Debunking Evolution

re: more psychoceramics ...
[quote=Daniel J. Boorstein]The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.[/quote]

Quoting Joe0082

seems like a little bit of a stretch to me.

Quoting Joe0082

seems only a partial truth,

This is known as "seems to me science." "Seems to me" in this context just means "I don't understand how." The world is full of things that seem to be impossible but which, none-the-less, exist.

A question - do you believe that all living organisms on Earth are the descendants of one kind of simple single-celled organism?

Reply to T Clark

Two things have evolved, you know -- bodies and minds. Gong from inorganic to organic is the easy one. Going from organic to self-aware organic is the hard one.

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Reply to tim wood Reply to tim wood God can man a lot of different things.

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Reply to Joe0082 It is remarkable that life evolved so many different forms, including us. It did take a long time -- life appeared on this planet about 3.5 Billion years ago. The first multi-cellular life appeared about 600 Million years ago. The first creatures slithered out of the oceans 440 Million years ago -- preceded by plants 700 million years ago.

Take the eye: cells found a way of reacting to light about 600 million years ago -- around the time of the Cambrian Explosion in species. From there it took many millions of years to develop what we would recognize as an eyeball.

Just guessing, but maybe 99.99999% of all evolutionary events resulted in flat out nothing. A very small percentage of errors in cellular duplication resulted in a feature that was useful to the animal, plant, or fungus.

Quoting Joe0082

Aristotle in my humble opinion missed one important type of fallacy, which is Partial Truth Taken As Full Truth. A perfect example being evolution. Nobody doubts that it is partially true but is it the Full Truth? Evolution is at best a crude and uncertain tool in Nature's hands. To believe that Nature managed to turn bacteria into human bodies consisting of 10 trillion cells, each of which is an amazing little factory, seems like a little bit of a stretch to me. And there are just too many inexplicable features in animals and humans to believe it all happened only through evolution, like the eye, and like self-aware intelligence, and many more. Why did the Neanderthals not evolve, but remained pretty much the same for two hundred thousand years, never even inventing the bow and arrow (or for that matter the throwing spear)? Why have chimps not evolved into higher organisms? There are a thousand reasons why evolution seems only a partial truth, and only really one reason to believe it is the full truth, namely scientific conformity and fear of being branded unscientific.

If you can't even project your thoughts in a way that you understand them, don't expect that bodies externally to yours will understand.

Reply to Bitter Crank
That's the science, the "how" -- the philosophy is "why". Why does life seem to want to emerge and evolve? Once alive, why does it have a will to live and procreate? Those questions go deeper than the material or historical facts which you mention.

Deleted by author

Your inability to believe natural selection has brought about the development of life from single cell organisms to man is natural when we cannot conceive of the timescales involved. Millions, even billions of years are way beyond what we can imagine. However, we are currently witnessing the rapid evolution of the Covid-19 virus in a timescale of months; rapid because it has managed to transfer to millions of humans. The arising of new variants demostrates the process, and shows that species usually do not evolve gradually and smoothly, but in spurts due to sudden changes in their environment. Imagine that we could not produce a Covid-19 vaccine. Humans would need to evolve. Over generations our genetic make-up would mutate until some Covid-immune variant of man became the norm.

It's probable that without evolution by natural selection life over any length of time would not be possible. The strong would eventually eat up all the weak, and then die out through lack of food. And how can you account for the millions of different but similar species on earth, except via the deduction that they evolved from fewer species, which in turn came from fewer species...?

There are explanations of how the eye evolved. I suggest you seek them out.
As for self-aware intelligence: try subduing your ability to use and understand language for a few minutes, and see how self-aware you are then..

Reply to Joe0082 :roll: Category mistake. "Why" only pertains to intentions, not processes; "life" (evolution) is an entropic process and not an intentional agent.

Reply to Joe0082

So your debunking of evolution amounts to "I don't get it."

Might I suggest you read Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel C Dennett:

"The fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution, is now beyond dispute among scientists. It demonstrates its power every day, contributing crucially to the explanation of planet-sized facts of geology and meteorology, through middle-sized facts of ecology and agronomy, down to the latest microscopic facts of genetic engineering. It unifies all of biology and the history of our planet into a single grand story. Like Gulliver tied down in Lilliput, it is unbudgeable, not because of some one or two huge chains of argument that might–hope against hope–have weak links in them, but because it is securely tied by hundreds of thousands of threads of evidence anchoring it to virtually every other field of knowledge."

Reply to counterpunch
Daniel Dennett is a naive materialist, which is an indefensible philosophy.

Reply to tim wood
that's "mean", not "man.". For example, Schopenhauer's "will" could be considered God.

Closing this.