Evolution Is Not Random (At Least, Not Totally)

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This is equiovocation or a straw man, it's hard to tell which. Actually, it could be both.

Most people who believe in a causeless Big Bang would not describe the universe as "created".

Furthermore, "causeless" and "random" are not synonymous.

I see LNH has not responded to this thread after her blatant misrepresentation of my position, still curious if you realise why and how this is so LNH

Of course evolution is deterministic, and God is the one who determines it.

Its not random.

Natural selection determines it.

But if you wanna claim that God determines it -via natural selection- then no one could disprove you.

Really any evidence that evolution is deterministic in the sense that it has direction? and have you thought just how much involvement would be required from a creator to achieve a desired outcome?

The notion that the primordial ooze is a bit like a cake, mix the ingredients then allow to cook and it will proceed in a directed fashion is absurd beyond words, and belies a pitiful level of scientific literacy.

It's like... Darwin doesn't exist in their universe?

evolution is not totally random, correct, it only allows those mutations that are beneficial (or at least not harmful) in the current environment to exist.

however: those mutations are random. most of them are irrelevant to an organism (eye/hair color, for example), some are negative (ainemia, down syndrome...) in 'the wild', and a rare few are positive (being able to digest milk at an adult age).

the occerence of mutations is completely random, the survival of such mutations into newer generations is not.

This is looking at it at a superficial level.

Rolling dice at a casino is random at a superficial level, however, knowing the speed, angle,inertia, bounce ... i.e., all the physics ... we can see it is not random. I would argue that the mutation is not random and is casual. At a fundamental level, matter has preference.

"Are mutations truly random?"
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles. ... y-random-/

Juding by the science people in the comments it seems this is a debated topic on whether the chromosomes/genome can determine mutation or not. I expect we will get to the point where mutation can be predicted before a human is born just by looking at the DNA of the parents (i.e., casualty of mutation is known).

Even if you were right none of it has squat to do with the "Prometheus" movie.

Second all that your article shows is that some parts of chromosome are more likely to have mutations than others. Thats the equivalent of saying a six sided dice can only come up as a number between one and six, and not one and 42. Its still leaves alot of unpredictablity. Its hardly predeterminded.

1. Something more likely to happen is possible evidence of improbability and would be evidence of non-randomness.
2. The website shows us much speculation on the physics of the DNA formation however, it appears that none of these people know, so what do *YOU* know that these people do not know? You can see they speculate on chromosome/genome encoded "design", another points out that the physics of DNA fold formation is unknown ....

I believe your conclusion is wrong. Full understanding of DNA may let humans "play GOD", and design DNA to do what we want it to do (i.e., pre-determined outcome). You appear to argue that humans can never know DNA well enough to know predetermined outcomes.

You have to remember from chemistry and physics that matter at its most basic level has attraction/repulsion (biasing), e.g. the fundamental electrogmatic force. So, for the formation of something to be random then it has to somehow overcome that biasing.

Even if we could predict exactly when and where errors would arise in DNA duplication, there are environmental factors at work that we certainly cannot predict. The classic one is ultraviolet light.

out of my area ... however .. something to think about ... as pointed out in the article below .. mutation is the same in the same environment (i.e., if you recreate the environment in a test tube you may get the same genetic mutation) Thus, you can predict outcome by pre-testing the environment.

Scientific America: "Predictable Evolution Trumps Randomness of Mutations"
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... mutations/

Pardon me, but this whole discussion is "out of your area".


You do not understand what this article is saying (you haven't even linked to the original article: http://www.nature.com/news/predictable- ... ns-1.12459 or to the paper: http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info ... io.1001490). In fact I'd be surprised if you've read it. This is literally saying what Narrator and I said on the first page of the thread, and indeed disagrees with your conclusion. Read the first nine words.

What is happening here is not "pre-determined mutations in a given environment", it is simple natural selection. Many mutations will be taking place, but most of these will not benefit the organism and will not become fixed (or will even die out within one generation). What has happened in this experiment is that the E. coli adapted for the same conditions, so very similar mutations survived. Note that the sample size is only three, and even then we don't observe identical mutation, but mutations with silent differences producing similar structures.

You're also making claims that are not supported by the evidence. As Michael Stumpf points out in the lay article there, these findings only really apply to E. coli, though (aside from the concerns about sample size) they'll probably hold for some other bacteria. Eukaryotes, on the other hand, cannot carry out vertical gene transfer, so we might well see very different results with Diptera.