What evolution is NOT, Installment 1: "How coud it all happen by chance?"

by seattleniceguy 46 Replies latest jw friends

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  seattleniceguy

  Golf, you may want to read the first post of this thread again. It may make more sense in light of the discussions we've had in the last few posts, and I think it will answer your questions. However, to give you the brief answers:

  Abaddon, his words were, "In your hands you hold a deck of cards. You hurl the cards into the room..." There is no person?

  The hand that throws the cards represents the mechanism of reproduction.

  About them black cards representing people, how do we know that, that person wasn't fit?

  The fact that the cards are wiped out indicates that they were not fit. True, the card had little say in it, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. See my next point.

  "Nobody said it was fair" true, but isn't life what you make it?

  Tell that to a wild puppy born blind. This dog has no chance of survival. Reproductive chance dealt him a bad hand, and unfortunately, the environment will wipe him out as unfit for survival. It's sad, but that's the way it works.

  As I said, the black tile wasn't tile but the white one was.

  LOL...That aspect of the story is totally immaterial. If I had mentioned that the walls in the room were purple, would you be getting hung up on that? The point is that some of the tiles support card-existence and some don't! Let's not miss the forest for the trees!

  SNG
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  Golf

  SNG, can I rightly assume your under the age of 30?
  
  
  Golf
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  seattleniceguy

  GBL,

  Thanks! Glad you're enjoying them.

  Narkissos,

  Regarding will to survive, Euphemism has already touched on the point, but organisms that don't have a will to survive are by definition seriously disadvantaged in the struggle for resources. Naturally, the organisms that are more active in survival efforts will be the most apt to pass their genes on.

  Golf,

  Sorry, man, I'm trying to keep this thread relevant.

  SNG
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  the_classicist

  Well, philosophers have argued on whether randomness really exists in the universe.
  

  Basically, random can be defined as "shit happens, but we don't know why." Things appear to fit this abstraction we call random, but it's an abstraction and categorization based on a lack of knowledge, which no one may never have or the abstract being(s), "god," might have.

  Good articles, btw.

  PS: The above doesn't make sense so much in writing as it does in my mind. I wish I could express it better.

  PPS: I'm monothestic, trying to be ecumenical.
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  seattleniceguy

  the_classicist,

  Yes, I too am of the persuasion that the universe is a deterministic machine and that nothing is random. I have been using the words "random" and "chance" in this thread to mean, "determined by forces to complex for us to predict." Thus, when you flip a coin, the outcome isn't truly random - if it were possible to measure the exact force from your thumb on the coin, the effect of the swirling motion through the air, and so on and so forth, you could predict the coin's fall.

  But, as I noted in a post to Carmel earlier, true randomness is not the requirement. The only thing evolution truly needs to function is diversity.

  Glad you're enjoying the series. Thanks for the post!

  SNG
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  AlmostAtheist

  Basically, random can be defined as "shit happens, but we don't know why." Things appear to fit this abstraction we call random, but it's an abstraction and categorization based on a lack of knowledge, which no one may never have or the abstract being(s), "god," might have.

  For purposes of the discussion of evolution, I think random just means unpredictable by any bias. The particular cosmic ray that was going through the solar system, penetrated our atmosphere, whacked a dna strand as it was being duplicated, and caused the mutation was actually not at all random. Trace it back and you could find the particular solar event that fired it off, see all the gravitational effects it experienced along the way, and determine that in fact there was no where else in the universe for it to be than where it was.

  The random aspect of it is that there was no intent on the part of the sun to send it for the purpose of causing the mutation. It was just in the right place at the right time. In that sense, it's random.

  Given all the variables, you could accurately predict the toss of a die. But we call it random because nobody bothers to do the math ahead of time. The thrower doesn't throw it with an intent (a hope maybe, but not an intent), and it follows the laws of physics until it arrives at a resting place. Not random at all, but following the only path it could possibly follow under the circumstances. The unpredictability is what we perceive as randomness.

  From that perspective, everything is proceeding according to the plan laid out from the beginning. Is that where God is? I don't think so, but if you want to believe it I can't imagine there's any fact stopping you.

  Dave
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  GetBusyLiving

  Whats the latest big theories about where the universe itself came from?

  GBL
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  Midget-Sasquatch

  Well Narkissos' musings on adaptions and environment were somewhat similar to those of a handful of microbiologists (albeit for a short time) in the late 80s to early 90s. It was an interesting phenomenon that Euphemism and others well versed in biology may have come across.
  

  Under certain adverse environmental conditions, it looked like specific adaptations were being induced in E.Coli by the environment rather than just selecting mutations that happened beforehand. This same thing was also seen in yeast. Cairns was the scientist who brought this up I believe. He first called it "directed mutation" then it was renamed to "adaptive mutation" and others called it "Cairnsian mutation".

  IIRC, subsequent research, has shown that the adverse conditions (usually an environment that starves the organism) apparently trigger mechanisms in the cell that increases mutation rates. A sort of internal means for the cell to influence its adaptedness if I understand it properly. The process of generating variants is sped up (and so then, is "hitting on" fitter ones). That can explain how it looked like the adaptations are being generated as a response to the environment or induced by it. But essentially the mutations that form are themselves still random ( in line with the accepted understanding of how things work).

  G'night all.
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  Narkissos

  Thanks for the enlightening responses to my marginal comments.

  I just feel somewhat reluctant to what may sound mechanistic in any description from the (necessary yet impossible) standpoint of an "outside observer" of evolution.

  And what I metaphorically called "will" may just be the indescribable "inner side" of what must be described as "random" from the outside.

  Perhaps a vestige of animism in my mind.
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  Mac

  I'm a strong believer in the goop/scoop theory...

  In the beginning there was goop and, the goop was spatial and chaotic in nature and sometimes stringy if not cooked properly.

  In it's desire for attention, the goop attracted observation by sliding from it's etherial scoop (for lack of a better term) and went ploop...

  thus, compacting itself into a much denser form of matter which eventually came to be known as poop...

  and as we all know...

  shit happens!

  mac, molecular proctologist class

  *edited thrice due to an evolutionary propensity for such things