[After someone noted that evolution doesn't deal with how life started]
So evolution was just sitting there waiting for life to begin, is that correct?
Just by coincidence, the engines of evolution started up the moment life [somehow] appeared?
And please understand my question. I'm asking if evolution started up co-incidentally with life.
Did whatever (or however) started life, also kick-start evolution?
60 comments
"Did whatever (or however) started life, also kick-start evolution?"
Uh, yeah, actually. Is it really that difficult to understand?
No, evolution is part of life. Understand, I don't mean the life of an individual organism, I refer to life in general. Without the process of evolution, life ceases to exist. To put it more starkly, without the ability to evolve, life would not have started.
So, your question of evolution starting up coincidentally with life is irrelevant.
"So evolution was just sitting there waiting for life to begin, is that correct?
Just by coincidence, the engines of evolution started up the moment life [somehow] appeared?"
Evolution is a byproduct of imperfect replication and natural selection. You know, like how gravity is a byproduct of mass.
"And please understand my question. I'm asking if evolution started up co-incidentally with life.
Did whatever (or however) started life, also kick-start evolution?"
Ugh...
Evolution didn't "start up" any more than lightning or gravity "started up". It's a natural process. We don't really know how life started, although we can make a guess. But once it started, we know that the duplication process was imperfect, some duplicates were better-fitted than others to conditions, and they were the ones who left descendants.
Evolution is a *process* waiting for imperfect replicators to act on. It was there before, during and will be after the existence of imperfect replicators.
Surely it is not that hard to understand - oh wait... AV1611VET...
Ah, fresh AV stupidity.
"Did whatever (or however) started life, also kick-start evolution?"
Reification of the highest caliber.
Evolution is a PROCESS that living organisms undergo over generations. It is not an entity in itself that can hang around 'waiting'. That's like asking "before there were seas, were waves hanging around waiting for the seas to form?" Until there are lifeforms to evolve, there can be no evolution; once lifeforms appear, evolution begins. I understood that when I was nine. Why is it so hard to grasp?
So arithmetic was just sitting there waiting for more than 1 of something to exist, is that correct?
Did whatever (or however) caused more than 1 thing to come into existence, also kick-start arithmetic?
Evolution is a process that operates on life. The first predominant world-wide biota were phytoplanktons, which transformed the Earth's atmosphere into something that hemoglobin could work with. (Zooplankton followed as soon as conditions were right.) Life and the environment are interdependent. The environment changes, and life adapts to those changes. That, once again, is evolution.
Evolution is the by-product of any system which has the following traits:
1) Finite resources
So evolution was just sitting there waiting for life to begin, is that correct?
Did taste just sit around waiting for the first edible thing to come along? Seriously, does this guy think evolution is some sort of force like God or gravity, or does it just really sound that way?
I just noticed this on AV1611VET's profile:
Join Date: 18th June 2006
Holy fuck this clown wastes a lot of electrons with this nonsense.
Did you wait to start breathing until you were born? Seems like one hell of a coincidence, eh? Unless they're, y'know, inclusive of one another.
So evolution was just sitting there waiting for life to begin, is that correct?
Just by coincidence, the engines of evolution started up the moment life [somehow] appeared?
And please understand my question. I'm asking if evolution started up co-incidentally with life.
Did whatever (or however) started life, also kick-start evolution?
So evolution was just sitting there waiting for life to begin, is that correct?...
...Did whatever (or however) started life, also kick-start evolution?
You seem to have some misperceptions about evolution. It's not an entity who waited for the appearance of life to act. To make a (bad) analogy, evolution is similar to gravity in that it has no effect until there is something to exert its influence on.
Once there was mass upon which it could act, gravity's effect kicked in and began to exert influence on those particles. Similarly evolution only made its "appearance" once there was:
1. A form of life.
and
2. An environment to which that life could adapt in order to better ensure its survival.
AV's problem, through most of his postings is that he insists on applying intent and consciousness to everything that exists. He has it so ingrained into his belief system that nothing can exist without a god of some sort, that it's completely beyond his comprehension that anything could exist without one. I think he believes that we all think science has a mind and intent and that we are dismissing his god in favor of a different one.
I really believe that when someone is that far gone, it's like trying to explain the color orange to someone who has been blind their whole life and expecting that they can somehow relate it to sound or touch in order to understand what we see.
It really is beyond his ability to understand this.
You IDIOTS !!! I can't believe you people lack the ability for basic word comprehension. Evolution is not some kind of object, deity, or mechanism (well, kinda) it's what we describe a process !!?!
Yes , you fucking mental defective, a thousand times, yes!
Evolution is not an entity of some sort; it is an emergent process! It was no more "sitting around waiting for life to come along" than the Gas Laws were sitting around waiting for molecules to exist!
AV's problem, through most of his postings is that he insists on applying intent and consciousness to everything that exists. He has it so ingrained into his belief system that nothing can exist without a god of some sort, that it's completely beyond his comprehension that anything could exist without one. I think he believes that we all think science has a mind and intent and that we are dismissing his god in favor of a different one.
Spot on. Ask a fundie to contemplate a hypothetical universe in which there is no god, and they will think of one in which there is an enormous god-shaped hole that they must fill with something god-like in order for everything to make sense.
If the whole life of the earth was represented by a 24-hour period, humanity has (relatively) existed for 3 milliseconds and fundies for less than a nanosecond.
You seem to be thinking of evolution as an entity (hint: it isn't). It's a natural process. Processes don't need creators or anything because they are nothing independently.
What you're asking is akin to suggesting that it's absurd that gravity just exists or I supposed popped into existence at some point. It's trait of all matter. If there is no matter then there is no gravity. Similarly, if there is reproductive life then there is evolution.
Maybe this will be clearer if evolution is looked at in its most general terms. Simply put evolution is the process through which complexity arises from simplicity.
As Dawkins states early on in The Selfish Gene, "Survival of the Fittest" is really a specialized case of "Survival of the Most Stable". Once you look at evolution in this manner things become a little clearer, maybe even to the fundie mind...no never mind that....Earth had a lot of oxygen atoms and alot of hydrogen atoms and in this environment a particularly stable way for those items to exist is H2O. Evolution really began at this level.
Life began when one of these stable (and increasingly complex) molecules had the property of being able to replicate itself. Once the resources required for replication became scarces, Survival of the Most Stable gave way to Survival of the Fittest.
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Evolution once occurred communally in the form of "horizontal gene transfer" (the sharing of genes by unrelated species). One day, a cell representing a primitive bacterium found itself at a metabolic/reproductive advantage and ceased sharing genes. This lineage became Bacteria. Two other similar events occurred (million of years later) and formed the Archea and Eukarya lineages. Eventually, the life of the original community ceased, leaving these three groups and their descendants.
At this point in time, the Darwinian Interlude began (extinction, speciation, natural selection, etc...). This lasted 2-3B years.
This epoch ended 10000 years ago when a single species (Homo Sapiens) began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere.
But I'm sure this wasn't what our boy AV was attempting to clarify...
That's pretty much it, in fact. Things that make more of themselves with tiny variations on each iteration, so that some have an advantage, tend to do that in the long run.
I know it's a waste of effort,,,, but I'll try to explain.
When you boil water, the bubbles that come out are a mix of dissolved air, and water vapour (steam). Boiling is a 'process'. Evolution is a 'process'. Evolution was waiting to happen, in just the same way that the steam was there, waiting for the heat to form it. So yes, whatever started life DID also kick-start evolution, in an indirect way.
It's easy to answer. The theory of evolution was formulated by Charles Darwin in the last half of the 19th century. It says that evolution is a process, not a cause. Come back, not to school, to KINDERGARTEN.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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