To all the ID theorists and others who have problems accepting the general
principle of variation-and-filtering evolution as the way life arose and/or
developed on Earth:
What would you do if you had God-like (or at least god-like) powers and
desired to make a planet as much like Earth was about 3.9 billion years ago
be able to evolutionarily generate life and have that life develop in at
least a general way to a state roughly like today's life? What would you do
to the laws of physics and chemistry to make it work? What would you do to
adjust the early Earth environment to help make evolution work? The idea is
that, once you have set things up, it is feasible for life to come into
existence and evolve richly without any further intervention, and without
violating such global laws as the conservation of matter/energy or the law
of gravity. You may fiddle with the laws of atomic physics and thus with
chemistry (or you can just specify your changes in terms of chemistry
alone). You may fiddle with things like ratios of available substances, if
you think that there wouldn't have been enough of some element. You may
fiddle with the temperature (almost certainly it was in fact *much* warmer
than it is now, I would guess, because of the fact that the Earth was so
recently formed and was still cooling (as it continues to do today, as a
ball of molten matter)).
Since I think life *did* evolve naturally (*after* considerable evolution
of self-replicating collections of non-living molecules), my version of the
question for myself has been to ask what would I do to make it work
*better* (so that, for example, more-sophisticated life-forms might have
evolved a billion or two billion years sooner, and have progressed much
further in terms of filling niches and generating complexity, etc.). I will
not, of course, give my views on this until after I see what others have to
say, but, suffice it to say that I do not think the early Earth was in fact
ideal, or that things have necessarily gone as well as they might (from my
perspective). Also, I need to work out what my answer *is* before I can
give it :-)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Sep 09 2000 - 00:16:40 EDT