Evolution v Creationism: guided evolution? dhw? (Evolution)

by David Turell @, Friday, March 20, 2015, 04:24 (3535 days ago) @ David Turell

Read this essay to see the odds against unguided evolution: nature's library of possible useful proteins;
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> http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/natures-library-of-platonic-forms/
... 
> "The library is a giant space of the possible, encoding all the proteins that could be useful to life. But here's the thing: evolution can't simply look up the chemicals it needs in a giant catalogue. No, it has to inch its way painstakingly along the stacks. Imagine a crowd of browsers - each one representing an entire familial line - who must blindly explore the library, step by random step. This sounds like a party game, but there's a grisly twist. A mutation that compromises an essential protein such as haemoglobin is punishable by death. On that ill-fated volume, the bloodline ends.
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> "The challenge, then, is to land on texts that work. Nature has already discovered millions of them. Human engineers have discovered many more, and the pace of discovery shows no signs of slowing. To appreciate the innovative wonders hidden in these libraries, you need to go no further than the bewildering diversity of organisms all around us. Evolution's giant epic unfolds while its populations scour these libraries.
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> "If you had to find a text on a specific subject in such a library - without a catalogue - you would get utterly lost. Worse than that, if missteps can be fatal, you would quickly die. Yet life not only survived, it found countless new meaningful texts in these libraries. Understanding how it did that requires us to build the catalogue that evolution lacks. It demands that we work out how these libraries are organised to comprehend how innovation through blind search is possible."
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> As a scientist she wants a blind search un-blinded by some mechanism. How about 'guided by God'? Why I believe-Why hasn't dhw commented on this? This is the key to understanding the argument for design.


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