Evolution and the age of the earth (civilised debate)

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Go ahead. If you need permission, you have mine, and that's worth every penny you paid for it.

But please be a bit clearer what you want to argue.


Showing faults and gaps in a theory sounds a lot like disproving a theory to me. But perhaps you meant faults in specific arguments and gaps in evidence? Do you have a list of evidence you would like to see before you're willing to accept evolution as plausible/likely to be true/as close to fact as you ever get in science (delete as appropriate)? Are you claiming there are logical flaws in the theory? Are you claiming there is at least one better alternative scientific theory?

If you want a discussion, give us something to discuss. I would appreciate finally seeing a scientific argument against evolution.

For many species there are no missing links and overall with most Animals you can make pretty good guesses based on evidence of their ancestors.


Wouldn't Creationists include muslims and jews, if we have any? Also I'm not implying all Christians, Muslims and Jews are Creationists but in the Creationist category that's what it's filled with.


I am so not proud to be an American..

I have said many times that's not what I'm trying to argue.


No I'm not. I'm just telling it as it is. If you think there is any kind of decent debate to be had around this, then you're clearly ignorant as far as a basic scientific knowledge goes. Like I said, that's easily remedied, so all is not lost. Why not just present the areas you're unsure about, and let someone like LKL help you out?[/quote]
I don't mind being proven wrong, it's the way it's done that I do mind.


Showing faults and gaps in a theory sounds a lot like disproving a theory to me.[/quote]
No. I was not disproving it, just trying to point out that you cannot call the evidence we appear to have 'proof'.

I'll try and get a debate going if I can put together a post to start it off with.

I am not trying to start a fight here. I really and trully want an intelligent, level-headed debate, so please don't take any of this the wrong way. I am willing to listen to your evidence etc. (providing it's kept civil) I mean, you'll probably blast whatever I say out the water, but as long as it's kept civil I don't mind

For a really simple starting point, some one might say the red-shift Doppler effect can show that so many millions of years ago there was a Big Bang and that we can determine how long ago that was because space is a vacuum and so the universe will be expanding at the same rate as it originally was, so by finding the velocity and the centre of expansion, we can find out how long ago the Big Bang was.

That does not prove there was a Big Bang. It proves that the universe is expanding. The calculations would prove when the world would have begun, if the Big Band were real. It does not prove the Big Bang did exist, merely how old the universe is if it was real.

By saying this, I:
- have not disproved the Big Bang theory
- have stated that this piece of evidence does not prove the Big Band theory
- have not brought religion into the debate
- have not directly insulted anyone
- am not stating that I will not listen to anyone else's views or facts
- am not stating I am right and will not be proved wrong

Red shifts can also be attributed to wave expansion as light travels through space. Just as optical interference can shift the frequency. Im not trying to disprove expansion though I believe it is of import to consider how light is affected by gravitational lensing, temporal distortion, etc.

If the universe is expanding at a rate that can be calculated then by logic there was a point when the universe was extremely tiny and the expansion started. It may have started expanding with a squeak, a whistle, a thud, a fart, or a burp, but who can tell the sound?

It's a little more complicated than that. A vacuum means you have no deceleration from aerodynamic drag, but that doesn't mean everything keeps going at the same rate forever. There's gravity. So the original expectation, once the expansion of the universe had been discovered, was that the expansion must be slowing down. The question was whether it would slow down enough that it would eventually reverse, and the universe collapse into itself in a big crunch. Astronomers were rather surprised when they found, a few years back, that the expansion is accelerating. That's why there is all this talk about dark energy. Apart from that, yes, you look at the movement now, and simulate the reverse to get some idea what you would see if you could go back in time. There is also a lot more to the big bang model than redshift. One of the predictions is the cosmic microwave background radiation. Different big bang models make different predictions how exactly that should look.



Are you talking about "prove" as in mathematics? Nothing in the natural sciences is ever proved as in maths. Or do you mean proof beyond reasonable doubt? Then you have to remember the way science works in practice: theories are abandoned if either definitely in conflict with observation (even then, a good enough approximation may see continued use if it's simpler than a better theory, Newtonian physics being one example), if it's been proved useless, or if a better theory has come along. It is not enough to offer one alternative explanation for one detail, an unrelated alternative explanation for another detail, and so on. If you want to replace a theory, you must offer one that is either more specific, more comprehensive, or both.



That one is new to me. I only know of intensity changes through interference. How do you get frequency changes?

* That is cosmology, not so much evolution.

* I know far less about cosmology than evolution, but here are my thoughts:

* The Big Bang theory is supported by the doppler effect, but the doppler effect alone is insufficient. That is, the red shift shows Universe is expanding. Tracing that backwards, one might come to the hypothetical moment of singularity, but describing the state of the universe at or before the big bang requires lots of other factors that interact.

* I'm not sure that the fact that space is a vaccume means that the universe expands at a constant rate - gravity, friction, the curvature of space, and other factors may lead to changes over time, which presumably have been incorporated to some degree in the models.

* Therefore, (with my limited understanding) I can agree with most of what you said.

OK then Greyhound, what do you want to discuss? You have to give us something to go off of. OK, so you claim there are holes in evolutionary theory? I already admitted that that was the case. I would simply argue that the evidence we have supports evolution better than it does alternative theories. Our understanding of evolutionary biology is almost certainly wrong in many respects, but it's as close as we're able to get for the time being.

If there are any specific issues you would like to discuss, just bring them forward and we can talk about them. But you can't just leave us hanging with nothing to go off of.

If you have any specific evidence you want to present that goes against evolutionary theory or something along those lines, that would help the discussion along.

From my perspective, our reality can be conceived of as a computational system. This seems to indicate that any time frame is just as valid. Every moment is a beginning and an end.

What if something else happened that we haven't imagined yet, or just for argument's sake was created by an intelligent being, the universe may not have started out being all that tiny. Yes, you can calculate where it would have been/how small it was as certain times in the past, but you can't say that it must have started from a tiny, tiny size because we don't actually know what size it was when it started out.


The sound it made is not the point being discussed here. I was talking about the Big Bang Theory, whether the theory states that it was a bang or not (something we wouldn't be able to know anyway).


So it's more unpredictable and difficult to calculate than it would first appear. Would I be correct in thinking, then, that any calculations done in relation to this would be much more inaccurate than they would have if the universe was simply expanding?


I know. And some of it confuses me a lot - because I'm not all that knowledgeable, I will have to admit defeat with certain points of the discussion, but I'm okay with that. No one should argue without at least a basic knowledge.


Can you please explain that for me, and I'll see what I think.


So there are several hypotheses of the big bang, all of which could be equally as accurate or inaccurate as each other, given the evidence so far?


I talking about proof beyond reasonable doubt. That is to say a theory that has not enough gaps to allow an alternative theory to be possible.


Just to let everyone know, this was a typing error and I am not so ignorant as to think the theory is called the Big Band Theory!

I don't know though - a whole load of saxophonists could have made the world


Title changed


Which would mean calculations would be even more difficult to prove the age of the earth had there even been a big bang.

I have to go to work now. See you all later

I hope the answer "Its relative" will suffice. Though I have a feeling it wont. Everyday the human mind processes many things. At some point in this life, I have either read it, heard it, deduced it, etc. Where ever I came across this concept I was in concurence with the logic. I hope that I will be able to direct you to the references I have suggested at some point. For the moment though, I simply can not recall. If I deduced it, I should be able to deduce it again. I will meditate upon the notion and see if I can derive a reasonable answer. I apologize.

Last edited by Psimulus on 02 Oct 2008, 5:13 am, edited 1 time in total.

In the natural sciences, that is always possible, for any theory. If you want to know how likely it is that an alternative theory could be developed, you have to be an expert in the field. Only then can you know enough about what constraints available observations place on possible theories. I mean, your hypothetical not yet imagined scenario must explain the same set of observations and must make testable predictions. Otherwise, what's the point?



I'll quote myself, so you don't have to go back and find it:

Do you have a viable alternative theory? If all you had was "What if something else happened that we haven't imagined yet?", then you would merely criticize the natural sciences for being natural sciences, and you'd have no reason to single out any one area of science or any one theory. So I expect you have something more specific. Would you tell us what?


Difficult is not the same as unpredictable.


Not strictly correct. It all depends on how good your information is. If you know how much mass and how it's distributed, you can make your calculations as accurate as if gravity had no influence on expansion. In practice, measurements are not perfect. you address that by running your simulations with all parameter sets that are even remotely consistent with your observations. That gives you your confidence interval. You would have the same problem if expansion were uniform, because of measurement uncertainty regarding that uniform rate. That's why cosmologists give you a confidence interval for the age of the universe, or the Earth, or whatever.

There is another point. Let's imagine an alternative scenario that would result in expansion. The universe was initially static, with everything that can be observed or inferred to exist now originally orbiting, at a distance of a billion light years, an enormous black hole with a mass far greater than our present universe. Then something removed that enormous black hole, and things moved (as a first approximation) at a tangent to their previous orbits. Everything moves apart. There are two immediately obvious differences to the big bang model: when you extrapolate back from present movement, things don't meet up in a single point. All the measurements indicate that our universe moves as if it did expand from a single point. And the orbit model doesn't predict space itself expanding. Astronomers have observations they can explain only by that assumption. If I understood correctly, the cosmic microwave background radiation is one of them.


A better explanation than I can offer you is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background_radiation


They all agree that there was a big bang, demonstrating that a range of possible histories, all sharing the common element of a big bang, lead to the present universe, within measurement error. If all the scenarios that are within measurement error lead to the same general theory, that means the general theory is robust, not weak. It addresses your point about the difficulty of calculations.


A gap in a theory means that there is a set of observations or a set of processes it does not account for, meaning the theory has no prediction for what should happen if the theory is correct. You haven't mentioned anything like that, so either I have to ask you to say what the gaps are, or I have to guess you mean something else. If something else, what is it?

The way you raise reasonable doubt about any theory is that you either point out gaps as I defined them, or you offer a better theory. If no one can do either, a theory is considered beyond reasonable doubt.

To be fair, Islamic countries are the absolute worst at getting evolution straight.

However, in the West, the Anglo countries in general are the worst. The US simply happens to lead the pack there.

Yes, I think the US is tied with Turkey when it comes to people who don't believe in evolution.

The point was that someone from another Anglo country is a little like the pot calling the kettle black when they criticize the US for things like cretinism, but also (functional) illiteracy and innumeracy.

Would not happen in another European country: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/sep/14/religion