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To: Heartlander
Evolution: What is it?

Basically, a claim that time has magical powers: a claim that, given enough time, things which have never been observed in the history of the world and which cannot be made to happen in controlled experiments, are gauranteed to happen. Kind of like a claim that given enough time, water will run uphill.

4 posted on 04/04/2002 11:02:13 AM PST by medved
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To: medved
Kind of like a claim that given enough time, water will run uphill.

More like ice carvings--diamonds...too funny!

7 posted on 04/04/2002 11:12:19 AM PST by f.Christian
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To: medved
Kind of like a claim that given enough time, water will run uphill.

It's a quantum universe, and if it lasts forever, water WILL eventually run uphill, once, somewhere, due to quantum effects. Electrons leap thru solid barriers every so often, and because of the frequency of the relevant experiments, we get to observe and calculate how often this particular form of "water running uphill" occurs. We presently are communicating because of this phenomena. You and Einstein apparently don't care for it, but, in fact, God does play dice with the universe.

14 posted on 04/04/2002 11:38:44 AM PST by donh
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To: medved
a claim that, given enough time, things which have never been observed in the history of the world and which cannot be made to happen in controlled experiments, are gauranteed to happen

Which can often be true. Flip 30 coins, and note that they will not come up all heads (technically, there's less than a one in a billion chance). You could repeat this every day for the rest of your life, and you would almost certainly never get all heads. But if you could do this every day for a billion years, you would be virtually guaranteed of eventually getting 30 heads. So yes, over long periods of time rare events are more likely to occur than over short periods, and over a sufficiently long time rare events can be "guaranteed" to happen.

44 posted on 04/04/2002 12:29:50 PM PST by ThinkDifferent
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