XKCD: It's more than a comic

Actually we do know what the DNA code means. Each group of 3 bases is matched with an amino acid. The sequence of bases can be easily translated into the corresponding protein. (How the protein folds and what it does is a bit more complicated, however...)

And some sequences code for telling a ribosome to stop making a protein.

It's pretty clever. I recall reading that biologists are the least religious type of scientist, on average (to mathematicians' highest). I always found that funny, whenever I studied biology I was amazed at how deliberately designed it all seemed.

That's an illusion. It took billions of years to 'design' the human body, through millions and millions of trials and errors. It only looks like it's designed because of natural selection. Better evidence for artificial design would be a life form that should never have evolved in or whose existence in a certain environment makes no biological sense , but even then we still couldn't be sure because science is always changing and what makes no sense to us would make perfect sense to our successors

And of course the human body - just as any organism - is far from perfect. I got my favourite example - the recurrent laryngeal nerve (look it up) - from Dawkins but there are plenty of other examples, as well. If we were designed there'd be no reason for that nerve to take the route it does.

The capability of designing things itself evolved out of millions of generations of random mutation and natural selection. That's why nature can look "designed" to us, because our ability to design things originally came from nature.

As random as any individual chemical interaction might seem, over 3.5 billion years the total quantity of them is as close to infinite as matters. If you flip a coin a quadrillion times, it'll land on its edge more than once. Flip a quadrillion coins a quadrillion times, and some of them will stack up to form the shape of the Eiffel Tower.

And that's not even a perfect analogy, as the coins don't aggregate into more complex coin-flip interactions over time. Life resists entropy; it makes order out of chaos. Once self-ordering molecules arose, they tended to create more self-ordering molecules, and the more successful those molecules were at reproducing, the more they reproduced.

The eyeball didn't arise spontaneously; it came from a billion generations of eyeballs that started as photosensitive spots.

edited 18th Nov '15 11:15:08 AM by Fighteer

And this is what it means that God has created us in his own image. Myths have more truth in them than people may think, though usually not in the way most people who believe in those myths think.

edited 18th Nov '15 11:14:38 AM by petersohn

Life does not resist entropy. It uses an external source of energy (aka the sun).

I had no idea there was so much going on behind the scenes on google's homepage.

Life pumps local entropy out into the larger system. I'd consider that resisting.

Resistance Is Futile

^^^ And the best part is, I'd bet you a large quantity of money that the important part of Google, the actual search algorithm, is nowhere to be found in the stuff you can see by examining the page source. We're not even looking at the secret recipe, just the drive-through window.

edited 18th Nov '15 3:45:07 PM by Brickman

Of course not, the actual work is done server-side. I wonder why the front page is so complicated, since it appears to be just a simple form and a few links...

Well, there's also dropdown menus that it has to render and control, including (if you're logged in to a Google account, I think) a dynamic content thingy that's likely powered by AJAX or somesuch.

If you leave the search box blank and hover over the I'm Feeling Lucky button, it will roulette to a random adjective, and if you click on it, it will take you to a search on that topic. That's a very complicated thing.

The search begins the moment you start to type. That's complicated.

If you're logged into your Google account, it recognizes that and gives you a ton of options.

I think it loads the default logo and then checks to see if there's a Doodle, but the main way I see the Doodles is on the New Tab page, which is a bit different.

I can believe that search-as-you-type and that fancy menu on the top requires this much Java Script code. It's obfuscated not because they don't want you to understand it, but to make it faster (less bytes, faster download).

Of course, the fun parts of the intelligent design theory come when you consider the possibility that a) the process of evolution itself was intelligently designed, and/or b) the fact that a perfect designer may deliberately design something to be imperfect if the goal is for it to perfect itself.

And even more fun is that those statements are fundamentally unprovable, so you can literally make up any bullshit you want and defend them under the aegis of epistemology.

edited 19th Nov '15 5:43:53 AM by Fighteer

Or to hide itself...

Even as a Christian, I find ID dubious at best, if for no other reason that for God to have done some of the stuff He's done, he would need to be /b/ personified.

In any case, ID has just about zero to do with the topic of this thread.

The length creationists will go to shoehorn data into their worldview can be hilarious.

For example, creationisms faces two apparently unrelated problems : first, Noah's ark was not nearly big enough to house two representatives of every species. Second, evolution on a small scale (what they call "microevolution") has been actually observed.

The solution ? The ark did not contain representative of each species, but only of each "kind" (basically genera or families). After the Flood, each kind became several species through microevolution. But evilutionists are still wrong, obviously, because each kind was created separately and do not share a common ancestry. Problem solved ! Occam is crying in the corner.

edited 19th Nov '15 6:10:46 AM by Aetol

God invented evolution to see what would become of it (For Science!). Now he facepalms when he looks at what we think of him.

Fun fact, it's not a pair of every animal, it's 7 pairs of each "clean" animal, 1 pair of the "unclean", and 7 pairs of each bird.

edited 19th Nov '15 9:53:02 AM by Joesolo

Birds are animals.