I've heard that the main focus of the forum was on the likelyhood of evolution due to random mutation (Not the other mechanisms of evolution). These claims may have been altered a little by some Creationists who are willing to stretch the truth to push their agenda.
Thats exactly what it was about and they proved that it was not possible to have evolution through random selection, and when you set aside randomness you are left with design, which would require "purposive planning by an Intelligence."
The problem with your argument is that selection is not random. Variation can be random, but selection is most definitely not random.
Take for example Gazelles. If random variation made one slower than the others, then that Gazelle would be more likely to be eaten by a predator. This is not random, neither is it design.
This proves that selection is not random, and as your "disproof" required selection to be random, it shows that your disproof is false.
Ok, I'd like for you all to try my Evolution Game:
1) Write down any word you can think of
2) Pick a another word as target word
2) Randomly make 10 copies of that word but make random change to that word. These changes can be one of the following:
a) Randomly change one letter into another letter
b) Remove a letter
c) Duplicate a letter that already exists in the word at a random point in the word
3) Remove any words that are not real words
4) Find the 8 words that most closely resembles the target word (at first this will not be very close to the target word). Usein the criteria:
a) Number of letters
b) Number of letters that match the target word
5) Select 2 of the remaining words at random to include in the list
6) Using the words selected in steps 4 and 5 randomly make 10 words out of each (giving you 100 words again) and repeat steps 3, 4 and 5 until the target word is reached (it might take a while)
In this, although there is random variation, the selection is not random, and although the criteria for selection is different than in evolution, the important matter is that there is selection (I have even included some random selection too).
Using this "game" you should be able to get form pretty much any word (ok, single letter words as a start word won't necessarily work).
The processes involved in this are the same as in evolution. First there is reproduction (you make 10 copies of each selected word) with variation (you make random changes to each replicated word ) and selection (which is not random).
Reproduction with variation and selection. This is the cornerstone of evolution, and by playing this game you can demonstrate that this process works.
Some freak evolutionary superior human gets a random rock to their head ending their potential evolutionary chain means that evolution is not always fool proof, especially when in the past "freaks" have been seen as works of the devil/witches and delt with appropriately another act of christianity's fear of chage, backward thinking and the handbrake to evolving in general.
You have made the most common mistake about evolution, that it is some how directed in the long term. It isn't
Sure there is short term direction, based on the current environment, but there is no longer term direction to evolution. When one starts talking about "evolutionary superior" organisms you are falling into that misconception.
As I said in that example, the selection criteria is not the same as in biological evolution. I previously didn't go into the details of selection in biological evolution (it is quite complex, but not impossible to understand) because it would have taken up too much of the post.
Selection in biological evolution (natural selection) is about removal of the weakest (more than survival of the fittest). In my previous analogy, it is not necessarily the fastest Antelope that passes on the gene, but that the slowest on does not (because it gets caught by the predator). If there is variation in the speeds, and the slowest gets removed, then the average will eventually increase.
Another thing about natural selection, the greatest competition between organisms, is not in the predator/prey competition, but between members of the same species (as the Antelope example shows, with a bit of thought).
When it comes to social organisms (like humans, ants termite, bees, etc), then things become more complex still (and I am greatly simplifying it as it is). However, you can simplify social organisms as Super Organisms. Not like in Superman super
, but that the collective acts as a single organisms made up on individual organisms. Indeed, multi cellular organisms are made up of individual cells, but there are individual organisms that are single cells so what we consider as a multi cellular organism is really a super organism already, only made up of single cell organisms.
Basically, the selection criteria in Natural Selection is dependant ton the current environment and the organisms that inhabit it. This causes the organisms to adapt to that environment, but as those organisms are part of that environment, their adoption causes the environment to change. As the environment has changed, the organisms have to re-adapt (which causes the environment to change, as so on...).
This is what I mean by complex. Because the environment and what is selected are so dependent on each other, if one changes, then the other change which requires the first to change again in a cycle. This kind of looping is specifically called a feedback loop (an engineering term) as the effects of one "feed back" around the loop to cause an effect on itself.
As a specific example:
At one time in Earth's history, there was not much oxygen in the atmosphere. We know this because oxygen reacts with certain materials to produce certain products. Like if you leave an iron bar out in the air, the oxygen will react with the iron to form iron oxide (rust). But if there was no oxygen, then no rust could form. Oxygen also reacts this way with rocks, but much more slowly. And so looking at the rocks that were laid down at the time, we can see that there was very little reaction with oxygen, so we can conclude that there was little oxygen in the atmosphere.
However, we also can find fossil evidence of life at this time too. So life, at the time, did not use oxygen. Oxygen is a highly reactive element, it reacts quite easily with many chemicals found in living organisms and this can cause damage to them. For instance we can often here about "Free Radicals" and the damage that they cause us. These Free Radicals are really just Oxygen (with a few electrons removed and maybe some other chemicals also attached).
Now, we don't think of Oxygen as bad, but this is because of what happened next on the ancient Earth. The Organisms that evolved in this environment did not have to combat damage from oxygen very often (there would have been a bit of it around, but not enough to threaten the organisms), but then there evolved the ability of plants to photosynthesise using sunlight.
Photosynthesis used sunlight to drive a chemical reaction that takes water (H
2O) and carbon dioxide (CO
2) to make carbohydrates (a class of chemicals that is a chain of carbon and hydrogen atoms). As you can see, carbohydrates use the carbon from the carbon dioxide, and the hydrogen from water to build the chain. This leaves Oxygen, which the plat expels.
Suddenly, there is a build up of oxygen in the atmosphere because plants have started to photosynthesise. As the other organisms have no defense against oxygen damage, they are in serious trouble. The highly reactive oxygen would be reacting with the very chemicals in the organisms and causing massive damage to them.
So we had an environment where spending energy and resources (from food) combating oxygen damage (repair, producing chemicals that mop up the oxygen, etc) gave you an advantage. But then when an organism evolved (plants) in a way that change the environment (expelled oxygen), what was once a selective advantage became a selective
disadvantage.
Any organisms that did produce chemicals that prevented the oxygen from causing damage, or that spent more of their resource on repair would have then been at a great advantage.
But then, because there is all this highly reactive chemical around, an organisms that could use it would ahve another source of energy and thus have another selective advantage, and because the reactions are fast, it could speed up it's metabolism and do things like move faster, or digest different materials as well.
Now there has been another change to the selective criteria and that organisms that just deafened against oxygen too well would be at a selective disadvantage as organisms that focused on repair would be able to handle the increased level of oxygen inside them and even evolve chemicals to control where that oxygen went in them (like haemoglobin does in us).
As there is a lot of oxygen in the atmosphere today, any organisms that could not defend itself against it would be at a disadvantage, and any organisms that just removed it from itself and didn't use it would also be at a disadvantage. There are environments on Earth that don't contain a lot of oxygen, and we can see organisms that are adapted for low oxygen environments. If you place them in a high oxygen environment they die. IF you place organisms adapted for high oxygen environments in the low oxygen environments, they die too. But it is possible by slowly changing the amount of oxygen in the environment (over along period of time) and the organisms change to adapt to the new environment (this has been done in the lab, and not only with oxygen but other chemicals as well).
As this shows, organisms react to the
immediate environment, not to some long term goal. And, what was once an organisms that would have been the "pinnacle" of evolution turns out, if the environment changes, to be a badly adapted organism.
So although we might think of Humans as the pinnacle of Evolution (at the moment), this is just plain Hubris. We are only so successful because we have adapted to this environment. If another Ice age came along, we might almost go extinct. If we could go from the population we have now, to quite possibly extinct, then we can't be the absolute pinnacle of evolution.
At one time, Neanderthals were more populous than Humans, this would have made them appear to be the Pinnacle of evolution to themselves, as those pathetically evolved humans could not survive well in cold environments. However, the environment change, and became less cold, what would those Neanderthals say now?