E. Coli vs. Linux (Humans)

by dhw, Thursday, May 13, 2010, 09:13 (5307 days ago) @ xeno6696

Matt ("let's have some fun") has drawn an interesting parallel between evolution and the economy. He sees both as "an amorphous series of actions that individual cells carry out to maintain their existence." The complexity of both systems "arose from the actions of many individuals", with each transaction being "a means to its own end". He therefore sees "no teleology to life, no empirical claim to a creator..."-Let me join in the fun. I think your analogy stands up very well in the context of teleology. If there's no God, then clearly there's no goal, but even if there is a creator, the coming and going of species, the apparent randomness of Life on Earth, the delayed arrival of human consciousness ... all of these suggest to me, as they do to you, that there's no overriding purpose. I would go even further. It seems to me that if there is a creator, there would be no fun at all in the game if he already knew the outcome. It makes far more sense to me that he should chuck the ingredients in the pot and see what emerges.-Out, then, with teleology (unless you want to take God's entertainment as an ultimate goal). But for me the analogy doesn't stand up in the context of design. I agree that "there's no conclusive evidence that the brain was designed...complexity doesn't automatically guarantee that something was designed", but I don't think anyone on this forum would dream of using terms like "conclusive" or "guarantee". The most anyone can hope for is a greater or lesser degree of likelihood, and that is where I think your analogy becomes problematical. Every single individual action in the history of economics, every addition to the complexity of the mechanism, has come about as the result of a conscious decision. The only way your analogy could therefore stand up to scrutiny would be if you believed that individual cells also took conscious decisions, so that at some stage you had them saying to one another: "Right, guys, let's make a leg, an eye, a backbone, a penis, a conscious brain...." Now crudely speaking, this is precisely what happened ... but the great question is where did the inventive intelligence come from to MAKE it happen? In the case of the economy, we know: it came from humans. In the case of evolution, you seem to be arguing that no intelligence was required. You would laugh to scorn anyone who claimed that the complex mechanisms of money, banks, debits and credits, stocks and shares came into being without intelligent guidance, but if it's suggested that the even more complex mechanisms of reproduction, heredity and adaptability (the essential bases of evolution), not to mention consciousness and all its ramifications, came into being without intelligent guidance, you don't laugh. Could this be a case of familiarity breeding blinkers?-But of course there's nothing conclusive, and there's no guarantee. And your analogy is fun.