Evolution (Evolution)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Thursday, January 15, 2009, 09:18 (5789 days ago) @ dhw

DHW: Can we for a moment /// imagine a scenario. I am a living, conscious, fairly intelligent being. You have put me in a vast laboratory with all the ingredients necessary to create life and reproduction (the two are inseparable if life is to go on). But you have also given me lots of other ingredients that are irrelevant. So there I am, with all I need. I just have to select which thingummies to put together, and there will be life and reproduction.
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> I am not, however, a scientist. I am ignorant of science. I don't know which material is which. I don't know which of the thingummies are needed, let alone how to put them together. There is no-one to teach me. And there is a vast variety of thingummies, and an infinite number of possible combinations. Would you be prepared to bet that one day I, dhw, non-scientist and ignoramus, would find the right materials and the right combination to create life and reproduction? - The main problem with this scenario is that you work in a limited, linear manner. You envisage yourself putting the "thingummies" together one at a time. Nature on the other hand conducts what I think is called "parallel processing". In nature many things can be happening at the same time in lots of different places and under many different conditions. - Also, the number of combinations is not in fact truly "infinite". Combinatorics can lead to very large numbers, but the result is not a mathematical infinity unless you start with an infinity to begin with. The number of chemical elements involved in phenomena of life is quite limited, as are the ways in which they can combine together.
 
DHW: The laboratory, of course, is the Earth. But if I follow the atheist line of thinking, I am not there. There is not even a living, conscious, highly intelligent scientist there. There is nobody there at all. Only the ingredients, and they know nothing. They may be blown around in the wind or swirled around in the water, but no-one is trying to put them together. - There is a sense in which nature "knows" more than we do. Natural objects obey the laws of nature, even those laws that we have not yet discovered. As Heinrich Hertz put it, referring to Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism: - "One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulae have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers, that we get more out of them than was originally put into them."
 - DHW: Here, then, is my personal situation: I do not believe that, left in my ignorance even for billions of years, I would ever be able to select and combine the ingredients and thereby create life and reproduction (not to mention, in due course, sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, consciousness). How, then, can I believe that a non-living, non-conscious, non-intelligent mass of materials, which don't even know there is such a thing as life, reproduction etc., could float round the otherwise empty laboratory to find the combination I don't think I could ever find? - The first part of your statement is correct, but the second part is wrong. This is because nature does not work in the linear way that you imagine.

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GPJ