Book review of Nature\'s I.Q. (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, August 26, 2009, 11:16 (5366 days ago) @ David Turell

David: "We humans are different in kind, and to apply human cooperation to animals and plants is stretching credulity beyond its bounds. They can't think like we do and they cannot imagine altruism." - I see the process in reverse. Animal cooperation preceded human cooperation, and social animals had to cooperate in order to survive. Man is a social animal, and he too has had to cooperate in order to survive. The difference in my view is that with our enhanced consciousness, we have created extraordinarily complex communities with formal laws and with forms of altruism that depend on reason and not on instinct. The framework is the same, however: our cooperation serves to enable our species to survive by providing us all with food, protection, care and training of the young etc. And so I would not apply human cooperation to animals, but animal cooperation to humans, which we have inherited and extended to a massive degree. - You continue: "I must conclude, if mutations are random and generally deleterious, with a series of lucky contingencies, these symbiotic relationships are miraculous." I can only agree with you. Minor adaptations (e.g. the length or shape of a beak) over generations are perfectly explicable in terms of natural selection, but new faculties, new features, new organs (think of sex ... that should cheer us all up!), however primitive they may be at the beginning, just can't be dismissed with a wave of the "natural" wand. But I can't go to the other extreme and attribute them to a "supernatural" wand either. We have what may be an insoluble mystery on our hands, but that shouldn't stop us from speculating on and having respect for other people's suggested solutions. If you can't believe in chance, you have good reason to believe in a designer, though most believers in design claim to have more positive reasons. If you can't believe in a designer, you have good reason to believe in chance, though most believers in chance also claim to have more positive reasons. And if you can't believe in chance or a designer, you have good reason to be an agnostic!