years later of gathering data we're none the wiser, since we have no idea what these brain regions do, or why... sometimes... it's other regions that light up, producing the same symptoms. So now we're back to square one. We have still no idea what those diagnosis are. How they work, or how the medication actually works. We know it works. But we can't explain why it works.

It's always wise to be conservative about evaluating evidence.

 

[bilby]

Ok I'm talking about abiogenesis in this case then. And I think Sir Fred Hoyle's figure of 10^40,000 is regarding abiogenesis.
See my previous post about there possibly only being 10⁷⁰⁰ combinations.

Where does that figure of 10^40,000 come from? What does it represent, and how does that figure relate to the simple chemistry of carbon compounds dissolved in water?

Ok say that a pack of cards had 100 different cards rather than 52. There are 100! combinations which is 10¹⁵⁸. Say there are 10⁸⁰ atoms in the universe and 20 billion years with 10²⁰ combinations happening per second. That's 10¹²⁰ combinations. If there were 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10³⁸) universes that were like that first universe, on average a given combination of cards would happen once - once out of all of those universes.

That figure of 10^40,000 can be seen here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle#Rejection_of_Earth-based_abiogenesis

Since he is a "Sir" I'd assume it is a reasonably informed guess.

The guy who played Baldrick on the Blackadder series is a 'Sir'.

The universe isn't a random scattering of atoms. The universe has structure.

Life didn't arise because a chance clump of atoms in the universe happened to be the right pattern.

It's as crazy as suggesting that if I drop a rock, the chances of all those atoms falling at once is tiny, so the rock should just float.

Gravity exists. If you start a dozen billion years ago with some fairly randomly distributed hydrogen gas, the action of gravity alone causes stars, galaxies and ultimately heavy elements, supernovae, Earthlike planets, and the starting conditions for abiogenesis.

Einstein said that God doesn't play dice. I can assure you that the universe doesn't shuffle cards. Gravity rigs the deck. Life isn't unlikely, it's inevitable.