Trilobite eyes (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, March 29, 2013, 21:59 (4258 days ago) @ David Turell

My admonition is read all of the essays to fully see the point. This from the end of the fourth essay:-"Overlooking all this, we are supposed to see — somewhere — blind, mindless, random, purposeless automatisms at the ultimate explanatory root of all genetic variation leading to evolutionary change.
 
The situation calls to mind a widely circulated cartoon by Sidney Harris, which shows two scientists in front of a blackboard on which a body of theory has been traced out with the usual tangle of symbols, arrows, equations, and so on. But there's a gap in the reasoning at one point, filled by the words, "Then a miracle occurs." And the one scientist is saying to the other, "I think you should be more explicit here in step two."
 
In the case of evolution, I picture Dennett and Dawkins filling the blackboard with their vivid descriptions of living, highly regulated, coordinated, integrated, and intensely meaningful biological processes, and then inserting a small, mysterious gap in the middle, along with the words, "Here something random occurs."
 
This "something random" looks every bit as wishful as the appeal to a miracle. It is the central miracle in a gospel of meaninglessness, a "Randomness of the gaps," demanding an extraordinarily blind faith. At the very least, we have a right to ask, "Can you be a little more explicit here?" A faith that fills the ever-shrinking gaps in our knowledge of the organism with a potent meaninglessness capable of transforming everything else into an illusion is a faith that could benefit from some minimal grounding. Otherwise, we can hardly avoid suspecting that the importance of randomness in the minds of the faithful is due to its being the only presumed scrap of a weapon in a compulsive struggle to deny all the obvious meaning of our lives. (my bolds)-
Supplement: Natural Genome Remodeling
 
In her 1983 Nobel address, geneticist Barbara McClintock cited various ways an organism responds to stress by, among other things, altering its own genome. "Some sensing mechanism must be present in these instances to alert the cell to imminent danger," she said, adding that "a goal for the future would be to determine the extent of knowledge the cell has of itself, and how it utilizes this knowledge in a 'thoughtful' manner when challenged."-
 Subsequent research has shown how far-seeing she was."-
Random chance? Horse manure!