I notice that Robert wasn't able to respond to my post.
I notice that Robert wasn't able to respond to my post.
Ooh! Ooh! I know! My station! My hand is up. Can I answer?Quote by: Jack
Thanks Mort, I didn't have the time.
Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith. - Christopher Hitchens
You all posit luck as the answer.
Believer
That all depends on the filter you use. Some might call living things unlucky. Maybe you disagree, but it's an equally valid (and equally testable) perspective.
Grandpa h.
Post by post, building his arguments by smashing a couple of theirs -- for America.
Yes Robert, it all starts with luck. The universe needed luck(we think) to be this way. There may have been countless universes before this one that couldn't support life but we got lucky and we're here to appreciate it. Evolution requires natural selection acting upon luck. This planet got lucky and orbits in the goldilocks zone. We got lucky and have a moon capable of stabilizing our planetary rotation. It all took luck. Have you never experienced luck? If you played poker for 15 billion years how many royal flushes would you expect to be dealt? If you answered over 1.2 billion you'd be right.* It doesn't matter how improbable this universe or this planet or the life on it is. We only need it to happen once.
To say that it's so improbable as to be impossible is just wishful thinking. C'mon, admit it. You want there to be a god don't you.
*One hand every 5 minutes for 15 billion years.
Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith. - Christopher Hitchens
Have we established the difference between the appearance of luck versus luck?
If the terrain and the map do not agree, follow the terrain.
When motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become a new race.
The answer is natural selection, which is neither random nor luck. While some mechanisms of evolution are random (mutation, gene flow, recombination, genetic drift), others are not (movable elements, natural selection, non-random mating [sexual selection], biased variation, biased gene conversion). None of them are luck.
"Luck" presupposes a target that is somehow a goal of evolution. That's a religious concept that asserts that mankind is somehow superior to all other life and is the goal of natural processes. That's not the case. Mankind is the result of natural processes, not the goal.
Words like "luck" and "random" are just opinions regarding otherwise neutral events. There are other word substitutions one could devise, really. The point is that there is cause and effect.
Grandpa h.
Post by post, building his arguments by smashing a couple of theirs -- for America.
Cause and effect is our native "language" of dealing with reality. Cause/effect is our interface to reality that guides our behavior within the human niche of reality. The cause/effect interface shields us from the complexity of reality and its success in doing so results in reproductive success versus that of a true perception which is driven to extinction. http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/interface.pdf
Cause and effect is, but the details are not so obvious.
If the terrain and the map do not agree, follow the terrain.
When motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become a new race.
Well...maybe. While "luck" is meaningless in discussions of evolutionary biology, "random" is not. Some events are random - stochastic if you prefer.
"Luck" implies that there is some sort of target or goal. Random just means "unpredictable." Thus, biologists talk about point mutations as being random, although with a quite limited set of possibilities. They aren't predictable because they happen for a multitude of reasons; replication errors, radiation (cosmic, medical, and otherwise). It is impossible to predict at what locus, in which individual, on which chromosome, in which gene a mutation will occur. Further, it is impossible to predict how any such mutation will effect the protein encoded in that gene.
Right. Some form of radiation or replication error causes a mutation. That mutation causes a change in the form of the protein that it encoded. The mutated protein causes a change in form or a change in function in an organism. It's still random.There are other word substitutions one could devise, really. The point is that there is cause and effect.
And then natural selection kicks in.
Maybe it includes my choice of language, but I also think it's a generally applicable description of process. The interesting thing is, if we break down our OWN behavior, we end up questioning what guides it.
It's like how non-human primates were taught sign language, and what it implies. Are we really that different at all? A lot of signs point to "No," if we're honest about it.
Grandpa h.
Post by post, building his arguments by smashing a couple of theirs -- for America.
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