Why do so many begin arguments against evolution with a common misconception..?

I believe that your genetics, environment, and the fluxuating time/light continuum currently pressuring your body, as well as, the unexpected and random "juice" provided by the unpredictable nature of your own neocortex, is the only reason you came up with this line of spatial reasoning.

Oh and BTW, I think you are sexy as hell!!

You are talking about evolution as an algorithm. Dennett proposed something similar in "Darwin's Dangerous Idea." The basic idea is that it guarantees some result, as you say, but there's no reason that it HAS to be this result (as you also say--it had no pre-defined purpose, or teleology). So if the process were repeated, something else could and probably would happen. It makes perfect sense to me.

A specific example: you could produce a person who won 1000 consecutive coin tosses by have a coin toss "competition" that winds its way down playoff style. While it will produce someone who won 1000 consecutive coin tosses, it will almost always yield a different winner every time because it depends on probability, not skill. It's a good analogy.

In a side note, I'd like to point out that Billy the Goot has used several misconceptions about evolutionary thought in his posting. Talking about making your point for you!

Creationists have this delicate, but big, ego that must be nurtured so very carefully. They think they are the perfect being, but created by an even more perfect being. You can see how that can be a house of cards on a windy day.

Why do they think they are so special? If they looked around them they would see prolific life everywhere that is perfectly adapted to their environment. A fish is exquisitely well suited to life in the water and useless on dry land. A tree is thing of beauty feeding off the nutrients of the soil, the air and the sunlight. Plant a human and it's called a funeral.

We think we are so special because we are well suited to our own environment. We can walk but have a tendency to drown if given the chance. We have appose-able thumbs. That should prove we are superior, right? We need appose-able thumbs or we would be digging for roots and vegetables with our bare fingers unable to use tools. We are suited to what we do.

If went to see life on a gas giant planet we'd see that a thumb would be useless and life would not have one. Duh.

So yes, there are gazillions of possibilities and we are the one that works well on this planet at this time. The dinasours ruled this planet for 144 million years before us. Humans have only been on the planet a fraction of that time and may never get the chance to win the title from them.

Be careful with that delicate ego of the creationists. They might take away your thumbs.

Considering that evolution continues and will continue for infinity, or until we kill ourselves or our planet (same thing), there is no goal that sense. Evolution is about adapting more than it is a means to an end.

If we are considered "perfect" as you suggest, we didn't start out that way. We have evolved in countless ways.

All that being said, I still think evolution and creationism are compatible. We can see evolution in our children and in plants. It's fascinating how each living thing in the world is interconnected through the food chain.

There is some newer evidence that there may have been two similar species of humans living at the same time, but the smarter species won out.

But just because we don't "see" God doesn't mean he doesn't exist. What we know and what we believe are crippled by our collective experience. The concept that time and space have no beginning and no end is evidence enough to me that we cannot comprehend everything.

You do have a point. But you have to figure out how to word it more clearly.

There's a basic misunderstanding of statisics and randomness in creationism that's related to your idea.

Along the lines of stats & randomness:

There's an assumption that what we got is the only intelligent looking result that could have happened. Therefore within that, it is more pausible to believe it went splat and appeared. However lots of variations could have happened, and been equally impressive - if not more so (I can think of plenty of improvements.)

On Randomness: Humans picture random as having many LESS patterns than truely show up in random events. Try this test. Write 50 RANDOM coin flips heads or tails. People will work hard to make it look random and have very few sequences of HHHH or TTTTT. However, one of the possible sequences is 50 heads. That has identically the same probability as any other sequence in any other arrangements. Althought, the probabibly of having all Hs is lower than of having some Hs because many orders of the throws could show up. However, each specific order has the same prob as any other. So, in reality randomness tends to have more patterns than people cognitively expect.

So, people think random looks much more chaotic than it does. So they think the lack of total chaos can't be from random (plus influenced development of evolution), but most have a higher hand in it. It's a misunderstanding of a scientific basic.

Mostly though, it's scary to believe evolution because it gives a reason to not believe in religion even though it doesn't conflict with believing in religion. So they pick on it. It's not directly effecting areas of our lives, so it's safer to pick on than laws of physics (once you know physics theory, you know how many gaps there are in those theories), and areas from which the developments directly effect us.

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Billy - that you think carbon dating has to do with proof of evolution, says you don't understand what it is. The evidential facts have been gathered/observed without using fossils. That's another field.

Because so many creationists are still stuck on the whole pre-ordained thing. They can't get past the fact that maybe we weren't meant to happen in the first place, that our existence happened by random chance along the evolutionary chain. Because they are stuck on the pre-ordained notion, your argument is completely lost on them. Your reasoning makes perfect sense to me. We were the outcome of a random set of events that could have deviated at any point in time with vastly different results. So, while your point makes sense to me, good luck convincing the "God put me here for a reasons" Christians.

Not really.

Evolution occurs. The theory is natural selection.

Natural selection occurs because of environmental pressure. Does the random mutation that resulted in you increase your odds of surviving or of attracting mates?

Then you are more likely to mate and produce offspring. That mutation will show up in some of your young.

They are more likely to survive or attract mates and pass along that mutated gene.

The results are not preordained, but they are the result of a series of cause-and-effect events.

The only wild card is whether or not an advantageous mutation happens to occur. If it does not, then extinction is the probable outcome.

Indeed a good point.

However, who says "THIS" is an end result.

The concept being that evolution is an ongoing process and never comes to an end. To improvise, adapt and overcome by whatever means are available. We are simply in one of an infinite number of stages in the process. Not the end and by no means the beginning.

sounds like u use more introspection than evidence

evolution is a hoax it was created before darwin set out on his fateful journey

people say what i offer you is crazy but if u check the reliabilty of the techniques used to verify evolution (ex carbon dating) you will see that they are faulty at best. the other arguments that supposedly prove evolution, if u can manage to think outside the box with a little info on science, can EASILY be rebutted

So why do i feel evolution is a hoax....GLAD U ASKED

the basis for it is so flimsy that the fact the entire scientific community endorses it means there is something behind it

science as any real scientist will tell u is never absolute regarding anything if u think all scientists around the world haphazardly all came to the same conclusion with such flimsy support then u still have a lot 2 learn about this world

They believe that evolution is a thing that is done to living things, not a process that occurs naturally and with varying results. It all comes from not understanding(or not wanting to)the science of it.