Theory of Evolution

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KiwiTim

341 posts

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#2169415 29-Jan-2019 08:26

frankv:

KiwiTim:

If I dump a load of building supplies on some land, nobody would expect them to self assemble into a house.

Right... but your building materials aren't alive. One of the features of life is the ability to extract energy from the environment and use that to alter the environment.

If you put a live monkey amongst your building materials, it will build a rudimentary house.

I'm alluding to abiogenesis, non-life to life, de novo. The systems of organic molecules required for a rudimentary, primitive, self-replicating cell. It would be absurdly improbable for the molecular machinery required for photosynthesis or chemosynthesis to self assemble, concomitant with the ability to self replicate, as well as the molecular machinery for all the other essential cellular functions, to spontaneously self assemble in the same location and at the same time. That goes against everything we know about probability, chemistry and thermodynamics.

I have no problem with living beings being capable of retaining order and complexity, and being capable of increasing that complexity via natural selection.

frankv

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#2169416 29-Jan-2019 08:28

tdgeek:

frankv:

tdgeek:

I can't see how it is surprising as the Moon is inert, no rotation, no wind

The moon rotates once per orbit around Earth. There being no atmosphere, there is obviously no wind.

If you choose part of what I said, you end up with the wrong sentence. I did not say its surprising that the Moon has no wind

I said "The Moon is Theia and the Earth as the fragments coalesced into the Moon. I can't see how it is surprising as the Moon is inert, no rotation, no wind, it just sits there, inert"

I.e. It is not surprising that parts of The Earth are on the Moon as the Moon is inert, no rotation, no wind i.e. it will be undisturbed, a comma after the word surprising should have been there though

Right. But, being pedantic, the moon does rotate.

KiwiTim

341 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2169419 29-Jan-2019 08:32

Sidestep:

KiwiTim:

If I dump a load of building supplies on some land, nobody would expect them to self assemble into a house. Why is that? What we know about thermodynamics and entropy suggest it would not happen. I could repeatedly dump those materials onto the site, and maybe they could form some rough hollow structure by chance, but it won't be stable and it won't be a house as we know it. You can take practical examples from the natural world to understand whether something is practically probable or improbable. Of course I'm not a universal arbiter of how random chance works, but everything absurdly improbable is not possible. Find me a moon made of cheese and you might change my mind.

Hey! You might find this interesting, it goes against what we understand of entropy and thermodynamics and is so improbable as to seem impossible but:
- I've found a planet where loads of building materials dumped on land often assemble into houses...

It all happens within a thin chemically reactive film covering a rocky, water covered planet bathed in the radiation of a G-type star..

Not only that.. but on this planet many of the ingredients for coke and marshmallow form spontaneously - the assembly of complex molecules from Carbon Hydrogen and Oxygen driven by a certain frequency of radiation from the star. They and the minerals involved separate and recombine through a massively unlikely transport mechanism.. yet apparently Coke's created at 700,000,000 litres per planetary rotation (very unlikely to create oceans, but a lake is possible), Marshmallow's appearing at 300,000 kg per rotation.. certainly the odds of a marshmallow island in the coke lake have improved..

Now - this is the clincher - the planet's producing cheese at 55,000 tonnes per rotation, and in the past 40 solar revolutions has ejected 10,000,000 Kg of random materiel (including a small amount of cheese) into planetary orbit.. It appears the odds of a (small) moon of cheese have increased exponentially..

The whole process appears to be an very unlikely side effect of an extremely unlikely cascading electro-chemical reaction that appears to have begun in a puddle 4 billion of the planet's revolutions around the star ago.

I'm not sure what to call this process yet.. I'm thinking the 'butterfly effect' sounds right.. And to increase the odds of a planet with an actual sea of coke, marshmallow islands and a cheese moon, I think we should collect reacting samples of this electro-chemical process and use them to seed perhaps 40 billion similar planets..

Whatever it is your taking, it must be really good. Where can I get some? I hope you are putting this level of imagination and creativity to good use. I'm looking in the crystal ball ... a Man Booker Prize? ... the vision is hazy, but I am seeing more clearly now ... it's a Pulitzer!

tdgeek

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#2169422 29-Jan-2019 08:39

frankv:

Right. But, being pedantic, the moon does rotate.

Pedantic back :-) cosmos wise, rotation is in the context of on it's axis, the Moon doesn't rotate on its axis. If you were on the Moon the stars will be moving as they do here, even without rotation of its axis

frankv

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#2169425 29-Jan-2019 08:54

KiwiTim:

That goes against everything we know about probability, chemistry and thermodynamics.

Nope.

What we know about probability is that if you have enough trials of a non-zero probability test, you will get some positive results. Probability of life is non-zero, because we exist. If the universe is sufficiently large, then it is probable that more than one life-form will exist. If the universe is infinitely large (which we don't (yet) know), then it is certain.

Chemistry also doesn't prohibit life, nor the creation of life. After all, we exist. Given the right conditions (energy + ingredients), any chemical compound can be created.

Thermodynamics also doesn't prohibit life, nor the creation of life. After all, we exist. Thermodynamics only says that you have to extract energy from your environment if you want to rearrange it to suit yourself.

One could even postulate that 4,000 years ago, the right combination of a cloud of charged atoms coalesced here and life began at that point. After all, there's a non-zero probability of this, and the universe could be infinite. But there's no evidence for that happening. And everything we know (apart from the stories of a tribe of desert nomads) says that it is *much* more likely that it started 3 billion years ago and gradually changed to what we see today.

KiwiTim

341 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2169435 29-Jan-2019 09:06

frankv:

KiwiTim:

That goes against everything we know about probability, chemistry and thermodynamics.

Nope.

What we know about probability is that if you have enough trials of a non-zero probability test, you will get some positive results. Probability of life is non-zero, because we exist. If the universe is sufficiently large, then it is probable that more than one life-form will exist. If the universe is infinitely large (which we don't (yet) know), then it is certain.

Chemistry also doesn't prohibit life, nor the creation of life. After all, we exist. Given the right conditions (energy + ingredients), any chemical compound can be created.

Thermodynamics also doesn't prohibit life, nor the creation of life. After all, we exist. Thermodynamics only says that you have to extract energy from your environment if you want to rearrange it to suit yourself.

One could even postulate that 4,000 years ago, the right combination of a cloud of charged atoms coalesced here and life began at that point. After all, there's a non-zero probability of this, and the universe could be infinite. But there's no evidence for that happening. And everything we know (apart from the stories of a tribe of desert nomads) says that it is *much* more likely that it started 3 billion years ago and gradually changed to what we see today.

Because we exist does not mean life started from nothing by itself. I'm not going to bother responding to your other points as we are just going over old ground. If you want, read through my posts from the beginning, or not, does not bother me.

frankv

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#2169440 29-Jan-2019 09:10

tdgeek:

frankv:

Right. But, being pedantic, the moon does rotate.

Pedantic back :-) cosmos wise, rotation is in the context of on it's axis, the Moon doesn't rotate on its axis. If you were on the Moon the stars will be moving as they do here, even without rotation of its axis

The Moon *does* rotate on its own axis. The same face is always pointed towards Earth, because its rotation period is the same as its orbital period. The reason the stars (appear to) move here is that the Earth rotates. If we didn't rotate (and didn't orbit the Sun) (and the Sun wasn't moving in the Milky Way) (and the Milky Way wasn't moving relative to the other galaxies), the stars would not (appear to) move.

If you were on the Moon, the motion of the stars would appear quite different from on Earth. There would be no 24-hour cycle. Instead there would be a 24*27.3 days = 655.2 hour cycle to the stars' motion relative to the observer.

[Pedant 2]: "it's" shouldn't have an apostrophe. ;)

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