Aquinasfan #fundie

Aquinasfan #fundie 209.157.64.200

Maybe that's why I find the idea of evolution so laughable. I have a degree in mechanical engineering, and as a mechanical engineer, I can tell you that the human musculo-skeletal system is far more complex than the most complicated machine. The level of complexity is staggering. At the very least, the human body is many orders of magnitude greater in complexity than the finest watch or robot. But we really don't even know how many orders of magnitude greater in complexity, because we don't know what we don't yet know.

Think of the human body as an engineering problem. Your job is to design a machine to the following specifications. This machine must:

-Begin at the size of a speck and self-organize to a final weight of 180lb.
-It will be fueled by animal meat, vegetation, air and sunshine.
-It must be able to self-heal.
-It must be able to travel over land, climb up and over objects, and through water.
-It must remain functioning for 30 years.
-It must generate copies of itself with the same capabilities.
-The machine must be able to measure sound, pressure, light, flavor, and odor.
-It must be easily able to differentiate objects.

You get the idea. Anyway, present that list to any engineer or any group of engineers, and they'll laugh their butts off.

97 comments

old comment by Angua

Yes. The human body is complex. It's stunningly complex. If Aquinasfan understood the theory of evolution, Aquinasfan would know that although we have incredibly complex lifeforms today, it wasn't always this way. Complex life forms exist because when DNA is copied, mistakes are occasionally made. Sometimes these mutations help the organism in question and it survives and produces more copies of itself and so on . . . a lot of small mutations over a long period of time roduce huge changes and living things with a great deal of complexity.

I find it fascinating that Aquinasfan mentions reproduction, but seems to think it somehow disproves evolution.

And, by the way, those engineers would probably indeed laugh. Because most of them would probably understand evolution better than Aquinasfan does and realize what a ridiculous list this is. And I would expect an omnipotent and omniscient being would know how to design human beings in the best possible ways. You don't even need to be an engineer to realize that the human body has design flaws. We've got blind spots in our eyes, we've got an appendix which serves no purpose but occasionally explodes and kills people, our trachea and our esophagus overlap, causing people to choke, etc.

old comment by Brain_In_A_Jar

Unless they were engineers familiar with evolutionary computational design, which many are, in which case they'd almost certainly be capable, given sufficient resources, of knocking together a suitable simulation program, feeding your parameters into it, and getting a working design out the other end, and thus comprehensively owning you.

Your very premise is fundamentally flawed - since evolution by means of natural selection is, by definition, not a consciously directed process, it is not subject to such limits as those of traditional engineering or design.

It's funny, I'm sure I once read that something like 90% of crank scientists who have any significant technical education at all, were educated as engineers, not scientists. Yet engineers really need to at least have a basic comprehension of scientific principles to be any good, though, so why do they seem to produce, if the figure is correct, by far the lion's share of scientifically illiterate kooks?

old comment by Thinking Allowed

Because a degree in mechanical engineering means you're an expert in biology.

The level of complexity is staggering. At the very least, the human body is many orders of magnitude greater in complexity than the finest watch or robot.

I actually find the muscular-skeletal system rather simple as opposed to a watch.

But we really don't even know how many orders of magnitude greater in complexity, because we don't know what we don't yet know.

Um...waiter, may I have blue cheese with my word salad please.

Think of the human body as an engineering problem. Your job is to design a machine to the following specifications. This machine must:

-Begin at the size of a speck and self-organize to a final weight of 180lb.

Not all human machines are going to weigh in at 180 pounds. A machine that is 5 foot even would be unhealthy as opposed to a machine at 6 foot.

-It will be fueled by animal meat, vegetation, air and sunshine.

Well, you have that part right.

-It must be able to self-heal.

To a point, that one is right too.

-It must be able to travel over land, climb up and over objects, and through water.

Ok, I'll give you that one too.

-It must remain functioning for 30 years.

Where the hell have you been. Life expectancy is well beyond 30 years old. The life expectancy at birth of the world is 67.2 years (65.0 years for males and 69.5 years for females) for 2005-2010 according to United Nations World Population Prospects 2006 Revision and 66.57 years (64.52 years for males and 68.76 years for females) for 2009 according to CIA World Factbook 2009. In the U.S alone, overall expectancy is 78.2

-It must generate copies of itself with the same capabilities.

Again, biology fail. It must mate somehow with a machine of the opposite sex (whether natural, test tube, or invitro) and produce offspring with both machines equally donating material for the result. Also, it won't be an exact copy. It will look different displaying traits of both machines. There will also be a chance that it may end up a better machine than each parent. If it is beneficial to the machine, those traits will be passed down to it's offspring when it mates.

-The machine must be able to measure sound, pressure, light, flavor, and odor.

Some machines are made not able to detect light, or sound. There are some that cannot detect pressure flavor or odor too. This also shows failure on your part.

-It must be easily able to differentiate objects.

That one is a given.

You get the idea. Anyway, present that list to any engineer or any group of engineers, and they'll laugh their butts off.

Yes your list will make them laugh their asses off.

old comment by John_in_Oz

Oh, so many levels of fail to address, it's hard to judge which is the worst!
1) Is it the ascription of greater complexity to the muscular-skeletal system than actually exists? They're documented in medical textbooks. They're a system of levers and pulleys. Check out 'The Greatest Show on Earth', and contemplate the amazing similaroity of these structures across all mammals.
2) Is it the 'moving the goal-posts' to shift from the muscular-skeletal system to the whole human body?
3) Is it the 'category error' of pointing to the differences between two types of systems and then declaring one to be inferior because it's not the other? The same mistake would be to say 'people are inferior to cars' because machines don't die, they can last for years in a garage without attention, they don't need to learn, they can travel much faster, etc.
4) Is it the fact that what you've described is a stillbirth? Without the presence of a mother, with a womb and placenta, actively foraging for food, the result of millions of years of evolution, your specified sysetem is nothing but microscopic dead cells.
5) Is it the fact there are so many failures in so many of the biological systems you're exalting? Both in individual instances and in fundamental design?
6) Is it the fact that rather than laughing at that list, from Von Neumann onwards engineers have seen this as an in-principle achievable task? Hell, from Mary Shelley onwards, even.

old comment by Vince

to actually defend this guy I have to say this is one of the closest to valid arguments against evolution. complex organic life forms like us are so insanely complicated it seems hard to believe such a thing could be created through a repeating pattern of mostly chance like evolution.

while I hear this a lot and it does sorta make sense it's kind of a moot point considering that we can clearly see that evolution did happen, and we have witnessed it in action, so weather it's unlikely or not matters little.

also most people can't grasp the scale of how long evolutions been at this. the sheer number of generations life has existed on earth is more than most people can wrap their heads around, hell it boggles my mind thinking about it all the time.

old comment by Anon-e-moose is superior to God

And yet, according to Genesis, in the Bible, a fictional invisible sky fairy took a handful of dirt, and made a man from it.

Maybe that's why I find the idea of creationism, and thus religion as a whole, so laughable.

"Your job is to design a machine to the following specifications. This machine must:

One Word: Nanotechnology. Before electricity, steam engineers would have laughed their arses off at the concept. Just as before transistors & semiconductors, electronics engineers working with valves would've done the same. As would those using transistors before integrated circuits. Similarly those using ICs before microprocessors. As from this time last year, computer companies & US universities have co-created CPUs in the .5-1 THz range.

We're now entering the early days of quantum processors.

You get the idea. The science fiction of the past is the science fact of today. Anyway, remember the old saying:

Be careful what you wish for.

old comment by rsh

it's funny that creationists like to call evolutionists/atheists arrogant in thinking that they can explain God's works, but then they throw out crap like this. how unbelievably arrogant is this tripe? it boils down to "humans can't do this, therefore it's impossible that nature could." first of all, most of what he's laughing about isn't even debatable parts of evolution (not that evolution itself is debatable or in doubt). EVERY human starts as a speck and "self-assembles" to full-size. we know that's true because it's how people are made. everything he's talking about as laughable from an engineering standpoint is something that is a feature of all humans. therefore, no matter how it came to be, it is, therefore whatever process arrived at humanity is more complex and wonderous than human engineering. given the billions of years that evolution has had to work its changes, it's hardly a wonder that humanity can't produce anything even close to the complexity of a human brain or skeletal or nervous system. this is a complete argument from ignorance; i can't picture how this was accomplished, so therefore it's impossible.

old comment by Mr. Boston

Try THIS on for an "engineering problem" okay? See if you can make this, and tell me if it's logical that such a thing could possibly exist:

1. It must be completely invisible and undetectable in the physical or temporal realm, yet be master of both.

2. It must have omnipotence, being unlimited in its own power and knowledge.

3. It must be its own power source.

4. It must be simultaneously its own father, son, and ghost.

5. It must be able to "design" an entire universe then design one creature, so vastly superior to all others that it will have dominion over that universe.

6. It must design this subservient creature to be in its own image and thus PERFECT; yet also simultaneously wrong and sinful in its every thought desire or action.

old comment by Ling

"Anyway, present that list to any engineer or any group of engineers, and they'll laugh their butts off."
Exactly, so no engineer/creator could have done it like that. You could only come to something as complex as that in hundreds of thousands of small steps, and trial-and-error your way there.

Are you sure that this was a good way to argue your case?

As to the spec:
-It doesn't generate copies of itself; it mixes its components with another and produces a new machine with half of one and half of the other.
-With the help of modern medicine and modern science, the machine can now be functioning for about 80 years, even 100 years in some cases.

"The level of complexity is staggering. At the very least, the human body is many orders of magnitude greater in complexity than the finest watch or robot."

Exactly, only descent with modification and natural selection could achieve this. If you're in engineering, you may be aware that we don't only borrow ideas from specific elements of nature, but also from its processes. Like genetic algorithms, because there are domains where that is surprisingly efficient. The results and algos can be refined, optimized and directed by humans, however.

When so far there is no evidence that biology was directed, concepts like the great chain of beings are oudated. Keywords for research and reading: watchmaker analogy, genetic algo, neural networks, teleology in biology, evidence of common descent, pseudoscientific creationism...

Aquinasfan #fundie 209.157.64.200

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