You see, I asked people to not call me boring and mean spirited and that sort of thing.

It's ok though, I'm going to just not reply to any more posts like this one n_n

A: I mean don't tell me I'm a bad person, just tell me how things I've been doing are bad. Big difference.
B: If emoticons don't count as smilies I'll just have to throw lol on the ends of things.
C: You made a long post about a lot of things, I'm just trying to acknowledge I've read and thought about it all, lol.

Oh I'm skipping past the overt microorganisms for a few reasons. The shapes of single celled organisms pretty well get lost in the move up to multicellularity anyway.

Even the early animal forms get contorted pretty severely when animals figured out how to take calcium out of the water so I thought I should start there-ish if only so people could recognize that steps were taking place.

So what sort of Cambrian life would you like to start off with?

Ya but I'm taking people's advice now so I let them change my definition of rude.

Way to read the post explaining it :b

Last time I tried that people told me I was rude and basically a spoiled brat T_T

That was another joke I put in the profile waiting to see how long until someone brought it up. It's been there for quite awhile. Screwing around at the beach isn't really an interest I care about people finding me by so unless it makes things worse I'm not concerned.

I've already gone through everyone in my area so why bother with that feature?

I already did.

I have always had a hard time telling arrogance and confidence apart.

Mostly I wrote that to try and make the profile less stiff.

That was me trying to mirror people in the last thread. I'm trying to avoid that now.

Show me what that looks like...

I don't know how to do it in text. There's no timing, I can't vary the quality of my voice, and when I say something bizarre people think I don't understand that it was weird.

Plus a lot of it is observational.

How rude. You act like those 141 pots under my name all came from the last thread.

But I'm setting a different tone in here so please say something constructive instead of belittling my social skills~

:O
I demand a recount!

It's just not a good option and lacks any reason to accept it over the null.


That's quite incorrect. Irreducible complexity was heralded as proof of ID. It took several years before we found that nothing was irreducibly complex. Again, the Dover Kitzmiller trial has a lot of information about this.

If you're going to talk in science terms "hypothesis" would be more appropriate. Scientific theories are, in layman's terms, proven. Scientifically all things remain open to criticism but on the basis of evidence, not "I don't want to believe that so I'll fight it forever."

If you want to believe that the Earth is flat you have every right to do so but it's not okay for you to complain that other people don't even consider it a possibility and that they have no evidence otherwise when they have brought up how we've seen the Earth from space and that you can sail around the whole thing and so forth.

By the founders' of ID's stance the Earth and all life upon it have been designed and natural evolution has at least been interrupted by having complex systems inserted into organisms. By their less implied stance the sun, moon, and all the lights in the sky were also designed by the same designer.
The admitted duration of this designer's involvement is left unanswered but the uncovered view would be that it is still intervening to this day.

From JB's stance the designer is a psychic network that all things connect into and that had at least enough capability to kick start the first organic life and makes ALL adjustments to life.

Sky seems to be more of the first variety with some "reality is imaginary" solipsism thrown in.

Well if you want to go with what the big bang actually says the hydrogen and helium would have started out evenly spaced and none of it really ever travels more than half the distance between it and the closest stars in every direction. Supernovae are about the only thing that sends anything on longer trips than that but those things are mostly the heavier elements I think you're going to talk about next.

Well no, we need other stars to fuse those and then later toss us the things like silicone and oxygen and carbon. Silicate materials make up most rocks while carbon- well, it can make things other than life but life has grabbed up so much of it as to have a near monopoly on carbon use. And you know more or less what we use oxygen for.

I'd say the last couple of hundred years when people started viewing God as a watchmaker with the universe metaphorically ticking away on it's own after having been wound up.

...but I'm clearly not who you were talking to with this stuff and I don't think the "man created God in the fictional sense" stuff would really fly with them. I thought I'd just insert some emphasis and redirect a few things.

Nope, it lacks the "what steps got you there?" stuff I've asked for~

But ya, it pretty well concludes any conversation we could have with him.

No, I'm letting you use your definition. It's meaningless but if you want to say that nothing in existence is anything but ordered you're free to. I can juggle hundreds of different rule sets and play within any particular one without any problem.

If disorder does not exist anywhere you're usinga word with a meaning but that meaning has nothing to do with anything in our universe so it's pointless to say anything about it.

So can you give me words that describe the difference between a castle built out of legos and legos scattered about all over the place from what was basically just un-aimed destructive force?

An argument from ridicule is when you say something is wrong just because it sounds ridiculous. This is not a valid way to argue that something is wrong because what sounds ridiculous only has any basis in reality to the extent that we already understand it. The logic behind it isn't any better than saying that an argument is wrong because the person who made the argument has sex with barnyard animals- that probably has nothing to do with their argument and is just a distraction.

If you'd like some more introduction to fallacies and why they don't work for arguments try this site: http://www.goodart.org/fallazoo.htm

Occam's Razor gives us the default. It is not always significantly better than the alternatives but if you cannot provide any reason the alternatives are better it is not appropriate to just claim that they are.

The very first time you find the tiniest little thing that does not fit with the default you need to rework the default to compensate it, if you can think of a way to do so.

...basically think of the default as a plain cube of clay. When you see anything that says that should not be the shape you can whittle away some of the clay and if you keep looking you should eventually complete the sculpture. We are just asking that you start with the basic and then work up to the complex and tell us why you take the steps that lead you there.

Again with the invisible pink unicorn: if I can't see it or feel it or touch or hear it or any sign of it how could i have become so convinced it was there in the first place? "I feel there must be a pink unicorn there" is kind of a crappy reason because I've felt that my sister must have misplaced my comb when she didn't so right off the bat I know that my intuition can be wrong. My intuition is usually a good first thing to check but a long time ago I stopped being surprised when my first guess didn't automatically give me the right answer.

These people aren't trying to brainwash you any more than you're trying to brainwash us. Are you trying to brainwash us?

It only denies certain specific designs which clearly don't match up with observed reality in important ways. Some people do take that too far and apply it to all beliefs but I'm sure there are people who fall into any category you fit who take things too far. For me I think one of the pillars for not turning into one of those ******** is recognizing that not all of them take stances against mine.

Your arguments that you are a credible scientist lack all of the things we would expect to see in a scientist.
Well, I'll stay open about it and give you a shot: physics, biology, psychology, chemistry, anthropology, sociology, astronomy, or medicine. Which did you teach/are your specialties?

Correction: They weren't.

For me it was mostly the Dover v Kitzmiller trial.

Well you can still open up the bok if you've got any new evidence (again, no fallacies please.)

What mechanism? What is something we could potentially see that would NOT allow for that?

No fallacies and it's fine. Basically going by the Greek tradition.


If it's "just what I believe" I don't share it with people. Why do you?

I generally avoid using this subject in arguments but do you think Jewish people shouldn't have objected to Nazi eugenics practices?

If objection is what creates conflict then conflict is not a meaningful stage of interactions to look at.

But pretending for a moment that objecting is the important step people should avoid. This thread was started by someone who has made it clear enough that she thinks there is no evidence of an original intelligent designer. Wouldn't this mean that you are in the wrong for having objected to that?

When you start saying the designer is all of the designs think these words stop having much meaning.

If I wanted to I could make it make sense to me but I choose not to because I know that the way I would make it work would be different from the way you do it.

So in pursuit of better communication I'm going to try to make you explain the hard stuff~

Only some people are demanding scientific proof. I for one am asking something more like "if I didn't assume any conclusions before I started how could I get to your conclusion in steps?"
With what you've said just now I'd have to "feel it" and that's the only step.

The trouble I have with that is that people feel different things. I'd even bet there are some people in here who "feel" that the thing you feel is all in your head.
So what makes yours better than theirs?
*If you thought that what each person feels should be their own guide it wouldn't make any sense for you to have been sharing what you feel- it would be nothing but static taking up space for the rest of us.

Well for me there's the issue of politics. Unfortunately I know about an alarming number of cases where people didn't say anything against spirituality and then the spirit minded people used that silence to mandate their beliefs into law.

After that people realize what just happened and start fussing about it again and pretty quickly they get it taken back out of law but still, it screws up a grade or two of children when it's educational but even if it's not it is always unjust.

I've got the seemingly infinite patience this requires and I point out fallacies without screeching them so it seems to work pretty well.

It's really hard to interpret what you say as sane.

Imagine a castle made out of legos and then picture it being smashed with a club. Quite a lot of disorder from an identifiable source, no?

Ah.
So if there's no disorder what meaning does order have? If order is such a broad term that it describes everything isn't the word useless?


I already set that up in my argument from ridicule fallacy in the previous post so you're either going along with fallacies because you don't understand that that word basically means "flaw in the argument" or in order to distract people from that to further your own goal.

I think the first option is more likely here (though feel free to show it is a false dichotomy if there's another significant possibility.)

I don't just understand any of this. I had good science teachers that grabbed my attention and were nice enough to explain when things I had learned before were watered down so little kids could handle learning them.

Some of it has been fun but after more than a decade I was ready to actually start looking at the collection of evidence for many of these things instead of just trusting my teachers when they gave me summaries of it, and now I've spent several years of not just one class a day doing that but three quarters of all of my classes pouring over this stuff while being introduced to innumerable deeper trends.


Now step back for a moment and think about why I rejected what you said. It's certainly frustrating watching people ask questions that we recall having been answered on day one and repeatedly ever since but that doesn't make them lesser people. The advantage we have is probably only how much we decided to value learning about these things and they are probably just as good at us in some of the other divisions of learning.

The only trouble is that they act as if we don't know more about these subjects than them but with how little people are able to give in response to their genuine questions is that any wonder?


That doesn't preclude a person from considering non-default options.

No.
It's the conjecture of "not design" that does not shoulder the burden of proof because as a negative claim it is unprovable.
"There is not an invisible pink unicorn standing in my room," should be the default stance for the presence of a pink horned horse there but you can't provide any evidence that that is the case- if the thing poops invisible sunshine and smells like whatever it's currently smelling and so on there's no way to ever work out that it is not there.

Now, as for evidence for naturalism- the Miller Urey experiment and hundreds of derivatives of it since then, supernovae, planetary accretion, universal common descent, dormant recombinant viral fragments, deep sea hydral vent communities, paleontology, radioactive decay, and basically all of genetics are packed full of evidence for it, and I kept the list horribly short.


Please stop calling it happenstance or anything remotely like "blind luck." People aren't arguing for that and it's a scarecrow argument that akes it look like you refuse to see anything but your own arguments in a positive light.

The things for a naturalistic origin are in place. I can spend forever and a day going over still more of them but as people never seem to quote and object to anything in the parts of my posts where I actually go into those details I suspect it's going over your heads.

I'm sorry you've never picked up the pieces you needed to see how easily it all works without any sort of divine intervention but I assure you it's all there.

I've been a bit skippy in my progress through this thread so I've probably missed a lot of your questions but if you'd like to you can start explaining to me what a naturalistic origin should require and we can build up from there.

The same reason I treat "I forgot to pick up my keys" as the default instead of "there's a doppleganger on the loose and he's started trying to replace me by stealing my keys!"
*Try not to get wrapped up in the argument from ridicule there, it's hard to explain why we don't do things without using it when people already innately understand it's ridiculous to behave otherwise.

Nice.

If you'd like to do some non-random ones for this though we need a simple ancestor for things. If I asked you to put something together with mostly just muscles and skin what would you start with?
*basically I mean no hard parts like skeleton, teeth, or scales.

Well for life like we know it you need temperatures that allow for liquid water (our solar system actually almost has three planets like that n_n) and common elements with around this amount of gravity. Basically there should be thousands or maybe millions of planets like that in our galaxy- the trouble has only been that our telescopes couldn't find planets much smaller than Jupiter. Now we're starting to.

All this after you said you only had questions... you've just lost some of my trust.

Well no, it matters that you said scientists proved it. If they proved it that means somebody did research and published it. Show us that or admit you were lying.

I've said quite a bit by this point. Do you think none of it answers your questions?


Ok, here's the big problem with that.
1. They don't say they know what started out universe.
2. They are making judgments about how likely it is.

That's bad. Let's say you don't know how many sides a dice has or if it starts at the number 1 but you do know that it came up six. What were the odds of that?

If you can even begin to think of a way to say what the odds of a dice you know nothing about coming up six... well I'm not sure you have a functional understanding of reality.
The odds might be one in six or they might be one in two (thing a coin with rounded edges,) or they might be one in a billion. If you don't know how many numbers there are you shouldn't be able to say how likely any number is.

Now what they are saying is that they DO know this dice. They say this dice is infinity and that all numbers are equally possible- except that they don't. They only imply it while saying that they don't know because they have to to pass this lie off.

It's like saying "The chances of a grilled cheese sandwich are virtually impossible! There must be countless failed grilled cheese sandwiches out there!"
Chances how? Are we talking about the chances of someone who is an ok cook putting cheese and bread together and then grilling it or are we talking about the chances of a tornado doing that? There might be a robot-cook involved, what then? Do you think a chimp might ever make a grilled cheese sandwich given the tools and ingredients?


But there's also a problem in your objections. "Nobody has ever shown these failed universes!" Well by definition they should be outside of our universe and nobody has ever been able to look there, at least not yet. To me this sounds kind of like saying "if the world was round there must be whole other continents out there and nobody has ever seen those" to Columbus.
*I know that's a bit inaccurate but the point should be obvious.

So without having found a 'failed' universe the idea is wrong but after we get a chance to look if we find one will it be right?


So murder and stealing from babies are ok, or least nobody can prove they're not.
Wow, this opens up so many possibilities!

._.;



It's very hard to tell when you change your story about what you are saying so much :\

I know those weren't your exact words but it's the closest phrase I could think of to describe what you have been doing.

And you've said that you DO know. Which is it?

So what your reason for reminding us all of these specific possibilities?

Why must it be an accident if there is no designer?

Are you the original designer of the universe?


Of course not, just awhile ago you said you already knew it.

We aren't talking about if there are designers now. Nobody in this thread would argue that you do not design things.

We are talking about origins. Did everything around us come from a designer or did it happen naturally? Do you think it couldn't have happened naturally?

But what about before there was anything alive on Earth and before there was anything alive on any planet in our universe?


Well I can't say that you are definitely wrong but you seem definitely inconsistent. Since you keep saying you're not saying certain things and then turning around and saying them I can't say what it is that you're saying so I don't have anything to show is wrong.

There's nothing wrong with considering it, we object to elevating it to beyond that without evidence for it.

You certainly act like we should accept it as one.
We consider these things too but that's it. There's no reason to take it further so we don't have any reason to inform people of other possibilities.

And it's often personal. Would you criticize someone for not getting naked on command?

Now maybe you don't mean any harm but a lot of times when I have told people what I imagine they turn it against me and say all of the things I have said are ridiculous because of it. I'm not totally scared by that or anything but what I imagine is rarely relevant to the conversation so I leave it out when reasonable.

If not then why keep telling us we're closed minded and such?

Why do you keep answering the questions with "designer"?

It's not random but it's stochastic. If you drop a single molecule of poison (that messes up DNA,) into a cell it's very hard to say which molecule it will interact with. Maybe it will bump around and touch on one strand of DNA or maybe it will touch down somewhere else. Same with high energy photons of light.

If you're standing in exactly a certain position and we shot a particular beam of light absolutely perfectly at a certain spot then sure, we could say what mutation would happen, but because the Sun is what's shooting most of those at us an we don't know exactly where it's going to shoot them and because we don't know exactly where all the molecules in anything you eat or otherwise put in your body and because we don't know the absolute exact position of your body there's so much going on that we're nowhere near close to working out cause and effect down to the level of atoms and photons.

We flat out know how most of those things interact that we can say how they will if we know exactly what they're all doing at any particular moment but we don't know exactly how things are at any moment in life. Generally sure but it's hard enough to just count how many hairs are on your head much less where all your cells are and how the stuff inside them is sitting.

So we call that random instead.

It wouldn't and it doesn't know to change. Know how computers sometimes freeze? They wouldn't if they did everything exactly the way they are programmed to but sometimes they don't follow the program. Maybe an electron jumped into the wrong place or some magnetic field threw it off. There's no way I could tell you exactly why it happened on a forum like this and even if I was there I probably wouldn't even be able to figure out what exactly happened unless I was lucky and watched it happen.

But programs are different than life so what freezes a program might make some stretch of DNA into something useful.


Well to fair I think there's a problem there. You're telling her to just accept it, and I think everyone has been.

I know it would be completely impractical to make everyone learn about the depths of chemistry and physics before they clear up misconceptions like these but I wish people would add a tool to their toolbox: The "I'm not good enough at this science to explain it well enough" tool. There are a lot of things that fall outside my range of expertise; even though I've seen the fantastic reasoning and evidence that lead up to the conclusions I don't every last piece of it and it's completely unreasonable to think that other people should see how right something is just from me recalling bits and pieces of what lead me to it.

So she doesn't need to accept it to know how evolution works, she needs to understand it to start understanding evolution.

I guess to put it another way:
imagine a pool table where the balls have just been split and are bumping around wildly. You know that bounce off of each other in certain ways and that it's all very mechanical but if you first hit that cue ball at a very slightly different angle or with very slightly different force the balls might end up in a very different position.

If you want you can see why illustrated here: http://faraday.physics.utoronto.ca/GeneralInterest/Harrison/Flash/Chaos/Bunimovich/Bunimovich.html

Just a tiny change and things start to bounce differently and as you add those up it very quickly becomes too much to handle. Now imagine if the balls never slowed to a halt and if there were hundreds, thousands, or millions of them. If you know how they interact when there are just two hitting each other you can technically work out exactly what they should all do but even just figuring out where they all are before they've moved some more is an impossible task.

Hell, why not say that all cases of disorder must have been the direct result of intention and purpose by a designer as well and that we just do not recognize the order in them?

But with that or without that the fallacy that renders that invalid is called begging the question. You do understand why fallacies are not valid, right?


When you say things like this it's hard to see how you can say that you're not telling us how things are. What you just did is called a statement. If you first tell us to imagine something or you insert words like "maybe" into that it could be less that a declaration of how things are.

Well what really matters is how many interactions any single part can make and how many parts you have.

But if size doesn't matter why didn't we start small?

But if we're the first then our crude computers would be the best computers, would they not?

Why should I imagine that? Just to be distracted from this conversation?

Having failed they would have fallen back in on themselves into basically nothingness.

But I thought you didn't understand math (I can grab the quote of you saying so if you want.) How could you think the universe had such a small chance when you don't understand any of the math people used to argue that?

You've accepted that idea, if only to use against people, because you liked it but you didn't corral any of the reasons for it to show to us.

-trying to catch up in this thread is quite the task. I fear I need yet another break.

Any chance of getting a link to it?

So would anyone be interested in doing some pretty simple sketches of things / should I give some instructions?

I care about the tone and there's no "perfect" tone, just good ones.

I guess for writing tone what I should have said from the start was "tell me something I don't know" :\


Acting like that doesn't help anyone. If you're going to keep holding a grudge please leave.

I know! Who in their right mind would set things up so it was so easy to clog the air intake with food?

Nobody here is concerned about if there are designers now. This was always a question of if there were designers involved in the creation of Earth before life on Earth.

...has anyone ever tried to argue with you that humans do not design things?



Well yes, that works because there is basically a mind there. "Gravity," as in just the attractive force between anything with mass, is not any god. Consciousness is an absolute must for something to be called a god.


I've done some introductory level programming so it's really nothing. Be thankful there aren't fifty times as many forum tags and that they are not caps sensitive n_n

An answer for yourself or an answer for the rest of us? You seem to dislike it when people disagree with you but if you're just trying to extract an answer that's more useful than people agreeing with you because you know that there is something to be improved by change.

Ya, I gave other options (or I think i did,) so who are you saying is the designer? Previous creatures or a universal consciousness that has existed since the beginning of (our) time?

Now with the evolution stuff there's the question "why should the butterfly need to be conscious to make it's wings like that?" In terms of genetics they can grow those patterns just by series of random changes (funfact: butterflies take the genes that grew them legs as caterpillars and use them a second time in their wing patterns,) and if it works they prosper and if it doesn't they get eaten by a bird or something. Couple thousand years down the road (and for butterflies that's about as many generations,) and you could go from a fairly dull pattern to one that works really well for getting the attention of predators who understand that color means toxic or one that works really well for blending into tree bark.

And from a complex pattern you can go blazingly fast to another complex pattern, like with the moths in Europe around the industrial revolution that turned black as the trees got covered in soot and are again white now that things have been mostly cleaned up.


It does because programming is something we do and we were comparing the way a butterfly works to something we do. The comparison is not perfect though. It's hard to relate to something we don't do so if instead of "programming" we had chosen a word that didn't imply some kind of designer the analogy would be meaningless to us.

With genetics and some chemistry it really looks like all of this stuff gets sets in motion just from common chemicals interacting for a thousand or maybe million years. The only reason it hasn't started up over and over on Earth is that now there are bacteria everywhere that gobble up those molecules long before they get a chance to form new life.


This is the real break down in communication here.
So what's important is WHEN do we get so say something is a design/program? Your argument implies that we call it a design or program every time we think it looks anything like a design or program but the other side here says we can only call something a design when we know who designed it or a program when we know who programmed it. There's some flexing room with that but we are basically arguing about the order it makes sense to do this with.

Now, the big problem I have with the "design means designer" order is that you are saying there is no possible way for that thing to have happened without a designer. People in my line of work have devoted decades of their lives to showing how every step of life from barest bacteria to the full diversity of things we see today has happened one step at a time and that each step is just a simple change that we know happen well enough at random in every living thing.

Reading through that definition the precondition for life would be the properties of chemistry. Going with the standard atheist's "Science answers everything" motif this question takes us through physics and to the start of the big bang. We have chemicals because we have elements because stars fuse them and then puff them out or explode because of how much mass an atom can support because of the four fundamental forces being the way they are because of how they split very early into the big bang.

Lately string theory and the related ideas have come onto the scene to say a thing or two about how and why the big bang happened and if I really understood the math I think I'd be able to describe another step back from there.
If you're assuming a creator you can keep asking if the next step is God and in time people will tell you no and describe what the next step is and then you can as if the one after THAT is God and so on for, maybe forever.

Right now there's no more reason to think a designer did it than there is to think that the Earth is really flat and people have just been faking all those photos of it from space. If you've already made up your mind that either of those things is the case you won't have any trouble arguing it with a series of people who eventually just get frustrated and leave you to your own mechanisms as the world moves on without you but is that any way to live?


There are two things that make evolution happen.
The first is mutations. A mutation is any time during DNA replication that the copy is not like the original. If you knew chemistry the question "why isn't the copy always like the original?" would be trivial to answer but on a layman's level there's basically too much going on to keep it absolutely perfect. Sometimes a photon of light hits some molecule and gives too much energy to something else which sticks itself in place when it shouldn't have and other times our body makes proteins that purposely throw a monkey wrench into the works to make mutations happen even more.
But no matter how they get there they are the source of genetic variation.
The second thing is selection. You've heard of survival of the fittest before but in more precise terms when there is variation and any kind of selective force those selected for continue while those selected against do not.

Of course, with our language being so anthropomorphic you're no doubt poised to ask who the selector is.
Well there are several. Natural selection is basically the idea that making more and healthier babies adds up over the generations. If your family had always each had ten children and someone else's has only had two in the first generation you outnumber them 5 to 1, in the second 25 to 1, in the third 125 to 1 and so on.

Sexual selection mixes things up a good deal and gives us things like rams bumping heads and peacocks flaunting those tails of theirs around. This shows up at "a higher level of consciousness," when an organism is able to look at the available mates and decide which one is best. With the rams the one that wins the fight was stronger and with peacocks the one with the nicer tail is, and this sounds a bit strange at first, also stronger. With some birds you see monogamy though and so things turn not to just "who will probably make the best babies" but rather to "who will help me raise the babies the most?"

There are several other types of selection but most of them a odd genetic quirks like "when you stick two people on an island how does that mess with the gene pool thirty generations down the road?" so the only other one I'll go over is domestication.
Wolfs became dogs when people first selected the ones that were friendlier towards people and since then we've selected fighters and retrievers and rat-hunters and runners and ones with pretty fur and all manner of things to form the many dog breeds. Given a few thousand years they might split into separate species but for now we see how compatible things can be so long as you don't change their immune systems.

As with dogs we have also domesticated every plant and animal we eat so that bananas are edible raw and not full of seeds, citrus fruits are virtually bursting with juice, grains are enormous and sometimes more hearty compared to their wild relatives, beef has almost artistic layers of fat between the meat, and chickens lay those big white eggs. For thousands of years we have actually selected the ones that were easier and more useful to eat.

And of course there are carrier pigeons and foxes but those arne't so relevant to our lives anymore.

Well almost. Those without a focus on survival just die off so we only see the ones the ones that are left.

Naw, you gave me lots of spots to inject biology information most people don't know. If you've had the patience to read all of it you should end up very far from where you started, whether it changes your overall interpretation or not.

So can we just end the line of reasoning here and say that a butterfly's wing is not design?

Being responsible does not always require that you made choices. I actually mentioned it earlier with the wing patterns having to do with caterpillar feet. Turns out dots with the same pattern as their feet look like eyes and when predators see what they think is a face that big they don't try to eat it.

Little bit of chance plus survival equals evolution.

And I blame that on the state of the public education system. Science courses are supposed to at least introduce people to these concepts but most science teachers are little more than high school graduates themselves in terms of scientific understanding at the time they are handed a curriculum to teach to students. Very few know how to keep students excited so many grow bored and other teachers get wrapped up in the race for funding and turn the class into preparation not for the world but for doing well on the final exam.

Good. This leaves what you've been supporting and evolution as the two preferable options. So far either should satisfy you.

This question is a whole can of worms. When you ask where the genes for something came from it's always the ancestors. It is absurd to say that some sea sponge is the origin of feathers but on a genetic level it really sort of is. Feathers didn't outright come from scales but the lifted the chemicals for telling one side from the other (top and bottom for scales is important, otherwise they would just form a sheet like skin but be too hard to flex and the disadvantage of that should be obvious,) and scales took their chemical systems from other genes and so on. In terms of multicellular animals the feather and tortoise shell are about the only things you can honest call "new" features but even they take lift almost all of the genes that create them from other things in their bodies.

That's the solution that is the most pleasing to the ear. When you know about much of biology I should hope you don't still think that makes sense.

Of course it's stiff, I wrote it for the other thread :p

I don't know about using ellipses though, I thought they make writing look like you're not sure of yourself. Sort of like saying "uhhhh" every other sentence.

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Come on, you know how hard I am on myself by now. I'll practice any "that's not the real you" thing I try to do until I think it not only doesn't look fake but isn't fake. It takes awhile but I do change my habits as time marches on.

Naw, it's a little Japanese car I'll have to vacuum out if I ever do actually get a date.

So there are two big options.
"Designer"
"Naturalism"

We want something that supports one but does not support the other. If it "supports both" it doesn't really support either.

Why does the designer make so many babies with downs? Why does it never ever start a new design instead of just making small revisions? Why does it act like it just randomly tries every mutation?

Yet strangely the only ones arguing for design are heavily religious.

Not really any arguing design because things seem to be designed.



I don't believe that there's not a designer and I don't believe in evolution, I just accept those things in light of the evidence.


Here's one thing I accept as evidence of design: a "made in china" label.
I've got a load of others I usually bring up but they only apply to design arguments that oppose common descent. Because you're saying "yes, I'm fine with evolution, I just think God is doing it," I'm not inclined to argue against you as much. I still think your methodology stinks but at least you're sort of on the right track.

There are countless apples on Earth. Does that mean there must be apples in other places?

Now when I hear design I think engineering. "Just look around you and you'll see that no engineer could be stupid enough to design things this way" sounds like the kind of argument you've been using (except against design instead of for it :O ,) and when I think of naturalism and selection and so forth I think tinkering. Maybe you saw a chair in half (front back) it turns into a useful spot to clamp things to and maybe a screwdriver handle makes a decent hammer etc.

The people that founded the design idea started it on ideas like "this is too complex and cannot be explained by evolution." When ALL of the things they claimed were too complex were actually studied we found how they could come about in steps just like they should and it looked like there were no reasons left to support design. This tinkering idea doesn't actually need a tinkerer though- changes in our DNA just happen and if they are harmful they get filtered out over time or if they're the other sort they stick around and spread to everyone in the population after long enough.

Cell differentiation. Because different sections of your body would be more or less prone to dispersing your body heat and because different places on your body are better at bearing loads (imagine if you had a beer belly hanging off of your forehead and how many neck problems you would get from that.)

Yes.
In the DNA prior to our genes there are "promoter regions" that proteins can bind to to increase or decrease how often that gene gets translated into proteins. These sequences actually do just straight up show up in unrestrained DNA (not the coding gene,) by pure random statistics quickly. Thing is you can have a whole bunch of these triggered by different things. If you've got the second, third, and fifth trigger at the stomach but just the second and third trigger you can set the fat cells to behave differently, and because the fat on your stomach has obviously different uses and drawbacks than in your breasts it's useful to be able to have control how the cells act independently.

But just to make sure the point gets through: imagine if you only had one type of fat cell all over your body. If there was fat somewhere it would have to be the same thickness as everywhere else. In order to have enough fat in the breasts for milk production (and whatever other purposes it serves) you'd have to have a lot of fat on your ankles, cheeks, and neck. That would be pretty ok if your body was shaped more like a worm or something but even something like a fish would want some variety in it's fat.

It's mainly a variety of molecules bound to certain stretches of DNA that shut down some genes and permanently enhance others. Sometimes those genes make sure to keep pumping out the proteins that do that to make sure they stay in place and sometimes other molecules just stay in place permanently.

I'm sorry you've never met someone that could explain genetics to you better than that...
This argument doesn't make any sense to me in light of your recent claim that butterflies don't design their wings...


Well you're actually better off with the "the cells are the ones that make themselves how they are" thing you seem to have built up to reject here.

The only remaining problem is how evolution has no foresight. These don't design complex systems and then build them- they just try everything and as you pile up single step upon single step eventually you get a complicated staircase.

...the big biology stuff is probably another point I should stop at.