zoitz
a capricious webcomic

Evolution vs. Creation

May 18th, 2007

And God said: Let there be black and white!

Irreducible complexity?

Posted in creation, evolution, stick figures

30 Responses

  1. mastermind26

    Quite the comic genius. 😀

  2. woot

    Are you predicting the next step in hominid evolution is neck arms?

  3. Kevin Mitnick

    When someone says “thank god” say “your welcome”

  4. oh god

    i suppose one could say your comic is “intelligently designed”? wahahahhahahahaa *shoots self*

  5. hmm

    Works well on paper, but what happens when your stick people come to life and find they have no digestive system? Or no nervous system? Irreducible complexity is a scientific fact, not theory.

    Apparently life evolved complete and fully operational within one generation. You can’t have an amoeba grow legs and crawl onto land without also having developed oxygen-breathing lungs, and a new digestive system to be able to eat the plants or animals already on land…. wait… where did THOSE plants and animals come from?

    Ugh… Evolution is a scientific mess. Idiots.

  6. Atheist

    Mwahahaha yeah I totally agree with the man over this input he must be so smart or american maybe.

  7. another atheist

    hehe, the “hmm” guy? american I guess. Smart american would be a nice oxymoron though… “hmm” now wonders what an oxy-moron is… it is someone who believes that a freely invented term like “irreducible complexity” is a scientific fact. In fact, it is not scientific to begin with… Check what Ken Miller has to say about that…if you really want to be able to understand science. else go on with american propaganda… 😛

  8. God

    Well, fuck.

  9. nice

    @hmm: does it ever bother you when the rest of the world laughs at you?

  10. Well...

    well the ad homanim argument, if you cant hit the discussion hit the person really mature guys. Unless you can explain your theory you should stop right now.

  11. Incredulous

    ‘hmm’, I stand in awe. Truly. You’ve single handedly managed to disprove the modern synthesis of the Theory of Evolution that has for the last 150+ years managed to withstand all attempts to disprove it, has been consistently confirmed by numerous fields of science (some of which didn’t even exist 150 years ago: ie. genetics) and is probably one of the best supported scientific theories ever and you’ve been able to do that in just three paragraphs. Outstanding work.

    Get yourself a clue. Do tell us what predictions you can make from Creationi ^K^K^K^K^K Intelligent Design. I’ve got one for you – according to the modern synthesis of the theory of evolution (which includes theories of neutral drift and sexual selection as well as natural selection) you will not find a transitional fossil between Birds (Aves) and Mammals. You will find transitional fossils linking reptiles to birds and reptiles to mammals, but not mammals to birds. Now, does ID make any falsifiable claims? Does it attempt to explain ANYTHING? Does it make any predictions? What the hell is ID anyway? Michael Behe and the rest of the clowns at the Institute for Creation Research sure as hell can’t tell, and they made it up themselves.

    Seriously, read a book or two dude, you’re embarrassing yourself.

  12. Healyhatman

    “Hmm” said the following crap:

    ***********
    Works well on paper, but what happens when your stick people come to life and find they have no digestive system? Or no nervous system? Irreducible complexity is a scientific fact, not theory.

    Apparently life evolved complete and fully operational within one generation. You can’t have an amoeba grow legs and crawl onto land without also having developed oxygen-breathing lungs, and a new digestive system to be able to eat the plants or animals already on land…. wait… where did THOSE plants and animals come from?

    Ugh… Evolution is a scientific mess. Idiots.

    *******************

    Those plants started as simple algaes, which evolved to simple plants (like liverworts and so on). Most likely from millions of years of those algaes and bacteria washing up on beaches and rocks. Something was sure to stick. Try opening a textbook.

    Land animals evolved from amphibians, which most likely evolved from fish speciesthat had evolved land-animal traits. For a perfect example of an evolutionary step from water to land look up the Australian Lung Fish. Idiot.

    Evolution isn’t “amoeba suddenly grows legs and stomachs and appears on land” try understanding something before you criticise it. Irreducible complexity has been disproven in every example given. It’s not a scientific fact, it’s pseudo-scientific posturing.

    As to Incredulous, the question “What does the [so-called] ‘theory’ of Intelligent Design predict?” is simple to answer. Since, of course, species are created by Go…Intelligent Designers, the theory predicts that anything can happen – breeding flies can suddenly make a horse appear. Seeing as it’s all God-Magic that does the changing.

  13. Jake

    Stop saying Americans are stupid, Christ. I’ve lived here all my life, and have never met a single person who didn’t believe in evolution (or at least expressed said disbelief).

    Granted, I live in the Northeast, but we’re the original part of the country anyway, AND we have more people.

    So when you’re being ignorant, rather than, “Americans are stupid,” you might try, “Americans from the South and Midwest, even though I have met very few if any, are stereotyped as being stupid, and I buy into pop culture enough to accept that evaluation secondhand.”

    Cheerio!!

  14. Loncha

    hah good 😀

  15. Josh

    Congratulations, you’ve accidentally triggered an online war with your wonderful comic. PS I believe in creation. Also, there is just as much proof to support it, and almost all evidence for both sides are reinterpretable, so it just comes down to this:
    Do you want there to be a God?
    If yes, then join a religion
    If you say no, then become an atheist.

    You need just as much faith to be an atheist to be a Christian, more sometimes. Both require the faith to ignore evidence to the contrary, so SHUT UP ABOUT ONE BEING BETTER THAN THE OTHER!!!!

  16. Hoohaa

    ^ I’m with stupid

  17. ilovejosh

    hahaha

  18. Anonymous

    Sorry, but I have yet to see ONE piece of evidence saying that evolution is wrong. All ID supporters seem to say is that they don’t see enough evidence to prove it correct. Therefore, the battle is not between 2 groups ignoring opposing evidence, but rather between one group accepting a huge mass of evidence and another ignoring it.

  19. Josh

    ^ There is evidence, such as the fact that c14 dating results can be changed by putting the object in a different environment. If you take a bail of hay from the bottom of a mountain in China and fossil from the top of the Rocky Mountains, the hay might end up older than the fossil. The reason for this is that the dating process doesn’t take in to account the different amounts of C14 that the subject absorbed. Some will take more, some have more to take.

  20. Josh

    http://www.howarddavidjohnson.com/essay4.htm
    This has some on the proofs against, as well as proof that its all a power struggle.

  21. Andy

    Blimey, I read a document on this subject a few years ago. It was written from a scientists point of veiw as opposed to a religious perspective. I think it boils down to peoples belief structures more than it does scientific knowledge. Frankly the notion that the earth was magically created along with everything on it in 7 days? Seriously, religious or not thats a children’s story if ever you read one right?

    Now the idea that the complex organisms we have on our planet having taken millions of years to adapt to their surrounding and take advantage of everything possible so they survive? plausible. At least more plausible that it magically appearing when Harry Potter, or god which ever character you want to back for the ID theory, said so.

    Especially as most religious texts are just written down Chinese whispers. Spanning a few century’s. Hey I’m not here to judge people for their beliefs, only, when people chose stone cold ignorance of facts to try and get their opinions heard, you gotta step up to the plate and tell them the truth. The earth, is Billions of years old kids, and that kinda screws up the whole Christian faith really doesn’t it. Hell the bible would’ve been an awfully slow read if it told the truth right? It would take the entirety of genesis to explain the reactions of the gases involved in the big bang.

  22. Lee

    @Josh:
    No.

    —–
    There is evidence, such as the fact that c14 dating results can be changed by putting the object in a different environment. If you take a bail of hay from the bottom of a mountain in China and fossil from the top of the Rocky Mountains, the hay might end up older than the fossil. The reason for this is that the dating process doesn’t take in to account the different amounts of C14 that the subject absorbed. Some will take more, some have more to take.

    Not quite. Some will have more to take (that’s why they have calibration curves based on ice-core samples etc.) but the amount that is taken up doesn’t matter, so far as I know, as the organism will take up stable isotopes in a relative amount.


    Also, there is just as much proof to support it, and almost all evidence for both sides are reinterpretable, so it just comes down to this:
    Do you want there to be a God?
    If yes, then join a religion
    If you say no, then become an atheist.

    You need just as much faith to be an atheist to be a Christian, more sometimes. Both require the faith to ignore evidence to the contrary, so SHUT UP ABOUT ONE BEING BETTER THAN THE OTHER!!!!

    OK, what’s the proof for Creation? Irreducible Complexity? There’s yet to be an irreducibly complex organ touted yet! There’s truckloads of evidence for evolution, the aforementioned transitional fossils for one (not to mention we can predict what we’re going to find and where (eg Tiktaalik))

    Do you want there to be a God? Well, why not? The afterlife sounds fantastic. I don’t think there is one though. I think you’re confusing “not believing in god” and “believing there’s no god”. Huuuuge leap of faith there. I don’t get why it takes faith not to believe. There’s no proof of God, none disproving God, and to me that seems to say there’s no good reason to believe in one (or many).
    I don’t much care for debating religion etc., but you spread disinformation about atheists/atheism (or say we’re not fit to (a la George H.W. Bush) and I will call you on it. And if you step into the ring of science and spread lies, it’s game on, buddy.

    Then again, Creationists don’t like to challenge science scientifically, they get shot down. Unfortunately, they manage to go through the political side of things, without having to stand up to scientific rigour.

  23. Josh

    Well argued my friend, well argued. I’m sorry about the C14 mixup, I was really tired and didn’t have time to find the source on that one before I passed out on the keyboard.

    On a side note, (taken from Dictionary.com)
    atheist noun
    a person who does not believe in God

    agnostic
    –noun
    1. a person who holds that the existence of the ultimate cause, as God, and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human knowledge is limited to experience.

  24. Darth Krunoseil

    @Lee

    Irreducible Complexity: I can name one case of this right now, the flagellum of a bacteria, the flagellum uses chemical reactions to spin its tail like end at several thousand revolutions a second to propel the said bacteria, allowing it to obtain more food, giving it an edge for survival. If any part of the flagellum’s more than 20 components is removed, the flagellum would cease to function at all.

    As another side note to everyone (Josh you should like this, lol), how do evolutionists explain the incredible odds against simple proteins forming out of basic amino acids?

    Take Ribonuclease for example, the simplest protein necessary for life, it has over 120 amino acids in it. For the sake of this argument, let’s jsut restrict our probability calculations to the 17 amino acids found in Ribonuclease, the odds of a acid strain forming with the right first acid is 1 in 17, not bad odds right? but then the odds of having the first TWO right, the odds jump to 1 in 289, still not bad, but not as good, but then the third acid comes into play, now the odds are 1 in 4913, again, still not impossible, but highly unlikely. now let’s take this all the way, the odds for a strain of amino acids in a particular order 120 acids long are 1 in 4.5068236576674551922085434081492e+147, this is roughly the odds of drawing a Royal flush in poker (the rarest had to get) 19 times in a row WITHOUT CHANGING CARDS!!! These odds are often calculated, so that if you waited long enough for them to play out, it would take the same amount of time for these odds to play out as it would take an amoeba to move every atom in existence from one side of the universe to the other, clearly macro-evolution is a preposterous idea with no more scientific founding than the idea that the earth is flat!

  25. Sigh...

    @Darth: Ah, the flagellum.. an old creationist/ID fave. Have a look at:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_HVrjKcvrU

    In fact if you have time, the whole of that lecture is fascinating and well worth a watch.

    I can’t comment on the odds you came up with but do bear this in mind: If the age of the universe was made equivalent to the length of a book: say, I dunno, the bible or something – life would begin halfway down the very last page. That is a ridiculously long time – and as any statistician will tell you, odds don’t tell the whole story. A time period is needed too! The longer that time period, the more likely something is to happen.

    I urge you to read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and try not to let any pre-conceived ideas you might have affect what you think of the content.

    -A frustrated atheist
    (Check your definition on that too, its all in that book mind)

    ps Just a small point: scientists are as sure of the _Theory_ of evolution as they are of the _Theory_ of gravity.

  26. Josh

    Technically, gravity is a “law”, not a “theory”

  27. Kitty

    Actually, gravity isn’t proven on all worlds throughout the entire universe. A “law” is universally applicable and absolute. It’s still a theory as it’s unfinished. The idea is that we only have experience with the gravity wells we have encountered thus far, and from this we’ve simply gathered that massive objects create a force that pulls objects with mass towards its center at a magnitude proportional to how massive the object is.

    There is no proof that this exists on worlds in other galaxies, nor is there proof (or disproof) that an anomaly can create a repulsive field or somehow “negate” the effect of gravity.

    Laws are human constructs, not universal fact. :3

  28. Kitty

    So I suppose a “law” isn’t universally applicable and absolute after all, huh? 😛 Just goes to show you what preconceived notions can do to a logical argument!

  29. lol

    evolution > creation
    the end =p

  30. Emily

    I LIKE THE CARTOON.

    The end.