DILEMMAS: A Response to DHW (Evolution)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Monday, November 10, 2014, 20:16 (3664 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by Balance_Maintained, Monday, November 10, 2014, 20:54

Just as a quick something to think about...-If you have base creature with 4 (and only four) possible 'components' or parts that it is comprised of, and you have 10 versions of each part, and 6 possible 'material' variations, and 2 possible colors, you end up with over 200 million possible combinations. Yes, those numbers are rather arbitrary, but consider this:-Let's say you have a base "Canine". All canines have some things in common. Consider this a 'Parent Class' in programming terms. Then you have varients:-Snout Length - Extra Long, Long, Normal, Medium, Small, Pug (6)
Ear Length - Extra Long, Long, Normal, Medium, Small (5)
Hair Length - Extra Long, Long, Normal, Medium, Small, None (6)
Tail Length - Extra Long, Long, Normal, Medium, Small, Bobbed, None (7) 
Body Length - Extra Long, Long, Normal, Medium, Small (5)
Leg Length - Extra Long, Long, Normal, Medium, Small (5)
Muscle Mass - Massive, Stocky, Normal, Slight, Small, Miniature (6)-
That is 189,000 Possible variants of "Canine" JUST off of those few variants. But in nature, the variants aren't discreet. They are more like floating point values between 0.0 & 1.0. That is literally 100 trillion possible variants based on just those 7 values. Add 2 more zeroes for every additional variant trait you add. So, when I say God could have literally created just a handful of animals originally, and had them populate the Earth and show such great variety, it is not that much of a stretch. Create one pair of canines, with say 50 possible variant factors that scale on floating point values, and you end up with 50e100 (50+100 zeroes) possible variants of a single archetype. -Now, there are only about 35 major phyla that are generally accepted. I seriously doubt that classification is correct. But even if we double it, or quadruple it, is it too much to think that the creator of the entire universe could create 140 separate creatures with 10 (or 50!) possible variants? As a game designer, I can tell you that creating a few hundred objects with a few dozen variables, while not trivial, is certainly doable event bu humans. If God already has the Blueprint (program), and understands it the way today's procedural programmers understand their code, the task would be almost trivial.-**edit** Creating them would be trivial.... balancing them... that is an ENTIRELY different story.-**edit 2** Even if the creation was done at the Order or Family level, it is still several orders of magnitude lower than would be required to create ever "species".

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What is the purpose of living? How about, 'to reduce needless suffering. It seems to me to be a worthy purpose.