Many scientist feel that the eco system is a intricate balance where if one component is missing the rest in turn is affected much like a Swiss watch, let's say. If you remove a component it doesn't work anymore.
Any particular ecosystem may fail if an important component is removed, but it will just turn into a different ecosystem. It may not be as "beautiful" by our subjective standards, but it still "works." That asteroid that darkened the skies and wiped out the dinosaurs also wiped out many other species, a significant fraction of the total in existence at the time. IIRC, something like one fourth. It utterly destroyed entire ecosystems. But plenty of living things survived. Mutations that wouldn't have had a chance of survival suddenly found themselves perfectly adapted to a new world and throve. Within a few million years the earth was remade by evolution into a new kind of place. Endothermic (warm-blooded) animals and angiosperms (seed-bearing plants) became the apex species on land and similar changes took place in the sea. To use your model, many of the key components of the watch were removed. The watch was never rebuilt, but in its place a digital clock arose.
As amazing as a Swiss time piece is, with all of our intelligence , we can't come close what is done in nature.
You express a weakness that virtually all humans have: the inability to understand huge numbers. You can't grasp how the law of averages works when it has
billions of years to work. Our entire civilization, starting charitably with the first farms which technically don't even count as civilization, is only twelve thousand years old. Give us two or three billion years and see what we might come up with!
Isn't design a much more logical than lightning striking a tar pond or whatever?
What is "logical" about design? Where does the designer live? What does he eat? Why don't we see him? What kinds of processes does he use to perform this design?
At the very best, if you manage to come up with answers to all of these questions, you are left with the one unanswerable question: Where did the designer come from? Who designed him? Your reasoning ends up being circular.
This is not "logic," this is one of the oldest classic bonehead fallacies.
"Overall, the criteria for scientific theories can be loosely be summarized by a few basic principles. Scientific theories are: 1.Consistent (internally and externally); 2.Parsimonious (sparing in proposed entities or explanations) 3.Useful (describes and explains observed phenomena 4. Empirically Testable & Falsifiable 5.Based upon Controlled, Repeated Experiments 6.Correctable & Dynamic (changes are made as new data is discovered) 7.Progressive (achieves all that previous theories have and more) 8.Tentative (admits that it might not be correct rather than asserting certainty) I don't know if evolution meets all of this criteria. And this is just one overview I ran across.
This is not a correct paradigm. #5 does not belong there. Science is the logical derivation of theories from empirical observation, but experimentation is not required. Astronomy is the oldest science and no one has yet performed an experiment in astronomy. (The "experiments" that have been performed all involve only new techniques of observation.)
A give away is using the word ecosystem, we all know an ecosystem operates within specific parameters that cannot be substituted and allow for limited deviation to what would be considered optimal. But taking away one component means it collapses, IT DIES.
We just went through that. One dies but another takes its place.
OK, I'll save time by stating that even IF new species can be made by isolation and environment, with all of our fossils we have none detailing a transition from say a mouse to a bat... If it takes as long as suggested, wouldn't the land be covered with fossils of animals in ALL states of the transitional process? Yet we have none?
Either you are joking or you are being disingenuous. Surely you understand how perfect conditions must be for anything to become a fossil. Weather, lack of predators/scavengers, geology. It's amazing that there are as many fossils as there are. Some of them turned to mush, like petroleum. Some turned to vapor, like natural gas. Some turned to a solid mass of indistinguishable molecules, like coal. Most just got ground up into the soil, dissolved in the water, evaporated into the air, eaten by scavengers, or ripped asunder by tectonic activity.
Since you brought up "most people": 85% of humans believe in a higher power/God.
Of course they do. Belief in the supernatural is an archetype, an instinctive belief programmed into us by the vagaries of evolution. An instinct that was a survival trait during conditions we can't imagine, a synapse that we all inherited through a genetic bottleneck, not all archetypes have been explained yet. But many of them have to be outgrown because they are remnants of the Stone Age. Religion, for example, may have been an advantage during our tribal era because it helped tribes bond. Today it is atavistic because it continues to hold us back in the tribal era and prevents us from coming together into larger communities.
My guess is that using multiple identities to conceal yourself on this forum is not encouraged by the site administrators.
No. If this turns out to be the case he will be permanently banned.
You are trolling, as you did before when you wasted peoples' time. You have no honest interest in discussion.
I'm not quite ready to dismiss this as trolling. But I do recommend that the Moderator combine this with the Sticky on Evolution Denialism. It's just the same discredited arguments all over, taking up our bandwidth.
Thanks for your insight. The bigger question at hand is: At what point does bacteria type organism turn into a fish for instance.
Oh come on now. You make yourself out to be an intelligent, educated person, and then you say something that sounds like a not particularly precocious twelve-year-old???Did I already say "disingenous?" Fourteen-year-olds know that bacteria did not turn directly into fish but went through a couple of billion years of intermediate forms as they became slowly more complex.
Are you are saying that bacteria changed into every single life form on the planet?
There were other single-celled species besides bacteria, but basically yes.
Well, how similar is a donkey to a horse? They both evolved from the same ancestor (which was neither a donkey nor a horse). (someone correct me if my memory of bio classes betrayed me.)
Eohippus, the ancestor of all the equines including the zebra. It arose in what is now North America but ultimately no species of that line survived here.
Do you see how ridiculous that is? You are saying that all on its own bacteria, which you need a microscope to see turned into (ok, it took 2-3mill years) an elephant and some turned int horses and some a zebra. WHY?
Because there were ecological niches for both species. Mutations only survive if they have a survival advantage over their ancestral species. This often happens during times of environmental distress.
And dont forget that some did not change at all, because they are still here performing the same EXACT function. Dont you see that it makes no sense?
I'm not sure that's true. We talk about alligators and cockroaches still being here, but they're not the same species of alligators and cockroaches. But even if they are, all this shows is that there were ecological niches available for both the ancestral species and the mutation. This does happen, after all. The polar bear is a mutation of the grizzly bear, the most recent speciation we have yet discovered, yet the grizzly bear still thrives in its original environment. There was a new environment for the polar bear so it evolved to fill it.
There needed to be, at the very least, some external direction. It is so obvious.
What kind of "external direction?" The "designer" that was mentioned earlier? The hypothesis that only results in circular reasoning? This is not science. This is starting to sound suspiciously like religion, which on this board is trolling. We have ghettos for religionists with antiscientific arguments and if they don't stay there we ban them. Postulating an unobservable supernatural universe is by definition antiscientific, because the essence of science is the premise that the natural universe is a closed system whose behavior can be predicted by deriving theories logically from empirical observations of its past and present behavior. This premise has been tested for about five hundred years and it has not been disproven. There is no need to give up on science and postulate supernatural phenomena like "designers."
In my area education is devolving and MDs give you psych drugs for a sinus infection. Is that because we are random organisms with no purpose?
Yes, America is getting pretty stupid. It started with the Religious Redneck Retard Revival about thirty years ago. True academia has lost all respect and "science" is being taken over by corporations who have products to sell.
