Contingent evolution (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, June 26, 2014, 23:21 (3803 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

dhw: Individual organisms may have the purpose of survival, but there is no apparent overall purpose to link the vast variety of plants and animals that have come and gone throughout the history of the evolutionary bush. In that sense, evolution is founded on the randomness with which a changing environment determines which organisms will and will not survive, depending on whether they are able to adapt and/or innovate appropriately. May I in turn ask you what the evidence is for the assumption that this process has a purpose?
TONY: I didn't think YOU made the assumption of random chance, but that is the underlying assumption of evolution. If it fails, the theory fails.-We may be talking at cross purposes here, as the discussion clearly depends on what we are referring to with (a) "random chance", and (b) "purpose". For me the theory can only "fail" if someone proves that there are organisms which have not descended from earlier organisms. Otherwise, there is no getting round the process whereby existing organisms have adapted and innovated. Personally, I don't believe in the creative talents of random mutations and have suggested an alternative whereby "intelligent cells" do the inventing, whereas David thinks God planned innovations, but even without that element of chance, we still accept that evolution happened. On the other hand, we both believe there is a link between innovation and environmental change, and so unless David's God planned all the environmental changes, there is still an element of random chance. Atheists quite rightly point out that Natural Selection is not a random process (see below), but some of them do believe in random mutations, and of course there remains the question of how "cellular intelligence" came into being (chance, God, or many "panpsychist" intelligences). However, no matter what explanation we offer, I believe the theory itself will still stand, with or without those elements of chance, and with or without divine participation, until common descent is disproved.
 
As regards purpose, David has again stressed his view: "As always the amazing appearance of conscious humans who have the ability to explore the theoretical workings of the universe." I shan't repeat the objections I have to this anthropocentric vision, because your own post is very different. For brevity's sake, I'll quote only the end, because I agree with virtually everything else you say (very beautifully) about Nature's balance and the extraordinary complexity of organs and codes. I think folk like Dawkins would agree too. Natural Selection ... the process whereby in general the fit and the useful survive and the unfit and the useless perish ... sees to it that Nature remains balanced. Once life and the mechanisms of evolution (origin unknown) began to work, the rest followed on logically. But to what purpose?-TONY: The evidence, my dear friend, is absolutely everywhere you look. The incontrovertible proof is everywhere you look. Everything is 'just so'. From laws to the stars to our genetic code to the tiniest building blocks of physics, everything exists in the ONLY POSSIBLE COMBINATION that would allow life to exist.-This is a huge assumption. We simply do not know if other forms of life might exist in other conditions, and I'm not talking just about life elsewhere in the universe. Discoveries of life forms in the most hostile conditions here on Earth already present many different possibilities. The article that began this discussion suggests that if a few chance mutations had gone a different way, life would have been very different from what it is now. The same may apply to the make-up of our universe. We only know the life we know. But that's just one part of the equation. The other is what you mean by "purpose". If you say that the purpose of evolution (the subject of my question) is to enable life to continue ... I used the word "survival" ... I doubt if even an atheist would disagree with you. But you don't need God for that, and you don't need humans to be the goal.