Junk DNA: goodbye!: Review article (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, March 20, 2015, 21:29 (3536 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Currently we only know of two possibilities to explain this reality of ours, chance or design. You want a third, fourth or fifth. Can you describe one reasonable alternative?-Too “simplistic”! When does chance begin? When does design begin? Over and over again you quote articles illustrating the complexities of life, and as often as not you comment: “All by chance?” We spend hours debating how evolution works, and you have conceded the possibility that organisms themselves may contain a mechanism that dispenses with the randomness espoused by Darwin. If this mechanism exists, you will have to confine your ironic question to the origin of the mechanism (maybe God, maybe chance), because then evolution itself does not proceed by chance. So that puts paid to one of your constant beefs about chance. However, when we discuss the origin, I try in vain to point out the irrationality of the belief that conscious beings have to be designed, whereas the conscious being that created those conscious beings doesn't have to be designed. When you do register the illogicality, you tell me that is the point at which one must take the leap of faith.
 
Here are the real alternatives: either the story of life began from the top with an undesigned supercolossal intelligence that always knew everything, or it began from the bottom with the tiniest intelligence that evolved into all the intelligence we now know. How the supercolossal intelligence came to be so intelligent you cannot tell me. How the tiniest intelligence came to be intelligent I cannot tell you. Both choices demand a leap of faith - or of course we choose not to leap.