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In your view, why does "real essence" necessitate purpose (as opposed to being the result of accidental combinations)?

The Aristotilean view of essences is not valid. A theory of nominalism is not grounded in reality. An entity is grouped with entities that share similar characteristics. I would think that if...

Sure, it's more remarkable. If I had to postulate a reason for this mechanism, it would be that land mammals in proximity to large bodies of water were not finding sufficient food on land at some...

all evolutionary events are likely random. You also exhale a bunch of CO2, yet some of the same CO2 comes back in when you inhale. Is that "bucking the system for some reason unknown to science" as...

well, its complicated by the fact that we have multiple synthetic pathways to nucleotides from different starting materials. so saying definitively that "evolutionary nucleotides came from X direct...

As I've suggested, mechanisms for the formation of nucleotides and proteins from lesser materials is widely understood in modern biochemistry.

I've gone farther than that, justifying the...

http://www.talkorigins.org/features/whales/

^ probably discusses changes in nostrils to blowholes.

which raw materials?

I don't put "faith" into a single writing with regards to evolution. I don't think I've ever read a writing on evolution, other than vague references to concepts of natural selection, etc.
...

I just ran a search on scifinder. There are plenty of papers published that describe synthetic chemistry routes to specific nucleotides.

How is your painting an example of something coming from nothing? It came from raw materials. The raw materials in the case of evolution seem pretty clear as well. Ultimately, the raw materials...

What are you talking about? Painting a picture? If there were no raw materials, there could be no picture painting. Something isn't created from nothing. The comparison is just silly.

What...

I'm 100% certain that Guisslap did not suggest that something came from nothing. Life might have come from something that was not life, but that is nowhere near the same thing. Nothing does not...

To bring this up again, and perhaps to express the problem with this rational most succinctly, in a significant amount of cases, the ordered state is more thermodynamically stable than the disordered...

I don't follow your question.

A large number of materials with vinyl (C=C bonds) react with either radicals or ions (cations or anions, depending on the molecule), leading to more saturated...

A molecule replicating itself would seem to violate the conservation of mass. A system replicating a molecule identical to another molecule already in the system would seem to require an energy...

I don't know enough about amino acids to answer your petri-dish scenerio precisely, but I do know that if you leave a bunch of styrene, acrylic acid, or many other materials in a petri dish in the...

That statement is ABSOLUTELY incorrect. Thermodynamics describes phenomena of energy, not complexity of structures.

Try these:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/thermo/probability.html

http://www.latechbbb.com/forum/showthread.php?t=39109&page=26&highlight=thermodynamics
^ a previous discussion on evolution...

That's why I mentioned other chemical environments besides water, with reference to the polymer community. Complex macromolecular structures are possible in non-aqueous systems, but the complexity...

I think you missed the relevant discussion. What you are arguing is a corruption of the theories of entropy. That is the error. SLOT is in no way at odds with evolution.

The laws of nature apply in all systems. biological systems are very unique in that there are functionalities present (amines, carboxylates, etc.) that can form unique bonds, and when crafted...

Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, phosphorous, etc., all mixed up. We know that certain molecular configurations are chemically desirable. We also know that many things self-assemble. I'm...

I don't think that Darwin is the end-all of macroevolution. I would say that it is most likely that all life came from a single cell. But there is no reason that it is impossible that all life came...

I don't think that Gus or Salty are dismissing the possibility that a significant amount of speciation took place in a relatively short time period.

But how exactly would macroevolution be...