An Alternative to Evolution: Expounded Upon (Introduction)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Friday, July 20, 2018, 06:18 (2317 days ago) @ David Turell

David: Do you believe life started as single celled animals and gradually changed into complex organisms like us?

Tony: No, I do not. For a number of reasons. First and foremost is the vast variety of life; both plant and animal. Yet, within all that variety is an order and organization that should not exist. It, by all rights, should be more chaotic and less homologous, less structured, lest organized. And yet, it is so organized that for the vast majority of things we can look at them and identify them categorically(bird, fish, amphibian, reptile, mammal, etc.) even if we don't know their 'given' name.

Now if you asked me if I believed all variety came from a base prototype of a given kind, I could conceive that as highly probable. From a programming stand point it appears like a Class>Subclass>Instance hierarchy. Bird>Finch>Specific Finch, where each sub-category contains mutually exclusive code specific to their ecological niche and physiological needs.

If I were to create a computer program for this, I would create a class of type Bird. I would program Bird with all the information needed for something to be a bird.

From there, there are two options. Option one, when the first new instance of this bird came into existence and reproduced, a limited amount of it's genome was able to pass to offspring. There would be information that was mutually exclusive, or mutually inclusive, as needed, so that the resultant off-spring were incapable of combining. Subsequent generations would be variations on a theme. That is the way to do it algorithmically, essentially evolution by design.

However, I do not think the designer would have, or possibly could have (due to inherent limitations of the environment), done it this way. It is too haphhazard. Personally, I think that he would have programmed a subclass of Bird, for example Finch. So, Finch inherits all the traits of Bird, then override the ones that must be overridden, discards any unnecessary data. Within the Finch subclass, there would be certain traits, such as beak_length, feather_color, etc. and tests for acceptable values, most likely within a given range that could be measured from 0 to 1, or -1 to 1. The actual values don't matter, only that I am referring to variation within a limited specified window for any given trait. There would likely be checks that compared traits to ensure that no non-functional combinations occurred. Doing it in this manner seems consistent with what we see in terms of variation within ranges without the chaos of random chance.

David: You have given your programmer approach and I find it very instructional and how I might imagine God doing it, but with the proviso that God also controls the environment which would limit the haphazard issue.

I think it is important to distinguish what you mean by control.

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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.