Do you believe in evolution?

[Nightson]

Err, no, anything can be called a theory. I think a quasar is actually masses of living organisms emitting radio waves. Thats a theory.

No IH, despite the unfortunate fact that that's what theory has come to mean in the common vernacular, that's not what theory in the scientific sense means at all. In science a theory is

"A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena."

[Nightson]

How is a theory a fact again?

A theory is 'a set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.' Evolution has been repeatedly tested to the point that the chance of the core concept of evolution (common ancestry, speciation, natural selection) being wrong is effectively zero.

[Nightson]

There's no actual distinction between microevolution and macroevolution, the terms are meaningless.

[Nightson]

Earth is not a closed system, and you're completely misunderstanding the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Then again, you're probably doing so intentionally. It's hard to tell with you.

He's quoting something from fstdt awhile back.

"One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn't possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it."

~awesomestnerd, SmashBoards

[Nightson]

And what exactly is this force that gets to shuffle the decks? Is it as random force or a creative one? Wouldn't the path of least resistance be to become even more disordered, not more ordered?

Water going down a drain doesn't seem to think so.

[Nightson]

Nightson: I'm not sure the anallogy of gravity works. If I were to shuffle a deck, would it become more shuffled or more ordered?

Assuming a already very shuffled deck, it could be either closer or further away from the arbitrary pattern we would call ordered. Neither one would be terribly more likely then the other and the chances of it getting back into the right pattern are pretty small. But imagine if instead of repeatedly shuffling the deck, you shuffled two cards at a time, and if a card ended up closer to the pattern, is has a 5% to be fixed there there. Now give it a billion years to work while shuffling every hour.

Edit: And just for kicks, say that there's 8 trillion possible combinations of a 52 card deck. In one billion years you'll see 8,760,000,000,000 combinations shuffling every hour. Which means you'd see every single possible combination once and about 760 million of them twice (in a perfectly not really random world)

[Nightson]

Edit: And just for kicks, say that there's 8 trillion possible combinations of a 52 card deck. In one billion years you'll see 8,760,000,000,000 combinations shuffling every hour. Which means you'd see every single possible combination once and about 760 million of them twice (in a perfectly not really random world)

Minor complaint: This isn't how randomness actually works. What will happen is that most combinations will show up 0, 1, or 2 times, but a small number of combinations will randomly show up a lot (where a lot means something like 10,000 times or so). It's impossible to predict which one will show up a lot. Basically, some amount of unevenness in the distribution is significantly more likely than perfect evenness.

Fun fact-people are bad at recognizing and creating random sequences, mainly because they confuse random with chaotic.

Hence the not really random comment.

[Nightson]

How do creatures when they evolve from one eviron to another (For example from underwater to on land). What i mean is, wouldn't there be multiple steps to surviving (Wouldn't they need land movment and lung power at the same time?)

Amphibians basically.