At 03:41 PM 09/26/2000, you wrote:
>Subj: What Would You Do to make evolution work?? (*Again*)
>
>
> >For ID theorists who claim that God *could* have created a situation which
> >would then go on to evolve sophisticated life on its own (i.e., without any
> >further intervention on God's part):
>
>Hi Chris
>The universe might well have been created without need for further
>intervention (by god or anything else.) However, I can't even imagine a
>world in which chance might play an important role in creating complex,
>rational systems.
I've already proved that that would happen, given certain conditions,
conditions which, as far as I can tell, do and have existed on Earth. The
*basic* technique is this: generate *everything*, absolutely without regard
for what it is; simply make every *possible* variation, and keep on doing
this for 3.8 billion years. Then, throw out everything that's incompatible
with universe ordered by the orderliness inherent in the physical
properties of it's constituents (various subatomic particles, such as
electrons, etc., or quarks, or strings, or whatever) and the "quantum foam"
or whatever is the medium they are in, etc.
Oh, to make this fit the real world, add these refinements:
1. Instead of throwing out those things after generating them, throw them
out along the way. Modify superficial characteristics, and let the
organisms themselves modify characteristics, of their environment so that
*different* organisms are thrown out as time goes on.
2. Don't generate *absolutely* every possible variation, but do generate
trillions of trillions of trillions of them (or some really large number of
them).
This "method" works to generate "rational" structures because it generates
nearly everything and "skims" off the ones that are "rational" improvements
on what's generated.
I'm truly sorry that you *still* don't understand even the *basic* idea of
evolution (or perhaps of "rational, complex systems." I'm not sure where
the most critical conceptual problem is, though it seems to be in the weird
belief that complex rational systems are *discontinuous* with complex but
illogical (i.e., non-functional) systems, and/or discontinuous with
*simple* systems. If this is it, it's a serious Platonistic/Rationalistic
error in reasoning (or rests on such an error (or two or three)). If I had
a Fortran compiler here, I could write you a program in an hour that would
generate complex rational systems to the limits of all of our hard disks
and those of nearly everyone else around, based purely on random numbers
and even on random selection (because *some* such "complex, rational"
systems would generally slip through the spotty selection process). There
would, of course, be much more dreck than such systems because random
selection would allow such dreck to "survive" as well as "complex,
rational" systems. That is, there would be a lot of complex, *irrational*
results, and a lot of simple results. This is, as I've said, mathematically
provable. I could even let *you* define what the criteria are for a
"rational, complex" system, and then use that to find such systems in the
results.
I've also already pointed out that *only* "rational" (to a point) systems
*can* survive in our Universe because of the lawfulness of our Universe's
physics. Further, the relative consistency and slowness to change of
general Earthly conditions has provided plenty of time for at least some
species to adapt. The mass extinctions show that this is not a universal
phenomenon, that *many* organisms *do* get selected out, or excluded from
further reproduction (along with their specific genes).
If you are not willing or able to think your way through the reasoning
involved (and you seem, possibly, *both* not willing and not able), I can't
help you; you really do not want to know, to understand enough to make the
effort to overcome your illogical habits of concept-formation and thought.
Without at least the motivation to understand, you probably never will. You
will be like the vast majority of people who never understand the theory of
relativity, computers, mathematics, physics, economics, and much else as
well. This is fine -- *except* for the fact that you continue to make
dogmatic pronouncements about what can and cannot happen naturalistically,
etc. This is like a mostly normal child who nevertheless poses as an expert
on physics or something like that, without *actually* having bothered or
been able (yet) to learn enough about it to be qualified to make any of the
pronouncements he makes.
As I pointed out in my pieces on faith (in "The 'Apparent' Trap" thread),
it is also *egotistical* to pretend such knowledge without having learned
either the requisite thinking skills or how the evidence supports the
conclusions. You are, in effect, merely *parading* your *faith* around,
because not only do you refuse to offer rational justifications for your
views, it is clear, after nearly two years of this, at least (since I
joined this list), that you *don't* have the requisite conceptual tools and
thinking skills to enable you to justify such conclusions as yours, even if
they *were* true.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Sep 27 2000 - 00:27:05 EDT