E. Coli vs. Linux (Humans)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Monday, May 17, 2010, 00:47 (5304 days ago) @ dhw

dhw,
> 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.-I need to stretch the analogy a bit further: The last class I took while still an environmental studies major was Ecology. Probably the most important aspect of this is the discussion of trophic levels. (Hierarchy of energy.) You can easily take the human economy and use its laws to describe how energy travels up the chain, and how individual cells up to fully-fledged organism use it as essentially--a currency. We can abandon the human-generated concept of money for ATP. (Base molecule for energy.) A study of the interactions of organisms and their environment resembles that of macroeconomics. -Forget financial instruments and derivatives: Think only of the abstract nature of a human transaction and apply it to cells. The modern economy as we know it today is quite complex. I want you to abandon the notion of human interference and simply go back to when governments didn't exist and it was just people trading things. There was no "invention" of the economy. It is a word that is simply applied to describe what it is that people do to get what they need; It seems that you let some more modern thinking creep in and it destroyed the notion I was trying to convey. -What I'm attempting here... is to cast doubt on the idea that life *had* to have been designed. Our economy wasn't designed: in fact, direct design tends to destroy it. (This goes for both governments, uncouth businessmen, and cartels.) Generally: a nation prospers the more it allows individual actors free reign to use its resources. -Think of why Communism failed as a government: You can't dictate supply and demand. This too means that since life so readily responds to economic principles, that we should consider the consequences if there's direct interference, and what patterns those would reflect on life itself.

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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.\"