There's only three kinds of people in the world.

[gasbanni]

Those that don't question or think much about anything.

Those that believe if you took St Paul's cathedral threw it all up in the air given enough throws and time it would all land in the correct order every stone, brick, statue, plaster and brick.

And those that don't believe it would ever land in the correct order.

Even then the chances in the scenario described above are way way less than the chances of evolution ever occurring !

 

[LastMagicBean]

I'm likely to give this topic no thought at all.
So I'm the first option.

 

[xhill]

Like it and agreed too.

Impress with your view and observation.

 

[joe-90]

There's a fourth option:

Those that don't understand evolution.

 

[trollmaster2000]

There's a fifth option:

Those that hate God

 

[Biker1959]

Those that can count

Those that can't.

 

[ladylola]

Those that believe if you took St Paul's cathedral threw it all up in the air given enough throws and time it would all land in the correct order every stone, brick, statue, plaster and brick.
!

Madness, and so dangerous it could so easily crush all those chimps writing Shakespear.

 

[Space cat]

And those that don't believe it would ever land in the correct order.

That's because they don't understand thermodynamics. Of course the probability is so vanishingly small that, for all practical purposes, it can safely be ignored; a bit like the way the mass of a spring goes up when you stretch it.

But I suspect this post has nothing to do with physics. It's the old intelligent design argument again. Sorry but I don't buy it. There are so many obvious flaws that the designer would have to have been a total idiot - or maybe it was a Friday afternoon job.

Yes, the probability that life as we know it would turn out the way it has is vanishingly small but that overlooks something rather obvious. A bridge player put it like this:

"I deal out four hands and we pick them up and look at them. Now what is the probability that we would get those four hands? It's so small that the chances of dealing them again are virtually zero - but there they are and we're playing them right now."

The point to note is that the number of paths that evolution could have taken is off the scale. We just happen to have got this one.

 

[joe-90]

But wouldn't the odds in the bridge game refer to getting the cards in a certain sequence?

 

[pred]

It's a bit up in the air this one, when i build a wall i chuck the bricks down and never do they land in the right place.

 

[JohnD]

a bit of a nonsensical argument.

Do you believe, gasbanni, that over a couple of dozen generations of selective breeding, you can develop breeds of cows that have long horns/short horns/no horns, long shaggy coats/short thin coats?

 

[joe-90]

But selective breeding isn't evolution. You can breed different breeds of dogs in no time - labra-doodler, cocker-poo etc, but they would all revert back in the wild.

 

[JohnD]

what I have in mind is the concept that characteristics can change by selection over a few dozen generations.

It will be very hard for anyone to deny that it occurs.

 

[Space cat]

But wouldn't the odds in the bridge game refer to getting the cards in a certain sequence?

Getting the right cards in each hand in any order would be hard enough. To have them arrive in exactly the same sequence is many times less likely. If I can find the time and the inclination, I'll do the sums.

 

[Brigadier]

But selective breeding isn't evolution. You can breed different breeds of dogs in no time - labra-doodler, cocker-poo etc, but they would all revert back in the wild.

"Selective" breeding can be evolution - the female peacock "selects" the male with the most prominent tail feathers; the toughest bear "wins" the maiden; the shrinking lake cuts off some fish populations, removing the possibility of "free lovin'". In the latter case (I think it was chiclid fish in Africa, but I'll stand corrected), entirely-distinct species evolved.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cichlid#Lake_Victoria

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