There are so many things wrong with this, I don't quite know where to start. When I showed this to two of my religious friends, they thought it was a joke. It's not. These people are serious. This scares me.
Now, the theory of evolution is not difficult to grasp. So that first of all tells you something about the people in this video. The guy seems to be suggesting that a jar of peanut butter is a comparable model to the earth. Note the language and music- all used to imply that this is a scientific video based on fact- this is delusion at its best!
-The Earth has been around for billions of years, the peanut butter has not.
-The Earth is subject to immense gravitational pulls, tectonic shifts, meteorite impacts and global fluctuations in climate. The peanut butter is not (or at least hasn't been, in its short lifetime).
-Carrying on from this, the Earth is massive (in the scientific sense, as in it has a LOT of mass), the peanut butter is not. As a consequence, the Earth has a relatively large gravitational field and a satellite (the moon). The peanut butter has nothing orbiting it :(.
-The Earth has been in flux, molecules and their relative proportions have changed. The peanut butter jar is sealed, and during its short time on the shelf the contents have hardly changed at all. I guess that's why we buy it...
-The Earth is subject to intense lighting storms, volcanic eruptions and solar flares. Peanut butter, for the large part, is not, unless it is quite unlucky.
-The peanut butter contains preservatives to keep it constant. The Earth does not.
-A man going into a supermarket, opening a jar of peanut butter, looking inside it and seeing only peanut butter would declare "no life" (or at least, a man like the one in the video). The same man going back in time to the origin of life would have looked around, squinted down at the primordial soup, and similarly declared "no life". Short sequences of nucleic acids are not visible to the naked eye... let alone the more advanced viruses, bacteria, protoctists...
-I could go on, but hopefully I shouldn't have to.
Now, it is possible that new life could spontaneously form in a jar of peanut butter. I mean, if bacteria can grow on deep sea vents, or oil, or arsenic, then I'm sure peanut butter is doable. But this man has also shown his keen lack of understanding of statistics. The universe is apparently infinite, and even if it's not, there are billions upon billions of other galaxies like ours, containing billions of similar planets to Earth. What are the chances that over billions of years (or perhaps over successive big bangs, making it infinite years...) that a few molecules would correctly bond together to give rise to early "life" (though I think it is important to take into account that it is possible that the first "life" was viral, in which case it wasn't alive at all)? I don't know, but what I DO know is that this is not the same chance as going into a supermarket, opening a jar and looking inside to see no evidence of life. To even the odds out a bit, you would need to open millions upon millions of jars over billions of years....

No comments:
Post a Comment