The evolution of intelligent life

[Sparhafoc]

Darwinists...

Whats a Darwinist?

... begin discussions with living organisms.

Incomprehensible.

Do you mean talk to animals ala Dr Doolittle?

Yet we know that for organisms to survive so many environmental factors come into play.

Who's 'we'?

For example, does anything exist on earth outside of gravity?

Outside? Well, obviously no as all parts of Earth are affected by gravity, so the question is based on a faulty premise.

However, gravity has more of an effect on larger organisms than on smaller ones.

Insects, for example, routinely have to deal less with gravity than they do water tension, while elephants and the like barely even notice water tension but have trouble with gravity.

We know it as the Law of Gravity,...

Who's 'we'?

There is no 'Law of Gravity'.

There's Newton's Laws of Universal Gravitation.
There's the Theory of Relativity.

... which coincidentally and miraculously existed previous to anything else,...

I understand all the words in your sentence, but I cannot hope to comprehend the meaning of the sentence comprised of all those words.

What's 'coincidental' about it? Is there supposed to be a scenario where everything else could have existed in the absence of gravity?

What's 'miraculous' about gravity's existence?

other than similar laws, such as the invisible world of atoms and particles.

They're not 'laws'. Can I ask you: do you understand the concept of 'law' in scientific parlance? It doesn't mean law in the same way as with human legal systems. Laws, in science, are just observations of cause and effect - descriptions of what happens in a given scenario. There's no prescription (as with human laws), only description.

These things pre-exist living things,...

Well, of course they do because living things as we know it evolved within the constraints of universal forces.

... and yet from ancient times they have been recognized as positive and/or negative, yang and yin — i.e., structured.

I am not understanding your 'and yet' as if you've offered something contesting your prior sentence. To be honest, I am not exactly sure what dragging in some pre-scientific notion is really going to offer in comparison to what we do know.

So, before anything else, the invisible foundation of the universe was structured and ordered.

Invisible foundation? What's that then?

Please define 'structure' and please define 'order'.

Space, air and innumerable other aspects of the universe had to pre-exist life,...

Not 'had to' because that presupposes there was an intended outcome.

They simply did pre-exist to life, and when life evolved it did so under those conditions.

... or it could not have come about.

What could not have come about? Life?

Well, I have to be honest, that's a bloody silly argument. Life as we know it today on Earth couldn't have existed under different rules, but who is to say whether different life could or could not have existed under different rules?

Essentially, your argument is that a house couldn't exist without ground for it to reside on, a watch could not exist without a wrist to wrap it round, spectacles could not exist without noses to perch on.

In each case there's a 'well yeah' component, but it's also startlingly lacking the component whereby all of the things that exist are obviously predicated on the prior existence of things which they were built from.

The idea therefore that life began from single-cell (which means, non-sexual) defies what we observe around us,...

This does not follow from anything you've written. There is literally zero logical path from what you were talking about to the supposed impossibility of single-celled life being the first form of life.

Of course, there's actually no contradiction at all with what we observe around us because we see multicellular lifeforms that are comprised of lots of single cells doing specialized functions.

if everything else exists in duality.

Everything doesn't exist in duality.

Life actually exists and is understandable because of the Law of Cause and Effect.

The notion behind this is actually not erroneous, but there's no such thing as the Law of Cause and Effect scientifically speaking, only some holdover notions from ancient philosophy. I presume most people citing this think there's a temporal element to it (thereby failing to understand a major flaw in their notions) and think that effects follow causes, but this has been shown to be dubious and restricted and there are fundamental states and scenarios within this universe where effect and cause can be simultaneous.

One has to de-educate people in order to pretend that life originated from chaos.

What does 'de-educate' mean?

Who is 'one'?

Please define 'chaos'.

No scientist has ever claimed that life originated from chaos - the concept sound more like Greek or Chinese mythology to me than anything scientific.

But that is what atheists like Richard Dawkins explain in The God Delusion: that order, law, purpose originated from chaos.

I've read the God Delusion and I cannot for the life of me remember anything like what you've claimed, but even were it actually the case, who gives a toss? It's not like Dawkins is a special ape above and beyond being wrong. Although, I have to be honest and say that I think you're probably misrepresenting him and that he said nothing of the sort.

 

[Greg the Grouper]

The idea therefore that life began from single-cell (which means, non-sexual) defies what we observe around us,

I don't understand this as a criticism for evolution. Is the presumption here that, when children are taught evolution, they're taught literally nothing else about the universe? I mean, that's true in the most banal sense: any class that concentrates on evolution is going to teach its students specifically about evolution. That isn't to say that children will be taught to ignore everything else that's understood about science.

Is the issue here that one might conceptually begin with some original life form when discussing evolution in a general sense as a means of explaining biodiversity? I'm not entirely sure myself if it's fair to say that there is a single ancestor, as I'm not sure it's fair to say that there could exist no diversity amongst the earliest life forms, but given that evolution is meant as an explanation of biodiversity, why would we start any earlier than that? Sure, the force of gravity has always played a role simply because the force described by theory has always been there, but gravity isn't a mechanism of biodiversity, so why would we even talk about it in a class about evolution?

 

[Sparhafoc]

Darwinists begin discussions with living organisms. Yet we know that for organisms to survive so many environmental factors come into play.

I can dramatically deobfuscate all of your confusion here.

Instead of 'Darwinists' - which means bugger all - use the real term 'biologist'.

And with a little more clarification the 'begin discussions with' becomes 'focus on'.

Then we have a perfectly reasonable and clear sentence:

Biologists focus on living organisms.

So now the remainder of your paragraph is stripped of obfuscation.

Biologists focus on living organisms; that's their area of study. So they don't study gravity or planetary formation or cosmogenesis because that's outside of their area of focus, and other scientists focus on these areas.

That is, of course, not to say that biologists wholly ignore environmental factors - in fact, there are entire subdivisions of Biology focusing on living organisms' interaction with their environment (evolutionary biology, just as one example), and their findings still need to consilient with the sum of scientific knowledge, so it's not like what biologists find is contradicted in any way by Chemistry or Physics.

 

[joshuashrode]

What's a Darwinist? Seriously, you give away your sources of education (or miseducation) on this matter in your very first sentence. The rest is just meaningless woo reasoning of the worst kind.

First of all, if we're discussing the Theory of Evolution, we're expressly not discussing abiogenesis.

Second, evolution cannot be properly understood without an external environment governed by whatever forces or laws you like. It is the environment that can and does serve as a, if not "the", primary source of both mutation and selection (even sexual selection can be considered a part of the external environment).

As to your point about unicellular organisms and sexual vs. asexual reproduction...I have no idea what point you think you're making.

And finally about your perceived duality of yin Yang forces. I'm at a loss other than to say it's usually the human mind that is responsible for recognizing and categorizing in such a Boolean fashion when in reality it is much more often to see a continuum with one characteristic blending into the next. I'm trying to help you out but truly I'm unable.

Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk