[tolbiny]

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Evolution is inevitable




I don't think your premises establish this. You would need another one, somthing like - Some genetic differences produce advantageous survival characteristics in the phenotype.


I agree. And another such as "and these are sufficiently likely and sufficiently numerous to produce humans from dust in a 3 billion year timespan."

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No, Borodog's post is about the inevitability of evolution, not the inevitability of man arising from bacteria. There is no such need for advantageous mutations for evolution to occur. Lets start with a hypothetical.
1. God creates a world with just one island, a sea of water and turtles. 1000 turtles are hatched at the beggining of year 1, 500 are identical clones of each other as are the other 500. The only difference between the groups is that when they crawl back onto the island to depsoit their eggs after maturing the exposure to the sun will produce a brown spot on the back of group A, but not group B. Here you have a difference in phenotype that confers no reproductive advantage or disadvantage, but allows us to distinguish the groups. All 1000 turtles go off and swim and mature but 500 return. The returning tutles deposit 2 eggs which hatch into 1000 new turtles and swim away repeating the cycle. God introduces brownian motion into the ocean which decides the which turtles make it back to deposit eggs and which don't. At some point inthe future either population A or poulation B will constitute 100% of the population. This is genetic drift due to randomness in the environment, as long as there is a differnece in reproductive success there will be change, it requires a mechanism to stop what would otherwise become a mathenmatical certainty given enough permeations. It doesn't matter that the phenotype had no impact on the reproductive success of the turtles for that phenotype to become dominant. Thisis evolution on a very very slow scale, but the point is that given Borodog's conditions evolution WILL occur unless there is a mechanism preventing it. So God could not create the animals as they are and have them remain that way for eternity without actively preventing evolution in some way.