Turns out Random is Better (Evolution)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Sunday, February 21, 2010, 17:38 (5387 days ago) @ David Turell


> > If you assert that life was designed, your overall problem to solve is to demonstrate that randomness simply doesn't exist in the internal process; you have to prove that life *always* goes in the *intelligent* direction. But there's many complexities to this, and I will try to illuminate what I think are the valid points. 
> > 
> > 1. You have to prove that the underlying system has a distinct goal in mind.
> > 
> > 2. You have to prove that their is a large number of possible actions (degrees of freedom) to reach the goal. 
> 
> 
> But it appears to me that there is randomness in the process, if not in the directionality. In the application of convergence, for example, there are 5-6 different type of eyes, not to talk about different forms of light-sensing spots. What if there is an internal guidance system to direct the evolutionary process toward the goal of H. sapiens? But the system allows random attempts to get there? That gives us a fixed non-random control mechanism at the core of the process, but randomness in seeking the goal. 
> 
> On the other hand I still don't see how a chance process can get where we are today. The degrees of freedom then reach infinity.-No, because it isn't possible for say, an amino acid to spontaneously convert to benzene or some other component; there is a stiff restriction in the degrees of freedom here. Plants also don't spontaneously sprout legs and move. There are restrictions on the degrees of freedom, and they can be enumerated. -All this boils down to, if a design hypothesis is valid, we must be able to differentiate it from chance, which becomes harder and harder to do the more randomness allowed in a given scenario, and the more restriction faced via degrees of freedom, the harder to argue intelligence over chance. (Or chance over intelligence.) The system becomes a tangle of vicious knots that restrict what we can ultimately say about the system under investigation.

--
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