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> any form of intelligent life that evolves anywhere will automatically find that it lives somewhere suitable for it. This is circular reasoning. I know it's
by hasenj 16y ago
> any form of intelligent life that evolves anywhere will automatically find that it lives somewhere suitable for it.
This is circular reasoning.
I know it's unpopular to question evolution, and this might lose me all the points I gathered in the past three weeks, but,
But this kind of argument assumes that life can and will inevitably evolve spontaneously some where, some how.
It's a tautology.
Sure, there could be a completely different form of intelligent life, in a completely different kind of environment, but that just means that God can and will create any form of life in any kind of environment.
The core question is, can life really evolve spontaneously? I'm sure many will scream "of course yes, duh".
Natural selection doesn't explain anything about how something might evolve, it just says: if you can produce many many good options, the best will survive, and therefore you get optimal design.
Sure, if there are forces that produce new ideas and things, and you can choose the best every step of the way, you'll get something really good. Like if, say, people submit patches to Linux, and they get reviewed and tested, you'll get something that Linus himself couldn't have come up with on his own.
NS is useless if there's nothing that can produce these patches. If you have a really good team of tester and code reviewers, but no one submits any patch (or, no one makes any change), then the software will not evolve on its own. It will not get better just because there are a lot of people to test it. It needs other people to make changes/submit patches.
It's the "mutation" part that tries to explain how new things actually get produced, and I find it ridiculous. Not only does it not fly with me conceptually, I'd say - at the risk of being stoned - that there's no real evidence for it. It's usually just a lot of hand waving as if, "of course mutation can produce many useful things for NS to select from, how dare you object to that?".
Yes, you can observe variations, and you can observe certain variations being selected. Like skin color, or hair type. This is, however, entirely different from observing useful patches being produced by mutations.
All cited instances of observed NS operate on variations that are already there. This is where hand waving about mutations come in.
Video games can be designed to use a high resolution or low resolution depending on the system specs. It's therefor not surprising when users on low end machines will "select" the low-resolution configuration. There are options to select from, but these options weren't produced by anything remotely resembling a mutation; it's a built-in option that's already available -- nothing new.
No one denies the design; no one, none at all. Neo-Darwinism just says that design can be automated by mutation and natural selection.
It is easy to describe how a complex system works once you discover it; but that doesn't make it any less impressive. I'm often impressed by some of my own programs, despite the fact that, not only do I know exactly how they work, but I even built them myself. Usually when you discover the internals of a system, it gets even more impressive.
- Sandman 16y agoYou're suggesting that there exists an intelligent designer, someone or something that created 'options', as you put it, which then go through the process of natural selection. I, on the other hand, propose that there was no intelligent design, that all the 'options' were created simply through the workings of the laws of nature. Now, somebody might say - but who, then, created these laws, who said that they're going to work the way they do? And that's just the thing - nobody did. It's just the way (our) universe works. No intelligent designer decreed that the speed of light in vacuum will be 299,792,458 metres per second, it's simply one of the laws of physics.
- hasenj 16y agoI'm not trying to come up with any alternative to anything; just pointing out the obvious problems with "mutations" that everyone seems to ignore. The design is obvious. It doesn't need any proof. No one even denies it. Even the most hard-core atheists I've come across use the word "design" a lot when talking about the human body or even any biological structure. They just propose that it can be automated in such a simple way that even the deaf and blind nature can do it. I'm pointing out a fatal flaw in a key element of this supposed automatic mechanism. "We'll find another way" is not really a good answer; not a very scientific one, anyway.
- ErrantX 16y agoThe problem is you are not considering the timescale - which is over millions of years. There is no "obvious flaw" in mutation, not if you understand how it works. It is easy to describe how a complex system works once you discover it The same can equally be said of the intelligent design theory.
- hasenj 16y agoI'm not trying to promote the ID "theory" or anything like that. Can't we just focus on the question instead of questioning my motives? > The problem is you are not considering the timescale - which is over millions of years. This is exactly what I mean by hand waving. So there's a humongous timescale involved, so what? That doesn't constitute any form of evidence. Unless you're saying it's not really testable because we can't simulate millions of years in a lab. In that case, well, you'd be confirming my point. Again, the design is quite obvious, while the "mutation" proposition is not plausible, and remains unproven. And no, I don't identify myself as a proponent of "The Intelligent Design Theory". I don't claim to have the definitive answer and I don't feel the need to propose an alternative to neo-darwinism.