[Ghostavo]

You stop buying that clock and then the company that sells that clock goes bye bye due to bad sales (yeah right...), and then all other clock companies get better business and other clocks (which supposedly don't die) become more numerous. So.... yeah... sort of...

[Ford Prefect]

You're missing the point of the analogy. Organisms better-suited to their environment are better-suited because of just such an unpredictable sequence of events. There's no rhyme or reason to it. What happens just happens.

[Ghostavo]

But the process by which they become more numerous HAS a reason.

The process by which their enviroments or habitat (whatever you want to call the things they interact with) changes is not part of evolution but a mix of several other fields.

[Bobboau]

yeah but wich ones survive are not random, it's the ones best suited to survival.

that isn't random, it's selective.

[Ford Prefect]

I think we have different interpretations of cause and effect.

An organism is well-suited to its environment, so it survives. That's a given. But the reason it is well-suited to its environment is the result of a culmination of variables that could easily have been different.

Perhaps what I'm not getting across is that the act of survival is only half of evolution; the other half is the events that cause an organism to be able to survive. You can't just isolate evolution from everything else that's going on around it. There's interplay between all processes.

[Bobboau]

yeah, but it isn't just simple random chance.

and my statment was evolution != random chance

if it were then it would have no way of, well evolving, if it was just toal dumb luck random chance then no mater what you'r genetics you would have just as good odds as anyone else, wich you don't.

there is random chance involved, but it is a subset.

[Ford Prefect]

I'll use your meteor analogy:

A meteor hits me in the head. By your logic, because the only probable outcome of this event is my death, my death was not random chance.

But although the meteor killing me is not exactly a coin-toss, the fact that it hit me in the first place certainly was.

The same goes for evolution. If a mutation is advantageous, it's not a tough prediction that it's going to change the course of the species. But the fact that the mutation took place to begin with is random chance. Therefore, evolution, like everything else in existence, is driven by random chance.

[Ghostavo]

Not if you know the velocity and position of every particle in the universe...

[Ford Prefect]

Which Heisenberg showed is not possible.

[Bobboau]

"the meteor killing me is not exactly a coin-toss"

right there, not random chance, therefore there is more involved than random chance, so saying it is all random chance is incorect.

cars are driven by people, cars are not people.
though I'll take issue with your statment, evolution is driven by reaction, it's the acting on the random mutation that is the more important part of evolution. what is more important random chance causeing a mutation, or that mutation alowing you to take advantage of some new food source? yes the second is dependent on the first, but the second is were the important part is.

[Ford Prefect]

Well that's just arbitrary. I would argue that the first is more important precisely because the second is dependent on it.

In the context of a religious debate, it is highly significant that evolution is fundamentally driven by chance.

[Styxx]

Originally posted by Thrilla
What takes more faith:

Example A: A contractor built the house.

Example B: Through millions and billions of years, trees falling in the right ways, metal and ground erosion, extreme heat and pressure, lime, water, gravel, and even the weather conditions throughout millenia caused a structure to slowly form itself.

And this is just a simple house. Cell structure, molecular interaction, and even the human body are so much more complex. And what about the biggest question of all: How does intelligent and self-aware life come from proteins? We all know that something doesnt come out of nothing; common sense really, but how do you explain that the human race is the only being capable of conscious thought? Animals have been chewing grass and grazing the same way for as long as we can record, yet man has gone from nomads to putting a man on the moon.

Im just proving an absurdity that you defend evolution as a scientific theory, already proven and stamped fact but not allowing the idea of ID or creationism to even be mentioned. At least be consistent with wanting your theories preached.

There's one fact that most people fail to recognize: you are only here to say how absurd the chances of life existing by "random" are because of the extremely long sequence of "lucky" events that led to it existing here. There may be billions of planets on our galaxy, and life may have evolved only on this planet, and this will be the only place where there's some intelligence saying how absurd the chances are.

Yes, the chances are absurd. But you only exist because this planet hit the jackpot. If even a single one of all the factors required for the evolution of life - and better yet, intelligent life - had gone wrong, you wouldn't be here to see that it hadn't happened. That's why your argument is bogus.

As for why other animals aren't sentient - who knows? Wait a few million years and some other sentient life form may pop up. Higher intelligence and sentience (through increased proportional brain size, mostly) happened to be mutations that provided humanity's ancestors an immense survival advantage. As far as we know (the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy may still be right), no other species has reached the "critical mass" of sentience, but it may still happen.

[Bobboau]

adaptations that improve survivability perpetuate themselves,
this is not random chance.

ok, you, define random chance.

[Bobboau]

if evolution is nothing but random chance than this argument

"What takes more faith:

Example A: A contractor built the house.

Example B: Through millions and billions of years, trees falling in the right ways, metal and ground erosion, extreme heat and pressure, lime, water, gravel, and even the weather conditions throughout millenia caused a structure to slowly form itself."

is valid

[Styxx]

Part of evolution is what, from our current point of view, can only be called random chance. We cannot determine all the factors that lead to a specific mutation - can be flawed cellular reproduction, a chemical defect on a DNA or RNA chain or any other number of factors, but for our practical purposes it is random.

The fact that some of these mutations are beneficial to the organism inside its specific environment, and that improves the organism's survivability and perpetuates the mutation is not random, though. It is a simple logical exension: if an organism has greater chance to survive and reproduce than others on the same environment, it will, with greater probability, perpetuate itself and the long string of mutations that led to it.

[Ford Prefect]

Styxx: That's exactly what I'm getting at.

Bobboau: I have just acknowledged that the only reason we're having this debate is because we're debating in different contexts. We're not even arguing the same point. You're saying the fact that a mutation causes a change is not chance. Technically, I agree. I'm saying that what causes the mutations is random chance. Which one you think is more important depends on what the argument is.

With that said, however, we could also get into the debate over the nature of chance itself. Quantum physics has told us that the best we can do in any situation is predict the probability of an outcome, so you can argue that literally everything is chance.

[Liberator]

The correct comparison is the following:

A chemical chain forms where there was none before since time immemorial, said chain joins with another exactly as required to form an ammino acid, that amino acid joins with other, different amino acids to form the basics of life, a burst of enegy at just the right moment in time initiates the life process of the earliest life form(singular)

That lifeform somehow lives long enough to procreate, it's spawn live and spread, some mutate in a way that allows them to survive longer and spawn twice, it's spawn live and spread. Somehow, we don't know, they make the jump from single celled very simple lifeforms to a dual-celled form, eventually over the untold millions of years the mutations have added up and now we have jellyfish(the simplest multi-celluar lifeform on Earth).  The jellyfish(which is carniverous) is king and eats quite literally every thing, eventually it makes the jump from what is basically a stomach with tentacles to insects and fish, eventually devloping into reptiles and mammals.  By this time we're up to about 65 million years ago and we're talking about quadrillions(at least) of beneficial mutations have added up and everythings fine.  Somehow some amazing sequence of mutations occur in rapid succession and put a single species on the road to intelligence which leads to us.

[size=10]OR[/size]

The all-powerful being who rules the universe and everything in it, whose full nature and motivation is beyond our ken, chooses to expend a infinitesimal fraction of his immeasurable might and create Everything.  Setting into place all the rules and laws that bind and govern it.

[Ford Prefect]

Well, I think we were working on the assumption of the absence of divine will. (That being a slightly different debate.)

[Liberator]

Why, Divine Will is the very center of Creationism.

[Ford Prefect]

Oh. I was assuming that you were referring to our debate over the role of chance in evolution.