In Evolution I prefer Steven J. Gould and appreciate the philosophical aspects of punctuated equilibrium.
Don't believe in chance and recognize that the overwhelming number of "participants" in Evolution don't Evolve at all. Stasis is the predominant feature of Evolution.
Glad to see you have already mischaracterized punctuated equilibrium. I am sure Gould is happy to see his theory still being misrepresented to this day. His theory isn't that the overwhelming number of "participants" don't evolve, it is that observable evolution happens in bursts rather than gradually over time. And of course, it isn't even the opposite of gradualism as you would portray it. Gould was talking about evolution as it pertained to the geological record. He fully supported the idea that genetic alterations (silent or otherwise) were occurring quite consistently throughout nature which is of course evolution in action hence your statement about most participants is more full of shit than your predictions about the basketball team. However in the fossil record one would not see this form of gradual change but rather observe rapid bursts of evolution most likely in response to substantial evolutionary pressures arising.
Fred Hoyle invented the Big Bang theory and later in life he essentially called it bullshit. It is an epochal myth that won't survive further scientific knowledge. As far as "gobbledy-fuckin-gook" it likely takes the cake. Nothing could be more profoundly un-scientific and the theory violates the laws set for exploring nature. Basically, no- thing comes from nothing. Had you lived in Ancient Greece you could have "believed in" one of the Big Bang's many precursors -- ab nihilo ...life sprang from the "egg of nothingness". India, which gave us the concept of Zero, also has its myths of a world created out of the void. Cosmologists will argue that it's not "something from nothing for there was a pre-existent space time singularity" and when you enquire the origin of thus you get shrugs and sighs. It's one of those Russian dolls within a doll within a doll...
This is a whole other level of stupid. I will let TW have fun with this one.
Dawkins' arguments for chance (in the creation of a protein strand or innumerable other components for life) is a myopic and ungrateful approach to a miraculous earth. Here you have a leading light in Darwinisn who accepts the most outrageous odds for the rise of life. The idea of "chance" he promotes is straight out of the theatre of the absurd and makes the 1 in 131 million lottery look like easy money. The odds he accepts are beyond any reasoned approach and to hear Dawkins "defend" them by throwing a billion years against the wall is sad and pathetic. That this icon of scientific enquiry would float such as a possibility is a great reminder of God's sense of humor.
Again, this point demonstrates a quite astonishing lack of understanding for biology or evolution. It is a good thinig you don't listen to actual experts or science on this, you might actually learn something for once. First of all, saying evolution is "random" or occurs by "chance" is not the same thing as saying all, or any, proteins formed by chance. The chance being talked about, for most of evolution, is random mutation of genetic material that may or may not give rise to a change in a protein that may or may not (at this point or ANY TIME IN THE FUTURE) confer an advantage or disadvantage to survival. That isn't the same thing as saying life, and the components there of, came together by pure chance. The type of truly random interactions occurring during the earliest stages of the formation of life aren't the mechanism for evolution so they really have no bearing on this discussion. Evolution of genes and proteins is due to RANDOM mutation (which leads to a templated change in a protein), not random association of amino acids or nucleic acids. But again, enjoy twisting Dawkin's thoughts (some of which many evolutionary biologists oppose) to produce a fun strawman for yourself.
Abiogenesis is a mathematical impossibility. Sir Fred Hoyle, a British astronomer and mathematician, calculated the odds of one simple bacterium arising from a primordial soup. He assumed that the 20 amino acids were present in the soup (contrary to the results of the Miller-Urey experiment, which yielded only seven of the simplest amino acids). A simple bacterium is comprised of 2,000 different functioning proteins. In turn, each protein consists of a chain of about 300 amino acids. There are 20 distinct amino acids, so the odds of one proteinated amino acid occurring in the correct sequence is one in 20. The odds of 300 occurring in the correct sequence is one in 30020. Hoyle realized that there can be some variation in the exact sequence, so the odds would be reduced to one in 1020. But because there must be 2,000 different functioning proteins, the odds of the spontaneous generation of a cell is one in 10(20)(2,000) = 1040,000. Even ignoring the problems beyond the math (such as the counter-productive effects that individual essential chemical components have upon each other, and the inability to create all 20 amino acids under simulated conditions), abiogenesis is impossible.
I guess its a good thing you are the only person dumb enough to suggest an intact and functional bacteria magically emerged from a "primordial soup" with no intermediates whatsoever. Setting aside just another shining example of how ignorant you are to even the most basic understanding of biology and evolution, let us actually look into early evolution. First of all, proteins coming together randomly in "primordial soup" isn't even the most logical or widely accepted path of early evolution. The notion of an RNA world is the most widely accepted, and IMO most intriguing, theory. Random associations (see now we can discuss chance interactions) of ribonucleic acids are thought to have resulted in shorter chains of RNA. Included in this RNA (we see plenty of evidence of these to this day) are primative RNA viruses which are capable of removing themselves from a strand of RNA and subsequently replicating and/or inserting themselves into other strands of nucleic acids. These uniquely self-propagating RNA viruses lay the foundation for more complex life, though there is debate as to whether they would be the first form of life on Earth. Why RNA you ask? Good question. The answer is that RNA, like DNA, encodes genetic information that can be passed on and translated into proteins. RNA can also catalyze reactions, like a protein, which DNA is not capable of doing. So not only does RNA serve as the intermediate between DNA and protein in modern life (the only molecule in the bunch capable, under natural conditions, to serve as both a template for DNA and for protein) but it is capable of mediating the major functions of DNA and proteins. In the early RNA world, you then have RNA strands which begin to associate (randomly within the contexts of allowed chemistry) with amino acids to form rudimentary ribonucleic proteins (or RNPs). Why is this significant? Well RNPs, including the Ribosome, are critically important for translating RNA sequences into proteins. Over the course of timescales no human can even possibly imagine (especially when taken into the context of how rapidly these types of interactions can form and dissociate) you have RNAs that associated with RNPs that mediate the conversion of those RNAs into proteins. Hence you start to form larger, more complex proteins. However this doesn't happen by the chance interactions you seem to think occur but is rather templated by the RNA. As changes occur to RNAs, new coding RNAs are made and more tRNAs are made that can bring amino acids in contact with one another via even more RNPs. One can see how this can snowball. But by all means, please continue to tell us how unlikely it is a fully formed bacteria arose from no precursor whatsoever by random chance, since nobody but yourself even advocates that as a real possibility. I would also like to point out that even the simplest of bacteria are complex to a degree that you do not seem to fathom Lectro so they have never and will never be considered the first forms of life. They are actually quite advanced compared to early "life".
