Higher math and Darwin (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Thursday, April 08, 2010, 14:39 (5342 days ago) @ dhw

GEORGE: This looks to be the usual creationist insistence that evolution is down to "chance" and nothing else. The process of "natural selection" is not random, it's a ratchet type process, so non-gaussian distributions are nothing untoward.
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> MATT: George is absolutely correct here. Even my favorite Massimo Pigliucci argues that evolution isn't random ... especially when animal behavior can influence evolution. I say now (as I did when I came on this forum) that chance vs. design is a false dilemma.
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> Round and round we go, though I guess that's the nature of this debate. George may be "absolutely correct", but Matt's conclusion seems to me to highlight the imbalance caused by such a selective argument. Two points, then, in an attempt to redress the balance:
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> TO GEORGE: It has been acknowledged ad nauseam that natural selection is not random, but ... if I may echo you ... this looks to be the usual atheist insistence that evolution is down to "natural selection" and nothing else. The chance argument relates (a) to the origin of the mechanisms that made life and evolution possible, (b) to random mutations, and (c) to random changes in the environment to which the evolutionary mechanisms respond. Natural selection does not create anything new.
> -It doesn't create anything new--but it is what decides (ultimately) what genes get conserved; if the goal of the original website was to say that because the general trend for complexity is to increase over time--of course this will be the case. If the general tendency is for "fit" genes to carry forward, then what you have is an accumulation. And if these genes accumulate enough--at what point do you say that whatever creature it describes isn't something "new?"-> TO MATT: the dilemma of chance v. design, as far as I am concerned, relates principally to (a) above. I don't have a problem with the role played by chance once those mechanisms are in place, but we do not have one scrap of evidence that chance is capable of assembling them. Even if we ourselves were to create from scratch life, reproduction, senses, consciousness etc., (and it's a big "if"), we would only have proved that such creation requires intelligence. It might sway the balance of the argument for some of us, as might the discovery of other life forms elsewhere ... particularly if they have evolved as we have ... but the choice between chance and design will still depend on faith and not on fact. I would say, then, that the dilemma is only false to someone who has already made up his mind.-I think we have spoken of this before: I still hold that because chance is an intrinsic part of the process, you can't simply create an artificial dividing line delineating the two. You have to be able to separate chance into chance, and design into design--and this simply isn't possible, because what if chance was part of the design in the first place? Why people like Pigliucci stay away from these conversations it is at THIS point that we are really discussing the nature of God without having demonstrated what, exactly--is God?

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"