Proving common descent (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, November 13, 2012, 20:16 (4394 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: Ok, I have a slightly unique perspective from my studies in game design. As a game designer, generally speaking I don't create objects, creatures, or anything else for that matter. What I create is the rules that govern their behavior and the programmer creates the mechanisms that govern their existence in such away that it implements the rules that I have laid out. This is an important distinction because, as a designer, in most cases I do not create each and every individual. I create templates, rules, and mechanics that often play out in different and unique ways every single time the game is played. The fact that the game changes is not randomness, it is 100% designed and happens according to rules that are written in stone. 
 
In a game, a million creatures can be created and destroyed without me having done anything to 'cause' it provided that their interactions are written in the rules. I believe God made the rules, designed the mechanics and started the game and handed the controller off to his creatures to play for themselves. -As a highly experienced technophobe who only has to touch a machine to make it break down, I'm not sure that I've understood this analogy correctly, but if I haven't, I'm sure you'll put me right!-As I see it, your image fits in perfectly with my own concept of how the system works. If there is a god, he made the rules and the mechanisms, started the game, and then left the rest to sort itself out. By "the rest", I mean the whole process of evolution. And this game, although it's played within strict rules, offers an infinite variety of moves plus a variety of random conditions that do not depend on the rules but do require responses from the mechanisms. Soccer, for example, has its marked-out pitch, its apparatus, its strict rules, and the restrictions of Nature (no known player has the ability to balance the ball on his foot and jump 100 yards into the opponents' goal). But there are other outside, random factors such as the weather ... hot, cold, rain, wind ... and the condition of the ground ... smooth, bumpy, wet, dry ... which will require adaptation on the part of the players. And occasionally, you get a genius who will invent a new move. However, and above all, it is the very essence of the game that its result is not known in advance.
 
The whole process of evolution seems to me to run parallel to this: rules, the pitch, the apparatus, natural restrictions etc. are all provided, and then it goes its own way. "A million creatures can be created and destroyed without [God] having done anything to cause it." Exactly. There is no pre-programming (David's pet theory), and no purpose beyond the game itself. Humans happen to be the result of countless generations of creatures who have "played for themselves". If there is no God (i.e. no self-aware creator figure), we have intelligent but unselfconscious Nature making the rules etc. as above, and the same game played in the same way. It's all set up, the framework is given, the moves are deliberate (by the "intelligent cell"), but the progress and the result are neither known nor planned in advance. That is the higgledy-piggledy game of evolution.