Creepy Condescending Wonka

The odds of evolution theory being right are the same as the odds of a tornado blowing through the scrap yard , and building a perfectly working 1972 Lincoln Continental, all the way down to the white walls. Aint gonna happen. Not in a hundred billion trillion years.

i've heard that claim so many times "evolution is random, therefor the odds of it creating something supercomplex are laughable" it isn't entirely random: natural selection!

Robert, the only people claiming life magically formed spontaneously in its current state as you've described are Christians, usually of the young Earth variety. One day all the animals were created. Another day man was created. All out of thin air (or dust, in the case of Adam, and Eve from his rib of all things). These are usually the same people who "think" humans and dinosaurs lived together in peace and harmony 6000 years ago thanks to Bishop Ussher's chronology of the Bible in the 1600's where he pinpointed the exact instant of creation: October 23, 4004 BCE at 9:00am. (Curious which time zone he meant there).

This spontaneous self assembly of a fully formed human being is not what evolution predicts in the slightest. Quite the opposite: Evolution is generally a slow, gradual process that occurs through successive generations with an occasional beneficial mutation along the way, not through a spontaneous assembly of a brand new species out of thin air like so many creationists say happened. With Ebola you can see it happen multiple times over the course of a week or so:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8

It's real. And don't give me any nonsense about "micro" versus "macro" evolution. They are precisely the same thing. Those terms only exist in churches.

The fallaciousness of the odds argument has been dealt with countless times by evolutionary biologists and the rest, often with a comparison about the numerical nature of statistical thermodynamics. YouTube has plenty of examples of this so I'll leave you to search for them if you care to learn what evolution is really about. It's not about how life came into existence, how the universe formed, or whether or not there is a god or gods. Those are other subjects with their own questions.

Evolution is the process by which genetically based life changes through the generations. That's all it is. Your flu shot changes from one year to the next because the bug population continues to evolve despite medical science's best efforts. It has a high mutation rate.

Tell an antibiotic engineer that evolution doesn't exist if you want to experience being laughed out of a room like you never thought possible. :-)

Concerning the meme: The video above is direct evidence of evolution. You can't get much better than time lapse photography of the same sets of mutations occurring multiple times in a comparatively small population in several stages, finalizing in a bug with 1000x the drug resistance of the initial group. That is evolution. Period. If you don't think it is, then you don't know what the word means. Harvard Medical School isn't confused about this.

Ask and ye shall receive. The meme is stupid because there is no such equivalent observation for god. The meme is stupid not only for that reason, but also for equating evolution to questions of god in the first place. These two subjects shouldn't have been mentioned in the same conversation at any point in the last 150 years. But hey, it's 2018 and there are still people who think the Earth is flat even when shown evidence to the contrary, so not much surprises me anymore.

Yes, it's ridiculous. These types of absurd conjectures are precisely the opposite of what the theory predicts. Observations like dogs giving birth to cats would therefore falsify evolution rather than confirm it.

One might as well deny gravity by saying, "I'll believe gravity is real when you throw a ball up and it *doesn't* come back down."

When your jaw drops at the grand display of ignorance before you, they misinterpret your speechlessness as victory and transform into the proverbial pigeon on the chessboard. Sometimes there simply are no words.

I had a YE creationist friend say to me in person when this subject came up that cells can't grow and divide because it would violate the law of conservation of mass. She's a teacher.

I patiently explained to this educator of children that cells take in food from outside themselves, mass which already exists. She was once a single cell that grew, split, grew again, eventually turning into a baby by taking outside mass in through her umbilical cord from her mother's body, which was in turn taken in through her mother's mouth whenever she ate food. All in just nine months. I was dumbfounded that I was having to explain to an educator that cells in fact grow and split, and do so without any COM violation or magical process of creating new mass out of nothing in the form of a new cell out of nothing. This point was completely lost on her. Then in the next breath she'd say the Earth was created of thin air from nothing instantly. Err... What happened to that COM violation you were just telling me about?

She's a teacher.

It escalated to the point where I felt the need to explain to her that one of the things I do for a living is write software using that COM law (referring mainly to gas dynamics engine simulations I wrote where the mass *better* be conserved) so could show her mathematically how it works if she'd like. I explained that it's not a real "law of the universe" like she imagined, that it's little more than a mathematical tool which is only true when it's true. I.e., it doesn't apply to nuclear reactions, particle annihaltion events, and on and on. Thank goodness for that. I like the sunshine.

Did I mention she's a teacher?

Great examples. New to me. It's all madness.

3 reminds me of my first encounter as a teenager with a YE person. I was never taken to church as a child so was fortunate to have never been exposed to any of this stupidity, even though my mother was a Lutheran. As a teenager I encountered a guy on the street who told me about all this for the first time: Earth is 6000 years old, Adam the divinely incanted dust cloud man, Eve from his rib, all this kind of childish nonsense. I'd never even heard of the 6000 year thing before and had no idea that anyone thought the Adam and Eve+rib story was literally true. My parents left me to draw my own conclusions growing up. After thinking about it for not very long, I took it as a children's story like "The Little Engine That Could," and that was the end of it.

I was absolutely floored that this guy who was probably 10 years older than me was that stupid and unable to process the information he'd been given in school versus his church well enough to figure out which side was feeding him bullshit about the physical world he existed in. Nevermind whether there's a god or not, this was just stupidity about basic physical reality at a level I couldn't even communicate. He seemed intelligent enough (verbally at least) to know better, but didn't.

"What about dinosaur bones?" was my first thought and question to the YE guy.

His reponse was that they were put there by God (or whoever) and made to look millions of years old in order to fool us as a test of faith in God/Jesus. I was floored. It was so mindblowingly stupid I couldn't even respond to it. I just shook my head and walked away speechless, totally dissilusioned by my previously held belief that people a lot older than me knew more about the world and had clearer perception than I did.

The only possible way anyone with a functioning human brain could believe any of this garbage is by telling them that failing to do so at death will cause them to burn in hell for eternity. I can't think of a more powerful motivation than that. Tell a child that and they can convince themselves of anything you want them to. Leprechauns and unicorns are real? Sure! I'll figure out a way to make them real in my head if you convince me I'll burn if I fail to do so. And when you grow up I'll tell you why you should hijack a plane and crash it until a building. You'll be an adult male by then, so we'll throw in a virgin orgy to get your testosterone flowing while you do it.

It's a disgusting manipulation that's been going on for 2000+ years, the ultimate control over another person's mind. The cognitive dissonance from it drives people to psyche wards. My mother, an RN on a psyche ward for years used to tell me stories about these people. It literally drives them mad.

I'm not much of a linguist, so 4 has me curious. Where do the Latin names come from? I never thought to care how or where things were given names. How did that come up as a conversation topic tied into all this? Something about animal names in the Bible, maybe? If so, that's new to me. Interesting.

When I want to see how deep the rabbit hole of stupidity from the religious world goes, I pop onto any live YouTube space video with a chat channel running. Inbetween the disturbingly numerous flat Earth people who genuinely think human beings have not advanced technologically to the level that might enable them to have determined the shape of our planet (arguing about it on the magical internet, ironically enough), there are plenty of overly religious ones who hold equally idiotic ideas. The last time I did that, I engaged a guy with a cross next to his name who was blabbering on and on about Jesus. He wasn't sure if the heliocentric or geocentric model was right, which I reminded him of every time he said something like hell is literally located deep below the Earth's surface or that he KNOWS the universe is 6000 years old. He'd ask obvious questions any elementary school student who wasn't asleep for her entire childhood could answer for him (like "what's the difference between geo/heliocentrism?"), but when I'd flip him the answer off the top of my head, he'd claim I was Googling it. He really thought he was about to teach me some new words! I told him what I do for a living that would qualify me to answer some of those questions, but he simply didn't believe me. I guess nobody could possibly be as smart as a fifth grader to some of these religious nuts.

I finally told him he ought to stop talking like that because he makes Christians look monumentally stupid to people like me, which was true. A couple other Christians/religious types in the chat who weren't complete nutjobs agreed with me and started telling him the same thing.

"Knock it off, you're making us all look stupid."

So that's probably going to be my approach from now on: Share what's known and not known, answer questions, but if they play the monkey with the fingers in the ears and continue Bible banging as so many unfortunately do, simply tell them the blunt truth: They're stupid, and they're making all the other religious people look stupid too which isn't helping their cause. Even the Pope and that creepy Pat Robertson guy know as well as the scientists that the universe is old. The Vatican accepts evolution too, they just have their own little "there was a hand of God in there somewhere" spin on it. So they're almost there.

The YE crowd is it's own worst enemy. They're on the decline and will eventually sputter out of the population as long as they keep proudly displaying to the world in what manner they allow their brains to function. And more importantly, not function.

Evolution can be ironic.

Yeah, God the trickster. If you fall his trick you burn in hell forever. Lovely guy. Definitely one to worship! :-D

most atheists i know (myself included) don't claim to know there is no god, they just say "i don't konw, but i lean towards no", as for you're claim:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIEoO5KdPvg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3GagfbA2vo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuqFUdqNYhg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfxAUHfqxho
and before you say "yt videos don't prove anything, they have conspiracy theorys too" watch them and try to debunk them yourself first

Good vids, memekip. Thanks for sharing. Potholer54 has done a lot of vids on the subject too, specifically dealing with creationist objections. He was a science journalist for Scientific American (or similar, I may be forgetting the name) so has a wonderful, direct style.

stated clearly, crashcourse, trey the explainer and viced rhino. i haven't watched a lot of AronRa but i've heard he's a great explainer too

A single random mutation is the same as having only one of an endangered species left. Animal conservation shows that we need a large population of a species with enough genetic diversity for it to be sustainable. Just a few and they'd have to resort to inbreeding. That was a problem with white tigers. They don't have albinism. It's a white fur trait. If they're bred with regular tigers we get an off color and eventually see the white fur trait bred out. But inbreeding them created the expected deformed offspring, so it was outlawed. One theory is that a new mutation becomes recessive and then something triggers it in a large enough population to create a sustainable population of that new species. Science has no answer for what would trigger a recessive gene like that. And that's why we have astrophysicists talking about evolution instead of geneticists.

you don't know how science works, do you?

Evolution can and has been observed in a lab in real time. 11 days worth:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8

Evolutionary theory works.

I'm not saying there is a god or there isn't a god. I just choose not to believe because if choose to believe in "A" god I would have to believe in all of the gods. Because who am I to say that Christianity is real but not Buddhism or Buddhism is real but not Islam or Islam is real and not the lady with the eight arms. I not going to justify what religion to believe in simply because of what part of the world I was born in.

https://i.imgflip.com/2ji8o5.jpg

Google. I’m sure you can find many things about evolution, but it’s late