Pope: Humanity Isn't Random Product Of Evolution

[Turbineguy]

Pope Benedict XVI marked the holiest night of the year for Christians by stressing that humanity isn't a random product of evolution.

Benedict emphasized the Biblical account of creation in his Easter Vigil homily Saturday, saying it was wrong to think at some point "in some tiny corner of the cosmos there evolved randomly some species of living being capable of reasoning and of trying to find rationality within creation, or to bring rationality into it."

"If man were merely a random product of evolution in some place on the margins of the universe, then his life would make no sense or might even be a chance of nature," he said. "But no, reason is there at the beginning: creative, divine reason."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=135664793

Evolution is random? I thought success and failure had something to do with it.

[Cirque du So-What]

1. The 'randomness' of evolution is a favorite straw man of creationists

It's a false assertion that others in the religious right have attempted to employ, so it's no surprise that Ratzo is using it.

[HereSince1628]

2. Evolution has both random and very nonrandom processes

Natural selection, which HAS been demonstrated in both the laboratory and in natural settings, isn't random at all.

The random issues are things like mutations, cross-over events, and segregation of chromosomes and all of these have been demonstrated in the laboratory and in natural settings--some of them by a Catholic Abbott.

As a defender of the Faith Ratzo is a tool of archaic claims. He even thinks LIFE begins at conception...in his world sperm and egg are not alive and human beings do not have haploid and diploid stages in our life cycle.

Such ideological preferences simply must be dismissed as intentional obfuscation of the utterly obvious.

LIFE began on this planet many billions of years ago it's been passed down cell by cell in unbroken chains of life ever since. Along the way Life has evolved from precursors that used the same genetic material and the same mechanisms for expressing genetic material. Moreover, peaks in the rate of change of species richness suggest that creation happened not once but continuously with at least 4 peaks in it's rate over the past billion years or so.

We have no evidence of a creators plans or any indication of his/hers/their sculpturing tools and we don't need it/them to understand the diversity of life on this little planet.

[Cirque du So-What]

3. I'll grant ya that nature produces random mutations

but *WE* didn't get to where we are today strictly through 'randomness.' Sometimes the mutations work out, but there are many more that don't.

[HereSince1628]

4. Selection, by its very nature is NONRANDOM it's a powerful force

But, you do believe in the influence of population size has on randomness of genetic drift/bottlenecks? You get random vs nonrandom mating in sexual species, right?

You get miosis right? The randomness involved in chiasmatic swapping of fragments of chromosomes so that genes move around the genome? You appreciate the totally random manner in which chromatids randomly assort themselves to different daughter cells, yes?

Aspects of microevolution generate variability in a manner that is most certainly random. Natural selection by definition is nonrandom and the test of fittness is survival of the cell line to produce new gametes. It's a very harsh rule. Your genes, or genes identical to yours (thinking of all those bees and wasps that made kin selection an issue), make it or they don't.

The pope is choosing to be an ideologue. He's choosing to invoke a creator spirit where none is needed, while ignoring what is currently very well known.

Bad choice in my mind, but then I am not historically the head of the office of the inquisition.

[Deep13]

16. Heads you win and reproduce. Tails you die.

The coin flip is random, but the results are deterministic. Anyone alive today had ancestors whose coin flip came up heads.

Excuse me for grossly simplifying your detailed explanation any the complex process of genetics which I understand only in outline. Obviously the Pope and other creationists are using that random aspect of the evolutionary process as a kernal of truth to lend credence to a gigantic lie. What, the guy who insists that using condoms in AIDS-ravaged Africa do more harm than good is being less than honest about evolution? Hard to believe, I know.

B-)

[madrchsod]

5. the head of the oldest crimnal organization in history speaks...

and says nothing.

[YankeyMCC]

6. I don't need to understand how it is I'm here

to strive to give my life meaning.

[Enthusiast]

7. I do not like this particular pope.

He is a right wing pope.

[skepticscott]

8. His predecessor

was a right wing pope too. He was simply more interested in projecting a warm and fuzzy public image to conceal it. Ratzi is too enamored with power to give a crap about how he is perceived.

[LeftishBrit]

11. Socially right wing, but at least he opposed the Iraq war, and supported cancellation of

poor countries' debts.

The current Pope seems preoccupied with social issues to the exclusion of all else.

[edhopper]

9. Perhaps the Pope

should read Sartre to understand how life can have meaning in a "random universe".

[LeftishBrit]

10. Nothing is a 'random' product of evolution

Evolution isn't 'random'; it is based on an organism's reproductive success in the environment in which it lives.

And if people were somehow produced 'randomly', this still would not say that their lives are meaningless. At least to me, the meaning of a life has little to do with what originally caused the species to exist or not exist.

[Warren Stupidity]

12. Well good for him in admitting that evolution is not a random process.

Oh wait, that isn't what he meant, is it?

[Odin2005]

13. Evolution isn't random, you dipshit.

[Deep13]

15. It's a pretty simple idea.

The only reason people don't get that is because liars like him keep telling everyone that evolution is random.

[Deep13]

14. The Holy Liar.

He's repeating a creationist meme that is intentionally calculated to deceive. While genetic mutations are random, the real driving force behind evolution is natural selection which is an unplanned, undirected, but completely deterministic processes. Environmental and physiological factors kill anything that is not at least of nuetral suvival value. The vast majority of mutations are fatal and are never heard from again. The exceptionally few that do confer a survival advantage slowly work their way into the population over generations. Again, there is no intentionality behind it, but it is not random either any more than gravity is random.

He's also employing the logical fallacy of appealing to consequence. Well, maybe "his" (again, the RC church marginalizes 51% of the human race) life makes no sense. Of course that is only true if the only sense to be had is divine. If we can create our own sense or purpose, then the assertion is simply false. Frankly, since we created religion and made-up god, any sense that comes from that god is necessarily a human creation anyway, so we may as well cut out the middle man.