We are legion.

Why do you think there was a single transition from aquatic to terrestrial? There are at least three different modern groups of organisms that represent different intermediate states between the two.

1. There are many species that inhabit tidal pools. These are aquatic; they have gills and breathe water. They also have various features allowing them to survive when the tidal pool dries up (as tidal pools sometimes do).

2. There are lungfish. These are species, as the name suggests, that have gills like fish, but also have lungs, allowing them to live in both environments.

3. There are amphibians. They develop as aquatic larvae, but undergo a metamorphwsis into a terrestrial adult. Most are able to absorb oxygen dissolved in water through their skin. By maintaining moist skin, they can live on land as well as in water.

The bolded is quite an extraordinary claim; what is your extraordinary evidence for it?

If it ain't distinguishable from paint cans falling to the ground, then it ain't art.*

*Unless the "artist" is either pre-Kindergarten or got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

At minimum, the animal and a suitable mate had to simultaneously get deposited on land.

There are also serious issues regarding the problem of Irreducible Complexity here.

All life is "biological life". Biology is the "study of life" Or, to put it negatively, there is no such thing as "non-biological" life.

There is a distinction between organic and inorganic life, though.

Not really. Irreducible complexity is not an issue for evolution, and there’s nothing preventing a gradual transition from aquatic to terrestrial lifer. For the latter, see the lungfish. These are, as the name implies fish that have lungs. Like other fish, they also have gills. This they can live both on land and in water. There’s absolutely no reason an organism can’t live predominantly in water, only occasionally venturing out on to land. A gradual transition to an increasing amount of land dwelling is certainly then feasible, until an organism reaches the point where it lives predominantly on land, only rarely venturing into the water.

As for irreducible complexity, just keep in mind that evolution is quite capable of causing functions and structures to disappear. In the case of land animals, gills would be useless and a waste of energy to maintain, so it’s likely that they’d disappear in species that never go in the water. A progression from gills to gills+lungs to lungs only is possible via evolution.

In general an IC system is defined as one in which removal of any component destroys the functionality of the system. It is contended that such systems cannot evolve, but that is false. Consider a hypothetical IC system composed of three components ABC. By definition, AB, AC and BC would be nonfunctional. We can’t get to ABC without going through one of those states, so such a system cannot evolve.

Or can we? If we recognize that evolution can eliminate components as well as add them, the argument falls apart. Suppose in our tou example there is a fourth component D such that any system containing D is functional. Then an evolutionary process such as D to AD to ABD to ABCD to ABC could produce our IC system ABC.

BTW, since the transition from aquatic to terrestrial organisms has been brought up, a question for all you evolution opponents: why don’t dolphins and whales have gills? Evolution explains this via the relationships between these organisms and other mammals. Whales and dolphins develop led from an ancestral species that had well developed lungs but spent most of its life in water— think of hippopotamuses, the most closely related modern species.

If evolution is wrong though, then whales and dolphins were designed to live in water and never venture onto land. Why would God, Zeus, Rael, the prime mover, or whatever you think designed life, design an aquatic organism in such a way that it could drown if it fails to surface every 20 minutes or so?

But the question was not "is it art?", but "is it a painting?".

As Bladesman said.

I'd describe Biology as the study of natural life.

While life is difficult to strongly define, back when I was at school, it was said to generally include some or all of the following: Growth, locomotion, nutrition, reproduction, respiration etc. Which elements used to describe natural biological life would you say apply to god?

Which is?

I submit that the bold text is NOT an extraordinary claim.

All it says is that if you have a tremendous amount of objective evidence for something, then you need a similar amount of objective evidence to disprove it.

That seems like quite an ordinary statement to me....

I submit that the claim "Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence" is an extraordinary claim.

Which gets the main issue: Who decides when a claim is extraordinary? For example, I find the claim that "God exists" a rather pedestrian observation that requires little argument. Many atheists, on the other hand, find the claim "God exists" to be quite extraordinary.

Interesting interpretation. I've never heard it interpreted like that. Food for thought!

Fair enough. Yet, it seems quite an extraordinary claim to me. Therein lies the problem.

Bolded was dumb.

Life is organic, non-life is inorganic.

"Biological life" is redundant.

Painting is a subset of art. Just like sculpting is a subset of art.

Art is a purposeful endeavour.

A work of art could certainly look like spilled paint, if that was what the artist was attempting to show.

Then you did understand my point, after all.

Ok. How about the rest of my post?

I think understood it "after the fact", as it were.

Of course, that doesn't alter the fact that, for example, the existence of a book proves the existence of author(s).

I never expect to see the following headline:

TORNADO RIPS THROUGH DOWNTOWN CLEVELAND; CAUSES AN ESTIMATED $20 MILLION WORTH OF IMPROVEMENTS

To the best of my knowledge, only living things can deliberate (i.e. make choices, do things "on purpose", make plans, and so on) And very few life forms can even do those things.

Ok.

That's bypassing the point Bladesman and I made: using this as a form of argument is question-begging.

If I was to ask you the difference between something created and something not created, I think I know you well enough to take a stab at your answer, something like "everything is created, there are no non-created things". Close enough?

This isn't an argument but a presupposition. I also think you understand this, which is why it is frustrating.

So all those things exist…

My point still stands.

All of those examples the genetic code to have those things existed w their parents.

It still makes zero sense why if all life comes from water why we would develop lungs and no longer be able to breath under water. It’s de evolution when you think about it… I mean how often do things evolve to do less?

Adaptations and survival of the fittest implies after years the more positive traits survive while the less desirables get left out.

It would be more desirable to be able to breath both above and below water but for some reason a frog can do that but a human can’t. It seems frogs are higher on the evolution process than us humans?!

Are you being intentionally obtuse? You are implying that “breathing water” and “breathing air” are two completely separate things and that there’s a major transition from one to the other. Those examples of modern species show that there is no such major transition; species can go gradually from gills to lungs via intermediate states where they are capable of living both in water and on land.


In a wider sense, though, still aren’t getting it. There is no “higher” or “lower” on the evolutionary process. There is no evolutionary process. There’s no end goal to which organisms evolve. There is no “de-evolution”. If a given organism has the ability to breathe air and water, but later descendants lose that ability, that’s evolution. Evolution can and does result in loss of structures and functions when such a loss confers an advantage to the organism (and here’s the critical part so I’ll do all caps) IN ITS ENVIRONMENT.

It doesn’t matter that it might be advantageous in some rare instances for a land animal to have gills. If an animal is land-dwelling, having gills is not enough of an advantage to overcome the energy cost of maintaining that structure. Do you really think, as an extreme example, that a desert-dwelling reptile would benefit greatly from possessing gills.

You are looking for design in an evolved system. Designed systems should be globally optimized; evolved ones are not. Evolved systems can be expected to be flawed; a variant of an ancestral species only needs to outcompete other variants to become dominant; it doesn’t have to have the best possible design. A designed system should, if the designer is competent, be optimized.

Given your opposition to evolution, I’d assume that you think life is such a designed system. I repeat a question I asked earlier then: why don’t whales and dolphins have gills? If these mammals evolved, lack of gills is expected. If they were designed, then they were incompetently designed. What competent designer would create an aquatic animal that could drown if it doesn’t surface every 20 minutes or so?

No it didn't. It's objections like this that are why I'll keep saying that evolution never actually gets debated. It's people trying to teach the theory but it's not actually a debate.

There's multiple possibilities but one would be that a population lives in increasingly shallower waters.

This is one of those things where I think it's both very open for debate philosophically as to whether there can be non-biological life, but also I suspect it's something you don't really believe.

I think we can imagine some sufficiently advance AI reaching the point we'd call it "alive" but it wouldn't be "biological" in the sense we mean it about plants.

But presumably you believe in a life after the death of the physical body. The soul, the spirit, that lives on eternally. Presumably you don't think that that soul is actually made up of the same physical matter that your body is, right? Because if you think that the soul is in fact a physical thing comprised of atoms then we're having a hell of a hard time finding it.

I think your example poses a bigger problem for evolution which implies getting better qualities

First off evolution does not imply getting better qualities. It implies selection of the best qualities out of the existing variants in the population. Evolution cannot produce new traits that don’t exist in the population, no matter how beneficial such traits may be. Unless there were a few dolphins with gills already, evolution cannot give dolphins gills. Has there been filled dolphins, they doubtless would have come to dominate the population and you’d not see gill free dolphins now.

Also, within the context of evolution, better doesnt mean what you think it does. It means more likely to reproduce and have more offspring. That’s it, no other meaning. A fruit fly that hatches from an egg, produces millions of new eggs and dies, all in a single day is “better” in the evolutionary sense than a human who lives 90 years and never has any children. In evolutionary terms, we humans are rather insignificant. There are only 7 billion of us. Among the animals, insects are the undeniable pinnacle of evolutionary success. There are estimated to be about 10^20 insects alive at any given time. That’s almost 10 trillion insects for every human on earth. Among life in general bacteria kick insects’ butts — estimated population of bacteria is about 10^30, or about 10 million for each insect, and about 10^23 per human.

The point is not that bacteria or insects are better than humans in any way that really matters. It’s that terms like “better” really don’t apply to evolution. Frogs, as you seem to suggest, are not more evolved than humans. Of course humans likewise are not more evolved than humans. Both are equally evolved to suit their respective environment. There is no trend or goal in evolution. To the extent that it seems like there’s a trend toward complexity, first it’s illusory; the vast majority of life on earth is very simple; we just (usually) ignore those organisms. Also, the starting point for evolution, the first living cell, was likely to have been much simpler than any living organism; the level of complexity rose because there was no way it could fall.

Long story short: there is no end goal to evolution and it does not imply adding complexity to organisms.

Then it's not a good answer to my question ("Which elements used to describe natural biological life would you say apply to god?")! Care to try again?

Couple of things:
- I commented earlier with an alternative way of thinking about different species, when you asked about half-monkeys half-humans (it's post 95). Maybe you missed it? Maybe you didn't care for it? If you missed it, perhaps take a read and lmk what you agree and disagree with.

- On a scale of 1-10, where would you score your understanding of Theory of Evolution, using whatever criteria you like. I know this is a really easy question to ignore or just not answer, but give it try?