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Comment by jcmoscon | Hacker News Reader

All you guys are developers and you know how hard it is to develop a computer system. Our body has multiple systems running in perfect harmony. And all the animals has it too. The solar system with all the massive planets spinning with an unbelievable precision that we can calculate where a planet will be in 10.000 years from now. And they are travelling around the universe and you think now body is in charge? Somebody very very intelligent designed all this. And most of you hope that God does not exists because He left commandments that we not follow and He will judge each and everyone of us and because of that men hate God.

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> All you guys are developers and you know how hard it is to develop a computer system

As some interested in both computer science and the science of evolution, one of things I know is that it has been demonstrated that computational systems that may be hard to deliberately design for have been demonstrated to be producable by processes fairly directly analogous to biological evolution, so long as they happen to be what is useful in the environment inhabited by digital organisms. [1]

[1] For a place to start, see http://avida.devosoft.org/about/

To add to what you are saying, one of the the interesting perspectives that computer science taught me early on was an appreciation for the emergence of complex behavior from simple rules. Cellular automaton are fascinating to learn about, particularly if you are having trouble grappling with the fact that not all complexity is born from equivalent or greater complexity.

Um, we're talking science and evidence. No need to proselytize here.

I laid down the evidence. Just look around. Or I could ask you to show me the evidence of evolution. Could you do it?

There are entire literal libraries filled to the brim with evidence of evolution. If you were really interested in reading it you would have noticed that you are practically swimming in evidence of it by now.

Just give us 1 evidence for evolution. The best evidence you can find. So we can discuss if is a scientific evidence or just a "I think" evidence.

See, your unidiomatic usage of the word makes me worry that you don't even have a solid grasp on what evidence even is. I've already told you where you can read scientific literature about evolution, if you have any specific concerns I'm happy to discuss them; I often learn from those sort of conversations.

This site has a very gentle introduction to evolution, you can start here if you like: http://evolution.berkeley.edu/

Just one evidence. Can you give me? I bet you thought about the bacteria, uh? :)

This isn't going to work if you refuse to read comments that other people are kind enough to give you. I am telling you that there is a staggering amount of evidence for evolution. If you think otherwise, then take your pick. Pick at that massive body of evidence wherever you want, you don't need me to tell you were to focus.

Lets roll with this bacteria idea though, you seem to think you've got a clever game-plan lined up; what is your problem with bacteria?

Sorry, I'm not trying to be smarter than you. Probably, I'm not. I'm just trying to make you see that actually, there is no evidence for evolution. What you have is tons of text books telling they showed you the evidence, but they did not. And I pic bacteria because everybody give this as an evidence and think it's a prove of evolution. And it is not because in the end of millions of interactions in the lab the final result that a bacteria is still a bacteria. Show an experiment that in the starts with a kind of animal and ends with another kind of animal. I could not find one.

See here:

http://talkorigins.org

The site has extensive information about evolution, as well as a section that addresses claims and assertions made by creationists/ID proponents about evolution. Even if you don't wind up accepting that evolution is the best currently available explanation for the diversity of life on earth, it'd be worth your while to have a look, if only to gain a better (and more accurate) understanding of the theory of evolution.

This is the best example of Poe's law that I've seen all month. Thanks!

He sure took his sweet time.

Addendum: There's an argument here about Intelligent Design that I thought I should elaborate on. High intelligence tends to slow down your perception of time, in a manner of speaking. Low intelligence humans can persist at drudge jobs long enough to make a career out of them, but high intelligence people will eventually find something more interesting to do.

So Intelligent Design states that something incredibly smarter than us front-loaded a ginormous amount of design work such that after the big bang, billions of years later, we'd emerge, like clockwork, no continuing intervention required.

Where'd it go? What's it doing? If you want to dislodge evolution as a directionless force, and avoid Occam's Razor, you need to account for this intelligence somehow, because evolution already describes a reality in which it's not necessary.

You might as well say "bored teenagers like to light things on fire. Teenagers bored for very long times like to start very large fires. Therefore the fact that the sun is a massive nuclear inferno is evidence that it was created by an incredibly bored teenager."

Of course there is no evidence for this bored teenager, so making guesses as to the circumstances, motivation, and mental functioning of this teenager that could cause him to light up a nuclear inferno is just silly.

I prefer not to use this argument. It's not really all that interesting. You can't prove or disprove the existence of a deity-like figure, because you can't nail down specifically what they actually are.

If a God did exist, it could easily skirt our evidence-based process simply by leaving none. Science is of no help. But we could argue against particular ways that a God might act because action without intent is nonsensical, and a God without sense isn't God.

My point is that because you can neither prove nor disprove the existence of gods, gods have no place in anything that calls itself scientific.

If you want to believe in Intelligent Design that is fine, it's a free country, but it isn't a scientific belief and has nothing to do with science.

Why restrict ourselves to the purely scientific?

Because anything else is offtopic. For some reason people always see fit to bring up their personal religious beliefs when the topic is biology, but it doesn't often get brought up when the discussion is, say, the formation of stars and planets. I don't know why that is, but I know that one tangent is not more appropriate than the other.

>>Where'd it go? What's it doing? If you want to dislodge evolution as a directionless force, and avoid Occam's Razor, you need to account for this intelligence somehow, because evolution already describes a reality in which it's not necessary.

You can state a similar(and in my view incredibly strong) objection to ID by pointing out that diverse bodies of evidence(DNA, morphology, speciation) support evolution in a way that would any other competing explanation would need to replicate. Considering this was identified in the 1700s once it was seen that whole classes of animals went extinct in the past it seems rather silly that with exponentially more evidence that has to replicated by a creation-like argument anyone would even consider ID as a serious view.

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