Turns out Random is Better (Evolution)

by David Turell , Sunday, February 21, 2010, 20:53 (5387 days ago) @ xeno6696


> > 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.
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> 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.-I must apologize, I mispoke in the use of the term 'degrees of freedom'. I'm not a great statistician as you know. The restrictions of degree of freedom really make my point as I view it. Like Gould, I view evolution as a series of contingencies. The more restrictions at each step, the slower the process. This eats up much of the available time for life to appear, or to get from original life to us. 
> 
> 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.) -I would state just the opposite,. Degrees of freedom limit the probabilities that chance alone can get the evolution process from inorganic material to us. If DNA is designed to push forward, with all the layers of epigenetic help that have turned up, in place, that solves the problem of limited time. Darwin and Einstein thought the universe was eternal. Hubble changed all that. The Darwin theory developed against that background of belief. George's recent post indicating that eukaryotic cells (with nucleus) developed at 3.2 billion years ago, is startling, a tremendous speed in covering that step toward multicellar organisms. I still find the Cambrian Explosian even more startling. Both points support my idea of a driving force behind evolution built into the genome, that is, design.